Healthy Oceans Require Healthy Policy
Our country has been making serious strides in rebuilding some of our most threatened fish species, but key members of Congress are now threatening to undo that progress and take us in the other direction. Luckily, we all have the opportunity to fight back.
Over the last several decades, our understanding of the ocean has deepened tremendously, although sometimes we have had to learn the hard way that the ocean is not inexhaustible. Decades of intense overfishing have led to severe declines in populations of fish, including Atlantic cod, Gulf of Mexico red snapper, and many Pacific coast rockfishes. Thankfully, we have learned a fair amount about how to restore the health of the ocean, and some of that knowledge has been reflected in updates to our nation’s primary fishing law, the Magnuson-Stevens Act, originally passed in 1976.…