February 5, 2020 — The Roaring 90s marked the nation’s longest period of uninterrupted economic growth in modern history. A few milestones from the first half of the decade included the introduction of the Ford Explorer, which sidestepped fuel economy standards and helped ignite America’s ongoing love affair with gas-guzzling SUVs; Saddam Hussein’s 1990 invasion of Kuwait, which started the Gulf War that culminated in the early 1991 shock-and-awe Operation Desert Storm; the 1992 election of President Bill Clinton; NAFTA; the 1995 IPO of the unprofitable search engine company Netscape Communications, which helped inflate a five-year investing bubble in dot-coms; Congress’ reversal of the fuel-conserving 55 mph national speed limit that had been in effect since the 1973 Arab oil embargo; the O.J. Simpson Trial; and the nation’s worst act of domestic terrorism up to 1995, when Timothy McVeigh exploded a bomb outside a federal building in Oklahoma City, killing 168 people.
Commercial fishermen may associate that same period with an unprecedented wave of attacks by environmental groups and sportfishing interests.
The dam broke after 1990 when the United Anglers of California convinced Golden State voters to ban the use of nearshore fishing nets. By the mid-1990s, sportsmen had mobilized in Alaska, Oregon, Washington, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, North Carolina, and four of the five Gulf Coast states. (Texas had already banned nets in 1988.)
The battle over nets in the Sunshine State was called the Mother of All Fish Fights, and rightly so: Florida’s extensive coastline had supported prodigious fisheries that gave rise to a deeply embedded commercial fishing culture that reached back centuries. By the 1990s, a hundred years of rampant coastal development, explosive population growth and a tsunami of recreational anglers had taken its toll. Still it took a shock-and-awe media campaign and a passel of naïve voters to dislodge the state’s net fishermen.