Back to PCFFA Fishermen's News
Archive
By Pietro Parravano, Zeke Grader and Glen Spain
Former Texas Agriculture Commissioner Jim Hightower is fond of saying “the only things in the middle of the road are yellow stripes and dead skunks.” Being in the middle of the road in America is often viewed as a safe place, not particularly courageous, and usually an effort to try not to offend anyone. It also conjures up images of folks who don’t really stand for anything. Folks in the middle have ranged from Solomon to Pontius Pilate – pillars of wisdom (or luck) as well as those who’d just as soon wash their hands of anything controversial.
We’ve been hesitant ourselves to use the metaphor of the road, because being in the middle of it connotes a lack of passion or commitment to a cause. That’s because, in today’s fishery debates, being a moderate can be downright dangerous. But that’s the position we’ve often found ourselves in here at PCFFA and, undoubtedly, some other fishing organizations have found themselves there too when trying to steer a course between two extremes.
Maybe it’s a natural thing for our industry, or at least the fish harvesting sector of it, to find itself in the middle. On the one hand, we’re commercial ventures, “extracting” (the term our detractors like to use) a natural resource. We’re also trying to get the best price possible from what we produce. On the other hand, we depend on the availability of abundant resources for economically viable operations. It doesn’t matter whether there are government regulators or environmentalists around or not -- if there’s no fish, there’s no fishery. So we’ve simply got to become adamant become defenders of the resources we depend on.
We’ve also got to sell our fish. That means not only that we’ve got to provide a high quality, safe and affordable product, but that it also helps if our customers like us – meaning, among others things, not saying something stupid to the press or doing things that offend the public.
Being in the middle of the road today, in other words trying to take a reasoned course and move forward, we often find ourselves caught between two increasingly polarized sides. It’s not quite as extreme as having PETA or EarthFirst on one side claiming the mere movement of our vessels is disturbing some fragile ecosystem or, on the other side, ideologues from the extreme right all pumped up after listening to way too many Rush Limbaugh rants, saying it’s our God given right (even our duty) to take the last fish and put out net pens everywhere filled with some super race of salmon, blackcod or whatever. But it is getting just about that bad.
In the fisheries right now, there’s nearly no dialogue between the various sides; they’re mostly just lobbing missiles in the form of campaigns, press releases, brochures, testimonies and downright nasty e-mails. Some of us, however, are committed to a future for our fisheries and recognize, too, that survival means a willingness and ability to adapt, to change. Rather than be on our hands and knees, or on our bellies like snakes, or in a gutter at the side of the road, we’re determined to be up on the road and moving ahead, and in the process learning when to slow down and when to speed up for the curves and bends in our way. But it’s not a safe place when those in the ditches to the side are not just firing at one another, but are locking and loading and taking a bead on you as well.
Let’s look at a few examples of where we’ve found being in the middle can be particularly precarious as well as important:
Long before environmental groups discovered fishing, or the regional councils began paying much attention to anything, complaints were being registered by non-trawl fishermen against certain trawl activities. Hook fishermen were mad about salmon, halibut or some other species being taken in trawl nets. Dungeness crab fishermen were angry about both the loss of gear and the kill of Dungeness in trawl operations. Most non-trawl fishermen were unhappy with the amount of bycatch some trawlers were shoveling over the side. Especially with the advent of heavy roller gear on higher horsepower vessels, there were a lot of pissed-off fishermen complaining about the damage this type of gear was doing to the rocky hard bottom habitats of rockfish. Some of the problems eventually were addressed by the councils, resulting in such measures as prohibitions on the take of certain species such as salmon, or strict limits on the take of other stocks, in order to protect the directed hook fisheries for salmon, halibut, etc.
Not much was done, however, about the impacts of roller gear on hard bottoms until the environmental groups got involved and started taking a larger role in fisheries management. While there have certainly been problems with trawling long identified by fishermen, even among trawlers, the problem today is that some environmental groups (and some of the more radical ocean sportfishing groups, but for far more selfish reasons) have decided that all trawling, which they equate with “bulldozing the bottom” or “ocean clearcutting,” should simply end, period. This is much too simplistic an approach, and amounts to an extreme position that becomes an article of faith that brooks no compromise.
True there are problems with trawling, or at least with certain types of trawl operations in certain places. But it is also true that trawling is the only practical way to catch some fish, ranging from the various species of sole to most shrimp. Trawling can also be done fairly cleanly with a minimum of bycatch. Bottom trawls on sandy or mud bottoms, particularly the lighter gear, probably creates no more disturbance than strong currents. The design of the gear, where it is deployed and how it is fished can also make a big difference in levels of bycatch, and can minimize or eliminate serious habitat disturbances.
This is where its gets tricky being “in the middle of the road” between those still denying there are any problems at all and those wanting to ban trawl gear altogether. PCFFA and a few other fishing groups have refused to be part of the “code of silence” regarding problems with some trawl operations, but at the same time we’ve refused to fall into lockstep with those who would simply ban the gear altogether. We believe there can be a future for trawling but also that some changes are needed, including a reduction in the amount of trawl effort currently allowed along the eastern seaboard and here on the west coast, particularly in the most fragile nursery areas.
That is why we recently entered into a dialogue with California State Senator Dede Alpert and supporters of her legislative bill SB 236 this past year. That measure could have eliminated all of California’s state-managed trawl fisheries. While PCFFA opposed the bill in committee, it was also sitting down with bill supporters to hear their issues and convey to them some facts about these fisheries they had never heard, and to see if some sort of accommodation could be arrived at, one both addressing valid concerns on the part of proponents while at the same time assuring that there would still be viable state-managed trawl fisheries. PCFFA’s sitting down with the enviros probably didn’t please a lot of trawlers, but Senator Alpert could otherwise probably have pushed the bill through with no changes, leaving those draggers permanently tied to the dock. That might very well have happened anyway had she not had a good discussion with Santa Barbara trawl fisherman Mike McCorkle (a PCFFA Board Member) and had it not been for PCFFA’s willingness to work with her on amendments.
None of this made PCFFA particularly popular, of course. Some of the draggers were more intent on ranting in committee hearings instead of sitting down with environmentalists at the negotiating table. In the end, though, some of the bill’s sponsoring environmental groups got more than an earful from PCFFA and a speedy education on the facts. In seeking a middle ground, our “middle of the road,” we were not seeking to either compromise conservation, nor the ability of fishermen to conduct their operations, but rather to more forward down that road to get to the types of changes that could be made that were both good for the environment (and fish habitat) and would also work for fishermen.
This may sound like a strange issue for PCFFA, or fishing groups generally, to be talking about being in the middle of the road on, but examining the facts, that is indeed where we’ve always been. The ocean salmon fishery along a large swath of the west coast (from central Oregon to central California) is managed based on the health of Klamath chinook salmon stocks. In years when these stocks are predicted to be abundant, we have more time and area to fish; in years when the number of these fish is down, seasons are short to nonexistent and areas to operate are highly constrained or totally closed.
One of the major factors affecting the health of Klamath salmon stocks is the amount of water allowed to flow into the river below Iron Gate Dam. The Bureau of Reclamation, which makes releases to the river from its Klamath Irrigation Project upstream, is obliged under at least two federal laws to provide more water for the fish – the Endangered Species Act (because of the listed coho salmon) and the obligation to meet water rights of the Tribes on the river (which have rights to have fish, which requires water). Under the Clean Water Act also, there are duties on the part of the federal irrigation project to provide higher quality water, but that has not yet been litigated.
By the 1980’s, fish populations in the Klamath had plummeted to less than 5 percent of historical populations, threatening widespread ocean salmon fishery closures. Since passage of the Klamath River Fish & Wildlife Restoration Act of 1986, PCFFA and lower river fishermen have been pushing to get sufficient water released back to the river to restore these fish populations and to loosen up ocean “weak stock” restrictions drive by very weak Klamath salmon runs. Protecting the listed coho also benefits the economically important fall chinook that support commercial, recreational and Tribal fisheries. Until two years ago, PCFFA and others concerned for the fish were simply blown off by the Bureau and its client irrigators. What little water the fish got was only that which the growers in the Basin weren’t taking first. During drought years, particularly, the lower river was reduced to a warm trickle and fish died by the thousands (juveniles by the tens of thousands) almost every year.
Then came the coho ESA listing, and in 2001 the normally arid Basin’s worst drought in 72 years. In that year, after years of litigation by lower river interests, under a National Marine Fisheries Service “Biological Opinion” the Bureau had to make minimum releases to the river sufficient to protect the listed coho from extinction, as well as maintain Upper Klamath Lake at specified minimum levels to protect two species of endangered suckers (a fish important to the Klamath Tribes). Because the Basin’s irrigators had fought off fish protections for nearly two decades, and have never acknowledged that in most years there was not sufficient water in the Basin to support the current level of irrigated agriculture, Klamath Irrigation Project-dependent growers were caught unprepared when their 2001 irrigation water was curtailed by one-third because of the drought. Naturally they were livid at having to surrender water to protect fish – for the first time in 90 years!
In the intervening year, PCFFA attempted to work with some of the more reasonable farmers in the area (of which there are still a fair number), looking at ways to fairly reduce off-stream water demand (land buybacks, water conservation, water banks, etc.) in order that there could be both sustainable levels of fishing and farming in the Basin. Months were spent in a court-supervised mediation, a process which PCFFA strongly supported and helped initiate. But ultimately those in radical denial within the farming community chose to rant rather than negotiate, and walked out of mediation, so nothing came of it. By the next year NMFS was pressured politically to sign off on a phony biological opinion, and the massive fish kill of September 2002, in which more than 34,000 adult potential spawners died prematurely, was the result. That same water plan was just thrown out by a federal court judge as “arbitrary and capricious” in a PCFFA-led lawsuit.
Yet despite the shrill “rural cleansing” rhetoric of some of the extremist “bucket brigade” folks, PCFFA has never had any animosity toward the farmers, who (like fishermen) are merely helpless victims of federal mismanagement. PCFFA has always looked for ways to provide for all parties. But that doesn’t satisfy the Upper Basin extremists and the outside agitators. Nor are matters helped when the White House’s Karl Rove advises the Interior Secretary to ignore the lower river and placate the mobs in the upper basin, opening the headgates in 2002 in a political grandstanding move that led to the massive fish kill.
Making matters worse, some of the more extreme elements in the Klamath Basin have now started making appeals to the understandable sympathies of some in the fishing community on the Oregon Coast, claiming that some “crazies” (meaning PCFFA) in the fishing industry were trying to put “honest Klamath farmers” out of business. Bull!
Now let’s get this right folks, federally subsidized farmers are claiming that fishermen shouldn’t be pressing to get enough water back into the Klamath to protect the fish that we are managed for on the ocean in order to get fishing opportunities that are now severely restricted. We’re supposed to agree to allow the irrigators to take all the water they want whenever they want it, in effect drying up the river, no matter what happens to the fish or what happens to us? Come on, get real! That’s telling fishermen to just quietly commit suicide so they go away and not bother them anymore.
The Klamath has not been an easy place to be in the middle of the road. At one section of the road we’re getting fired on by extremist irrigation interests who are personally affronted that fishermen would even dare demand more water to support fisheries, with Karl Rove as their arms supplier. Along another section of the road are some folks in our own industry unclear on the concept and thus easily duped, who are taking shots as well at folks trying to save Klamath runs that will benefit them and their own communities.
Nevertheless, we will continue making progress down that road, demanding enough water to make sure our salmon fisheries throughout that huge section of the coast can continue to eventually recover. In the process, however, we are always willing to work with farmers willing to work with us, on every possible common ground, and to help them survive the necessary transitions toward a water balance between the river and the farmers that is sustainable in the long-run.
Marine Protected Areas (MPAs) aren’t something dreamed up by environmentalists. The first suggestion for a form of protected area or refugia for fish on the west coast was advanced for salmon in the Klamath Basin in the latter part of the 19th century. The idea is hardly new. PCFFA worked with the University of California’s Bodega Marine Laboratory in establishing a refuge site off that facility, understanding the need for some places where there was almost no human activity or impacts that can serve as baseline reference areas for understanding marine systems. More than a decade ago, California urchin divers toyed with the idea of protected areas for that fishery, where there could be large concentrations of urchins untouched to help seed outside areas. We’ve always said that MPAs in some instances may have some value. That includes those where no take whatsoever is permitted, provided you are clear on what it is for and why, and not just restricting fisheries for the hell of it.
The problem is that while MPAs may have some value in some instances, the idea has been picked up by a lot of environmental groups and marine researchers who see this potential tool as a magic cure-all for everything. Listening to the rhetoric of a lot of these people, one would be left to believe that MPAs, or more specifically no-fishing marine reserves, are the ultimate and best answer to whatever ails our fisheries and oceans. Overfishing? Not a problem. Create a marine reserve. Habitat destruction? Not a problem. Create a marine reserve. Bycatch? Not a problem. Create a marine reserve. Pollution? Not a problem. Create a marine reserve. And on it goes. This is pure folly, of course, but apparently folks believe that if they repeat it often enough and keep piling scientific journal report upon scientific journal report (most little more than literature searches with no independent research), somehow it will become so. This is what is called “magical thinking.”
It is easy to understand how all the MPA jive got started. Foundation boards have businessmen on them who want to see something for their investment. Fair enough. They want something tangible. So for environmentalists dependent on foundation grants, working on MPAs is one easy way of providing their funders a deliverable. Just get some circles placed on a chart, stop the fishing within them, cash the check and move on to something else. For a researcher it’s not much different: just get an area set aside that you have to yourself, get the grants to study it, do a few papers on what you’ve found and you’re set for life. The one glitch to all of this, of course, is the collateral damage done to fishing men and women and fish production that can often unnecessarily result. However, bolstered by magical thinking and an unshakable belief in the righteousness of their cause, that’s not their concern.
The problem is that in the complex field of marine resource management and marine ecosystems, it’s not always easy to come up with something tangible that someone can point to and say, “See that, we created it,” and much harder still to ever tell whether what was accomplished actually provides any biological benefit. Remember that MPAs are really nothing new, and some have been around for decades. There are plenty of examples of existing MPAs that provide little or no biological benefit, and have become little more than closures for closure’s sake.
On the other side of our admittedly cynical, if all too accurate, view of MPA advocacy are those arguing for “not one square inch of ocean” to ever be put in MPAs anywhere at any time. This side is not necessarily opposed to shutting down some fishing -- just not theirs. Just ask the Recreational Fishing Alliance, which is sponsoring “freedom to fish” legislation all over the country to exempt marine sportfishing, but no one else, from future MPA designations.
PCFFA finds itself directly between these two extremes. We recognize that MPAs (which are also not necessarily no-fishing zones, depending on their purpose) may have some value in some places for providing habitat protection, protection of certain stocks or just providing important scientific baseline information. At the same time, MPAs are just one tool and have a limited use. If they’re not established carefully they can unnecessarily impact fisheries without any compensating benefits for the environment and/or fish production. Nor are they a substitute for good fisheries management generally, only a possible additional tool in the tool box that has to be used with thought and caution.
In all of the MPA debate to date, it seems that hardly anyone is looking for a rational discussion anymore, and it’s getting a little lonely here in the middle of the road taking flack from both sides. Nevertheless, the middle of the road is where you have to be in this discussion to make any forward progress at all.
We use the Pew Oceans Commission, which Pietro served on, as yet another example of where we find ourselves in the middle ground. The Commission report, released this past June (see FN June 2003, “A New Look at Managing Oceans, Fisheries,” at: http://www.pcffa.org/fn-jun03.htm) after 3 years of work has garnered a lot of controversy. One side is out there thumping it like a Bible-belt preacher, selectively taking the parts they like and embellishing them, often completely out of context. To many in the fishing community and at least a few on Capitol Hill, however, it is the work of "infidels" and they’ve issued their fatwa, declaring a jihad against it and all who believe any change is needed in the way we protect our oceans and manage our fisheries. It’s a “coffee table book” and a lot worse according to them. Listening to both of these sides, we’re not sure if anyone has even read the report, much less given it any real thought, although everyone seems to have a lot to say.
The report was developed by an extremely diverse Commission, and like any such report it is not written as any single member of the group might have crafted it, but to reflect as much as possible a consensus of what people could agree to. Sure, there are parts of it that give us pause, and that if it were just from the fishing industry would have been written differently, including the MPA section, some of the governance parts, etc. However, we should also recognize that some of the business leaders and economists on the Commission would have written it differently as well, certainly the environmentalists alone would have done it differently, as would have the researchers and the public officials. While it was not written by the fishing industry, nor any other interest group, the report, however, does have a number of important sections in it that can greatly help our fisheries and our fishing communities.
For years, fishermen have been angered that when it comes to managing fisheries, all regulators ever do is restrict fishing. They almost never tackle the really hard issues of pollution and habitat loss that are taking large tolls of some stocks. The Pew Report puts it right out there up front about the impacts of land-based activities on the health of our oceans, including the impacts of run-off and the oil from our streets getting in ocean waters, not just from tanker spills and platform leaks.
The report is also important for warning of the dangers posed by aquaculture operations. This is critical at a time when the National Marine Fisheries Service has become an unabashed proponent of open-ocean fish farming, and the Economist magazine is touting the “Blue Revolution,” to center the discussions not just on the promise of aquaculture development, but also on the serious problems it poses.
Finally, even in the recommendations on MPAs, the report makes clear, as has the Commission’s Chairman Leon Panetta numerous times, that fishermen have to be involved in the establishment of these set-aside areas.
Yeah, we’re in the middle on this one too. In the Holy War going on between the two sides regarding the Commission’s report, we’re caught in the cross fire, trying to urge folks to read the report, think about it and remember that we’re all supposedly working for the same ends. We’re asking the industry and the public to at least focus on some of the sections we think are really important and to see what can be done to get them implemented.
Last, we get a lot of flack for various alliances that we form pursuing one issue or another. In particular, a lot of folks in the fishing industry wonder why a fishing group would ever work with environmentalists. But consider this. Conservation organizations push environmental protection, or at least what they believe is protecting the environment. Our industry also depends on a healthy and clean environment to support the abundant fish stocks that we catch and sell. No fish, no fishery. So we have a lot in common with environmental groups, like it or not. The more responsible groups can be a natural ally for us on issues ranging from clean water, to wetlands protection, to sound forest and rangeland management (anadromous fish originate in those same forests and rangelands) and any number of things that threaten the ecosystems of the fish we depend on. Alone we probably couldn’t accomplish much. Alone they wouldn’t be able to accomplish much, and can go off in directions that are counterproductive. Together, however, we’re a powerful force and have demonstrated that fact a number of times to the benefit of fish stocks, fishermen and, yes, even processors.
However there are clearly times when we part company with environmental groups on an issue. That is no different than when fishing groups may, and often do, come at issues from different sides. Nor are our alliances just with environmental groups. We’ve worked closely together with the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California and the Central Valley Project Water Users Association to remove old dams in Sierra streams in order to restore fish habitat. We’ve also been on opposite sides of litigation with these same two organizations over diversions from the San Francisco Bay-Delta. We’ve also worked with ranchers, farmers and loggers on innumerable watershed restoration projects over many years.
We’re currently working with NMFS on a coho captive broodstock program, at the same time we’re the lead plaintiff against them on their bungling of water issues in the Klamath. We’re working under a contract with the Sonoma County Water Agency on the same coho broodstock program for the Russian River and will probably be suing them over the diversion of flows from the Eel River. We’ve worked with the Farm Bureau on Oregon stream protections, while facing off against them in court on salmon protections generally. We work with whomever we can, wherever we can and whenever we can, to best protect the resource and the people who depend on it.
The lesson is that each issue potentially has a different set of interests and different alliances. Fishermen should make their alliances based on what’s best for the fish and our fisheries, not on rigid ideologies or political lines. For this we are often barraged with criticism from groups that think they should have our undying allegiance on all issues. It doesn’t work that way folks. Our allegiance is solely to the fish, fisheries and fishing communities, not to any one group. Here, again we are taking the middle ground. It’s not the easy place to be, sometimes, but it’s the correct place to be if you are trying to accomplish something more than just rhetoric.
We could give a lot more examples of the precarious position those of us in fisheries who are taking the middle ground find ourselves in. The lesson is that it’s not an easy place to be, nor a safe place, but it may be the only place to be where any progress can be made. It won’t win you any friends, but it may earn some respect and that’s most important.
If you’re really making progress in the fisheries, if you’re really moving ahead, you’ll be taking shots from both extremes. But it’s a helluva lot better being up on the road marching ahead, even through the snipers and the flack, then to be in the ditches with your head down crawling on your hands and knees or slithering along on your belly.
The real skunks are in the gutters and the yellow stripes in the road are for the brave.
Pietro Parravano is the current President of the Pacific Coast Federation of Fishermen’s Associations (PCFFA), the west coast’s largest organization of commercial fishing families, and Zeke Grader is its Executive Director. Glen Spain is PCFFA’s Northwest Regional Director. PCFFA’s Southwest Regional Office can be reached at: PO Box 29370, San Francisco, CA 94129-0370, or by phone to: (415)561-5080. PCFFA’s Northwest Regional Office can be reached at: PO Box 11170, Eugene, OR 97440-3370, or by phone to: (541)689-2000. PCFFA’s website is at: www.pcffa.org and its email is: fish1ifr@aol.com.