IBM Computer, Laptops and Servers

18 MARINE FISHERIES CONGRESSIONAL REPORT CARD

Author: Ken Hinman
Who in the 105th Congress Is Working to Uphold Laws Crucialto Stopping the Assault on Our Fishery Resources - and Who's Working to Decimate Them?

Laptop Battery By Ken Hinman

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Desktop Computer The Sustainable Fisheries Act (SFA) of 1996 is the landmark legislation that amends the U.S. Fishery and Conservation Act to outlaw overfishing and bycatch. During a 1997 meeting between conservationists and members of the Clinton administration to discuss progress on carrying out the most critical new requirements of the SFA, one of the government's top fisheries officials posed a revealing question.

Notebooks What happened to the Marine Conservation Network? he asked.

Lenovo That alliance of 100 or so organizations responsible for persuading Congress to pass the SFA a year earlier hadn't been heard from since the act passed. But having changed fisheries law, he pointed out, wasn't enough. If the SFA weren't actually implemented, nothing - including peril faced by increasing numbers of marine fish species listed as overfished or threatened - would change. There were and are many who would have liked nothing better.

Hard Drive After all, in the year that followed enactment of the SFA, the implications of what Congress had really done in passing this legislation became increasingly clear. The statute, in no uncertain terms, requires fishery managers for the first time to stop overfishing wherever it occurs, restore all depleted stocks, minimize bycatch and give added protection to coastal habitats.

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Gateway As opponents understood this, they sought relief from Congress. (After all, if you want to change a script, you talk to its authors.) They hoped to persuade sympathetic legislators to tell the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) and the Regional Fishery Management Councils (which must set and enforce the law) that, well, the SFA doesn't really mean what it says after all.

Laptop Parts So administration officials came under mounting pressure from powerful members of Congress to implement the SFA in a way that would not protect fish stocks as it was originally intended to do. These legislators wanted officials to:

Software * Soften the way they would interpret the strictest provisions of the new law;

Hard Drives * Cut the fishing industry slack whenever possible; and

Electronics * Permit flexibility (read: leave loopholes) wherever they could.

Canon With the new law under assault from both the 105th Congress (1997-98) and the administration, saltwater fishermen and marine conservationists had to take up the fight once again in an attempt to keep from losing territory so hard-won in the 104th Congress. In the process, we learned anew which lawmakers are really our friends - and friends of beleaguered fish stocks - on Capitol Hill.

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Desktop Computers THE YEAR OF THE OCEAN

Think Pad In this third election-year edition of the Marine Fisheries Congressional Report Card, Sport Fishing and the National Coalition for Marine Conservation once again strive to inform readers about the defining issues before the current session of Congress. We review the issues and actions we believe will most directly affect the quality of fishing in the years ahead and grade those senators and representatives up for reelection this November who've played key roles in setting fisheries policy.

Repair With few new fisheries-related bills before the 105th Congress, a big part of this year's grades stemmed from how lawmakers helped or hindered implementation of the SFA - the number-one environmental bill enacted by Congress in the previous session, according to leaders of both parties. Who stood tall when the proverbial bullets began to fly, and who looked for cover?

Data Recovery Ironically, attempts by some in Congress to weaken the Sustainable Fisheries Act went largely unmentioned in the press, even as ocean issues in general were receiving unprecedented media attention. In 1997-98, both Congress and the White House were making a grand show of concern for living marine resources.

Cisco After all, 1998 is the International Year of the Ocean, a designation meant to draw global attention to the precarious state of the world's coasts and sea life. The United Nations estimates that three-fourths of the world's fish stocks are either fully fished, overfished, in decline or the object of recovery efforts. In the U.S., according to a September 1997 Report to Congress on the Status of U.S. Fisheries, 86 species off our shores are overfished.

Keyboard The American public, it turns out, is more aware of the plight of our oceans than ever before. In a national poll conducted last year by Sea Web, a marine education project of the Pew Charitable Trusts, 85 percent of those surveyed said that destruction of the ocean poses a threat to their quality of life. More than half (60 percent) said that the capacity of the sea to sustain life is diminishing because of man's activities. Half of those polled felt that we're taking too much out of the sea in terms of commercial fishing. A majority chose understanding the oceans - 71 percent of the earth's surface - as more important to their lives than exploring outer space.

Monitor THE OCEANS ACT

Desktop As the Sustainable Fisheries Act proved a high-water mark for the 104th Congress, the most heralded piece of new legislation to emerge from the 105th Congress is the Oceans Act. As Congress endeavors to take advantage (in both a positive and pejorative sense) of this Year of the Ocean, the Oceans Act is likely to pass Congress and be signed by the president this year.

Infosys What would this Oceans Act do? For one thing, assemble a blue ribbon commission to assess the nation's many, varied and often conflicting coastal and ocean programs and policies. The commission's ultimate purpose is to create a new ocean plan to, in the words of Rep. Sam Farr (D-CA), one of the bill's sponsors, lead us into the 21st century.

Refurbished Laptops The U.S. hasn't undertaken such a holistic look at national ocean policy in 30 years, and on one level, the Oceans Act, which has garnered broad, bipartisan support, is a breakthrough by helping move ocean issues to the top of the national agenda. A White House-sponsored conference held in June in Monterey, California, provided an unprecedented platform for politicians and environmentalists to air their support for more research and stronger efforts to protect marine resources.

Wipro But on another level, the bright light that politicians are shining on the ocean mustn't blind us to the job at hand. Commissions and studies are the easiest things for politicians to get behind because they carry no obligations. That's why the Oceans Act has the support not only of sport-fishing and environmental groups, but the nation's largest commercial fishing associations - including some trying to undermine the critical SFA. The shelves of my office, and I suspect the offices of all the bill's backers, are filled with government reports from the past 20 years that contain many good recommendations for action never implemented because our leaders in Washington lacked the political will.

Lap Top And political will brings us back to the all-important Sustainable Fisheries Act. It's difficult to imagine a new commission recommending, or the government adopting, standards for ending overfishing and rebuilding depleted stocks tougher than those already contained in the SFA.

Refurbished Looking ahead to the next millennium is all well and good. But what about the here and now? Implementing the anti-overfishing, bycatch reduction and recovery requirements of existing law should be our top priority in the Year of the Ocean.

Memory CONGRESSIONAL SUPPORT FOR THE

Intel SUSTAINABLE FISHERIES ACT ...

As400 Make no mistake: 1998 is a pivotal year for marine conservation and the future of saltwater fishing. The year 1996 will be remembered as the year we as a nation finally got serious about putting an end to overfishing. But what happens this year, when the Sustainable Fisheries Act amendments are actually implemented, will reveal just how serious we really are.

Averatec On January 16, Terry Garcia, Assistant Secretary of Commerce for Oceans and Atmosphere, summed up the heart and soul of the SFA when he declared: It is now against the law to overfish a fish species. Recovery plans for all species identified by the government as overfished must be completed by October, he added, to rebuild that species as soon as possible, but no longer than within 10 years with certain limited exceptions. The law also requires that all plans minimize bycatch and identify essential fish habitat for federal protection.

Hardware Two years ago Congress approved these new rules by a unanimous vote in the Senate and a 10-to-1 margin in the House. But for some congressmen, these changes are fine only up to a point - when they interrupt business as usual. But of course, interrupting business as usual was the whole point of the 1996 reforms.

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Storage ... GIVES WAY TO CONGRESSIONAL ATTACKS

Seagate The first point of attack by legislators on the Sustainable Fisheries Act: guidelines being prepared by NMFS to direct regional fishery management councils in implementing the SFA's new provisions. Two of the chief sponsors of the SFA, Sen. Ted Stevens and Rep. Don Young (both from Alaska), joined with a number of their colleagues (mostly from the Pacific Northwest) to warn NMFS it was going too far in its proposed rule to identify essential fish habitat. In particular, they feared it might affect activities such as timber and agriculture in coastal watersheds.

Computer Sales Senators Olympia Snowe (R-ME), John Breaux (D-LA), Trent Lott (R-MS) and others leaned on NMFS to be more flexible in setting overfishing standards. In essence, they argued for guidelines that would:

Computer Hardware * permit so-called minor stocks of fish to be overfished as part of a mixed stock fishery;

Printers * allow overfishing thresholds to be exceeded for short periods without triggering any action; and

Technology * permit open-ended rebuilding periods for our most overfished populations rather than rebuild within 10 years or as short a time as possible, as the SFA calls for.

Mainframe The second point of attack has been the congressional appropriations process. A common legislative tactic att-aches controversial riders to funding bills. These riders can then slip through and be approved as part of a popular spending package. Riders can be either straightforward edicts, such as language introduced by Gulf coast congressmen overturning regulations requiring shrimpers to use bycatch reduction devices, or death by defunding, such as language that would prevent the expenditure of any federal money to implement essential habitat rules.

Samsung This sort of legislating by the dark of night has become such a commonplace tactic by opponents of environmental regulation that a coalition of environmental groups held a special press conference in June to decry the practice.

Computer Repair Third and finally, if all other forms of coercion fail, there is the ultimate threat: fixing the statute itself. In a May 20 statement to the New England Council, Rep. Barney Frank (D-MA) objected to cutbacks in the scallop fishery proposed as part of a new rebuilding plan. Urging the council to reject the proposal, he warned ominously: I am convinced that the amendment before you, based as it is on science which has little popular support, and a rigid interpretation of the SFA, guarantees either litigation or a major effort to amend the SFA, or both. The Magnuson Act is up for reauthorization in 2000, and hearings may begin as early as next fall.

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Network SUPPORT FOR A CONSERVATION-MINDED

Digital Cameras CONGRESS

Desktops When Congress passed the SFA, it changed the face of fisheries management. But to some members of Congress, under pressure from the commercial fishing industry, it's still constituency casework. If federal fishery managers are allowed to start bending the rules, lowering their sights and compromising/accommodating too much, we'll quickly end up right back where we were before the Magnuson Act was rewritten.

Cognos Fortunately, a number of congressmen have risen to the challenge and are fighting to keep the SFA strong, along with other laws that protect marine fish and their coastal habitats. In most cases, these legislators are on our side because sport fishermen and other conservationists are working to keep them informed about threats to marine fisheries and supporting them whenever and wherever they can.

Hosting In fact, if there's one take-home lesson from this edition of the Marine Fisheries Congressional Report Card, it's that anglers can make members of Congress their allies - but only if they work hard to educate them and keep educating them about the enormous social and economic value of abundant fish populations to recreational fishing.

Netfinity Likewise, our senators and representatives can count on the support of great numbers of sport fishermen if they make themselves accessible and remain open-minded. They don't have to do what we want every time to earn a good grade, but their actions do need to show that they truly understand that conservation benefits all fishermen and all fish. If they understand that, then we want them to be reelected and to remain in Washington - and that's especially true next term. Then, U.S. fisheries laws will be up for renewal again, and Congress can either build on the progress we've made in recent years or succumb to the pressures to return to the bad old days.

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