January 12, 2015 — "If decision makers do not use balanced and reasonably correct information in the development of conservation policy, we cannot hope to emerge intact from our current sustainability crises."
In “Where Have All the Cod Gone” (New York Times, Jan. 2) history professor W. Jeffrey Bolster claims that the “… recent ban on cod fishing in the Gulf of Maine (GOM) was an important step toward restoration.” He thinks that the present low levels of cod in the Gulf of Maine are the “tragic consequence of decision makers’ unwillingness to steer a precautionary course in the face of environmental uncertainties” and that “decisions could have been made to exploit fish stocks more sustainably” over the last 150 years. He states “overfishing has been the norm for a very long time."
But Bolster’s analysis is an oversimplification and a misunderstanding of this important conservation issue. And in a broader sense, it is symptomatic of how we misunderstand and oversimplify our conservation and sustainability issues, and how this limits our ability to develop efficient and cost-effective solutions.
There is a lot at stake! We need to understand that practical solutions require a reasonably accurate understanding of what we know and what we do not know. Faulty assumptions can easily engender unrecoverable societal costs. If decision makers do not use balanced and reasonably correct information in the development of conservation policy, we cannot hope to emerge intact from our current sustainability crises.
The state of the Gulf of Maine cod makes an excellent case study concerning the sustainability of our fish resources. So let’s ask three critical questions: 1) how reflective is the GOM cod of fisheries management in general; 2) is there a GOM cod stock; and 3) has the decline of the GOM cod really been caused by “massive nets dragged along the bottom that snared every fish in their path”(as stated by Bolster — a point in fact, the efficiency of trawl nets is closer to 30 percent than 100 percent)?
Read the full opinion piece from the New Bedford Standard-Times