What Fish Stock Rebuilding Means to Communities

What Fish Stock Rebuilding Means to Communities

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0:00:01.1 John Sheehan: In the late '90s, there was something of a sea change in the way the country handled overfishing.

0:00:06.2 Speaker 2: "In 1996, the Sustainable Fisheries Act established rebuilding requirements".

0:00:10.0 JS: This is a recording from a 2017 congressional hearing assessing the nation's fishery laws.

0:00:15.5 S2: "And we now have the lowest level of over-fished stocks in our entire history, at least since we've been recording this".

0:00:22.4 JS: That work continued, and NOAA Fisheries just recently announced a new milestone, the 50th rebuilt fish stock since implementation of that 1996 amendment. This is Dive In with NOAA Fisheries, I'm John Sheehan. And today we're taking a look at stock rebuilding, what's required of fishing communities, and the people who make the decision that rebuilding is necessary. I spoke with two of those individuals. Brad Pettinger, chair of the Pacific Fishery Management Council.

0:00:50.0 Brad Pettinger: I've been fishing, well, involved in commercial fishing industry since 1968. My dad was a commercial fisherman. My first experience was salmon fishing off the Oregon-California coast.

0:01:00.7 JS: And Togue Brawn, a fisheries manager on the New England Fishery Management Council.

0:01:05.8 Togue Brawn: I worked for the state of Maine for a number of years, helping to manage basically every fishery other than lobster. I have a master's degree in fisheries policy. I am currently the owner of Downeast Dayboat where I'm on a mission to show the world what scallops are supposed to taste like.

0:01:20.6 JS: Atlantic Sea scallops were actually the first stock to be rebuilt in 2001. And as we'll hear, it's now fished sustainably and is one of the most successful fisheries in the country. The 50th stock declared rebuilt just recently was the Snohomish Coho Salmon on the West Coast.

0:01:37.7 BP: Snohomish Coho I believe was declared a fish I think in 2018. Well, there's the collapse of Coho stocks in the Northwest from the warm water blob we had offshore. And with the Snohomish, we have treaty agreements with the tribes and they co-manage. And we also have international treaties with Canada. That stock, I guess, was more conservatively managed. So the rebuilding time took quicker to come to fruition.

0:02:01.3 JS: Well, the occasion that we're speaking today is about rebuilding stocks, how it's done, what it means to rebuild a stock. So let's first set some definitions. What does rebuilding a stock mean?

0:02:14.2 BP: Well, rebuilding a stock means that you went below a level that you've predesignated a level of stock abundance. To rebuild, I guess, as fast as you can, taking the needs of the communities. Some tough cuts have to happen. And you try to give, as a council member, you try to give folks every opportunity that you can given the constraints that are in front of you.

0:02:33.7 TB: I always try to think of it as a bank account. And I'm very fortunate to work a lot with Scallops. Scallops grow at 25% per year. So if you had a bank account and you were making 25% interest on it, you would not withdraw a principal, you would leave it in there. You need to have some principle. So it's just a sort of a balancing act of you want to build up enough principle, so reproducing fish, that you can live off the interest. So the community of fishermen are trying to live off the interest. But basically, if my job is to rebuild a fishery, then I wanna get it to the point where the population is large enough that it can produce dividends that will keep fishermen gainfully employed. And you won't be making too many other people too upset, [chuckle] basically.

0:03:20.9 JS: Yeah. And I think that cuts right to the issue of what sustainability means. I think you defined it right there, which is enough fish that will keep producing and keep making more fish. And you're not going to dip below that level of, oh, no, there's not enough fish left.

0:03:36.3 TB: Yeah. I actually had a lot more experience with this when I was working for the state of Maine. And we were working to rebuild our scallop fishery and of course, it seems very easy in principle, especially with Scallops when they're sedentary, so you know a lot more about them. When you have fish that are moving around, you don't know where they're going to be. Whereas with Scallops, you have the luxury of a bit more certainty. The surest way to have long-term sustainability, long long-term gains come because of short-term pain. And so the way to make things really sustainable is to make things really, really unpleasant for a while. And so, again, it's a balancing act. All fisheries management is just such a balancing act. And I guess that wasn't really... You were asking about sustainability. And of course, what is sustainability? Is it the sustainability of the stock? Is it the sustainability of the communities? It's always a lot more complicated to bring fisheries resources back than people realize.

0:04:31.4 BP: Yeah, that's right. Well, and also I'd add that a lot of things are happening outside our control. Ocean conditions are primary, right? We thought originally that some of these rockfish stocks would take 40, 50, 60, 70 years to rebuild. Well, it turns out things are rebuilding much faster than that. We've had a pretty good recruitment over a number of species for the last 20 years, thankfully.

0:04:53.7 JS: And you both point to a sobering fact of what it means to rebuild stocks and to set these limits. In a perfect world, you're doing it just based on what the fish need, what is going on in the environment, what the science dictates. Whereas the reality is that you're doing this within a community, a community that relies on the resource and also has their own needs. Can you talk a little bit more about that tension of being able to perform this task with or without public buy-in? I imagine you have to have a certain amount of it in order to have any kind of success.

0:05:31.3 BP: The closer the fishing industry gets with the scientific community, I think the more success you have. Have that communication, I think the better results you get. We had a stock off California that was declared that was over-fished or that was really close to the level. And it kind of surprised people to where the quota was going. And a huge outcry from those folks down there. The assessor of that stock was really nervous about coming down and be in the middle of a firestorm in essence. And we said you need to come because people need to understand why the result they got. It went really well because people, they understood what a stock assessment is and what it isn't. And they understood where the shortfalls were at. You have to have buy-in, but communication is key. And I think there needs to be a two-way street as far as between the fishermen and the science folks.

0:06:19.8 TB: I would completely agree with that and I actually was able to witness a transition here in Maine. So in Maine, our lobster fishery, which is not managed by the council, it's inshore. It's a collaborative process by and large with the fishermen and scientists and regulators, and the guys believe that it works. So my father was a lobsterman and there was a lot of shaming if you broke the rules. So there was very little rule-breaking in the lobster fishery compared to other fisheries because the guys believed that the regulations worked, partly because they had a hand in creating them. In Scallops, which was completely over-fished, everybody was poaching. And when we made the changes that we did in the state waters to help bring the fishery back, I am not going to say that it's all rosy and everyone loves it now, but they began to see that it was showing some progress and the ethics began to change and fewer people broke the rules. You have to have the buy-in.

0:07:20.3 TB: If the fishermen don't believe that the rules you're putting out there make sense, then you have to... It's a real pain to enforce them. Whereas if they believe that they work, they will enforce them themselves.

0:07:32.4 BP: Well, it's almost a sense of ownership in your fishery, right?

0:07:36.9 TB: Mm-hmm.

0:07:37.5 BP: And then a stewardship aspect that goes with that. And that's why it works so well.

0:07:41.7 JS: Togue, could you tell us the story of the Atlantic Sea Scallop? It was the first stock to be rebuilt, I believe in 2001. So what happened there? And can you describe like why it's such a sort of a good illustration of this success?

0:07:57.5 TB: So the fishery was declared over-fished. There were a bunch of closures that were put in place in 1996 and 1997, I believe to bring back ground fish, not specifically for the scallop resource, but in attempts to bring back the ground fishery. And lo and behold, it didn't do anything for the ground fishery, but it sure brought those scallops back. And so basically it was over-fished. The permits themselves were not worth all that much. And now it is consistently the, I believe the number one, two, or three most valuable resource in the United States.

0:08:31.7 JS: Yeah, incredibly productive.

0:08:33.5 TB: Incredibly productive. It's just producing a lot of healthy protein for Americans to eat. We are fortunate, it's an easier resource because it doesn't move around much and it grows so well. You go to New Bedford and you see all these boats and it's like, wow, this is an industry that is thriving. It's nice to see that there's money coming in on that fishery and that's what we're supposed to be doing is increase maximum sustainable yield and make sure that the fishermen can make a good living and their crew can make a good living and the shore side support services do the same. And when you go to New Bedford, you see that in action.

0:09:08.0 JS: And Brad, I'm wondering if you have sort of a similar West Coast example of that kind of rebuilt stocks that look, this process works.

0:09:19.6 BP: Yeah. Well, I mean, for us, I mean, the early 2000s, it was a pretty grim picture. I've never seen the graphs, but see all those lines going down and the rebuilding time was very sobering. And I think maybe the difference between New England, I think, and maybe West Coast is that we knew up front it was going to take a long time. We didn't get there overnight and we weren't going to get out of there overnight. And so people accepted that and they understood that and it took a while, but it didn't take as long as we thought it was going to. And we were pretty... We were pretty good about, we had rockfish conservation areas, right? That were adjusted depending on which stock as they come off rebuilt. We moved that around. We had industry-funded buyback where he borrowed like 30 million dollars from the federal government. We bought out like 40% of the catch history and 91 boats. We had 500 boats in the early '90s and we're down to, I think there's 170 permits, but I think it was only about 70, 80 boats fishing, I think, West Coast.

0:10:12.6 BP: So we took the hits and the ocean has actually been pretty good. I mean, those conditions have been really good for the most part, right? Stocks are very abundant for the most part. And so that helps. But for real, can you rebuild a fishery? Yes, you can, but a lot of things have to line up.

0:10:31.1 TB: Brad's answer made me want to sort of speak again to the rebuilding of the scallop resource. I made it sound like, oh, we had these closed areas, and boom, it came back and that's not, that's a massive oversimplification. The closed areas actually were extremely effective in allowing the resource to rebuild. But then we had to make sure, and I wasn't a member of the council then, so I shouldn't say we, but, the council and National Marine Fishery Services put in quite a few dramatic effort restrictions, in terms of cutting back the number of boats that could fish, cutting back the number of days per year that they could fish, implementing catch limits. So there was a lot, there was a lot of pain that was implemented in order to bring the fishery, the scallop fishery, to where it is today.

0:11:14.1 JS: Thanks, Togue. And you bring up a really great point, which is sort of a bigger theme, I think, of this conversation, which is we say rebuilding and what we're talking about is cutting back. And I was wondering if you could speak to your experiences with that over the years, not as council members, but as members of the fishing community.

0:11:36.3 BP: Yeah, I know that when those cuts came in the early 2000s, it was brutal. I mean, brutal. We closed off the entire shelf, I think inside of 100 fathoms. So the fishery was all outside. And a friend of mine was on the council and I think he made the motion to do what had to be done. And he said he was on his drive home. "Yeah, we have a beautiful coastline here, right?" And he pulled up just south of Port Orford, I think, and looked out over the ocean and just like, had a teary moment just 'cause of just what they'd done. So, pretty sobering. But I mean, fishermen are pretty resilient folks. For me, I'm partners with my brother. We have two vessels. He owns one, I own one, but it's operated on the same S Corporation. And so we had to, how are we going to get through this? Well, basically, we got to cut back because it's going to be a long, hard pull. Crab season hadn't been that great up leading up to that time. Shrimping was not very good either. And so my brother was going to get a job at the prison and I was going to basically run and manage the boat. Or I applied for the Director of the Oregon Trawl Commission. And so if I got that job, I was going to take that job and he was going to manage the boats. Well, I got the job and he didn't have to go be a prison guard. [laughter]

0:12:49.8 TB: And I would say I have been somewhat [laughter] blessed in terms of I have not had to suffer from the cuts. My father was a lobsterman, but he also... He officiated soccer. It's the Maine way, you always have five different jobs in order to make ends meet. I waitressed and bartended at J's Oyster on the Portland's Waterfront for 26 years. And so that was always when I was at the state, that was difficult but I wanted to maintain that job. Because I knew it was [laughter] important to have a side gig. And then when I left my stable state employment to start my own business, Downeast Dayboat, where I'm selling scallops, I wasn't making money. I'm still not making the money that I need to support myself. I have rental properties and I had waitressing. So, I am very lucky in that I have not had to experience firsthand to the devastating degree that so many others had, the impacts of fisheries cutbacks. These are people's livelihoods and they're very difficult. And I have been very fortunate that I have not had to bear the brunt of the decisions that I've made. It's a difficult situation.

0:14:00.1 TB: I can certainly understand why your friend pulled over and had a teary moment. 'Cause you're impacting people's lives, but you still have to do it. There's a guy up here that we were talking about lobster fishery cutbacks, and he's like, well, I can always eat mustard sandwiches. And this, a friend told me this story and I said, what are you talking about? What's he talking about mustard sandwiches? And he said, well, growing up when the fishing was tough, his father would eat mustard sandwiches so the kids could have the luncheon meats. And that's what some of these decisions result in. The people are eating mustard sandwiches because they can't afford to eat anything else.

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0:14:32.3 JS: Maybe the basis for this episode has been sort of like we're looking at 50th stock rebuilt. It's a good milestone. And I'm wondering if you look at it as a milestone or is it another step on the path. Do you... What do you see on the horizon in terms of, is stock rebuilding getting easier? Do you see choppy waters ahead, not to overuse a sea metaphor?

0:14:58.3 TB: I feel confident that we will continue moving forward and things are improving. But I certainly do not feel like the 50th stock being rebuilt is a time for us to pat ourselves onto the back and stop. We've got a lot of work to do and things are getting harder because of climate change and we need buy-in, we are suffering right now from, I think a particularly difficult time in New England in terms of buy-in. So much of the industry that we had is gone. And the few that remain are tired and struggling and we're in kind of a difficult position where we really need to find a way to come together and get more trust and buy-in from the industry in order to get where we want to go and get on a better path, a better trajectory in terms of all moving together in the same direction. I think we're going to get there, but there is a lot of work still to do.

0:15:56.1 BP: Yeah, I think rebuilding the 50th stock is great, but everybody should realize that over-fished stocks aren't necessarily over-fished, they're depleted. So, we're always going to be rebuilding stocks, but I think we need to see some more surveys to better inform us. The more information is better, and so we're getting better. Some of the offshore ocean graphic information we're getting, I think potentially could be assistance down the road. A lot of challenges in the future, but I think that for us, I know with the team we've got in place, the council staff we have, and the folks at the National Fisheries Service for the most part, I think is really good people.

0:16:31.3 JS: Well, Brad Pettinger and Togue Brawn, thanks so much for talking with me. I really appreciate both of you taking this time. This has been great.

0:16:39.1 TB: Well, thank you very much. I appreciate you having me.

0:16:42.3 BP: You bet. Thank you, John. Yep. It's been great.

0:16:44.0 JS: Togue Brawn is a fishery manager on the New England Fishery Management Council and the owner of Downeast Dayboat. Brad Pettinger is the chair of the Pacific Fisheries Management Council and a vessel owner in the West Coast commercial fishing industry for over 50 years. The most direct way to learn about these rebuilding plans and to get involved in them is to reach out to your regional fishery management council. Public participation is very encouraged and meetings are increasingly online, making them more accessible. As always, you can learn more at fisheries.noaa.gov. I'm John Sheehan, and this has been Dive in with NOAA Fisheries.