Many of the long cards in the 1ac (including ones that have tags that start with ) are useful to answer the counterplan in the packet

Fish stocks being rebuilt now

For over a century, the major bodies of water surrounding the United States were drastically overfished. “Prior to 1976, there was no federal legislation that managed U.S. fisheries,” says Ted Morton, the director of Federal US Oceans at the Pew Charitable Trusts, a nonprofit environmental organization. “Fishing was going on, but there was no management system in place that was encompassing all of US waters.” As a result, many groups of fish, like the famous cod or the popular red snapper, were depleted beyond sustainable levels.

Starting in 1997, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) began tracking the status of fish populations with the help of various research institutions and fisheries. What they found was somewhat startling: not only were the vast majority of fish populations overfished, but there were significant regional differences between the east and west coasts.

Knowing the Score

Starting in 2005, NOAA assigned a number to each “fish stock”– a group of single fish species that is considered reproductively independent– to assess its overall health. That number, called a Fish Stock Sustainability Index (FSSI), ranges from 0 to 4 to indicate the fish’s population and known status. If a stock has a higher FSSI number, it is generally in healthier shape and less subject to overfishing. NOAA issues quarterly reports in collaboration with a number different research institutions around the country .

Armed with the FSSI, NOAA started setting annual catch limits for each fish stock, measured by weight. This has been the most successful attempt to oversee a universal reduction in overfishing, says Karen Greene, a representative from NOAA’s Office of Sustainable Fisheries. Since 2000, overall FSSI scores have almost doubled.

Researchers toiled over the past few decades to determine how to keep fish populations sustainable – just how many fish can be removed so that the stock’s reproductive members can keep the population stable. But according to Greene, the process hasn’t been smooth; the initial catch limits are still “a very crude tool” for researchers to understand how much a stock is being overfished.

Coastal Debate

While administrators on the East Coast have spent years tinkering with their catch limits, the West Coast and Alaska already had a leg up in making their stocks sustainable because, according to Greene, catch limits have been in place for a long time. “They have highly productive fisheries there, so they don’t have chronic overfishing problem like in New England,” she says. NOAA biologist Kristan Blackhart agrees, crediting the region’s success to the directors’ focus on streamlining the stock assessment process and reducing bureaucratic excesses.

The NOAA report for the last quarter of 2013 shows that FSSI scores of fish stocks in the Pacific are just slightly higher than those of Atlantic stocks.

Atlantic Pacific

Total FSSI 325.5 168.5

Total number of entries 125 63

Average FSSI score 2.604 2.675

Although the scores are almost equal now, the scores from the East Coast have changed more dramatically in the past decade because those stocks had been overfished longer than any other ocean around the U.S. “There is a longer history of fishing in Northeast, ” Morton says. “It’s really been centuries of effort, even prior to colonial times.” Despite significant progress, many fish stocks are still overfished.

White hake populations are proof that NOAA’s catch limits are working. The less white hake that’s caught, the more that exist in the seas. As NOAA has determined better catch limits, the hake has slowly recovered. Over time, momentum builds: the more fish that are left in the water, the more that can reproduce and augment the stock’s population.

In stark contrast to the white hake, the blue marlin population continues to plummet. A large, popular fish spanning from the coasts of Argentina to Nova Scotia, blue marlin are vulnerable in countries with fewer catch regulations. Rebuilding this population, Greene says, will depend a combined international effort to curtail overfishing.

“A Success in the Making”

Calculated from the FSSI data from late 2013, only 22 percent of stocks have management strategies listed as, “continue rebuilding” or “reduce mortality.” This means the other 78 percent are in good shape and well on their way to being sustainable if they’re not there already.

“I think it’s a success in the making,” says Morton. “As we are transitioning, we are finding out more and more about the status of our fisheries. But we still have to take strides to be sure we have good data to effectively manage them.”

It should be emphasized that as fish stocks continue to rebuild, the FSSI scores won’t necessarily show it. “The trend line is really going to start flattening out,” Greene says. Finely-tuned catch limits for overfished stocks will elevate FSSI scores to their maximum. The improvement on this scale may not be as pronounced, Greene says, but the overall stocks will be healthier. “A lot of scientists say that we’ve already reached the limit in the amount of wild fish that [can be caught sustainably],” Morton says. “We have to be smart about our management and thinking about the needs of future generations.

Aff ev is too alarmist --- overhyping the problem decreases support to address it

I am no Pollyanna — the public’s growing disconnect from climate issues troubles me deeply. But when scientists analyze and extrapolate data using methods that are open to debate and then firmly conclude with statements such as, “Our analyses suggest that business-as-usual would foreshadow serious threats to global food security, coastal water quality, and ecosystem stability, affecting current and future generations,” I wonder what is being accomplished? Have we not learned that scaring people paralyzes them instead of motivating them to act?

For The Conservancy’s science magazine, Science Chronicles, the world renowned fisheries biologist Ray Hilborn just wrote a fascinating essay examining the doom-and-gloom rhetoric surrounding the state of marine fisheries. For sure, there is another side to the story, and there are scientists who would disagree with Ray. But it is important that the conservation community and the public learn to think skeptically about messages of a forthcoming apocalypse as well as about messages of “everything is wonderful.” Our marine fisheries are too important to the world’s economy and food supply to waste energy on emotional rhetoric — our oceans demand cool-headed analyses and data-based solutions that work. Ray’s essay (reprinted below) about why all the world’s fisheries are not collapsing is a good place to start.

No overall fishing collapse --- positive trend

It's personal as well as scientific.

"I have actually given thought to whether I will be hosting a seafood party then," Worm said, meaning 2048.

Ray Hilborn of the University of Washington challenged Worm's original report, leading the two — plus 19 other researchers — to launch the study that led to the new findings. They're being published in Friday's edition of the journal Science.

The news isn't all good.

Of 10 areas of the world that were studied, significant overfishing continues in three, but steps have been taken to curb excesses in five others, Hilborn and Worm report. The other two were not a problem in either study.

This is based on the best study

The research was funded by the National Science Foundation and the University of California, Santa Barbara.

Many fish stocks being rebuilt now --- they overlook more optimistic data

Hilborn, 10 --- Professor, Aquatic and Fishery Sciences, University of Washington (November 2010, Ray, “Apocalypse Forestalled: Why All the World’s Fisheries Aren’t Collapsing,” http://www.atsea.org/doc/Hilborn%202010%20Science%20Chronicles%202010-11-1.pdf, JMP)

***Note NCEAS = National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis
The database generated by the NCEAS group and subsequent analysis has shown that many of the assumptions fueling the standard apocalyptic scenarios painted by the gloom-and-doom proponents are untrue:

• For instance, the widespread notion that fishermen generally sequentially deplete food webs (Pauly et al. 1998) — starting with the predators and working their way down — is simply not supported by data.

• Declining trophic level of fishery landings is just as often a result of new fisheries developing rather than old ones collapsing (Essington et al. 2006).

• Catch data also show that fishing patterns are driven by economics, with trophic level a poor predictor of exploitation history (Sethi et al. 2010).

• Furthermore, the mean trophic level of marine ecosystems is unrelated to (or even negatively correlated with) the trophic level of fishery landings (Branch et al. 2010).

• And the oft-cited assessment that the large fish of the oceans were collapsed by 1980 (Myers and Worm 2003) is totally inconsistent with the database we have assembled — for instance, world tuna stocks in total are at present well above the level that would produce maximum sustained yield, except bluefin tuna and some other billfish that are depleted (Hutchings 2010).

Nevertheless, many in the marine conservation community appear unwilling to accept these results, continue to insist that all fish may be gone by 2048, and use declining catches in fisheries where regulations have reduced catches as indications of stock collapse.

No one argues that all fisheries are well-managed, and so far we do not have abundance estimates for many parts of the world, especially Asia and Africa. Using the catch-based methods of Worm et al. (2006) and Pauly, these areas appear to have fewer stock collapses and overfished stocks than in the areas for which we have abundance data. However, we do not know if these areas have been reducing exploitation rates or if they are still increasing.

Finally, in places without strong central government control of fishing, there is broad agreement that community-based comanagement can be effective. For these fisheries, management tools are very different than those used for industrial fishery stocks, and MPAs are here often a key ingredient. The lessons from the Worm et al. (2009) paper about what works to rebuild fish stocks are applicable to industrial fisheries, but probably not to the small-scale fisheries that support many fishing communities.

There is considerable room for policy debate about where we want to be in the tradeoff between yield and environmental impact of fishing. There is no denying that sustainable fishing changes ecosystems, and that different societies will almost certainly make different choices about how much environmental change they will accept in return for sustainable food production. But science cannot provide the answers for this debate; it can only evaluate the tradeoffs.

My perspective is that we need to treat fisheries like medical diagnoses. We must identify which fisheries are in trouble and find the cures for those individual fisheries. The evidence is strong that we can and are rebuilding stocks in many places. Let us accept that progress and identify the problem stocks and how to fix them.

Apocalyptic assertions that fisheries management is failing are counterproductive — not only because these assertions are untrue, but because they fail to recognize the long, hard work of fishery managers, scientists and stakeholders in the many places where management is working. While the gloom-and-doom advocates have been attracting public attention and press coverage, thousands of people — decried by Pauly (2009b) as agents of the commercial fishing interests — have worked through years of meetings and painful catch and effort reductions to lower fishing pressure and successfully rebuild fisheries. SC

Fisheries recovering now

Zabarenko, 9 --- Environment Correspondent (7/30/2009, Deborah, “World fisheries collapse can be averted – study,” http://www.reuters.com/article/2009/07/30/idUSN30463, JMP)
WASHINGTON, July 30 (Reuters) - The world's commercial fisheries, pressured by overfishing and threatened with possible collapse by mid-century, could be rebuilt with careful management, researchers reported on Thursday.

In fact, a fisheries expert who in 2006 predicted total global collapse of fish and seafood populations by 2048 is more optimistic of recovery, based on a wide-ranging two-year study by scientists in North and South America, Africa, Australia and New Zealand.

Still, 63 percent of fish stocks worldwide need to be rebuilt, the researchers said.

"I am somewhat more hopeful that we will be in a better state ... than what we originally predicted, simply because I see that we have the management tools that are proven to work," said Boris Worm of Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada. He is a co-author of a paper in the journal Science and also an author of the pessimistic 2006 report.

These tools include: restrictions on gear like nets so that smaller, younger fish can escape; limits on the total allowable catch; closing some areas to fishing; certifying fisheries as sustainable; offering shares of the total allowable catch to each person who fishes in a specified area.

Worm's optimism was provisional, however, because the current research only looked at about one-quarter of the world's marine ecosystems, mostly in the developed world where data is plentiful and management can be monitored and enforced.

Of the 10 major ecosystems they studied, the scientists found five marine areas have cut the average percentage of fish they take, relative to estimates of the total number of fish. Two other ecosystems were never overexploited, leaving three areas overexploited.

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