Of gumballs, the American Sportfishing Association and fisheries management

Gumballs sure are fun, but policy decisions should be based on complete and accurate information

(For a printable pdf version please go to http://www.fishnet-usa.com/Gumballs.pdf. This should in no way be considered an attack on recreational fishuing, nor is it an attempt to in any way diminish the perceived economic importance of recreational fishing.)

Nils E. Stolpe/FishNet USA/May 9, 2014
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Points to keep in mind while reading this:

  • U.S. commercial fishermen aren’t fishing for themselves, they are fishing for the 300 million or so consumers in this country who want a diet that includes wholesome, high quality and, if possible, locally produced seafood as soon after it is caught as possible.
  • The American Sportfishing Association is a trade organization that represents businesses that provide goods and services to recreational anglers. All conservation rhetoric aside, it’s members do better if there are more recreational anglers who are fishing more, and it’s no secret that getting more anglers fishing more is most easily accomplished if they are allowed to catch more fish.
  • The more fish that are allocated to recreational anglers, the less fish will be available to the non-fishing public. The rise in the consumption of cultured tilapia, cultured swai and cul-tured shrimp of questionable origin and questionable quality is due to two factors: per capita seafood consumption in the US has been tending upwards for years, and commercial landings of many of the most popular fish and shellfish produced in our exclusive economic zone have been tending down for decades (see http://www.fishnet-USa.com/After%2035%20years%20of%20NOAA.pdf and http://www.fishnet-USa.com/Research%20funding_A%20win-win.pdf).

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The people at the American Sportfishing Association (ASA) are embarking on the second year of a campaign to convince anyone who will listen that recreational fishing is equally as or more important than commercial fishing and that in their estimation the federal government should not be putting so much emphasis on managing the commercial fisheries. It began with a press release announcing the completion of an ASA commissioned study by Southwick Associates on May 6 of last year and has progressed to a YouTube video starring gumballs as fish surrogates and with Michael Nussman, the President of the ASA, in a strong supporting role.

In the press release Nussman stated “the current federal saltwater fisheries management system has historically focused the vast majority of its resources on the commercial sector, when recreational fishing is found to have just as significant an economic impact on jobs and the nation’s economy.”

You might ask what the point of this exercise is.

According to Nussman “we’re not releasing this report in an effort to demean commercial fishing. Commercial fishing is very important to our nation’s economy! Our goal is to highlight the importance of rec-reational fishing to the nation. As our coastal populations continue to grow, along with saltwater recreational fishing, significant improvements must be made to shape the nation’s federal fisheries system in a way that recognizes and responds to the needs of the recreational fishing community.”

Among other things, “demean” means to lower in standing, and in spite of Nussman’s assurances to the contrary, it sure seems like that’s exactly what the ASA and their Southwick Associates report is attempting to do.

From the report:
“In 2011 anglers landed 204.9 million pounds of saltwater fish. In pursuit of these fish, saltwater anglers spent $26.8 billion on fishing tackle and equipment and trip-related goods and services. Including multiplier effects, their spending generated $70.3 billion in economic output (sales), created $32.5 billion in value-added growth and supported 454,542 jobs with $20.5 billion in in-come…. Of the commercial sector’s landings, 4.9 billion finfish pounds were the same species frequently targeted by anglers, with a landed value of $2.1 billion. Including multiplier effects along the entire value chain from harvesters to processors to final consumers, commercial finfish harvest of species also sought by anglers generated $20.5 billion of economic output. This is the ‘sales impact,’ which is not to be confused with expenditures or retail sales which created $10.6 billion in value-added impacts and generated 304,611 jobs with $7.5 billion of income.”

If that isn’t an attempt to lower the standing of commercial fishing, particularly when Nussman introduced the report with the words “the current federal saltwater fisheries management system has historically focused the vast majority of its resources on the commercial sector,” it’s hard to imagine what would be.

The entire report centers around the idea that expenditures on recreational fishing services, equipment and supplies are somehow equivalent – on a dollar to dollar basis – to dollars generated by commercially caught and landed finfish (The Southwick people disregard commercial shellfish landings, which will be discussed below).

In reality commercial fishermen and the people in every other business in the seafood supply chain are dedicated to producing the best possible product at the lowest possible price, as are any business owners engaged in producing products in a free market system. If they weren’t they wouldn’t be in business for very long, because there is a world’s worth of alternative center of the plate proteins competing for the US consumers’ dollars. On the other hand recreational fishermen aren’t buying fish when they go fishing, they are buying a recreational fishing experience, and the more pleasurable that experience is the more they are likely to spend. Within limits this isn’t determined by the amount of fish caught. Recreational fishermen aren’t driven by anything approaching the bottom-line constraints that commercial fishermen and others in the seafood supply chain face.

To equate what a recreational fisherman pays to catch a fish to what a commercial fisherman is paid to catch that same fish is to equate the total cost an equestrian pays to ride her horse for a mile to what Amtrak would charge to move her the same distance on a train. Apples and oranges doesn’t come close to describing how unapt the Southwick comparison is, maybe Ferraris and oranges does.

Why omit shellfish?

In the Southwick report the authors also ignore the value and the economic contributions of the commercial shellfish fisheries (mollusks and crustaceans), stating as their rationale “shellfish are rarely targeted by anglers.” This implies that there is no relationship between commercial shellfish fisheries and commercial or recreational finfish fisheries. The impact that the yellowtail flounder fisheries have on the New England/Mid-Atlantic sea scallop fishery, the most valuable commercial fishery in the US, demonstrates how a seemingly unrelated fishery can have a profound effect on another, and how “dismissing” any of our fisheries, recreational or commercial, can leave naïve readers with severely distorted impressions.

The New England/Mid-Atlantic sea scallop fishery is constrained more by the catch of yellowtail flounder, which supports a small recreational fishery in New England, than it is by sea scallop abundance. If the small allocation of yellowtail flounder is inadvertently exceeded by the sea scallop fleet the sea scallop fishery will be closed for a predetermined period in the subsequent fishing year depending on the amount by which the allocation is exceeded. The allocation of yellowtail flounder to the scallop fleet has been on the order of 500 metric tons annually. The sea scallop fishery, the most valuable commercial fishery in the US with landings that have averaged over a half a billion dollars a year in recent years, is dependent on catching just over a million dollars’ worth of these flounder (that have an ex-vessel value of around a dollar a pound). If the yellowtail flounder population declines for any reason the allocation of them to the sea scallop fishery will be reduced proportionally, as will the sea scallop catch.

The Gulf of Mexico/South Atlantic shrimp fisheries provide another example of how closely intertwined commercial shellfish fisheries and commercial/recreational finfish fisheries are. Domestic shrimp fisher-men exert a tremendous effort – at a tremendous expense – to avoid bycatch of juvenile stages of important finfish species, particularly snapper and grouper. The Mid-Atlantic/New England squid fishery is managed in large part for the butterfish bycatch (more on butterfish later). And there are similar finfish interactions in other shellfish fisheries.

Also, and it’s kind of surprising that the Southwick people ignored this, a small yet significant part of the “commercial” shellfish harvest goes to providing bait to recreational anglers, and the price that they pay for their clams, shrimp, squid and clams tend to be quite a bit higher than what consumers are willing to pay for the same products at the seafood counter.

In ignoring the value of the commercial shellfish fisheries the report makes it appear as if fish caught by recreational fishermen add three times as much value to the economy as fish caught by commercial fishermen. The inclusion of all commercially caught fish and shellfish would definitely affect this ratio, meaningless as it is. In fact, well over half of the commercial finfish catch is composed of relatively low value per pound species and virtually all of the commercially caught shellfish are high value per pound. In 2012 the ten most valuable commercial finfish species had an average landed value of less than 26 cents per pound while the ten most valuable shellfish species had an average landed value of over two dollars per pound.

Chart 1

No matter what the reasoning, not considering the entire commercial fishery relative to the entire recreational fishery leaves readers with an incomplete and very possibly distorted picture.
What about exceeded quotas?

In every discussion about inequities in recreational fisheries management this seems to be the 800 pound gorilla lurking invisibly in the corner.
If you are at all familiar with the current state of fisheries management in the US you know that it’s next to impossible for commercial fishermen to overfish their quota (or TAC or whatever it’s called) in federal waters. Unfortunately that’s not the case with recreational fishermen in recreational fisheries or in those that they share with their commercial colleagues.

At this point virtually every commercial fishery that takes place in federal waters is under one form of limited entry or another. What this means is that you need a federal permit to participate in those fisheries. The number of permits allowed in each fishery is limited. Accordingly it takes more than a boat and a desire to participate in a particular fishery to fish. The controls on the limited number of commercial fishermen in a particular fishery can (and usually do) limit where they can fish, when they can fish, how they can fish, the size and horsepower of their boat, the type and amount of gear they can use and the size and amount of the fish they can catch. Depending on the fishery, when a predetermined amount of a particular species is caught the fishery may be shut down. If the amount caught exceeds the commercial quota, as with yellowtail flounder in the sea scallop fishery, the excess amount may be deducted from the following year’s quota.

Recreational fishermen are managed with various combinations of size, season and bag limits (the number of a particular species of fish that they can have in possession). However, there is no limit to the number of fishermen who can participate in a recreational fishery, nor in how many trips they may make in which they catch a particular species. It seems obvious that a fisheries management system that for all intents and purposes has no cap on the number of participants nor on the number of fish of a particular species each of those participants can take can be pretty far from effective. Recognizing this and effectively dealing with it is one of the improvements that is definitely necessary to, in Mr. Nussman’s words, “reshape the nation’s federal fisheries system.”

As the chart below (from NOAA/NMFS) shows, the number of saltwater recreational anglers, which remained reasonably stable for the last two decades of the twentieth century, grew significantly in most of the first decade of the twenty-first, until the “Great Recession” began. Whether most of those who left come back to the sport or not, there are and will continue to be millions more than there were a decade ago while the productive capacity of our waters isn’t going to increase significantly.

Chart 2

What of what seems to be an underlying theme of Mr. Nussman’s remarks in the press release and in his gumball presentation; the idea that the commercial fisheries are making off with most of the fish and that’s costing the US economy billions of dollars? Coincidentally NOAA/NMFS in the 2012 edition of Fisheries of the United States included a graph titled Top Ten Recreational Species-Harvest Vs. Commercial Harvest reproduced below.

With the exception of Atlantic cod and summer flounder, well over half of the harvest of each of the most recreationally sought species nationally are taken by recreational anglers (I’ll note here that the commercial Atlantic cod fishery was historically our most significant commercial fishery since well before the founding of the United States and the summer flounder fishery has been one of the most important commercial fisheries in the Mid-Atlantic for most of the last hundred years).

Could it be that Mr. Nussman wants even more of these and other species to meet what from a management perspective appears to be the uncontrollable demands (by managing what an angler can catch per trip but not the number of anglers/number of trips) of the recreational anglers? The commercial landings of these ten species and any others that support both recreational and commercial fisheries seem meager indeed, particularly when one considers commercial landings in the US in their entirety. But they certainly aren’t to the fishermen, recreational, party/charter and commercial, who catch them and the businesses they support. And, while Mr. Nussman lumped all commercial finfish fishermen and fisheries together, that is certainly not the real world case. The most valuable commercial fisheries generally involve large companies, big boats, a lot of onshore or onboard processing and a lot of capital. The smaller ones generally don’t, and in them are the fishermen who would suffer the greatest harm from any reallocation. They are also the fishermen who have been the bedrock of our fishing communities from Maine to Alaska and beyond, and as we’re already seeing, as we lose them we lose those communities as well.

The final chart, again from NOAA/NMFS, shows how the number of fish taken home by saltwater anglers each year has declined to less than half of what it was in the 1980s. While I’m in no way expert on the saltwater recreational angling industry, this seems to be a pretty unsustainable trend, but does its continuation have to be inevitable? No more inevitable than the constant whittling down of commercial and recreational quotas are.

 

Chart 3

Is there a solution to what I’ll call the saltwater recreational anglers’ dilemma?

Every year more commercial fishermen and the people in fishing dependent businesses are realizing that better science almost always means more fish – and when it doesn’t we definitely don’t want to be catching too many. As long as the precautionary principle is applied only to protect the fish and not to protect fishing communities and is rigidly controlling fisheries management decisions, what we don’t know about fish stocks is going to hurt us. Some of us have come to terms with this and are committing to collaboration with researchers ashore and on the water. One of the most recent positive results of this was announced by the Mid-Atlantic Council last week, reporting that a just completed stock assessment determined that butterfish were presently not overfished and hadn’t been for at least twenty-three years. This assessment was the result of several years of cooperation and collaboration between the Council staff, researchers at the Northeast Fisheries Science Center and several universities, fishermen and their representatives. It wasn’t easy, but it’s getting easier, and the reward is going to be larger – but sustainable – harvests of both butterfish and squid. And it didn’t involve any fishermen trying to grab quota from any other fisherman. All it involved was getting the science closer to right.

A recent NOAA/NMFS publication (Fish Assessment Report – Fiscal Year 2014 Quarter 2 Update available at http://www.st.nmfs.noaa.gov/Assets/stock/documents/report/FY14Q1_AsmtReport_Summary.pdf) reported that only 59.6% of the fish stocks listed on that agency’s Fish Stock Sustainability index had “adequate” assessments (from NOAA/NMFS “generally a minimally adequate assessment can be con-ducted where there is good information on the level of annual catch and an indicator of the degree of change in stock abundance over time”). Over 40% of our important fish stocks do not. What that means is that, because of the precautionary principle the harvest of almost half of our important fish stocks are too low because we don’t know enough about them because the science isn’t there to adequately assess them.
There’s definitely a message in there for Mr. Nussman and his members. And it wouldn’t require gumballs to illustrate it.

I would be remiss if I didn’t finish this with a reminder that we are importing on the order of 90% of the seafood we consume in the U.S. and fresh, locally produced fish is getting harder and harder to find and increasingly expensive. There are more fish out there. We need to find or force the funding to provide our scientists and our managers with the science necessary to adequately manage our fisheries. That would be good for everyone, not just the recreational fishermen, the commercial fishermen or the party/charter fishermen.

Magnuson not a weapon to use against fishing communities!

I wrote the column below over six years ago. Since then we have gone through two demonstrations in Washington, DC that were enthusiastically supported by recreational, party/charter and commercial fishermen. Thousands of fishermen finally realized that, regardless of disagreements about allocation, we had far more in common than not and that the only way that we were ever going to change the federal management system is by working together (I’ll add here that a subtext of what has become an ongoing dialog deals with the fact that, given higher catch levels and more flexible management, many of our allocation difficulties might simply evaporate.)

Have we been successful? Not hardly, unless the fact that some fishermen are still fishing, and some fishing dependent businesses are still in business is viewed as success.

The chart below shows total commercial landings on the US Atlantic Coast from 1950 to 2012 (I excluded menhaden, a fishery which is so large that its inclusion would have distorted what’s happening with our other commercial fisheries).

Chart

Needless to say, those supposed rewards of increased harvests when the stocks “rebounded” thanks to the fishermen’s sacrifices haven’t yet appeared, even though most of our stocks are in better shape than they have been in for decades – and those that aren’t are in “bad” shape because warmer sea temperatures have caused them to seek more hospitable areas to the north.

And if you suspect that the slight uptick starting in 2008 or so is indicative of a general trend, bear in mind that the landings have only been reported up until 2012. This was before some pretty significant cuts were (once again) inflicted on the New England groundfish fleet.

As anyone who is reading this can attest, it’s no different for the recreational fisheries.

We didn’t get done what needed to be done in Washington in 2010 or 2012. But things might be looking up. Congressman “Doc” Hastings, Chairman of the House Resources Committee, has been circulating a draft Magnuson Reauthorization package that addresses some of the most egregious outrages that have been inflicted on fishermen by the anti-fishing ENGOs and the handful of fishing industry “leaders” who have joined their camp, and journalists in the popular press, at least those who haven’t partaken fully of the blame-it-all-on-fishing Kool Aid, are starting to look behind the Pew/Oceana media blitzes. For a great example, see John Lee’s Time to rethink fisheries management in The Providence Business News.

It’s going to take a significant and focused effort to turn the Magnuson Act back to the supportive legislation it once was, with meaningful roles in federal fisheries management by scientists, managers and fishermen, with research that is equal to the tasks that it is expected to perform, and with safeguards in place that protect both the fish and the fishermen.

Crowd and Capitol

It can happen, but don’t believe it’s going to happen without your support and your participation. Find out who the appropriate staffers are in your Senators’ and Congressperson’s office and let them know what you need as a fisherman, or as someone who owns or is employed in a fishing dependent business. Let them know that the federal fisheries management system was never designed to protect the wellbeing of the fish while totally ignoring the wellbeing of the fishermen. That’s where we’ve been for most of two decades, and look where it’s gotten us. It’s time to stop Magnuson from being a weapon against fishing communities!Nils Stolpe

(From Another Perspective on the Saving Seafood website – http://www.savingseafood.org – on December 8, 2009)

A reduction in sea scallop landings of thirty percent. A total closure of the Gulf of Mexico recreational amberjack fishery. A reduction in spiny dogfish landings of twenty-five percent. A total seasonal closure of the recreational sea bass fishery in the Northeast. A total closure of the red snapper fishery in federal waters from Florida to North Carolina. Recreational summer flounder restrictions that have decimated the for-hire fleet. Massive West coast rockfish closures based on less than adequate science. A looming lobster bait crisis stemming from a massive though biologically unnecessary reduction in herring landings. One hundred and thirty thousand tons of uncaught groundfish TAC. A labyrinth of MPAs off California established wherever catchable fish are found. And the list could go on and on.

These are either proposed, recently instituted or ongoing management initiatives — initiatives being imposed on fishermen who are looking at fisheries that are healthier today than they have been in decades. In total they are going to cost commercial and recreational fishermen, the businesses that depend on them and fishing communities in every coastal state billions of dollars. The pending sea scallop cutback alone is estimated by industry experts to come with a quarter of a billion dollar price tag and the cost of the red snapper closure will undoubtedly be in the tens of millions. All of those uncaught Northeast groundfish, if caught, would have pumped a billion dollars into the fishing communities in New England.

Those fishermen have been laboring – and suffering – under severe management restrictions for those decades with the understanding that the sacrifices they would make today would be more than justified by the rewards they would reap in the future. Well, judging by the status of the stocks, the future is finally here, but judging by the foregoing list of management actions the rewards definitely aren’t.

Are you starting to detect a subtle trend here, or perhaps one that’s not so subtle?

The Magnuson Act, when passed by Congress in 1976, broke new ground when it established that managing our nation’s fisheries was to be accomplished jointly by scientists, resource managers and resource users – fishermen. It was intended as a tool to enable U.S. fishermen to more effectively utilize those fisheries, something that it was effective — in instances too effective — at doing.

Needless to say, there were teething pains. It’s hard to imagine a new management system that would work from the beginning, and this one didn’t. In the beginning there was a “catch ‘em all” attitude that was probably due more to the Cold War than to fisheries management concerns. Then, starting in 1981, an ill-advised “economic recovery” program by the Reagan administration brought far too much fishing capacity to the domestic fleet than was necessary. Shortly afterwards, in 1984, the World Court awarded much of the New England fleet’s fishing grounds to Canada. Obviously, in the first decade or so of Magnuson management, some fisheries suffered, but external factors were much more responsible than anything intrinsic to the fishing industry or to the management process itself.

But, using these early stumbling blocks as the reason, over the intervening three decades fishermen have been gradually dealt out of the Magnuson process, the scientists have been put in charge, and as the list of closures and restrictions up above painfully demonstrates, the Act has been turned into a weapon that is now being used against fishermen and fishing communities.

How has this been accomplished? Through a well-orchestrated campaign based on what has come to be known in the world of propaganda as The Big Lie – a lie so outrageous and repeated so often that the people will eventually accept it as the truth.

In this case The Big Lie is that fishermen are inherently incapable of sustainably managing the fisheries they participate in. The sole basis of this theory is The Tragedy of the Commons, an article published in the journal Science by an ecologist, Garrett Hardin, in 1968. Hardin’s article describes the dilemma of hypothetical herders sharing a hypothetical plot of land in medieval Europe. It’s been used and is still being used as proof positive that fishermen are incapable of rationally harvesting fish that “belong to everybody.” Hardin is reputed to have said later that his article might better have been titled “The Tragedy of the Unregulated Commons,” which has no bearing at all to today’s over-regulated fisheries. This obvious fact is understandably ignored by the foundation-funded anti-fishing activists in their so far successful campaign to marginalize fishermen in the management process. (Note that this year’s Nobel Laureate, Elinor Ostrom, convincingly – at least to the Nobel selection committee – argues that Hardin’s “tragedy,” though applicable in limited situations, suffers from over-application.)

So with the fishermen on the way out, or at least the independent fishermen who don’t kow-tow to Silver Spring or the anti-fishing clique, who’s taking up the slack in the fisheries management process? That would be the scientists that work for NMFS and those on each regional management council’s Science and Statistics Committee. At this point they’re in charge, and their statistics and their computer models, no matter how imprecise, based on their samples, no matter how meager, and their budgets, no matter how inadequate, are what’s determining what we can and can’t (emphasis on the latter, of course) catch. And don’t forget that extra 20 or 30 or 40% “off the top” that is used to make up for the uncertainty of their science.

Those imprecise statistics, meager samples and inadequate budgets are exactly why Congress decided over 30 years ago that fishermen and resource managers should have a major say in fisheries management. The experience and observations of the fisherman, and the concern of the managers for the resource users as well as the resource were put there to balance the narrow input of the scientists.

But, thanks to the last two Magnuson reauthorizations, and to what it’s impossible for me to see as anything other than the “let’s get rid of as many fishermen as we can” vibrations emanating from NOAA/NMFS headquarters, that’s no longer the case. The science, no matter how limited, rules and the experience, judgment and concern for the human impacts have become completely irrelevant.

This wasn’t the intention of the Magnuson Act’s authors, it wasn’t the intent of the Congress that passed it, and if they understood how purposefully fallacious this particular Big Lie is and the full extent of the damage it has unnecessarily caused and continues to cause in every fishing community in the U.S., it’s hard to imagine any of our elected officials allowing it to continue. But as we are all too well aware, continue it does.

 So what do we do to fix this mess? First off, the members of every aggrieved recreational or commercial fishery, and name more than one or two in the lower 48 that aren’t, have to realize that the most serious of their problems begin and end with the purposely mutated monster that Magnuson has become. Then, as members of that fishery, they have to make the demand that Magnuson be returned to its former state, once again with the balance for the inadequate science provided by the judgment of fishermen (nominated and approved by their peers, not forced on the system by the palace guard in Silver Spring) and resource managers. And finally they – but at this point it’s we – have to set aside our differences and come together, along with all of the associated businesses and organizations and individuals that have a stake in viable fisheries, in the effective lobbying power that we should be, and start to get the job done.

This is a process that’s already started, both in Congress and with a number of fishing organizations. But it’s not going to succeed without your support and your participation. You can start off by demanding that your reps in Washington join Congressman Barney Frank’s East Coast congressional caucus, which he plans on starting within two weeks to organize “an uphill battle against environmental forces to create a more equal balance between the reconstruction of fish stocks and community interests.” And there are other, industry-focused efforts in the works as well. Do everything you can to get them and keep them going. I’ll keep you posted to the extent that I can, but remember that ultimately it’s up to you.

In keeping with the season, they’re your chestnuts and you’re the only one that’s going to get them out of the fire that we’ve allowed to burn for way too long.

Nils Stolpe

The Providence Business News gets it right!

John Lee, a reporter for The Providence Business News, tackles the potentially complex and confusing subject of the impact of increasing ocean temps on fisheries and fisheries management. His article starts out “Fishery management traditionally has focused on fishing pressure, the removal of animals from a population with nets, lines and traps, as the only statistic worth using in the regulatory equation. The rationale is simple, at least in theory: If the landings in a fishery drop, it’s assumed that the population has declined.Everything else that might change a fish stock – all the environmental, ecological or climatic variables that are virtually impossible to quantify with any accuracy – have been addressed as statistical constants in fish-population models.But climate change and its rapid effect on fisheries are forcing scientists and policymakers to rethink the traditional management approach. Suddenly, every fixed point in the equation has to be reconsidered as a network of moving parts.” From there he gets into ecosystem based management and the reactions of both managers and fishermen.

The article is at http://pbn.com/Time-to-rethink-fishery-management,96247

and for the layperson is well worth reading, covering territory that is never explored by the blame-it-all-on-fishing claque.

A must read blog (along with Fishosophy, of course!)

The title is Confessions from the Lone Shark Conservationist Who Supports California’s Drift Gillnet Fishery (at http://organiccreativity.com/eatusseafood/?p=115) and I’ve taken the liberty of reproducing the first paragraphs below:

Prej•u•dice

Noun

Preconceived opinion not based on reason or experience.

 

I admit I used to be prejudiced towards gillnet fisheries. I used to believe that all gillnet fisheries should be shut down, period. In my defense, all I knew of gillnets were the injuries that they can cause. During my time as a volunteer for the Santa Barbara Marine Mammal Center from 2007-2011, I personally rescued over 20 sea lions with gillnet entanglements. Although 100% of these animals were eventually released alive, the sights and smells of those injuries throughout the rehabilitation process still haunt me to this day. I didn’t understand why gillnet fisheries still existed and I was hungry to learn more. And thus began my incredibly humbling journey to learn more about California’s set and drift gillnet fisheries which target swordfish, thresher sharks, halibut and white seabass.

 

I’m telling my story for a couple reasons. First because I know a lot of folks share my intense passion and genuine intention to help preserve our world’s oceans, but like me are not very sure where and how to start. I want to share some lessons I learned the hard way in an effort to prevent you from wasting your time. I’m also writing this because I think it’s scary how easy it is for someone that knows very little about shark fisheries to be considered an “expert” on the subject with the power to influence other like-minded conservationists. And finally, I want to show how it’s possible (and quite necessary) for shark conservationists to understand and support responsible shark fishing. This is contrary to popular belief for most so if you disagree I urge you to read on. The only problem is that my story is so complicated that I split it into two parts so please stay with me.

 

The blogger is Jonathan Gonzalez, a graphic designer with a solid and obvious commitment to ocean conservation. What separates him from the crowd, and what brought his blog to my attention, was his unwillingness to accept at face value the myriad of commonly held “truths” of marine conservation and his willingness to devote himself to researching what’s really going on in our oceans and in our fisheries.

Five minutes invested in reading the “about me” page on his website (http://organiccreativity.com/eatusseafood/?page_id=61) will tell you all you need to know about his bona fides as a committed marine conservationist, and Part 1 and Part 2 of his Confessions will provide you with an inkling of the research/learning process that he went through when he realized the human dimensions of the “save the sharks” campaign he was involved in. Quoting from his blog once again:

The chef asked me, “So you say I can’t serve this thresher shark meat because it’s not sustainable, but you say it’s OK to serve this halibut that was caught it the same net as the sharks? I don’t get it.” I didn’t get it either. I don’t remember what I told the chef after that, but I said enough for him to remove local thresher shark from his menu. What I do remember is walking away feeling very dirty. For the first time I asked myself, “What the hell am I doing?” “ How did I get here?” “Am I really doing the right thing?” This gut check was another life-changing moment.

I can’t recommend too highly his blog or his personal website, Organic Creativity, at http://www.organiccreativity.com/html/contact.htm. His description of the learning process he went through is invaluable and should be mandatory reading for anyone who has bought hook, line and sinker into marine conservation campaigns without considering their human impacts or the degree to which they are based on facts.

Nils Stolpe