Fish Fight
Environmentalists vs. the fishing industry
in the Northwest Hawaiian Islands.

by Alan D. McNarie

Oceans are earth's last frontier. Almost no one lives in them, though the vast majority of the planet's human population lives nearby, and billions depend on them for food. But the world's oceans, including those around Hawai'i, have also been ruthlessly exploited, to the point where entire fisheries have collapsed. At least two such fisheries, for lobsters and pearl oysters, once existed in the Northwest Hawaiian Islands - the string of small, uninhabited islands and atolls that stretch for 1,200 miles from the main Hawaiian Islands to Midway and Kure.
The NWHI have recently been the recent subject of often-acrimonies legislative maneuvers between a coalition of conservationists, native Hawaiians and fishers who want the islands to become a permanent wildlife sanctuary, versus another coalition, composed mainly of the fishing industry, who want the islands kept open to further exploitation. Championing the commercial interests is the Western Pacific Regional Fishery Management Council (Wespac), a federal agency which manages fisheries in federal waters in the western Pacific. Wespac proposes to expand the existing bottomfish industry in the NWHI, reopen the lobster fishery, and establish new fisheries for precious coral and reef fish.
So far, the conservationists are winning. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, Wespac's parent agency, has already rejected one Wespac management proposal as "inconsistent" with the goals of the marine refuge.
Wespac's new proposal is couched in greener terms - touted as part of a "fishery ecosystem plan" for the entire Hawaiian archipelago. But under the veneer of eco-science, it's basically the same proposals that the agency has been pushing for years - despite opposition from NOAA, the federal courts, and even the Lingle administration and the White House.
Rep. Ed Case (D-2nd) has introduced a bill in Congress to create the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands National Marine Refuge. If successful, the law would strengthen the President's executive orders with the force of a Congressional mandate.
In the words of Case's bill, "The waters of the NWHI must be set aside as a fully protected national marine refuge, to preserve in perpetuity their unique and fragile ecosystems, habitats and communities of flora and fauna, as well as areas of traditional Hawaiian cultural significance."
Part of the price for establishing the refuge would be to buy the remaining nine commercial fishing permits in the island chain. Governor Linda Lingle has endorsed the buyout plan.
Last September, Lingle established a state marine refuge in the state controlled waters of the NWHI, with limited access and no fishing or other marine harvesting.
But the fight is far from over. The Bush administration needs to give its final okay for the reserve. Case needs the votes of conservative colleagues in the House and Senate. And Wespac is still lobbying to open the islands to wider commercial exploitation.
Ocean Yellowstone
In a speech introducing his bill, Case called the NWHI ann "ocean Yellowstone" and an "incredible remnant of a purer world."
The total land mass from all these islands and atolls combined is miniscule, but the acreage of reefs and shallow water is immense; all told, the island chain encompasses 131,800 square miles. The islands and reefs host more than 7,000 species of life, at least 25 percent of which live nowhere else on earth.
Most of the world's remaining Hawaiian monk seals live there (some scientific studies have linked the starvation of seal pups to the lobster fishery's crash). The tiny islets are also the main nesting ground for the honu, the green sea turtles, including those that are often seen grazing around the main Hawaiian Islands. Endangered honu'ea (hawksbill turtles), loggerhead and leatherback turtles also use the area. The turtles and seals share the islands with 14 million birds of 21 species. There were once even more bird species, but several were wiped out, along with many varieties of plants, when rats and rabbits were introduced to some of the islands. The rabbits have since died out or been eradicated, as have the rats on some islands.
Other species have also suffered. Long-line fishing boats, operating under NOAA fisheries guidelines that allowed ever-increasing "by-catch" takes of turtles, have so badly decimated the leatherbacks and other turtle species that the courts stepped in, placing huge swathes of the Pacific off-limits to long-liners in rulings that the industry has repeatedly challenged. (Instead of nets, long-line boats set out miles of baited hooks and lines.) Massive harvests of black-lipped pearl oysters from Pearl and Hermes Atolls in the 1920s left too few oysters to rebuild a viable population.
Although the NWHI have been consistently overfished, fish populations still reflect a much healthier balance than exists around the main Hawaiian Islands. In their booklet The Importance of Refuges for Fish Replenishment in Hawai'i, Charles Birkeland and Alan M. Friedlander point out that in some the less-fished NWHI ecosystems, the majority of biomass by weight is "apex predators" such as sharks and tuna; in the more heavily-fished main islands, limu-eating vegetarians are the norm.
The emphasis on "trophy fish" in the sport fishing industry has worked against fish stocks repopulating quickly, since in some species, larger females produce exponentially more eggs than smaller ones.
Culture Clash
A catastrophic shift in knowledge has taken place: our technology for removing massive amounts of fish from the ocean has grown rapidly, while much traditional knowledge of how to maintain fish populations has been lost or ignored. Traditional technology harvested one fish at a time - and was complimented by a huge body of traditional knowledge about how, when and where to fish.
"The restrictions on fishing were not based on quotas or amounts taken, but rather on times and places so as not to interfere with important processes such as spawning," note Birkeland and Friedlander. "By allowing the fish populations to replenish themselves, and by not interfering with important activities such as spawning, Hawaiian communities in the past were able to maintain the productivity and yield of the coral reef fisheries near their villages." Kapu also restricted the take of some more easily disrupted fish populations, or limited their consumption to ali'i.
"In ancient Hawaiian culture, a young fisherman was required to watch the older fishermen at work and to hold the catch, but he as not allowed to actually fish until he had years of training," add Birkeland and Friedlander. "He had to know the life history, behavior and ecology of the fishes before he was allowed to catch them…. However, Western culture, with its emphasis on freedom of the individual, is attractive and has had a major effect in undermining the structure of Pacific Island societies. Rather than obey the customs and strict regulations of the kupuna or elders, young fishermen now claim a right to fish as much as they please and anywhere they like."
The result has been catastropic. American culture evolved over four hundred years of pillage and expansion across a continent rich in resources. It then slammed into tiny islands with limited near-shore ecosystems, quickly developing the technology to plunder those environments - monofilament line, cheap nets, fish-finding SONAR, SCUBA, GPS - while disrupting traditional culture and losing, or ignoring, much of its accumulated wisdom about fish conservation.
The Hawaiian tradition of free access to the ocean also collided with one of the few Western practices that did seem to work: the establishment of marine protected areas or "no take zones" where no fishing was allowed. Marine protective areas sprang up along the coast of the Big Island during the 1990s, partly as a result of the aquarium fish trade, which was wiping out reef species, such as the yellow tang, in many areas. Today, about 35 percent of the Kona-Kohala coast is protected. The Kapoho tidepools are another protected area.
"It's very, very clear that marine protective areas have very productive effects," says Dr. Bill Walsh, a DLNR marine biologist who was a key player in establishing the Kona refuges. "It actually has improved fisheries in areas outside the protective areas."
Within the protected areas, he notes, the numbers of yellow tangs are up 113 percent. In areas not closed, numbers also increased by about 49 percent. The protective areas serve as nurseries, growing fish that expand out into the non-protective areas.
Walsh claims that the aquarium industry today is "catching more fish, they're getting more for them, they're making more money, and there's more people [catching fish]."
But the protective areas have been a bitter pill to swallow for some local fishers, especially native Hawaiians who fished in the same areas as generations of their ancestors. Why, some argue, did they have to give up their rights to fish, because others were overfishing and shipping their catches the U.S. or Germany for aquariums?
World's Largest Marine Refuge?
The state and federal governments both want to make the NWHI the world's largest protective area - a refuge even larger than Australia's Great Barrier Reef.
Some sections and types of wildlife in the region have enjoyed protection for a long time. In 1909, Theodore Roosevelt issued an executive order establishing the Hawiian Islands Bird Reservations around the NWHI. In 1940, President Franklin Roosevelt changed the name to Hawaiian Islands National Wildlife Refuge and broadened its mission to protecting all wildlife in the area. In 1988, Ronald Reagan designated Midway Atoll, then under Navy control, a National Wildlife Refuge; Bill Clinton transferred the atoll from the Navy to the National Park Service in 1996, and in 2000 issued an executive order creating the NWHI Coral Reef Ecosystem Reserve.
The current administration enacted interim measures to preserve the reef systems while preparing an EIS for the proposed sanctuary; meanwhile, NOAA released draft "goals and objectives" for the "longterm protection of the marine ecosystems in their natural character" and rejected Wespac's proposed precious coral fishery as antithetical to those goals.
Wespac has struck back with its "Fisheries Ecosystem Management Plan" which consolidates its individual, species-based management plans into one unified document, but "does not establish any new fisheries management regulations at this time."
It has launched its own set of hearings, preceded by a blitz of radio spots decrying the wildlife refuge plans as undermining native Hawaiian gathering and cultural rights (which the refuge plans specifically do not do).
The fishing lobby has also gone on the attack on the state level. House Bill 2881 would have required "the Department of Land and Natural Resources to demonstrate a scientific need prior to establishing new prohibitions or limitations on fishing in public fishing areas." But conservationists and the DLNR cried foul, saying that the criteria that the bill used would have been impossible to meet - effectually eliminating restricted- or no-fishing areas as a conservation tool.
H.B. 2881 died in committee, as did its Senate equivalent, S.B. 3047. Four of the five representitives (Evans, Herkes, Takamine and Tsuji) and one of the four senators (Kokubun) who introduced the respective bills are from Hawai'i Island.
A milder fisheries bill, H.B. 2857, was passed by the House after amendments took out some of what Young terms "the worst" language, and is currently before the Senate.
DLNR Chair Peter Young told the Journal that much of the language from H.B. 2881 came from a failed New Jersey initiative touted as a "freedom to fish" bill. In some cases, said Young, the scientific criteria would have forced his department to "study the entire Pacific."
"We're happy that the worst of the bad bills died," Young said.
The Cascadia Times, an Oregon-based environmental journal that has covered NWHI issues extensively, reports that Wespac representatives were seen leaving the offices of Rep. Ezra Kanoho (D.- Lihue, Koloa) and that Kanoho told Linda Paul of the Hawai'i Audubon Society that Wespac had written H.B. 2881. The Journal was unable to confirm this.
"It's been pretty clear that if they [Wespac] did not initiate it, they were certainly active in lobbying for it," Walsh said. "Western Pacific Fisheries Council is supposed to concentrate on federal fisheries concerns - three miles out. It doesn't seem appropriate for them to be meddling in state affairs."
Despite repeated attempts, we were unable to speak with Wespac Executive Director Kitty Simonds.
Rep. Dwight Takamine (D- N. Kohala, S. Kohala, Hamakua, N. Hilo, S. Hilo) told the Journal that his staff wrote Bill 2881, based on language from "statutes that had been implemented in other states."
Kanoho, Takamine said, had introduced similar legislation the year before, but that it had met sharp opposition from fishermen.
"We held that bill," Takamine said. "Ezra Kanoho of the Finance Committee [sic; Kanoho actually chairs the Committee on Water, Land and Ocean Resources] planned to have hearings throughout the state. My impression was his idea for those hearings was to educate people on what he was attempting to do in creating the preserve areas, so we would not have those kinds of clash…[but] rather than serving to bring the people together, some of those hearings were actually combative, which was not the intent…. In the meantime, some of my constituents, as well as others, generally from that sort of local fishing community, did express their concerns that led to the drafting of Bill 2881….
"I felt it was important that because there are so many residents in the state that sort of are recreational fishermen…that in this discussion, their views and concerns would be heard also," Takamine said.
Another Hawai'i Island supporter of 2881 was Rep. Cindy Evans (D.-N. Kohala, S. Kohala)
"I think he [Kanoho] really wanted to focus on marine managed areas because DLNR really likes that as a management tool," she told the Journal.
According to Evans, the fishing community wants to know how DLNR planned to manage the areas, and what the criteria were for closing an area to fishing.
Evans also noted that the fishermen weren't the only culprits in fish decline.
"What are the factors affecting the species?" she asked. "It could be storm water runoff, it could be invasive species…. The fishermen were bringing up that it's not just the fishermen."
But conservationists, both globally and locally, point out that no matter what's causing the shortage, taking more fish doesn't help.
In his essay "The Nature of Change," biologist Daniel P. Botkin maintains that nature is dynamic, constantly changing. The failure of fisheries, he says, perfectly illustrates that the "balance of nature" model is wrong.
"[Fisheries management] has been purposeful, well-meaning, but generally a failure... The decimation of the California sardine industry (immortalized in Steinbeck's Cannery Row) in the 1950s; the disastrous crash of the Peruvian anchovy industry in the 1970s, and the steep decline of Atlantic menhaden, cod and other commercially important species on the Grand Banks in the last quarter of the 20th Century are spectacular examples…. Fisheries' managers assumed the environment was constant, and based harvest levels on normal years… Such a faulty understanding of how nature works inevitably led to over-fishing during years of poor upwellings and other natural fluctuations, resulting in the general failure of the fisheries."
Evans said she had "never heard of Wespac," until those testifying at the hearings on H.B. 2881 accused Wespac of lobbying her.
Bill Walsh thinks that Evans was "duped."
The legislation, as originally written, he said, "would have put a burden of proof where every fish stock would have been shown to be improving, and if they were declining, you had to show why." In something as complex as a reef ecosystem, he said, such a high level of proof would be nearly impossible to obtain.
Walsh also noted that 2881 would have made fishing improvement the sole criterion for establishing a marine protective zone.
"When we moved to protect Kealakekua Bay, it wasn't that it would improve bottom fishing," he pointed out.
But both Walsh and Evans agreed on other matters. Both, for instance, saw the need for DOCARE, the DLNR's enforcement arm, to provide better enforcement of existing laws.
Walsh believes that part of that problem lies with Act 226, 1981 legislation that expanded DOCARE's role beyond resource enforcement to include policing drunks in state parks and busting pot-growers and other duties. As a result, he says, two-thirds of all DOCARE enforcement actions now are non-resource-related. He thinks that new legislation is needed to get DOCARE back to its original mission.
Another area of agreement is the need for a state recreational marine fishing license - not only to bring in more revenue, but to get better data. Some industry sources believe that the recreational fishing industry in Hawai'i is bigger than the commercial industry, yet much less is known about it. While commercial fishers must submit detailed catch records to the state, recreational fishers do not. Walsh pointed out that if a DOCARE officer wanted to look in a fisherman's cooler to see what he'd caught, the officer would need a warrant.
Evans agrees. "Some people think that if we just got a handle on how many people were out there, it would help," she told the Journal.
But all agree there are fewer fish than there used to be, and that more effective tools need to be found for managing that resource. Overall, notes Peter Young, fish stocks are declining "relative to species, relative to ecosystems and relative to geographic areas."
"I think the intention of everyone at the table was the same. They all want to preserve the fishery," maintains Evans. "Why would they want it to go away? They don't."

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