CONSERVATION, EQUITY, AND ECONOMIC JUSTICE

 

Self-serving arguments are common in many debates, and fisheries management proves no exception.

We learned that the other night, at one of the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission’s hearings on the emergency striped bass measures, when some New England charter boat captains argued for “sector separation”—basically, letting their customers fish under special, more liberal rules—as a matter of economic justice, claiming that their boats provide access to fisheries resources to folks who lack the means to purchase and maintain a boat of their own.

It almost seems plausible.  But stop and think about that for a minute.

The primary proponent of the argument—I won’t embarrass him by name—runs a good-sized charter boat.  His cheapest trip, available only on July and August afternoons, is aimed at

“those who want to spend a few hours fishing in the…area with the chance to bring home some fresh fish for dinner.”

It costs $525 for the trip—or at least it did a few years ago, when fuel was much cheaper and his website was last updated—which means that everyone in a typical, 6-person charter party would have to pony up a little over $100 apiece, once a tip for the mate, travel costs to the dock, and related costs are considered.

That’s not a lot of money for entertainment these days, the per-person cost being just a little bit more than that of a half-day trip on a party boat (here on Long Island, the party boats charge somewhere around $60 for a four or five hour trip, to which tips, transportation, and such must again be added).  But when things are framed in an economic justice context, as those captains did, $100 is still a lot of money for someone with little discretionary cash to pay for a trip on which one might or might not catch a striped bass (mid-summer afternoons probably being the least-likely time to convince one to hit), although targeting other species such as summer flounder, scup, or black sea bass would probably guarantee at least modest success.

Still, the for-hire fleet often couches its arguments for less restrictive regulations in economic justice terms, whatever the species, claiming that they represent poorer folks’ access to the resource, that bag limits must be high enough to allow anglers to take sufficient fish home to justify the costs of the trip, etc. 

And as I noted, that sounds reasonable at first hearing.

But when you think about it a little longer, you begin to realize that in a fisheries context, real economic justice is achieved not by lax regulations which erode the health of fish stocks, and allow higher harvests in the short term, but by effective fisheries conservation measures that increase fish abundance, and ultimately makes fish so widely available that anglers—rich or poor—don’t need to hire a boat at all.

For, while plenty of lower-income folks fish, most fish for food and not just for pleasure, and while a good share of those folks occasionally treat themselves to a for-hire trip, the majority of their angling is done close to home, at places they can access by foot, or maybe by bicycle or even public transport, at minimal cost to themselves.  Places that, unlike the docks where the for-hire boats moor, they can access without even owning a car.

I see such anglers when I drive off Long Island, fishing alongside the Cross Island Parkway and from the jetties and shoreline near the Throggs Neck Bridge.  You can see them fishing in the East River, from Brooklyn’s piers and bulkheads or from the Manhattan shoreline, which gives them access to the Hudson River as well; on the other side of the Hudson, they fish from similar structures jutting out from the New Jersey shore.

You can find their counterparts fishing from pieces of public—or not well fenced-in pieces of private—shoreline in every town and big city along the coast.  Some are equipped with utilitarian rods and reels; some wrap their line around beer cans, having learned to “cast” surprisingly well with such simple gear.

I well remember having a conversation with the groundskeeper of place where we stayed in the middle Keys, who pointed to the small barracuda swimming around the dock and described how he and his wife often depended on them for food after they first arrived from Missouri; the fish kept them going while they were still unemployed.

Such economically disadvantaged anglers who have no ability to follow the fish, anglers who can’t afford to travel to Cape Cod, Point Judith, or Montauk to fish for striped bass, hire a charter for tautog, or fish offshore structure for fluke.

What fish they catch must be fish that come to them, fish that can be caught in their local waters.

The ability for anglers of limited means to experience decent fishing without paying for a boat, or traveling any distance from home, is a real measure of economic justice in our recreational fisheries

It’s a timely issue to consider, as NOAA Fisheries has just released its Equity and Environmental Justice Strategy, which considers how to better share the nation’s marine resources among every resident of the United States, regardless of their economic status.

Such strategy is built around five basic principles.

·        The public should be afforded meaningful opportunities to participate in the formulation, design and execution of Department programs, policies and activities.

·        Tribes should, on a government to government basis, be afforded regular and meaningful consultation and collaboration opportunities in the development of policies that have tribal implications.

·        All populations should share in (and are not excluded from) benefits of Departmental programs, policies or activities affecting human health or the environment.

·        No population should be affected in a disproportionately high and adverse manner by agency programs, policies or activities affecting human health or the environment.

·        The department will engage in environmental justice activities in a transparent and accountable manner.

Three of those principles are primarily process issues, but the other two—which provide that all populations should share in, and none should be disproportionately disadvantaged by NOAA Fisheries policy—are relevant to conservation and management.  Having said that, it should be noted that NOAA Fisheries’ jurisdiction is focused almost entirely on federal waters, three or more miles offshore.  Outside of managing stocks for long-term abundance, it has little ability to aid those folks forced to fish, if they wish to fish at all, from their neighboring shoreline.  Still, the same principles ought to apply on the inshore grounds.

Which brings us back to species such as striped bass.

As anyone familiar with the fishery knows, the last couple of years, and particularly this year and last, have been marked by the big 2015 year class, both with respect to total abundance and to the number of fish falling into the recreational slot limit—currently 28 to 35 inches in most states, but soon to be 28 to 31 inches pursuant to the ASMFC’s recent emergency action—that people can legally take home.  There have been some bigger fish around, but most places aren’t seeing too many smaller fish coming up behind the 2015s.

Fishing can be spectacularly fast when the 2015s are around; you can watch the fish migrate up and down the coast, spurring a flurry of fast fishing wherever they happen to be.  But because most of the year classes between 2004 and 2010 were small, with many well below average, and because the last four years of recruitment in the Maryland portion of Chesapeake Bay, which produces the lion’s share of the migratory fish, has been poor, if the 2015s aren’t around, fishing slows to a near stop.

That’s not too much of a problem for folks who have a boat, and might run 30 miles from their home port to find fish, even if they have to troll over a deeper-water ledge a mile or two from shore in order to put something in the boat.  And it’s at best inconvenient for many surfcasters, who have the vacation time and resources to jump in their trucks and drive up to Cape Cod, take the ferry to Block Island, or take a ride out to Montauk for a few days, following the bite.  But if you’re a guy who pays the rent by washing dishes in the back of some Brooklyn bistro, and just want to toss a chunk of bunker into the East River for a few hours after work, if the 2015s have migrated past, and are now out in Montauk, Rhode Island, or Cape Cod, they might as well not exist at all.

That’s because when a fish population is small, it tends to concentrate in what’s known as its “core range;” in the case of a migratory species such as striped bass, there are typically two such ranges, one where fish feed during the summer (for striped bass, eastern Long Island to Cape Cod) and another where it spends the winter (for bass, traditional the deeper waters off the Virginia/North Carolina border, although the currently warming water has been moving the site somewhat farther north, leaving North Carolina behind).  Outside of those places, fish are generally caught only during their migration.

But when a population is large, competitive pressure causes some fish to leave the core range and feed elsewhere.  An abundant bass populations sees good numbers of fish migrating well into Maine waters, and also sees quite a few so-called “resident” fish remain behind, to summer in coastal bays and estuaries between Delaware and New York.

It is those resident fish that kindle hope in the hearts of urban anglers, and allows them to believe that if they cast a bait out into the Hudson (or Boston Harbor, or Rhode Island’s Providence River), they have a reasonable chance to put a striped bass fillet on the table without having to shell out $100 or more for a few hours fishing from somebody’s boat.

Good striped bass conservation can make that dream come true.

Sometimes, though, conservation isn’t enough.  The folks stuck on the shoreline need a little more help.  Consider scup and black sea bass.

Both are very abundant, but both tend to run larger farther from shore, where only the boats can reach them.  And despite—or perhaps because—they are so abundant, they’re being harvested in high enough numbers that fairly restrictive recreational management measures, including size limits, are still needed to avoid overfishing.

In the case of scup, managers in the northeast are trying to do the right thing, setting a 9 ½-inch size limit for shore-based anglers, an inch less than the 10 ½-inch limit for those fishing from boats.

But back sea bass remains a problem in the northeast.  This year, a mandated 10% landings reduction forced New York to go to a 16 ½-inch size limit.  While I’ve seen such fish in the bays, usually in the May, and always caught from boats, there is little chance for anglers fishing from piers or jetties to catch one big enough to take home.  New York could have kept its old 16-inch limit—and give up just a few days of the season—but the for-hires wanted the extra days.

And to be honest, as a practical matter, to a guy sitting on the end of a pier, the difference between 16 and 16 ½ is pretty close to none.  He probably won’t catch a fish of either size.

Now, New York might have been able to go to a somewhat smaller sea bass size limit, maybe even one small enough to give the folks on shore a realistic shot at a legal fish, if the bag limit didn’t double after August 31.  Might be even easier to drop the size if the state shut down the season sometime in September, the way Massachusetts does, instead of letting it run through the end of the year.

But given that the angling industry folks weren’t willing to give up even a few days of season to keep the 16-inch limit, it’s just about certain than any suggestion to cut out the entire fall season, just to provide a few fish for the guys stuck on shore, would face immediate rejection.

Things just tend to work out that way.

In fisheries, as elsewhere in life, folks talk about equity and economic justice if they think it will win them something that they want, but look the other way, and ignore the issue, if it might cost them anything at all.