At a time when fisheries are suffering, and environmental review and public feedback on fisheries management are crucial, the Bush administration is proposing to make an end run around both -- which could have catastrophic effects on management of crucial resources such as sea turtles, corals, and valuable fish populations.
When Congress reauthorized the Magnuson-Stevens Act in 2006, it directed the National Marine Fisheries Service to update its environmental review procedures to make them consistent with National Environmental Policy Act requirements. The Act requires the agency to carefully consider the environmental impacts of how it manages federal fisheries and make informed choices based on science and public input. This law has worked for 30 years to ensure sound management of public natural resources such as sea turtles, corals, and valuable fish populations.
Unfortunately, the agency's proposed rule flies in the face of everything the law requires. Instead of streamlining environmental review of fisheries management, the Fisheries Service's proposed rule creates a cumbersome system that makes compliance difficult. In addition, the proposed rule makes it hard for citizens to weigh in by vastly shortening public comment periods from a mandatory 45 days to as little as two weeks, and introduces multiple new ways for fishery managers to avoid environmental review and public participation entirely. Moreover, the rule would put environmental review authority in the hands of fishery management councils — advisory bodies largely made up of appointed members with significant financial interests in the fisheries they manage — rather than the agency accountable to the public for the state of our fisheries.
The Fisheries Service's proposed rule threatens the health of our fisheries and the public's ability to do anything about it. Worse yet, it sets an ominous precedent for the government to roll back crucial NEPA requirements for other categories of agency actions across both land and sea.
Please tell the agency to take back these flawed regulations and develop new regulations that comply with the spirit and letter of the Act.
