Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
difference between the earthquake victims and New England cod fishermen was
that Californians did not cause the earthquake, whereas the cod crisis was largely
self-inflicted!
During this time, fisheries scientists regularly sounded the alarm regarding the
need for stronger management measures. However, the realpolitik of fisheries fre-
quently defeated the scientists' calls for restraint. Leading members of Congress
from coastal states routinely intervened with the regional fishery management coun-
cils on behalf of their constituents. As a result, federal fisheries managers often fo-
cused on resource allocation issues rather than conservation, a practice that became
known as 'rearranging the deckchairs on the
Titanic
' (Lemonick 1994). As a result,
fisheries continued to decline across the board.
As conservationists studied this situation, it became apparent that the indus-
try's influence over US domestic and international fishery management was so
powerful that it effectively forestalled serious management reforms. Despite these
formidable political barriers to fisheries reform, the conservation community mus-
tered its troops and achieved a few victories. In 1996, for example, Congress passed
the Sustainable Fisheries Act, which re-authorised and strengthened the Magnuson
Act over the objections of the committees of jurisdiction. It took three unusual
floor votes in the House of Representatives for that body to finally approve the bill.
But the Act, while a significant departure from past practice, did not deal at all
with issues such as reform of the industry-dominated management councils, whose
members are exempted from federal conflicts of interest laws. Even in 2006, when
Congress again re-authorised the act, there was no meaningful reform of the council
system.
The realpolitik of fisheries, coupled with the pace of depletion of many ocean
fisheries, led conservationists to reluctantly conclude that they could not rely on
governments to restore and conserve marine fisheries. The slow pace of the public
policy process and the oligarchy of fisheries led many observers to believe that new
and more influential approaches would be necessary. Accordingly, conservation
organisations and funders such as WWF (World Wildlife Fund), Greenpeace, the
Packard Foundation and newly created SeaWeb began to turn instead towards the
market itself.
20.2
Early campaigns
Paul Hawken, in his groundbreaking work
The Ecology of Commerce
(Hawken
1994), argued that the only force powerful enough to counter the unsustainable
use of natural resources such as timber, rangelands and wilderness is commerce
itself. Ocean conservationists began to think about how that might be applied to
fisheries. The Forest Stewardship Council (FSC), an independent effort to assess
and certify environmentally friendly logging and forestry practices, seemed to be
having an influence on the large and powerful forest products industry. Leading
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