PCFFA – Fishermens News

Toxic Tires: Getting 6PPD Out

The Pacific Coast Federation of Fishermen’s Associations and the fishing folks we represent have never been timid about taking on hard tasks, especially when it comes to protecting our fisheries. PCFFA was formed in 1976 for the specific purpose of protecting—and where necessary, restoring—sustainable commercial fishing as a way of life, including using the combined strength of the many local fishermen’s organizations that make up the PCFFA to take on all the hard tasks involved. Since salmon has long been a major West Coast ocean fishery (in spite of recent collapses) our mission also means working hard to protect and restore damaged salmon habitat wherever salmon occur, all the way up to the tops of coastal watersheds. PCFFA’s sister organization, the Institute for Fisheries Resources...

Managing Offshore Wind Threats to West Coast Fisheries

Note: The suddenly looming threat of massive, industrial-scale offshore wind farm development in the midst of the West Coast’s most productive fisheries is alarming. Identifying, avoiding and mitigating impacts on our fisheries is now a high industry priority. This special guest column by former PCFFA/IFR Executive Director Mike Conroy, now with the Responsible Offshore Development Alliance (RODA), will help bring West Coast fishing industry leaders up to speed on these issues as well as highlighting opportunities for making our fishing industry’s voice better heard. Endnote source references are indicated in the text by numbers in parenthesis. – Glen Spain, Executive Director, PCFFA and IFR. As many harvesters headed out during a busy time of year, this summer the Bureau of Ocean Energy...

Finally—A U.S. Ocean Climate Action Plan

The Earth’s oceans are fragile ecosystems that nevertheless provide essential protein to about 3.3 billion people. We ignore the potential ocean impacts of accelerating climate change at great peril to this major world food supply and to the 6% of the world’s economy represented by its seafood harvest and distribution sector. With so much recent research and concern about the onrushing impacts of climate change on land, its remarkable that so little attention has been paid to these impacts likely to hit our oceans. This is extremely short-sighted. Fortunately, some of this neglect is now being addressed—at least in the U.S.—by the first-ever U.S. Ocean Climate Action Plan (OCAP) released in March 2023. The OCAP includes three broad themes: (a) creating a carbon-neutral future; (b) impl...

The Battle Over Columbia River Salmon

Over the next several months, the West Coast has a golden opportunity to push for a serious Columbia River salmon recovery plan. This chance to finally get it right comes after decades—and more than $15 billion—spent by the federal government trying to fix a broken system, along with more than 20 years of litigation. After decades of dam building, four final dams—Ice Harbor, Lower Monumental, Little Goose and Lower Granite—were built on the Snake River, the Columbia River’s largest tributary, in the 1960s and ‘70s. Before they were constructed, Washington’s Department of Fisheries warned that the Lower Snake River dams would spell trouble for salmon: “The development would remove part of the cost of waterborne shipping from the shipper and place it on the taxpayer, jeopardizing more than...

The ‘30×30 Campaign’ — What and Why?

As the just released—and very alarming—2023 United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Sixth Assessment Report verifies, there is an across-the-board and strong scientific agreement, now supported by hard data from several independent sources, that the world as a whole is right on the precipice of another Great Extinction Event, triggered by climate change. The current widespread decline in biodiversity is powered by insatiable human population growth and development that is devastating the natural environment. That, coupled with nearly 200 years of world industrialization that has already thrust fossil-fuel generated carbon dioxide as well as atmospheric methane (which is 21 times more powerful as a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide) up to levels well beyond the poi...

PCFFA Principles Regarding Marine Protected Areas

Introductory Note: There is no scientific doubt that the world as a whole is facing serious biodiversity loss, as well as a potential extinction crisis, both being driven by rapid climate change, and that serious biodiversity protection and habitat conservation mandates are needed, based on sensible, science-driven solutions. But unfortunately, some groups are still championing ever more ocean marine protected areas (MPAs) as “the solution” to ocean ecosystem problems that are all too often also resulting in major fisheries declines. For some groups this has become a form of “magical thinking,” rather than only one of many management tools to be deployed with forethought and guided by good science. Marine protected areas (MPAs) especially are back in the limelight with the recent public...

Let’s Fight For Salmon, Not Over Them

The reality is that salmon-dependent fishing families are the ultimate victims of widespread salmon declines, not their cause. At the time of this writing in late January, prospects for 2023’s California, Oregon and Washington ocean commercial, recreational and Tribal salmon seasons are bleak. Ocean salmon abundance projections are so low that broad closures may be a “weak stock management” necessity, simply to keep already severely diminished Coho and Chinook stocks from extinction. The West Coast fishing industry is actually at the tail end of decades of salmon abundance declines. The onrushing threats of climate change bringing more droughts will only exacerbate these problems. The two questions salmon-dependent communities need to ask now are “Why is this happening?” and also “What...

An Energy Revolution in the Commercial Fishing Fleet?

With diesel prices soaring and the world abuzz about climate change, there has never been a better time for fishermen to contemplate our fuel use. Diesel fuel is a necessary part of today’s fishing businesses, but let’s face it. If we could get by with less of it—or find a long-term substitute that was cheaper, cleaner and just as reliable —then wouldn’t we want to? Fishermen in places as far-flung as Maine, Massachusetts, Washington and Alaska think so, and they are stepping up to do something about it. And they’re using bottom-up approaches that are tailor-made for their operations, looking to prevent or in some cases outrun burdensome, inflexible top-down mandates. In Sitka, the Alaska Longline Fishermen’s Association (ALFA) is supporting the installation of a hybrid electric engine ...

What To Do With All Those Oil Rigs?

Widespread, industrial-scale oil and gas development of the U. S. Pacific Outer Continental Shelf (POCS) has been a constant threat to West Coast fisheries since the 1890s when the first wave primitive offshore oil wells were originally drilled into shallow coastal waters. The great oil spill off Santa Barbara in 1969, which dumped more than three million barrels of crude oil into the ocean, made it clear, however, that if anything goes wrong with offshore oil development, impacts on regional fisheries could be catastrophic. Thankfully, and as a direct result of perseverance, coastwide political organizing and luck, our commercial fishing industry, working with our state legislatures and key members of Congress, has—mostly—held this effort at bay since West-Coast wide oil and gas develop...

Pacific Salmon in Hot Water—Again

One of the most dramatic natural resource tragedies of our times, and one which directly affects our fishing industry by destroying thousands of fishing jobs coastwide, has been the thoughtless and sometimes deliberate destruction of the West Coast’s once abundant salmon runs. Everywhere on the West Coast (both U.S. and Canada) these once abundant wild salmon runs are in steep decline, with many of them already extinct. The steady decline of West Coast salmon runs was an unacknowledged disaster until the prestigious American Fisheries Society (AFS) published a peer-reviewed, comprehensive scientific survey of the problem in “Pacific Salmon at the Crossroads: Stocks at Risk from California, Oregon, Idaho and Washington,” (Nehlsen, et al., Fisheries, Vol 16, No. 2, pp. 4-21 (March-April, 19...