Our Oceans At Risk

My fourteen month old son Gus loves the ocean. Already he’s gone swimming in the Gulf, the Caribbean and the Pacific, he loves eating fish and watching old Jacques Cousteau submarine adventures, and he just cracks up laughing when his octopus bath toy emerges from the depths of our tub.

But the ocean ain’t what it used to be and if we don’t take action soon, little Gus will have to rely on the My Aquarium application on Facebook to see what sealife used to look like.

Every month or so seems to bring another sobering scientific article about the declining health of our oceans and disappearing stocks of fish. Individually these articles give us pause for thought; taken together they paint a startling picture of a vast ocean in slow decline if current practices continue unabated.

More than one third of all federally managed fish species are either currently overfished or are being caught faster than the fish population can grow. Despite that, we’ve failed to take effective action to rebuild these fish stocks—only five percent of the fish populations below healthy levels with government-approved rebuilding plans have actually recovered in the last ten years. A recent issue of Science predicted the global collapse of most commercial fish species by 2048 if trends continue unchanged.

Fortunately, Congress took some good steps toward reforming ocean conservation law last year when it reauthorized the Magnuson Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act. Among changes to the law are requirements to end overfishing permanently by 2010, base annual catch limits for fishermen on the best science, collect timely and accurate information on catch from all sectors of fishing so that we will know if limits are being respected or not, and impose clear and immediate accountability measures if the annual catch limits are exceeded.

Now it’s up to the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) to ensure that these Congressional changes are incorporated into standard practice by the regional fishery councils that manage and enforce U.S. fishing law. Over the next several months, NMFS will undertake a rulemaking process to implement changes to our country’s fish conservation law.

Without effective change, we will further endanger the health of our oceans, our fish, and the marine mammals like whales, dolphins, and porpoises, as well as the fishing communities that depend on them. Tens of thousands of fishing jobs and a source of food and recreation for millions of citizens are at stake. Our current fish conservation practices are broken-- the rules aren’t strong enough and there is no accountability when the rules for sustainable catch limits are exceeded.

The National Marine Fisheries Service has a rare opportunity to reform our ocean conservation system and to bring hundreds of fish species back from the brink of decimation. For the sake of our seas, we hope that they take it.