Thursday, August 20, 2020

FISHERIES MANAGEMENT: PASSING THE TORCH TO A NEW GENERATION

I first got involved in fisheries management in the mid-1970s, after meeting the late Bob Pond in the Connecticut tackle shop where I worked during the summers.

Bob Pond is best known as the inventor of the Atom line of fishing lures, some of the first lures designed specifically for striped bass.  He may also have been the first member of the recreational fishing industry, at least on the northeast coast, to realize that the health of his business was intimately tied to the health of the striped bass population.  And he was willing to work very hard for striped bass conservation, and spend significant amounts of his own money on affecting the management process.

As author Dick Russell noted in an obituary in The [Attleborough, MA] Sun-Chronicle,

“Bob Pond was way out ahead of all the experts in sounding the alarm in the 1960s about dangers facing the striped bass, and without his tireless efforts on this magnificent fish’s behalf, we wouldn’t be out there catching them today.  He was a pioneer in ocean conservation, long before the impacts of overfishing and coastal pollution became topics of widespread concern.”

While Mr. Russell was a little off on the decade—it was in the 1970s, rather than the 1960s, that Bob Pond began to warn of a coming striped bass collapse—the rest of what he wrote was right on target.  

When I first spoke to Mr. Pond, he had come into the shop to talk to us about a disturbing decline in the Maryland juvenile striped bass index, which portended hard times ahead, and to ask whether we’d be willing to take a box of sample jars, and return them filled with the reproductive organs of striped bass of both sexes and various sizes, which would then be tested for various pollutants that might possibly be causing striped bass recruitment to drop.

I was bass fishing just about every day back then, and after talking to Bob Pond for an hour or so, was convinced that the striper was headed for trouble.  

As we all know now, Bob Pond was right.  The striped bass stock collapsed, and the recreational fishing industry ended up hurt a lot more by the absence of fish than it would have been hurt by any conceivable set of timely and effective regulations.  And my experience with Bob Pond, the striped bass’ collapse, and its eventual recovery set me on a path of fisheries advocacy that I continue to follow.

Along that path, I met a lot of dedicated people.  Here on the striper coast, they included folks like the late Fred Schwab, a hard-core surfcaster who became an equally hard-core advocate for the striped bass.  Later on, down in Texas, I met the late Walter Fondren and some of the other founders of the Coastal Conservation Association, who invested a lot of time and a lot of cash into rebuilding the Gulf’s red drum population.

As you might have noticed, all of the people I named—Bob Pond, Fred Schwab, Walter Fondren—aren’t around anymore.  They’ve passed on, but before passing on, they first passed the conservation torch to a new generation of advocates, to which I belong.

But now, as I look around, it’s hard to deny that I’m one of the “old guys” moving steadily toward the Grim Reaper’s to-do list, and it’s probably time for folks my age to look, in our turn, to a new generation of torchbearers.

Let’s be honest:  We’ve already had most of our fun.  The decisions that we help shape today will shape our lives, and our angling experience, far less than they will impact folks now in their 40s—and the sons and daughters that those folks are now introducing to the sea and our sport.  It’s appropriate, then, that those who will be most affected by the decisions should be the ones who help shape them; they will still be heavily impacted by what our fisheries look like in 2050.

I, on the other hand, will either be dead or shopping for a good crematorium by then.

Of course, it’s not that easy to walk away and hand the advocacy work to someone else.

In the first place, folks willing and able to take over the job can be hard to find.  There is a steep learning curve.  But most of all,k fisheries work takes time, and that’s something in short supply for someone trying to balance a career and a family, who also wants to get out and fish a bit, too.  Driving a daughter to basketball practice, or taking a son to a Little League game, takes priority over going to a fisheries management meeting.

And a lot of those meetings are held during the day, or even out of town.  In most families, telling your spouse that you can’t take the kids to Disney World this year, because you used up your vacation time going to various fishing-related events, isn’t going to go over too well.  

When I served on the Mid-Atlantic Fishery Management Council, which at the time involved at least seven three-day meetings each year, I solved the vacation time predicament by taking unpaid leave from my job.  I could get away with that, because we never had any children, and thus no related food, clothing, school, or college tuition payments to worry about   And my wife had a pretty good job.

Most folks don’t have that option, and even if they did, well, I couldn’t seek reappointment to the Council after my first term, because the bank that I worked for was taken over by another institution that had far less regard for employees’ public service, and wasn’t willing to extend my unpaid leave past that first term. 

It’s even worse for folks who work for themselves.  Taking time off might not only cost them the days’ pay; if they do it at the wrong time, it could cost them their entire relationship with an important customer.

Thus, the difficulty of finding someone who, at the peak of their professional and family life, has the time and the willingness to take on an advocate’s role makes passing the torch very hard.

As a result, representatives on the various management bodies too often end up being either cranky but retired old farts, many of whom still live in the past and see conservation as some sort of silly, newfangled notion that was probably inspired by a bunch of granola-munching ex-hippies, or those with an economic interest in the fisheries that they manage.  

In either case, we end up hearing a lot about how things were in 1970, and why we need to turn back the management clock to those good, old, unregulated days, when just about every fish was a keeper, and just about every keeper was kept, even though a fair number of them ended up under the roses or dumped back into the bay sometime later.

That might sound extreme, but I can’t tell you how many meetings I’ve gone to where some representative of the for-hire fleet begins talking about how, back in the ‘70s, people went out on party boats expecting to catch enough fish to pay for their trip, and how “poor people” can’t justify fishing anymore because the same regulations needed to conserve fish populations—and give them something to fish for—prevent them from at least breaking even when they go fishing.  Thus, the story often ends, regulations need to be relaxed in order to restore the 1970s status quo. 

The likely impacts of that on fish stocks are never a part of the conversation.

At the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission, there are some young state fisheries managers who try hard to do the right thing, and some younger legislative proxies and governors’ appointees, too.  But there are still far too many commissioners who have their eyes fixed firmly on the past; as we enter the middle decades of the 21st Century, they spend too much time talking about what fisheries looked like forty or fifty years ago, and too little time thinking about what fisheries ought to look like forth or fifty years from now.

New Jersey’s Governor’s Appointee provided a prime example of that sort of thinking at the April 2019 Atlantic Striped Bass Management Board meeting:

“I’ve also been down this road before; as you made me change my slot limit years ago, when I basically go for a regulations and four years down the road, three years we were not in as bad a shape as we thought we were…”

It’s an interesting statement for a couple of reasons.  The first is obvious; whatever data issues might have existed many years ago have absolutely no bearing on the current data, from a brand-new benchmark stock assessment.  Nor do mistakes make a decade, or maybe a couple of decades, ago have any bearing on what’s needed to keep the stock healthy ten or twenty years in the future. 

But the speaker also uses some old fart-isms that deserve some attention.  Note the use of the words “you made me change my slot limit,” rather than “you made New Jersey change its slot limit,” words that suggest that ego has gotten the upper hand, leaving the speaker unable to make a distinction between his personal preferences and the needs of the striped bass and the New Jersey stakeholders who depend upon a healthy striped bass fishermen for their recreation and, in some cases, their income.

Any scientific advice that contradicts those preferences is rejected as unreliable, while any constituent comments that contradict those personal preferences is dismissed with language such as

“…You know everybody is talking about e-mails that they get.

“You know a form e-mail is very simple to get out.  But go out and talk to the people on the street.  Go out and talk to the people who fish on the docks and the piers, you know the ones that aren’t basically sitting behind a computer, basically out fishing and basically looking to take a fish home and eat it and things like that…

“I grew up fishing on Canarsie Pier and Steeplechase Pier in Brooklyn.  That’s what people wanted to do…”

Because people who care enough to send emails are apparently incapable of being “basically out fishing,” and what went on along the Brooklyn shoreline in the late 1950s and 1960s clearly reflects the situation sixty or more years later.

Another argument for an infusion of youth…

Still, the greatest argument for passing the torch is that today’s younger adults have a far greater stake in the future of our fisheries than people of my age.  

If the striped bass stock collapsed today, I’d probably be too old to benefit from its recovery; if we accept that the bass population hit its low point around1996, and that Amendment 3 to the ASMFC’s management plan, adopted in 1985,sparked the stock’s rebuilding, then it took about 25 years, until 1995, forthe stock to fully recover.

Twenty-five years from now, I’ll be 85 years old, and probably won’t be able to bass fish that much, even though I’ll have plenty of time to do so—if I’m still alive.  So if you’re my age, or older, lax regulations that allow me to take more fish today, at the expense of the future health of the stock, are in your best personal interest.

If I had a fishing-related business, that would be even more true.  I won’t be around to benefit from the striper’s recovery, so it probably makes the most sense to seek regulations that allow me or my customers to kill as many fish as I can, for as long as I can, until the stock collapses, thus allowing me to maximize short-term returns knowing that there will be no long term to worry about.

On the other hand, someone in their 30s, 40s, or even early 50s has many years of angling ahead of them.  If they have an angling-related business and wants that business to last, they know that they will need an abundance of fish to keep their customers happy.  And if they are serious anglers, and have children, they have an even bigger investment in the future, as they’ll want their descendants to enjoy some of the same good times on and around the water that they’ve had.

Those are the folks who need to be managing, and advocating for, our nation’s fisheries.  People who have a big stake in the future, and want to see that future filled with healthy fish stocks.  Not people who keep looking at the long road behind them, because they know that, ahead, they're approaching a dead end.

We need to find those younger folks, and pass the torch on to them.  And then we need to give them all of the support that we can, teaching them how to keep the torch lit, while still allowing them to form their own vision of how to shape fisheries in the years ahead.

Because they, not we, own the future.

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