October 5, 2016 — The following is excerpted from a story written by Ben Raines and originally published on AL.com. Mr. Raines is a 17-year veteran investigative reporter for Al.com specializing in Alabama’s natural systems. He wrote, narrated and coproduced ‘America’s Amazon’, a documentary about the Mobile River Basin. He is a Coast Guard licensed captain and leads tours in the Mobile-Tensaw Delta, to barrier islands and other remote spots:

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“We always hear from them at the Council meetings,” said Bob Shipp, a former president and longtime member of the Council, which sets regulations for the commercial and recreational fisheries in the Gulf.

“They don’t explain how their groups are linked, but EDF and the fishermen with these non-profits are always on the same page.”

The intimate connection between EDF and the non-profits they helped start was on display on national television this year on the National Geographic TV show “Big Fish, Texas,” which starred Buddy Guindon and his family. On that show, the top EDF official in the Gulf was shown in a private meeting coaching Guindon on what to say moments before he spoke to the Texas Legislature.

“They pay for all of the travel, meals, everything for anyone who goes on one of these trips to Washington or the council meetings. They talk to the fishermen about what to say. And they tell the fishermen to just give them all their receipts and they’d cover everything,” said Wayne Warner, who was a founding member of the Shareholder’s Alliance but quit the first year because he disapproved of the environmental group’s involvement.

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One of the nation’s largest environmental groups — bankrolled with $50 million from the heirs to the Walmart fortune — has spent millions of dollars pushing a wholesale change in how the U.S. manages its fisheries, an AL.com investigation reveals.

Critics blame the Environmental Defense Fund effort for hurting fishing communities on every coast, from Kake, Alaska, and Gloucester, Mass., to Bayou La Batre, Alabama.

But catch share systems are also blamed for knocking thousands of fishermen out of the industry, usually because of inequities in how the shares were originally distributed by the government.

In the Gulf of Mexico’s red snapper fishery for instance, some fishermen were granted the right to catch six percent of the annual harvest, worth millions of dollars a year, while others were granted as little as 0.006 percent of the harvest, or a few hundred pounds a year, meaning they could no longer earn a living from fishing.

Because all other fishermen are locked out of the fishery unless they buy or lease catch shares, critics say the system has turned those who were granted the largest portion of the harvest into Sea Lords who lease the right to fish to those who received the least. Many of these lords are able to earn millions of dollars a year without ever leaving the dock, simply by bartering the right to fish. The Sea Lord problem has affected fisheries all over the country, creating haves and have-nots when it comes to the basic right to fish, and forcing hundreds of crews out of the industry.

EDF gained unprecedented access to the levers of power in 2008 when President Obama appointed the vice-chair of EDF’s board – Jane Lubchenco — as the head of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which manages the nation’s fish stocks. Once in power, Lubchenco, a respected but little known fisheries professor at Oregon State University, enacted a national catch share policy that mirrored EDF’s longtime goals.

As Lubchenco pushed for catch shares from the top, EDF staff members simultaneously organized and funded the creation of several non-profit activist groups made up of small numbers of commercial fishermen on the Gulf and Atlantic coasts. Critics say the move was intended to create the impression of grass roots support for catch shares that didn’t actually exist.

The leadership of these non-profits often consists of the fishermen who control the largest portion of a given fishery, who are also the folks who benefitted most from the switch to catch shares.

“They work hard to make the public and politicians believe they are representing the majority of charter for hire boats when in reality they represent maybe 200 of 1,300 federally permitted owners,” said Bob Zales, president of the National Association of Charterboat Operators. “Through EDF and their puppet associations such as the Charter Fishermen’s Association, there is much political lobbying and at least yearly, sometimes more often, trips to D.C. to garner support for catch shares in all fisheries, commercial, charter, and private recreational with stamps.” 

“What you are seeing is a conservation group that has gone rogue… What EDF really wants is to privatize the entire resource,” said Daniel Pauly, a professor at the University of British Columbia and one of the world’s preeminent fisheries scientists. Pauly is responsible for developing the concept of keystone species in aquatic food webs and popularizing the notion that the world’s fish stocks are much worse off than most scientists believe. He disputes the EDF position that catch shares improve fisheries. Instead, he said, they cause “economic redistribution.”

“Everywhere you have a catch share, a small group of people end up controlling the fishery. We have in British Columbia, one person controls 50 percent of our fishery. This is what is happening in the Gulf,” Pauly said. “EDF has no business favoring the concentration of capital and ownership, but that is what it is doing.”

Indeed, one of the key benefits of switching to catch shares, according to Lubchenco’s national catch share policy, is “consolidation” of the fleet. In other words, when catch shares are put in place, the number of people in a fishery shrinks, often dramatically, as the larger harvesters buy up shares from the smaller fishing boats.

EDF officials describe such concentration as one of several “unintended consequences.” Others say it created an age of the sea lords and sharecroppers that began in earnest with Lubchenco’s appointment. Lubchenco, who left NOAA in 2013 and resumed her position on the EDF board, did not respond to requests for comment.

Lubchenco met fierce resistance in Massachusetts, when catch shares were enacted for the fisheries in the north Atlantic. John Kerry, then a senator, along with Gov. Deval Patrick and most of the state’s congressional delegation, bitterly opposed the introduction of catch shares, saying they would cost hundreds to thousands of jobs and devastate coastal communities.

“A lot of our fishermen have been put out of business or pushed to the brink,” because of catch shares, Kerry said at the time.

“Normally environmental groups and NGOs are for the little guy, but here, the EDF people are siding with the big guys, the corporate interests that want to own and privatize our fisheries,” Pauly said. “It makes EDF very strange in the world of environmental groups. But then they are being funded by Walmart.”

Pauly said the solution is to require the owner of shares in a fishery to actually captain the boat that is doing the fishing. In most U.S. catch shares, such as the red snapper IFQ, there is no such requirement. In fact, any U.S. citizen is allowed to buy, sell, or trade shares in the fishery, whether he or she has a boat, or has ever been fishing in their life.

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