The New England Fisheries Management Council is meeting in Portland this month to vote on whether to consider a different approach to managing cod and haddock fishing in the Gulf of Maine. The management of these species has been a disaster since at least 1991 when the first lawsuit was filed to halt overfishing.
The United States government continues to insist that there is no clear scientific consensus as to whether increased carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere are a result of the burning of fossil fuels, and furthermore no clear evidence that global warming will cause serious disruption or harm to life as we know it.
What do these situations — one local, one global — have in common?
Denial.
The human brain is biologically hard-wired to detect and react to immediate threats. We have all experienced the autonomic fight-or-flight response when our faces flush and our hearts race when we are frightened. But when threats to our lives unfold slowly — over decades or longer — no matter the magnitude of the threat to our collective well being, we seem to lack an innate response or perception that we need to change our behavior. We cope. We hope. We make do. We shoot the messenger.
The fisheries of the Gulf of Maine that have sustained community life for us and our ancestors for the past 400 years — and the past 10,000 years of aboriginal Indian life — on this coast have never been more threatened. There are now only two active groundfish permits held by island fishermen in Maine, and no groundfish permits at all held by any fishermen east of Port Clyde. Even our mainstay, the lobster fishery, which has sustained island and working waterfronts along the Maine coast for the past 15 years, has significantly declined for each of the past two years. Monhegan’s lobster fishery virtually collapsed this past winter. The ecosystem of the Gulf of Maine is responding to all kinds of pressures, from both human and natural causes, but since we don’t understand its immensely complicated parts and functions, we appear paralyzed by inaction.
The word “crisis” comes from a Greek word meaning turning point and implies an impending abrupt change. I am as loath as the next reasonable person to use the crisis word to describe either the prospect of arresting Maine’s declining fisheries or of maintaining our existing and enviable standard of living based on our current consumption of fossil fuels. But I cannot think of a more accurate description that fits our situation.
Maybe cod and lobster populations will rebound without having to dramatically change our fishing patterns. Maybe there will be fewer hurricanes, tornadoes and drought-driven fires that will allow us to continue eating grapes and salmon flown in from Chile. I would love to think so. But common sense tells me otherwise.
There are strategies that islanders and fishermen have proposed to deal with the obvious threats that stare us in the face. Small boat fishermen along the coast have banded together under the umbrella of the Area Management Coalition to propose a new system for managing groundfishing based on Maine’s successful lobster fishing model. The concept is simple: if fishermen have control over a fishing area they help manage, they will have an incentive to conserve stocks for the future, knowing they will have access. It’s like lobster territories that have been enshrined in the zone management system. Such a system, unlike current management, would not reward “roving bandits,” — those successful fishermen who through investment in bigger boats and fish-finding technology essentially destroy the incentive for any local conservation. Guess what? Big boats, mostly based in ports like Portland and a few other New England ports, oppose this approach and they have disproportionate influence on the New England Fisheries Management Council and within Maine’s Department of Marine Resources.
Islanders on Vinalhaven, North Haven, Swan’s and Frenchboro are carefully studying the costs and benefits of wind power — not so much as a local response to global warming as a response to the terrifyingly steep increase on fossil fuel based electric power they are purchasing. Whether a handful of large towers with slowly spinning blades interrupt the landscape in the country of the pointed firs remains to be seen. But increased power costs throughout all of New England, where we depend heavily on diesel and natural gas generating facilities, are going to bring more proposals to windy towns in our hills and coastal towns in the years ahead.
I have no doubt of the inherent abilities and adaptabilities of us, the hairless monkeys, to develop successful strategies to deal with any recognized threat. We have evolved, sometimes very rapidly, to be the most successful species in the evolutionary record of life and the chances are that we will be able to do so again. Whole civilizations have picked up and moved in the past, sometimes successfully, sometimes not. But the first step in any crisis is to recognize the situation we face and then to develop a plan. The rest follows if we are serious and stay focused.
Houston, we have a problem.
Philip Conkling is president of the Island Institute.