Opinion

Nils Stolpe responds to The New Republic article Aquacalypse Now: The End of Fish by Dr. Daniel Pauly, and takes issue with "it’s-the-fishermen’s-fault ocean alarmism."

Remember a couple of years back when satellite photos revealed the “devastation” due to sediment trails kicked up by shrimp trawlers? A staggered line of shrimp boats were shown, each preceding a plume of cloudier water, and Daniel Pauly, University of British Columbia researcher and one of the chief crepe hangers of the Pew funded “let’s blame it all on commercial fishing” campaign, was quoted widely as saying "these images of trawler mudtrails confirm that this mode of fishing is terrible. Think of the story about China’s Great Wall being the only human artefacts (sic) visible from space. Now we can add the mudtrails of trawlers.” 

The satellite pictures are at a level of resolution that is available to billions of us (for free) on the web’s Google Earth, as it was when Dr. Pauly was waxing catastrophic on trawling. Now I’ve spent a reasonable amount of time messing with Google Earth, and while I’m not an expert in satellite photo interpretation, using it I can clearly distinguish the three skylights on my house, each of which is perhaps two feet wide and four feet long. The Great Wall of China is, I think, somewhat larger. So it appears that we can add to Dr. Pauly’s Great Wall of China and the mudtrails of trawlers perhaps a billion or so other human artifacts (including my skylights) visible from space. But hey, why should anyone, even if he is a respected scientist, be held accountable for everything that he is quoted as saying to make his “doom and gloom” predictions more worrisome? 

But back to the shrimpers and their “catastrophic” sediment plumes. They were fishing on the Yangtze River delta. The Yangtze is one of the world’s largest rivers, until the recent construction of a series of dams it transported an average of 472 million tons of sediment to the sea each year. Needless to say, most of this sediment ended up being deposited on the delta. The finer sediment layer (these are the sediments that would be resuspended by trawling) ranges from about 130 feet thick at 60 to 100 foot water depths to 3 to 6 feet in thickness at 300 feet. It’s estimated that this “mud wedge” contains 500 billion tons of sediment. 

While I’m certainly not the fisheries scientist that Dr. Pauly is, I’d be willing to bet that the critters in and around the Yangtze delta are pretty much adapted to suspended – or resuspended – sediment in the water. Any bottom dweller that can’t deal with suspended sediments shouldn’t be hanging out on the Yangtze (or Mississippi, Nile, Amazon, Mekong, or you name it) delta, and the way that nature works, they definitely aren’t. In spite of this, Dr. Pauly convinced a bevy of media people that trawling was dooming us to yet another ocean Armageddon. Quintessential sound bite science. 

Well, Dr. Pauly and his somewhat less than compelling “science” is back, this time in the pages of that widely regarded scientific semimonthly journal, The New Republic. 

In an article provocatively entitled Aquacalypse Now – with no acknowledgement of Francis Ford Coppola, Marlon Brando or Martin Sheen, but we all get it, don’t we? – Dr. Pauly once again tries to convince us, or at least those of us that read The New Republic, that the biological integrity of the world’s oceans is being destroyed. His ogre du jour; that the oceans are being stripped of their big and visually appealing (no kidding, he actually wrote “boats began to catch fish that were smaller and uglier”) critters by what he’s termed the “fishing-industrial complex,” whose operations he relates to Bernie Madoff as well as a “giant Ponzi scheme.” Sort of like the military-industrial complex that the talking heads of the Sixties were assiduously trying to make us all believe was well on the way to ruining the free world. In spite of the best efforts of what at the time was only a fledgling crisis industry to convince us otherwise, we did survive it. Now it appears we’re being threatened by its aquatic sibling, the fishing-industrial complex, but with more greed, corruption and rampant illegalities thrown in. The parallels are kind of staggering and, according to the best thinkers in the fisheries science/marine ecology world in a recent paper in Science magazine (Worm, Hilborn et al, Rebuilding Global Fisheries, 07/31/2009), we’ll more than likely survive this latest product of the crisis mongers as well. 

Dr. Pauly continues that this all began “in the 1950s, as their (the fishing industrial complex, I presume) operations became increasingly industrialized–with onboard refrigeration, acoustic fish-finders, and, later, GPS.” That makes a nice story for all of the Luddites who read The New Republic, but from what I remember about Kipling’s Captains Courageous, the cod fishermen on the Grand Banks a century ago did really well with salt, with an intimate knowledge of their fishery, with a compass and dead reckoning, and with not even an inkling of a fishing-industrial complex. And let’s not forget the Atlantic halibut, a still unrecovered casualty of the prefishing-industrial complex.

Interestingly, Dr. Pauly has the fishing-industrial complex developing at about the same time as the military-industrial complex. Perhaps the sun spot activity was at a peak in the 1950s?

He also resurrects yet again the specter of oceans filled with jellyfish and writes prophetically about “the end of fish,” even going so far in a strained and labored effort as to blame the oceanic dead zones – including our very own in the Gulf of Mexico – on trawling for shrimp, rather than on nutrient-laden agricultural runoff, their indisputable and long recognized cause.   

Most of this could be overlooked as artistic license, particularly if Dr. Pauly was an artist, but he’s not. He’s a scientist and I have to assume he’s writing as a scientist. 

But he seems to be moving pretty far from objective science and into the role of polemicist when he writes “one study, published in the prestigious journal Science, forecast that, by 2048, all commercial fish stocks will have ‘collapsed.’” Boris Worm, the lead author, has since recanted his position on this universal collapse in such a high profile manner in Rebuilding Global Fisheries cited above that even Dr. Pauly up there in the wilds of British Columbia should have been aware of it. I can only assume that he missed it because he failed to renew his subscription to Science. 

Most disturbing from the US fisherman’s perspective, Aquacalypse Now is underneath all of the doom and gloom hyperbole nothing more than another argument for catch shares, the form of fisheries management that has been adopted as the Holy Grail by NOAA head Jane Lubchenco, that has been touted by the Pew-supported “conservationists” as the only salvation of the world’s fisheries, that seems to be well along a path to self-destruction in the New England groundfish fishery, and that has been repudiated as unworkable by the fisheries managers in the European Union (whose lack of success based on catch share management speaks for itself). Not at all surprisingly, Dr. Pauly, the programs he is involved in at the University of British Columbia and the University itself have received on the order of 10 million Pew fisheries/oceans dollars. 

He takes the catch shares argument a step farther, suggesting that fishing rights be auctioned by government to the highest bidder (while doing this, he also manages a slam aimed at “most fisheries economists,” but that’s for another column). This definitely rang a bell for me, thinking back to one of the initial meetings on sector management in New England when the “marine conservationists” were rhapsodizing about what they were calling conservation sectors. How’d you like to co-own a fishery with the people at Pew? And he doesn’t miss getting in a plug or several for ocean zoning, another Pew priority that came to NOAA/NMFS with Dr. Lubchenco and is yet another way to wrest control of the oceans from the fishermen, and to wrest their future away from them as well.

On the other hand, the title Aquacalypse Now is particularly apt for this, Dr. Pauly’s most recent venture into it’s-the-fishermen’s-fault ocean alarmism. What he writes is identical in feel to the phantasmagorical world of Colonel Kurtz in the movie (minus the fog/mist/smoke, the tiger and the pyrotechnics, of course). But, not wanting to be outdone by anyone in the field of new word coinage, I’d like to offer my own humble effort – Acrockalypse Now.  

 

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.  

The TAC is not being caught and commercial fishermen are frozen out of the selection process for the head of the National Marine Fisheries Service.

What do they really want?

The people running the National Marine Fisheries Service are hell bent on “fixing” the New England groundfish fishery regardless of the impact that their “fix” is going to have on the tens of thousands of people who directly or indirectly depend on it. NMFS’ solution, a variation of catch shares called sectors, is going to make the groundfish fishery easier and cheaper to manage, and it’s unquestionably going to put some people in the commercial fishing industry in a better economic position. At the same time it could also destroy much of the social fabric that holds together New England’s fishing communities while irrevocably altering a way of life that’s become synonymous with the New England character.

But what’s broken? I’ve already pointed out that there are enough groundfish off New England to, if sustainably managed, keep today’s entire groundfish fleet working (see Chronic Underfishing – the Real New England Groundfish Crisis at http://www.fishnet-usa.com/chronic_underfishing.htm). If the groundfish fishermen hadn’t been hobbled by a Machiavellian morass of fishing restrictions, in 2008 they could have harvested most, if not all, of the 170,000 metric tons of groundfish target TAC (that stands for Total Allowable Catch) rather than the 40,000 tons they did land.

If catching the Total Allowable Catch of groundfish had actually been allowed over the last decade, something that might well be considered heresy on Great Republic Drive in Gloucester, there’s not much in the groundfish fishery that would actually need fixing. If it weren’t for foundation-funded “marine conservationists” strangling the groundfish fishery into submission via ecologically unsupportable and economically devastating regulations, how many tons of catchable and sellable groundfish would have been caught in those years? With each pound of groundfish landed generating five bucks or so of economic activity, every 100,000 metric tons of landings means over a billion dollars pumped into the New England economy. That kind of money would do some serious “fixing.”

And what about spiny dogfish? There are about a million tons of them out there, and they’re having a huge negative impact on other species and other fisheries from Cape Hatteras to up past the Hague Line. How many boats, how many fish cutters, how many truckers and how many of every other kind of tradesman or woman that gets a piece of the fish pie could an extra fifty- or a hundred-thousand tons of dogfish support? And what would a significantly reduced dogfish biomass do for all of those competing stocks, including groundfish (see the note below)?

The groundfish stocks definitely aren’t broken. As the folks at NMFS admit, the fish are there. Going by the target TAC, there are enough catchable groundfish to support a fishery as big as it was in the late 1960s or the early 80s. And if the huge biomass of spiny dogfish could be reasonably reduced, there would be even more, and more fluke, and scup, and sea bass, and striped bass, and on and on and on as well. But the 2009 spiny dogfish TAC is under 6,000 metric tons. That’s not going to make a noticeable dent in the dogfish stock, which will thereby continue to make sizeable – and very noticeable – dents in just about every other stock.

But, with their seemingly obsessive focus on implementing the groundfish sector program, Phase I of Dr. Lubchenco’s “catch share revolution,” and with that huge uncaught TAC staring us in the face, it’s awfully difficult not to suspect that the NMFS leadership has turned a blind eye towards anything that would allow more of the allowable groundfish to be caught. And it seems the same blind eye has been turned towards anything – say, for example, reducing the spiny dogfish biomass – that would increase the allowable groundfish catch. If there’s any rational reasoning behind the former other than reducing the perceived need for revolutionizing groundfish management it’s really hard to understand what it might be. It’s not so difficult to see why no one is doing anything serious to increase the TAC. A hundred and thirty thousand tons of uncaught TAC must be hard enough to explain (or to not explain, which has been the case up until now). Could you imagine being a manager and having to explain – or not – even more?

Putting it as succinctly as possible, there are four times more catchable groundfish in New England than are being caught, and if it wasn’t for a huge biomass of spiny dogfish that ratio would be higher. Yet the people at NMFS haven’t made any substantive efforts to allow fishermen to harvest more of the uncaught groundfish TAC or significantly more (in terms of predation on or competition with other species) spiny dogfish. And while not doing all of that, they’ve apparently also botched the job of groundfish record keeping, which to the fishermen is undoubtedly the most critical part of the entire catch shares process.

And last but certainly not least, from the September 10 Gloucester Daily Times, “ignoring the wishes of 109,817 Massachusetts online voters, the federal government has rejected Gloucester’s Man at the Wheel for engraving on the back of a series of U.S. quarters. Chosen in a landslide over hundreds of other sites in Massachusetts in Internet voting this spring, the Gloucester Fishermen’s Memorial and its iconic image of the man at sea was deemed ineligible for the quarter program because it is not federally maintained, according to a Mint spokeswoman” (Feds nix ‘Man at the Wheel’ for state quarter honor by Patrick Anderson).

In addition to the comedy of errors that management of one of our oldest and most important commercial fisheries has become, in addition to commercial fishermen being frozen out of the Obama Administration’s selection process for the leader of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and in addition to commercial fishermen being frozen out of the selection process for the head of the National Marine Fisheries Service, commercial fishermen are now even being denied recognition on the back of a U.S. coin. Kind of makes me wonder what’s coming next, but while I’m wondering I’m strapping on my crash helmet and mapping out my quickest route to the bomb shelter.

Note: According to The Ecosystem Status Report for the Northeast U.S. Continental Shelf Large Marine Ecosystem by the NMFS Ecosystem Assessment Program just published this month, “the direct and indirect effects of species-selective harvesting patterns have also contributed to shifts fish community composition which is now dominated by small pelagic fishes and elasmobranch species (skates and small sharks) of low relative economic value.” Assuming each spiny dogfish consumes 1.5% of its total body weight in prey species daily, every 60 days the total biomass of dogfish off New England will eat an equivalent weight in other species, for a total of 6 million metric tons of spiny dogfish predation a year.

Contact Your Representatives

Nils urges readers — whatever their perspective — to communicate with their elected officials.  The more people who do this, the more responsive – and responsible – they’ll get.  None of this is a lot of work, but it will take some effort and might make you uncomfortable, but your future depends on it. 

First off, there are few things that I find as rewarding, at least work-wise, as hearing from anyone in the fish and seafood industry that something I’ve written has been right on target. That kind of feedback is invaluable to me, because without it, what do I know?

Running a close second on my reward meter is constructive criticism of what I’ve written. I’m not familiar with every segment of the industry and I don’t converse regularly with people from all over who are involved in fishing. If I step on a toe, if I misstate a fact, if I screw up in any way, shape or form, I’m only going to know if somebody tells me. Once you get past the stage where you’re sitting in a lecture hall taking notes on how one expert or another interprets his or her little corner of the world, that’s in large part what learning is all about.

Unfortunately, but pleasantly, I get far more of the former than the latter, and while the compliments feel a lot better, there’s not a lot I can do with them. If I didn’t already think that what I wrote was accurate, incisive, valuable, useful, illuminating, revolutionary, etc., in all probability I wouldn’t have written it.

However, this is all taking us to a much more important point. Whether you read it here or elsewhere, if you come across something that you know should be considered by the people who shape our fisheries policies, it’s up to you to make sure that they consider it. Don’t count on someone else doing it, because if you do, it might not get done. If you do it and another person does it as well, so much the better. And if a dozen or so do it, that’s better still. When it comes to substantive public participation (and that doesn’t mean signing on to a form letter on a web site), the more the merrier definitely applies.

There’s one thing that you have to keep in mind. No one can present your perspective on fisheries issues to the people representing you in Washington with anywhere near the effectiveness that you can. But that’s only if they know who you are, where you live and what you do. It’s your job to see that they do.

How do you do that? If you know your zip code and have a telephone, it’s really pretty simple.

There are a number of websites that give you free and easy to get information about your two Senators and one Representative. As an example, I’ll use Roll Call at Congress.org (http://www.congress.org/congressorg/directory/congdir.tt), but there are others. While it and similar websites have a wealth of useful information, for now let’s focus on reaching your Senator X, Senator Y and Representative Z.

Enter your zip code in the window and click on “GO.” You’ll be provided with a list of your state and federal elected officials. Click on their names and you’ll get a lot of relevant information including their local and Washington office phone numbers. Call and ask to speak to the Chief of Staff, who’s listed on the website.

After introducing yourself, tell the COS your background in and local connections to the seafood industry and your general concerns about federal fisheries management. Then say you’ve got some particular concerns and you’d like to talk about them with whoever is responsible for environmental/fisheries issues.

Make sure that the staffer you’re referred to knows that the referral was by the Chief of Staff. After talking about your current issue, say that you’ll be forwarding relevant information on this issue, and that you want to be sure that the Congresswoman, Congressman or Senator is made aware of it. Also mention that you’ll be sending other important information as you come across it in the future.

Get the staffer’s email address, send the article, letter, etc., wait a few days then call back and ask what the Representative or Senator thought of it. If you don’t get a satisfactory answer, say you’ll call back in a day or two. And follow through.

Use a similar approach with members of the print or broadcast media. When something gets printed or aired about fishing that’s wrong, let the reporter, the producer, the editor or the station’s or paper’s ombudsman know, and let them know that you’re a local business person whose business is being hurt by their failure to “get it right.” Offer whatever proof you have demonstrating that they’re wrong, or offer to put them in touch with people who will show them the error of their ways.

The more people who do this, the more responsive – and responsible – they’ll get.

None of this is a lot of work, but it will take some effort and might make you uncomfortable, but your future depends on it.

And on another, related note, it’s become the vogue among some of the defenders of the way things are heading to argue that complaints without suggested solutions are without value. Let me be the first on the block to label that argument as utter nonsense. We have thousands of scientists and bureaucrats on the government payroll getting paid well and regularly to manage our fisheries. Their job is to keep you catching or cutting or selling fish or manufacturing boxes or repairing marine electronics or whatever. Your job, as far as fisheries management is concerned, is to keep them apprised of how they’re doing at keeping you catching or cutting or selling. If you have suggestions about how they could do it better, fine, but don’t buy into the idea that unless you can tell them how to do it better, you have no right to criticize what they’re doing or how they’re doing it. Fortunately, that’s not the way our government works.

Hilborn-Worm: Not a Human Interest Story 

The New York Times failed to mention that the fish stocks in the Northeast have rebounded quite well. This is one of the most positive aspects of the report as well as the one most relevant to New York readers, and it happened without the imposition of catch shares. 

If you’re at all familiar with fishing issues, and if you’re reading this it’s a safe bet that you are, you’re aware of the publication in the current issue of the journal Science of an important article dealing with fisheries management from a global perspective. In the article, Rebuilding Global Fisheries, lead authors Ray Hilborn and Boris Worm and over a dozen coauthors conclude that not all is doom and gloom in the world’s fisheries and that we’re not facing the inevitable decline of all of our fisheries culminating in an ocean filled with jellyfish and similar critters.

There’s been a reasonable amount of media coverage of the article, and I don’t intend to add to or rehash any of it here, so to stay informed I suggest that you examine some of it on your own (starting with Richard Gaines’ work in the Gloucester Times). What to me is much more interesting is the character of some of that coverage, particularly relative to the coverage of other “blockbuster” fisheries research that we’ve been subject to over the past few years.

For anyone familiar with the real-world status of domestic or international fisheries, the article didn’t break any new ground. Most simply stated, some of the world’s fisheries are in good shape, some are improving, some are in trouble, and fisheries management can and does work though it’s not effectively applied everywhere. There aren’t any revelations there unless your understanding of fisheries issues is no more profound than that provided by the anti-fishing, marine conservationist claque with their “the oceans are devastated and it’s all the fishing industry’s fault” mantra.

Also not news, though still edifying to see in print, is the fact that the fisheries off the Northeast US were doing well and getting better (be on the lookout for an upcoming issue of FishNet USA in which I’ll be writing about what’s really happening with the New England groundfish fishery). Management in New England and the Mid-Atlantic is paying off, at least for the fish.

Most of the media coverage of the report made note of this, adopting the general tone that things aren’t as bad as they might be, and there’s light at the end of the tunnel.

However, a curt press release by Rebecca Goldburg, director of Marine Science at the Pew Environment Group (which along with all of the other Pew-supported organizations has been part of a frighteningly well-financed campaign pushing for a revolution in how we mange our fisheries and our oceans) totally ignored all of the positive content in the report, ending with "two scientists who once held opposing views about the state of ocean fisheries now agree about the significance of global fisheries declines and the solutions needed to reverse these trends. If fishery managers worldwide heed these important scientific findings, then we have an extraordinary opportunity to restore ocean fisheries." No surprises there, why would anyone connected with the Pew machine want to admit that there’s anything positive going on in the oceans? Pew’s been pushing an agenda, and why should that change?

But what about the supposedly objective media?

In her coverage, Cornelia Dean at the New York Times focused almost exclusively on the “human” dimensions, rhapsodizing about scientists from two previously opposing camps finally coming together for the greater good of us all, and of the world’s oceans and fisheries.

While she did report that the authors “wrote that management techniques like closing some areas to fishing, restricting the use of certain fishing gear or allocating shares of the catch to individual fishermen, communities or others could allow depleted fish stocks to rebound,” Ms. Dean failed to mention that the fish stocks in the Northeast have rebounded quite well. This is one of the most positive aspects of the report as well as the one most relevant to New York Times readers, and it happened without the imposition of catch shares. Need I mention that catch shares, in essence a system of privatization of our fisheries, are at the foundation of the fisheries management revolution that the Pew campaign has been fomenting?

Looking back at Ms. Dean’s coverage of the publication by Boris Worm that was the first in the string of events that led to the recent Science article (Study Sees ‘Global Collapse’ of Fish Species, 11/03/2006), she went much farther into the scientific nitty-gritty, among other things quoting Jane Lubchenco, at the time at Oregon State University and now head of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, as saying the article was “compelling…. It’s a meta analysis and there are challenges in interpreting those, but when you get the same patterns over and over and over, that tells you something.” Somehow Ms. Dean failed to get Dr. Lubchenco’s reaction to Rebuilding Global Fisheries, about as close as one can get to an outright refutation of the study she found so compelling, and one by that study’s principal author. Now there’s an opportunity that I can’t imagine any journalist passing up, but Ms. Dean did.

(As a perhaps relevant aside, Josh Reichert, Director of the Pew Trusts’ Environment Program, fully endorsed Dr. Worm’s earlier work.)

Is Ms. Dean’s coverage of Rebuilding Global Fisheries reporting or is it editorializing? The people at the New York Times didn’t identify Ms. Dean’s piece as “opinion” so it’s probably meant to be the former. However, when looked at in relation to her reporting on Dr. Worm’s prior, though objectively less compelling, work and considering her penchant to educate Pew-supported researchers in how to deal with the media in tropical resorts (see Sea Around US Project Newsletter, November/December, 2002 at NewsLetter   ), is that what the readers of the New York Times, still one of the most important daily newspapers in the country, are actually getting?

Do a web search on “Cornelia Dean Pew” and compare any of the pieces Ms. Dean has written on Pew funded, supported or endorsed initiatives to her almost totally dismissive coverage of the good news content of Rebuilding Global Fisheries. While she did write “but they [the authors] also agreed that fish in well-managed areas, including the United States, were recovering or doing well,” that’s hardly the take home message I came away with.

One of the most important points in Rebuilding Global Fisheries is that managing fisheries as we have been doing it in the United States has been and will continue to be effective. We don’t need a revolution in fisheries management to get to sustainable fisheries because in fishery after fishery we are either there or well on the way and the mega-foundations that are pouring money into “reforming” how we do it would do well to find something really useful to do with their dollars. For whatever reason, that got right by Ms. Dean. Unfortunately, that means that it probably got by the people who read the New York Times.

They deserve more than that, and so do our fishermen and those that depend on them.

In 2008 the New England fleet caught just 43,000 of the 172,000 metric ton total allowable catch. If fishermen matter to policymakers, why wasn’t there a crash program to figure out how they could catch and sell some of the 130,000 metric tons of groundfish that went uncaught and unsold last year?

Peter Shelley, Vice President of the Conservation Law Foundation in Rockland, Maine, sent a letter to the editor of the Gloucester Daily Times published on the Fourth of July that was critical of the thorough and ongoing commercial fishing coverage the paper has been providing. In it he raised the specter of a conspiracy regarding fisheries management and a pending upheaval in the way New England groundfish will be managed.

He ended his letter with the question “isn’t it time to put the conspiracy theories away?” Of course Mr. Shelley wasn’t claiming that a conspiracy is actually ongoing behind the massive shift in management philosophy in our nation’s oldest fishery, he was suggesting that the Times was supporting (or proposing) the idea that a conspiracy actually existed when it didn’t.

Now why would he do that? Obviously, that’s something that’s impossible for me to even speculate about. But I have a pretty good idea of what the effects of his suggestion were on those who read it. To the general public, conspiracy theories are automatically associated with wild-eyed fanatics, black helicopters, grassy knolls and Roswell, New Mexico. Whether he intended to or not, Mr. Shelley was putting reporter Richard Gaines, the editorial staff of the Times and the fishermen up and down our coasts — who know that things aren’t right in many of our commercial fisheries — in that same category, aluminum foil hats and all.

Need I mention that Mr. Shelley and the Conservation Law Foundation have benefited from the Pew Charitable Trust’s largess since he was awarded a Pew fellowship back in 1996.

According to Merriam-Webster, a conspiracy theory is “a theory that explains an event or set of circumstances as the result of a secret plot by usually powerful conspirators.”

Now we’ve definitely got an “event or set of circumstances” going on in fisheries management and ocean governance in the U.S., and the New England groundfish fishery is at the epicenter. It’s a fact that a number of people with high level, long term relationships with the multibillion dollar Pew Charitable Trusts, established with Sun Oil megabucks and apparently still largely under the control of the family of founder Joseph Pew, have been chosen for leadership roles in the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). This is the federal agency that is responsible for just about everything non-military in the world’s oceans that involves the U.S. government and the U.S. people. But this is hardly a secret, and “secret” is the operative word in defining a conspiracy. That cat’s much too far out of the bag – and has been for much too long – for it to be considered anything but common knowledge by anyone who’s interested. And so is the fact that Pew has funded to the tune of many tens of millions of dollars much of the current campaign to reform our commercial fisheries and to convince legislators, media and the public that such reform is urgently needed. 

Nor is it a secret that those Pew-connected officials at NMFS/NOAA are convinced that the solution to our supposedly overwhelming fisheries problems, beginning with the New England groundfish fishery, lies in privatizing those fisheries, as are their colleagues in the foundation-funded Environmental Non-government Organization (ENGO)  world. In fact it is so far from a secret that at a high level investment conference in Los Angeles earlier this year, representatives of one of these ENGOs, the Environmental Defense Fund, were touting fisheries quotas as a good place for the attendees (largely representatives of charitable foundations) to put their bucks. No secret there; in fact an audio transcript of the seminar session is available on the web.

And, as the ongoing investigation by the Department of Commerce’s own Inspector General’s office into NOAA/NMFS enforcement activities in New England indicates, it isn’t any secret that things might be rotten not just in Denmark. Just to put icing on the cake, NOAA/NMFS was apparently hand feeding information about pending legal actions in Gloucester, Massachusetts to specific members of the media even before notifying the people who were supposed to be on the receiving end of those actions. It’s hard to see that as anything other than an attempt by a government agency to manipulate press coverage, favoring particular reporters and papers over others in an effort to influence what the public sees and when. There is such a taint there that a federal judge has demanded an explanation from NOAA/NMFS.

None of this is secret, In fact, in much of the fishing industry it’s common knowledge. That makes it kind of difficult to credit Mr. Shelley’s claim that the people at the Times, or anyone else, are pushing the idea of a conspiracy.

But  all of this is minor compared to the fact that in a recent publication NOAA/NMFS revealed that in 2008 the New England fleet caught just 43,000 metric tons of of groundfish out of a target TAC (total allowable catch) of 172,000 tons (Northeast Preliminary Fisheries Statistics, July, 2009, NMFS/NEFSC). The participants in a fishery which supposedly is and has been in an overfishing crisis, at least according to NOAA/NMFS and the foundation-funded “conservationist” organizations including Mr. Shelley’s Conservation Law Foundation, were allowed to catch only 25% of the fish that were available to be caught. This crisis, supposedly incapable of being addressed via conventional fisheries management tools, is being claimed as justification for a switch to a management regime that may have a cataclysmic impact on New England’s fisheries; a type of management demonstrated to be effective in only a 121 of 11,135 fisheries worldwide. ("Can Catch Shares Prevent Fisheries Collapse?", Costello et al., Science 19 September 2008: Vol. 321. no. 5896, p. 1679)

To suggest that “catch shares” have been a proven management method in the real world (as opposed to the computer programs of the theoreticians who are now in control, that’s the one with real fish, real fishermen, real boats and real salt water) and to implement them because of that strains credulity a lot more than the average government action does. Yet here we go. And why? To save the fish and the fishermen from overfishing in a fishery in which only a quarter of the fish that could be are actually being caught.

If fishermen really make a difference to those who are influencing or formulating government fisheries policy, why wasn’t there a crash program at NOAA/NMFS, perhaps utilizing some of those tens of millions of dollars that the people at Pew spend so eagerly on pushing their agenda, to figure out how all of those fishermen with time on their hands and boats at their docks could catch and sell some of that 130,000 metric tons of groundfish that went uncaught and unsold last year? If the harvest of groundfish could be doubled or trebled sustainably, why isn’t doing so getting as much attention from the managers – and from the “conservationists” who have been claiming they are on the side of both the fish and the fishermen – as is reducing the fleet size and totally disrupting the lives of so many people who depend on such an important fishery?

Could it be that Mr. Shelley wasn’t far off base in raising the specter of a conspiracy after all?         

Are accused fishermen entitled to a presumption of innocence? In a recent journal article Jon Sutinen and Dennis King note that a violation “is a violation even though it may not be prosecuted or have a resolution that results in a penalty.” In their widely-publicized analysis, they count all accusations "as actual violations.” 

 

Ask law enforcement officers whether they thought that the people who were issued summons were guilty, regardless of whether the summons resulted in a penalty of any sort or not. What are the odds that the majority of responses would be that the recipients of the summons were guilty, regardless of the outcome? Common sense and human nature argue that it would be pretty high – that’s why we have judges, courts, trials, hearings and such.

Our system of justice is predicated on the assumption that people are innocent until proven guilty. Evidently Jon Sutinen’s (University of Rhode Island) and Dennis King’s (University of Maryland) isn’t.

In the report on their research on the New England Groundfish Fishery that they published in the journal Marine Policy in April of this year (Rational noncompliance and the liquidation of Northeast groundfish resources), Professors Sutinen and King demonstrated that the academic world they inhabit isn’t constrained by such silliness.

Examining 1,689 “probable violations” in a NMFS database, they state “33% of (the) violations reported by law enforcement resulted in one or more types of penalties.” Particularly considering the cloud of overzealous prosecution that has been hanging over the fisheries enforcement bureaucracy in the Northeast for the past year or so, to most of us it would seem reasonable to believe that those fishermen who were not penalized were in all likelihood innocent.

Not according to Sutinen and King. They write in a footnote “interviews with NOAA enforcement staff and others familiar with this database indicate that in many cases enforcement officers have probable cause to inspect for a violation and, if after inspecting they decide to report a violation, it probably is a violation even though it may not be prosecuted or have a resolution that results in a penalty.” This leads to “based on this criterion, 1,614 of the 1,689 incidents (95.6%) reported during this period probably are actual violations and, for purposes of this analysis, will be treated as actual violations.” 

In Sutinen’s and King’s analysis you’re damned if you’re convicted and you’re damned if you’re not. Judge Roy Bean would have approved whole-heartedly.

And of course there’s more. They use the assumption that only a third of the fishermen who cheat are cited for fishing violations in making the determination that “by fishing illegally a midsize trawler in the NEGF fishery is estimated to increase expected earnings per trip by $5,500.” With the $1,116 cost of the average penalty assessed, they conclude that “when compared with the illegal gain, the economic incentive not to comply is $4,334 per trip.” They continue “normative factors, such as moral obligation and peer and community pressure often induce fishers to be law-abiding despite potential illegal gains,” but in the case of the New England groundfish fishermen those “normative factors” are weak because, in essence, the fishery is in such a mess and the fishermen hold management responsible for the mess it’s in. Hence, more fishermen in New England cheat.

Andrew Cohen, Special Agent-in-Charge for the National Marine Fisheries Service’s Office of Law Enforcement, was quoted in a recent article in the Boston Globe (B. MacQuarrie, Seafood auction gets ban of 10 days, 06/20/09) as estimating “that 98 percent of the US fishing fleet from the Canadian border to the Carolinas adheres to the law.” He should know. Its not news to anyone reading this that many of the thousands of fishermen that Agent Cohen is referring to aren’t satisfied with how their fisheries are being managed, a lot of them realize that they could do quite a bit better economically if they “cheated” on the rules, and their chances of getting caught don’t differ significantly from their colleagues’ in the groundfish fishery. Yet we’re to assume from Sutinen’s and King’s paper that the New England groundfish fishermen are somehow different.

So what’s the impact of this “condemned by probable cause” view of commercial fishermen? Naturally, the up-front conclusion is that the fishery management system has broken down and needs radical surgery before it can work again. Another conclusion is that an awful lot of fishermen, particularly in New England, are bad actors who look at breaking the law simply in terms of the probability that they’ll get caught and what it will cost them if they do. They’re not the victims of a management system that has been distorted beyond reasonableness by megabucks of foundation-funded interference, they’re coldly calculating “criminals” that deserve anything that the conservationist community does to them.     

Being published in an academic journal would normally relegate this research to the dust bin of history, only being dredged up by other academics every once and while to be used in other such studies. Not this time. The research was supported by the Lenfest Ocean Program, which as of May of ’09 was being administered by the Pew Environment Group. As with other Pew-connected research critical of fishing and fisheries management, Professors Sutinen and King and their inescapable indictment of commercial fisherman – that given a reasonable return to compensate for the risk involved in cheating, fishermen will do it, and that their doing it in New England is a significant factor in preventing the recovery of groundfish – enjoyed an uncharacteristically wide coverage for such academic esoterica in the media.

Can this be considered anything but another step to marginalize commercial fishermen? The timing is impeccable. The study – and the media attention that was generated for it – saw the light of day only a few weeks before the New England Council was due to make its final determination on taking management of the groundfish fishery in a totally new direction, a direction, I probably don’t have to add, that while virtually untested is supported whole-heartedly by the heavily Pew-connected higher-ups at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the National Marine Fisheries Service’s parent agency, and various and sundry ENGOs that are hell-bent on “fixing” our fisheries regardless of the costs to fishing communities.    

Would yet another indictment of how the groundfish fishery is being managed, and of the fishermen who are being managed, help nudge this transformation? Borrowing a line from the movie Fargo, “you’re darn tootin.”

 

 

 

"Fortunately, we have some people in Washington who see what’s really going on. Senator Schumer is as concerned about his fishing constituents as he is about the fish, just as Congressmen Pallone, Frank, Jones, LoBiondo, Kennedy, Adler and others in the House of Representatives are. "

Our friends in Washington are catching on 

I know it’s asking a lot, but imagine that you’re a career employee of a mega-billion dollar foundation or one of the non-government organizations that depends on it for handouts. You get paid regularly and well as long as you “produce” for the folks who sign the checks, because the interest from those endowments keeps on rolling in. 

If you’re on the high end of the foundation/NGO food chain, you’re probably the product of an Ivy League school or two, and to suggest that your connections with anyone in the real world, or with the day-to-day problems they increasingly face in just trying to get by, is severely limited would be a understatement of earth shattering proportions. 

What, you worry? Sure, but not about the stuff that keeps the common folk awake at night. Wallowing in financial security thanks to the earnings of those Big Oil investments, you worry about the fish. You don’t worry about the thousands or tens of thousands of working stiffs whose lives are going to be immediately and severely impacted by your “devotion” to the fish because you’re convinced that in the long run the fishermen, their families and the working communities they support will be better off thanks to your concern.  

A couple of lean years for them? So what? You’re facing economic challenges as well. The market’s way down and those investments aren’t generating bucks the way they used to. You’ve had to reduce your travel budget (no fun and frolics in Molokai, La Paz or Virgin Gorda this year – see this list of Pew Fellows 1990-2004 meeting locations) along with letting a few clericals go, and haven’t renewed some contracts, but when the economy improves, your budget will be back where it belongs and your privileged world will be intact once again. 

And here comes this Senator from New York, a guy who has actual working people as his constituents, and actually cares about them. He cares so much about them, in fact, that he ignores all of the ecocatastrophic babble that you and your foundation-funded colleagues have been spewing and introduces legislation that attempts to give working fishermen and their families as much consideration as you have given the fish. Needless to say, it’s time to crank up the PR machine, and your opening salvo is an editorial in the New York Times. Why the NY Times? The editorial board is as solidly Ivy League and apparently as out of touch with real working people as you and your colleagues, and you’ve hung out with Ivy educated Cornelia Dean, the Times’ premier science editor/writer at Pew “retreats” at upscale resorts in Key Largo and Bonaire. 

Seems a little elitist, doesn’t it?

In fact, it sounds a lot elitist. But, fortunately, we have some people in Washington who are finally looking beneath the ever-expanding oil slick and seeing what’s really going on in our oceans. New York’s Senator Schumer is as concerned about his fishing constituents as he is about the fish, just as Congressmen Pallone, Frank, Jones, LoBiondo, Kennedy, Adler and others in the House of Representatives are. Hence they have formed the nucleus of a growing movement in Congress that, in spite of the editorial opinion of the New York Times and the expenditure of many millions of dollars by the Pew Chartable Trusts, is aimed at preserving recreational and commercial fishing, the lifestyles of millions of fishermen, and the tens of thousands of businesses and hundreds of fishing communities that they support. Just like the Magnuson Act intended before it was sabotaged by supposed marine conservationists. 

At face value it’s about nothing more than timing; a stock can be rebuilt in ten years by inflicting a massive amount of damage on those who depend on harvesting it, or it can be rebuilt in a slightly longer period with a correspondingly lessened impact. And while I’m not telling anyone reading this anything they don’t already know far too well, with today’s economic climate, most of us – unless we have our hands in the deep pockets of one tax exempt mega-foundation or another – aren’t in any position to absorb any unnecessary economic impact. 

What’s the difference between having a particular fishery rebuilt today or rebuilt in a couple of years? To the fishermen and to the fishing dependent businesses the difference is obvious. They get to keep on fishing and they get to keep the money coming in. They get to stay in business, and our coastal communities get to maintain economies that aren’t entirely tourism-dependent. The consumers get to continue to enjoy fresh-caught local seafood. The coastal developers don’t get to swallow up even more out-of-business commercial docks, marinas, marine railroads and packing houses and replace them with cookie-cutter condos, but considering that once gone, a fishing-dependent waterfront business is very unlikely to be replaced, haven’t we had too much of that already? 

To the anti-fishing claque, however, the difference is that with rigid time frames you get to treat fishermen like criminals deserving punishment.

The bottom line is that virtually every fish stock under management in the US is rebuilding (and the few exceptions are due to non-fishing factors like habitat loss, climate change or pollution), and the management regime will insure the rebuilding will continue. So why inflict more economic pain on people who are already suffering in order to get to the same place rebuilding-wise a few years earlier? 

Is it that the “marine conservationists,” the foundations that fund them and the media people that support them are so completely out of touch with anything having to do with people who work for a living that they actually believe that their “fish first” philosophy is in anyway justified, or are there some ulterior motives involved? Whatever the case, at this point Senator Schumer and his Congressional colleagues in the House deserve the thanks and the support of every one of us who fishes, whether for fun or profit.

 

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. He is a regular contributor to Saving Seafood and operates the FishNet-USA website. 

At the May 6th meeting of New Bedford Mayor Scott Lang’s Ocean and Fisheries Council, Brian Rothschild and Kevin Stokesbury led a discussion about the proposal drafted in response to Governor Deval Patrick’s request.

Mayor’s Ocean and Fisheries Council Meeting

May, 6, 2009 – Waterfront Grille Restaurant, New Bedford MA

Meeting Summary

The Mayor’s Ocean and Fisheries Council met on May 6, 2009 at the Waterfront Grille restaurant in New Bedford, Massachusetts. The meeting was attended by forty-five people representing various stakeholders from the states of Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Maine. Brian Rothschild and Kevin Stokesbury, of the School for Marine Science and Technology, led a discussion about the proposal drafted in response to Governor Deval Patrick’s request. At the previous meeting of the Mayor’s Ocean and Fishery Council, Governor Patrick requested that Dr. Stokesbury draft a proposal within thirty days to address the perceived uncertainty within the Southern New England winter flounder assessment.

Stock Assessment & Uncertainty

Given the implications of the Southern New England winter flounder stock assessment and the inherent uncertainty, a review and examination of alternative interpretations has been proposed. A preliminary look at the data suggests that Southern New England winter flounder may undergo periodic pulses of strong recruitment, with intermittent periods of low abundance. If this theory was confirmed, it would suggest that the current estimated Bmsy is too high. Currently the Southern New England winter flounder stock is considered overfished, thus we are mandated to rebuild it. The rebuilding deadline is 2014; however, by current assessments there is less than a 1% chance of success, with no fishing mortality.

Modifying Boundaries

Through discussions with industry members, it became clear that the configuration of current Southern New England winter flounder “no take” zone is preventing fishermen from efficiently harvesting Georges Bank winter flounder and other groundfish species. The group proposed moving the “no take” boundary west, to line up with that of the Gulf of Maine 2:1 area, allowing fishermen to harvest Georges Bank winter flounder and other groundfish in one trip. Using study fleet data Dr. Stokesbury was able to demonstrate that Southern New England winter flounder are not caught within the area of the proposed boundary change, thus modification would not jeopardize stock recovery and would alleviate some stress on the fleet.

Alternative Fishing Strategies

The proposal also includes an investigation of alternative fishing strategies to minimize catch of Southern New England winter flounder while obtaining optimum yield from healthy stocks. Previous discussions with industry members yielded several species characteristics that could be used to design specialized fishing strategies. Spatial and temporal patterns in abundance, seasonal movements, and distribution at depth can be used to determine, on a fine scale, where the fish are located, and thus can be avoided. Gear modifications are also a promising solution. At the meeting it was pointed out that there are already two gears that catch little to no flounder; the Rhule trawl and Haddock Separator trawl.

Proposed Survey Program

At a previous meeting, the distribution of Southern New England winter flounder was discussed. Industry members identified an area where historically there have been high abundances of Southern New England winter flounder. Within this area the National Marine Fisheries Service has conducted, on average, eight survey tows. To further investigate the abundance and distribution of Southern New England winter flounder within the ‘target area,’ Dr. Stokesbury is proposing to conduct more than 200 survey tows with industry vessels. A tagging study and shadow survey have also been proposed. These experiments would provide valuable information about catch per unit effort (CPUE), abundance, by-catch, movement, migration, stock structure, size frequency, growth, and natural mortality. While Southern New England winter flounder are the primary focus of the proposal, it was logical to incorporate skates. Regulations associated with declines of thorny skate threaten over 500 jobs in New Bedford alone, and information can easily be gathered in association with the proposed survey.

Decision Support System

A frustration common among stakeholders is the current information systems, specifically the interface between independent data and management decisions. Many industry members feel that even if they were to produce information relevant to a particular stock assessment, it would not be incorporated into management decisions. With increased opportunities for cooperative research, and major changes to the current management regime, a system needs to be developed to more efficiently process and incorporate information into fishery management decisions. Currently such a system is being developed at the School for Marine Science and Technology, the Decision Support System.

There was general agreement on direction. A proposal to accomplish the tasks is being developed by the Massachusetts Marine Fisheries Institute (MFI).

 

The Northeast Seafood Coalition has expressed six observations regarding the NMFS Final Interim Rule.

1.       The Final Rule is an improvement from the previously proposed NMFS measures but falls short of the Council’s plan.  Furthermore, we cannot lose sight that these measures present an enormous loss from where we are today.

 

2.       The manner in which the economic figures in the Final Rule are represented masks the devastation these measures will have on the groundfish fishery.  The figures appear to incorporate the revenue of all fishing in aggregate including scallops, lobster, rather than examining groundfish revenue only.

 

3.       NMFS’s election to go beyond Magnuson requirements for an Interim Rule, especially for Southern England winter flounder, contributes to a substantial portion of these negative impacts.   

 

4.       NMFS refers to this Final Rule as a "bridge"; however, we need to fully understand where this "bridge" is leading. It cannot be a bridge to nowhere. A bridge to an undefined future provides no benefit.

 

5.       Any discussion of a "bridge" needs must not be theoretical. This "bridge" must be built immediately, and public investment is required.  The fishery needs transitional assistance; funding and other responsibilities cannot fall on a fishery that has been financially crippled by regulations and unrealistic law. NMFS must lead this effort by committing substantial human and financial resources.   

 

6.       The completion of Amendment 16 and the development and implementation of “Sectors” is threatened if the Southern New England winter flounder assessment is allowed to stand.  NMFS needs to focus 2009 resources towards updating this assessment.

Saving Seafood has submitted this response to the Boston Globe's March 27 editorial "Bring this Fishery Back".  

Also, read Jessica Burrows' letter to the editor. 

by Robert B. Vanasse, Executive Director 

The Globe’s March 27 Editorial “Bring this Fishery Back” correctly assessed the one-year “Interim Rule” proposed by the National Marine Fisheries Service for 2009 as “restrictions that come close to shutting the fishery down”; but nonetheless urges the NOAA administrator Dr. Jane Lubchenco to impose them.

The Globe states that the NOAA Administrator “could offset some of the financial loss to the industry by paying fishermen for their work in making the transition to the new management system.”  Perhaps she “could” do this if there were funds available under the direct control of the Administrator for this purpose, but there are not.

While the system proposed for 2010 onward is expected to improve safety by alleviating the current system’s pressure to work in foul weather, the Interim Rule’s closed areas and restrictions decrease safety by encouraging fishermen to travel further than usual in small boats.

The Globe mischaracterizes the one-year rule as being “designed to give groundfish stocks … a chance to rebound [before 2010]”.  Species with a 7-12 year lifespan do not rebound in a single year. The 2010 system is expected to provide incentives to rebuild stocks, but the 2009 rule is a stop-gap measure for a single year.  It is not expected to achieve the management reforms and resource improvements that the 2010 system intends. A stop-gap measure should not shut down an industry.

The editorial did not mention that there is an alternative interim plan for an 18% cut that passed the New England Fisheries Management Council by a 15-1 vote — with the support of both industry and environmental advocates.  The lone vote against this plan was cast by the regional NMFS administrator, who advanced the more severe plan against the advice of her statutorily-mandated advisory council.

The Globe correctly observed that Marine Fisheries scientists limit the total allowable catch to amounts they believe are sustainable.  But it ignored the long history of regulation that prevents fishermen from actually catching to these limits. Only two species (monkfish 101% and white hake 87%) of the ten species for which NMFS statistics are available had commercial landings at levels near the total permitted.  For most species, fishermen landed only 4%-52% of the allowed catch.  For haddock and cod, two mainstays of the New England Fishery, only 32% and 48% of the limits were landed. 

Uncaught fish are not sold at auction.  Uncaught fish translate to dollars that did not go to working families, and taxes that were not paid to struggling municipalities during difficult times.  Poor regulatory schemes have forced New England fishermen to leave half of their potential legal within-limit earnings in the sea.

The Globe’s position, like the NMFS proposed interim rule, ignores National Standard 8 of the Magnusen-Stevens Act: “Conservation and management measures shall… take into account the importance of fishery resources to fishing communities in order to (A) provide for the sustained participation of such communities, and (B) to the extent practicable, minimize adverse economic impacts on such communities.”