May 2, 2013 — As a young Coast Guardsman in the 1970s, I saw the problems we faced enforcing our nation's fishing laws. Too many large foreign fishing trawlers, using devastatingly efficient technology, caught massive amounts of our fish. Today, those ships are gone, and we are on track to end the problem of overfishing in U.S. waters. In fact, we now have one of the most advanced marine resource management programs in the world.
These changes wouldn't have been possible without the 1976 passage of the Magnuson-Stevens Act, the bedrock of modern U.S. fisheries management law. Updates in 1996 and 2006 gave the law a greater conservation focus, requiring federal managers to rebuild depleted fish populations and set strong, science-based catch limits that prevent overfishing. This made a huge difference. Over the past 11 years, rebuilding plans have restored 32 severely depleted fisheries, including Pacific lingcod and mid-Atlantic bluefish.
The Magnuson-Stevens Act is due for another update. Though American coastal communities are starting to see a return on decades of hard work, the oceans face renewed pressure from a host of threats. Indiscriminate fishing practices continue to damage irreplaceable marine habitat, kill too many species incidental to the targeted catch, and remove too many of the small forage fish that provide food for many of the larger inhabitants of the ocean. Together with warming temperatures and more acidic waters, these ecosystem-wide burdens stand to undermine previous accomplishments.
We now know that saving our nation's fisheries one species at a time is an inefficient way of doing things. For many individual types of fish, current policies help stem the severe damage to them from overfishing. But the overall health of the oceans continues to deteriorate. Enormous trawlers can drag equipment across the ocean floor, scraping it almost bare and destroying places where marine organisms live. Other vessels deploy longlines that stretch an average of 30 miles, baited with hundreds of hooks, which catch and kill severely depleted bluefin tuna. They also haul in approximately 80 species of ocean wildlife, with most thrown back dead or dying. And the catch of small schooling fish such as Atlantic menhaden and Pacific sardines take away potential food from ocean predators, among them salmon, seabirds, and whales.
Lee Crockett is director of U.S. fisheries campaigns at The Pew Charitable Trusts, 901 E Street NW, Washington, D.C. 20004
Read the full opinion piece at The Miami Herald
Read more here: http://www.miamiherald.com/2013/05/02/3376219/a-new-approach-to-protect-our.html#storylink=cp
Read more here: http://www.miamiherald.com/2013/05/02/3376219/a-new-approach-to-protect-our.html#storylink=cpy