Tell the Fisheries Service to stop overfishing

With mammoth ships towing fishing nets as tall as a football field or setting lines tens of miles long, industrial fishing fleets are destroying the delicate balance of our oceans, scraping the ocean floor clean as if they were strip mining or sweeping the water of everything living in their path. Whether it’s herring or cod in New England, snapper or grouper in the Gulf of Mexico, or rockfish in the Pacific, our fish stocks are in serious trouble.

Help us stop this destruction by asking the National Marine Fisheries Service to enforce strong overfishing regulations.

Petition Text

Dear National Marine Fisheries Service:

I congratulate you on your ideas for National Standards; they reflect a true shift in your paradigm for the management of fishing.  But as an interested party I want make sure the final regulations reflect the following concerns.  I believe the regulations should reflect the following principles:

(1) the amount of any fish that is allowed to be caught be based on science rather than the special interests of commercial fishermen who dominate the decision making process today; (2) the annual catch limits be based on a precautionary approach that will end overfishing with a high degree of certainty rather than setting optimistically high limits and hoping that fish and the environment cooperate; (3) annual catch limits therefore need to be set to allow for uncertainty of all types; (4) if fishermen catch more fish than the limit, there are accountability measures which let the fish populations recover in subsequent years; and (5) all fishermen report their total catch in a timely fashion so that accountability measures can be used swiftly and fairly.

Please consider this to be an official comment.

Sincerely,