GLOUCESTER — Hundreds of grumpy fishermen, their spirits visibly buoyed yesterday by the assemblage, rallied at the doorstep of the National Marine Fisheries Service regional headquarters, arguing new laws pushed by the Obama administration will put many small fishermen out of work.
It was the largest protest of its kind in years and drew fishermen from across New England.
In banners, homemade signs and through a battery-operated bullhorn, the boats-men and -women, a lawyer and scientist all proclaimed that with the rebounding stocks stronger than any other time in the past 30 years, there is no reason to consolidate and commodify the fishery.
But Patricia Kurkul, the service's regional administrator, suggested redress can only come from Congress, and afterward, many protesters agreed.
"We need Congress to give us a little flexibility," said Chris Odlin, husband of Amanda Odlin, the lead organizer.
Others were not so sure.
The transformation of the nation's fisheries to catch shares on May 1, the start of the fishing year, is a policy of the Obama administration, originally sponsored by large components of the environmental lobby, that has never been mandated by Congress.
Rally attendees repeatedly said that moving to catch shares is an action with predictable results: In every place that has seen the common resources of the sea transformed into tradeable catch shares, boat owners have been driven out, replaced by investors who have come away with rich profits from the sacrifices of the displaced fishermen.
"I'm ready to lose my home; I'm ready to lose everything," Bruce Gibbs, a longtime commercial fisherman from Cape Cod, told the crowd.
Speakers addressed the crowd in front of an effigy of Jane Lubchenco, administrator for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, NMFS' parent agency, lynching two fishermen.
Shrinking the size of the fleet is an expressed policy goal of the Obama administration.
"A significant fraction of the vessels will need to be removed," according to a spokesman for Lubchenco.
Rally organizers said they counted more than 350 participants; police Lt. Joseph Aiello estimated the crowd at 250.
The rally, which was scheduled to start at 8:30 a.m., began at 9:15 and broke up at about noon, but otherwise went off smoothly.
Fishermen from Monterey Bay, Calif., U.S. Sen. Olympia Snowe, R-Maine, and Nobel laureate Elinor Ostrom all sent letters of solidarity.
More than one bitter speaker commented that the size of the fleet was shrinking as the size of the bureaucracy grew.
Wearing a Yankees cap, Cindy Kokell left Port Lookout, Long Island, at 2:30 a.m., drove the length of the island and arrived in Gloucester — which, with New Bedford, serves as co-capital of the East Coast fishing nation — an hour before the speeches started.
After the rally, Kurkul invited five protesters into a conference room on NMFS' ground floor for an ad hoc exchange of ideas; the meeting ended with Kurkul tacitly agreeing with the general bill of particulars but demurring that her job was to administer, not make, rules and laws, and only Congress can redress the grievances, according to conferee Mike Walsh, who owns four draggers based in Boston.
"The meeting didn't accomplish anything," Walsh said.
Another conferee, Chris Odlin of Scarborough, Maine, who with his wife owns two Boston-based trawlers, walked out mid-meeting.
Bob Vanasse, executive director of an industry public relations organization, said the Magnuson Stevens Act allows NMFS to make exceptions. A bill, the Flexibility in Rebuilding America's Fisheries Act of 2009, was filed by Congressman Frank Pallone, D-N.J. and sponsored by a number of New Englanders, exists to clarify congressional intent, he said.
"The agency's hiding behind the law," Vanasse added.
Fishermen from Rhode Island have retained a major law firm to sue the federal government's plans embodied in a comprehensive new management scheme pending implementation next May.
Speakers and sign makers at yesterday's rally assigned blame with impunity, or as one banner-holder asserted, "Environmental Defense dictates fishery regulations."
The assertion that the Environmental Defense Fund and the Pew Environment Group have gained controlling influence over the federal fishery regulators at NMFS headquarters in Silver Spring and its year-old regional office in the Blackburn Industrial Park was a unifying theme of a protest that was hatched in the Odlins' home.
Identified and vilified in signs and rhetoric for suspected complicity in the sellout was Lubchenco, who was EDF's vice chairman and a stalwart in the Pew organization before joining the Obama administration.
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