THE PACIFIC COAST FEDERATION
OF
FISHERMEN'S
ASSOCIATIONS
From Fishermen's News of May, 2000
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PCFFA Home Page by MOLLY THOMAS and ZEKE GRADER
In this column, over the past few years, have been discussions on environmental threats to the fish stocks we depend upon, and also the actions fishing men and women need to take to conserve the resources that sustain our livelihoods and culture. In this article we will explore a role the fishing industry inevitably must assume (and some already have) in conservation, as part of our stewardship of this tiny blue-green jewel in this vast universe. This role should obviously not be limited just to people in fishing communities, but should also include all people who depend on natural resources and the environment, including family farmers and ranchers.
Conservation is nothing new. Throughout history there have been societies that learned to exist in balance with their environment. The nobility of England, for instance, maintained vast forest preserves and there are, in history, instances of efforts to address depleted fish stocks going back to at least the 14th century.
In the course of human events, unfortunately, conservation has mostly been the exception and seldom the rule. Farming, particularly irrigated agriculture in places such as the fertile crescent in the Middle East, left soils depleted and saline. Erosion from agriculture washed away the thin layers of top soil along much of the Mediterranean, in Africa and elsewhere. North Africa once supported forests, prior to deforestation which left it a massive desert. And in parts of the world, even before modern technology, fish stocks were depleted from excessive fishing, dams (many of New England's rivers, for example, were harnessed to support the U.S. industrial revolution in the 18th and 19th centuries) and water diversions for agriculture and industry.
Even before pollution from modern industrial and chemical operations began making our waters unfishable and unswimable, human waste and debris from settlements along rivers and shores, if not destroying fish outright were at least making them unsafe to eat. Some societies did learn to live within the limits of their natural ecosystems (or at least to not completely destroy those systems), but according to Charles Redman's Human Impact on Ancient Environments, not as many as once thought.
Conservation on a concerted, organized level, nationally and internationally, really only began during this last century. Undoubtedly human population growth, new technology and the impact of the industrial revolution were its driving forces. Conservation over the last hundred years has consisted mainly of two movements.
The first movement we'll call the "preservation movement," which targeted specific areas or species. Examples are numerous in this century, evolving from the undertakings of President Theodore Roosevelt and John Muir to protect places such as Yosemite into a national park system. Then there have been the efforts by hunters to protect waterfowl habitat, and by fishing interests in the late 1920's to protect Pacific Halibut. Even the work of Livingston Stone in California in the late 1870's to establish salmon hatcheries on the upper Sacramento River could be viewed as part of such a preservation movement, even though we are rethinking hatcheries more than a century later. A hundred years later, of course, there was the push made by coastal fishermen both in the U.S. and among other fishing countries to extend national fisheries jurisdiction out to 200 miles to, at the minimum, preserve fish stocks for their own use. Preservation remains a vibrant movement within the overall conservationist school of thought, from the establishment of new wilderness areas and national monuments to the use of the Endangered Species Act to preserve specific species. Most fishery regulation, too, is based on the notion of species preservation.
The second movement came along a little later, and is what, for lack of a better term, we will call the "ecosystems movement." While Roosevelt and Muir defined preservation, it was probably Rachel Carson that best defined the ecosystems movement. Her famous book Silent Spring for the first time caused broad public awareness of the impacts of such things as industrial poisons (DDT, for example) in the environment. This movement differed from the preservation movement in that its focus was not on any particular area or species, but on the impact of such things as air and water pollution on whole ecosystems, either locally (Love Canal) or on a broad regional basis (acid rain). Indeed climate change, believed to be occurring as a result of accumulating greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, is a global phenomenon.
The fishing industry, more than any other group that depends for its living on natural resources, has been part of the ecosystems movement. The efforts of Bodega Bay fishermen in the early 1960's to stop a nuclear power plant from being sited at their port - on top of the San Andreas Fault - was an early example of fishing industry activism in this movement. It did not stop there, though. Santa Barbara and Bristol Bay fishermen fought offshore oil development, Hudson River fishermen fought for the clean up of that waterway from PCB pollution, California north coast fishermen joined the fight to stop dioxin-laden herbicides from being sprayed on forests surrounding salmon streams, and today fishermen and conservation groups are working together to establish TMDL (Total Maximum Daily Loading) standards under the Clean Water Act as a way to protect important fish bearing river systems. In fact, the Clean Water Act is probably the best example of an environmental statute adopted in response to the ecosystems movement.
The third, and emerging, movement in conservation we are calling the "economic movement" (although "cultural," or "integrational" might also describe it). This movement, containing elements of the first two movements, acknowledges the permanent part, or role, that fishing men and women (and those others dependent on renewable resources) play within the environment. The fact of the matter is, as much as we like to think of ourselves as somehow removed from our environment, we are always very much a part of it.
Anyone who has ever taken an elementary science class in school knows about the "web of life," that is the interdependence of each living being on everything around them including water, air, food, etc. This simple and humble model is, however, long forgotten by the time we reach the upper reaches of our educational system. Economics classes have historically taken place as far away from the natural sciences as possible (both philosophically and on many campuses physically as well). Yet as we have begun to see in recent times, the rapidly depleting natural resources of our world are quickly becoming of serious economic consequence as well, not only to academics, but also to everyday people, including particularly our fishing industry. We are all beginning to wake up to the fact that the natural resources upon which our whole world society is inherently based are exhaustible.
In many cases the methods of non-sustainable resource management which we have been wont to use in the rush for immediate economic gains have in the long-run been extremely costly for society as a whole. For instance, the report published in 1996 by the Institute for Fisheries Resources, "The Cost of Doing Nothing," analyzed some of the economic impacts that the extirpation of stocks of Pacific salmon have cost our society. Just in the Columbia River alone, these costs have been staggering -- roughly 25,000 jobs and lost income of about $500 million annually. It is clear to us now that cheap timber, power, water and oil all came at a very high total social economic price. The fishing industry pays that price daily in lost jobs, economically depressed coastal fishing communities, and lost production of some of the world's best sources of protein.
For most of the past century at least, and perhaps longer, fishing and farming have been viewed as, and all too often been, the antithesis of environmental protection. Many types of fishing and farming operations have been non-sustainable. A recent U.N. report found 70 percent of all fish stocks "overfished." And, of course, there was never a greater nor more extensive environmental change than with the advent of farming, including the subsequent pervasive losses of topsoil due to agriculture over much of the world. Moreover, in the last half century there has been a massive chemical assault on the land by agriculture that has already lead to the extinction or near-extinction of many wildlife species and has resulted in countless human health problems.
The litany of charges against many fishing operations are well known: overfishing; waste from bycatch; damaged marine habitats. A similar litany of charges can be made against many agriculture, ranching and timber operations. Yet as bad as some past practices may have been, there have always been some in fishing and farming who have sought to conduct their operations in an environmentally sustainable manner. It is these forward-looking operations, whether it be a salmon or herring fisherman or an organic farmer, that are showing the way - proving that, in fact, those with an economic stake in the resources can not only be good stewards of the environment, but make the best and most compelling advocates for environmental protection.
The economic movement is unlike the first two movements of conservation, which tend to be predicated around a particular issue or campaign, whether it be saving a place or critter, or prevention or clean-up of some insult to an ecosystem. This third wave is, rather, an ongoing daily thing, much the same as maintaining a vessel or farm machinery. For farmers or timberland owners or those who graze on their own lands, this concept may be easier to understand. After all, what they do on their own private land ultimately affects the productivity and the value of that land. It is somewhat different for those logging or grazing on public lands or harvesting public trust fisheries resources. However, for fishermen in limited access fisheries (that do not necessarily have to be managed on an individual quota basis), there should be a clear understanding that the care they exercise toward the fish and their habitats will translate into better and on-going production, something of value to pass on to their children or crew, or simply something that will maintain or increase the value of their permit or vessel.
Unfortunately, direct ownership is not always akin to stewardship. Often landowners, out of ignorance, will act in ways that diminish their holdings; whether it be through soil erosion, drawing down or collapsing aquifers, increasing salts or economic poisons in their soil, or overgrazing their lands. There is the problem, too, that landowners may take care of their land for the particular use they wish to put it to, but be oblivious to, or act in total disregard for, public trust resources that may be found on their own land or on nearby land or waterways. Land held for a single use, such as timber, is often not managed in an environmentally sensitive manner. One of the reasons we have not included loggers or timberland owners in the mix of fishermen, farmers and ranchers here, is that most privately-held timberland is corporately owned and managed. Corporate lands are managed to maximize shareholders' quarterly dividends and not for long term forest productivity or even high value timber. Unfortunately, a corporate officer managing timberlands for long-term productivity and high value lumber would likely be thrown out by shareholders. Either that, or the corporation will become the target of junk-bond takeover artists such as happened with Pacific Lumber Company in northern California.
Thus, it is not surprising that fishermen, among resource users, have been in the lead in working for sound conservation. Fishermen cannot afford to be myopic like many landowners or land-based users. The areas fished are seldom fixed and most fish stocks tend to migrate. It also means that fishermen are more likely than others to act collectively in conservation efforts, despite our own fierce independence, because the stocks are collectively "held."
This is not a call for fishermen to begin calling themselves "environmentalists." Greenwashing is usually the province of some oil company, timber industry or agribusiness executive, and never rings true. No, fishermen should be fishermen and farmers should be farmers. However, we should all realize by now that if our industry and other natural resource industries work for long term sustainability, then we will be working for environmental protection. If we do what is right for our long term economic and cultural interests we must inevitably be practicing sound conservation.
The problem has been that few have acted with any long-term vision. Our government, enamored with large-scale industrial fishing operations and aquaculture, has too often dissuaded actions by fishermen aimed at long-term sustainability. They have been all too quick to write off the smaller family fishing operations. Sustainable fisheries and sustainable farming, however, we believe can be, and are, synonymous with conservation. The important thing is not what we call ourselves, rather it is what we do.
And indeed there is still much to be done. Ahead for fishing men and women is the work to assure that all fisheries are conducted on a sustainable basis. Massive rebuilding efforts will have to be undertaken to restore some stocks back to full productivity, and with that will be the challenge of how to let some leave the fishing industry "with dignity" while still providing some form of sustenance for those who would like to remain, to hold them over until stocks have recovered. There is also the challenge of modifying or developing new gear that is much more selective in order to minimize bycatch and prevent habitat damage.
Many of the problems we are faced with in the fisheries are the result, not of wanton recklessness, but of ignorance. We will have to find the funding and get on with the research and stock assessments necessary for establishing sustainable fishing regulations. Yet research, by itself, will not be enough. We also have to develop a system for putting the data gleaned into a readily accessible and easily usable form that can be constantly updated - similar to that developed for some watersheds. Sustainability will also mean better observer programs as well as putting fishermen together with scientists more frequently.
Sustainability will also mean making adaptive management really work. It will mean learning to work within the precautionary approach, not to shut things down because of uncertainty but to proceed with caution when we are uncertain in order to prevent any significant harm occurring while we seek to learn more.
It will also mean learning to be less wasteful by getting the most value out of every pound of fish delivered. Getting more dollars for every fish through new markets and better marketing will mean more dollars back to the fisheries and more jobs for fishing communities and for youth who have too long been discouraged from entering most fisheries.
Sustainability also means thinking about what we want the fishery to look like in 25, 50 and 100 years. Envisioning a future for fishing should not be the province of government bureaucrats, corporate executives or even environmentalists. It is what fishing men and women themselves need to be doing. Yes, it can be difficult to think ahead when there are boat payments, fuel bills, crew shares and mortgages to be paid. It is hard to look forward when all that is on the immediate horizon are cutbacks or shutdowns. However, if fishing men and women don't look ahead, they're never going to get ahead.
Sustainability requires planning, and that means long-term business plans. Salmon for All developed a lower Columbia River terminal fisheries business plan in 1996 which is helping those fisheries survive, but to date fishing business plans have been a real rarity. No other industry would think of "winging it" the way our industry does.
Finally it will mean being activists - not relying on government agencies, not relying on environmental groups, but using our own resources and organizing ourselves - in the constant effort to protect fish resources and their environment. No more silence!
Intrinsic in all of the effort before us is a deep economic and a cultural motivation. If sustainable fisheries, or sustainable agriculture, is as we believe, synonymous with both environmental protection and sound conservation, then we are at the forefront of a third conservation movement. This movement combines elements of the first two movements, but is constant, runs deeper and is therefore much more dependable than movements based on mere altruism.
It is our role to be good stewards of that on which we depend. No one else can do it as well, and no one else can be relied upon unless they have a real stake in the outcome. It is also our obligation to look out for our future -- and this duty cannot be delegated. After all, it is our future, and we must shape it. We are in fact in a symbiotic relationship with our resources and their ecosystems. This does not mean putting them on a pedestal to worship, it means to acknowledge that we are part of that environment as well as its chief stewards.
Our stewardship means careful and thoughtful respect for the ecosystems we depend upon and which support us. It is also our role to teach that respect to others, whether they be those who would harm our environment out of ignorance, or just a public that is naive but curious. As fishing families, this is our chosen place, both humble and proud in this grand scheme.
Molly Thomas is a biologist and the Administrator for the Institute for Fisheries Resources. Zeke Grader has spent his lifetime in the west coast fishing industry and is the Executive Director of the Pacific Coast Federation of Fishermen's Associations. PCFFA is the west coast’s largest organization of commercial fishermen. PCFFA’s Southwest Regional Office can be reached at: PO Box 29370, San Francisco, CA 94129-0370 and by phone (415)561-5080. PCFFA’s Northwest Regional Office can be reached at: PO Box 11170, Eugene, OR 97440-3370 and by phone (541)689-2000. PCFFA’s web site is at <http://www.pcffa.org> or PCFFA can be reached by email at <fish1ifr@aol.com>. The Institute for Fisheries Resources is independent of, but affiliated with, PCFFA and can be reached at the same postal and email addresses. The Institute's Internet Home Page is at: <http://www.ifrfish.org>.