Law journals don’t usually make for scintillating reading, but anyone interested in the debate over how to manage fishing in a sustainable manner will find it hard to put down the fall 2006 issue of Sustainable Development Law & Policy, published by American University’s Washington College of Law. More than two dozen articles address topics that range from exotic species in ballast water to poaching of highly desirable fish (such as Chilean sea bass) to threats to biodiversity posed by heavy fishing of selected species.
Here is a short overview of some of the articles that speak to fishing management issues here in Hawai`i:
Monument vs. Sanctuary
When President Bush declared the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands to be a marine national monument last year, he deflected it off the path toward protection as a marine sanctuary. The question that arose immediately in the minds of many who had watched the sanctuary designation process closely was: Are marine national monuments better than national marine sanctuaries?
Robin Kundis Craig, professor of law at Florida State University College of Law, asks the question with specific reference to the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands – and answers it in the affirmative.
Craig’s argument is based mainly on expediency. She notes that the process of placing the archipelago under the protections afforded to marine sanctuaries was painfully slow. The Bush administration took two years to reconsider former President Clinton’s establishment of the area as a reserve, which set in motion the sanctuary designation process. The scoping process required as part of the environmental impact statement development, was extended twice because of high levels of public interest. Working out a fishery management plan for the archipelagic waters, as required by the Magnuson-Stevens Act, dragged things out even more.
She writes: “it is fair to say that the sanctuary designation process effectively stalled out. As late as May 2006, NOAA [National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration] was still working on the draft EIS for the proposed sanctuary, and management of the NWHI Reserve was still proceeding through the uneasy double authorities of President Clinton’s executive order and WestPac’s [Western Pacific Fishery Management Council] implementation of the Magnuson-Stevens Act. This four-year delay helps to explain why President Bush reached for the Antiquities Act,” which provides for presidential declaration of national monuments.
“The Northwestern Hawaiian Islands’ history as an MPA [marine protected area] strongly suggests that pure presidential authority is a more efficient vehicle for establishing MPAs, especially marine reserves. Even at the executive order stage, President Clinton accomplished far more through the NWHI Reserve Executive Order than NOAA managed in five years of the national marine sanctuary designation process.”
The Antiquities Act, Craig writes, has two advantages over the Marine Protection, Research, and Sanctuaries Act. “First, the Antiquities Act has the advantage of speed of designation… Second, the legal protections for a marine national monument are potentially much greater than those for a national marine sanctuary.”
Since President Bush established the monument (now named Papahanaumokuakea), however, environmental groups have criticized they way NOAA seems to have “gone subterranean” in its decision-making.
Although Cha Smith, executive director of KAHEA: The Hawaiian Environmental Alliance, also prefers a monument to a sanctuary, she complains that the decline in transparency regarding NOAA’s permitting process and management has raised “tremendous concerns that no one is minding the store….the public has been iced out since the proclamation was signed.”
Smith says it is now more difficult to find out what NOAA is allowing to occur in the monument and she voices concerns that the agency is permitting research that could be done elsewhere. Also, the fact that a paddling contest has been allowed suggests to her that “there are no filters at all. If you want to go, basically you could go,” she says.
But even with these drawbacks, Smith supports the monument over a sanctuary.
“The fact that it’s a monument is tremendously important,” she says, adding that sanctuaries are generally more activity-based and designation of the area as a sanctuary could have allowed a variety of inappropriate uses. Under sanctuary designation, an advisory council would have had to include members from user groups and stakeholders, including fishermen, dive tour operators, and other commercial users. These could “all come together and divide it up,” she says. “That is what we were most horribly afraid of.”
The lack of public involvement and oversight could be easily resolved, Smith says. As an example of a model that could be profitably adopted by the monument, she points to the Kaho`olawe Island Reserve Commission, a multi-agency group that holds public meetings and makes decisions regarding activities on the island.
Islands of Garbage
The “Eastern Garbage Patch,” a floating island of trash halfway between Hawai`i and San Francisco, covers an area twice the size of Texas. The “Western Garbage Patch,” off the shores of Japan, is just slightly smaller. These are but two of a growing number of such rafts of debris that are being discovered worldwide and the subject of a brief note by Ursula Kazarian.
Kazarian notes that past international agreements on marine debris focused on controlling the release of trash from ships, but up to four-fifths of the waste in the garbage islands is thought to have come from land, carried to the ocean in rivers and streams.
No international policy exists as yet regarding the debris piles, but Kazarian lays out some possible directions, including: raising public awareness of the problem to an international level, encouraging existing organizations to expand their reach and hold known polluter countries (including the U.S.) responsible, and “supplying short-term solutions such as onsite mobile incineration clinics.”
Kazarian’s short essay relies heavily – almost exclusively, in fact – on a series of articles published last August in the Los Angeles Times. She cites that source for her claim that 40 percent of the “native species of albatross” die before reaching adulthood, with most of them succumbing “because the parent birds mistake the plastics for food and feed the garbage to their young.”
Beth Flint, a scientist with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in Honolulu, knows more than most about mortality of albatross chicks, but she rejects such claims. “It’s hard to attribute chick deaths to plastics alone,” she told Environment Hawai`i. “For millennia, chicks have been fed the eggs of flying fish and the substrate they float on, whether its wood, pumice, or indigestible squid beaks.” The birds have developed a mechanism for getting rid of what they can’t digest, she said, and most plastics are treated in the same way that other substrate is handled by the chicks. No special harm comes from the plastic “unless a piece is large and can’t be regurgitated, like a toothbrush handle, and gets jammed, or it cuts the stomach or gullet.”
Flint said that she is often asked to confirm that plastics cause the deaths of thousands of albatross chicks – most recently, when Laura Bush was in Hawai`i to rename the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands Marine National Monument. “I told her staff what I tell everyone else – that we can’t say this. At most, I’d say that plastics may compromise the health of albatross chicks.” If a chick is not receiving sufficient nutrients because of plastic in its gut, or if, say, the butane in a lighter sickens a chick, the plastic could be said to contribute to a chick’s poor health. But so far as being a direct cause of death, it’s probably not, she says.
Lots of people have tried to determine the role plastic might play in chick mortality over the years, she added, but no one has been able to say with any degree of certainty that any number, much less 40 percent, die as a direct result of ingesting plastic.
Subsidized Overfishing
Daniel Pauly of the University of British Columbia is one of several prominent fisheries experts who have been warning for years that current fishing harvests and practices are unsustainable to the point that fish populations may never fully recover under any scenario.
But if the world’s oceans are overfished, government subsidies must bear some of the blame. In his article “Unsustainable Marine Fisheries,” Pauly reports that he and his colleagues have estimated the annual government subsidies to the fishing industry globally to be worth around $32 billion. Fuel subsidies account for 25 percent of that, Pauly writes, which enable “energy-inefficient industrial fleets to remain afloat.”
Pauly states the obvious, perhaps, when he notes that the “major, direct environmental impact of fishing is that it reduces the abundance of the species it targets.” “It is a frequent assumption that fishing does not impose any direct threat of species extinction since marine fish generally are very fecund and the ocean expanse is wide,” he continues. “However, recent decades have witnessed a growing awareness that fish cannot only be severely over-fished, but could also be threatened with extinction through overexploitation.”
“It is clear that a real and drastic reduction in fishing rates must occur if fisheries are to acquire some semblance of sustainability,” he writes. “If we act soon, there is still time for restoration to get underway, while remaining fisheries continue to provide seafood and wealth for humans.”
Facts about Fishing: The articles contain a wealth of data and information that give insight into the extent of the problems associated with fishing as it is prosecuted today. Here are a few examples (authors of articles that are the source are mentioned in parentheses):
- A side order of coral: For every ton of orange roughy caught in waters of the South Tasman Rise (near Australia), 10 tons of coral were brought up in the trawl nets (Hemphill and Shillinger).
- Ballast critters: Each day, some three thousand species are transported in ship ballast or on ships’ hulls (Firestone and Corbett).
- Oil spills: In the 1990s, 1.14 million tons of oil were spilled into seas and oceans, “and this figure does not even include wartime spills” (Okrent).
- Few takers for no-take reserves: Nearly 20 percent of the world’s coral reef habitat lies within a Marine Protected Area, but less than a tenth of a percent of the world’s reefs are in no-take areas (Sylvan).
- Disappearing reefs: “By one estimate, 40 percent of the world’s remaining coral reefs may be gone by 2010, 60 percent by 2030 if nothing is done” (Sylvan).
Current and back issues of the journal are available online: [url=http://www.wcl.american.edu/org/sustainabledevelopment]http://www.wcl.american.edu/org/sustainabledevelopment[/url]
— Patricia Tummons
April 2007 — Volume 17, Number 10