September 9, 2024 — Fishermen are gravely concerned that regulators are stealing our futures with baseless cuts to landing quotas. Rep. Jared Golden is taking positive steps to fix this problem.
It often happens that government regulators, who lack deep knowledge of what it takes to catch fish in the Gulf of Maine, reach conclusions about the state of our fish stocks that do not match what fishermen are seeing and what we know from being on the water every day.
The obvious objection whenever we raise this concern is that “anecdote is not the plural of data.” The doubters ask: Why would an individual fisherman know more than a government agency with a dataset? That’s a fair question.
The answer is this – we know what tactics regulators are using to catch fish for their surveys, and we know they don’t work. We know where regulators are conducting surveys, and we know fish don’t hold in those waters. We know how extensive the surveys are, and we know they aren’t thorough enough.