I know this stuff isn’t supposed to bother me as much, because I’m over 50 and somewhat jaded about how much the government actually represents the interests of individual citizens, but the feds’ latest foray into fisheries management has made my skin crawl. Going against the advice and over the objections of state fisheries commissions, regional councils set up by the federal government to manage fisheries — not to mention recreational-fishing groups — the National Marine Fisheries Service has opened up two previously closed areas to longliners. One is the “Charleston Bump,” a popular fishing spot off the South Carolina coast.
In layman’s terms, the NMFS was forced in 2000, by a lawsuit filed by conservation groups, to set up protected areas in which the use of commercial longlines could not be used.
If you don’t know what longlining is, think George Clooney and the movie, “The Perfect Storm.” A longliner is a boat that sets out literally miles of fishing line, with hundreds of baited hooks, then goes back and winches in whatever unlucky fish happen to have been hooked. Longlines are generally aimed at swordfish, an extremely popular menu item in restaurants. When swordfish numbers plunged drastically in the late 1990s, federal judges told the NFMS to get off its, ahem, sitting parts, and protect the fish.
It did so by setting aside the Charleston Bump and an area off the east coast of Florida as protected areas, prohibiting longlining in an effort to help fish populations rebound.
Three times since 2000, the NFMS has received requests for Exempted Fishing Permits (EFP) to allow some longlining in the protected areas. The first two requests were denied after conservtion groups screamed “Foul!” But in January, the NMFS issued an EFP to allow three commercial longliners to fish the Charleston Bump and the area off Florida — “for research purposes.”
Apparently, the price of swordfish that longliners get at the fish market is causing them to itch for a little more research.
One reason cited in the NMFS’s approval of the permit was that some limited commercial longlining would allow fisheries managers to determine whether keeping longliners out of an area actually played a role in restoring swordfish populations.
Ah, so we keep the fox out of the henhouse for a while, and despite seeing that the number of chickens is increasing, we can’t absolutely say that not having any foxes around is the reason. So we let them back in, and after a little while, if we lose a bunch of chickens, we’ll know it was the foxes’ fault the whole time.
In a word, that’s stupid.
The other day, I wondered aloud to Scott Whitaker, the executive director of CCA-South Carolina, that it would be too obvious to discover that the longliners who received the permit happen to hail from the district of a Congressman who oversees the NMFS.
He said, “There’s no question somebody in D.C. got to them.”
Then, he said, “The fact is, the fishery is recovering in those areas, and the (commercial longliners) want back in on it.”
Folks, if something’s wrong and you fix it, you don’t send it back to the guys who broke it in the first place. To do so is to risk natural resources that belong to the public. The problem is, the general public can’t rise up and get things done in Washington.
We aren’t well-connected enough. We haven’t set out a longline and hooked people who can lean on somebody to make a decision.
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