On the surface, the Nature magazine article by Environmental Defense Fund-rooted scientists Steven Gaines, Christopher Costello and another colleague touting NOAA's job-killing catch share management system as an effective tool for protecting whales might sound like a step into the absurd.
Yet, by citing the advantages of using such a system to move toward the elimination of whaling, Costello, Gaines and Leah R. Gerber, their cohort on this diatribe, actually point out the very aspect of catch shares that makes the system such a threat to drive out virtually all small, independent fishing businesses and steer commercial fishing the way of the family farm, toward a corporate-dominated agribusiness of the seas.
According to the Nature story, Gerber, Gaines — the brother-in-law of NOAA chief Jane Lubchenco — and Costello, who joined Lubchenco and Gaines in writing the alarmist and laughable pseudo-science paper "Oceans of Abundance," with funding from Wal-Mart's Walton Foundation, all see catch share as a means of gaining control of the foreign whaling industry and shutting it down.
In their published report, headlined "A market approach to saving the whales," the authors explain that, by their estimates, global profits from commercial whaling of $31 million were nearly matched by the expenses of almost $25 million of anti-whaling activism.
Read the complete editorial from The Gloucester Times