June 8, 2020 — We here at FishOn get most of our news from the man with cleft stick that visits our village, barring the monsoon, on a semi-regular basis. It’s a bit cumbersome, but that’s the price you pay for enlightenment. At least he doesn’t do a podcast.
That’s how we learned that President Donald Trump traveled up to our neck of the woods — well, Maine — last Friday and held a roundtable discussion with members of the Pine State’s seafood industry. Though, according to our crack FishEye investigative team onsite, the tables were actually horizontal. We plan a 10-part series.
Trump, as you might have heard, signed a proclamation re-opening the 5,000 square-mile Northeast Canyon and Seamounts — which lie about 130 miles of Cape Cod — to commercial fishing. With one sweep of the pen, Trump heartened commercial fishing interests in Maine and beyond and enraged conservation and environmental groups throughout the solar system.
The marine national monument has been a wren’s nest of contention from the day in 2016 that President Barack Obama signed it into existence. Obama used the 1906 Antiquities Act —not exactly the bedrock legislation for national fisheries management — to create the first marine monument in the Atlantic Ocean.