June 28, 2013 — The facts I pay attention to leave me, unfortunately, completely comfortable in concluding that these are the worst of times for Atlantic cod.
There remain some marginal voices in the fishing industry who continue to claim that cod populations are not in bad shape. Taking issue with a recent conclusion of mine that Atlantic cod were in their worst condition in history, these apologists for overfishing suggest that cod are just “in the middle of a rebuilding period.” Nonsense. Atlantic cod have been officially determined to be overfished since 1990 and been in a “rebuilding period” since 1995. They are not even close to the halfway point of being rebuilt even after 23 years of “management.” I suspect there are some who don’t care if cod ever come back.
The facts are this: the 2012 federal fall trawl survey and the Massachusetts spring trawl survey—both independent, science-driven and fully objective processes—each caught the fewest Atlantic cod during their survey that they ever have in the full history of the surveys. The federal spring survey in New England started in 1968; the state survey started in 1978. Is this a situation that the industry really wants to quibble about?
Read the full opinion piece at the Conservation Law Foundation's Talking Fish blog