May 17, 2013 — Painting is about all the action Mirarchi's boat has seen lately. Facing massive cuts in government-proscribed limits to the groundfish species at the very heart of New England's commercial fishing economy, the Barbara L. Peters — like the 30 or so other nominally active boats remaining in this New England sector, and dozens more boats up and down the Northeast coast — has been locked hard against its pier, rising and falling with the tides but going nowhere.
"We're gonna lose a bunch of boats," Mirarchi says, referring to the high odds that some fishermen, perhaps even himself, will be forced to abandon the livelihood that has sustained them for decades. Mirarchi barely broke even last year, and with official catch allocations for some crucial species down by nearly 80 percent for the season that opened May 1, he expects that he will be forced to put the Barbara L. Peters — only eight years old — up for sale. "What else am I going to do? My entire life's résumé is running boats, and they aren't hiring these days.
"It's a beautiful boat," Mirarchi adds. "It just doesn't have any fish to catch."
Why that should be so is a matter of heated and sometimes rancorous debate. Nature being what it is, after all, good years and bad years on the high seas are par for the course. And while federal regulators have been on a long and difficult quest for balance, managing the nation's historically over-harvested commercial fishing grounds remains an exceedingly difficult task, not least because determining just how many fish are out there at any given time still requires a bit of groping in the darkness. As one marine expert famously quipped, counting fish is like counting trees, except "the trees are invisible and keep moving around."
But a growing number of scientists, as well as fishermen like Mirarchi, recognize that another factor — global warming — is sending the already delicate and opaque mechanics of marine ecosystems into a period of rapid flux. Some research suggests, for example, that as ocean temperatures rise, many fish species are being driven into deeper waters or toward the planet's poles. Those same shifting conditions, meanwhile, are inviting historically anomalous breeds into new ranges — with unpredictable results.
Read the full article at the Huffington Post