From CivilEats.com
The dismantling of the once expansive agency will not only affect fisheries but also the oceans and weather forecasting. Across the U.S., fishers are already feeling the impact.
On a cold, bright April day, Sarah Schumann and Dean Pesante are painting the bottom of their fishing boat, the 38-foot Oceana, to prevent barnacles and weeds from attaching. They’re almost ready for the spring fishing season at Point Judith, Rhode Island, New England’s second most valuable fishing port.
Schumann and Pesante harvest bluefish, dogfish, scup, and bonito using gillnets that they set daily at the mouth of the Narragansett Bay in Rhode Island Sound.
“Our income and catch have dropped about 30 percent over the last four years,” Pesante told Civil Eats. They’ve caught fewer bluefish in the summer season and found far fewer bluefish during the fall run out of the bay. “We didn’t even reach the quota with what we were landing,” he said.
There are multiple factors that likely contribute to the declining bluefish catch, including rapidly warming ocean waters, which affect fish migration and behavior; dredging to lay cables for offshore wind turbines, which disrupts fish habitat; and a reduced quota for fishers, which explains some but not all of the lowered catch.
“We are looking at an effort to dismantle NOAA as it has functioned for the past few decades.”
For small commercial fishers like Pesante and Schumann, it’s become harder to make a living, and it could get a lot worse. Deep cuts to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the sprawling federal agency charged with monitoring and conserving fish stocks, managing coastal waters, and predicting changes in climate, weather, and the oceans—which commercial fishers rely on for day-to-day as well as seasonal forecasts—threaten the long-term viability of America’s $183 billion commercial fishing industry and the 1.6 million jobs it supports.
Schumann, who founded the Fishery Friendly Climate Action Campaign to give fishermen a voice in advocating climate solutions that work for them, spoke at a House Natural Resource Committee hearing in April about the NOAA cuts.
Though initially buoyed by the Trump administration’s pause on new leases for offshore wind, and its call for a more thorough review process that would heed community concerns, Schumann said she quickly became dismayed by the administration’s wrecking-ball approach to NOAA.
“These cuts will bog down the agency’s ability to serve the public and fishermen at a time when we desperately need—because of climate change—faster, more nimble, and more collaborative data collection and decision making,” she said.