Conservation & Environment

Actor and environmental activist Ted Danson joins Morning Joe to talk about his new book "Oceana," and the global problem of 'bycatch,' which refers to marine life unintentionally caught by fisheries.

See the video from the Mother Nature Network.

 

 

 

 

 

 

A plan for community catch share programs in fisheries nationwide was unveiled in Washington D.C. by a panel of fishermen and environmentalists Tuesday morning. Brought together by Eco-Trust, an environmental investment think-tank based in Oregon, the panel sought to present a framework on how communities can benefit from catch-share fisheries management.

Download the .mp3 audio from the Alaska Public Radio Network.

 

 

 

 

 

 

On the same day New England groundfishermen entered a federal courthouse in Boston to challenge the U.S. Commerce Department over implementation of catch shares, an environmental group conducted a conference call with national media, promoting its release of a report supporting the catch share system.

Ecotrust, based in Portland, Ore., said the timing of its release was coincidental.

The report was issued by an 11-member panel that included one representative from New England, Paul Parker, who is director of Cape Cod Fisheries Trust, a pro-sector group.

Read the complete story from The South Coast Today.

 

 

 

 

 

 

NEW BEDFORD — The first meeting of the governor's Fisheries Working Group on Offshore Renewable Energy nearly became the last.

About 30 members of the fishing industry met with state officials Monday in the Wharfinger Building, expressing deep skepticism and often open opposition to the idea of putting as many as 800 wind turbines on a 3,000-square-mile swath of Atlantic Ocean south of Martha's Vineyard and Nantucket.

Bill White, assistant secretary of federal affairs for the state's Executive Office of Energy & Environmental Affairs, became frustrated that the meeting wasn't generating comments to submit to the Interior Department during what is an extended comment period.

"If you want to say 'no,' we don't need to meet again," White said at one point.

"We're not saying 'no' to anything. These are quick, initial recommendations to submit to the feds. We're sending them during the comment period to make recommendations to minimize impacts."

Yet several people expressed worry that participating in the review process is tantamount to endorsing the idea of wind farms atop a fishery and a critical habitat for spawning fish.

Read the complete story from The South Coast Today.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Lobster populations across all of southern New England, from the elbow of Cape Cod to the Sound, have sunk to what fisheries biologists consider dangerously low levels. Meanwhile, their kin to the north flourish, accompanied by a healthy fishery for this favorite culinary crustacean.

When the waters of the Sound and elsewhere in southern New England warm to 68 degrees Fahrenheit, and stay there for two months or more – a condition occurring more frequently with climate change – lobsters, it seem, become chronically distressed. The gills on their undersides flutter rapidly, they don't draw in the oxygen they need from the water and their off-kilter respiration leaves their blood saturated with carbon dioxide. Adding to that, warm water holds less oxygen than colder water, so the lobsters are working harder for less.

"They start to pant, just like a dog," said Howell, showing a slide of data correlating lobster respiration rates and water temperatures during her presentation at the Connecticut Conference on Natural Resources last week at the University of Connecticut in Storrs. "They have no other way of cooling themselves off. This causes respiratory stress."

"This is not a linear effect," Howell said. "Lobsters are very tolerant (of changing water temperatures) until they can't tolerate it. It's a threshold effect."

Read the complete story from The Day Publishing Company.

 

 

 

 

 

Bird’s testimony will also emphasize the importance of allocation; highlight the federal government’s failure to implement the national recreational registry program by 2009, and review well-known current and pending fisheries debacles including South Atlantic red snapper, black sea bass, dolphin, wahoo and cobia. “These problems are creating a damaging rift between conservation-minded anglers and the federal agencies charged with managing our fisheries. It is critical that before annual catch limits are imposed on data-poor fisheries and fisheries that have had no assessments, the Congress must require the stocks actually be assessed,” Bird said.

Among other issues, the 2006 amendments to MSA included a provision requiring “annual catch limits” or ACLs that must not be exceeded for every federally managed fishery. However, accurate data is clearly a prerequisite for establishing an ACL and that accurate data has been sorely lacking for the recreational sector.

“Recreational fisheries that have suffered for years from a complete lack of federal management cannot now be expected to implement arguably the most aggressive legal fishery management requirement ever established,” said Bird. “Without a recent, accurate stock assessment and good catch data, there is no way to meet the legal requirements of the 2006 Reauthorization of MSA. It is the legal equivalent of requiring drivers to not exceed the speed limit while driving cars without speedometers.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

EPA talks a great deal about environmental justice. In "EPA speak" this means the protection of minorities and lower income families disenfranchised from the regulatory (e.g., siting of landfills and factories) process.

Seems to me that what is going on right now is the disenfranchisement of the local fisherman from the regulatory process. Biologists and regulators are trying to save the Chesapeake Bay, but in doing so they are endangering the local waterman to such a degree that by the time the Bay is saved the fisherman will be gone.

There are similar stories about oysters on the Eastern Shore. The bottom line is that the Maryland Department of Natural Resources is enforcing the law. The State Legislature needs to get its arms around a solution that preserves some semblance of the industry that is the real reason we want to cleanup the Chesapeake.

Read the complete piece by Gary Liberson, PhD from The Huffington Post.

 

 

 

 

 

 

At The Pet Shop in Allston, next to goldfish, blue tetra, and cichlid varieties of fish, is a tank of cardinal tetra. These fish, natives of the upper Orinoco and Negro rivers in South America, are only about an inch long, and are characterized by red bodies and a long silvery blue stripe.

Pet shop owners sometimes prefer tank-raised fish instead of wild-caught fish because wild fish are much more sensitive since they live in very specific natural environmental conditions. These conditions—a certain amount of sunlight and water with a specific level of acidity, among other things—are hard to replicate and add an extra burden to the shipping costs of wild cardinal tetra.

At every transition point in the shipping process, the fish must be re-acclimated to their new environment, according to Gentile. This conditioning puts undue stress on the fish and makes them more vulnerable to disease, he said.

Tank-raised fish do not have these same problems, and are not as likely to get sick during and after the shipping and reconditioning process.

Read the complete story from The Boston Globe.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Criticized for underpublicizing a request for developers to build windmills over more than 2,000 nautical square miles — including parts of the Georges Bank fishing grounds — the federal government has extended the public comment period for the controversial project.

The 30-day extension for public comments on the wind development project off the southern New England coast now expires March 30, according to the Department of Interior's Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement.

The locale for the wind energy grid, selected in consultation with the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, and the limited initial notice for the hearings brought complaints from the fishing industry, Congress and the administration of Gov. Deval Patrick.

The complaints noted the overlap of windmill plots on the fish-rich Georges Bank, the Northwest Atlantic's most fertile harvesting water.

Read the complete story from The Gloucester Times.

 

 

 

 

 

 

A bill recently introduced in the California Legislature would ban the sale and possession of shark fins, including the serving of shark’s fin soup. Down the rickety alleyways and produce-laden byways of San Francisco’s Chinatown, some see the proposed law as a cultural assault — a sort of Chinese Exclusion Act in a bowl.

Similar to a measure passed in Hawaii, the bill seeks to curtail shark finning, a brutal, bloody practice of the global trade in which the fins are typically hacked off a live shark, leaving it to die slowly as it sinks to the bottom of the sea.

The bill is attracting a motley group of supporters, including the state’s sport and commercial fishermen’s associations, aquariums, chefs, scientists and numerous environmental groups.

But in a city where food and the environment are perhaps equal obsessions, the politics of soup has also highlighted a generational divide between eco-conscious children and their tradition-bound elders.

Read the complete story from The New York Times.