MARINE FISHERIES ETHICS: DEFENDING THE COMMONS

 It was just an offhand comment in an Internet forum, in a thread about false albacore (a/k/a “little tunny”).  Somebody got offended when another angler commented about releasing fish properly, and responded

“But what an angler does with his catch within the law?  Is nobody’s business but their own.”

It’s a sentiment that I’ve heard echoed more than a few times, various versions of “If it’s legal, than it’s OK,” or “Don’t worry about it.  Nobody broke any laws.”

Yet when I saw that comment about false albacore the other day, I couldn’t help but have a negative reaction—and not just because of the lousy grammar.

What’s right and what’s legal can often be a long way apart. 

False albacore are a good example of that.  They fight well, often bust bait on the surface, and can generally be found close to shore.  That makes them popular with light-tackle anglers, and particularly valued by the flyfishing crowd, who can’t generally find any fish that pulls harder without traveling some distance offshore.

On the other hand, while false albacore, if properly handled and eaten on the same day that they’re caught, can provide excellent sushi and sashimi, the fish are otherwise typically shunned as seafood.  Because of that, the commercial false albacore fishery is very small; in 2019, East Coast false albacore landings were around 450,000 pounds, with an ex vessel price of roughly $250,000, or about 56 cents per pound.  Recreational harvest is significantly higher—about 1.8 million pounds—but only about half of that was actually landed; the rest is attributed to fish that were dying when returned to the water.

At the same time, false albacore are the most abundant tunain the Atlantic ocean; fishing mortality doesn’t have much impact on the health of the stock, so fisheries managers haven’t bothered to regulate the false albacore fishery.  Thus, everything is legal.  An angler could kill every one that he catches, then dump them back, dead, into the sea, and face no legal consequences at all.

While the commenter on the website was arguing that it was nobody’s business how an angler releases false albacore, his comment that “what an angler does with their catch within the law…is nobody’s business but their own” would apply the angler who killed and wasted his entire catch as well.

Yet we all should agree that sort of action—although legal—would be ethically reprehensible, no matter how abundant and unregulated false albacore might be.

To demonstrate that point, let’s step outside the fisheries context just for a moment, and think of another natural resources issue.  Back in the mid- to late 1800s, right after the Civil War, just as the first trans-continental railroad was built, buffalo—more properly, American bison—abounded; it’s generally believed that somewhere between 30 and 60 million of the great animals, which might weigh somewhere around 1,500 pounds each, lived on the Great Plains.

After the railroads were built, they began advertising special trips for East Coast sportsmen, who could engage in “hunting by rail” for the buffalo.  A contemporary journalist described one of such hunts this way:

“The train is ‘slowed’ to a rate of speed about equal to that of the herd; the passengers get out fire-arms which are provided for the defense of the train against the Indians, and open from the windows and platforms of the cars a fire that resembles a brisk skirmish.  Frequently a young bull will turn at bay for a moment.  His exhibition of courage is generally his death warrant, for the whole fire of the train is turned upon him, either killing him or some member of the herd in his immediate vicinity.”

The buffalo, once killed, were left on the ground to rot.  No effort was made to recover them.

It was all perfectly legal, but was it morally right?

Today, wild American buffalo hang on in only a few places, such as Yellowstone National Park, some remote areas of Utah, and the Nature Conservancy’s Joseph H. Williams Tallgrass Prairie Preserve in Oklahoma. 

But back in the 1860s and 1870s, when bison were abundant, killing them wasn’t only legal, it was encouraged, with General Philip Sheridan encouraging the slaughter, and even the extinction, of the buffalo, believing that it would be the most effective way to weaken the various Plains tribes and end their resistance to settlers taking over their lands.

So back then, killing the buffalo was not only legal, but encouraged.

And yet, was it ethically and morally right?

Today, I think, most reasonable people would say no.

Yet if that was wrong, why would it not be wrong to kill, or even carelessly mishandle, a false albacore, or any other fish, merely because they are currently abundant, and no laws give them protection?

I would hope most thinking anglers would believe that ethics and morality would play a role there, as well.

And if we agree that it’s wrong to kill something that you have no intention to eat, and just let it rot on the beach, then isn’t it equally wrong to release a live fish in a way that makes it more likely to die?

Or for an angler to keep a fish that he has no intention of eating, with the vague expectation that he’ll be able to give it away to someone he knows?  Or to keep the fish for himself, knowing that he already has so many fish in the freezer that much will be thrown out in the spring?

Those things, too, are legal.

And those things, too, are not right.

Yet how do we answer the angler who says, “I didn’t break any laws, so what I do is nobody’s business but mine?”

My response is that such anglers are wrong, because the marine resources of the nation are a commonly owned resource.  We may use them.  But when we abuse them, we do a great disservice to our fellow citizens who may depend on such resources for food or for their economic survival.

Unfortunately, commonly owned resources are particularly susceptible to abuse.  That point was popularized, and made into a near-cliché, in Garrett Hardin’s 1968 essay, “The Tragedy of the Commons,” but the point was first made more than a century earlier, in a lecture given by English economist William Forster Lloyd, who noted that when farmers all graze their animals on a publicly-owned pasture, known in England as a “common,”

 “if [such farmer] puts more cattle on a common, the food which they consume forms a deduction which is shared between all cattle, as well that of others as his own, in proportion to their number, and only a small part of it is taken from his own cattle.”

Thus, it makes sense for a farmer to graze too many cattle on a shared pasture, for the benefits that he receives will outweigh the damage caused by overgrazing, as the effects of that damage is shared between the cattle owned by everyone.

However, that strategy only works when just one or two people abuse the system, because when abuse becomes commonplace,

“In an inclosed pasture, there is a point of saturation, if I may call it so (by which, I mean a barrier depending on considerations of interest) beyond which no prudent man will add to his stock.  In a common, also, there is in like manner a point of saturation,”

and when that point is reached, the common declines so badly that no one, including the abusers, can profit.

Hardin’s essay took Lloyds comments on pasturage and expanded them into a more general truth:  When individuals are allowed unrestricted access to a common resource, then they will naturally seek to take more than their share, and everyone will suffer.  That truth applies in fisheries as well.  People claim that they have the “right” or the “freedom” to do what they want, so long as they stay within the law, but such freedom is illusory, for as Hardin observes,

“the morality of the act is a function of the state of the system at the time it is performed.  Using the commons as a cesspool does not harm the general public under frontier conditions, because there is no public, the same behavior in a metropolis is unbearable.  A hundred and fifty years ago a plainsman could kill an American bison, cut out only the tongue for his dinner, and discard the rest of the animal.  He was not in any important sense being wasteful.  Today, with only a few thousand bison left, we would be appalled by such behavior.”

Thus, in a fisheries context, it may be legally acceptable to harvest one striped bass each day.  But right now, with the striped bass stock already overfished, it is probably morally unacceptable to do so, because of the harm that such harvest can do to the commonly owned resource.

Similarly, the comments we often hear at fisheries meetings, that back in the 1960s or ‘70s, people would go out onto party boats expecting that the fish that they caught would “pay for the trip” in food value, are irrelevant today, when growing coastal populations have placed greater pressure on coastal marine resources, and anglers can have a much more profound impact on fish stocks than they had half a century ago.

Thus, the notion that “what an angler does with his catch within the law…is nobody’s business but their own” is inherently flawed.  Such a concept might be valid if applied to a private pond, with no inlet or outlet, sited solely within the bounds of someone’s private parcel of real estate, as such fish could reasonably be deemed to be the personal property of the landowner.  But it cannot be rightly applied to the capture of fish resident in the coastal sea, for such fish are part of the commons, in which every citizen maintains an interest; thus, what people catch, let alone harvest, is everyone’s business, for everyone has an interest in the health and management of such natural resources, which are held in trust for us all.

In fact, as owners of such commonly held natural resources, it is in our interests to be good and responsible stewards, who not only take care to ensure that such resources are properly managed, but also go out of our way to point out when such resources are being abused.

In the end, natural resources, including the nation’s marine fish stocks, belong to all of us, and it is not only our right, but our duty and our moral obligation, to stand up and speak out when we find an individual taking more than his share.