Email received from Nils Stolpe dated Feb. 28th 2010


Wednesday, February 24, 2010 was the day that US fishermen* found their
collective voice, and that voice was a roar. And that roar echoed in the
halls of Congress. It was the day that two dozen US legislators heard
that roar loudly and clearly, and responded unequivocally that they were
committed to the cause that brought us all to Washington - to Fix
Magnuson Now.

The day was a complete success from the fishermen’s perspective, and I
can’t imagine it turning out any better than it did. Upwards of 5,000
fishermen were there, on the very steps of the Capitol, to express their
dissatisfaction with the anti-fishing weapon that federal fisheries
management has been turned into; a weapon based on the Big Lie that
fish-ermen shouldn’t be involved in managing their own fisheries. Some
fishermen expressed it with religious fervor and some expressed it with
humor, but they all expressed it with passion, with pride, with
integrity and with conviction. Anyone who was there and was listening
couldn’t have missed that.

But there was a downside.


One of the major themes was the chasm that has developed separating
fishermen from the federal fisheries managers and the federal fisheries
management system. This was echoed by speaker after speaker. The
NOAA/NMFS presence at and reaction to the rally provided compelling
evidence that this chasm is getting wider and deeper, and that the
peo-ple in charge at NOAA/NMFS aren’t at all interested in bridging it.

Two days before the rally Jim Donofrio, Executive Director of the
Recreational Fishing Alliance and one of the rally’s chief architects,
was contacted by NOAA/NMFS with a request to have Eric Schwaab, newly
appointed NOAA Assis-tant Administrator for Fisheries, added to the
agenda. When Jim found that Mr. Schwaab wasn’t interested in support-ing
our cause, legislation to bring much needed flexibility back to the
Magnuson Act, he graciously declined and he did so with the unanimous
support of all of us who were involved in putting the rally together.

On the day of the rally Mr. Schwaab issued a press release, which he
passed out to the media reps in attendance, stat-ing that he was there
“to listen to those who have come to rally Congress.” But, as Tony
Bogan, another rally organizer and president of the party/charter boat
association United Boatmen, said, “his press release stated that he was
‘there to listen’ to fishermen, but he spent the majority of his time
talking to reporters instead of listening to any of the thou-sands of us
that were available.” And from what I’ve read subsequently, and based on
his press release, his talking had everything to do with convincing
those reporters that neither the rally nor the changes to the Magnuson
Act that it was in support of were necessary.

In other words, according to Mr. Schwaab and NOAA/NMFS, all of those
fishermen had wasted their time, their money and their energy and had
wasted the time and energy of all of those legislators as well, because
we didn’t need what we were asking for.

I’m not going to speculate here on how appropriate it was for the person
in charge of the Obama administration’s fish-eries agency to be actively
campaigning against legislation introduced by high ranking Democrats and
sponsored by more than thirty legislators from both parties at a rally
of people who are supposed to be his constituents during his second week
on the job. Nor on exactly whose interests he was representing while he
was doing it. But for the sake of all of our fishermen, there are some
serious questions about this that demand to be answered.

What of the rest of his press release?

I’ll start off with his plea for patience on the part of fishermen,
predicated on his agency’s success in rebuilding four fisheries.

I’m familiar with two and know that the “success” in their management
only started when cooperative research pro-jects inarguably demonstrated
that there were far more monkfish and sea scallops available than the
NOAA/NMFS vessels, crews and scientists had been able to find on their
own. While perhaps Mr. Schwaab hadn’t yet been briefed on these
fisheries (the sea scallop fishery is the most valuable in the country
and the monkfish fishery is the most valu-able federally managed finfish
fishery on the East Coast), his claim that their management success was
due to “rebuild-ing” was slightly less than accurate. They were both
cases of fishermen working cooperatively with NMFS scientists and
showing them how to find the monkfish or scallops that were there all
along. (Unfortunately, such positive out-comes are unlikely in the
future because NOAA/NMFS plans to transfer $6 million from the
cooperative research budget to a campaign to force catch shares on
fishermen who might not want them.)

As far as the third of the four species he mentioned, for as long as
people have been fishing on the East Coast, the blue-fish population,
regardless of fishing pressure, has cycled from high abundance to low.
In fact, a page on Mr. Schwaab’s agency’s own website states “cycles of
low and high abundance of bluefish follow a pattern…. Several re-cent
studies have examined potential causes of this pattern and have found no
biological explanations.” This cycling happens with or without
management, and bluefish are at a high level of abundance now. His
scientists don’t know why but Mr. Schwaab wants us to believe that his
agency and its management program are what did it.

I don’t know anything about the king mackerel fishery, the fourth that
he claimed as a “we rebuilt it” success. Perhaps he got that one right.

But most troubling to me was his ongoing advice to just sit back and let
the management measures work because the sacrifices that fishermen are
making now “have the potential to result in significant long-term
economic benefits to fishing communities.” In his release Mr. Schwaab
asserted “I am familiar with fishing communities, their proud
tradi-tions, and the challenges we face in keeping them vibrant for
future generations.” I don’t know how much time Mr. Schwaab has actually
spent on the ground in those fishing communities, but I’ll bet he’s
never seen a fishing business or a fishing-dependent business closed
down because of management cutbacks required by unnecessarily
restrictive rebuilding requirements that was eventually replaced by
another fishing business. Tee shirt shops, condominiums, convenience
stores and fast food places definitely, but never another fishing business.

And what are the displaced business owners and employees in these
fishing communities going to do while they’re waiting for these
arbitrary rebuilding targets to be reached? Become investment bankers
and finally get something from the federal government other than pain
and suffering? That might keep them vibrant, but it sure won’t keep them
as fishing communities.

Mr. Schwaab’s press release ended “I am interested in hearing the
concerns of everyone involved, and I look forward to a cooperative and
productive relationship,” but it seemed as if he wasn’t really
interested enough to listen to the big-gest gathering of involved and
committed fishermen than I’ve ever seen.

On Wednesday I heard 5,000 fishermen saying that they were tired of,
threatened by and paying grievously for a fed-eral management system
that was being run from the board rooms of billion dollar foundations by
people who are about as far removed from the docks, beaches or marinas
that any of us frequent as it’s possible to be. Those founda-tions have
spent hundreds of millions of dollars on legislation that makes the fish
more important than the fishermen and has taken all of the human
judgment out of a system that was originally designed to rely on that
judgment.

Congressman Pallone’s and Senator Schumer’s legislation is the first
step, now that we have the knowledge, the safe-guards and the will to
avoid another plunge into overfishing, in getting us back to the level
of sustainable management where the fishermen matter as much as the
fish. It’s too bad that the new head of the National Marine Fisheries
Service had decided by his eighth day on the job that we don’t need
anything like that, that what we really need is more of the kind of
“fish first” management that brought us all to Washington.

I’d respectfully suggest that Mr. Schwaab find a somewhat more accurate
definition of “cooperative” than the one he’s presently using.
________________________________________________

*When I write ”fishermen,” that’s my personal shorthand for men who
fish, women who fish, kids who fish, and all of the people whose
livelihoods depend in all or in part on those fishermen keeping on fishing.
________________________________________________

In what is an unfortunate postscript, on February 26 Mr. Schwaab sent
out an invitation to “participate in an informal stakeholder call to
introduce and familiarize myself with the interests and view points of
you and your community,” scheduled for the afternoon of Monday, March
15. While it’s a sure thing that a host of foundation subsidized
fisher-men and so-called marine conservationists will participate, that
is the first day of the Boston Seafood Show, the most important annual
event for the seafood industry in the U.S. That’s about the best way I
could imagine to guarantee that an awful lot of commercial fishing
industry leaders would not be available. Let’s assume that it was just
an oversight. Considering that one or two phone calls or about a half a
minute’s worth of web surfing would have revealed this con-flict, Mr.
Schwaab seems even more out of touch with the real fishing industry than
his press release would indicate.