THE RECREATIONAL FISHING AND BOATING INDUSTRIES MUST TAKE UP THE FIGHT FOR CLEAN OCEANS

If anyone is honest with themselves when they look back at their lives, they’ll probably find a time or two that they’re truly ashamed of, a time when they knew that something was probably wrong, but they failed to act, or speak out, or at least try to prevent it from occurring.  

If they’re even halfway decent folks, the memory of such a time will chafe at their conscience for the rest of their lives, and remind them that, in the future, they have a duty speak.

I know that I've done just that.

I failed my trial of conscience more than ten years ago, down in Houston, when I still sat on the Executive Board of the Coastal Conservation Association.  The Center for Sportfishing Policy—what was being called the Center for Coastal Conservation, back then—was still in the planning stage, and I sat in on a number of committee discussions about it.   

CCA was a legitimate conservation advocate at the time, and had prevailed on a number of important issues.  It was a proudly independent organization, that forged its own path, and was very careful about lending out its name or affiliating itself with other organizations.  Even a simple press release was sent around and vetted by various members and staff, and carefully edited, before it went out to the public.

As soon as CCA staff began discussing the possibility of creating the Center, I became concerned.  

In my experience with various local angling organizations, mergers of conservation and industry interests rarely have happy endings.  The conservation groups always mean well going into such arrangements, but they soon became addicted to the funding and in-kind contributions from industry, which certainly help pay the bills and aid in meeting and exceeding membership goals.  Thus, they acquiesce when their industry partners give lip service to conservation, but commit the joint venture to positions and policies that best benefit industry’s bottom line in the near term, rather than the long-term health of coastal fish stocks.

I should have voiced those concerns, loudly and clearly, as soon as the proposed Center for Coastal Conservation was put on the table.  I don’t pretend to believe that my speaking would have made any difference; the top leadership were fully committed to their course, and it is highly unlikely that anything that I said might have affected their plans.  Still, as a member of the Executive Board, and of one of the relevant committees discussing the matter, I had a duty to speak out loud and clear.

To my shame, that was a duty I shirked.

In the end, I did the wrong thing, and stayed silent.  I let my native cynicism slip, and trusted someone I had come to know and deeply respect over the years, who gave assurances that the Center for Sportfishing Policy “won’t get into the nitty-gritty of fisheries management.”  

Instead, it would address larger issues, such as nutrient inflows creating a “dead zone” in the Gulf of Mexico, which were far too large and too politically fraught for the relatively small CCA to take on alone.

Maybe he lied, and intended to see the Center involved in fisheries matters from its very first day.  I’d like to believe that he began with good intentions, just to see the Center morph into a kind of Frankenstein’s creature that destroyed the soul and the mission of the organization that had sparked its creation. 

In the end, it doesn’t matter. 

The Center got deeply involved in “the nitty-gritty” of fisheries issues, pushing the Secretary of Commerce to allow anglers to overfish Gulf of Mexico red snapper back in 2017, sought to weaken federal fisheries laws with the Modern Fish Act, and works hard every year to get its representatives on the regional fishery management councils, where they work for industry-friendly fishery management measures.

But the Center has not gotten deeply involved in the sort of big, national issues such as water quality, which was supposedly the reason why it was first created.  

In fact, it has consistently aligned itself with pollution-friendly politicians at every level, who because of their anti-conservation bias, tend to be willing to weaken fishery laws to allow larger recreational harvests and who, at the state level, are willing to nominate the Center’s preferred candidates state and regional management boards.

Taking on polluters, who are often important campaign contributors, could destroy such a cozy arrangement.

Consider the Gulf of Mexico “dead zone.”  It’s a vast hypoxic area that lies off the mouth of the Mississippi River, which reaches its maximum size during the summer when seepage and runoff from farms, lawns, sewage plants and other sources of nitrogen and phosphate pollution wash into the Mississippi River watershed, a broad expanse of the United States contained in a rough triangle that stretches from western Pennsylvania to eastern Montana and down to the mouth of the Mississippi River southeast of New Orleans.

At best, the dead zone spans a section of ocean about the size of the State of Delaware.  Within the zone, low levels of oxygen make it difficult, if not impossible, for fish to survive, and it is estimated that losses due to the dead zone cost the fishing and tourism industries in the region about $82 million per year.

This year, the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration has predicted that the dead zone will be larger.  At a predicted 7,800 square miles, it will be about the size of Massachusetts, and just a little smaller than the record-large dead zone of nearly 8,800 square miles, which occurred just two years ago.  The size of this year’s dead zone is hardly surprising, given that in the month of May alone, about 156,000 tons of nitrates and 25,300 metric tons of phosphorus was washed down the Mississippi drainage and into the Gulf, most coming, according to NOAA,

“from human activities, such as urbanization and agriculture, occurring throughout the Mississippi River watershed.”

NOAA also notes that

“This year’s historic and sustained river flows will test the accuracy of these models in extreme conditions, which are likely to occur more frequently in the future according to the latest National Climate Assessment.  The assessment predicts an increase in the frequency of very heavy precipitation events in the Midwest, Great Plains, and Southeast regions, which would impact nutrient input to the northern Gulf of Mexico and the size of the hypoxic zone.”

It is exactly the sort of issue that, we were told at the beginning, the Center for Sportfishing Policy was created to address.  

Yet if you go into the Center for Sportfishing Policy’s “Media Room,” and go all the way back to July 17, 2008, when the organization was first created, you won’t see a single press release calling out for water quality reform, for federal legislation that will address dead zones in the Gulf of elsewhere, or action on other serious pollution issues.  All you will see is efforts to hamper the commercial fishing industry, allow recreational fishermen to kill more fish, and otherwise support the fishing tackle and boatbuilding industries.

It’s probably not surprising that the Center leaves the polluters alone, because the same legislators who don’t really care if some farmer in Iowa lets pig manure flow into 

the rivers are usually pretty indifferent about the long-term consequences of killing too many fish.  

That sort of attitude is reflected in some of the “Conservationist of the Year” awards that the Center hands out.

It’s particularly interesting to look at some of the Center's recent awards in the context of their recipients' opposition to regulations intended to keep large volumes of things such as pig shit—and human waste as well—out of America’s rivers and ultimately out of the Gulf.  

Those regulations reached their apex in the Obama-era “Waters of the United States” rule released in 2015, which an article in Politico described as protecting

“tributaries that have physical signs of flowing water, even if they don’t run all year round, and ditches that ‘look and act’ like flowing tributaries.”

That would seem to make sense.  If it’s illegal to dump a few hundred—or a few thousand—gallons of pig shit into a navigable river, it should be illegal to dump the same stuff into a ditch, even a ditch on private property, that flows into such river and ultimately deposits the shit in the same place. 

But that sort of thinking gets the shit-dumpers concerned.  The American Pork Producers Council, for example, was worried that they might run into real problems if drainage ditches and other waterways that fed into navigable rivers were covered by the Clean Water Act.  It noted that

“Under the [Clean Water Act], there is an absolute prohibition on discharging any pollutant, whether manure, chemical pesticides or fertilizer or even a seed of corn, into a [Waters of the United States]-covered feature without a federal permit.”

And since the Pork people clearly believed that it was their right as American citizens to dump pig shit, pesticides and fertilizer into the nation’s rivers (even if they had to do so in a roundabout way), regardless of the impacts downstream, they lobbied for their representatives in Washington to kill the new rule.

According to the piece in Politico, a number of other industries accustomed to dumping questionable things into ditches, and so into our rivers, including the

“American Farm Bureau Federation, Dairy Farmers of America, pesticide manufacturers, mining companies, home builders, state and local governments, water utilities, flood control districts, the timber industry, railroads, real estate developers and even golf courses”

lobbied against the rule because, if it remained intact, they might be forced to deal with their own shit, and no longer be allowed let it to flow downstream to become someone else's problem.

So when we look at who the Center for Sportfishing Policy recognized as “conservationists” since 2015, we find 2019 awards to Senator Roger Wicker (R-MS) and Rep. Garret Graves (R-LA), who were the primary sponsors of the Modern Fish Act.  Although that law, as ultimately passed, was essentially toothless, in its original version it posed significant threats to effective, science-based management of recreational saltwater fisheries.

That hardly seems like something that a “conservationist” would support.  But then when we consider the contribution that both the Senator and Congressman made to preserving the dead zone in the Gulf,  with their opposition to the Obama-era Waters of the United States rule, it all makes a kind of sense.

Sen. Wicker called President Trumps’ plans to weaken the rule

“a major win for Mississippi’s farmers, ranchers, private property owners, small businesses, and local municipalities”

as they could continue to dump their stuff into drainage ditches that, in the end, lead to the sea and keep the dead zone alive, while Rep. Graves voted to prevent implementation of the Waters rule, which he believed would

“infringe upon the rights of private property owners and have a devastating effect on small business and economic development projects in southern Louisiana”

and so

“diminish the liberties of hardworking Americans”

who apparently should have the freedom to dump shit in a river, so long as they do so indirectly and from a private waterway.  

When you think about it, there is a sort of intellectual and philosophical consistency between sponsoring a bill that would have let anglers kill more fish, and promoting policies that sustain the Gulf dead zone.  Both, in the end, decrease the number of fish subject to the public trust, although calling someone who supports either action a “conservationist” might be stretching credibility just a bit too far.

I couldn’t find a release announcing who the Center named as “conservationists” in 2017 or 2018, although there may have been something that I missed, but in 2016, the award was given to Rep. Rob Bishop (R-UT), largely because of his ardent support for H.R. 1335, a bill that many long-time conservationists dubbed “the Empty Oceans Act” for its likely impact on the nation’s fish stocks, and also for his support of H.R. 2406 which, the Center opined,

“will enhance fishing opportunities on federal lands and waters and protect anglers from unnecessary restrictions.”

Rep. Bishop didn’t care for the Waters of the United States rule either, and later praised the Environmental Protection Agency’s Acting Administrator Andrew Wheeler for creating

“much needed clarity and certainty for America’s farmers, contractors, landowners, and ranchers”

by reducing the scope of the Waters rule, allowing pollution to continue to flow from private lands and, of course, keeping the dead zone well-fed.

Again, that might not sound like the acts of a “conservationist” to most folks, but the Center apparently defines things in its own special way.

It’s time for the Center, and its component industry and angler’s rights organizations, to start revising their definitions, because one thing that was true was said down in Houston, more than a decade ago:  It will take the full political and financial influence of industry and anglers, along with the conservation community that the Center leaves out, to challenge the pesticide and fertilizer dumpers, the leaky sewage plants and the pig shit folks.  

And that challenge needs to happen, because things are getting worse.

The Gulf may have the biggest dead zone in the nation, but it’s not the only one. 

Chesapeake Bay has been suffering from a dead zone for years.  Thanks to effective regulations that restrict discharges, it had begun to shrink.  However, the 2019 dead zone is expected to be very large, probably one of the largest on record.  Worldwide, hypoxia problems have increased by 1,000 percent since 1950.

A recent Outdoor Life article announced that

“Florida’s Water Crisis Has Sport Fishing on the Brink of Collapse,”

and reports that declining water quality is seriously and negatively impacting both fish habitat and fish numbers.  The article describes a myriad of problems ranging from agricultural and septic tank runoff causing toxic algae blooms to freshwater discharges from Lake Okeechobee that degrade once-productive estuaries.

So far, the recreational fishing and boating industries have been relatively indifferent to the problem. 

The American Sportfishing Association, which represents the tackle industry, has been actively advocating for actions to improve water quality in Florida, but has not taken a leading role on systemic issues like those that create regional dead zones.  

The National Marine Manufacturers Association has struck a similar pose, advocating for cleaner water in Florida, and even taking steps to reduce boating’s environmental impacts, while shying away from addressing polluters head-on.

And, as I mentioned, the Center for Sportfishing Policy has been taking virtually no position at all.

That’s not good enough.

The Center for Sportfishing Policy, and members such as the American Sportfishing Association and National Marine Manufacturers Association, have created a vision that correlates increased recreational landings of fish with greater angler participation, and the resultant greater industry income.

So far, they’ve attempted to achieve those higher landings by weakening fisheries regulation and taking fish away from the commercial fleet.  But even if they were successful at those things, they will ultimately fail in their efforts if they don’t successfully address the water quality issue.

Because there won’t be any fish for anglers to land, whatever the rules, if those fish have nowhere to live.