Tag Archives: Northwest Atlantic Marine Alliance community organizer Brett Tolley
US Coastal Communities Fight for Space for Small-scale Fishermen
U.S. coastal waters are a public good increasingly at risk of privatization, threatening local economies that have depended on the sea for generations, fishermen and environmental advocates warned. Critics point to efforts to open up waters to industrial-scale fish farms, (offshore wind farms), a federal permit system they say is stacked against small or new operators, and even coastal real estate development squeezing out independent businesses. “There is another real estate grab, but it’s in the ocean,” said Jason Jarvis, a commercial fisherman in Rhode Island who has been fishing for three decades and also sits on the board of the North American Marine Alliance (NAMA), a national network that seeks to boost fishing communities. “This is a gold rush,” said Crystal Canney, executive director of Protect Maine’s Fishing Heritage Foundation, which has worked on model legislation to help towns push back. The efforts are prompting inquiries from concerned communities in other coastal states, she said. “The questions are really, do we have any rights?” more, >>CLICK TO READ<< 12:30
At U.N. Ocean Conference – Brett Tolley Touts Small-scale Fisheries
Fisheries activist Brett Tolley of Chatham has told many people about the plight of small-scale fishermen like his father, who left the industry because he couldn’t compete with big corporate interests. Last week, he told that story to world leaders in a special forum at the United Nations in New York.,, “We can’t buy our way out of this problem,” he said. The government rules that regulate commercial fishing tend to empower large corporations, and Tolley said that needs to change. Fisheries management that’s based on the allocation of shares (catch shares) or quotas of a particular catch tend to privatize the oceans, rather than treating them as shared public resources, he argued. Those policies tend to concentrate access to fisheries to a few big players. click here to read the story 13:47
