Our BP is the National Marine Fisheries Service.
The time for the benefit of the doubt has long passed. It’s time for a public spotlight on a system that merely eats up tax dollars in return for a paper assurance that the system is working on the problem.
Del Barber is a retiree in Westerly who loves to fish from our beaches from Watch Hill to Charlestown. Del can tell many stories about his many years sport fishing in the Ocean State, including one grand night a week before Christmas, in 1972.
On that night, Del and a friend landed 17 codfish from a beach 200 yards west of Quonochontaug Breachway (Quonny, to the locals). Three were over 40 pounds, and one weighed an astounding 64 pounds — caught not with a net, but with a rod and reel.
Today, that fishery is a memory, victim of mismanagement. In the mid-1970s Del and others saw the fish disappear. Like the canary in the coal mine, their loss signaled the decline of what once was a proud symbol of New England’s greatness.
Alarmed by the loss the billions of pounds of fish harvested from our waters by factory ships from foreign countries, Congress passed the Magnuson Act in the late 1970s. It set up a series of regional councils around the country, planning agencies that submitted recommendations to their parent organization, the National Marine Fisheries Service. One goal was to reverse the decline in our cod populations, so that middle-class Rhode Islanders like Del could once again enjoy a healthy fishery not far from their homes.
Read the complete editorial from the Providence Journal.