Our fisheries are in better shape than they have been since well before the passage of the Magnuson Act in 1976 and every fisherman worthy of the name is fully committed to sustainability, but our oldest and busiest fishing ports and the fishing communities that have nourished them and held them together for generations are in shambles. Tens of thousands of fishermen and others in fishing dependent businesses - both recreational and commercial - are out of work or are just barely holding on financially. Many more thousands of recreational fishermen have given up the sport because of too stringent regulations. And what is the response of Ms. Lubchenco? Pushing catch shares, a form of management that everyone agrees means fewer boats and fewer jobs, making cuts in the budgets of research programs that will prove that just about all of our fisheries are in good to excellent shape, and protecting personnel who were responsible for an out-of-control enforcement program that terrorized and demonized fishermen and only came to notice due to overwhelming political pressure and a resultant investigation by the Inspector General of the U.S. Department of Commerce.

And from the very beginning of the catastrophe which has yet to be permanently fixed in the Gulf of Mexico, she has done everything in her power to minimize the perceptions of the public regarding the seriousness of the impacts of the released oil and dispersants. From her complete lack of follow-up on her hyper-critical letter to the Minerals Management Service six months before the blow-out thru her denying the existence of the huge sub-surface oil/dispersant plumes to her stating at a White House media briefing in early August “now let’s say for example that a fish is eating some of these smaller creatures that had oil in them. That fish will degrade that oil and process it naturally and so it doesn’t bio-accumulate so it’s not a situation where we need to be concerned about,” she has downplayed the impacts of the devastation inflicted on the residents of the Gulf Coast states and on the ecology of the Gulf. Because her remarks are now part of the public record, and because they were placed there by the head of the federal ocean agency, how many billions of dollars in potential claims and settlements are they going to cost the tens of thousands of damaged individuals and businesses? 

Sign the petition from the official website.