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

Genie Back in the Bottle



New England fisheries are currently facing an overload of “challenges”. Among them: The threats to access to groundfishing privileges posed by the consolidation of quota ownership. The wild card of global warming and its probable impacts on everything that lives in the ocean. The lawsuit driving the National Marine Fisheries Service to get out from under a lawsuit regarding the threatened northern right whale. The rapidly expanding scale and number of aquaculture leases in Maine waters and the resultant displacement thereby of fishermen.

Privatization of groundfish quota is part of a larger trend promoted by investor beneficiaries. Global warming, which at this point could be documented, in theory, by an elementary school science experiment. But it is dismissed by the energy industries that largely cause it, their puppet Citizens United politicians who run interference for them and the investment managers of large blocks of energy stocks.

The many threats to the right whale are known and a greater collective responsibility may be the more difficult solution to reach.

The leasing of Maine bottom and the water column above it seems like it could be a more approachable problem. The legislative changes regarding acreage, length, renewability and transferability of these leases are relatively recent. However, the developmental period for aquaculture has been long. Federally funded scientific research and development at the state and federal level has a decades-long history. There is a lot of momentum behind it.

Has the research, development and financial momentum behind what appears to be a new means of bringing seafood products to market, pressuring the state of Maine and the Maine DMR, unwittingly or otherwise, to fast-track it over the historic stakeholders in Maine’s most valuable fishery?

The aquaculture model presented by its promoters is of the small owner operator business. However, if this is the early outcome, consolidation of ownership will likely follow as it has elsewhere.

The interest in growing kelp for the distillation of energy fuels and chemicals can easily be seen as subject to consolidation. Is it behind the recent increase to the 1,000 acre leases?

Now is the only time to address these concerns. Getting the Genie back in the bottle will be no easier with bottom leasing than it has been elsewhere.