In this nation, great laws protect us from ourselves. National laws such as Bill of Rights, the Fair Labor Standards Act, and the Civil Rights Act all serve the purpose of the common good and yet protect the rights of individuals. Since its inception in 1976, the Magnuson-Stevens Act (MSA), the fishing law of this […]
It seems that humans are the only members of the animal kingdom who care about drawing arbitrary lines on a map and then making a big deal about who should or shouldn’t stand on either side of those lines. While fish are not afflicted with this trait, they are often the victims of it. The […]
One of the hottest issues in saltwater fisheries management is who—state or federal agencies—should have the power to manage the fish. Federal fishery managers have a record of success. In 2000, 92 federally-managed stocks were overfished and 72 were subject to overfishing. By the end of 2016, thanks to the efforts of federal managers, only […]
In his 1977 book, The Unsettling of America, Wendell Berry identified two poles running through America’s engagement with its natural resources. These two poles he calls exploitation and nurture. “The exploiter is a specialist,” says Berry, “the nurturer is not. The standard of the exploiter is efficiency; the standard of the nurturer is care. The […]
In 2017, at the behest of some federal legislators and angling-related organizations, the Department of Commerce (Commerce) reopened the private-boat recreational red snapper season in the Gulf of Mexico, even though agency officials knew that such action would lead to significant overfishing and delay the recovery of the red snapper stock. Representatives of the recreational […]
A thought that saturates my consciousness with respect to conservation in general is what I have come to think of as the psychological problem of urbanization. Since the high middle ages, in the West, people have been increasingly, gradually, aggregating in cities. And this aggregation is speeding up. A threshold was crossed in the American […]
Fisheries policy has a responsibility to be sustainable to ensure that future generations will have access to the same resources we’ve always had the luxury of taking for granted. Fisheries policy also has a responsibility to the people who make a living from the fisheries, whether directly at sea or indirectly at market. Policy needs […]
The start of a new year is a chance to reflect on the work the Marine Fish Conservation Network has done and start thinking about the year ahead. The end of 2017 marked the completion of my first year at the Network. To say it is all I expected is to understate it by a […]
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