Nils Stolpe questions whether Dr. Lubchenco made best use of her opportunity to address the public on October 30 in the pages of the Gloucester Times. My last column was critical of the propensity of NOAA/NMFS and the “conservation community” to marginalize commercial fishermen in the fishery management process. Subsequently NOAA Chief Jane Lubchenco provided what could be interpreted as an example of that sort of marginalization.
On October 30, in what is usually NMFS Acting Assistant Administrator Jim Balsiger’s column in the Gloucester Daily Times, she wrote about the many contributions that federal employees at the NMFS Northeast Regional Office (NERO) in Gloucester make to the Cape Ann area’s economy and culture.
These contributions include NMFS employees’ involvement with local schools, volunteering “for countless community programs and civic organizations,” donating “5,000 pounds of top quality lobster, crab, shrimp and other fish from its routine inspections each year to The Open Door, a Gloucester food pantry that serves the hungry,” providing meeting space in NMFS to “local businesses” and supporting various local/regional science education initiatives.
Towards the end of her list, she wrote, “with our new building, we are able to invite numerous school and community groups to see the work we do.”
Does NOAA leadership believe that school and community groups in Gloucester need a tour of a new $25 million government building to see the work that they are doing?
Gloucester, one of our oldest and most important fishing ports, is in the process of losing most of its commercial fishing fleet and many of the businesses that depend on that fleet. The local folks don’t need a tour of what they sometimes call the “Castle on the Hill” to see that. They just need to take a walk or a ride down to the waterfront.
While donating 5,000 pounds of top quality seafood to needy people is a good thing to do, the gift comes from the people whose policies have forced fishermen to throw hundreds of tons of equally high quality seafood over the side every year. All of this has occurred because no one has been able to come up with an acceptable – to the so-called conservationists – way to avoid wasteful by-catch.
All of the rest is what good people in towns and cities all over the country do where they live and work. Some of it is laudable, some of it is necessary, all of it helps the community, but none of it is unique to NOAA/NMFS employees. If the people at NOAA/NMFS were able to figure out how to let Gloucester’s fishermen catch their proportionate share of the uncaught annual TAC (see Chronic Underfishing – the Real New England Groundfish Crisis at http://www.fishnet-usa.com/chronic_underfishing.htm ), say 30,000 metric tons or so, the tens of millions of dollars that would enter the local economy would have a far more dramatic effect than twice as many federal employees could.
But these are only minor quibbles. My major quibble is that this column appeared on the same day that hundreds of fisherman from Maryland to Maine converged in the NMFS parking lot to peacefully demonstrate against the impact that "the work" that Dr. Lubchenco and her staff are doing is having on their communities and on their lives.
These fishermen have valid grievances. Some of them are shared by their fellow fishermen who are working, or trying to work, under the NOAA/NMFS regime on both coasts, in Alaska and the Gulf of Mexico, in the Caribbean and the US Trust Territories. It’s not just Gloucester, it’s not just New England, and it’s not just the East Coast.
They and their colleagues who work in the recreational fisheries are being strangled by an increasingly repressive management regime. It doesn’t need to be repressive — unless you believe that it’s appropriate to inflict severe economic suffering on working people during a recession to get a population of fish to an arbitrary level of abundance in ten years rather than twelve or thirteen.
Is there a difference as long as the stocks are improving? How many jobs is it worth, how many lives should be disrupted, to get to an arbitrary population level a day or a week or a month sooner?
Dr. Lubchenco had an opportunity to use the space normally given to Dr. Balsiger to address these serious issues.
But the official comment from NOAA that day focused on such banalities as hanging works by local artists in the new office building the taxpayers just bought for them.
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Correction: When I wrote my last column I believed that Associated Press reporter Jay Lindsay had accompanied fisherman Jamie Eldridge on a trip targeting cod that was ruined by the profusion of spiny dogfish. Since then I learned that Captain Eldridge had been targeting dogfish on the trip. So here is an application of Forest Gump’s “when life gives you lemons, make lemonade,” this particular trip wasn’t ruined by dogfish, but their numbers have made the tub trawl fishery for cod off Cape Cod unworkable, and the damage they’re inflicting on other recreational and commercial fisheries still continues.
Nils Stolpe has written "Another Perspective" since 2005. He is communications director for the Garden State Seafood Association, and has been a consultant to the fishing industry for over two decades.