The Exhausted Sea

With a few notable exceptions (Alaska being one), the situation is no better in the Pacific or the Gulf of Mexico. And it's even worse in foreign waters. Canada has depleted its cod to the point that commercial fishing is basically over for the foreseeable future. Recovery may not be possible. The journal Nature reports that the planet has lost 90 percent of its high-level marine predator fish, such as cod, flounder, and tuna. "I still believe the cod fishery . . . and probably all the great sea-fisheries are inexhaustible; that is to say that nothing we can do seriously affects the number of fish," proclaimed the great British biologist Thomas Huxley.

Since he made that comment, 140 years ago, marine biologists have learned better. Managers, politicians, and commercial fishermen have not. The United States has no discernible policy for the oceans. Management decisions are made by special interests or court rulings, and they are implemented in three geographical jurisdictions under 140 statutes by six frequently feuding departments.

If any entity can convince Congress, the administration, and the public to do better, it is the Pew Charitable Trusts. On June 4, 2003, amid a perfect storm of professionally generated fanfare, the 18-member Pew Ocean Commission unveiled a three-year, $3.5 million study that offered the first comprehensive review of U.S. ocean policy together with recommendations for reform. It was everything Audubon, the Ocean Conservancy, the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), and other environmental outfits have been saying for 30 years, but it was said all at once, in a flashy, easily understood way and by people who have lots more credibility with this administration and Congress. The commission included New York governor George Pataki, former Kansas governor Mike Hayden, philanthropist David Rockefeller, and Kathryn Sullivan, a former astronaut and onetime chief scientist at the National Ocean and Atmospheric Administration.

What I was seeing at the Chatham fish pier is called "fishing down the food chain." As you destroy each descending link, you reduce biodiversity, until you literally hit jellyfish. In the early 1990s, when marine activist Carl Safina, then director of Audubon's Living Oceans Program and a member of the Mid-Atlantic Fisheries Management Council, suggested a management plan for tautog, he elicited incredulous stares. "There are plenty of tautog," exclaimed one member."That's the whole point," Safina said. "Let's keep it that way."

"Next you'll be asking for a management plan for jellyfish," remarked someone else. The following year mid-Atlantic fishermen, desperately seeking "underutilized species," started netting jellyfish and shipping them to the Japanese, who had decided they liked them in salads.

Fishing down the food chain is dangerous, because recovery of a depleted species may not be possible. It may be permanently suppressed by species that have moved into its niche. Also, survivors may be spread so thinly over the continental shelf that they have difficulty finding one another. Consider the Atlantic halibut—a giant, predacious flounder that doesn't spawn until it's three feet long and that is capable of attaining weights of 700 pounds. It was fished to commercial extinction in the 19th century. But despite the fact that there has been virtually no directed fishery ever since, it hasn't recovered. When Atlantic halibut are caught today, it's almost always by accident. They're rugged fish and lack air bladders, so they can be safely released even when brought up from great depths. But incredibly, the NMFS allows commercial fishermen to kill one per trip. "We have fishery management regimes but not ecosystem regimes," comments Steve Murawski of the NMFS's Woods Hole Science Center.

In those rare cases where scientists are allowed to set quotas, marine fish management isn't an oxymoron. Sometimes, however, even the scientists are reluctant to cut the public out of decision making. It's just not PC. "We rely heavily on the regionalization of the process and a lot of public input," says Murawski. "Ours is an exercise in Jeffersonian democracy." But there are places where Jeffersonian democracy doesn't work—such as in cardiovascular-surgery units and carrier battle groups. Americans have never understood this. In 1976, after watching vessels from the Soviet bloc wipe out Atlantic groundfish, Congress passed the Magnuson Fishery Conservation and Management Act, thereby creating the 200-mile limit, setting up eight regional councils on all three coasts to manage fish in federal waters (supposedly under the paternal gaze of the NMFS), and providing sufficient financial aid to the U.S. fishing fleet to double it by 1983.

The Magnuson Act was a grand experiment in Jeffersonian democracy in that it ensconced user-group representatives on the councils, thus giving people who profited directly or indirectly from commercial fishing "a stake in their own future." It sounded wonderful and very American. But when regulations are made by those requiring regulation, nothing good ever seems to happen. The public pays to educate fisheries professionals, pays for their salaries and benefits, pays for their equipment, then tells them how to take care of fish. So the guiding principle of American fish management has become: "Strict dieting, except in cases of hunger."

By 1989 it was clear that we had saved our marine fish from foreigners in order to wipe them out ourselves. With record low catches that year, the New England council declared groundfish "overfished." When scientists recommended a 50 percent reduction in catch, the council refused. In 1991 a lawsuit by the Conservation Law Foundation and the Massachusetts Audubon Society forced the council to write a new groundfish plan, a process it dragged out for three years. Congress tried to fix things in 1996 with the Sustainable Fisheries Act, which finally defined and forbade overfishing and mandated the fast recovery of overfished stocks. But there has been scant enforcement.

Despite the new law, the NMFS allowed the New England council to implement groundfish quotas four times those deemed safe by scientists on the technical committee. So in 2000 the Conservation Law Foundation, Audubon, the Ocean Conservancy, and the NRDC sued. On April 26, 2002, U.S. District Judge Gladys Kessler ordered prompt, tough restrictions needed for groundfish recovery. But after hearing arguments from states, cities, fishermen, and the NMFS, Judge Kessler amended her original decision and substantially weakened protections. "We won hands down, and we now have weaker groundfish restrictions than we did before," laments Fordham.