An homage to Michael Crichton

(from the March, 2006 issue of National Fisherman)

According to one of the main characters in his latest bestseller, State of Fear, “Modern people live in abject fear. They are afraid of strangers, of disease, of crime, of the environment. They are afraid of the homes they live in, the food they eat, the technology that surrounds them….they are convinced that the environment of the entire planet is being destroyed around them. Remarkable! Like the belief in witchcraft, it's an extraordinary delusion-a global fantasy worthy of the Middle Ages. Everything is going to hell, and we must all live in fear.” Unfortunately, while the words, the character and the book are pure fiction, the sentiments are real.

Crichton makes it abundantly clear, both in State of Fear and in his afterword, that agenda-driven science, particularly when it’s confused with or substituted for real (meaning objective) science, is a threat to all of us. This won’t come as a revelation to anyone associated with commercial fishing; professional fear merchants have been making doom and gloom predictions about the future of our fisheries for years. We’ve been suffering the consequences.

What’s agenda-driven science? Yet again, in dealing with fisheries the folks at the Pew Charitable Trusts have provided several excellent

The recommendations of the Pew Oceans Commission, and their subsequent high profile selling, have had a significant impact on public perceptions of our industry. The foundation that the Pew Commission built on was a series of reports addressing the “state of the science” in various subject areas. Because of the growing emphasis on ecosystem management, I looked at one, Ecological Effects of Fishing in Marine Ecosystems of the United States, in fair detail a while back (the resultant article is available at http://www.fishingnj.org/netusa23.htm). Among other things, I found that two of the three authors who contracted with the Pew Oceans Commission to prepare the report were recipients of Pew Fellowships, that of the 179 references cited in the report, well over a third had one or more authors directly connected to “first generation” Pew funding, and that of those references that were written since 1995, almost half were connected to Pew by funding.

In the past several decades how many thousands of marine and related researchers have published how many tens of thousands of papers on subject matter dealing with or relevant to the ecological effects of fishing? How many of them were beneficiaries of Pew funding? How well represented in the report was the work of those who weren’t? If we reasonably assume that Pew-sponsored research has a bias, is there any way we can suppose that this report was an objective representation of the state of the science dealing with fishing impacts?

All the folks in Washington who will be deciding how to amend the Magnuson Act will have been exposed to the conclusions of a “Blue Ribbon” commission chaired by former Congressman Leon Panetta. Those conclusions were largely justified by research funded by the same Pew Charitable Trusts that paid $5.5 million to establish and operate the Commission. What are the odds that Congress has been left with the impression that the underlying research was representative and objective.

Pew SeaWeb has a website. On it is an “Ocean Citations” section containing “Selected Science Publications on Ocean Issues” (note the emphasis on science). In contains 483 citations for publications dealing with fishing impacts, 96 with coastal development and 43 with oil pollution. I’d venture that having ten times as many articles listed dealing with fishing impacts than for oil pollution and five times as many as those dealing with coastal development is going to have an effect on anyone who looks at those pages. What message is he or she going to draw from that regarding what’s “endangering” the oceans?

I did a Google search on some of SeaWeb’s categories of ocean issues. Of  the three attributable to commercial fishing, “overfishing” yielded 1,900,000 hits, “trawling impacts” yielded 357,000 hits and “bycatch” yielded 523,000 hits. That’s less than 3 million in total. “Coastal development” yielded 34,600,000 hits, and “oil pollution” yielded 22,900,000 hits, each an order of magnitude greater than the total for fishing impacts. If we assume that the internet has become a reasonably accurate measure of interest in and writings on various subjects, and that a Google search is a somewhat accurate sampling of all of the web content available, then the ocean citations listed on the SeaWeb website seem to be pretty far from an objective cross section of relevant literature. But is anyone who visits the website going to figure that out?

It might be a bit difficult to define agenda-driven science, but it’s sure easy to recognize it when it smacks you in the face, isn’t it.

Nils E. Stolpe