Mobile Rally Aims to Stop Overfishing in the Gulf
By Mladen Rudman, Northwest Florida Daily News, Fort Walton Beach
Oct. 10–Bruce Blackwelder intends to travel to Mobile, Ala., today to make a point: Overfishing in the Gulf of Mexico must end.
The Fort Walton Beach resident plans to participate in a stop-overfishing rally today at Cathedral Square downtown.
From the retired businessman’s perspective, shielding the gulf and heavily exploited species such as red snapper and greater amberjack is about protecting people as well as the environment.
Blackwelder summed up Tuesday the ongoing struggle to write federal recreational and commercial fishing regulations by quoting an old oil filter TV commercial.
“You can pay me now” with less economic turmoil by enacting regulations that curtail catch limits or “you can pay me later” when fisheries would have to be more regulated, he said. Stricter rules to protect a collapsed fishery would jeopardize thousands of jobs and take longer to expire.
Blackwelder, an outdoorsman, believes it’s not too late the save popular gamefish by lowering catch limits.
First, folks would have to accept that many fisheries are in trouble, he continued. Then, they’d have to accept that something needs to be done.
“If we think it’s important enough, we will put forth the time and assets to fix it,” Blackwelder said.
Building public awareness about the poor health of the gulf and the rest of the globe’s oceans is part of the rally’s objective.
A more pressing concern is influencing proposed National Marine Fisheries Service guidance for fishery management.
The fishery ser vice’s National Standard 1 has been rewritten but has not made available for public comment, according Emily Stone of U.S. Public Interest Research Groups, an environmental organization.
Research Groups helped organize the rally that includes participants from charter boat operations to sociologists and many other groups. It has a number of suggestions, which include:
–Science-based catch limits with safety buffers. The buffers would assume catch data is incomplete or inaccurate, so the number of fish kept has a greater chance of being below the level of overfishing.
–Hold fishery managers accountable for regulations that fail to curb overfishing. –Adapt ecosystem-based management that takes into consideration, among other factors, the availability of animals serving as food for gamefish.
“Unfortunately, in the past, regulations have been relatively weak. They had quite a few loopholes,” Stone said.
Daily News Staff Writer Mladen Rudman can be reached at 863-1111, Ext. 1443.
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