by Michael Conathan

Earlier this month, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration released its annual “Status of Stocks” report to Congress outlining the overall health of our nation’s fisheries. To the relatively small cadre of fish geeks (myself included), the release of this document is a major event. It lacks the panache of the Oscar nominations, but for us it is perhaps comparable to the way the 1 percent gets all giddy for Berkshire Hathaway’s annual letter to shareholders.

NOAA’s report for 2011, similar to that of Warren Buffett’s financial powerhouse, continued its recent trend of positive returns. The topline numbers showed modest yet continued growth in the overall health of America’s fish populations. At the end of 2011, just 14 percent of fish stocks were subject to overfishing, and 21 percent were in an overfished state—down from 16 percent and 22 percent in 2010, respectively. (Recall this description of the difference between a stock that is “subject to overfishing” and one that is “overfished.”)

Yet the most impressive news to emerge from this year’s report was that six stocks have been declared fully rebuilt—more than in any other year—bringing the overall total of stocks rebuilt since 2000 to 27.

Despite these positive trends and all the feel-good stories the report has spawned (in more than 100 newspapers nationwide), correspondence in my personal inbox this week was dominated by references to a Washington Post Wonk Room blog post proclaiming boldly that it had found “The end of fish, in one chart.”

The chart in question comes from a wide-ranging World Wildlife Fund study on global biodiversity, and it displays the dramatic increase in global fishing pressure from 1950 to 2006. The blog piece goes on to reference an overpublicized doomsday scenario article published by lead author Dr. Boris Worm in 2006 in the journal Science. Worm’s study predicts the demise of global commercial fisheries by 2048. Ah, how the mass media truly loves a ticking clock.

The rest of that story, as I explained in an earlier column, is that Worm later collaborated with several other colleagues, including Dr. Ray Hilborn, on a follow-up article that Science ran in 2009 showing a far rosier outlook on the future of the world’s fisheries—specifically that “conservation objectives can be achieved by merging diverse management actions, including catch restrictions, gear modification, and closed areas.” Sound management practices mean fishery rebuilding is possible.

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by Michael Conathan

This past week, the New York Times Magazine concluded an essay contest challenging its readers to make the argument that eating meat is ethical. One of my colleagues, Andrew Light, was a judge of the submitted entries, and his involvement got me thinking about these issues in the context of our favorite oceanic protein.

More than one-third of the people on the planet rely on seafood to provide at least 15 percent of their protein intake. In 2000 the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization found that 1 billion people rely on fish as their main source of protein. Increasingly, we’re getting that fish from aquaculture operations, also known as fish farms. This should come as no surprise—after all, virtually every ounce of nonfish sustenance that passes our lips is cultivated, not harvested from the wild. But is aquaculture the cleaner operation? Is it more ethical?

In his defense of meat, the Times’ contest winner, farmworker Jay Bost, points out that, “A well-managed, free-ranged cow is able to turn the sunlight captured by plants into condensed calories and protein with the aid of the microorganisms in its gut. Sun > diverse plants > cow > human. This in a larger ethical view looks much cleaner than the fossil-fuel-soaked scheme of tractor-tilled field > irrigated soy monoculture > tractor harvest > processing > tofu > shipping > human.”

Bost references ecologist Aldo Leopold’s land ethic to bolster his case: “A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise.” At first glance, such a philosophy would seem to favor a reduction or elimination of wild fisheries and a move toward properly managed aquaculture operations—an admittedly nebulous target given the legitimate questions that go along with fish farming, including concerns about pollution, location, and sources of feed stock.

Wild harvest in general is less efficient than cultivation, which is why we have given up on the former in the case of virtually every other food product. Yet the biology of fish has raised technological barriers to domestication or cultivation. It’s tough to shepherd a creature when the two of you don’t breathe the same way. As a result, fishing has become more than just a source of protein—it’s a way of life. So to extend the use of Leopod’s ethic, as we value biodiversity and ecosystem health, we must also conserve the “integrity, stability, and beauty” of our socioeconomic structure.

As a society, we value our fishing industry. We want fishing to remain part of the fabric of our coastal heritage and culture. Bost’s point—that in many cases an animal can turn solar energy into people food far more efficiently than an anthropogenic process can—certainly applies to a fish as readily as to a cow. For all the efficiencies aquaculture can provide, there is still a great deal of intrinsic value in wild fisheries.

Some supporters of the commercial fishing industry decry aquaculture as an intruder in their markets with the potential to drive down demand for their fish and corrupt the public perception of their product’s quality. This message is delivered with particular enthusiasm from Alaska, where, it should be noted, almost half of the state’s famed commercial salmon began its life in hatcheries—though once released in rivers and streams, the fish spend the bulk of their lives in the ocean and so are considered wild.

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Rising ocean temperatures are driving major changes in fisheries throughout western Europe, bringing warm water species typically seen in the Mediterranean to the coast of the United Kingdom.

A new report card issued by European marine researchers details the ecological and economic impact that climate change is having on fisheries in the UK and Scotland — concluding that there are “clear indications that climate change is affecting fish stocks” in the region.

The report card features a map of changes currently underway. In southwest England, there are increases in blue fin tuna, triggerfish, thresher sharks, stingrays, and ocean sunfish; In the North Sea, fisherman are catching far more squid, shifting from a traditional focus on haddock and cod; and on the coast of eastern England, fisherman are seeing major declines in cod due to overfishing and changing temperatures.

A rise in ocean temperatures could have mixed results in Europe, wiping out some fish stocks and making others more abundant. But the net impact would be unquestionably bad, warn the researchers:

Projected global redistributions of fish will affect different parts of the world unequally. By 2050, tropical regions could experience significant declines in landings with gains in some high latitudes. The overall cost of adaptation of the fisheries sector worldwide in response to climate change is predicted to be large and could lead to losses in gross fisheries revenues of $10–31 billion by 2050.

If ocean temperatures rise by 1 degree Celsius, the report predicts that mussel harvests could fall by half, while increasing storms could damage salmon farms — potentially introducing new predators or causing farmed salmon to escape in the wild and hybridize wild stocks.

The report card was put together by Marine Climate Change Impacts Partnership, a group of scientists from government agencies and NGOs. While some of the long-term predictions for fisheries are sketchy, the impacts today are already being seen: “There are clear changes in the depth, distribution, migration and spawning behaviours of fish – many of which can be related to warming sea temperatures.”

Campaigning in New Hampshire earlier this week, Mitt Romney took yet another stab at the evils of regulation — this time with a focus on fisheries.

Speaking with New Hampshire Senator Kelly Ayotte in the seacoast city of Portsmouth, the two railed against regulations that “burden [companies] with red tape and put them out of business.”

The focus on regulation is no surprise. Even though only 0.3% of reported layoffs across the U.S. economy in 2010 were due to regulation, Republicans are applying anti-regulatory rhetoric to every subject they can think of. Stretching the argument as far as he could take it, Romney tied Obama’s health insurance plan to the woes of the east coast fishing industry:

“It’s a tough time to be in the fishing business in America,” Romney told a crowd of about 200 on the Portsmouth Commercial Fishing Pier. “Not just in that industry, but in many industries. Small business has really felt like it’s been under attack over the last several years.”

“One, of course, is the discussion to put in place Obamacare,” Romney said. “The last thing these businesses want to hear is that they’ve got a new expense they’ve got to pay.”

“Then regulation,” he added. “We heard today about fishing regulations. I’ll continue to learn more about those regulations as they affect this industry. But across America, regulators [are] just multiplying like proverbial rabbits and making it harder for enterprises to grow and to understand what their future might be.”

The ironic part of this connection is that Romney’s policies as Massachusetts’ governor laid the foundation for both Obama’s health care plan and National Ocean Policy — both of which Romney now claims are examples of government over-reach.

Romney’s push for mandatory health care as governor has been well documented. But most people don’t realize that Romney also helped create an Ocean Management Initiative to help pro-actively manage commercial, recreational and ecological needs along the Massachusetts coast. The “smart growth” plan resulted in a comprehensive policy for sustainably managing the economic and ecological interests of the ocean.

The current plan supported by the White House uses many of the same concepts developed in Massachusetts under the Romney administration.

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by Michael Conathan

Before Christopher Columbus’s grandparents were born, early European explorers from the Vikings to the Basques had already discovered an untold wealth of fish in the corner of the northwest Atlantic now known as the Gulf of Maine. Here, the proximity of seemingly limitless stocks of cod that could be readily salted, dried, and transported back across the ocean helped establish communities that laid the groundwork for our modern-day society.

Today there is no more iconic profession in eastern New England than fishing. From the “Ocean State” of Rhode Island, to the Sacred Cod that has hung in the Massachusetts House of Representatives chamber since 1784, to the lobster that epitomizes coastal Maine, fish are integral to New England’s culture and economy.

Today this fishery—which was once so robust, legend says, that fishermen could haul in a healthy catch just by dropping a weighted basket over the side of a skiff— is struggling to recover from decades of overfishing.

Coastal communities throughout New England rely on fishing as a fundamental source of employment, revenue, and cultural identity. And interest in this fishery expands beyond the shores from Eastport, Maine, to Point Judith, Rhode Island. As consumers become ever more educated about their seafood—trying to balance factors such as local sourcing, environmental impacts of different fishing gear, mercury and heavy metal content, and overall sustainability—reestablishing one of the world’s most productive fisheries is of interest to more people than ever before.

This report begins by summarizing management of the northeast multispecies fishery, which is more commonly known as the New England groundfishery and whose participants are referred to as groundfishermen. (These terms will be used throughout this report.) The fishery is comprised of 15 bottom-dwelling species of fish such as haddock, flounders, and the iconic cod, which in some cases are further divided into distinct populations known as “stocks.” Atlantic cod, for example, is managed as Gulf of Maine cod, Georges Bank cod, and Georges Bank cod east.

The document details a sea change that occurred when the groundfishery shifted to a management system known as sector management, or simply “sectors,” at the beginning of the 2010 fishing year. It then provides an overview of looming challenges facing the fishery including the state of fisheries science, how to monitor and oversee the fishery in a cost-effective manner, and how to prevent socioeconomic upheaval in traditional fishing communities during the transition to a new management system intended to end the recent history of overfishing in the region.

The report concludes with recommendations for improving both the management of the fishery and the relationships among fishery stakeholders, which are critical to the fishery’s future.

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by Kiley Kroh

In another stark warning about the dangers of Arctic Ocean drilling, the German bank WestLB announced on Friday that it would not provide financing to any offshore oil or gas drilling in the region. The company’s sustainability manager said the “risks and costs are simply too high.”

The decision was made just a week after insurance giant Lloyd’s of London issued a report concluding that offshore drilling in the Arctic would “constitute a unique and hard-to-manage risk” and urged companies to “think carefully about the consequences of action” before exploring for oil in the region.

Dustin Neuneyer, sustainability manager at the corporate and investment bank WestLB, explained the decision to Environmental Finance:

“The further you get into the icy regions, the more expensive everything gets and there are risks that are hard to manage.… There are projects that are evidently unsustainable in an encompassing sense. For WestLB, the risks and costs are simply too high.”

The bank’s new eight-point policy on offshore drilling lays out specific criteria for the projects and companies that are eligible for financing — excluding any exploration or production activities in areas where the average temperature for the warmest month is below 10°C (50° F).  Additionally, the policy’s criteria — which are binding for any company seeking a loan — require companies to use the best available technology, abide by the highest technical safety standards, and show that activities are validated by an independent third party.

The concerns raised by Lloyd’s of London and WestLB come as Royal Dutch Shell prepares to drill in Arctic waters off the coast of Alaska this summer. The recommendations of these institutions echo those in the recent Center for American Progress report, Putting a Freeze on Arctic Ocean Drilling: America’s Inability to Respond to an Oil Spill in the Arctic.

The dearth of supporting infrastructure throughout Alaska’s North Slope — including ports, roads, railroads, and permanent Coast Guard facilities — coupled with the lack of sound science and extremely volatile conditions make any potential offshore operations precarious at best.  The remote location, harsh and unpredictable conditions, and absence of proven clean-up technologies designed for Arctic conditions would make large-scale response efforts nearly impossible.

Those factors represent a cost and risk WestLB isn’t willing to shoulder.

The stakes are high for Royal Dutch Shell, which after spending nearly five years and $4 billion, will likely soon receive the necessary permits for exploratory drilling in the remote Beaufort and Chukchi Seas. And other oil giants aren’t far behind — Exxon and ConocoPhillips are aiming to start offshore operations in the pristine Arctic Ocean by 2013.

WestLB might be the first bank to explicitly refuse financing for offshore drilling in the Arctic, but they may not be alone for long. “Other banks contacted us and are very interested in this approach and policy,” Neuneyer told Environmental Finance.

How many influential corporate voices will have to raise concerns before someone hits the pause button on Arctic Ocean drilling?

Kiley Kroh is the Associate Director of Ocean Communications at the Center for American Progress.

by Kiley Kroh and Michael Conathan

Yesterday, former members of the National Commission on the BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill and Offshore Drilling released a report card evaluating the progress made by the federal government, Congress, and industry toward implementing the critical reforms recommended by the Commission in their 2011 report.

None of them make the honor roll. While the harshest rebukes were aimed at Congress, the report card finds that overall, “in every category, much more needs to be done.”

Big Oil, on the other hand, touted the reforms made by the oil and gas industry. Oil & Gas Journal reported “the industry has always demonstrated a strong commitment to operate safely and responsibly offshore, and has deepened that [sic] the commitment in the nearly 2 years since the Macondo well accident.”

Erik Milito, API’s upstream and industry operations group director, said “the bar continues to rise, the commitment is stronger, and the mechanisms are in place to support the strongest safety standards possible.”

Such assurances from API are dubious at best, considering the Commission’s 2011 report found a direct causal relationship between API’s role as the industry’s principal lobbyist and public policy advocate and “compromised” safety standards that were a direct contributor to the BP disaster:

API’s proffered safety and technical standards were a major casualty of this conflicted role … Because the Interior Department has in turn relied on API in developing its own regulatory safety standards, API’s shortfalls have undermined the entire federal regulatory system.

John Watson, CEO of oil giant Chevron, told USA Today that he’s confident production can occur safely, saying, “we’ve learned from the Macondo incident and others and have steadily improved our practices as an industry. We’re in a much better position as an industry today than we were a few years ago.”

That’s a questionable self-evaluation from a company recently slapped with an $11 billion lawsuit and criminal charges for a November 2011 spill off the coast Brazil and responsible for setting the ocean ablaze with a natural gas fire in Nigeria this year that burned for 46 days and took the lives of two workers.

While both the federal government and industry have taken steps to improve the serious shortfalls in safety and oversight that led to the Deepwater Horizon disaster, a great deal remains to be done – especially as the industry looks to move into frontier areas like the Arctic that are fraught with uncertainty and risk.

The Commission gave the administration an overall grade of B, industry a C+ and Congress a D. (The ocean conservation group Oceana released a similar report card yesterday comprised of nothing but D’s and F’s.)

Let’s take a look at the commission’s findings.

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Rep. Doc Hastings (R-WA) relentlessly attacks the administration's National Ocean Policy even though it would streamline government involvement, eliminate duplication of effort, and ensure taxpayers get more value for their dollars.

by Michael Conathan

Even in the bitterest partisan times, ocean issues tend to exist outside the traditional political boxing ring. They usually foster alliances based far more on geography than on party affiliation. Members who represent coastal states and districts usually recognize the value of sustaining and investing in our valuable ocean resources, and they prioritize them more than their inland counterparts. But in recent months the escalation of rancor and polarization encompassed even the normally temperate issue of ocean policy.

Nowhere is this tone more prevalent that in the House Committee on Natural Resources, where Republicans have made President Barack Obama’s National Ocean Policy public enemy number one.

Ever since its roll-out, the policy—implemented by an executive order in 2010 to provide a comprehensive set of guiding principles for the “stewardship of the ocean, our coasts, and the Great Lakes”—has been taking fire from opponents who cite it as an overreach that would spawn “job-killing regulations,” according to Rep. Doc Hastings (R-WA) and would mean the “death of all land-use planning” in this country, in the words of Rep. Tom McClintock (R-CA).

Leaving aside the inherent contradiction espoused by Rep. McClintock—that the National Ocean Policy’s nefarious efforts to develop a framework for the great evil of ocean-use planning would in turn kill the wonderful benefits of land-use planning—boiling these statements down to their roots leaves little more than bald political rhetoric. In practice, the policy will improve scientific management and will help safeguard the commercial and recreational fishing industries—some of the most fundamental drivers of our ocean economy.

Rep. Hastings, who chairs the Committee on Natural Resources, and Rep. McClintock both hail from coastal states, yet neither of the regions they represent in Congress actually touch the Pacific Ocean. Still, the rivers that run through their districts ultimately terminate in the sea, and new findings are proving regularly what we already knew—what enters those rivers flushes into the ocean and directly affects all facets of marine life, including our fisheries.

Rep. Hastings has held multiple hearings about the National Ocean Policy in his committee this year, repeatedly questioning administration officials, scientists, industry members, and advocates about what he sees as an authoritarian overreach and a prime example of the regulatory stranglehold the Obama administration is putting on America’s economic growth. (I testified before Rep. Hastings’s Committee on October 29, 2011.)

On April 2 Rep. Hastings sent a letter to his colleagues in the House Appropriations Committee—the holders of the congressional purse strings—asking them to “prohibit the use of funds for the implementation of the National Ocean Policy.”

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by Kiley Kroh and Michael Conathan

In a decision yesterday on offshore drilling in the Arctic, the Department of Interior undermined its own authority on regulating potentially devastating oil spills in the region.

Just like the cleanup of an oil spill in the Arctic, the permitting process is extraordinarily complicated — for a good environmental reason. It just got more complicated. But not in a good way.

As the government considers the logistics of Shell’s offshore Arctic drilling plans, it has created two different standards that could impact the ability to respond to a blowout or spill.

Last December, the Interior Department’s Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) conditionally approved Shell Oil’s Exploration Plan to accompany its plans to drill exploratory wells in the Chukchi Sea off Alaska’s North Slope. In so doing, BOEM took the reasonable step of shortening the approved drilling season by 38 days to ensure that if a spill occurred toward the end of the season, the company would still have time to clean it up before darkness, cold, and encroaching ice made the task impossible.

In approving Shell’s Beaufort Sea Oil Spill Response Plan, the agency’s Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement (BSEE) touted this reduction as a key element of ensuring adequate spill response capabilities.

But yesterday, BSEE approved Shell’s Oil Spill Response Plan for its proposed operations in the Beaufort Sea – for a drilling season extending through October 31^st.  The announcement, heralded by Shell as a “major milestone” in its effort to begin exploratory drilling in the Arctic Ocean this summer, came with assurances from BSEE Director James A. Watson that the organization’s “focus moving forward will be to hold Shell accountable.”

Yet, the inherent contradiction of allowing drilling to continue until November in the Beaufort when it would be shut down in late September in the Chukchi leads us to question the strength of the standard by which accountability will be measured. There’s no reason to think that if drilling is unsafe in one part of the Arctic in October, it would be safe in another.

Perhaps more importantly, yesterday’s approval will make it more difficult for the administration to defend its position from Shell’s challenge that a shorter Chukchi season is unnecessary. Shell spokesman Curtis Smith has already stated that this is a fundamental point of contention in the company’s challenge to the shorter Chukchi Season:

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The Deepsea Challenger submersible begins test dive near Papua New Guinea. The sub is the centerpiece of a joint scientific project by explorer and filmmaker James Cameron, the National Geographic Society and Rolex to conduct deep-ocean research. Photo: National Geographic

by Lisa Speer, via NRDC’s Switchboard

Yesterday, filmmaker James Cameron became the first solo explorer to reach the ocean’s deepest point, traveling nearly seven miles down through some of the darkest, most mysterious waters on Earth. Cameron’s successful venture to the bottom of the Mariana Trench comes at a pivotal time for the deep ocean. As world leaders prepare for a June meeting in Brazil to discuss the future of our planet’s resources, the fate of the deep ocean is at stake.

In just 12 weeks, heads of state from around the world will gather in Rio de Janeiro for a major global summit on the planet’s future. Known as the “Earth Summit,” this meeting addresses the health of our climate, air, food sources, fresh water, and oceans. This meeting is vastly important—the last time world leaders gathered like this to discuss broad environmental concerns was a full ten years ago. It is essential that leaders at the 2012 Earth Summit address the future of some of our most vulnerable ocean space, the high seas.

Half of the Earth is covered by a vast global commons—that portion of the deep ocean that lies beyond the jurisdiction of any one country. Known as the “high seas,” this area of international waters (present in all regions of the globe) constitutes two thirds of the world’s oceans. The only way to ensure the health of the high seas is through international cooperation. And as this enormous area is increasingly threatened by deep sea mining, overfishing, ocean warming, acidification, and plastic and noise pollution, protecting the high seas is getting harder and harder every day.

Adding to the hurdles of protecting this crucial ocean area is the outdated and gap-ridden legal regime under which human activities—including fishing, shipping, energy production, and others—are managed.

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