FROM THE CROWE’S NEST

A Killing Not A Living

The lobster fishing season has been decent enough to allow light to be seen at the end of what has been a dark few years. The wedding of Maine fishermen, scientists and state regulators, in what is not always an easy marriage, has built a resilient industry. Worldwide demand for its product will likely grow.

At this point increased demand is seen as the fix for low boat prices. Increasing demand may not be the only difficult issue for the fishing industry in a rapidly changing world. Competition for the resources of the Gulf of Maine, one of only two of its scale in the country, has many courting its bounty.

The Gulf of Mexico as a fishery resource, with dead zones, years of continuous lesser spills, and nearly being KO’d by the BP disaster, might not be with us very long.

As for the Gulf of Maine as a natural resource, fin fish aquaculture as now practiced, the unknown limits to and effects of developing energy resources, and the industrial mindset of government and investors regarding the exploitation of natural resources, are three reasons to be concerned.

The federal government is currently spending millions of dollars on wind energy and aquaculture development. These are two indications of a changed government position on the oceans to active assessment, survey and determined utilization.

Professor Martin Smith wrote recently about transgenic salmon in the journal Science. He pointed out that salmon need to be fed “wild stocks that are already poorly managed.” The effect of raising these fast growing giants “will lower the price of salmon, but since prices move together, it will lower the price paid for wild caught fish as well.”

Other fin fish rely on wild stocks, and in the Gulf of Maine that’s herring, porgies and alewives.

How much bait fish will a $5 billion aquaculture industry consume on its way to balancing the trade deficit in seafood? Will a $5 billion aquaculture industry trump a $300 million lobster industry?

Biological natural resources run on nature’s clock. Lobstermen, keyed into that reality, have built a sustainable fishery where they make a living.

Wind energy and aquaculture are not the problem.

It is the gold rush, push it through, get it done at any cost, disposition of their proponents and investors, masking as it does the desire to make a killing, not a living, that is the problem.