Odd Alliance Is Forged Over Access to Herring
Chris Becker for The New York Times
Crew members on the Western
Sea, a fishing boat owned by Glenn Robbins, prepare the gear for their
two-day voyage in the Gulf of Maine.
By JESS BIDGOOD
Published: July 3, 2012
PORTLAND, Me. — There is no great love between Glenn Robbins, a
bright-eyed third-generation fisherman, and the environmental lobby. Mr.
Robbins grew up trapping Atlantic herring in cotton nets strung up in
craggy coves off the Gulf of Maine. These days, he casts a net off a
104-foot boat, but catch restrictions limit those trips to twice a week,
he says.
Pat Wellenbach/Associated Press
Environmentalists and traditional fisherman are
concerned that trawlers’ efficiency is depleting herring stocks and
depriving other animals of a critical food source.
Chris Becker for The New York Times
Environmental agencies have recently placed restrictions on herring fishing.
Chris Becker for The New York Times
Mr. Robbins, a third-generation fisherman, worked
with advocacy organizations to impose the new restrictions.
If he can’t go out for herring, he fishes for lobster, and he serves as a
deacon in a Baptist church. Mr. Robbins is a staunch skeptic of global warming.
So it was supremely odd, he said, to find himself working with advocacy
organizations like the Pew Environment Group as the New England Fishery
Management Council recently imposed new regulations on the herring
fishery.
The issue at hand was about 30 large boats that use nets as big as a
football field to scoop up hundreds of thousands of pounds of herring, a
cheap fish often used for bait. Called midwater trawlers, they fish at a
much higher volume than the purse seine nets
used by operators of herring boats like Mr. Robbins’s, and they account
for 98 percent of the roughly 100,000 tons of herring caught annually
in New England waters, according to the council.
Their appearance in New England about 10 years ago alarmed both
environmentalists and traditional fisherman, who are concerned that the
trawlers’ efficiency is depleting herring stocks and depriving other
fish, birds and sea mammals of a critical food source.
“They’re on the bottom of the food chain. Everything eats the herring —
the whales, the mammals, the birds. If you don’t have a good stock of
herring, nothing else is going to stick around,” said Mr. Robbins, who
used to operate a trawler but does not anymore.
The new rules require midwater trawlers to have independent observers on
every trip, and establish guidelines for weighing and sampling their
haul. Such measures can help fishery managers get a better idea of
whether the trawlers are depleting herring stocks and taking other
species with them, as some fishermen and environmentalists insist. The
new rules will also allow the council to cap the amount of river herring
that trawlers looking for sea herring can scoop up by accident.
“While we’re trying to rebuild cod
stocks and keep small boats alive, reintroducing industrial-scale
fishing is a really bad idea, and doing it without any monitoring is
real folly,” said Peter Baker, the director of Northeast Fisheries
Program for the Pew Environment Group.
The alliance between groups like Mr. Baker’s and traditional fishermen
is unusual, given that the two sides have battled fiercely over catch
limits on other fisheries. “I had to get into bed with those guys,” said
Mr. Robbins, indignantly, standing outside the meeting where the
fishery management council voted to adopt the rules. “I don’t like it,”
he added. “They want to save everything.”
Steve Weiner, who uses a harpoon to catch bluefin tuna in the Gulf of
Maine, was another uneasy ally. “I would say Pew was one of the primary
organizations leading that charge, which would have put us out of
business,” he said, before chatting cordially over lunch with Mr. Baker
during a break in the herring meeting.
But this issue, Mr. Weiner said, is fundamental enough to unite both
sides. “It’s so obvious, the damage that was done,” he said. “These guys
would come into small areas where we’d been tuna fishing, ground
fishing, whale watching, where there is a lot of herring, and just fish,
fish, fish. We call it localized depletion.”
Despite anecdotal accounts of localized supply problems, current
assessments of Atlantic sea herring do not show major depletions in the
overall stock since the midwater trawlers began harvesting the fish. The
most recent assessment of Atlantic herring, released by the council in
2010, did not project that the stock would be overfished.
Eoin Rochford, who used to operate trawlers and now runs a factory that
freezes herring, said that the assault on this corner of the industry
amounts to a “witch hunt” and that the midwater trawler fleet is
actually good for the ocean.
“These fish are the most abundant fish in the ocean,” he said. “ To keep
the ecosystem in balance, somebody has to harvest them.”
Mr. Rochford is hopeful that the new observer requirements will prove that the midwater trawlers operate a clean fleet.
But traditional fishermen say they will continue the standoff, convinced the data will back up their anecdotal evidence.
“As a fisherman who spends his time observing, noticing, what we have
observed is a very bad situation,” Mr. Weiner said. “A lot of times in
commercial fishing, there’s a saying: don’t speak against another
fisherman. But there’s times where you can’t do that, and this is one of
them.”
Mixed oxide, or MOX fuel, is nuclear fuel containing more than one oxide of fissile or fertile materials. Specifically, it usually refers to a blend of oxides of plutonium and natural uranium, reprocessed uranium, or depleted uranium which behaves similarly (though not identically) to the low-enriched uranium oxide fuel for which most nuclear reactors were designed. MOX fuel is an alternative to low enriched uranium (LEU) fuel used in the light water reactors that predominate nuclear power generation.
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