My View
Jim Munn
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Fishermen from Maine to Long Island and beyond tried once again to attract the attention of President Barack Obama when they steamed into the harbor at Vineyard Haven at noon Thursday to protest the government's ever-escalating assault on their proud, nearly 400-year-old industry.
The latest attack is newly mandated fisheries management system that, by the government's own admission, has been designed to reduce the nation's commercial fleet to a "significant fraction" of its current size.
Clearly, one of the primary targets of Thursday's demonstration was Obama appointee Jane Lubchenco, head of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the one individual most responsible for developing, administrating, and articulating the various rules and regulations that will do for the nation's fishermen what earlier government policies did for America's small family farmer—drive them to extinction.
The current government-fishermen conflict points to a crisis every bit as tragic as the recent British Petroleum disaster in the Gulf. And yet, while the latter has garnered more than three months of daily coverage in the national print and broadcast media, the former has been all but ignored.
Hopefully, Thursday's protest will begin to change all of that, given that the stock assessment methodology that forms the basis for Dr. Lubchenco's so-called fisheries conservation policies are so skewered, if not deeply flawed, as to be little more than what one critic has called, not science, but "science fiction."
Unfortunately, such needed change will come about only if the fishermen's demonstration gains the attention, and then the support, of the president.
Clearly, the time has come for NOAA, the Commerce Department, and the National Marine Fisheries Service to return to doing what they once did—which is to work with, not against, America's commercial fishermen.
NOAA's current rules and regulations need to be scrapped, and the now bitterly conflicted parties brought back to the table to begin rebuilding the kind of cooperative, productive relationship that will be good for both fish and fishermen.
That will happen only if President Obama responds to this latest SOS sent out by New England's fishermen, and then gets personally involved in seeing to it that the current crisis is put to an end.
Jim Munn is a regular Times contributor and boys' track and field coach at Gloucester High School.
