With participants expected from as far away as Maryland, plans for a massive fishermen's protest Friday against federal policies at the regulators' regional offices got a boost yesterday with the release of a supportive "Dear Colleagues" note from Elinor Ostrom, the new Nobel laureate in economics.
A professor at the University of Indiana, Ostrom said major commitments on campus will keep her from joining the protest, which is informally generating a list of grievances that includes converting common resources into privatized commodities or catch shares in the groundfish and scallop fisheries.
But in an e-mail she said "could be read from me at the event," Ostrom wrote, "I wish I could join you today as you struggle with an important issue for you and your families and for all of us affected by the fisheries of the world."
Lead organizer Amanda Odlin, who with her husband Chris, owns and operates two Boston-based trawlers, said "hundreds" of fishermen are expected by bus and car from all the Middle Atlantic states and New England.
Odlin said the plan is to rendezvous at 8:30 Friday for a morning of solidarity and speeches at the new $25 million office building in Blackburn Industrial Park from which the National Marine Fisheries Service regulates and manages fishing in the United States' 200-mile, exclusive economic zone waters from the Canadian border through the Carolinas.
If attendance even roughly matches Odlin's estimate, the event could be the largest fishermen's protest since at least 2002.
It was then that an armada of fishing boats paraded through the harbor of America's oldest fishing port to express anger and determination to survive a program of effort controls created to achieve the recovery of the fishery mandated in the Magnuson-Stevens Act.
In sheer numbers of participants, Friday's event could be even larger, but the floating protests seven years ago included a spiritual shot in the arm from the fishermen's longtime friend in Congress, the late Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, who flew in from Hyannisport to the cheers of the crowd.
Speaking from Stacy Boulevard in the unmistakable, uniquely passionate voice of his — stilled only, finally, by cancer two months ago yesterday — Kennedy asserted that "this harbor out here has seen fishing for 400 years, and we're not going to let it stop now."
The list of speakers for Friday was a work in progress at mid-afternoon yesterday. But Odlin said U.S. Sen. Olympia Snowe, R-Maine, is not attending "because the Senate is in session," but is sending staff and "has wished us much success."
Mayor Carolyn Kirk said she had not been asked "by the organizers" to speak and has decided not to.
She said she was "not comfortable" with the decision to stage the event at the NMFS building at Blackburn Industrial Park where more than 200 bureaucrats work on fishery regulation and the law enforcement and counsel's offices are housed.
It has been these offices with their aggressive prosecution of often technical violations that has fueled fishing industry anger. The Inspector General of the Department of Commerce, where NOAA is situated, is completing a national probe of law enforcement practices, and its report is expected soon.
Because NMFS's parent agency, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, leases from the builder-owner, a North Carolina company which won the contract at mid-decade, the property is private.
Gloucester police Lt. Joseph Aiello said the U.S. Departments of Homeland Security, Immigration, Customs and Federal Protective Services has agreed to defer to the local police for crowd containment.
"We'll be ready for whatever happens," said Aiello, "but these are full-grown men who have a (complaint) with the federal government. We'll make sure all rights are upheld; we want them to voice their opinion."
Aiello said he did not expect trouble. "These people have a sympathetic ear, the last thing they want to do is lose it," he added.
The list of grievances changes somewhat organizer to organizer, but the one repeating theme is the objection to the attitude of the overseers, more dictation than solicitation, leading to unpopular policies, notably the catch share programs for the groundfishery and scallop fishery.
To organizers, catch shares, a form of individual transferable quota that can be traded and leased in a federally managed commodities market, are seen as the creation of powerful environmental non-governmental organizations or ENGOs, namely the Environmental Defense Fund and the Pew Environment Group.
The catch share mantra became a mandate, issued by Jane Lubchenco, President Obama's choice to head NOAA, soon after her confirmation. She was an officer of EDF and a former Pew fellow before taking office.
"The idea for this has been floating around for a long time," Odlin said from her home in Scarborough, Maine. She cited the rush to catch shares and the influence of Pew as motivators and the proclamation of federal officials that the fishing industry needs to suffer before emerging "from the primrose path" into "better times."
She also said the Congress needs to hear of the need to modify Magnuson-Stevens, which is perceived by fishermen as absurdly rigid in its requirement that all stocks be recovered simultaneously at once.
A bill to introduce flexibility to Magnuson that is backed by a number of New England and Middle Atlantic congressmen and -women has been met with a petition campaign by its opponents at the Pew Environment Group.
Ostrom's letter was noncommittal on the issues that divide the industry from its overseers and the influential ENGOs, notably EDF and Pew.
But commentary from the Nobel Prize committee and from journalists and academics about the prize that was awarded to Ostrom centered on her work that questioned a long held theory, the "tragedy of the commons" from 1968.
Ostrom's work is credited with debunking the idea that human greed was such that left to their own devices, people sharing a common resource would exhaust rather than conserve it, hence the "tragedy of the commons."
She made clear that she believed it essential that stakeholders be allowed to help formulate usage programs for their resources and argued that government systems and privatization would not work without the buy-in of the stakeholders.
Fishermen interpreted that perspective as sympathetic to their frustrations, but Rod Fujita, a scientist employed by Environmental Defense, wrote in a EDF blog that Ostrom's work "laid much of the intellectual foundation" for catch shares.
Other opinions abounded. "In a nutshell," wrote Kevin Gallagher for The Guardian, a prestigious United Kingdom publication, "Ostrom won the Nobel Prize for showing that privatizing natural resources isn't the route to halting environmental degradation."
"The important thing that our research has found is that there are no panaceas for solving the problems of overfishing," Ostrom wrote.
"They are indeed challenging problems. The solutions are not easy and usually involve sacrifice of short-term benefits in order to achieve long-term sustainability. You will need to work together with local communities, with the states along the Eastern Coast, and with national agencies to think through how to reduce overfishing so as to insure the long-term survival of the fish stocks and the fishing families along the coast."
Richard Gaines can be reached at 978-283-7000 x3464 or rgaines@gloucestertimes.com.
