"Fortunately, we have some people in Washington who see what’s really going on. Senator Schumer is as concerned about his fishing constituents as he is about the fish, just as Congressmen Pallone, Frank, Jones, LoBiondo, Kennedy, Adler and others in the House of Representatives are. "
Our friends in Washington are catching on
I know it’s asking a lot, but imagine that you’re a career employee of a mega-billion dollar foundation or one of the non-government organizations that depends on it for handouts. You get paid regularly and well as long as you “produce” for the folks who sign the checks, because the interest from those endowments keeps on rolling in.
If you’re on the high end of the foundation/NGO food chain, you’re probably the product of an Ivy League school or two, and to suggest that your connections with anyone in the real world, or with the day-to-day problems they increasingly face in just trying to get by, is severely limited would be a understatement of earth shattering proportions.
What, you worry? Sure, but not about the stuff that keeps the common folk awake at night. Wallowing in financial security thanks to the earnings of those Big Oil investments, you worry about the fish. You don’t worry about the thousands or tens of thousands of working stiffs whose lives are going to be immediately and severely impacted by your “devotion” to the fish because you’re convinced that in the long run the fishermen, their families and the working communities they support will be better off thanks to your concern.
A couple of lean years for them? So what? You’re facing economic challenges as well. The market’s way down and those investments aren’t generating bucks the way they used to. You’ve had to reduce your travel budget (no fun and frolics in Molokai, La Paz or Virgin Gorda this year – see this list of Pew Fellows 1990-2004 meeting locations) along with letting a few clericals go, and haven’t renewed some contracts, but when the economy improves, your budget will be back where it belongs and your privileged world will be intact once again.
And here comes this Senator from New York, a guy who has actual working people as his constituents, and actually cares about them. He cares so much about them, in fact, that he ignores all of the ecocatastrophic babble that you and your foundation-funded colleagues have been spewing and introduces legislation that attempts to give working fishermen and their families as much consideration as you have given the fish. Needless to say, it’s time to crank up the PR machine, and your opening salvo is an editorial in the New York Times. Why the NY Times? The editorial board is as solidly Ivy League and apparently as out of touch with real working people as you and your colleagues, and you’ve hung out with Ivy educated Cornelia Dean, the Times’ premier science editor/writer at Pew “retreats” at upscale resorts in Key Largo and Bonaire.
Seems a little elitist, doesn’t it?
In fact, it sounds a lot elitist. But, fortunately, we have some people in Washington who are finally looking beneath the ever-expanding oil slick and seeing what’s really going on in our oceans. New York’s Senator Schumer is as concerned about his fishing constituents as he is about the fish, just as Congressmen Pallone, Frank, Jones, LoBiondo, Kennedy, Adler and others in the House of Representatives are. Hence they have formed the nucleus of a growing movement in Congress that, in spite of the editorial opinion of the New York Times and the expenditure of many millions of dollars by the Pew Chartable Trusts, is aimed at preserving recreational and commercial fishing, the lifestyles of millions of fishermen, and the tens of thousands of businesses and hundreds of fishing communities that they support. Just like the Magnuson Act intended before it was sabotaged by supposed marine conservationists.
At face value it’s about nothing more than timing; a stock can be rebuilt in ten years by inflicting a massive amount of damage on those who depend on harvesting it, or it can be rebuilt in a slightly longer period with a correspondingly lessened impact. And while I’m not telling anyone reading this anything they don’t already know far too well, with today’s economic climate, most of us – unless we have our hands in the deep pockets of one tax exempt mega-foundation or another – aren’t in any position to absorb any unnecessary economic impact.
What’s the difference between having a particular fishery rebuilt today or rebuilt in a couple of years? To the fishermen and to the fishing dependent businesses the difference is obvious. They get to keep on fishing and they get to keep the money coming in. They get to stay in business, and our coastal communities get to maintain economies that aren’t entirely tourism-dependent. The consumers get to continue to enjoy fresh-caught local seafood. The coastal developers don’t get to swallow up even more out-of-business commercial docks, marinas, marine railroads and packing houses and replace them with cookie-cutter condos, but considering that once gone, a fishing-dependent waterfront business is very unlikely to be replaced, haven’t we had too much of that already?
To the anti-fishing claque, however, the difference is that with rigid time frames you get to treat fishermen like criminals deserving punishment.
The bottom line is that virtually every fish stock under management in the US is rebuilding (and the few exceptions are due to non-fishing factors like habitat loss, climate change or pollution), and the management regime will insure the rebuilding will continue. So why inflict more economic pain on people who are already suffering in order to get to the same place rebuilding-wise a few years earlier?
Is it that the “marine conservationists,” the foundations that fund them and the media people that support them are so completely out of touch with anything having to do with people who work for a living that they actually believe that their “fish first” philosophy is in anyway justified, or are there some ulterior motives involved? Whatever the case, at this point Senator Schumer and his Congressional colleagues in the House deserve the thanks and the support of every one of us who fishes, whether for fun or profit.
Nils Stolpe has written "Another Perspective" since 2005. He is communications director for the Garden State Seafood Association, and has been a consultant to the fishing industry for over two decades. He is a regular contributor to Saving Seafood and operates the FishNet-USA website.