FISHERIES SCIENCE VERSUS SENTIMENTALITY--AGAIN

 

Just last Thursday, I wrote about a bill introduced in the New York State Legislature that would outlaw octopus farming, even though there are currently no octopus farms—neither in New York nor anywhere else—and there is no data suggesting that octopus farming would create more environmental issues than any other form of open-water aquaculture for free-swimming animals of any kind.

Instead, the primary motivation for the anti-octopus farming legislation seems to be a sentimental vision of the eight-legged cephalopods, largely driven by the much-watched, award-winning movie, My Octopus Teacher—along with a lot of pressure from the animal rights community.

It was a classic example of people’s emotions getting in the way of rational decision making.

When I finalized that piece, I was pretty certain that I wouldn’t write about octopuses again—or, at least, not for a very long time—and while that is hopefully true, it seems like the conflict between fisheries science and emotional, arbitrary decision making is going to be the subject of many essays to come.

The latest example appeared on the conservation website Mongabay, where an article appeared under the remarkable headline,

“At high seas treaty summit, a dispute over fisheries managers’ role in conservation.”

I found that statement remarkable, because it can be easily argued that a fisheries manager’s primary responsibility is the conservation of fisheries under his or her jurisdiction.

The United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization seems to agree, as it published a Guidebook on fisheries management, which describes fisheries management as

“The integrated process of information gathering, analysis, planning, consultation, decision-making, the allocation of resources and formulation and implementation, with enforcement as necessary, of regulations or rules which govern fisheries activities in order to ensure the continued productivity of the resources and the accomplishment of other fisheries objectives.”

At the risk of stating the obvious, fisheries management is what a fisheries manager does.  And “ensur[ing] the continued productivity of the resources” sounds a lot like conservation to me.

After all, the Merriam-Webster dictionary defines “conservation” as

“a careful preservation and protection of something especially: planned management of a natural resource to prevent exploitation, destruction, or neglect  [formatting omitted],

while no less authoritative a source than the Oxford English Dictionary defines it as

“The preservation, protection, or restoration of the natural environment and of wildlife; the practice of seeking to prevent the wasteful use of a resource in order to ensure its continuing availability.  [emphasis added]”

The Food and Agriculture Organization’s description of fisheries management falls neatly within both of those definitions.  And it’s important to note that the latter definition contemplates the sustainable use of natural resources, and not merely closing them off from any sort of human access or harvest.  “Conservation” does not require complete and absolute protection.

The problem is that some people disagree, and don’t merely advocate for conservation; they want to see marine resources completely walled off from human utilization.  Their goal is not merely conservation and management—which is what United States law, in the form of the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act, provides—but complete protection as a goal in itself, whether or not there is any scientific evidence that such protection is needed.

The first two paragraphs of the Mongabay article describe that problem pretty well, in connection with a recent treaty intended to conserve worldwide marine resources:

“For conservationists, one of the major accomplishments of the high seas treaty [which was agreed to by many of the world’s nations in 2023] was that it created a means to establish marine protected areas (MPAs) in international waters.  High seas MPAs are viewed as essential to meeting the looming 2030 deadline to protect 30% of the Earth’s ocean, especially since countries have only just reached one-third of that goal.

“Now, the multilateral organizations that manage high-seas fishing, known as regional fisheries management organizations (RFMOs), are pushing to make sure that their own work is not duplicated or displaced.  Some conservationists see the RFMOs’ engagement as a way of inhibiting protection efforts, arguing that RFMOs are heavily influenced by fishing industry priorities.”

Once again, we see the insinuation that fisheries managers—or, at least, regional fishery management organizations—are not “conservationists.”  Some advocates/advocacy groups, the article tells us, claim that they “are heavily influenced by fishing industry priorities.”  But is that necessarily a bad thing, if one of those industry priorities are to keep fish stocks healthy, so that they may support sustainable—and profitable—fisheries into the foreseeable future?

Anyone who has followed the history of such RFMOs will have to admit that, at times, they fell short of taking the measures necessary to adequately conserve fish stocks, because of industry pressure.  But they will also have to admit that without them, management of highly migratory pelagic fish species would be effectively impossible, and that, in recent years, we have seen the RFMOs do some real good.  Here in the North Atlantic basin, for example, we have seen the International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas preside over the rebuilding of once-depleted broadbill swordfish and bluefin tuna stocks, and recently impose a complete moratorium on landing shortfin mako sharks, in order to rebuild the population.

Those all seem like solid conservation measures to me.

On the other hand, while the various advocacy groups might throw stones at the RFMOs for being influenced by the fishing industry, they never mention how their own advocacy efforts shift focus at the whims of the big foundations that provide much of their funding.  Two decades ago, there were multiple environmental groups who were focused on Magnuson-Stevens, seeking to keep the law strong in the face of a congressional reauthorization, and when that was achieved, working hard to put conservation-oriented people on the regional fishery management councils.  Then the big funders decided that Magnuson-Stevens didn’t matter anymore, turned their back on domestic fisheries, and started putting their money into things like 30x30, while the advocacy community, which relied on the foundation money, followed right along, shrinking or eliminating their domestic fisheries staff to focus on international issues.

The regional fishery management organizations, on the other hand, stayed focused on their mission of managing regional fisheries.

That’s probably a good thing, for as the Mongabay article notes, the proper name of the treaty is the

“agreement on the conservation and sustainable use of marine biological diversity of areas beyond national jurisdiction.  [emphasis added]”

And sustainable use is just what the regional fishery management organizations try to promote.

Perhaps that’s why, at a meeting called to draft the treaty’s rules, held in New York City between March 23 and April 2, the delegates present agreed to what Mongabay described as

“rules or procedure that would help enshrine [the RFMOs’] authority to be part of decision-making under the treaty.”

Those rules have yet to be confirmed in a final vote of the parties to the treaty, but the MPA advocates are already upset, even though the draft hardly gives the regional fishery management organizations control of the process, but merely states that

“interactions between the [treaty organization] and bodies such as RFMOs shall be guided by ‘the need to develop strategies to manage overlapping mandates and avoid duplication of efforts, including, where appropriate, by leveraging the expertise and best practices of relevant instruments, frameworks and bodies, and existing cooperation and coordination agreements and platforms.’”

That’s hardly unreasonable, yet the MPA advocates’ response was harsh.  Megan Randles, the global political lead for oceans for the environmental group Greenpeace, raged that

“The organizations that have presided over decades of destruction on the high seas have made a completely unacceptable power-grab which would dramatically weaken the [treaty’s] ability to protect the ocean.  They are attempting to re-write the Treaty in favour of fishing industry vested interests.”

Mongabay also quoted Ryan Orgera, the global director of the United States-based organization Accountability Fish, as saying that regional fishery management organizations

“are not equipped as bodies, philosophically nor logistically, to add value to MPA creation processes…Many of the actors internal to RFMO processes are publicly opposed to the creation of MPAs in their respective treaty-areas.  RFMOs fail in ecosystem protection—they don’t think of ecosystems in meaningful ways; they often treat individual fisheries as discrete entities.”

And perhaps, in that statement, we see the real roots of the conflict.

Regional fisheries management organizations, informed by science, seek to manage fisheries for sustainable harvest, while the organizations opposing RFMO involvement in the process are seeking to create marine protected areas, not because any specific research suggests that they are needed, but merely because of a philosophical belief that MPAs, which prevent any harvest in certain areas, are inherently good—and because they help attain certain arbitrary goals.

We should probably take another look at some of the language at the beginning of the Mongabay article, and really consider what it says:

“High seas MPAs are viewed as essential to meeting the looming 2030 deadline to protect 30% of the Earth’s ocean, especially since countries have only just reached one-third of that goal.”

“Essential to meeting the looming 2030 deadline.” 

High seas MPAs are not viewed as essential to maintain sustainable fisheries.  They are not viewed as essential to rebuild—or prevent the decline of—specific fish stocks.  They are only viewed as essential to meet what is, in fact, an arbitrary deadline of 2030 to protect an equally arbitrary 30% of the ocean from some sort of activity that has never been clearly and completely defined.

That doesn’t mean that high-seas marine protected areas cannot have value.  There might be cases where the best available science will suggest that the only way to adequately protect a population of fish is to close an area of ocean to all commercial fishing, or perhaps to all fishing of any kind.  But such circumstances are probably not common enough to justify closing 30% of the ocean just because it seems a nice thing to do.

Not long ago, MPA advocates were aggressively touting a paper titled “A global network of marine protected areas for food,” which appeared in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in October 2020 and argued that

“Strategically siting marine protected areas (MPAs) in overfished fisheries can have important conservation and food provisioning benefits.  We use distribution data for 1,338 commercially important fisheries stocks around the world to model how MPAs in different locations would affect catch.  We show that strategically expanding the existing global MPA network by just 5% could improve future catch by at least 20%.  Our work demonstrates that a global network of MPAs designed to improve fisheries productivity can substantially increase future catch, enabling synergistic conservation and food provisioning.”

However, that paper has since been retracted, something that only happens when the data underlying the paper, the analysis of that data, or some other aspect of the academic process leading to the paper’s production was seriously and fatally flawed.

So once again, we see an emotional appeal—in this case, the slogan 30x30, which embodies a clear, if unjustified concept, and can easily be used in public relations campaigns—supplanting, in at least some advocates’ minds, data-based management efforts.

Advocates for the arbitrary creation of marine protected areas, and the arbitrary protection of 30% of the ocean, rail against the input of regional fishery management organizations that proceed not on the basis of compelling public relations campaigns, but on the basis of compelling scientific information.

It is the sort of thing that we’ve seen before, when advocacy groups championed causes with public relations appeal, perhaps involving charismatic megafauna—sharks, bluefin tuna, or broadbill swordfish in the ocean, and elephants, lions, or grizzly bears on shore—while ignoring the decline of species such as winter flounder, ocean pout, or bobwhite quail because they aren’t big enough or photogenic enough catch the public imagination and inspire public support.

In the same way, “30x30” can capture the public imagination far better than technical measures intended to rebuild dusky shark populations, even though the need for the latter is far better supported by data.

Which is just another reason whey fisheries management should remain the realm of fisheries managers—people who have been trained, and have dedicated their lifetimes, to conserving fish stocks and maintaining sustainable fisheries—rather than a place where advocates, pushing their cause of the day, merely roil the waters and keep the truly important work from being done.