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Attack on our Fisheries

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baldwin

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6 mins ago, baldwin said:

This bill would seriously weaken the piece of legislation that rebuilt our formerly depleted fisheries and kept them viable for over 4 decades. 

S1520 _ MSA coalition fact sheet .pdf

Another typical bill favoring big business over the environment 

You’re not some crazy uncle you know!

 

I'm so glad I don't live in the fact-less bizarro world you live in...just sayin'.

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35 mins ago, jsbergen said:

Thanks to the Republican Party. 

Probably should keep that noise in the Political forum...

 

I'm researching this atm. Can you tell how this is an attack? What I'm reading says it's a bill that will do research to manage fish stocks better. But that's just at a glance. 

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16 mins ago, rollincoal said:

That is to some degree already happening.

That’s always been what’s happening. Commercial and charter guys crying that it’ll hurt their livelihoods, when they’re the ones who have been unsustainably fishing for decades. It’s as if we all still have to ride horse drawn buggies instead of cars because the buggy industry didn’t want to lose their industry.

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18 hours ago, Theseeker66 said:

Probably should keep that noise in the Political forum...

 

I'm researching this atm. Can you tell how this is an attack? What I'm reading says it's a bill that will do research to manage fish stocks better. But that's just at a glance. 

One of the biggest problems is that it creates a lot of ambiguity in the current law, particularly with regard to rebuilding timelines.  Debating a default 10 year rebuilding timeline versus Tmin + 1 is one thing; allowing an open-ended rebuilding timeline if "the Secretary determines that the stock has been affected by unusual events that make rebuilding withing the specified time period improbable without significant economic harm to fishing communities" is something quite different.  Under that exception, instead of trying to timely rebuild a stock--say, summer flounder--after multiple years of poor spawning, that language could allow NMFS (or, more to the point, Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross) to find that such poor spawning was unusual, that cutting back fluke landings would hurt the dragger fleet, or the party boats, or another economic sector, and let them keep hammering the stock without any deadline for rebuilding (note that fluke aren't in a rebuilding situation now, as the population is not yet overfished--unless the upcoming stock assessment says otherwise--but it did experience at least 6 consecutive years of back-to-back below average spawns, so the scenario is not completely hypothetical).  Note that the "unusual event" isn't required to even be biological or oceanographic in nature--an argument could be made than an unprecedented and supposedly unexpected level of overfishing, either directed or as bycatch, could meet the standard created by such language becomes truly troubling.

 

And take a look at what the bill says about "research to manage fish stocks better."  It seeks to make it possible for information obtained from non-scientific sources, including fishermen, to be incorporated in stock assessments and other currently science-based analyses of fish stocks, so that if we have researchers telling us that fish stocks are headed for trouble at current harvest rates, such professional advice could be offset by fishermen arguing that they're catching and seeing plenty of fish, etc., or of fishermen being able to locate the remnants of a depleted population (think concentrations of Gulf of Maine cod on inshore banks a few years ago) to reach a conclusion that fish are abundant and no management action is needed.  Another provision would even allow "nongovernmental sources," which by definition includes fishermen, to supply the fisheries data and even perform the analyses.

 

This is a nightmare bill that has been rattling around Congress since at least 2014, that no one believed had a chance of passage, until party-line votes rather than the sort of bipartisan action that typically characterized fishery bills in the past, and committee chairman such as Rob Bishop of Utah, who never saw a conservation law that he didn't want to weaken or repeal, began to characterize House actions.  Hopefully, it will die in the lame duck.  Although I suspect Don Young will introduce it again in the 116th, in that Congress, it should exist in the limbo of bills that don't have a prayer of making it out of committee.

 

So if the Senate doesn't act on it in the next couple of months, it should be--and deserves to be--dead.

 

 

"I have always believed that outdoor writers who come out against fish and wildlife conservation are in the wrong business. To me, it makes as much sense golf writers coming out against grass.."  --  Ted Williams

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18 hours ago, Mastatwista said:

That’s always been what’s happening. Commercial and charter guys crying that it’ll hurt their livelihoods, when they’re the ones who have been unsustainably fishing for decades. It’s as if we all still have to ride horse drawn buggies instead of cars because the buggy industry didn’t want to lose their industry.

But the key is that, under current law, federal fishery regulations have to place a priority on preventing overfishing and timely rebuilding overfished stocks.  Ever since Natural Resources Defense Council v. Daley was decided in 2000, any federal fishery management action that does not have at least a 50% probability of achieving those goals is illegal, and can be challenged in court.

 

Note that such requirement does not apply to state actions, either in the case of states acting independently or states acting collectively through ASMFC.

"I have always believed that outdoor writers who come out against fish and wildlife conservation are in the wrong business. To me, it makes as much sense golf writers coming out against grass.."  --  Ted Williams

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1 hour ago, pakalolo said:

Not really, kinda like PETA in a way,

That's a bit of an overstatement.

 

EarthJustice litigates environmental issues.  While I don't agree with all of the actions that they've brought, they're far from a PETA.  Left of center, yes.  But on fisheries issues, they are more concerned with sustainability, and are neither pro- nor anti-angling.  

"I have always believed that outdoor writers who come out against fish and wildlife conservation are in the wrong business. To me, it makes as much sense golf writers coming out against grass.."  --  Ted Williams

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Especially if the goal of a fishery is abundance, management is fundamentally flawed by design; in order to enact conservation, it must be established that there aren't enough fish.

"If you know that and you don't know anything else you know more than if you know everything else and you don't know that."
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