A few days ago, a story came out about Andrew
Wheeler, the former coal industry lobbyist whom the United States Senate
recently confirmed as the new head of the Environmental Protection Agency.
It doesn’t seem that he’s really a climate change “denier,”
because he admits that the phenomenon poses a future threat. He just doesn’t think that the future is all
that important, and would rather live in the “now,”—presumably a “now” in which
his former clients in the coal industry can sell their product largely free of
government regulation, even if such sales will worsen the coming crisis.
The unspoken truth, of
course, is that Wheeler will be little more than a pile of moldering bones 50
or 75 years from now, and thus will escape the worst consequences of the crisis
that he acknowledged was coming, but did nothing to avert.
He will pay no price for the role that he
played in the coming tragedy; that price will be paid, in full, by future generations,
many not yet born, who will be forced to live—or, very possibly, die—as a
result of the events that Wheeler helped to put into motion.
It’s an old story, and one
not limited to the coal fields. As I
read it, the whole, sad history of fishery management immediately came to mind.
It’s not just the annoying inaction
that you see at times, such as the
Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission’s Atlantic Striped bass Management
Board failing to rein in harvest, after learning that the stock was on a
trajectory toward becoming overfished, because it wasn’t overfished, or subject
to overfishing, yet.
That sort of bureaucratic
inertia, and defense of the status quo, is just a fact of life. And in that case, the consequences of managers’
inaction would--and did--become manifest in only six years, so most of the management
members expected to be around at the point when they'd have to fix the
problem that they're now confronting.
So no, I’m not talking about times
when people have to clean up their own mess.
Instead, it’s the times
folks leave the mess for others that annoys me.
Winter flounder might be the
best example. I write about them a lot,
because they’re probably the best example of fishery management gone
wrong.
Here in
New York, anglers took home as many as 14 million winter flounder in a single
year, as recently as 1984. It wasn’t
long after that, though, that state fishery managers started noticing things
sliding downhill.
To their credit, they tried
to react, and put in regulations to protect the fish, but those regulations
weren’t very popular in certain circles. The
recreational fishing industry as a whole didn’t support them; the party boat
fleet, in particular, was strongly opposed. It argued that customers
needed to have the “perception” that they might still enjoy a “big day,” when
they filled a bucket with fish, even though such “big days” might
be very few and far between in the real world. If
regulations destroyed that perception, they argued, many customers wouldn’t come
out at all.
So the state backed off on
their plans, and instead of adopting regulations likely to conserve the stock,
they took an incremental approach, setting the first size limit at a mere 8 inches (pull out a ruler to get an idea of
just how small that is) and the first bag limit at no less than 15 fish (it may
have been more, but this was so long ago that not even the Internet remembers).
That was more than thirty
years ago, but the pattern never changed. As the flounder declined, managers would try to adopt rules to protect
them, and the industry would fight back, opposing any regulation that might have
been strict enough to do some real good.
Today, the flounder are
pretty well gone. There
aren’t even enough being caught to get a realistic estimate of recreational
landings; last year’s supposed number was just 25. That’s certainly an undercount, but the fact
that surveyors couldn’t find a single private boat with a flounder on board, over
the course of the entire 60-day season, is mute testimony to the fact that
the real number was also obscenely low.
Today, the recreational flounder
fishery is pretty well gone, too.
I live
about 15 minutes away from Captree State Park, on the South Shore of Long
Island. There’s a
big party boat fleet there, which once billed itself, back in the halcyon days
whey fish were abundant, as the “Captree Flounder Fleet,” because they
caught plenty throughout the season—which ran from the beginning of
March through mid-December back then, although fishing slowed down quite a bit during the
summer.
Like their counterparts on
every coast of Long Island, the folks who owned the boats back then fought against
regulations that might have kept the flounder stock from collapsing. Instead, they made their money while the
making was good, squeezing the last drops of blood from a dry and quickly crumbling
stone, then got out of the business, to leave the people who own the boats
today with the consequences: A bay so
empty that no
one in the entire fleet is even advertising trips for April 1, the opening day
of the season, this year, and some
of the top boats—perhaps most of the top boats—aren’t planning to sail for
flounders at all.
Today’s boat owners are paying
the price for those who refused to address the coming crisis three decades ago.
We saw a similar thing
happen with cod, as the New England Fishery Management Council, peopled largely
by folks who profited from the fishery, refused for years to bring overfishing
under control. As Discover magazine reported back in 1995,
“After 1977…the New England fishing
industry experienced the same euphoria as Newfoundland. Fishermen had lobbied Congress hard to have
the foreign trawlers kicked out, and they expected a bonanza. Between 1977 and 1983, the number of boats
fishing out of New England increased from 825 to 1,423. The new boats were bigger and equipped with
the latest electronic fish-finding equipment.
The fish never had a chance. The
cod catch on Georges Bank alone peaked in 1982 at more than 53,000 tons. Then it started to decline. As the stock declined, the mortality
inflicted by fishing rose, just as it did in Newfoundland. The difference is that in New England,
fisheries biologists knew it was happening all along, and said so…
“During the 1980s the New England
council proved itself unwilling to control fishing. Indeed, one of its early actions in 1982, was
to eliminate catch quotas. Its goal, it
said, was a simpler system that allowed the fishery to operate in response to
its own internal forces. As the decade progressed,
the fishery did just that—and as NMFS scientists warned of declining stocks of
cod, haddock, and yellowtail flounder, the council dithered…”
Once again, the older
generation of fishermen, who owned the boats back then, made their money while
depleting the cod population, and nothing really ever changed until the 2006
reauthorization of the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act
compelled all of the regional fishery management councils to adopt catch limits
for all managed stocks.
Maybe, one day, such limits will
restore the cod stocks. But today,
thanks to fishermen—and the New England Fishery Management Council—who failed
to even try to prevent a future crisis, and concerned themselves only with current
cash flows, the spawning stock is badly overfished, and constitutes only a very small fraction
of its real spawning potential.
More recently, we saw the
same thing happen with blackfish—more formally known as “tautog”—in Long Island
Sound.
Tautog are managed by the
states through ASMFC, but they’re atypical for ASMFC-managed species in that
tautog don’t engage in long coastwise migrations. Instead, populations tend to be local, and
move between deeper and shallower waters as the seasons change. Thus, ASMFC broke the coastwide
population into four separate sub-stocks, assessed each one independently, and
established different sets management measures for each one.
The
Long Island Sound population was found to be badly overfished, and subject to
significant overfishing. Fishing
mortality needed to be cut by 47% in order to end overfishing by 2021 (assuming
that the regulations were first put into place for the 2018 fishing season). For New York anglers, that would mean a
16-inch minimum size, a somewhat shortened fishing season, and dropping the bag
limit from four fish to just one.
Needless to say, that didn’t
go over too well with the fishing industry.
Back
in 2017, I described the raucous and inappropriate behavior of the crowd at the
meeting that ASMFC called to discuss tautog management here in New York. But there was something else besides their
disrespect for the people and process that was shared by that crowd. Not only were they generally unshaven
and shaggy; they were also generally gray.
There weren’t a lot of young
folks in the audience. Just a lot of
aging fishermen and boatmen, looking at a depleted blackfish stock and, as was
the case with the flounder and cod, probably figuring that if they could hold
on to what they had for a few more years, they could cash out of the fishery and let someone
else clean up their problem.
It didn’t even try to
predict when, if ever, the stock would be rebuilt.
That, too, is just another
issue that might be addressed in the future--if there are still enough tautog around to make the remaining fishermen care.
I still fish for
blackfish in Long Island Sound, and maybe I should listen to the white in my
hair and the creak in my bones, and be happy that I can still kill some fish--and will be able to keep on killing fish for much of what likely remains of my
lifetime.
But unlike Andrew Wheeler,
and some folks involved in fisheries debates, I can’t bring myself to think that way.
I still remember when I was
a boy, and caught winter flounder at will from shore, and from the docks in local harbors.
I still remember going out party boats with my
father during the summer,
when catching a few cod was hardly a noteworthy event—although not catching a few
definitely was.
I still remember fishing from the
riprap at the town beach when I was barely in my teens, and catching more decent
blackfish standing on the rocks than most people now catch from boats—when they have
a good day.
And given those memories, I’m not willing to say
that the current sad state of so many fish stocks is somebody else’s problem, that
they can start worrying about when I’m done catching mine.
I see new generations of
anglers, left with so many fisheries that have been degraded, or have just
disappeared, and I see their loss as my problem, too. Because I remember the good days, and believe
that generations yet to be born are entitled to have their good days, too.
So I’ll do what I can to help make that happen—hopefully, while I’m still alive.
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