Two years ago, Maine’s Commissioner of Marine Resources, George Lapointe, addressed a large crowd at Maine’s annual Fisherman’s Forum at the Samoset Resort and made an astonishing admission. The way we manage groundfish in New England is broken, he said, and we need to change it. You might be forgiven for thinking that if a state fisheries commissioner, who is also one 17 voting members of the New England Fisheries Management Council, described such a clear institutional failure, that the system might be on the verge of change. But you would be wrong; nothing much has changed other than a handful of additional fishermen and their vessels have been wrung out of the fishery.
Ever since the first lawsuit was filed in 1991 to halt the chronic over-fishing of cod and haddock on Georges Bank and in the Gulf of Maine, fisheries managers have responded by attempting to limit the number of fish landed, by limiting the number of days a vessel could fish for hard pressed groundfish stocks — the “money” fish that once congregated in their enormous schools and roamed through the benthos or the bottom habitats of New England.
When these original “days at sea” limitations did not reverse the depletion of cod and haddock, managers closed large areas where they hoped spawning stocks might recover. When days at sea and closed areas failed to rebuild stocks, managers set trip limits on the number of pounds of cod that could be landed with other groundfish cousins, which resulted in massive numbers of dead cod being thrown away at sea in the name of conservation. And when the stocks still failed to respond to these combinations of measures, managers continued ratcheting down the number of days at sea a vessel could fish, from 170 days to now approximately 56 days or less.
A year ago, perhaps heeding Lapointe’s admonition that the management approach is broken, the New England Fisheries Management Council announced it would finally consider “alternative management plans.” A handful of fisheries organizations submitted detailed alternative management plans, but then our fisheries managers admitted they did not have the time or resources to consider any of them, and thus set the stage for another gut wrenching round of limitations to the days at sea program.
The effect of these policies, planned or otherwise, is that except for one active groundfishing vessel based on Mount Desert Island, none remain in any fishing harbor between Port Clyde and the Canadian border. Hundreds upon hundreds of cod and haddock fishermen let their permits lapse and went lobster fishing, adding unsustainable pressure on that one last vulnerable resource. And still the stocks of cod have not rebuilt themselves.
Maine’s state government appears resigned to the consolidation of the groundfish fleet in Portland, recognizing both the large public investments there and the politically powerful influence of Portland’s big-boat fleet. However, such a policy is tragically myopic, because it sacrifices the future of virtually every other fishing harbor beyond Portland, while rewarding the least conservation-oriented fishing practices — bigger boats fishing larger gear — allowed under current regulations.
You might reasonably ask why none of New England’s increasingly draconian fisheries regulations has worked. One of the answers is that habitats especially for small juvenile fish on rocky bottoms have been seriously degraded by ever-larger gear dragging them bare of their nursery cover. Damaging our fish nurseries is like eating our seed corn; it’s a downward spiral with a predictable end. But another reason the “days at sea” restrictions have failed is that the remaining groundfishermen have become ever more wily predators. They’ve learned to adapt to their new “environment;” they’ve become more efficient with fewer days at sea; these survivors, God love them, are clever. Good for them, but bad for the fish and bad for scores of fishing communities that have lost their fleets and now depend on a declining lobster fishery. We compound the errors of our ways.
This would all be just another “inside baseball” or “inside fishing” story — tragic to be sure for far too many multi-generational fishermen and fishing communities — if the public did not notice. But the public has noticed, and has learned the wrong lesson: most consumers now believe fishermen are short sighted, greedy and environmentally irresponsible and deserve every bad thing that is happening to them. And they are beginning to adjust their shopping habits accordingly. It is increasingly common to run into someone who pulls a card out of his or her wallet to refer to a list of sustainably caught fish before ordering a fillet at a restaurant or a fish market. More and more people want to know where their fish come from and whether it has been harvested in an environmentally responsible manner — and not by rapists of the sea.
If fisheries managers cannot manage the fisheries after 17 years of collective failure in New England, then consumers will and therein is the take home lesson for fishing in the future — New England fishermen must change the way they fish, or consumers will make them museum stories.
Philip Conkling is president of the Island Institute.