Spitting In The Ocean
DNR secretary quizzed on state’s oyster program…
That’s the headline in the Sunday edition of our hometown newspaper, The Star-Democrat. As is so often the case in local papers with a clientele to consider, it is commentary posing as reporting. Its author betrays his preferences in his first sentence, noting that, in this fight it is "watermen against bureaucrats".
Gosh, I wonder which side he is on. The free-ranging, hardworking, last-of-the-cowboys watermen, or the faceless, mindless, paper-pushing bureaucrats?
Let’s think about those bureaucrats. Could they also be described as resource managers? Paid stewards of natural endowments that belong to all the people of Maryland? Are they the ones who are supposed to use the best empirical information available to make informed decisions for managing fishery resources?
If you were going to describe the bureaucrats that way, then you would then have to take a second look at the watermen. Free to do what? Harvest oysters that are only there because of stocking efforts financed by the taxpayers of the state (and implemented by those bureaucrats)? Free to continue harvesting oysters just as hard as they please, regardless of whether stocks are being decimated by diseases in addition to their harvesting? Free to fish the resource down to nothing?
After briefly describing the State’s plan to encourage aquaculture, close some productive bottom, and more carefully managing oyster harvests in the wild fishery, the article goes on to report a series of self-serving options and opinions from watermen with a vested interest in the outcome. More power dredging, better shell, let us be in on all of the decisions, etc.
This listing is familiar to anyone who has traveled among watermen and DNR staff and runs very true to the incentives that motivate either group. The watermen care about the current year, because now is when they have to pay the mortgage. The DNR staffer is told to manage over a longer time horizon than just the current season. Now that we are about at the end of the oyster fishery, managers have determined that it is time to take the hard choices. But the waterman still has to pay his mortgage. And, the folks at DNR will still be drawing their salaries, regardless.
There is something inequitable about being on the short end of the stick. Nobody likes it. But allowing watermen to hit oysters as hard as they want is what has gotten us where we are today. Allowing them to continue to drive down stocks may provide a few of them sustenance this year, but the price that we pay for that is fewer oysters next year, and the year after that. If we want to change where we are heading, we will have to change what we are doing.
Three years ago, when I was describing the situation in Maryland’s oyster fishery to a couple of friends, they both agreed that it would soon get down to what the buy-out price would be. I guess it depends on your definition of how long "soon" takes to get here, but it seems to me that this discussion hasn’t really started yet. How rotten do the taxpayers feel about the bad luck of those watermen who have come along at the end of the party? What do we think is an "equitable" fix for their bad luck?