Who needs science

(from the May, 2006 issue of National Fisherman)

 There’s a new movement in the anti-fishing world. Most simply, it’s “to hell with the science; we know what we know.” This was articulated in a press release from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council about Daniel Pauly, part of the Pew Trust’s “blame it all on overfishing” claque of well-funded researchers.

Pumping up Pew’s doom-and-gloom perspective, Pauly said in the release, “the world has passed ‘peak fish’ and fishermen’s nets will be hauling in ever-diminishing loads unless there’s political action to stem the global tide of overfishing… The crisis in the world’s fisheries is less about scientific proof than about attitude and political will. And the world’s fish need a dynamic, high-profile political champion like a Bono or Mandela to give finned creatures the public profile of cute and furry ones.”

I guess neither Ted Danson nor Leon Panetta could fill those shoes.

It’s kind of intriguing when an internationally recognized scientist suggests we don’t need scientific proof about the fishing-induced ruination of the world’s oceans; what we really need is a media superstar, isn’t it?

We’re seeing the same thing, on a less grandiose scale, in the Chesapeake Bay in the most recent wave of assaults on the menhaden reduction fishery. This assault has focused on the “localized depletion” of this important little fish.

If you’re unaware of menhaden matters, the reduction fishery is one that various recreational fishing groups and “environmentalists” have been targeting for generations. This stems, in large part, from the fact that big boats and big nets are employed, and they’re employed in waters that the sports and the enviros like to consider their own. In the March/April issue of Mother Jones, Rutgers professor (of English and American studies) H. Bruce Franklin devoted the first two paragraphs of an article about the supposed plight of the pogy to comparing Omega Protein’s Malcolm Glazer to “evil tycoon C. Montgomery Burns” of “Simpsons” cartoon fame. And, of course, he lets us know that Mr. Glazer is a “billionaire tycoon.”

I guess if you can’t find a superstar, creating an arch villain is a reasonable alternative. (I’ve always known fish killed by recreational fishermen weren’t as dead as fish killed by commercial fishermen. To that knowledge, I can now add — thanks to Franklin — that fish killed by a billionaire tycoon are even deader.)

Getting back to the alleged localized depletion and its alleged role in devastating Chesapeake Bay, where’s the science supporting it? According to the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission, it’s not there yet, and I’ll give you odds that it never will be.

But consider that the Chesapeake watershed has been the victim of tremendous development over the last 50 years. All those people, all those cars, all those malls, all that impervious cover, all those pharmaceuticals (once all those people are done with them), lawns, farms, outboard motors. All of those necessary appurtenances to life in the late 20th/early 21st century have been steadily increasing for decades, as has their cumulative impact on the Chesapeake.

Who gets blamed? Blamed, I might add, by the folks driving those cars, fertilizing those lawns, owning those outboards and popping those pills? A billionaire tycoon, of course, and a fleet of boats run by commercial fishermen with the temerity to want to fish the bay they’ve fished for decades and that more and more people are living next to, flushing into and driving around.

Virginia menhaden landings for the last 20 years have been trending steeply downward. They’re declining similarly to landings in most other commercial fisheries. And what other anthropogenic factors that negatively impact fisheries — in the Chesapeake watershed or virtually anywhere else — have declined correspondingly? Industrial wastes coming out of pipes, and sewage that’s received primary treatment are about it. With everything else, it’s onward and upward, but that’s OK, ’cause if we’ve got tycoons and working fishermen to blame, we don’t have to blame ourselves.

Menhaden are the only domestic source of omega 3 fish oil, a dietary supplement that has been proven to fix much of what ails most of us (though in my book, getting omega 3 from consuming fish, not a supplement, is the best way to do it). But why should that stand in the way of restrictive actions supported by a compelling lack of knowledge and a bit of Pauly’s attitude?

He’s got it right. Who needs science? Bring on the superstars, keep on flushing and save the bay.

Nils E. Stolpe