July 25, 2013 — The approach of Ted Stevens Day in Alaska on Saturday brings back many memories from a lifetime working in fisheries. When Stevens was appointed to a Senate seat in 1968, I was working on my bachelor’s degree in biology. Today, I am writing as director at the Ted Stevens Marine Research Institute. In looking back at Ted Stevens’ legislative career, I was reminded of how dramatically it had affected me and everyone else involved in U.S. fisheries.
Never was there a more appropriate namesake for a federal fisheries research facility than Ted Stevens. The legislative record leaves no doubt that Ted Stevens’ vision and tenacity are largely responsible for the laws and government institutions that presently secure the economic, environmental and cultural benefits of our nation’s oceans for all future generations.
Let us never forget that the future of living marine resources off the coasts of the U.S. was far from secure when Ted Stevens first became a member of the U.S. Senate. Beginning in the post World War II era, an army of diplomats, legislators and scientists worked diligently to forge international agreements to control and reduce impacts of high seas fishing.
Nonetheless, most waters off Alaska in 1968 were still wide-open killing fields where the fishing was mostly done by foreign fleets.
Foreign fleets stalked Alaska’s salmon, fishing an estimated 10,000 kilometers of gill net in the western Bering Sea and the Aleutian Islands. One of the darkest periods for Alaska’s salmon occurred in 1973, when the often mighty Bristol Bay sockeye salmon return was reduced to a total of just 2.4 million fish, including an inshore catch of only 761,000. In the Bristol Bay of today, a sockeye salmon catch in the neighborhood of 15 million, like this year, is considered small. In 1973, it was clearly time to do something, but what could be done without the international agreements so many had been seeking?
Sen. Stevens had the clarity of vision to identify a unilateral 200-mile fishing limit as the means to control foreign fishing fleets off the coasts of the U.S., introducing S46, a bill to extend jurisdiction from three to 200 miles in 1971. Although S46 was unsuccessful, in 1975 Sen. Stevens got the support from Sen. Warren Magnuson, of Washington state, who co-sponsored the Fishery Conservation and Management Act enacted by Congress in 1976. Sen. Stevens introduced the motion that renamed the bill the Magnuson Act. Today, it is known as the Magnuson-Stevens Act.
Phil Mundy is director of Auke Bay Laboratories, which is headquartered in the Ted Stevens Marine Research Institute in Juneau and is operated by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s National Marine Fisheries Service. The lab has served Alaska and the nation from Juneau since 1958 as a division of the Alaska Fisheries Science Center. Mundy has worked as a fisheries scientist for a variety of other public and private entities. The opinions expressed in this article are solely those of the author.
Read the full opinion piece at the Daily News Miner