OCEAN
OF TROUBLE
“I’m going nuts,” Mirarchi says.
“I’m going all around to different meetings and talking to everybody, from
regulators to congressmen to other fishermen to fishery associations, and everybody says, ‘We don’t know how to fix
this.’ None of us, individually — nobody
knows how to fix this.”
At the end of April, despite weeks of
protests by fisherman and local politicians, federal regulators announced that
they would try to fix it, at least in part, by
maintaining steep cuts in catch limits for
the 2013-2015 fishing seasons. Limits on
cod, among the most historic and lucrative species associated with these waters,
were set 78 percent below 2012 levels for
the Gulf of Maine and 61 percent below
last year’s mark for Georges Bank. Varieties of yellowtail and witch flounder, haddock and American plaice have also seen
dramatically lower catch limits.
Many fishermen argue that the fish
are more plentiful than these cuts suggest, and that environmental groups and
government scientists, who conspired
to implement a new system for divvying
up catch quotas among local fishermen
in 2010, are simply inept and unable to
provide an accurate measurement of fish
abundance. But others suggest that the
very real effects of climate change are
now being made plain in New England’s
waters, as cod and other species seek
out more comfortable conditions.
HUFFINGTON
06.23.13
Mirarchi, who has acquired the sort
of wry, world-weary temperament that
often comes with a profession at the
nexus of so many opposing interests, says
there’s lots of blame to go around. But
until scientists and regulators get a grip
on how the ocean is changing, he adds,
one of the planet’s most vital food sources — and the multibillion-dollar industry
built around it — hangs in the balance.
As the new fishing season opened
on May 1, researchers were reporting
that atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide had topped 400 parts per
million — higher than at any point in
human history. Mirarchi, meanwhile,
once again made the trek down to the
Scituate town pier and boarded his
boat — not to fish, but to paint.
“Something is different out there. You
can call it climate change or whatever
you want, but the whole thing is a mess,”
he says. “They project some fish as being
abundant but we can’t catch them. They
project the others as being scarce and we
can’t get away from them. There’s a real
disconnect and we’re not able to put the
two halves together to make it work very
well at all.
“And,” he says, “it’s getting worse.”
A BRUTAL EFFICIENCY
It may not be revelatory to note that fish
are a crucial source of nutrition to the
human animal, though it’s an easy fact