May 30, 2013 — Bullard and other NOAA officials should be required to answer serious questions as to how this ill-conceived listing got as far as it did in the first place — and as to what this travesty says about the credibility of NOAA’s fishery science in the first place if the agency ever looked at even circumstantial evidence that suggested such protections were needed.
From the start, NOAA’s tentative listing of the Atlantic sturgeon as an endangered stock last year was a travesty — a shameful, sure-fire sign that this federal agency, still under the leadership of pseudo-scientist and then-administrator Jane Lubchenco, was essentially in the pockets of hard-line environmental groups.
NOAA, after all, had not carried out a stock assessment on the sturgeon, officials conceded; it merely backed a petition from the nonprofit Natural Resources Defense Council. And in the process, it set the stage for keeping fishermen from accessing other stocks in the sturgeon’s common inshore swimming grounds, since it would put clamps on hauling up any ugly sturgeon as bycatch.
Now, however, NOAA is pulling back the “endangered” listing, based on a draft biological finding that other fisheries, in fact, pose “no jeopardy” to the sturgeon at all. Indeed, as Allison McHale, special assistant to NOAA’s Gloucester-based regional administrator John Bullard put it, “the population seems higher than we thought.”
That is, of course, good news. Aside from the health of the sturgeon itself, the lifting of this listing would have fishermen breathing a bit easier — if, of course, they had any meaningful quota among most stocks to pursue in the first place.
Read the full editorial at the Gloucester Daily Times