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EDITORIAL: No Special Treatment: Federal Fishing Rules Shouldn't Get Environmental Law Exemption

Posted on: Monday, 5 June 2006, 12:00 CDT

By Anchorage Daily News, Alaska

Jun. 5--Should the rules for the nation's offshore fisheries be exempt from the long-standing law that requires thorough review of federal agency actions affecting the environment?

Some key congressmen, including Alaska's Rep. Don Young, think so. They support an update of the nation's fisheries law that would exempt federal fishing rules from the National Environmental Policy Act. That decades-old law is the one that requires environmental impact statements.

Rep. Young and others contend that requiring those environmental studies duplicates protections in federal fishing laws and gives litigation-happy greenies a tool for launching lawsuits that tie up fisheries. A bill that includes the environmental law exemption for fisheries cleared the House Resources Committee on May 17.

No doubt every industry would welcome a similar break. If fishing bureaucrats don't have to follow the nation's most basic environmental law when writing their rules, how can the feds say no to exemptions for other industries?

Good question. The environmental exemption for fisheries is a misguided move.

An environmental impact statement requires two main things that other federal fishing laws don't. When making their decisions, managers have to consider a reasonable range of alternatives, including no action at all. And they are supposed to consider the cumulative effects their decision will have on the environment over time.

Those are pretty basic considerations. If an agency can't answer them, it can't make a well-informed decision.

But then, making well-informed decisions is not a hallmark of current federal fishing management. Outside of Alaska, the regional councils that set federal fishing rules repeatedly, stubbornly allow overfishing. Nationwide, dozens of stocks are in trouble. In more than 100 commercial fisheries, the government has no idea what the health of the stock is. If anything, an update of fishing laws should include more respect for environmental concerns, not less.

It's not as if the current level of environmental review has tied up the nation's fisheries in knots. From 2002 into early 2005, the National Marine Fisheries Service prevailed in all eight U.S. District Court rulings on environmental challenges to fisheries decisions. By contrast, the agency had won only 42 percent of those claims from 1996 to 2002. Clearly, the agency is learning to do a better job.

Yes, federal fishery managers sometimes face conflicting timelines and public comment requirements imposed by two different sets of laws. The rules for doing an environmental impact statement don't always mesh well with the time-sensitive process of setting rules for fishing seasons.

Alaska Sen. Ted Stevens has embraced a more constructive approach for solving that problem. His proposed update of federal law directs regional fishery councils and the federal management agency to develop a public review process that harmonizes any conflicts between the two laws.

The intent is to allow managers to set rules in time to start a particular fishing season. Small fixes in timelines and public outreach requirements shouldn't be a problem.

But give the nation's fisheries a wholesale exemption from the nation's most basic environmental law? That would be a dangerous step backward. It would undermine the law that has helped the nation clean up its environmental act, and it would risk pushing the nation's troubled fisheries closer to irreversible ruin.

BOTTOM LINE: The nation's fisheries don't need a special exemption from the nation's basic environmental law.

Ditch or creek?

On a recent walk along Airport Heights Road, near the Northway Mall, I noticed a ribbon of running water at the bottom of a deep roadside ditch. When I saw a duck hunkered down on the grass just above the water, I got curious. Could this be a creek?

If it was, it obviously hadn't made the list for the May 20 citywide creek cleanup. Like most Anchorage roadsides, it had a good collection of plastic bags and bottles, plus a few odds and ends of junk.

I followed the water "upstream," north to the Glenn Highway and then east along the backside of the Northway Mall. In some spots, the water was little more than a foot wide, and it was never more than a foot deep. Elsewhere, it spread out to fill a shallow grassy swath about 10 feet wide. Always there was at least a slight trace of a current, and the water was varying shades of brown. At one point, someone had thoughtfully thrown down an abandoned tabletop to make a footbridge.

Back near the Airport Heights fire station, the water made a sharp right-hand turn into a culvert under the road. On the other side of the road -- nothing. The water had disappeared underground, behind a chain link fence, headed in the general direction of Alaska Regional Hospital and the old Merrill Field landfill. There is a branch of Chester Creek that used to run near the landfill. Could this water be part of that?

Holly Kent of the Anchorage Waterways Council thought it might be the remnant of that creek, but she wasn't sure. It didn't show on the stream map she had. She told me about her group's new public service ad, on a People Mover bus, prompting more awareness of city waterways by telling people, "It's not a ditch, it's a creek." She laughed. "Sometimes it can be hard to tell the difference."

Mark Madden, an engineer at the city's solid waste department, knew the difference. "Officially it is North Fork of Chester Creek," he said. It disappears at Airport Heights because it was put in a 60-inch underground pipe and steered away from the Merrill Field landfill. It resurfaces near Sitka Street Park and flows into Chester Creek.

So that duck I saw wasn't a crazy quacker who didn't know better than to hang out by the side of a busy road next to a near-trickle of muddy water. He was homing in on what for his kin used to be home.

-- Matt Zencey

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Copyright (c) 2006, Anchorage Daily News, Alaska

Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune Business News.

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Source: Anchorage Daily News

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