Greed is good. That, anyway, was the mantra of the Wall Street anti-hero.
But it serves just as well the owners of the Hawai`i longline fishing fleet and their personal civil servant, Kitty Simonds. Not content to accept the miserly (in their eyes) quota of Western Pacific bigeye tuna allocated to them, they have won an amendment to fishing rules that lets them almost double their annual haul. And were that not enough, they are setting their sights now on bigeye in the Eastern Pacific where stocks, though relatively healthy now, cannot take any further fishing pressure.
Simonds, as executive director of the Western Pacific Fishery Management Council, has stepped-up efforts to turn this federally funded agency into a private club and to treat observers as trespassers. Those efforts have reached a point where her dismissal is more than warranted and this month’s editorial calls for just that. If secret meetings and destruction of government records are not enough to get her handlers at the National Marine Fisheries’ Service to take action, then what the heck will it take to set them in motion?
But there’s more than fish in this month’s wrapper. Our “Board Talk” column looks at a wide range of issues tackled by the Board of Land and Natural Resources in recent weeks. And our write-up of Carla D’Antonio’s recent work should give folks who want to understand the mechanisms of ecosystem invasions a lot to think about.
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