Eric Schwaab, the administrator of the National Marine Fisheries Service, or NMFS, stood before a crowd of fisheries experts on Monday at the Boston Seafood Show. Schwaab had made many forays to New England—home of some of the squeakiest wheels in our nation’s fishing industry—since taking over the job about a year ago. But this time was different. He came bearing a remarkable message: We are witnessing the end of overfishing in U.S. waters.
The end of overfishing should be shouted from rooftops from New England to the Carolinas to the Gulf Coast to Alaska to the Pacific Island territories and back to NMFS’s Silver Spring, Maryland headquarters. This is the biggest national news story our fisheries have seen in years.
So where are the headlines? A few stories trickled onto the pages of local New England newspapers. But even the Boston Globe didn’t spare so much as a column inch. Prophetically, Schwaab alluded to the likelihood of radio silence during the second half of his remarks, in which he suggested the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration should “do a better job of getting out the word on the progress made.”
Fisheries doomsayers have certainly been more successful at garnering attention. Dr. Boris Worm, a scientist at Dallhousie University in Canada, published a study in November 2006 that splashed across major media outlets worldwide. His study, “Impacts of Biodiversity Loss on Ocean Ecosystem Services,” contained a message far more digestible than its title: Continuing the world’s current rate of fishing would lead to the “global collapse” of fish populations by 2048.
Now that’s a headline.
As panic ensued about the possibility of empty seafood menus, Dr. Ray Hilborn of the University of Washington penned “Faith-Based Fisheries.” It was a sharp rebuke of not just Worm, but the entire scientific publishing community, which he accused of accepting “articles on fisheries not for their scientific merit, but for their publicity value.”
This all sounds esoteric on the surface. In the elevated discourse of academia, however, Hilborn’s words should have sparked nothing short of a Biggie-versus-Tupac-level throwdown.
Yet instead of Worm or Hilborn upping the ante with the academic journal iteration of “Hit ‘Em Up”—Tupac’s vitriolic rap widely credited with escalating the east coast/west coast hip-hop conflagration—a funny thing happened. The two scientists decided they had more in common than in opposition, so they sat down to work on a collaborative assessment of world fisheries.
Science published the result of their efforts, “Rebuilding Global Fisheries,” in July 2009. It is a comprehensive assessment of 10 large ocean ecosystems with the most comprehensive catch data. The findings showed that fishing in half of the areas they studied was either already sustainable or showing significant progress toward sustainability and that “combined fisheries and conservation objectives can be achieved by merging diverse management actions, including catch restrictions, gear modification, and closed areas.”
Not coincidentally, all of these practices are in place in the United States today to varying degrees.
Michael Conathan is the Director of Ocean Policy at American Progress. His work focuses on driving progressive solutions to the multitude of problems facing the world’s oceans. Prior to joining American Progress, Mike spent five years staffing the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation’s Subcommittee on Oceans, Atmosphere, Fisheries, and Coast Guard—initially serving a one-year appointment as a Dean John Knauss Marine Policy Fellow before joining the committee full-time as a professional staff member in 2007. In that capacity Mike worked primarily for Subcommittee Ranking Member Sen. Olympia Snowe (R-ME), as well as the Ranking Members of the full committee, Sen. Ted Stevens (R-AK) and Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-TX). He oversaw enactment of multiple key pieces of ocean legislation, including the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Reauthorization Act, the Integrated Coastal and Ocean Observing Act, the Federal Ocean Acidification Research and Monitoring Act, and the Shark Conservation Act. A native Cape Codder, Mike received a master’s degree in marine affairs from the University of Rhode Island in 2005 and also holds a Bachelor of Arts in English literature from Georgetown University.
Read the complete article from the Center for American Progress.