O P I N I O N

The Big Green Money Machine

by Nils Stolpe

“One of the more clever things in this most recent bout of “market research” was the lumping of mining, drilling and fishing together. This seems to me to be tantamount to asking people how they feel about crimes committed by “murderers, rapists and shop lifters.” After the recent (and very possibly still ongoing) BP disaster in the Gulf of Mexico we all have a pretty accurate idea of what the potential downsides are to drilling in the oceans, and who hasn’t seen pictures of huge open pit mines (if you are one of the few who hasn’t, Google “open pit mine” and click on images)? Not in our ocean, huh? But in U.S.waters can anyone make a rational comparison of the potential impacts of mining, drilling and fishing?”

Yet again the Pew Trusts, the Conservation Law Foundation and another handful of anti-fishing organizations are have embarked on a foundation-funded greenwashing campaign to close off even more of the the U.S. Exclusive Economic Zone to fishing. They’re attempting it this time by trying to persuade President Obama to declare a huge and productive area off New England a National Marine Monument via presidential fiat. They are relying in large part on a poll by Edge Research a marketing research firm. Combining fishing with sea floor mining and drilling, they are basing much of their campaign on the fact that their poll revealed that the majority of the respondents would favor ocean protection. For the full FishNet piece go to http://www.Fishnet-USA.com/DejaVu.pdf.

“For the past several years, fanned by what’s going on in modern Russia, there has been a lot of interest by the media in oligarchs and oligarchies. Defined as “a country, business, etc., that is controlled by a small group of people” (Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary), an oligarchy would seem to be the antithesis of government as Lincoln envisioned it. But along with the foregoing, follow some of the links below and then consider the influence Pew has in or over the domestic fisheries management system (and on fisheries management in other countries as well). And consider as well that thirteen people wield all that power. Of those thirteen people seven are in the founder’s family and at least twelve have significant ties to Sun Oil/Sunoco and/or the private bank that was formed to administer the trusts established with Sun Oil/Sunoco stock. You decide!

To the extent that multi-billion dollar foundations such as Pew continue to have their way by mounting campaigns that any of the affected groups can’t afford to effectively counter, and by exerting influence in Washington that few in the private sector are capable of, the folks at the St. Augustine Lighthouse Museum who think the people can’t change government will be justified. And the rest of us, those of us who know that Lincoln had it right at Gettysburg, will be increasingly marginalized.”

For most of the past two decades the Pew Charitable Trusts have been playing an increasingly dominant role in how - and to what end - our fisheries are managed in the U.S. Exclusive Economic Zone (and in the fisheries of other nations as well). Backed by a multi-billion dollar endowment, the Trusts and their thirteen member Board have directly or indirectly (through many millions of dollars in grants to selected “fishermens” organizations, ENGOs, academic institutions, on their own and with “hired help”) impacted fishery after fishery, and those impacts have largely been negative. In Who’s really in charge of U.S. fisheries? at http://www.fishnet-usa.com/Of For By the People.pdf I examine the relationship between the Pew Trusts and fisheries and ocean governance.

“It doesn’t matter that overfishing in U.S. waters is no longer a concern. It doesn’t matter that increasing ocean temperatures are affecting the “sustainability” of our fisheries to a much greater extent that overfishing ever has. It doesn’t matter that they are increasingly focused on what are nothing more than token fishing issues like saving deepwater corals, saving forage fish, completely eliminating bycatch or protecting huge areas of natural ocean through Marine Protected Areas (which are generally protected only from fishing). The sum total is fewer fish landed and at greater cost to the fishermen every year.... The bucks keep rolling in, the misinformation those bucks buy continues to influence the public and the non-coastal politicians, the lawsuits those bucks fund continue to put our fishermen out of business, the anti-fishing bureaucracies continue to grow and the anti-fishing salaries continue to increase.”

In Their careers and their futures depend on attacking fishermen and fishing. What more can we expect from them? I address the ever more trivial exercises that anti-fishing organizations and individuals are pursuing in order to keep their “Blame it all on fishing” band wagon rolling along and to keep their coffers overflowing. That’s a natural condition for a successful bureaucracy to be in, because few of the people involved would be willing to call it a day while there was still money to be grubbed, regardless of how irrelevant their original mission has become. The full FishNet is at http://www.fishnet-usa.com/Living down to expectations.pdf

“If the populations of most marine mammals and other highly efficient predators such as spiny dogfish have increased significantly over the past decade or three it’s obvious their predation, the largest part of natural mortality, inflicted on their prey species would have increased correspondingly. Yet is this factored into fisheries management programs? It appears not. It appears as if, as is apparently the case in New England, controlling fishing mortality is the only “effective” method (which really means “is the only easily available method”) by which managers assume that they can affect total mortality. Fisheries managers have to do something, because the whole fisheries management system is predicated on managing or on appearing to manage fisheries. So the natural mortality of a stock increases because of increasing predation and at this point, given research funding limits as well as limits on what we know about predation, the only way that the managers can compensate, which they are required to do by federal legislation and forced to do by a handful of mega-foundation funded ENGOs with huge bank accounts and droves of lawyers, is by reducing fishing mortality. What comes immediately to mind is a snake busily at work eating its own tail.”

For information on who’s getting what to control fishing in U.S. waters, visit the “Big Green Money Machine” website. Link here.

Nils Stolpe has worked for, in and around various aspects of the seafood industry for over three decades. He is currently the communications director of Garden State Seafood Association. He has been a columnist for National Fisherman and the website SavingSeafood.org.