July 27, 2013 — As director of the Ted Stevens Marine Research Institute in Juneau, I'm here to say there could be no more appropriate namesake for a federal fisheries research facility than the late Sen. Ted Stevens. His Senate record (from 1968 to 2009) leaves no doubt that Stevens' vision and tenacity are largely responsible for the laws and government institutions that secure the economic, environmental and cultural future of our nation's oceans.
Let us never forget the bad old days of 1968 when foreign fishing fleets overexploited marine resources on the high seas right up to three miles off the coast of the U.S. Many people worked diligently in the post-WWII era to make international agreements to reduce the effects of high-seas fishing. Yet, by 1968, most waters off Alaska were still wide open to the fish-killing foreign fleets.
Those fleets stalked Alaska's salmon, fishing an estimated 10,000 kilometers of gill net in the western Bering Sea and Aleutian Islands. One of the darkest periods for salmon occurred in 1973, when the mighty Bristol Bay sockeye return was just 2.4 million fish, including an inshore catch of only 761,000. In Bristol Bay today, a sockeye catch of about 15 million, like this year, is considered small. In 1973 it was clearly time to do something, but what could be done without international agreements?
Stevens had the clarity of vision to identify a unilateral 200-mile fishing limit as the means to control the foreign fishing fleets. He first introduced a bill in 1971. Although initially unsuccessful, in 1975 Stevens teamed with Washington Sen. Warren Magnuson to pass the Fishery Conservation and Management Act, now the Magnuson-Stevens Act, in 1976.
Read the full story at the Anchorage Daily News