The Obama administration will accept no more public input for a federal strategy that could prohibit U.S. citizens from fishing some of the nation’s oceans, coastal areas, Great Lakes, and even inland waters.
This announcement comes at the time when the situation supposedly still is “fluid” and the Interagency Ocean Policy Task Force still hasn’t issued its final report on zoning uses of these waters.
That’s a disappointment, but not really a surprise for fishing industry insiders who have negotiated for months with officials at the Council on Environmental Quality and bureaucrats on the task force. These angling advocates have come to suspect that public input into the process was a charade from the beginning.
ESPN
Of course it was a charade. Obama doesn’t give a damn about what the public thinks about anything. He’s demonstrated that pretty consistently throughout the past year.
So what is the point of this? The states have been managing the use of their waterways with little to no problem for over 200 years. Well, it turns out that this whole unconstitutional power grab is being orchestrated by the radical left environmental movement.
As ESPN previously reported, WWF, Greenpeace, Defenders of Wildlife, Pew Environment Group and others produced a document entitled “Transition Green” shortly after Obama was elected in 2008. What has happened since suggests that the task force has been in lockstep with that position paper.
Then in late summer, just after he created the task force, these groups produced “Recommendations for the Adoption and Implementation of an Oceans, Coasts, and Great Lakes National Policy.” This document makes repeated references to “overfishing,” but doesn’t once reference recreational angling, its importance, and its benefits, both to participants and the resource.
Additionally, some of these same organizations have revealed their anti-fishing bias by playing fast and loose with “facts,” in attempts to ban tackle containing lead in the United States and Canada.
That same tunnel vision, in which recreational angling and commercial fishing are indiscriminately lumped together as harmful to the resource, has persisted with the task force, despite protests by the angling industry.
As more evidence of collusion, the green groups began clamoring for an Executive Order to implement the task force’s recommendations even before the public comment period ended in February. Fishing advocates had no idea that this was coming.
The commercial and recreational fishing industries have already been taking a big hit in both North and South Carolina and the last thing we need is further encroachment by the Federal government. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has already exhibited plenty of incompetence in the way it enforces U.S. fisheries laws such to the effect that Congressman Walter Jones (R-NC-03) has called for a halt to all prosecutions of fishermen by the NOAA and a complete overhaul of how the laws are enforced.
Morlock fears that “what we’re seeing coming at us is an attempted dismantling of the science-based fish and wildlife model that has served us so well. There’s no basis in science for the agendas of these groups who are trying to push the public out of being able to fish and recreate.
“Conflicts (user) are overstated and problems are manufactured. It’s all just an excuse to put us off the water.”
In the wake of the task force’s framework document, the Congressional Sportsmen’s Foundation (CSF) and its partners in the U.S. Recreational Fishing & Boating Coalition against voiced their concerns to the administration.
“Some of the potential policy implications of this interim framework have the potential to be a real threat to recreational anglers who not only contribute billions of dollars to the economy and millions of dollars in tax revenues to support fisheries conservation, but who are also the backbone of the American fish and wildlife conservation ethic,” said CSF President Jeff Crane.
Morlock, a member of the CSF board, added, “There are over one million jobs in America supported coast to coast by recreational fishing. The task force has not included any accountability requirements in their reports for evaluating or mitigating how the new policies they are drafting will impact the fishing industry or related economies.
“Given that the scope of this process appears to include a new set of policies for all coastal and inland waters of the United States, the omission of economic considerations is inexcusable.”
This is not the only access issue threatening the public’s right to fish, but it definitely is the most serious, according to Chris Horton, national conservation director for BASS.
“With what’s being created, the same principles could apply inland as apply to the oceans,” he said. “Under the guise of ‘marine spatial planning’ entire watersheds could be shut down, even 2,000 miles up a river drainage from the ocean.
“Every angler needs to be aware because if it’s not happening in your backyard today or tomorrow, it will be eventually.
This is what happens when you put an out of touch ideologue beholden to radical special interests in the highest office in the land. The fact that Obama intends to implement this with an Executive Order completely bypassing Congress gives credence to the accusation that he is becoming an elected dictator, much like Hugo Chavez.
This won’t be used to just regulate fishing either. Rest assured that the bureaucratic entities created to manage all of this will also be used to thwart any oil or natural gas exploration off our coastal waters, thus effectively reinstating the Federal drilling ban that just expired less than two years ago.
There is already talk of a ban on bottom fishing all the way down the North and South Carolina coasts to Georgia. Thousands of jobs in these states can potentially be effected by this at a time when they are experiencing double digit unemployment rates. That aside, there is also the element of this being yet another chipping away at the block of individual freedom and liberty that Americans have enjoyed for over two centuries and that the President and this Congress spit on daily.
If this is put into place it seems like El Presidente will get to decide when and where you go fishing. With the industry being so large I am hoping this will end up in the Supreme Court with a Constitutional challenge if Obama makes good on this move.
