December 16, 2012 — On fishermen's trucks in coastal New England, a popular bumper sticker tells a grim story: “National Marine Fisheries Service: Destroying Commercial Fishermen and their Families Since 1976.”
It’s a great sound bite. And for men from New Bedford, Chatham, or Boothbay who have had to tie up their boats because of federal regulations, or withdraw from the fishery altogether to make ends meet, it rings painfully true. 1976 marked the moment when the National Marine Fisheries Service actively took over the regulation of fishing, and today’s fishermen have spent most or all of their careers chafing under catch limits, fishing ground closures, and rules about days at sea. As environmentalists and fishermen argue year after year about which population is suffering more—working fishermen or the fish they rely on—it is easy to assume that conflict is inevitable, and that fishermen and regulators have always been at each other’s throats.
Yet their relationship was once just the opposite. In fact, when the government first began to intervene in the key business of New England fisheries right after the Civil War, it was at the request of fishermen, who insisted that the government help them contend with declining fish stocks. The solutions they found to shore up fishermen’s livelihoods—sometimes passing regulations to restrict overfishing, but more often helping fishermen develop new technologies to fish harder—were effective in the short term, enabling the industry to survive to the present day. But through nearly all these years, the health and productivity of marine ecosystems continued their decline.
What rings loudly in today’s complaints, and in the tale told by those bumper stickers, is the notion that fishing has only recently been regulated, and shouldn’t be. But regulators and fishermen have a far longer and more complex relationship than that. The tragic drama over depleted stocks, and about overfishing and its consequences, has been playing out for more than 150 years. Regulators, scientists, and fishermen have taken different roles over the decades, sometimes playing the alarmists, other times resisting them. The consequences—fewer fish—have been the same. Today, making progress on the severely depleted fishery depends on looking much deeper into the history of this industry so key to the region’s past, and finding a way to collaborate once more.
Read the full story at the Boston Globe