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04 Feb 2001 - 26 May 2016

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Various fishery conservation oriented articles

We're back on it - doing a lot of thinking about what's important in fisheries management and what's not so important. Primarily, we're trying to decide if our personal preferences in fisheries management is important enough to prohibit our promoting recreational industry based fishing organizations. It's a difficult question. Yes, these organizations do fight to for access and do fight to make sure we're allowed to keep fish. But at what cost? Many folks are under the mistaken impression that because some organizations take recreational angler's money that they are only representing recreational angler's best interests. What people don't often realize is that for these organizations to succeed, they need to represent a lot of people - they need you and I to become members. Yet in some cases, the very organizations were developed by recreational industry in order to promote and protect the industry's needs - not the needs of the individual anglers. The "bycatch" if you will, of promoting and protecting the recreational fishing industry is that, much of the time, the recreational angler also benefits. We like to look at these groups as "conservation organizations" - but that's not always the case - many times these organizations primary concern is keeping their large corporate sponsors, even their very founders, happy. In general, this is not always what's best for the individual recreational anglers - or the fish. There have been opportunities to do some real conservation good in certain decisions - your dollars were used to promote harvest instead of promoting conservation. At critical times when something truly good for a species could have been done, harvest was increased and/or management guidelines relaxed. Is this what we think of when we think of "conservation orgs"? It's not how I used to picture them, but then again, I've always been cynical.

This is where my dilemma starts - the organizations that are most powerful and most able to do some good are also the very ones that always seem to be pro-harvest instead of pro-conservation. It's the nature of the beast. Industry will throw support and monies at organizations that they feel are promoting their positions - and currently, as misguided as it seems, most recreational industry apparently feels that harvesting more fish is better than promoting fishing for sport. So organizations that try to reduce harvest or push for tighter management are deemed "elitists" and they receive no support from the very industry that would reap the financial rewards of healthier fish stocks - the recreational industry. People will pay more and travel further to catch more and bigger fish - even if they have to release most of them!

So the dilemma continues - do we support and promote recreational industry based organizations because our support will potentially help them become even stronger? Or do we support non-industry based organizations in the hopes that eventually, enough groups will realize how short sighted it is to continually increase harvest and will also get behind non-industry orgs? My gut tells me that it would be most advantageous to support those that are already strong - making them stronger would help us all in the recreational/commercial allocation battles. My heart tells me to promote organizations that I can truly align myself with in their fisheries management goals. It's either pro-industry at the expense of higher mortality but with the financial support of the industry - or pro-fish at the expense of being the under funded, under supported step child with little financial support from the recreational industry? This is where we're currently stuck :-)

Sincerely,

Tim Surgent and StripersOnline