The New England Fisheries Management Council began a three-day meeting today in Newport, Rhode Island which, according to the trade journal Greenwire, poses a "historic change" in fisheries management in New England.
NEFMC will be voting tomorrow on an "ecosystem approach" to fisheries management, which differs from the current methodology of species-specific management.
"Ecosystems-based management is just a fancy name for facing up to the fact that if you are going to take the food out of the mouth of one group of animals, there are going to be consequences for that. There is essentially no free lunch," said Jud Crawford, science manager for the Pew Environment Group's Northeast Fisheries Program in the Greenwire article. "If you take it from one place, you have to pay for it somewhere else."
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