Back to PCFFA Fishermen's News Archive
Think for a minute what it might be like if you were not a fisherman, but a farmer or rancher working your own land, with no ties to the fishing industry. Now let's consider the following scenario.
You've been farming or ranching more or less successfully and sustainably on a piece of land that hasn't had much in the way of fences, so you might occasionally grow crops on some of your neighbors land and they sometimes might graze on yours. You share equipment and help each other out. It's been a good arrangement except for that occasional neighbor whose farming practices are depleting their own land and affecting others' land, causing soil loss and erosion, or who insists on over-grazing at the expense of everyone else. You and your neighbors try to educate them, but not everyone can be reasoned with.
Your produce and your sides of meat are sold in a nearby city for distribution. It seems like a pretty good arrangement, except that the city fathers (with close ties to developers who paid for their campaigns) have pandered to the public on a "no taxes" platform. One of the ways they've kept their taxes artificially low, and curried favor with the local developers, has been to allow the externalization of environmental costs both for the city and the developers to others.
One way they've externalized their environmental costs is by making the farm and ranch land of you and your neighbors their favorite trash disposal site. It's not even contained, they just dump anywhere with little regard for your operations. Plastics, used motor oil, you name it and they're dumping it on your land. Moreover, they've diverted water needed to keep your land productive and, in return, turned their sewer pipes onto yours and your neighbors' farm lands.
Coupled with this, they've condemned some of your lands without compensation by simply taking it and leasing it to their industrial friends to drill and mine. The environmental footprint of these mining operations is much larger than the actual site where the activity is taking place. Noise from their operations has already driven off, even killed your livestock. The pollution from these mining operations goes unregulated, of course -- and much of the residue of their operations is toxic and laden with heavy metals that could poison your land for generations.
The city fathers promised to return your land to you and your neighbors cleaned up, once their industrial friends were finished, but now the cost of environmental clean-up and removal of structures has given their industrial friends pause. Yes, they are obligated in their leases for clean-up and removal, but it just costs too much. So instead, they're claiming their old abandoned mining structures are really newly made "wildlife habitat," or have other uses that will delay their day of reckoning on facing these cleanup costs.
The city fathers, always looking for new money without having to use the "T" word, have jumped at the idea of getting a fraction of the savings their industrial friends would enjoy by getting out from under their clean-up and removal obligations. The city fathers would be the winners by collecting some chump change and keeping their industrial friends happy. Their industrial friends would reap huge savings. The only loser is you and your neighbors who permanently lose productive lands. In the name of "progress" and "low energy prices" you are told this is a small price to pay.
All of this pollution has caused yours and your neighbors' lands to be much less productive. Many of your neighbors have just given up and you are just kind of hanging on. Some who are farther way from the city are still doing fairly well. But even they are beginning to feel the affects of the acid rain and toxic chemicals being produced from the smokestacks of the industry in the city. It's starting to make all the surrounding farm and range lands less productive and, if something isn't done soon to control it, it could make all of the lands around the city unusable for crops or livestock or any other type of food production.
Over the years, falling production from some of these lands has caused alarm among some of the folks in the city. So they've developed regulations to institute sustainable farming practices and stop overgrazing. Many of these regulations were even requested by you and your neighbors. Since then they've sent inspectors, observers and sheriffs to implement these regulations. But now, they're even putting cameras on some of your lands to watch you, and putting ankle bracelets on some of your neighbors to keep track of where they are going. Now they also want to place these cameras on all of the lands and ankle bracelets on all of you whether or not any of your operations have ever caused a problem.
Of course you've gone along with these land use regulations (if grudgingly), because you don't want to be evicted from your land. It's even helped in those few instances where your neighbors are careless, to ensure better and more sustainable farming and ranching practices. But you know that these minor problems were not the biggest threats you and your neighbors face -- not by a long shot.
The problem is that the city fathers and their developer cronies still don't want to address their own waste stream, and that's the single most important threat to all of your lands. Instead, they still want you to pay for all their environmental costs they've externalized. Of course, it is not just you that are paying the costs. Your consumers are paying too, because your farm products are becoming scarcer and therefore higher priced.
But so far, the city fathers and the developers have been successful in avoiding nearly all responsibility for their actions. They've even got you and your neighbors fighting amongst yourselves, mostly over the regulations they've placed on you as a diversion. Not many have paid attention to the fact that all of your lands are still being systematically trashed. That, more than anything else now, is causing all of your lands to be less and less productive year by year.
The big problem is that there are not a lot of you and your neighbors any more. Your numbers are continuing to decline and all of your lands are losing productivity. With fewer of you and your farmer neighbors, it is getting politically easier to just ignore you.
At times you've forged alliances with environmental groups to fight for better regulations over your activities or to try to stop the dumping of trash and pollution threatening your land. But lately many of them seem to have deserted you. Some have even been co-opted by big grants from developers, and have since found it's far more profitable (and politically much easier) just to bash you and your neighbors, even when you've done nothing wrong, than to attack the underlying -- but far more politically difficult -- systemic problems that are still threatening the productivity of your land and your way of life.
The city fathers, of late, have become concerned with the reduction of food production from you and your neighbors' lands. But rather than address the pollution and diversion problems causing your land to be less productive, or to engage in restoration efforts, they've decided massive industrial feed lots are a better use for your lands. So they're now proposing to condemn more of your lands, again without compensation for your losses, to put in these large industrial feed lots. Not surprisingly, these feed lots will ultimately be owned or controlled by some of the same developer corporations they are already politically beholden to.
These corporate feedlots, offered up as an industrial "solution" to declining biological productivity from the land, are going to create even more problems for you and your farming/ranching neighbors. They will pollute and spread disease to your livestock. Their livestock sometimes get loose and destroy rangeland used by your livestock. Worse, there are proposals for using genetically modified and cloned animals in these operations with little concern for what happens if they escape into the wild or accidentally breed into your livestock herds.
These corporate feedlots also require massive amounts of alfalfa and corn, which puts a greater burden on you and your neighbors, causing more demand for these commodities to supply the feedlots than can be sustainably grown. Moreover, consumers are then forced pay higher prices for corn, and other items you once produced are no longer available.
Making matters worse, the corporate feedlot operators are all tied to large food processing companies that can unfairly manipulate market prices, starving out you and your neighbors. By exempting themselves from the rules for sustainable farming you have to abide by, these industrial feedlots will also compete unfairly against your ecologically sustainable farming practices and may drive you and ecologically responsible farmers like you out of business.
Adding to this, some of the large environmental groups, "Big Enviro," in league with wildlife scientists worried over loss of wildlife habitat, have now come up with their own "solution" for lost productivity from your lands. They want to fence off large portions of it to completely prohibit its use either for crops or rangeland.
However, the wildlife habitat value of these fenced off lands is highly questionable without concurrent actions to prevent widespread pollution, actions which Big Enviro and the city fathers don't want to take because it would be too politically difficult. So they want to force you and your neighbors off some of your prime lands, yet they refuse to do anything about the trash and pollution that will continue being dumped on these lands, and which is the primary driver behind the lost productivity of these lands.
In most instances the only thing that would be prohibited on these "reserve" lands would be your kind of farming. All the other numerous problems of pollution, including impacts from tourism, mining, dumping and recreational use, would still remain, and still be driving productivity down for those few farmers who remain.
If that's not bad enough, along comes yet another Big Enviro group with some pet economists with its ultimate, or should we say final, solution. Their "solution," developed with grants from two large developers, is to "rationalize" the food operations on these lands by simply reducing the number of your neighbors, so the remaining ones, at least in theory, will be more profitable.
The only problem is that nothing in this "rationalization" scheme addresses the root cause of declining crop and livestock production. The impacts of pollution, mining and drilling, plus acid rain, will continue to destroy the productive capacity of these lands no matter how the land is divided up. Moreover, a reduction in your numbers further decreases your communities' collective political power to halt these pollution problems at their source.
If this scenario sounds the slightest bit familiar, that's because it is. All you have to do is substitute the word "oceans" for "land," and "fishermen" for "farmers," and it's all happening to all of us right now.
If you were a farmer or rancher under the scenario we painted above, you'd be pissed. You'd be demanding action, real action, not just talk from your colleagues, not press releases from government, not the glib, unsubstantive, feel-good "Twinkie Environmentalism" offered up by some large conservation groups. If you"re a fisherman, if you depend on the fish or fisheries, then you should be pissed too. You too should be mad as hell -- and determined not to take it anymore.
It's your ocean. It's my ocean. It's our ocean, dude! And we're not going to let it be screwed up by anyone!
There are several specific actions needed now -- not tomorrow -- to protect our oceans from their devastation from pollution, industrialization and climate change, and the ultimate collapse of this fragile place where fishing men and women have plied their trade for thousands of years. Here are the most critical.
No New Offshore Oil Drilling: In case you did not pay attention to the energy politics surrounding the last Presidential election, for the first time in decades there is now no moratorium on widespread offshore oil extraction and development, most of which would threaten and pollute key U.S. offshore fishing grounds.
Offshore oil expansion would be devastating to our industry in a number of ways, as we have written before (see FN, Nov. 2008, "Offshore Oil Drilling -- It's Back!" at: www.pcffa.org/fn-nov08.htm). Reinstating this moratorium both Congressionally and through Executive Orders should be a very high priority of the next Congress and the Obama Administration. Seismic testing on the west coast, which all by itself can harm fisheries, could start up as early as this summer.
Oil lease sales are already proceeding in Bristol Bay in Alaska, in spite of the fact that oil development there threatens the last best remaining salmon fisheries in the world.
There are also a number of emerging issues having to do with non-oil minerals mining in both U.S. and international ocean waters. Each of these proposals has to be carefully scrutinized in terms of both long and short-term impacts on ocean ecosystems, and every effort must be made to avoid impacts on important fisheries, fish habitats and fishing areas.
We need to tell Congress, it's time to "Think, Baby, Think." Putting our oceans and fisheries at risk for a little bit of fuel, whose use is also destroying the planet, makes no sense whatsoever.
Develop Alternative Energy To Combat Climate Change: Burning massive amounts of irreplaceable carbon-based fossil fuels is no longer an option for the world, and the fishing industry should do its bit not only to develop and begin using non-petroleum based fuels and engines, but to get aggressive about reducing greenhouse gases that are acidifiying our oceans. The issue is not "cap-and-trade" (which so far has failed in Europe), taxation or regulation -- those are just tools. The issue is reducing greenhouse gases substantially and soon.
Since a lot of these global climate change impacts are already unstoppable, we also have to do as much as we can to adapt local port infrastructures, communities and our fleets to higher sea levels, more violent storm events and unpredictable changes in ocean currents and fish migration patterns (see FN, March 2007, "Global Climate Change and the Fishing Industry: What It Means and How to Adapt," www.pcffa.org/fn-mar07.htm).
We are also facing the impacts of widespread ocean acidification, growing coastal "dead zones" in Oregon and elsewhere, and depletion of inland snow packs that will adversely affect major salmon runs throughout the west coast. This means we have to increase the pressure to remove salmon-killing dams in the Snake River and the Klamath River, as well as restore more fish-friendly water flows to badly depleted salmon producing rivers such as the California Central Valley river system and the Klamath.
We also need to push for far better and more "real time" stock assessments and ocean environmental monitoring so that we can more flexibly manage our fisheries in a global climate change era where the past will no longer be a good predictor for future ocean and fish stock conditions.
Control and Tightly Regulate Any Offshore Energy Projects: Offshore energy development, if done properly, would be neutral or even beneficial for commercial fishing communities, but if done wrong could severely limit or eliminate access to many important fishing grounds. The ocean environmental consequences of large-scale wave energy development is also unknown. Each project has to be judged on its own merits, however, and fishermen must be vocal about what they need in these project to protect their interests.
PCFFA is monitoring these various west coast ocean energy development proposals carefully, and encourages fishermen to take part in all aspects of these FERC and state regulatory proceedings to make sure any potential impacts on our fisheries are minimized or fully mitigated.
PCFFA is planning to formally intervene in several of these FERC license applications in the near future, as it already has in the Jordan Cove LNG development proposal currently being considered in Coos Bay, Oregon. This will assure a fisheries voice is at the table.
No Open-Ocean Aquaculture: Open-ocean aquaculture has had disastrous consequences on related wild stocks wherever it has been widely developed, and has been most recently implicated in the precipitous declines of wild salmon in British Columbia due to sea lice infestations transmitted to wild runs by caged aquacultured salmon in multiple B.C. fish farms.
There is a proper place for aquacultured fish production, but the open ocean is not that place. Problems with aquaculture-produced pollution, with net loss of food protein, and with disease transmission still have no solutions, and by the very nature of these open-ocean operations, probably cannot be solved.
Genetically modified "super-salmon" that are being developed specifically for aquaculture will inevitably escape and pose not only an ecological risk to local stocks, but could be a genetic disaster for west coast wild salmon runs that has no historic parallel. "Frankenfish" should never be created in the first place, much less marketed for aquaculture.
Proposals by the oil industry to convert various of its offshore oil drilling platforms to aquaculture use should be exposed as the shams they are -- mere attempts to defer or avoid the massive costs to the oil industry of fully removing those platforms and cleaning up the pollution plumes they have created on the ocean floor and which they promised to do. The oil industry should be required to meet its obligations for that cleanup, not be allowed to simply reclassify these platforms as "aquaculture" operations, energy platforms or "rigs-to-reefs" boondoggles as a ruse to escape its multi-billion dollars cleanup duties. Foisting environmental problems the oil industry has created and profited from on to future generations, not be mention polluting current and future fisheries, should not be tolerated.
Expansion of aquaculture should be done on land where it can be contained in ponds, and utilize those stocks that consume only fish waste and plant waste so in the end there will be a net increase in usable, edible protein (not a net loss which is the result of most finfish aquaculture). Irrigated lands being fallowed due to toxicity problems or excessive water use present a real opportunity for conversion to fish farms. This is where new aquaculture development should occur, not in cages in the open ocean.
Conserve, Treat and Reuse Inland Water: Water, particularly in the arid West, is already in short supply and competition between instream water uses (such as fisheries protection) and out of stream water diversions (primarily for crop irrigation) is only going to be more intense in the future as population grows.
However, further depleting already over-appropriated salmon-bearing rivers, and thus destroying fishing jobs and communities to create farming jobs cannot be economically or socially justified. Groups like PCFFA have and must continue to fight these kinds of false tradeoffs.
Instead of relying on more destructive water diversions and construction of yet more fish-killing dams, our political leaders must come to grips with reality and live within increasingly obvious biological and hydrological limits. This means looking to water conservation, treatment and reuse, and to new technologies such as ocean water desalination, as the major sources of additional water to meet future agricultural and urban water needs.
California's water distribution and use system is often referred to as one of the least efficient and most wasteful in the world today. There is much that can be done using conservation alone to meet future water needs, and all without jeopardizing future salmon fisheries.
Stop Non-Point Source Ocean Pollution: Thanks to the federal Clean Water Act and similar state clean water laws, most point-sources of pollution can be identified and are being controlled. Multiple origin "non-point source" pollution from such problems as urban and agricultural runoff, however, is now the largest water pollution problem we face as a nation, and unfortunately is much harder to fix. Nearly all of this runoff eventually makes its way to our oceans.
This includes multiple-source agricultural pollution flowing into the California Central Valley and Bay Delta river systems. This sort of pervasive agricultural pollution is almost entirely unregulated in California even to this day, due to special exemptions that have been provided to agricultural users in the Central Valley for the past 20 years. This sort of multiple-source aquatic pollution has been implicated as a contributing cause in the recent Central Valley salmon stock collapses, and badly needs to be traced, curtailed and controlled.
Multiple pesticide residues are also present in all Western rivers, many at levels that exceed the US Environmental Protection Agency's (EPA) own aquatic life standards. PCFFA has successfully sued the US EPA to force the impacts of the worst of these pesticides on endangered salmon runs to be reviewed under the Endangered Species Act, but much more needs to be done to identify where these water-borne pollutants come from, and to impose buffer zones and other protections to keep them out of our rivers in the first place. Pollution prevent is always cheaper and more effective than cleanup after the fact.
Water pollution is also a public health problem -- many of these chemicals are not only toxic to fish but to people as well, and are increasingly being found in urban water systems.
Statewide pesticide use tracking programs need to be implemented and far better funded. In Oregon, for instance, its relatively new Pesticide Use Reporting System (PURS), which has long been fought by agricultural interest groups, is now being defunded in proposed budget cuts after only two years of operation. Only three states even have such pesticide use tracking systems -- California, New York and Oregon. Tens of millions of pounds of pesticides used in the U.S. annually are currently untrackable.
Implement Effective Regulations to Protect Against Plastic Pollution at Sea: The oceans are awash with human garbage and debris, all of which represents a hazard to sea life and a long term threat to ocean ecosystems. Though some comes from cruise boats and ocean-going vessels, nearly all of it washes into the oceans from inland sources. All of it must be better controlled, and ocean dumping of any sort prohibited.
Our rivers and oceans must not be used as the world's dumping ground. Recycling helps, but ultimately we must move to truly biodegradable packaging and abandon many types of plastics that do not degrade. Scientists are increasingly concerned about many types of petroleum-based plastics which, when they decompose, are merely reduced to nano-particles that remain in the ecosystem and which could have some very bad biological consequences for ocean organisms that take them up and concentrate them in their bodies -- including within the human food chain.
Protect Critical Fishing Grounds for Fishing: Several billion of the Earth's human inhabitants currently depend on the world's oceans for a large part of their food. We have policies to protect farmlands and terrestrial sources of food, but pay relatively little attention to securing the ocean habitats that support our basic seafood species.
Much more needs to be done to identify and protect important ocean and nearshore habitats that are the biological sources from which harvestable ocean seafood species come. "Marine protected areas" should serve the needs of future fisheries protection, not be used (as they all too often are today) just for preservation for its own sake or to eliminate commercial fishing -- but not ocean pollution, recreational fishing, offshore oil development or any of the other often much more impactive pressures on these areas.
Fishermen should be and often are doing their part to reduce their long-term adverse ocean ecosystem impacts. But the oceans should be recognized as a sustainable food resource for billions of people, not just a plaything for a handful of marine scientists.
Ocean ecosystem protections should be designed primarily to protect the ocean resources our industry depends upon to keep people fed. Humans must be considered part of that ecosystem too.
Control Ocean Impacts Nationally and Internationally: Ocean protections all too often depend on the good will of individual nations, most of whom have far less protection for their ocean resources than the U.S. does, and some none at all. Many species of fish also migrate widely through international and multi-national waters and these migratory patterns can vary. Bad fishing practices in any one part of the world can affect many other areas.
We need stronger international treaties and protocols supporting ocean protections internationally, as well as stronger national laws and policies to implement national sustainable fishery management standards locally.
The ocean is the last and greatest of the Earth's common resources for Humankind. The environmental problems of any part of the ocean quickly become international problems. Our planet is much smaller, and its delicate systems much more interconnected, than we often believe.
Pay for Ocean Protection Programs -- An Ocean Trust Fund: Ocean protection, research, monitoring and fisheries management has been grossly underfunded for decades, compared to their funding needs.
We have written extensively in Fishermens News about the need to fully and permanently fund a multitude of fishery programs outside the annual U.S. Congressional budget process, through a separate National Fisheries Trust Fund supported by a nominal ad valorem fee on U.S. sales of domestic and imported seafood (see FN, Dec. 2008, "Change for the Better: An Agenda for the New Congress and Administration," www.pcffa.org/fn-dec08.htm; see also, "Planning and Paying for Future Fisheries Research," FN, August, 2003, www.pcffa.org/fn-aug03.htm). This fund would be capable of supporting a variety of programs, from basic fishery research to fishermen's health care.
We also need a fund to support larger ocean programs, including monitoring, research and pollution prevention. Such an "off-budget" Oceans Trust Fund could be supported by royalties on offshore oil and gas, offshore energy development, even fees on eco-tourism.
Proposed discussion draft language for such federal Ocean Trust Fund legislation is already available. Contact us if you would like a copy. With proposals now for a national economic stimulus package, the time is now to finally establish both a national Fisheries Trust Fund and a National Oceans Trust Fund.
A necessary first step to developing a meaningful ocean protection campaign is to build alliances with all the groups that are now (finally) showing interest in the fate of our oceans, its living resources and its beneficial activities. Policy decisions are being or will be made soon that will affect your fisheries' future, yet nearly all of us are unaware of them and currently have no voice in deciding these issues. If we do not show up, our voices will not be heard.
This emerging "Blue Vision" movement is badly in need of more blue-collar, rank-and-file fishermen to keep the vision soundly based in reality, and meaningful in terms of long-term protection of our ocean resources for future generations. It is not enough just to want to "protect the oceans." We need to have a much stronger national vision of just what it is we are protecting the oceans for, what we are protecting them from, and what services we want those ocean ecosystems to provide in the future.
For Detailed information about the Blue Vision Movement, including their latest conferences, go to: www.bluefront.org.
Making your voices heard also means supporting your local port's commercial fishing association (or starting one), which in turn helps support the efforts of such federations as PCFFA and the Commercial Fishermen of America (CFA) (www.cfafish.org) to translate the needs of our industry into legislation and effective policy. It also means getting more involved with and supporting groups that protect fishermen's interests such as the Institute for Fisheries Resources (IFR) (see www.ifrfish.org), which PCFFA founded in 1992.
And this also means reading industry trade publications such as this Fishermen's News, and passing them on to friends in the industry asking them to subscribe. Drop us an email note and we will also subscribe you to our free Internet fisheries information newsletter, the Sublegals. Keeping yourself well informed keeps you well equipped to participate and be effective as a spokesperson for our industry.
There is also an ongoing fisheries-related California events calendar being published and updated daily by members of the Central Coast Women in Fisheries at www.fishcalendar.net. These and similar organizational efforts are needed everywhere so commercial fishing folks anywhere can know what meetings are happening in their area and how to have a stronger impact.
Separately we have little power and no voice. Working together, however, commercial fishermen will be heard and can be very effective at promoting the types of changes we need to protect the future of our resource, our industry and our coastal communities.
Tell them, "It's my ocean, Dude!" and make your voices heard.
Zeke Grader is the Executive Director of the Pacific Coast Federation of Fishermen's Associations (PCFFA). Glen Spain is PCFFA's Northwest Regional Director. David Bitts is the PCFFA's current President, and a long-time commercial fisherman operating out of Eureka, CA. PCFFA can be reached at its Southwest Office at PO Box 29370, San Francisco, CA 94129-0370, (415)561-5080, and at its Northwest Office at PO Box 11170, Eugene, OR 97440-3370, (541)689-2000 or by email to: fish1ifr@aol.com. PCFFA's Internet Home Page is at: www.pcffa.org.
Back
to PCFFA Fishermen's News Archive