What are we managing?

(from the January, 2006 issue of National Fisherman)It’s called “fisheries management”

It’s called “fisheries management”

But of all those things – anthropogenic and natural – that influence our fisheries, how many are we actually managing?

Think of a fishery, then think of everything that impacts it. If you can’t come up with a half a dozen factors, you aren’t really trying. Obviously, fishing is going to be on your list. And maybe water temperature and “traditional” industrial pollutants will be there to. If you’ve really given it some thought, perhaps you’ve also included food availability and predation. But what about spawning success, larval survival, inter-species competition, “upstream” habitat loss or degradation, catch and release mortality, seismic profiling, decadal - or longer - natural cycles, or residues of pharmaceuticals and personal care products (household pollution) in the water?

Any one of these might play an important role in the health of particular fish and shellfish stocks. But how many can we, and more importantly, how many do we control?

Since the Magnuson Act became law, and in some instances since well before then, we’ve gotten pretty effective at controlling commercial fishing. Commercial fishermen are told when they can fish, where they can fish, what gear they can use, how big their vessels can be, who they can fish with and how many of what size of fish they can catch. But, in spite of this gruelingly stringent level of control, some fisheries refuse to respond the way they are supposed to.

What’s the problem? Depending on whether you’re an anti-commercial fishing recreational fisherman or an anti-commercial fishing environmentalist, it’s either that commercial fishermen are cheating or that the management system  has been co-opted and conflicted by commercial fishing interests – or some combination of the two. Hence we have demands for even more drastic restrictions on fishing, for around-the-clock, around-the-calendar surveillance of fishermen, for removal of commercial fishermen from the decision making process, for large areas of the ocean to be declared off limits to commercial fishing, and for the human aspects of the commercial fisheries to be given even less consideration in the management process.

But these all assume that commercial fishing is the root cause of our non-responsive fisheries.  

For at least a decade we’ve been living with the fall-out of a large segment of the environmentalist community’s fixation on fishing as the source of most of our fisheries- and ocean-related problems. Millions of foundation dollars are spent each year on research “proving” that it’s all about fishing, and on subsequently peddling that research to a largely uninformed public (ten years ago could anyone have imagined that “leading scientists” would be holding press conferences to announce publication of the latest “fishing is evil” article?). Aside from the obvious and painful impacts on commercial fishermen, dependent businesses and coastal communities, this myopia is effectively drawing attention away from other, and equally or more significant, human activities.

Speculating on why multi-billion dollar foundations are so heavily invested in this misdirection is a great way to while away a winter’s afternoon, but what accounts for the managers’ fixation on fishing as the factor that drives the whole system? In a nutshell, it’s got to be bureaucratic necessity.

Fisheries management today is a multi-million dollar endeavor, burning up a lot of tax dollars, employing a lot of people and exercising a lot of power. But that power is restricted to controlling fishing activities, and considering that the management establishment has proven largely ineffectual in dealing with recreational fishing, that leaves commercial fishing as the thing that it can most effectively control. So, suppose that commercial fishing might be having no – or relatively little – impact on a fish stock. Suppose that a fishery’s condition is totally or mostly dependent on non-fishing factors. Is the fisheries management bureaucracy likely to consider the impacts of a human activity or a natural phenomena that it has no influence over?

Ideally, yes. In actuality, bureaucracies don’t work like that (and let me emphasize here that bureaucracies can and do take on a life of their own, moving in directions that have little to do with the individual actions of the bureaucrats that make them up). A “successful” bureaucracy might not be willing to recognize it is incapable of doing what it is charged with doing or that something it can control isn’t worth controlling. So fishing gets most of the attention while other factors are ignored, and fishing is being managed while not much else is.

The downside of this is obvious. So is a reasonable, and easily implemented, solution. Mandate the inclusion in every management plan of an estimate of the relative importance of all those factors having a significant impact on that particular fishery. This would allow our fisheries management resources to be applied where they would be most effective, conserved where they would otherwise be squandered, and would serve as an all too necessary reminder that it’s not just fishing that’s affecting the fish.

Nils E. Stolpe