Saving Seafood

Trump team nears decision on national monuments

August 21, 2017 — As Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke approaches the 24 August deadline for his recommendations to President Donald Trump on whether to alter dozens of national monuments, conservation proponents say it remains all but impossible to predict which sites the administration could target for reductions or even wholesale elimination.

In recent months, Zinke has traveled from coast to coast as he conducted the review, which included 27 national monuments created since 1996, the majority of which are larger than 100,000 acres.

Northeast Canyons and Seamounts Marine National Monument, Atlantic Ocean

Obama created the first Atlantic marine monument in 2016 when he designated nearly 5,000 square miles for preservation off the coast of Massachusetts.

But the decision — which barred oil and gas exploration in the area and restricted commercial fishing — drew a lawsuit from Northeastern fishermen, including the Massachusetts Lobstermen’s Association, Atlantic Offshore Lobstermen’s Association, Long Island Commercial Fishing Association, Rhode Island Fishermen’s Alliance and Garden State Seafood Association.

The case is pending in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, but a judge stayed action in the case in May to await the outcome of the Trump administration’s reviews (E&E News PM, May 12).

During his visit to the East Coast in June, Zinke stopped in Boston to meet with both fishermen’s groups and scientists about the monument.

The Boston Globe reported that Zinke appeared sympathetic while meeting with about 20 representatives of New England’s seafood industry.

“When your area of access continues to be reduced and reduced … it just makes us noncompetitive,” Zinke said at the time. “The president’s priority is jobs, and we need to make it clear that we have a long-term approach to make sure that fishing fleets are healthy.”

Papahānaumokuākea Marine National Monument, Hawaii

This site near Hawaii is the world’s largest marine protected area at nearly 600,000 square miles.

Bush first designated the site — originally named the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands Marine National Monument — in 2006, then renamed it to Papahānaumokuākea in early 2007 in honor of Hawaiian gods Papahānaumoku and Wākea, whose mythology includes the creation of the Hawaiian archipelago and its people.

In 2016, Obama opted to quadruple the site’s size to protect the 7,000 species that live in the monument’s boundaries, as well as to extend prohibitions on commercial fishing and extractive activities (E&E Daily, Aug. 26, 2016).

The Trump administration could opt to try to roll back those prohibitions as well as the monument’s size.

Read the full story from E&E News at Science Magazine

Activists say proposed EPA cuts threaten Maine

August 16, 2017 — SCARBOROUGH, Maine — Officials and experts spoke out against President Donald Trump’s proposed cuts to the Environmental Protection Agency, saying they could hurt beaches, air quality, and tourism, and contribute to sea level rise and damage the health of Maine residents.

The remarks came at a press conference Aug. 10 at Scarborough Beach State Park, hosted by the Natural Resources Council of Maine.

“President Trump’s EPA budget could spoil Maine coastal towns, beaches, water, and air,” Emmie Theberge, federal project director for the NRCM, said. “The Trump Administration and its allies in Congress are endangering our children and communities by pushing to gut environmental protections that are critical to Maine people and our economy.

“These cuts would affect every corner of Maine, but today we are focused on coastal impacts in particular,” Theberge said. “Sea-level rise could cause widespread economic impacts and costly property damage in Maine communities up and down the coast. Maine can’t afford to have EPA turn its back on climate science and the resources needed to help states prepare. These cuts mean more asthma attacks for our kids, more health problems for Maine’s elderly, and more ‘Code Red’ bad air days when vulnerable people must stay indoors.”

During the event it was announced a letter, signed by more than 70 organizations, is being sent to Maine’s U.S. senators and representatives, urging them to do “everything possible” to maintain the EPA’s budget “at no less than current funding levels. The health of our air, water, people, and economy is at stake.”  

Read the full story at The Forecaster

BBC: Meet the fishermen beached by Obama

August 14, 2017 — Today, the BBC published a short video by journalist Charlie Northcott in which several fishermen discuss how they have been impacted by the designation of the Northeast Canyons and Seamounts Marine National Monument. The monument, located off the coast of New England, was created by President Obama in the fall of 2016 using executive authority under the Antiquities Act. NOAA is currently reviewing the monument as part of President Trump’s order to review all national monuments created since 1996.

Tomorrow is the last day to submit comments to inform this review. If you have not already submitted comments, Saving Seafood encourages you to do so here.

Watch the video at BBC News

Read about the monument designation at the Boston Globe

Read about Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke’s recent meeting with New England fishermen at the Boston Globe

NOAA rejects bid to list tuna as endangered

August 9, 2017 — The Trump administration on Tuesday chose not to list the Pacific bluefin tuna as an endangered species, rejecting a petition by the largest global conservation group that the U.S. is a member of, with France, South Korea, Australia, and several other countries.

The Commerce Department’s National Marine Fisheries Service announced the decision after a 12-month review of the request that started under the Obama administration.

In response, environmentalists are organizing an international boycott of sushi restaurants, decrying what they say is the startling reversal of the agency’s original intent to list the tuna under the Obama administration.

The agency said that it looked at all factors affecting the bluefin tuna’s habitat, and based “on the best scientific and commercial data available … and after taking into account efforts being made to protect the species, we have determined that listing of the Pacific bluefin tuna is not warranted,” the agency said in a notice published in the Federal Register.

The International Union for Conservation of Nature had petitioned the U.S. government to list the tuna after assessing “the status of Pacific bluefin tuna and categorized the species as ‘vulnerable’ in 2014, meaning that the species was considered to be facing a high risk of extinction in the wild,” the notice read.

Read the full story at the Washington Examiner

US Senate committee rejects most of Trump’s proposed cuts to NOAA

August 8, 2017 — The appropriations committee of the United States Senate has voted to reduce the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association’s 2018 budget, but the cuts are less severe than those requested by President Donald Trump.

The Senate Commerce, Justice, and Science appropriations subcommittee agreed to a USD 85.1 million (EUR 72.3 million) cut to NOAA’s budget to USD 5.6 billion (EUR 4.8 billion) – much less than the nearly USD 900 million (EUR 764 million) in cuts requested by Trump, according to a press release put out by Senate Republicans.

The committee voted to fully fund NOAA operations including ocean monitoring; fisheries management; coastal grants to states; aquaculture research; and severe weather forecasting, according to the press release.

Read the full story at Seafood Source

Tuna won’t be listed as endangered, Trump administration says

August 8, 2017 — Rejecting a petition from environmental groups, the Trump administration announced Monday that it will not list Pacific bluefin tuna — a torpedo-shaped fish that can grow to 1,000 pounds and which sells for $100,000 or more per fish in Japanese sushi markets — as endangered, despite that fact that the animal’s population has fallen 97 percent.

Even with heavy fishing pressure, the steely fish, which swim 6,000 miles between California and Asia, still number about 1.6 million, officials from NOAA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, said Monday.

“The Pacific bluefin tuna does not meet the definition of threatened or endangered under the Endangered Species Act; that is, it’s not likely to become extinct either now or in the foreseeable future,” said Chris Yates, assistant regional administrator for protected resources at the NOAA Fisheries West Coast Region in Long Beach.

“The population has been at low levels before and has rebounded,” he added.

Environmental groups, however, were disappointed. They have compared bluefin tuna to elephant tusks or shark fins — products that come from an important, but vulnerable, species and command high prices for status value.

Read the full story at the Mercury News

Offshore drilling backers, opponents ready for North Carolina battle

August 8, 2017 — RALEIGH, N.C. — Federal regulators again want to hear what North Carolinians think about allowing oil and gas drilling off the state’s coast.

Last year, former President Barack Obama’s administration adopted a five-year energy plan that excluded drilling off the East Coast. But President Donald Trump has said he wants to see more offshore energy development, so his administration has tossed aside the 2016 plan and is starting over.

As part of that process, a public hearing was held Monday night in Wilmington, and others are set for Morehead City on Wednesday and Manteo on Thursday.

Gov. Roy Cooper said last month that he’s opposed to opening the coast to offshore exploration and drilling, saying he doesn’t think the risk to the state’s coastal tourism and commercial fishing industries of a major oil spill are worth the limited revenue North Carolina would receive from the move.

Read the full story at WRAL

SHAWN REGAN: Property Rights Help Environmentalists Protect Wildlife

August 7, 2017 — Earlier this year, President Donald Trump announced that his administration would seek to open oil and gas drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. The plan, outlined in Trump’s 2018 budget resolution, has reignited a long-standing debate over the oil-rich Alaskan wildlife refuge.

“Some places are so special that they should simply be off-limits,” Nicole Whittington-Evans of the Wilderness Society said at the time, arguing that the refuge is “too wild to drill” and “has values far beyond whatever oil might lie beneath it.” David Yarnold, president of the Audubon Society, said that drilling in ANWR “would cause irreversible damage to birds and one of the wildest places we have left on Earth.”

Drilling proponents cite the area’s immense energy potential. More than 10 billion barrels of oil could be tapped by developing just a small portion of the 19-million-acre refuge, according to the U.S. Geological Survey – enough to produce 1.45 million barrels per day, more than the United States imports daily from Saudi Arabia. The Trump administration claims that opening ANWR for leasing would reduce the federal deficit by $1.8 billion over the next decade.

How are these conflicting environmental and natural-resource values to be resolved? In the case of ANWR, the answer is politics. The refuge is federal land, so decisions about its management are political by their nature. Debates are often characterized as all-or-nothing decisions – either “save the Arctic” or “drill baby drill” – and when one side “wins,” another side loses.

But what would happen if ANWR were privately owned, perhaps by an environmental group?

Read the full opinion piece at the Foundation for Economic Education

Review renews debate over first Atlantic marine national monument

August 7, 2017 — BOSTON — During his eight years in office, former President Obama protected more than 550 million acres of public land and water as national monuments under the 1906 Antiquities Act. Unlike creating a national park, which requires an act of Congress, a president can declare a national monument to protect “objects of historic or scientific interest” with a proclamation.

Critics of the monument say President Obama overstepped the powers set forth by the Antiquities Act and did not provide enough opportunity for public comment. In April, President Donald Trump signed an executive order asking his Secretary of the Interior, Ryan Zinke, to conduct a review of 27 monuments created since 1996. The purpose of the review is to determine if these monument areas qualify under the terms of the act and to address concerns from the community.

Two days later, Trump signed another executive order outlining his “America-First Offshore Energy Strategy.” The plan demonstrates Trump’s vision for the exploration and production of energy on federal lands and waters to decrease America’s dependence on foreign energy.

Fishing industry’s concerns

Captain Fred Penney, a lobsterman out of Boston Harbor, believes that the monument will hurt the future of fishing in New England because the new restrictions were implemented without much input from the fishermen themselves.

“To have no regulations and have it be a free-for-all, that’s completely unacceptable, I understand that,” he said. “I wouldn’t want to see that. But what they’re doing now doesn’t seem to be it.”

Many in the industry felt fishing in the area should have been regulated under the Magnuson- Stevens Fisheries Conservation and Management Act, which created eight regional fishery management councils to maintain sustainable fisheries and habitats in the U.S.

The councils are divided up by region, including the New England, Mid-Atlantic and South- Atlantic councils on the East Coast. Each council sets regulations for certain fisheries such as limiting catch size, issuing permits and monitoring fishing equipment.

Fishermen argue the council’s lengthy public process is more transparent than a proclamation from the president and allows for more input from the community.

Jon Williams of the Atlantic Red Crab Company said the fishermen were not given much notice about meetings and the scope of the monument. He argued the area was thriving under the council’s management before the monument designation.

“We’d been in there for 40 years and if it’s… pristine now, after our presence for 40 years, why is there an emergency for the president to use an act to protect this thing?” Williams said. “Why not give it to the council and let the council do its job?”

Before the Obama administration announced the monument, the New England Fishery Management Council was working on a coral amendment that would protect deep sea corals, one of the goals of the monument. The South and Mid Atlantic Councils passed similar regulations years earlier.

 

Read the full story at The Groundtruth Project

Under Trump, recreational anglers feel tide turning in their favor on red snapper

August 7, 2017 — WASHINGTON — It’s getting easier to snap up red snapper.

The sought-after game fish has been at the center of a years-long debate between environmentalists who want to protect the iconic species while it continues to rebuild from overfishing and recreational anglers who contend years of economically crippling restrictions have paid off and it’s time to go fishing again.

After eight years of policies under President Obama that emphasized protection, there’s now a rising tide of momentum under the Trump administration to loosen restrictions in the federal waters off the Southeastern United States. Already:

• Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross in June expanded the recreational fishing season for red snapper in the Gulf of Mexico from three to 42 days.

• Legislation has been reintroduced in the House and Senate to give more say over red snapper management to Gulf Coast states, which are seen as more sympathetic to recreational anglers’ interests. Such bills are likely to get a friendly reception if they reach the president’s desk.

• And next month, the agency overseeing fishing restrictions in the South Atlantic is expected to lift a years-long ban on red snapper in 2018.

All of that delights anglers who feel the Obama administration ignored their arguments that red snapper had rebounded so well they were literally “tripping over” fish.

“I feel a whole lot better today than I did a year ago,” said Jeff Angers, president of the Louisiana-based Center for Sportfishing Policy, which advocates for the recreational fishing industry.

Read the full story at USA Today