Now that I got you to click through to the whole article, let me take a step back; not in substance (the title is technically true) but in tone. The protection I am referring to is the announcement yesterday by U.S. Secretary of Commerce Gary Locke to “prohibit the expansion of commercial fishing in federal Arctic waters until researchers gather sufficient information on the fish and Arctic marine environment to prevent adverse impacts from commercial harvesting activity on the ecosystem.” While this measure won’t do anything for the world’s bankrupt fisheries right now, it is still an important step for the United States, and for fishery management around the world.
Consulting scientists before making policy decisions seems like an obvious step, but it doesn’t always work that way. In fact, some of our own fisheries nearly collapsed in the mid 20th century due to fishing practices that didn’t take into account long-term sustainability. The newly approved plan aims to address this issue by prohibiting commercial fishing in a huge swath of American waters in the Arctic. In practice, these waters have never been fished, and nobody currently wants to fish them (hence the snark in my title). HOWEVER, this is still a smart move because the rapidly melting Arctic sea ice, caused by climate change, will someday soon make this area of the Arctic more accessible, and thus more commercially attractive.
The government’s plan was developed by environmentalists and the Marine Conservation Alliance, the same group that turned Alaska from the sustainable fishing nightmare of the mid 50's into the model of sustainability it is today. (As I’ve said before, fishery management is one of the few environmental areas where the U.S. is really at the forefront: Alaska is currentlyrecognized as one of the world’s leading sustainable fisheries. More on this in another post).
The problem with this plan is that fish don’t respect international borders, so unless our arctic neighbors follow our example, this effort is effectively dead in the water. Still, our commitment is both symbolic and practical - the U.S .is signaling (finally!) that it is willing to engage unilaterally in a sustainability initiative - something it has avoided doing elsewhere. Hopefully, we’re sending a strong enough signal to the other Arctic nations that while there may be an economic opportunity for fishing newly accessible areas of ocean, it must be done in a sustainable way in order to ensure economic prosperity not just now, but for future generations as well.
