Some Things Never Change
This post is a response to this article, published on the Huffington Post website by Julie Packard who is the Executive Director of The Monterey Bay Aquarium regarding the problems faced by bluefin tuna populations.
Ms. Packard,
You make some excellent points but you ignore and attempt to have your audience stay ignorant of, far too many of the factors at work here. I agree with what you put forth as the basic premise of your post, that “cuteness” should not be a determining factor in our efforts to protect all creatures from over infringement by man, be it by hunting and fishing, loss of habitat, or careless pollution.
That said, I bristle when I see your article once again advancing the oft repeated meme of the Monterey Aquarium and its financial supporters, The Pew Foundation, that fishermen’s greed has been the root cause of all the challenges sea life faces. This is simply not the case.
Also, by advancing only the argument that greed (or economic considerations, to use the euphemism adopted here) has caused the decimation of yet another marine species is to ignore both of the biggest factors responsible for the problem, pollution and bad regulation. By ignoring problems caused by years of pollution and over-development, you free your parent group, the Pew Trusts, from taking a large share of the blame for these problems based on the fact that they were begun and continue to be financed largely by oil industry money. By ignoring the problems caused by poor regulation, you are free to propose increased reliance on regulation to cure the problems that you have so conveniently laid at the feet of what is basically a small group of hardworking Americans that you continue to demonize.
It is no secret that the “Dead Zone” in the northwest Gulf of Mexico created by agricultural and industrial run-off from the Mississippi River has been steadily growing for years. Like much of man’s encroachment on our Oceans, the long term effects and ramifications of this are unknown. However, it simply can’t be good. It is not for nothing that it is known as “the dead zone”.
The migratory pattern of all tuna in the Gulf of Mexico takes them is a big loop around the northern Gulf that never comes closer to land than it does at the mouth of the Mississippi river and the top of the Mississippi and DeSoto Canyons in the northern Gulf. The tuna, and their food supply, can not help but be impacted by the increasing amount of toxic run-off entering the Gulf from the Mississippi. However, instead of taking steps to diminish that run-off, we are more likely increasing it as agricultural production (and run-off) all along the river basin relies increasingly on chemicals, fertilizers, antibiotics, and other agents whose impact on downstream ecosystems has not been fully understood.
As for regulations, for many years the Japanese fishing fleet, a well organized fleet of some of the best fishermen in the world, was allowed to bring their 110 foot steel longliners into the Gulf of Mexico in pursuit of bluefin tuna. In a perverse attempt at regulation, they were told that the ONLY fish they could keep was bluefin tuna and were further given an American observer for each vessel to ensure that all they kept were bluefin tuna. They were setting 30 to 50 miles of longline gear per boat every night (at a time when the American fishing fleet pursuing swordfish in the GOM was setting an average of 10 miles of gear per night) and they had an observer on board to make sure that they threw everything except bluefin tuna, dead or alive, marketable or not, back into the water. During this period American fishermen in the Gulf of Mexico often saw large, 200 – 300 lb swordfish bobbing away from the Japanese fleet, swollen and wasted. When the American fishing fleet realized the value these tuna had on the Eastern market (themselves the victim of greed, they had been previously told the bluefin and yellowfin tuna in the Gulf had no substantial value and were not paid enough for the fish to warrant targeting their gear to catch them. They eventually upgraded their gear and spent one season fishing alongside the Japanese fleet and were stunned by the amount of bluefin they were able to catch and saw their ex-vessel price for bluefin increase and a possible new market open up for them. The very next year the American fleet was hit with strict limits on bluefin tuna, while the Japanese were still allowed to come into the Gulf for a few more years to cull through the American resource, deplete the fish which should have been protected by our government as an American resource, and take home enough of the Gulf bluefin population to raise concern as to the future of the biomass.
For you, and your colleagues, to ignore these very real and major factors while being happy to blame the entire problem on the greed of the American seafood producers is disingenuous and downright insulting.
The prevailing attitude of The Pew Trusts, a group whose policies are increasingly influence, if not dictate, those of our country, since a Pew Fellow (Jane Lubchenco) is sitting as the head of the Federal Agency that oversees all fishing regulations (NOAA), is that all fishing is bad and man could survive quite well on farm raised seafood as a protein source without any wild caught fish being consumed at all.
Finally, replacing poor regulation with more regulation, replacing ineffective and harmful regulation with more stringent regulation, and using flawed and incomplete science put forth by a group with a bias and an agenda like Pew’s to do it, is a recipe for economic disaster for the American Seafood Industry as well as an ineffective way to protect our Oceans and the resources therein.
