The
current effort to weaken the Magnuson-Stevens
Fishery Conservation and Management Act is built on a number of…well, to be
polite, let’s call them “myths.” Perhaps
the greatest of those is that the entire angling community is on the same side.
It makes for a good story, and has probably convinced a
legislator or two to support a bill that wouldn’t have otherwise gotten the nod,
and convinced a few more anglers to jump onto a bandwagon that they would have
otherwise ignored.
The story’s a lot more attractive than the unvarnished truth,
that the bill is largely the creation of a
fishing-tackle trade group seeking to boost its members’ incomes, boatbuilders
with similar goals, and a
handful of anglers’ rights groups—the biggest
of them having, by its own count, a little over 100,000 members (a very
small piece of the
estimated 8,300,000 saltwater fishermen in the United States)—who want to
put a few more fish in their coolers, and leave a few less in the sea.
But slowly, the real story is trickling out.
The study’s findings won’t be any
surprise to folks who regularly read this blog, but the fact that a respected Washington
think tank thoroughly investigated the issue, and came to the same conclusions, is significant.
People who matter are
beginning to look behind the curtain, and are clearing away the smoke and
mirrors generated by the critics of Magnuson-Stevens who are behind the so-called
Modern Fish Act and similar bills.
The authors of the study caught
the key issue in a single paragraph, when they observed that
“In the past, outdoor recreation advocates
have measured the success of their policy advocacy by fishery abundance,
focusing on keeping their resource plentiful.
However, in recent years, some recreational equipment manufacturers have
joined forces with the majority of recreational fishing organizations to
support changes to the law that would provide greater recreational access to
fisheries while weakening science-based safeguards that promote the health and
abundance of fish stocks. This
emphasis on access at the expense of abundance reflects the business model of
the equipment industry: Selling more
boats, tackle, and gear requires perpetual growth in the number of fishing
participants not just the size of fish populations. [emphasis added]”
Undoubtedly, that statement is going
to draw some outraged shrieks from the anglers’ rights crowd.
It’s likely that the same sort of folks
who howl at the moon about losing “the days of freedom in our fisheries,”
or who
spout trite complaints about federal fisheries managers’ “harmful overregulation,”
and “burdensome restrictions” will eventually claim that the report only
reflects the pro-regulation bias of the progressive think tank
that produced it.
Such specious arguments are destined
to fail. Not only is “The Rise of the
Recreational Fishing Lobby” well-researched, but it’s core message, quoted
above, merely reflects statements made by Modern Fish Act supporters.
Last
summer, they held what they called their “Weigh-in on the Hill,” where they
met, discussed the Modern Fish Act and tried to attract congressional support. One of the speakers
at that event was New Jersey tackle wholesaler Nick Cicero, of Bimini Bay Outfitters
and the Folsom Corporation. According to
The Fisherman magazine, Cicero told
the assembled crowd that
“These amendments need to not only support
the existing population of recreational anglers and fishing related businesses
but also allow new entrants to come into the fishery and businesses to grow and
expand. The law needs to recognize that
in itsMagnuson-Stevens Act] taking away opportunity from the rest of the
fishing community. [The Magnuson-Stevens
Act], as it applies to recreational fishing, is a flawed law, one that stifles growth
of our industry and challenges the very future of our tradition. [emphasis added]”
His statement completely
corroborates the thesis of the report, and the rest of the report seems equally
true.
Anglers and
everyone else concerned with the health of our fisheries should also think long and
hard about a very important question posed by the report:
“If the prioritization of fish abundance is
now being superseded by the pursuit of opportunity to fish, precisely what is
it that recreational advocates are fighting to access?”
It’s an important question,
because as just about any angler can tell you, abundance matters. Fishing for spooky, selective, hard-to-fool
fish is a challenge; even when you can’t catch one, you can have a good, if
frustrating, day.
But it’s important to know that
the fish are there. It’s tough to get
excited about fishing in a largely empty sea, when you know that you can do
everything right, and still come up empty, solely because the fish aren’t
there. I lived through that forty years ago, when the striped bass collapsed.
But those were striped bass and I
was still almost young, not yet married and stubborn enough to think that hunting
unicorns might be fun. I was willing to make thousands of casts in an effort to find the handful of
fish that swam along miles of otherwise empty shore.
But I was largely alone. Unicorns were not for everyone. A lot of folks chose to stay home.
The important thing to remeber, though, is that just before the collapse, people
caught a lot of striped bass. The stock
didn’t collapse all at once. The
spawning failures began in 1975, but big fish were abundant throughout most
of the 1970s. I worked in a tackle shop
for much of that decade, and for a few years, saw customers bring a parade of large
stripers—the sort of big females that were critically important to the future
of the stock—through the door, to get their photos taken and hang their bass on
the scale. Sometimes, they’d hang three
or four at a time.
Yet, although it was clear that
the bass was in trouble, and that a serious reckoning was on the horizon if
nothing was done, the owner of the shop where I worked thought things were just
fine. He didn’t support conservation
efforts, and grew angry any time that I raised the topic. All he cared about was the short term.
That, I think, provides an answer
to the puzzle of “What is it that recreational advocates are trying to access?”
Remember that fish stocks don’t collapse all at
once.
If Magnuson-Stevens were weakened,
and anglers were allowed to overfish, businesses would, at first, see a
boom.
Red snapper, summer flounder,
black sea bass and other fish that have been at the heart of the Modern Fish
Act debate are essentially meat fish; they might be fun to catch, but fishermen
catch them for meat, not for sport.
If bag limits were higher, seasons
longer and size limits smaller, anglers would undoubtedly respond, fishing more
often to fill up their freezers, so long as the fish were available. They would buy boats and tackle, and the industry
would thrive—while the boom lasted.
Then stocks would decline, and
everyone would suffer, but that wouldn’t happen all at once, either, and fishing would
continue while stocks declined.
We saw that with winter flounder
in the northeast. Up through the early
1980s, anglers who fished in the best spots during the peak season could
literally catch them by the bushel.
In
New York, recreational fishermen took home more than 7,000,000 of them in 1984. After that, things went downhill pretty
quickly, falling by 95 percent—to 330,000 fish—by 1994. Yet the tackle shops and the party boats
still opposed harvest restrictions, arguing that anglers needed the “perception”
that they could have a “big day” and take home, if not a bushel, at least a
pailful of fish, even if that almost never happened.
By 2014, landings had dropped to
just 24,000 fish—one-third of one percent (0.3%) of what they were thirty years
before—but the representatives
of the recreational fishing industry were fighting hard to significantly
lengthen the season, seeking whatever short-term benefits that might provide,
instead of trying to rebuild the stock.
To use the language of the Center
for American Progress report, they were still emphasizing “access over
abundance,” even though the stock had
collapsed and local extirpation was a real threat.
And that probably explains the current
debate over the Modern Fish Act and Magnuson-Stevens.
“As a result, they’re not investing in
their workers, in research, or in technology—short-term costs that would reduce
profits temporarily.”
Given that fact, it’s hardly
surprising that many fishing tackle and boatbuilding businesses don’t support
conservation and the abundance it brings, which in the end is essentially an investment in our fisheries’ future.
Instead, because conservation has short-term costs, such businesses are
investing their efforts in access, seeking the short-term profits such access
may bring.
Such thinking probably isn’t in
the long-term interest of the businesses, and it certainly isn’t in the
long-term interest of our fish stocks.
American anglers need to
take some of the findings in the Center for American Progress report to heart, because the long-term
health of fish stocks is critically linked to the long-term health of American
angling.
So, as the Modern Fish Act supporters fight to increase what they call “access”
at the expense of abundance, and threaten the future of our fish stocks, I will
leave you with a final thought, and one final question,
gleaned from the late Leonard Cohen’s “Stories of the Street.”
“I know you’ve heard
it’s over now and war must surely come,
the cities they are
broke in half and the middlemen are gone.
But let me ask you
one more time, O children of the dusk,
all these hunters who
are shrieking now oh do they speak for us?”
If you believe in abundant fish
stocks, when it comes to the Modern Fish Act folks, the answer is clearly no. That's something that our federal legislators need to understand.
Well said young warrior. And the biggest story is the way the cca/asa and others are taking the commercial seats off the Gulf of Mexico and South Atlantic Fishery Management Councils.
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