Connecting the dots

(from the October, 2005 issue of National Fisherman)

PBS recently aired “Gutted,” documenting the agony of a Scottish fishing family being forced to deliver their boat to a scrap yard in Denmark.

It started out as an unvarnished look at a tragic upheaval in the life of the West family. But, unfortunately, PBS trivialized this tragedy with their own editorial comments and an “afterword” by Pew Oceans Commission chairman Leon Panetta that turned it into just another anti-fishing rant.

By his words, Mr. Panetta seemed anything but an expert on commercial fishing. This is hard to fathom, considering the time he’s invested in chairing the $5.5 million dollar commission, but he displayed a seeming lack of knowledge of or familiarity with fishing – either elsewhere or in his California backyard. Among his more noteworthy blunders:

• Addressing advances in fishing, Mr. Panetta stated “they have these huge nets that can basically go down and scrape the bottom of the ocean.” Then, on the nets’ size, he said “oh, they're huge…. they can go as far as eight miles in some instances.” Can anyone with any real knowledge of net fisheries - whether trawls, gillnets or purse seines – explain what kind of gear he was referring to?

• Getting it partially right in Alaska with “fishermen and the scientists and the community and the state have said, ‘This is a vital economic resource for our state. We depend on it,’’’ he got it seriously wrong with the subsequent “as a result, they're taking steps to try to restore their key fisheries.” Since passage of the Magnuson Act, none of Alaska’s important finfish fisheries have been overfished. All of Alaska’s groundfish species, 40% of our domestic landings, are fished at sustainable levels, as are salmon. No one is “trying” anything and these fisheries aren’t in need of any restoration.

• Reminiscing about his grandfather’s employment in the Monterey sardine industry, and referencing John Steibeck’s Cannery Row, he said “and suddenly, in the late '40s, the sardines were fished out, they were gone.” While they were gone in the late ‘40s, they went because of natural conditions that have caused their populations to fluctuate widely and regularly for millennia. Fishing pressure hastened the fishery’s demise, but certainly didn’t cause it.

• “There's a problem with regards to what are called the snappers and groundfish, particularly off of the Florida coastline, the Carolinas.” Snappers and groundfish, snappers and groupers, Southeast or New England, what’s the difference? To a layman, particularly to one who is uninvolved or uninterested in domestic fisheries, probably none.

• “The shrimp fisherman in the gulf themselves are concerned about whether or not they're going to be able to maintain their livelihood.” They’re not concerned about catching enough shrimp. They’re concerned about declining prices, skyrocketing expenses, government mandated inefficiencies and, right now, recovering from Katrina.

• And of course, he squeezed in “ninety percent of the large fish in the oceans -- by the large fish I mean tuna, marlin, swordfish, sharks -- are gone,” treating it as a foregone conclusion, not as a controversial theory based on severely limited research and nowhere near acceptance by the scientific community.

Mr. Panetta isn’t just another “talking head.” As the chairman of a commission that seems to have been designed and (privately) funded to overturn how our oceans and fisheries are managed, his role in determining our industry’s future could be huge.

But that doesn’t automatically make him an expert in fisheries.

So why was he allowed to turn a documentary personifying the real-life tragedy of an entire community into yet another verse of the Pew “Chicken Little” refrain? Why didn’t PBS find someone to speak authoritatively about “huge nets,” who knows the difference between grouper and cod, who could differentiate between a collapse caused by fishing and one that was inevitable because of natural processes?

Pew’s given somewhere around $10 million to public broadcasting. That’s a big hunk of change, particularly for a network that is incessantly cajoling $50 and $100 pledges from listeners and/or viewers. Could that kind of money invested in that kind of atmosphere buy that level of exposure – and the credibility that goes with it – on PBS?

I’m afraid the actions, and the facts behind them, speak louder than any words. Rather than a balanced presentation, the viewers got yet another version of Pew’s doom and gloom message. And we all got to subsidize it.

p.s. PBS will soon air "Last Journey for the Leatherback?" with an introduction by Sylvia Earle, another member of the Pew anti-fishing claque. The press release is rife with absurdly overblown “statistics” about longlining and high seas gill netting, but when you’re out to destroy an industry, who needs accuracy?

Nils E. Stolpe