Pat Kurkul recently announced that December 2011 would be the end of her tenure as Regional Director for NMFS in New England. This announcement brings to a close more than ten years of service by Pat in an extremely difficult and high profile position.
As regional director, the buck stopped at Pat’s desk during one of the most critical periods of fisheries management in New England’s long fisheries history. And she inherited a mess. Most of the groundfish species and other regional species were overfished and rampant overfishing was still the rule, the New England fleet was significantly over capacity relative to any foreseeable sustainable yield of fish from the ocean, the New England Council was barely operational and completely reactive, and the politics of fisheries were raw.
Today, New England has just finished a fishing year where practically none of the species managed by the New England Council were subject to overfishing—a first for some species in several hundreds of years. The fishing power of the fleet is in much better balance with available fish populations and the New England Council has gone through a remarkable sea change with respect to its professionalism and capacity. The politics—we concede—of fisheries are still raw.
Read the complete article from Talking Fish.