COMMERCE
Subscriber Services
Classified Ads
Subscribe
Advertise
NEWS
This Month
Editorial
Letters
F/V Safety
Past Issues
ABOUT US
Contact Us
Latest Issue
Subscribe
History
MORE CONTENT
CFN Archives
Links
Each month exclusively in the PRINT edition of CFN
Along the Coast
Ask the Lobster Doc
Bearin’s
Classifieds
Coming Events
Editorial
Enforcement Report
FISH SAFE
Fleet Additions
Letters
Lobster Market Report
New Boats
News Catch
Quahog Market Report
|
Commercial Fisheries News
Volume 35 Number 10
June 2008
Stellwagen fishing under attack once again
Early in May, after years of meetings, the advisory council of the Gerry E. Studds Stellwagen Bank National Marine Sanctuary released its draft management plan, laying out a policy framework for taking action over the next five years to further fulfill the mission of the sanctuary.
It didn’t take long for commercial fishing critics to use the document to demand that sanctuary administrators immediately begin to manage all commercial activities within the sanctuary, including bottom trawling. And so, the fishing industry must once again remind government officials and the public of the original agreement under which the sanctuary was formed.
The executive summary of the draft management plan details the tremendous biological diversity of the 842-square-mile sanctuary located at the mouth of Massachusetts Bay, which encompasses all of Tillies Bank and southern portions of Jeffreys Ledge. Then it gets down to business.
“However,” the document states, “fishing – especially commercial fishing – impacts and pressures every resource state in the sanctuary. On an annual basis, virtually every square kilometer of the sanctuary is physically disturbed by fishing.”
Part of the draft plan’s vision statement is to fully protect and restore the ecological integrity of the sanctuary, which includes allowing “compatible use” of the area. The document further lists a number of “action plan” focus areas as the roadmap for achieving this vision.
Among the focus areas are: determining which human activities are compatible; developing a modified zoning scheme, “including consideration of fully protected reserves” to preserve the ecological integrity of the sanctuary; and reducing “ecological impacts of biomass removal by fishing.”
In an op-ed piece titled “Stellwagen Bank’s unmet mission” published by the Boston Globe on May 16, Philip Warburg and Priscilla Brooks of the Conservation Law Foundation (CLF) charged that the draft management plan failed to offer any “substantive or immediate” solutions for restoration of the sanctuary. They further declared that “the sanctuary must manage all commercial and recreational activities inside the sanctuary,” as well as “identify and protect the most vulnerable habitats from harmful bottom trawling and other damaging human activity.”
This is not the first time CLF and other environmental groups have tried to advance the creation of no-take marine reserves within the sanctuary to further restrict commercial fishing, even though such fishing was listed as a recognized and sanctioned use of the sanctuary when it was designated in 1992.
When the question of who has authority to regulate fisheries within the sanctuary came up during the management plan development process in 2004, National Marine Sanctuary Program Deputy Director Michael Weiss issued a memo stating that sanctuary managers cannot regulate fishing activity. Rather, it is up to the New England Fishery Management Council and, ultimately, the National Marine Fisheries Service, to take any actions to restrict fishing.
“Fishing is not an activity listed as subject to regulation in the (sanctuary) designation document,” Weiss wrote. “Therefore, it cannot be regulated without amending the designation document.”
With the strong words in the draft management plan about the impacts of commercial fishing on sanctuary habitat and marine life, amending the document may be just what the environmental community has in mind.
It’s now up to the fishing community to re-engage in the Stellwagen management process, remembering how the sanctuary came to be 26 years ago. We need to ensure that historical uses of the area – including commercial fishing – are preserved as originally intended. /cfn/
Back to story list
|
|
Tell us what you think.
