The Next Shiny Fetish Object

[Boreas]

Originally Posted by Wasillaguy

Commercial fishing is another problem- somewhere around 70% of the returning salmon are caught in nets at the mouths of the rivers by purse seiners that motor up from Seattle every year. In 2014, commercial fishermen harvested 28.8 million sockeye, 557K chum, 266K coho, 1.3 million pink, and 13K kings. This is in Bristol Bay alone.

Now imagine the days before commercial fishing, when all of those fish would have run into the interior, some hundreds and hundreds of miles inland, where they die and are then eaten by birds, wolverine, fox, coyote, bear, etc. Any that was not consumed by animals served to fertilize the river banks, promoting growth of a dozen types of berries as well as willow (which the moose eat).
How much less wildlife lives in these areas today than when it was annually blessed with all this meat? The rivers and creeks are literally the veins that carry the life blood of the interior. Taking the fish at the mouth is like applying a tourniquet.

Actually, large scale commercial fishing has been going on for a round 1,000 years. Long before Columbus, Basque fisherman, among others, traveled all the way to North America after Atlantic cod and other fish. When the continent was finally settled, the fish stocks were truly amazing and stayed that way until the middle of the last century.

The problem isn't commercial fishing per se. Rather, it's largely unregulated commercial fishing with catch limits that are unsustainable and licensing technologies like drift nets that decimate sea life that are the problem.

We need sensible regulation, designed to ensure healthy plentiful stocks in the long term instead of maximizing catches and profits for fleet owners and damn the consequences. We could start by outlawing purse seiners in favor of stern trawlers (no pairs), instituting lower sustainable limits and instituting a rotating no-go system where a given river mouth is off-limits for a season or two or three, then reopened and the next in rotation closed.

The Maryland oyster harvest in the Chesapeake Bay must be done under sail. It's a supremely elegant way to sustain a marine population. Maybe Alaska could require that the marine salmon harvest be accomplished by kayak.