December 22, 2013 — The New England groundfishery is a disaster. Conservationists know it, the federal government knows it, processors, shipyards and supply houses know it. And nobody knows it like fishermen do.
The source of the disaster can be summed up in a word: Complexity.
Around every corner in the quest to manage the groundfishery lurks another tangled issue.
Fishery managers declare catch limits that are little better than arbitrary because our definitions of overfishing are at odds, a condition created by murky, imprecise language in the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery and Conservation Management Act, further complicated by the inability to agree on the size of the fishery, its relative vitality, the impact of warming and acidifying oceans, the number of fish versus the size of the fish, the role of economics and management mechanisms "¦ you get the idea.
Dr. Brian Rothschild points out in the policy paper intended as a launching point for debate over the looming reauthorization of Magnuson-Stevens that a network of national institutes might make sense of this complexity.
Rothschild, the president of the fledgling Center for Sustainable Fisheries based in New Bedford and the former — and founding — dean of the UMass Dartmouth School of Marine Science and Technology, met with The Standard-Times editorial board last week to discuss reauthorization and the center's policy paper.
Read the full opinion piece at the New Bedford Standard-Times