Visit the Pacific Northwest Coastal Conservation Association
Download the application form and hand it out wherever you go. These links will each print two applications on one 8.5" X 11" page. The first link is in PDF and the second is in JPG.
Read the paper I wrote in 1989 during one of the initiative petition drives to eliminate the nets (Click here.) When I began to seriously research this fishery, I was truly appalled at what I found. Frankly, it was difficult to stop at only the "Seven Reasons." The most astonishing thing to me was the history of the gillnetting monopoly. If you look at the historical roots, you'll see that the initial grant of this monopoly came about by outright fraud against the citizens of Oregon. The paper is now almost 20 years old, and I am saddened to see how little progress we've made to demand a non-lethal selective harvest method for anadromous fish in the Pacific Northwest. For pete's sake people, these fish come right back to where they were spawned. Why in the world do we need to put lethal nets out on mixed stocks including highly endangered Salmon and Steelhead runs? It is time to take a serious look at this fishery and ask why it was ever allowed in the first place.
4 comments:
Selective harvest will enable commercial and sport harvest of hatchery salmon on the Columbia river for years to come. It is the only way to protect native stocks and provide a sustainable harvest of hatchery stocks. Selective harvest is a win-win for everyone involved, and most of all for the salmon. Please, no more dead ESA listed fish from gill nets, it's got to stop. Thank you CCA for supporting selective harvest and looking out for "the fish".
So long as quotas and seasons for the Columbia River are based on allowable ESA impacts, we will kill right up to and oftentimes right past those allowable impacts.
There will be no conservation benefit whatsoever until we stop killing ESA fish.
Selective fishing kills just as many ESA fish, it just takes longer to do it.
Good for fishing, good for the fishing industry, but does nothing at all for ESA listed salmon and steelhead in the Columbia River.
Just as many will die.
Ending gillnetting will greatly benefit ESA listed and depressed stocks of salmon and steelhead. The indiscriminate killing of steelhead, a game fish, in commercial gear will end. Quotas and management of Columbia River salmon and steelhead will not "always" be based on ESA impacts if we act collectively to recover these weakened wild runs and work to have them delisted. Ending non-selective harvest is the urgently needed first step to reduce our 'footprint' on ESA listed stocks to put them on the road to recovery. The cannard that "just as many fish will die" is false and misleading and is being used as a scare tactic to divert people's attention from the effort to reduce our careless killing of ESA fish as bycatch in commercial net fisheries.
Post a Comment