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The History of the NFCC Coverage of fisheries was limited The circle of folks in the American fishery management policy world is a small one by national policy standards. Fishery managers, council members, coastal congressmen, and their constituents had the conversation pretty much to themselves until the mid-1980s. 
The decade from 1984 to 1994 was notable for increased activity by environmental groups on issues from incidental catch of marine mammals in fishing gear to the causes and effects of overfishing. As more voices joined the conversation about how we governed fishing in U.S. waters, it was inevitable that some would sound more shrill. Just as the circle of conversants about policy was a close one, the number of journalists covering fisheries issues was limited. With the exception of a handful of reporters writing for dailies in Boston and Seattle, the place to get the latest about fishery management was in newspapers and magazines devoted specifically to the topic: Commercial Fisheries News out of Massachusetts, National Fisherman in Maine, and Pacific Fishing and Alaska Fisherman's Journal, both published in Washington. The focus on bycatch One writer in particular began to focus on bycatch and incidental take, and on the way people in the environmental community and the fishing industry talked about those topics and each other's activity. In early 1994, Brad Warren, writing for National Fisherman, did a series of articles on bycatch, noting throughout that there were fishermen who were using their ingenuity to avoid catching animals like birds, dolphins, and seals, and that there were environmentalists who were willing to talk to such fishermen. The series was not only well received, but readers wanted more. Reaching out to his sources, Warren pulled together an advisory board of people who had in common their expertise as communicators, their willingness to focus on bycatch as a resource issue and not on personalities or individual motives, their commitment to building bridges between environmental activists and fishermen, and their desire to find solutions that met the needs of both camps. This group of volunteer advisors, with Warren in the lead, was to become the NFCC. The dialogue begins Hoddie Hildreth, owner of National Fisherman magazine, provided the money to publish a book, Win-Win Bycatch Solutions, which expanded on the series and set the stage for a national conference on bycatch held in conjunction with the 1994 Fish Expo in Seattle. The advisors and Warren pulled together a day-long program of speakers, panelists, and small group leaders that played to a standing-room-only audience that December in Seattle. 
Rollie Schmitten, then head of the National Marine Fisheries Service, was the keynoter and promised the help of the agency in implementing the ideas and strategies brought to light by the conferees. The conference was a breakthrough event for NFCC and the bycatch issue.Warren credits the conference not only with launching NFCC, but believes that dialogue begun there between leaders of the conservation community and the tuna industry in the Eastern Tropical Pacific helped build relationships that led to negotiation and eventually agreement on a new international regime governing tuna fishing operations and changes in U.S. law regarding "dolphin safe" tuna. Click here to read more. Solidifying the Base In the following year, 1995, NFCC conducted two bycatch workshops in Alaska, was commissioned to advise the National Marine Fisheries Service in development of a national bycatch strategy, spoke out on the topic at conferences and meetings all over the country, helped launch an international symposium "Solving Bycatch," and sold out of the book, Win-Win Bycatch Solutions. Subsequent years saw the organization solidify its base with consolidation of a board of directors and strengthen its infrastructure with bylaws, tax-exempt status, and additional grants and contracts. Warren describes NFCC's first two years as "exhilarating and sometimes exhausting" as the organization rose to the challenge of changing the tenor of the debate. "Too often," he wrote, "we find ourselves reaching for hammers when the work requires fine chisels. While some organizations portray [fishery] problems in the galvanizing terms of combat-urging the public to rally and smite wrong-doers-our mission has always been to find out how to work with fisheries that have real problems...It has been heartening to see fisheries leaders, conservationists, scientists, and other fisheries folk learning to cooperate on many issues, even in a time of sharpening competition for resources and bitter conflicts over allocation and conservation. The intensity of those conflicts has sometimes been almost numbing. But they illustrate clearly why the kind of bridge-building we do is necessary." NFCC continues that work today. |