FINDING COMMON GROUND

I came back from a trip out of town a few days ago, to find the November/December issue of Sport Fishing magazine waiting on the kitchen counter.

I picked it up and turned to the Editorial page, as I usually do.  It’s always worth reading.  Doug Olander, Sport Fishing’s editor, is a thoughtful, reasonable sort of writer, who is willing to look well beneath the surface of the issues that impact salt water fishermen and the stocks that they pursue.  Sometimes I agree with him, sometimes I don’t, but his thoughts are always well-presented and worth real consideration.

The editorial in the November/December issue was no exception to that rule.

The topic was the current, fraught relationship between many salt water anglers and the conservation community. 

Olander noted three recent alleged “wins” for the recreational fishing community—the Commerce Department’s decision to extend the private-boat recreational season for Gulf of Mexico red snapper, its decision not to enforce the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission’s determination that New Jersey was out of compliance with ASMFC’s summer flounder management plan and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s decision not to list Pacific bluefin tuna under the Endangered Species Act and observed that sportfishing suddenly seems to matter in decisionmakers’ eyes.

He also noted that the conservation community has recently been very visible opposing legislation supported by elements of the recreational fishing community, which would amend the conservation and stock rebuilding provisions of the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act, which governs fishing in federal waters.

At that point, Olander could have entered into the kind of rant that has become all too typical in the angling press, condemning the conservation community and accusing them of trying to push anglers off the water and forcing them to stop fishing.  But that’s not how he operates.  Instead, once again, we got something thoughtful.

“I realize that many of my fellow fishermen consider such groups as an evil-incarnate enemy.  Vilification and hating are the easy responses.  But more reasoned voices realize that, at the least, the end goal of these environmental groups is one that everyone supports:  safeguarding our marine-fish populations.

“The issue, of course, and where the disagreement comes in, is how best to do that…

“I recall, back in the 1990s, when some large environmental groups really did reach out, trying to find common ground.  But in the past 15 or so years, mistrust and outright hostility have increased to toxic levels…

“Tearing down the walls to find common ground for cooperation represents an extraordinary challenge, but stranger things have happened.”

Bravo.

And I mean that in the original sense of the word.  Brave.

For while there were other parts of the editorial where Olander made it clear that he wasn't necessarily a fan of the various conservation groups, he had the integrity to admit that at least their end goal was the right one—healthy fish populations.  

That admission alone could cause some of the more militant anglers’ rights advocates to make him a target of their typically vitriolic attacks.

I have a lot of sympathy for what Olander said, because I have long had a foot in both worlds.  I caught my first fish when I was barely able to walk, and have been an angler ever since.  And I fished through the striped bass collapse of the 1970s and ‘80s, when I watched fisheries managers dither instead of trying to stem the decline. I have been an advocate for strong and effective conservation measures ever since.

Over that time, I’ve also seen both conservation groups and anglers do stupid things.

The worst occurred in 2000, when the various conservation organizations involved in ocean issues seemed to suggest that roughly 20% of U.S. coastal waters should be set aside as “marine preserves” where no fishing, not even catch-and-release, would be allowed.  

The recreational angling community, feeling that they would be shut out of some of their most productive fishing grounds, immediately felt threatened by the proposed closed areas, and mobilized to oppose the conservation groups’ efforts.

While it’s true that some environmental groups reached out to anglers during that time—Doug Olander and I both attended a meeting with various such organizations, hosted in New York City by the Norcross Wildlife Foundation—there wasn’t much meeting of the minds going on.  It was more the environmental folks telling anglers what they were planning to do, and why, and anglers pushing back.

As author Ted Williams notes in his book, Something’s Fishy,

“…If the enviros had bothered to communicate with sportsmen, they could have avoided a war, gained allies, and learned what kind of [marine protected areas] are genuinely beneficial to fish.”

Instead, Williams relates, the then-responsible American Sportfishing Association, which represents the fishing tackle industry, responded to the conservation groups’ heavy-handed tactics with a press release warning that

“Extreme Environmentalists Offer Misleading Statements on [Marine Protected Areas},”

while

“Mostly, though, the ASA has maintained its cool.  Not so the otherwise savvy, effective CCA (Coastal Conservation Association).  For example, I and my fellow members received the following communication from President David Cummins.  ‘Recreational fishing is under attack as never before…attack by the feds and the radical environmentalists…Environmental extremists are conspiring with federal bureaucrats to take away our freedom to fish…These No Fishing Zones are a power grab; they’re all about control of the citizens, not protection of anything…Now picture this:  the fish-no-more map proposed by these well-funded environmentalists.  I’ve seen it, and I can tell you what it looks like.  You’ll be stunned.  All along the Atlantic, from Maine on south, wherever there are aggregations of fish, they’re proposing to ban fishing…’”

Cummins’ letter, which was intended to drum up donations for CCA’s Legal Defense Fund, contained far too much hyperbole.  However, I sat on CCA’s National Executive Board at the time, and I was a Vice-Chair of CCA’s National Government Relations Committee, so I know that the fear of no-take marine reserves expressed in that letter wasn’t feigned.  Everyone was afraid that we anglers were going to be permanently forced off the water.

In time, the threat of such no-take reserves faded away in most of the country (although not in California, where anglers remain closed out of once-favored grounds), replaced by a more reasonable approach of creating marine protected areas that protect certain species—such as spawning deep-water grouper—but permit fishing activities that won’t impact the protected stocks.

However, the conservation groups’ clumsy efforts to create marine reserves ended up doing real harm, driving a wedge between groups representing anglers and the conservation community, giving real credibility to claims, previously uttered only by the extremist fringe of the angling community, that the “environmental industry” was attacking recreational fishermen, and rendering anglers far more likely to believe such assertions.

The wound that wedge created continued to fester.  In 1996, angling and conservation organizations worked together, successfully urging Congress to pass the Sustainable Fisheries Act, which finally added enforceable conservation and stock rebuilding provisions to Magnuson-Stevens.  They worked together again when Magnuson-Stevens was being reauthorized in 2006, to keep those provisions strong, but the relationship was strained, with the angling groups not really trusting the environmental folks.

Today, the wound opened back in 2000 has done more than festered; gangrene has set in.  While the conservation groups have learned a good lesson from their earlier error, and are trying to reach out to anglers, groups such as ASA and CCA have completely changed course, and have adopted policies that are completely opposite the positions that they took a decade ago.

In Something’s Fishy, Ted Williams observed that in 2000,

“[Michael] Nussman [president of ASA] and his predecessor, Mike Hayden, have managed to convince the tackle industry that the best way to improve sales is to preserve and restore fish stocks; it was an idea that hadn’t previously occurred to it…”

And as I mentioned before, I was very involved with CCA back then, and know from personal experience that the leadership there, at that time, were very committed to the idea of “putting the fish first.”  As late as 2010, CCA put out a document, which I helped to write, explaining why there was no need to amend (read “weaken”) Magnuson-Stevens in order to give the law more “flexibility.”

Since then, such organizations have taken far less enlightened positions.  

In June 2015, both ASA and CCA praised the House of Representatives passing H.R. 1335, the so-called Strengthening Fishing Communities and Increasing Flexibility in Fisheries Management Act, a bill that would undo much of the good work that such organizations did in 1996 and 2007, and add the sort of “flexibility” to Magnuson-Stevens that CCA opposed in 2010.

And while CCA’s former president, David Cummins, complained back in 2000 that “Environmental extremists are conspiring with federal bureaucrats to take away our freedom to fish,” today in 2017, documents obtained through discovery in a lawsuit brought by two conservation organizations, the Ocean Conservancy and the Environmental Defense Fund, reveal that

“A letter to Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross from Ben Speciale, president of Yamaha Marine Group, was sent on April 3, less than a week after Ross met with Speciale, Mike Nussman, Scott Deal and Pat Murray to discuss the need for a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) fisheries administrator who had experience with the recreational sector…

“Nussman is president of the American Sportfishing Association, Deal is from Maverick Boats and Murray is from the Coastal Conservation Association…

“Speciale’s first request was about more red snapper for Gulf of Mexico anglers…”

Two months later, Speciale’s request was granted with a reopening of the red snapper season that was predicted, by the agency, to cause substantial overfishing and delay the recovery of the stock by as much as six years. 

Apparently, “conspiring with federal bureaucrats” is OK if CCA is among the conspirators…

It’s not surprising that the conservation groups were upset about that, and eventually sued.  CCA dismissed the lawsuit with the comment that

“It’s no surprise.  We figured they would sue when this first happened because it’s what they do.  Basically, anytime that there’s something positive for anglers, anti-angler groups like these step up and file lawsuits.”

The CCA representative who made that comment, David Cresson, identified as “CEO” of CCA’s Louisiana chapter, failed to explain how substantial overfishing and delayed stock rebuilding was “positive for anglers,” possibly because no one asked, and possibly because there is no good answer to such a question.

So yes, in the end I agree with Doug Olander, that it’s in everyone’s best interests for angling organizations and the various conservation groups to come together to protect the health of marine fish populations.

Certainly, most anglers want and benefit from healthy and abundant fish populations when out on the water; fishing on a mostly empty ocean quickly loses its appeal.

But before those groups can reunite, organizations like CCA and the Recreational Fishing Alliance have to finally realize that having healthy fish stocks for the foreseeable future, and not more dead fish on the dock for a couple of years, is really in the best interests of their members.

And industry groups such as ASA need to remember what they once knew:  that the best way to sell more fishing stuff is to have more fish in the water for anglers to catch, because without those fish, there’s little need for an angling industry.

It’s probably up to the anglers themselves to bring that awareness about, by making it clear that they don’t want to fish on meager, half-depleted stocks when much greater abundance stands within their reach.

And if the angling groups don’t listen, then it’s time for the anglers themselves to work with the conservation community, bring the needed cooperation to life, and leave the organizations that no longer represent their best interests behind.