Follow Through
Chuck Cook of the Nature Conservancy (and a native Tennessean) spun an intensely encouraging sea yarn this morning to kick off the third day of the Society for Conservation Biology annual meeting. It’s not a new story: the successful agreement to close large tracts of ocean off the central coast of California to bottom trawlers and to buy out fishing permits and boats in Monterey, Morro Landing, Moss Bay, and Half Moon Bay made a big splash last year, including prominent coverage in the New York Times. It’s also not a simple story, but Cook did an impeccable job of distilling an incredibly complex and byzantine environmental, scientific, regulatory, and commercial history into a clear narrative line. His masterpiece (though Cook is far too modest and deliberate to put it that way) may be the first offshore conservation easement.
By the time Cook’s initiative kicked off five years ago, decades of destructive West Coast bottom trawling had produced what he called “a failed fishery and a classic example of government mismanagement and inaction,” The value of the catch plummeted from $110 million in 1987 to $35 million in 2003. The fishery produced 55 million pounds of sole, ling cod, sablefish, black cod, thornyhead, and other commercial species in one recent year, but it also hauled up an astounding 51 million pounds of by-catch, mostly dead, which was simply thrown overboard.
The Nature Conservancy sometimes gets a bad rap for its willingness to compromise and partner with business in the interest of conservation, but this deal seems as sweet as it gets in the real world. One key lesson is getting the focus and scale right: the agreement zeroes in on a 150-mile stretch of coastal waters, but that limited expanse has extraordinary protection and a real chance to recover. Another lesson is engaged follow-through: rather than simply hustling the displaced trawler fishermen out of the industry, the deal invests in introducing new gear to line-catch fish (producing a much higer quality harvest) and developing a strong local market (with premium prices) for fish that can be marketed as healthy and sustainable.
Commercial fishing has long viewed no-catch zones as a death sentence for its ailing industry, but reports today from England (where a protected lobster habitat is making a rapid comeback) and Australia (where coral trout have returned in healthy numbers along a no-catch zone of the Great Barrier Reef) suggest that allowing abused fisheries to recover may resurrect both marine species and environmentally sound fishing fleets. “Optimizing profits in fisheries requires a large standing stock of reproducing fish,” Chuck Cook said this morning. “Real sustainability can lead to real profitability.”
Photograph of Monterey Bay by Jawad Zakariya / Creative Commons
