Doing the “Right” Thing?

The tragic decline in the credibility of the angling community as a conservation force.

By Capt. John McMurray

At one time, anglers were proudly at the forefront of the marine conservation movement, calling on regulators to cut landings and impose more restrictions on all users, including anglers, for the betterment of our fish populations.  Anglers’ passionate efforts to rebuild the striped bass population in the 1980s and ‘90s, including wide support for a harvest moratorium, represent just one shining example of that conservation legacy.  However, in recent years, that all seems to have changed.

The problem seems most acute in the upper mid-Atlantic region where I reside.  There, a small but very vocal minority has somehow managed to hijack many of the local outdoor publications.  Their intemperate rants, which sound like nothing so much as the self-serving rhetoric of the New England commercial fishing community, makes it appear as if the recreational fishing community has abandoned a conservation ethic and adopted the “we-need-to-kill-more-fish-and-to-hell-with-the-future” mantra that was (and still is) all too commonly heard repeated on fish docks anywhere from Brielle to Gloucester to Portland. 

It’s easy to understand why such sentiments arise.  People who make their living by putting a price on the head of a fish see more restrictive regulations and other conservation efforts as immediate and direct threats to their livelihood.  Concerned with paying for this month’s dockage and next week’s groceries, they concentrate on short-term profits and are nearly blind to the long-term benefits of science-based fisheries management.  Thus, fisheries managers must rise to the challenge of making difficult decisions that focus on the long term, knowing that such a “tough love” approach is best for fish and fishermen alike.

I find it extremely disturbing that a contingent of the fishing community has now gone so far as to partner with the commercial fishing community, and continues to mount a concerted effort to tear the most important conservation provisions out of the Magnuson Stevens Fishery Conservation Act, which was reauthorized after much work a bit more than a year ago.  Using bullying tactics that seem calculated to intimidate and stigmatize anyone who opposes them, they label conservationists, including conservation-minded anglers, as “elitists,” “environmental radicals” and “extremists” trying to “take food off the table,” “putting good folks out of business” etc.  While that is simply not true, it has had the effect of making many anglers suspicious of biologists, fisheries managers and conservation efforts generally, and creating a “real men kill fish” attitude among the less knowledgeable members of the angling community.  Readers need only look at previous fishery management success stories, including striped bass, haddock and red drum, to understand how important angler-supported conservation efforts are to the health of our fisheries, and to realize how the current anti-conservation message being spewed from some media outlets threatens the long-term prospects of the nation’s marine resources.

Hiding behind the euphemism “flexibility”, commercial fishermen and their allies in the recreational community call for the extension or removal of rebuilding deadlines for species such as summer flounder, grouper and red snapper.  Years ago, we heard New England groundfishermen voice similar cries as they devastated stocks of fish that had previously supported not only North Americans, but most of coastal Europe, for more than five centuries.  It is sad that some who purport to represent anglers would take us back to the days when too much emphasis on short-term economic well-being led to the collapse of not only our northeastern fisheries, but a traditional way of life in the region.  Now, despite a decade of tougher management, cod populations are still a shadow of what they were, and there are serious doubts that some species, such as winter flounder, will ever come back.  The commercial fishing industry’s short-term mindset has brought great hardship to commercial fishermen; I now fear that anglers have also lost their long-term perspective, and in adopting the attitudes of the commercial fishery, will suffer the same awful fate. 

Editorial dishonesty is adding to the problem.  Too many publications and too many columnists prejudice their readers against scientific fisheries management, throwing around emotion-laden catch phrases such as “Arbitrary rebuilding deadlines”, “pie in the sky targets” and other such catch phrases, in an effort to make scientists and conservationists look like fools.  (My favorite nonsense headline came from a New Jersey paper which announced “Fluke Anglers Take On Experts Blinded by Science”, suggesting that knowledge and technical expertise is antithetical to proper fisheries management, and that ignorance is, in fact, bliss.  These folks don’t have a leg to stand on when confronted with the science, but since they never print both sides of a story, they give their readers no opportunity to form an educated opinion about fisheries issues—which is what they want, because education is the greatest threat to their position. 

There is a very real battle underway for the soul of the angling community, pitting those who are fighting to kill more fish now, and perhaps never fully restoring our fisheries, against folks who have taken a longer view and support precautionary measures to ensure there are abundant stocks of fish around for the next generation.

I know where I stand.  The question is, who’s doing the “right” thing here, and which side are you on?