When the Magnuson Act and I first met, it was 1978, and we were both young and inexperienced. I was lucky enough to get a job with the National Coalition for Marine Conservation (NCMC, now Wild Oceans), an organization that was there at the birth of ocean fish conservation and helped mid-wife it. Two years earlier, Congress had passed the Fishery Conservation Act, today known as the Magnuson Act, creating a 200-mile fishery conservation zone around the U.S. and setting up eight regional councils to manage the nation’s fisheries.
So as it happened, the first fishery management plan I ever worked on was also the nation’s first, for New England groundfish, initiated in 1977. Years of heavy foreign fishing in the 60s and early 70s depleted stocks of cod, haddock and flounder. This was the primary reason for passing the Magnuson Act. After passage, the foreign trawlers were excluded from our waters, and stocks of groundfish began over the next few years to rebound toward historic levels; meanwhile the U.S. fleet grew to exploit them exclusively for the U.S. All good, it would seem. Unfortunately, without any constraints on our fleet of trawlers, which doubled in size to 1,000 permitted vessels, it turned out that the light at the end of the tunnel was a runaway train headed straight at us.
For the next decade and more, the New England Council struggled to control the fishery, stubbornly resisting quotas and limits on effort in favor of indirect – and ineffective – limits like net mesh size and minimum fish sizes, even as assessments showed the stocks were collapsing…again. Neither the council nor the law, with only a toothless mandate to “prevent overfishing,” was prepared for what was happening. To borrow an analogy from Samuel Butler, it was like learning to play the violin and having to give concerts at the same time. The intent was laudable, but the performance was awful.
And it wasn’t just cod and flounder in New England. By 1992, 67 fish stocks in U.S. waters were classified as overfished. The regional fishery management councils were struggling everywhere, north, south, east and west. Yet it was the unremitting futility of groundfish management that stood out, given its place in the history of fishery management. For me, it called to mind the last line of another American tragedy, The Great Gatsby: “So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”
Now here’s where the Marine Fish Conservation Network comes in. In late 1992, a steering committee of representatives of the NCMC, National Audubon Society, World Wildlife Fund, Greenpeace and the Center for Marine Conservation was convened with the idea of creating a broad-based network of fishing and conservation organizations to work together to strengthen the Magnuson Act, which was up for re-authorization by the 103rd Congress (1993-94). Based on early discussions among the steering committee about how best to address overfishing, bycatch and other issues critical to the effectiveness of the Act, NCMC organized a 3-day National Symposium on the Magnuson Act and published the proceedings as Conserving America’s Fisheries. The symposium was attended by Congressional staffers, leaders from the commercial and sport fishing communities, environmental groups and council members.
The Network steering committee subsequently drafted and circulated “A National Agenda to Protect, Restore and Conserve Marine Fisheries” to garner public support – the Network eventually grew to over 100 fishing and conservation organizations, national, regional and local – and proposed legislative language to present to Congress.
After three years of testimony before Congress and working with members and staff, the Sustainable Fisheries Act (amendments to the Magnuson Act) was passed in 1996, including one of the Network’s key recommendations: require all fishery management plans to have an objective and measurable definition of overfishing, and for any stock identified as overfished, a measurable program for rebuilding the stock to a specified target over a specified period of time, not to exceed 10 years.
As a result, the number of stocks subject to overfishing was cut by more than half, with some added but many removed from the list. More accountability measures were added at the next reauthorization of the Act, again with the backing of the Network. Forty-one stocks have been rebuilt, including thirteen in New England, although Atlantic cod remains depleted (for a number of reasons unrelated to the Act, most notably “ecosystem overfishing” – that is, fishing to a degree that alters and jeopardizes the integrity of marine communities – an issue near and dear to my heart and one the Network recognizes as unfinished business.)
Also as a result of the Network’s efforts, councils were required to identify fish habitat essential to the health of managed fish species and, more importantly, made reduction of bycatch – fish and other marine life caught and killed incidental to fishing with indiscriminate gears, such as trawls, gill nets and longlines – a new national mandate, requiring the councils to include measures in their fishery management plans.
There are two take-home messages here for the 50th anniversary of the Magnuson Fishery Conservation and Management Act. First, that concerns about the health of New England’s groundfish fisheries were the main impetus both for the 1976 Act and for subsequent changes that gave the law the tools to stop overfishing. The beginning and the end of overfishing, if you will. Today NOAA Fisheries estimates 84% of U.S. fish stocks are no longer overfished.
The second is that those of us who formed the Marine Fish Conservation Network more than three decades ago (myself, Gerry Leape, Carl Safina, Mike Sutton, Dave Allison and Suzanne Iudicello) recognized that the historic changes enacted in 1996 and in subsequent amendments could only come about through cooperation and collaboration among those who care most about the ocean; whether it is to fish, to sail, to dive, to explore or simply to enjoy. The Network remains a place where individual and organizational egos are left at the door, where we say “we” when referring to our shared goals and accomplishments.
