TIME FOR SOME "TOUGH LOVE" FROM FISHERIES MANAGERS

“Tough love” has been defined as

“promotion of a person’s welfare, especially that of an addict, child, or criminal, be enforcing certain constraints on them, or requiring them to take responsibility for their actions.”

In many ways, that exactly the role of a fisheries manager.

Fishermen, and fishing industries, obviously rely on having enough fish in the ocean to support their activities.  Yet, the very nature of those activities involves removing fish from the sea; if taken too far, such removals can threaten the future of fishing, whether as avocation or occupation.  Historically as well as today, fishermen have often failed to control their own actions, and have hurt themselves by driving important fish populations into decline.

That’s where fisheries managers come in.

When fishermen, focused only on today’s harvest, place their future welfare at risk, fishery managers have the job, and the obligation, of looking out for their welfare whether the fishermen want to be looked after or not.  Here in New York, the obligation to assure the states’ fisheries’ future is laid out in section 13-0105 of the Environmental Conservation Law, which begins

“It is the policy of the state that the primary principle in managing the state’s marine fishery resource is to maintain the long-term health and abundance of marine fisheries resources and their habitats, and to ensure that the resources are sustained in useable abundance and diversity for future generations.”

That’s a noble and worthwhile policy, but efforts to live up to it in the real world are often frustrated by the fishermen themselves, who tend to discount the future and spend most of their efforts trying to defeat any effort to conserve and rebuild fish stocks.  So managers are often forced to impose unwanted and very unwelcome regulations on fishermen, in an effort to save them from themselves.

That’s where the “tough love” comes in.

If managers listened to fishermen, and more particularly, to the recreational and commercial fishing industry, many fish stocks would become overfished, and many already-overfished stocks would slip over the brink of collapse.  Here in the northeast, we only need to look at the virtual disappearance of the southern New England/Mid-Atlantic stock of winter flounder, or the collapse of once-vast stocks of Atlantic cod, to see how that worked out.

Yet, even though the lessons of history should be obvious to all, a large segment of the fishing industry has failed to learn them although, in all fairness, some of the most successful commercial fishermen now recognize that conservation really does pay, and in the most important currency—an abundance of fish that results in higher, more sustainable earnings.

Thus, managers must preserve the fishermen’s future, by establishing real constraints on their actions, and forcing them to take responsibility when they exceed sustainable landings limits.

That doesn’t make managers popular with many industry members; like the parent trying to turn around the life of a sullen and drifting teen, or the parole officer trying to keep an offender from heading back to jail, fisheries managers are often condemned for their efforts to turn fishermen away from their self-destructive path and onto a road that, in the end, will provide them with a better and more survivable future.

For the past few decades, I’ve watched managers use every skill that they owned in an effort to convince fishermen that conservative, science-based management was in their best interests, and I’ve watched a lot of those fishermen curse and complain, reviling the managers for trying to keep the future of their businesses alive.

Quite honestly, I’m not sure how they put up with it on a day-to-day basis; considering the abuse that they take at meetings, in publications and in various on-line forums, neither state, regional nor federal fisheries managers get paid nearly enough.

In many ways, along with shouldering their scientific and political burdens, they’re forced to act like underpaid nannies to a bunch of physically mature, but socially adolescent people who neither comprehend the science nor respect the management process.

Here in New York, the commercial fishermen are not, for the most part, badly behaved.  They’re a little rough around the edges, at times, but in mostly a colorful way; while there is a certain amount of sharp-edged banter at meetings, in the end, they stay well within the bounds of acceptable discourse.

But when meetings affect the recreational industry, the atmosphere is very different.  I thought of today’s “tough love” theme because, when I’m at a lot of these meetings, I feel as if I’m reliving my much younger days, and again seeing the inmates at my old junior high school’s detention hall.  There is little mature conversation, no respect for people nor process, and a smug satisfaction derived from some combination of excessive ego and a childlike failure to admit their own ignorance.

Thus, instead of sitting down and trying to rationally work out the issues with tautog management, they start off the meeting by telling a top state biologist, who dedicated years to learning his trade,

“We don’t care about your science.  Your science is bullcrap.”

At which point the speaker’s cronies, like teenaged rowdies, all clapped and cheered. 

So we go to meetings and waste too much time watching people perform for the crowd, posing at the end of their speech to bask in the hoots and applause of their pals.  We endure personal attacks and name calling, when we should be sitting down together to work towards needed reforms.  We’re forced to watch supposedly grown men acting like undisciplined children, and getting away with it for the same reason that kids do—to keep things sort of quiet, avoid outbursts of screaming, and minimize unpleasant scenes.

It’s difficult to deal with someone as an adult when they act like a two-year old—with colic.  And if the folks at the front of the room fail to discourage such bad behavior when it first raises its head, it always tends to get worse.

We’ve reached a point where fisheries managers should stop tolerating such actions.  We have a problem out on the water.  Many fish are no longer there.

Here in New York, we’ve effectively lost our winter flounder.  We’ve lost our spring mackerel run, and our winter whiting.  Tautog are a shadow of what they once were, particularly in Long Island Sound. Most of the cod and pollock are gone; what’s considered good fishing today would have been a bad day just a few decades ago.  Striped bass have been declared overfished; that hasn’t happened with fluke or bluefish yet, but both are sliding downhill.  Weakfish might or might not be getting better, but are still pretty scarce.  On the inshore grounds, the only thing left are porgies and sea bass; both are abundant, but it’s hard to support a business on just two species, and the odds and ends of whatever else might be around.

A regional angling publication, The Fisherman magazine, has created a sea robin category in its “Dream Boat” contest, which may be a better indication than anything else of how bad things really are.

If there was ever a time for the adults in the room to get serious about preserving the future, that time is now.  But instead, we hear the same tired rhetoric about the fish being fine, with no need for more rules.

It’s time for tough love.

It’s time for fishery managers to promote the interests of the fishing industry, by assuring that there will be sufficient fish to catch not just this year, but next year, and also next decade.

And if that means placing additional constraints on the fishery, and making fishermen responsible for everything they do, then that’s how it should—and must—be.