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Protect OUR Oceans!

Our oceans need you now. The ocean waters around the United States and the wildlife in them are important to our health, wealth, and future. Each one of us has the privilege to use them and the right to help protect them. Unfortunately, right now a plan is underway to limit access to ocean resources to only a handful of individuals and corporations under the guise of conservation. Help fight for our oceans and stop this privatization plan.

Government agencies are given the great responsibility of managing our oceans and everything in them for the benefit of all of us in the United States.Those agencies have tilted the balance to mostly favor big business interests. This can ultimately damage both the marine environment and long-term stability of coastal communities.

So what can you do about it? You can tell the National Ocean and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) that they need to uphold their mission!

NOAA’s mission is “to…conserve and manage coastal and marine resources to meet our Nation’s economic, social, and environmental needs.” The agency has recently created a task force to assist with designing a new management program for our fish. Unfortunately, this new program, called catch shares, amounts to little more than a privatization scheme for valuable public resources. It is almost entirely about economic benefit for just a handful of people, rather than about conservation and smart management of our precious ocean resources for the benefit of all.

Tell the Catch Share Task Force that you want a new program for better fisheries management that is sustainable for our fish and marine environment and will provide the most benefits for everyone in the U.S.!

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February 09, 2010

Subject:

Dear Members of the U.S. Catch Share Task Force and Ms. Medina

As a U.S. citizen, I share in benefits from and privileges to our natural resources. I am writing to convey my strong opposition to any policy statement for the U.S. that advocates privatizing our fish and turning them into a tradable commodity, like shares of stock.

Under the guise of conservation, fisheries nationwide are being forced one by one under traditional catch share programs. In reality, most of these programs are about giving our public fish resources to just a handful of people and companies – for them to make long-term profit and everyone else to be left out. This can cause serious economic problems for coastal communities and even increase ecological problems for marine wildlife and our oceans.

Now we have a Catch Share Task Force to help guide the U.S. in developing a policy for using catch shares to manage fisheries nationwide. I urge any policy statement that is created by the Task Force to articulate that there is no good reason to privatize access to public fish stocks to use a catch share approach.

Natural resources are cultural resources. Government should be helping to develop community-based local and sustainable wild fish catch industry, not giving away our children’s natural resource inheritance.

If NOAA has decided that the best approach for U.S. fisheries is to allocate catch-shares as a management tool, it should rent these catch-shares directly eligible entities -- such as coastal communities and independent fishermen -- on fair terms. Cap-and-rent is a fair approach. Privatization of a public trust resource is not OK, and I strongly oppose that.

People of the U.S. have the privilege to use our natural resources, like fish, and the right to protect them and expect they be managed for the benefit of all, not just a few. I ask the Catch Share Task Force to help NOAA uphold its mission to “conserve and manage coastal and marine resources to meet our Nation’s economic, social, and environmental needs” and NOT recommend privatization of public fisheries in its policy statement on catch shares.

Sincerely,

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