F R O M   T H E   C R O W E ’ S   N E S T

Long Live King George III



Natural resource baselines for the ocean are being developed by the Northeast Regional Planning Body (NRPB). The baselines are important because they will be a long-overdue collective examination of a wide range of scientific marine data, and because they will become essential reference points. The NRPB will set goals for itself, prioritizing the value of the various resources and offering all of this to be used by near-future ocean resource consumers/stakeholders.

The federally directed planning body process will create a data context to prepare for the expanded industrial uses in the ocean that are anticipated in the 21st century. If there will be the larger cargo ships, wind energy facilities, oil and gas exploration, industrial-scale finfish aquaculture facilities, and sand and gravel extraction that are foreseen in the northeast, then planning is in order.

In a more balanced world, the decades of marine science and research could be the foundation on which we base future decisions regarding the use of the public ocean. In a more perfect Union, there would be more clarity regarding whose money is in play. Instead, private interests and their economists appear to be working to manipulate the rational processes inherent in science, using a concept called “tradeoff analysis” in their quest to leverage allocations of the ocean resource.

Since the 1950s, the concept of tradeoff analysis has been used in the U.S. to decide how to make the most out of a set of circumstances. Usually, that means profits. The financing of large ground fishing trawlers in the 1970s dragged fishermen out of the fishing business and put a new word, “bycatch,” into play. Now, private foundation money has stepped between Congress and its constituents on ocean policy.

Fishermen and many others fear economic tradeoff analysis will cut them off at the knees – and will wreak havoc on food and economic security. The private money funding the NRPB and, ultimately, ocean policy has paid NGOs to help make the fishery resource into a privately owned, tradable commodity. Funneling money through NGOs masks the truth – that private interests want to control the resource. And the NGO mantle perpetuates the fallacy that fish, commodified by catch shares, will result in more sustainable fishing practices and less bycatch.

It doesn’t take a desperate-for-a-job business grad, shilling for a resource grab, to know that money talks – and will say anything.

With our Congress falling over itself to cede authority to the highest bidder, it should be saying, “Long Live King George III.”