Back to PCFFA Fishermen's News Archive
Both conflict and cooperation have marked the relationship between the conservation movement and fishing. Disputes over harm to marine mammals and sea turtles, allegations of overfishing, habitat damage from fishing gear and, finally, bycatch have been the issues at the forefront of the conflicts between environmentalists and many fishermen.
The conflict has gotten most of the headlines over the years, but there has also been a fair amount of cooperation and collaboration among some fishing groups, at least, and mainstream conservation groups. We’ve seen environmentalists and fishermen working together on pollution issues, opposing offshore oil, fighting for strict controls over aquaculture, preventing a fishery on krill near the base of the ocean food chain, and working to make our rivers fish friendly again.
In fact, there has been at least a forty-year history of cooperation among fishermen and conservation groups. The first that comes to mind was the coalition of commercial fishermen, some fish scientists and the Sierra Club, all led by a local waitress, that stopped a nuclear power plant planned for Bodega Bay - about the same time Alfred Hitchcock was there filming The Birds - from being built in that port right atop the San Andreas Fault. The political establishment locally and in Northern California was either supportive of the atomic facility or was acquiescent, so stopping it by this “rag-tag” coalition was no small feat.
The old Northwest Trollers Association put out bumper stickers in the 1970’s saying “STOP” for Stop This Ocean Pollution, and later in that decade Northern California salmon trollers joined with the Sierra Club working to stop the aerial spraying of dioxin-laden herbicides over coastal watersheds. The dioxin – the same chemical used in Agent Orange to defoliate Vietnamese jungles – was hazardous to man and fish alike.
The moratorium on new oil and gas development on the continental shelf (“OCS”) that has been in place for the past 25 years is a casebook example of successful collaboration between commercial fishermen and environmentalists (along with some coastal businesses and local governments). At the height of the 1970’s energy crisis and long gas lines, oil companies were exploiting public and political frustration to get a toe-hold in new offshore areas. The coalition working to stop new drilling, however, was successful not simply by reminding people of past oil spills and the fact the known reserves offshore probably wouldn’t make a dent in oil supply, but by having fishermen to testify about the potential loss of jobs and fish – all based on the actual experience of the fishing industry in the Santa Barbara Channel.
The levels of cooperation have varied among fishing groups. At PCFFA, in large part due to the number of salmon fishermen we represent, our work with conservation groups has been extensive over the past 30 years. Indeed, we’ve been represented by environmental law firms, such at Earthjustice and the Natural Resources Defense Council, in much of the litigation we’ve been involved in. That litigation has successfully brought about reforms of water operations on the upper Sacramento to protect endangered winter-run salmon (those operational changes are also a large part of the reason Sacramento fall-run chinook are so abundant today and why Coleman Hatchery production is so successful now), challenging the grossly inadequate Biological Opinions the National Marine Fisheries Service keeps producing for the Columbia, challenging bad flow decisions on the Klamath, and most recently developing a settlement agreement, after 18 years in court, to restore fish flows to the upper San Joaquin River to reestablish salmon populations that were extirpated 60 years ago by a federal dam’s operations.
This collaboration has been good for the environment and it’s produced fish on the back decks. Even Dungeness crab off San Francisco are believed to have benefited from the work done to help the salmon and their habitat and flows. Fixing the Klamath so salmon fishermen can go back to work will also be a collaborative effort between fishermen, Tribes and conservation groups.
Overfishing. Looking back at the major conflicts fishermen, or at least some fishing groups, have had with environmentalists, many of these sprang from issues initially raised by fishermen long before there was any significant marine conservation movement. Northern halibut may be one of the first instances where fishermen confronted overfishing and successfully addressed it through management measures in the early part of the 20th century (fishery management does work). In the 1950’s I can remember salmon fishermen talking, following the disastrous 1956 season, about closing fishing for a season or two to let the fish recover. Of course that was the wrong answer because the fish were being wiped out in their watersheds, not in the ocean fishery. Nevertheless, fishermen at that time were sensitive to overfishing issues, and had just witnessed the demise of the sardine fishery, which many at the time believed was caused by overfishing. (Fishing probably exacerbated this fish’s decline in the late 1940’s and early 1950’s, but was probably not the root cause of the problem). Fast forward a decade, to 1976, and it was pressure from fishermen from Central California to Alaska and New England that finally got Congress to pass a 200-mile fishery act principally to prevent overfishing of stocks offshore by foreign fleets.
“Overfishing” is not something that was invented by conservation groups to get fishermen off the water. It was a problem the industry itself had identified, although it wasn’t always willing to confront. Thus, whether or not marine conservation groups ever arrived on the scene, overfishing where it was taking place was going to have to be addressed or stocks would plummet. More than anything, the environmentalists have been the messengers many did not want to hear. Their style and rhetoric, sometime exaggerated (no one in our industry has ever exaggerated?), have made them handy villains that we could then lay all the blame on. But keep in mind its not just environmentalists saying there’s overfishing; as we’re seeing in New England, a lot of fishermen are siding with conservation groups saying yes, there is an overfishing problem and it has to be dealt with.
Marine Mammals. We can also lump in here sea turtles and sea birds. While harm to these animals may be considered a bycatch issue, the issue is much broader than that because it also includes predation by mammals and the animals direct affects on fishing, not just being caught in gear. Most would be hard pressed to hear a fisherman express much sympathy for a sea lion that has just taken a hooked salmon, or a seal that has torn at a cod end to remove a halibut. But, in the 1960’s the new purse seine gear developed for the tuna fishery did evoke some sympathy from many of the old fishermen who had come over from the bait boats about the catch of porpoise with this new fishing method. I heard it directly from crew onboard the seiners in the mid-1960’s, long before Congressman Pete McCloskey or Greenpeace was making it an issue. The catch of porpoise was something these fishermen were not used to and did not like and that, I believe, eventually led to a camera man coming aboard and filming the catch of dolphins that created the public outcry and led to passage of the Marine Mammal Protection Act.
It wasn’t so much environmental groups, but the general public that took an interest first in the highly “charismatic mega fauna” – the porpoises, seals, sea lions, whales and, later the sea turtles and albatross – and didn’t want to see them harmed. It was not a major environmental campaign that brought about “dolphin-safe” tuna, but school children who refused to eat tuna sandwiches. Thus, dealing with the marine mammal issues, and now sea turtle and sea bird issues, we’re not battling with conservation groups so much (though in Hawaii there’s still a big problem) as it is a public relations issue assuring consumers that fish were caught in a way that did not harm the sea creatures people care about. The issue had to be addressed to have a market to sell to.
Bycatch. This issue wasn’t invented by environmentalists either, but came out of the anger of some fishermen at the amount of fish being thrown overboard, and later by some fishing groups whose whole fisheries were eliminated to allow for the bycatch in other fisheries. I can remember reports from friends, fishermen here on the west coast, who had gone to the Gulf in the early 1970’s to crew on shrimp boats out of Texas expressing their disgust with the amount of fish being dumped overboard.
It wasn’t much different here on the west coast, when crabber friends had gone to work on the sterns of trawlers finding themselves spewing dungies overboard as they sorted the catch. The fact is, the bycatch issue was going to come to a head in the fishery sooner or later just among fishermen, regardless of whether there were conservation groups around. The only issue was going to be whether our industry would do anything about it.
Habitat Damage. This issue, too, was first raised by fishermen, not environmentalists. It was angry hook-and-line fishermen who watched in the early 1980’s some of the new heavy roller gear come into areas where nets could never be used before and clear out rock piles and hard structure that had previously been habitat for rockfish. Had this not occurred, people like Elliot Norse and others would not be leveling charges of “bulldozing” or “clear cutting” coral beds against trawlers, even the small ones who had no part in this. But it was the affected fishermen who first raised the issue and brought it to the attention of agencies and academia. This was not something invented by the environmental movement; all they did was publicize what fishermen were already saying.
The purpose of this article, however, is not to apologize for the conservation movement or make excuses for environmentalists. Yes, PCFFA and some other fishing groups have worked closely for decades with the more responsible conservation organizations; that work has helped our members financially by protecting and restoring the fish stocks fishermen depend upon. Many of the battles we’ve been involved in working with environmentalists have been difficult and hard fought and the individuals and organizations in the conservation movement we’ve worked with have been knowledgeable, tough, and mostly all have been ethical.
The issues we took on together were not easy, whether it was stopping offshore drilling in fishing grounds, halting the clear cutting of salmon watersheds, getting changes in dam operations or even taking on the dams themselves, trying to control waste water discharges or get flow or water quality standards imposed, and working to improve the management of fisheries to better protect fish stocks in a manner sensitive to the needs of the fishing community.
The problem I’ve seen, mostly beginning in the mid-1990’s, when we began to see a lot more interest on the part of environmental groups that hadn’t paid much attention or been involved in fishery issues in the past, as well as a lot of new groups with little or no conservation credentials, is that a lot of the new players are what I’d call the second or third stringers – the bush leaguers – and not the best and the brightest in the conservation movement. Add to that, the issues they’ve been taking on and their campaigns look to have been designed by fund-raisers and pollsters looking for easy sound bites to mount campaigns around. Moreover the campaigns appear designed more for fund raising or membership recruitment, instead of tackling the daunting conservation challenges facing our fisheries and oceans. Publicity splash has replaced substance; sound bites have displaced sound science.
Let me give three examples of what could be called “Conservation Lite,” where the stated goals may be laudable but where the methods used are dubious, at best, and too often disingenuous. Worse, they appear aimed more at creating villains or causing harm rather than achieving conservation solutions that will benefit fish stocks and the ocean environment.
After being beaten-about for the past two decades or more about overfishing, bycatch and habitat damage in many of our fisheries, I’m seeing changes being made and feel fairly confident that within the next decade these three problems will have been largely eliminated. How many fishermen will be left and what kind of fisheries we will have, I’m not so sure about.
I frankly don’t know how much more tweaking is needed for our management system. I think the proposals put forward by Congressman Tom Allen of Maine in this Congress for Magnuson-Stevens Act changes should about take care of structural changes needed for our nation’s primary fishery law for the next decade. The bigger problem is likely to be the nature and quality of people appointed to the regional councils and to head the National Marine Fisheries Service, as well as the political will to carry out what Congress has mandated.
Unfortunately, too much of the environmental effort is still focused on policy issues surrounding overfishing, bycatch and habitat damage and has not moved to the more difficult area of implementing the needed changes. The biggest impediment now to change is not resistance or denial -- those have been overcome -- but finding the resources to carry it through.
Finding the funding that is necessary for research, stock assessments, management, enforcement, or to assist the fleet in modifying or changing to more environmentally friendly fishing gear, where needed, is hard work that is not something that interests these twenty and thirty-something young wonks, nor is it a sexy issue for the fund raisers driving policy back in DC or New York. This is long hard work and not something easy to build a campaign around.
But the fact is, if we’re going to achieve conservation goals it’s going to require money. And, sadly, too date, the only efforts we’ve seen from most of these conservation groups has been to shake down private foundations for establishing no-fishing grounds off California and blithely (some would say blindly) or writing an annual support letter for the NOAA budget request, hoping the agency will throw them some scraps for a favorite project. In other words, there’s been no heavy lifting on the part of the environmental community to date to address the problem of the nation’s inadequately funded fishery management program.
Both the Pew Oceans Commission and the U.S. Commission on Ocean Policy recommended the establishment of a national ocean trust fund to fund ocean-related activities, which would include fishing management and research. While other portions of the two ocean commission reports have gotten some attention, the trust fund, which along with a national policy to protect oceans, and which may be the most important recommendations coming from the reports, has been ignored. Environmental groups have been Johnny-on-the-spot with proposals to their patron foundations seeking money to work on fishery management or marine protected areas. But to mount a campaign for establishment of a trust fund to support long-term management changes, research, monitoring, enforcement, or enact protections? Forget it. That’s too difficult it seems for these folks. And, it’s not “sexy.”
In an August 2003, column here in Fishermen’s News, the outline of a Fishery Trust Fund was put forward (see: www.pcffa.org/fn-aug03.htm). To date, other than a few members of the Marine Fish Conservation Network, there has been no interest expressed (there hasn’t really been opposition either, just indifference to the funding issue) by any of the groups involved in marine conservation issues in securing long-term funding needed for fishery conservation and ocean protection. But you can bet they’ll be right there at a press conference, or at a legislator’s door, or in a glossy full-color pamphlet bemoaning “overfishing” or wanting some large area of ocean set aside as a “marine reserve” (i.e. an area where only fishing is prohibited but just about anything else goes).
We’ve recognized for years that there may be some benefits to establishing special protections for designated ocean waters, either to protect specified species (e.g., resident fish populations and key nursery areas), protect sensitive habitats from certain types of fishing gear, or to set aside areas where there is minimal human impact to provide base line information for marine research. This, of course, is in the context of effective protections for all ocean waters, since neither fish nor currents recognize lines on charts and pollution affects them all. For PCFFA’s Policy Statement on Marine Protected Areas see: www.pcffa.org/mpa3.htm.
What we’ve seen instead, however, from this new generation of conservationists that have adopted the marine venue, has been a hijacking of the marine protected area concept and an attempt to enact the largest possible closures on fishing. To date, it’s been nothing but fishing that’s been affected. Don’t look for these groups to lift a finger to enact any other protections against offshore oil development, aquaculture or water pollution that is often far more dangerous.
Area closures for fishing are nothing new and have long been one of the tools used by fishery managers. What’s different here with the marine reserve movement is they’ve taken it out of fishery science, claiming it’s not fishery management, and are holding up this concept of ocean wilderness as a cure-all. They’ve ad-mixed the idea of a marine Yosemite with some percentage of ocean waters, which I’ve always found a bit strange, since making Yosemite a park (it’s not really protected – it’s floor is paved over and overrun with tourists) was because of its grandeur, not its total acreage.
Part of the campaign is the claim that “only a fraction of ocean waters are protected.” What they mean by “protected,” however, is where there is no fishing allowed. This rhetoric doesn’t recognize that there are vast areas of the ocean where there is no fishing or fishing is highly regulated, thus, “protected” as they use the term for their circles on the chart. On the other hand, many of the areas they claim are protected really enjoy no protection from discharges or dumping or the threat of a major oil spill, as occurred recently in one of the Philippines marine parks. Their claims about protection then are totally disingenuous. They’re unnecessary. They mislead the public. Moreover, they diminish the credibility of the environmental movement as a whole.
Coupled with all of this, marine scientists, apparently smelling some research dollars out of marine reserves, have all pilled on the bandwagon with statements about more and bigger fish being found in reserves. What’s newsworthy about that? Fishermen have known that for centuries and that’s why area closures are a part of fishery management. The question is whether having more and larger fish – the resident fish, that is, since migratory fish move in and out – does any good as far as the total population of a particular stock or the ecosystem is concerned. In some cases it may, in other instances it does not. This is hardly a revelation. Yet to listen to the scientists that have been hired, or hope to get money from all of this, this is something just discovered, deserving as much print as unlocking the human genome.
Many of us have looked in disgust at the so-called scientists who took money from the coal companies to argue against global warming, or those government scientists who acquiesced to White House censorship, but I don’t see a lot of difference between those “scientists” and some of my friends now in the marine science community making exaggerated claims about the benefits of marine reserves which are, in fact, nothing but no fishing zones.
Another aspect of the marine reserve initiative has been the way the campaign has been conducted. Keep in mind, if these protected areas or reserves will have the fishery benefits claimed for them, fishermen would be the first ones promoting them. But the marine reserve proponents have treated the fishing community almost as if it were the oil industry. The campaign has been one of exaggerated claims and overkill, alienating rather than engaging the fishing community as they should.
Worse than what may be loss of fishing grounds with no substantive conservation benefit, is that the way the campaign to establish reserves is being conducted it gives the public a false impression oceans are being protected, when, in fact, these “reserves” provide very little real protection. Moreover, it opens the door for everyone from oil companies, offshore aquaculture proponents, and anyone else who is angling for ocean real estate to claim that since the MPAs are established they should be allowed to do any damn thing they want in the remaining waters.
The way the whole marine reserve campaign is being conducted, I fear, is seriously undercutting substantive efforts to truly protect our fish and oceans. This, more than lost fishing grounds, may be the greatest harm that could be felt in the long term by the fishing community.
The latest “silver bullet” discovered by the newbies in the conservation movement is the concept of ecosystem management. Not only is ecosystem management now being ballyhooed by many conservation groups – I doubt most even understand what it is – but there is the equally troubling reaction from some in the fishing community, viewing the concept with fear and loathing.
Ecosystem management, as I’ve always understood it to mean, is simply that we look at an individual or species for its impact on its surrounding environment and that environment’s impact on that individual or species. We’ve had various degrees of ecosystem management in some fisheries for years. Certainly in salmon there has been consideration of the in-river environmental factors affecting the fish and more recently a better understanding of the importance of that fish to the environment, from the food it provides bears and eagles to the nutrients it brings to coastal forests. The recent decision by the Pacific Council, for example, to enact a ban on any krill fishing was a recognition of the importance of that species as forage for a number of other marine species – a simple form of ecosystem management.
The thing about ecosystem management is that it’s not something one just declares but something one works toward. The reason is that we simply don’t have a good understanding of all the interactions in the marine environment. This doesn’t mean ecosystem management should not be enacted, it simply means that it will be crude at first and must be refined as our understanding of the marine environment increases.
While I’ve heard any number of marine conservation groups demanding that we enact “ecosystem management” for our fisheries – and I’m not disagreeing – I don’t see any similar effort to provide managers, scientists and fishermen the financial wherewithal to actually conduct the research, the monitoring or the assessments that will be needed to build (it doesn’t come ready-made) ecosystem management and to figure out how to live within it as its being built.
Moreover, while we do have data already available from a number of different sources, there has been no discussion, no work on the part of these “ocean champions,” to push for a system to integrate the information – the biological, the physical, the oceanographic data -- needed for an understanding of marine ecosystems and the effects of our removal of species from those environs. We’ve built a resource information system for coastal watersheds in Northern California, as well as some isolated watersheds in BC and Maine, called the Klamath Resource Information System (KRIS). We ought to be doing the same thing now on a much expanded level for our coastal ocean waters.
The battle with regard to ecosystem management is not and should not be whether to move toward it, but rather how to secure the financial resources for necessary research and monitoring, and development of a resource information system to house and integrate the data. That’s what’s needed for ecosystem management.
The problem with the practical side of implementing ecosystem management is that it’s a lot of hard work, it takes some skill and understanding, and it’s not particularly sexy or foundation fundable. It’s much easier just to keep nattering about ecosystem management and, if you’re lucky, as many of the newbies have been to date, no one will ask what you mean by it or how to do it. This is the brave new world of “Conservation Lite.”
Given my work and that of PCFFA with many legitimate conservation organizations over the past 30 years, I felt I could say these things, where others could not. I have the greatest respect for many of the conservation groups I’ve worked with and many of the individuals in them. The problem, as I see it, has been with a lot of the new folks that are not used to, or have never done, any heavy lifting. This is not something I haven’t told most of them to their faces. Funny how some of these folks begin avoiding me.
I encourage our industry to work with the conservation community whenever it can – to collaborate where our interests are the same, to sit down and discuss and negotiate where our interests diverge. At the same time I think we have to demand, as we would from ourselves, that groups and individuals purporting to be working on behalf of “marine conservation” must work on issues of substance. The conservation community is or should be a valuable ally for commercial fishermen; we both have an interest in maintaining or rebuilding abundant fish stocks in a healthy ocean. It’s therefore in the interest of fishermen that marine conservation groups be credible and fully engaged in the substantive issues, of which there are many.
Conserving fish and protecting our oceans isn’t going to come about from the fluff we’ve seen lately and press releases, but through knowledge, courage and hard work.
It’s high time we throw out “Conservation Lite” along with everything else - from cigarettes, beer, to rock ‘n roll - with a “lite” label – and get to work on the real issues.
Zeke Grader is the Executive Director of the Pacific Coast Federation of Fishermen’s Associations (PCFFA). He’s been around a long time (probably too long) and is one of the organization’s resident curmudgeons; he is housed in PCFFA’s San Francisco offices and can be reached at PCFFA at (415)561-5080 x 224 or by email to: zgrader@ifrfish.org. PCFFA’s web site is at: www.pcffa.org.