We Americans think of Thanksgiving when we think of turkey, but the history of Christmas turkey dinner runs much deeper. While the classic American Thanksgiving turkey feast is a relatively modern 19th century contrivance with its myriad revisionist imperialist overtones, turkey dinner at Christmas dates back to at least the early 1500s, during the reign […]
Much of the crucial aid distributed to fishing families in response to the COVID-19 emergency this year has been provided using the regulatory machinery from the NOAA fishery disaster program . Forty years ago, Congress included the fishery disaster program in the Magnuson-Stevens Act in order to protect fishing communities from rare and unpredictable environmental […]
Photo: Sockeye Salmon Candy Contributors to this blog often write about fishery policy and the love they share of catching fish. Every so often, there’s a discussion of the culinary delights that drive most of us to the sea and fuel our love for seafood. I’ve cooked a lot of fish in my life, but […]
Top: Shortraker rockfish, photo via NOAA Fisheries A lifetime ago, on the day after Christmas last year, the Associated Press published a news story about West Coast fisheries that tens of thousands of Americans read, and you may have read it too. Calling the recovery of rockfish stocks off the West Coast “the biggest environmental […]
Photo: California salmon fisherman Mike Hudson wrestles a Sacramento River Chinook salmon on his boat, the F/V Cash Flo II Jerry Brown did many good things for the state of California during his multiple tenures as governor, but water management was not among them. He was a good showman, but it has been rightly pointed […]
Fifty years ago this month, Lyndon Johnson signed the Wild and Scenic Rivers Act, establishing the protection of rivers possessing “outstandingly remarkable scenic, recreational, geologic, fish and wildlife, historic, cultural, or other similar” as a national priority. This legacy has been storied, keeping flows flowing and water courses unimpaired in some of our most special […]
Among the first things I learned about fisheries management is that fish moving across jurisdictional boundaries present a challenge. Whether in rivers and streams, in the ocean, or migrating between the two, the arbitrary boundaries the U.S. has devised sometimes aren’t malleable enough to accommodate the lifecycle and behavior of fish species that cross between […]
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