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This Website is Dedicated to Alvin Alexander Cheyne January 10, 1921 - June 17, 2005 |
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Bush, Schwarzenegger and the Wise Use Movement: The Crushing of Public Trust Fishing Rights
The ripping away
of public trust access to our waterways and ocean waters
by extreme property rights folks and the Bush and
Schwarzenegger administrations is something that many
sportsmen don't seem to understand. I get sick and
tired of some ill-informed sportsmen who point to
"animal rights groups," "environmentalists," and
"liberals" as the reason why we are seeing more and more
areas closed to fishing, when it is the two state and
federal administrations that are in power at this time,
along with their buddies in the "wise use" property
rights movement, that are actually responsible.
Unfortunately,
some of the larger, corporate funded environmental
groups have served as collaborators with the Bush and
Schwarzenegger regimes in instituting no fishing zones
along the coast in an egregious example of
federal-state-environmental green washing. However, if
you actually review the history of fishing closures in
California history, the Bush and Schwarzenegger
administrations have consistently been the biggest
proponents of closures and no fishing zones off the
California coast.
The Marine Life
Protection Act was passed by a Democratic-dominated
legislature, but it is Schwarzenegger, a Republican,
that has fast-tracked this process. Most sportsmen
aren't opposed to Marine Protected Areas (MPAs); they
are opposed to the inequitable and hasty manner in which
they have been imposed. MPAs under the Schwarzenegger
only "protect" areas of ocean from recreational and
commercial fishermen, a largely redundant and punitive
effort since salmon fishing is completely closed this
season and rockfishing is severely restricted to certain
depth areas and seasons by the Pacific Fishery
Management Council. At the same time, these MPAs do
nothing to cause the declines of fish caused by
pollution or help stop future oil and chemical spills
from taking place!
Meanwhile,
Schwarzenegger has consistently vetoed fishery
restoration passed by the Legislature and pushed for the
destruction of Central Valley salmon and Delta fish
populations by building a peripheral canal and more dams
to bail out subsidized corporate water contractors.
Although certain
environmental groups support "no fishing" zones in the
state's ocean waters, I would argue that the greatest
threat to public fishing access is the anti-fishing
rights policies of the Bush and Schwarzenegger
administrations, as well as the ascendency of the
lunatic fringe of the "wise use" property rights
movement. Every angler should consider the destruction
of fishing rights and fisheries under these two regimes
before they go into the voting booth on Tuesday.
Just look at
this year's unprecedented salmon closures in California
and Oregon ocean waters and Central Valley rivers.
Politically manipulated Bush administration biological
opinions, coinciding with Department of Water Resources
failures to observe the provisions of the Endangered
Species and Clean Water Acts, resulted in massive
increases of export pumping and the loss of thousands of
thousands of salmon smolts. The DFG's failure to put the
salmon in acclimation pens, combined with bad "ocean
conditions," produced the "perfect storm" leading to the
salmon collapse.
In 2006, the
Bush administration, not "liberals" or
"environmentalists," tried to close down all
recreational and commercial salmon fishing on the ocean
off California and southern Oregon, due to the
alarmingly low numbers of Klamath River fall-run
chinooks. To add insult to injury, these closures were
the direct result of the Karl Rove-instigated fish kills
of 2002. Fortunately, massive outcry by West Coast
Democratic Congressmen and sportfishing and commercial
fishing groups allowed anglers to have a season that
year, although commercial fishermen were severely
limited.
At the same time, the property rights fanatics, through compliant Sheriffs Departments and District Attorneys and the anti-fishing zealots in the federal and state governments, have closed off vast areas of public trust access on levees to bank fishermen on the Delta and Sacramento River - in direct violation of the California Constitution.
According to the
California Constitution, Article 1, Declaration of
Rights, Section 25, "The people shall have the right to
fish upon and from the public lands of the State and in
the waters thereof, excepting upon lands set aside for
fish hatcheries, and no land owned by the State shall
ever be sold or transferred without reserving in the
people the absolute right to fish thereupon; and no law
shall ever be passed making it a crime for the people to
enter upon the public lands within this State for the
purpose of fishing in any wate containing fish that have
been planted therein by the State; provided, that the
legislature may by statute, provide for the season when
and the conditions under which the different species of
fish may be taken."
This right is
also guaranteed in Article 10, water, Section 4, "No
individual, partnership, or corporation, claiming or
possessing the frontage or tidal lands of a harbor, bay,
inlet, estuary, or other navigable water in this State,
shall be permitted to exclude the right of way to such
water whenever it is required for any public purpose,
nor to destroy or obstruct the free navigation of such
water; and the Legislature shall enact such laws as will
give the most liberal construction to this provision, so
that access to the navigable waters of this State shall
be always attainable for the people thereof."
Since 2001, the
Bush administration on the federal level and Governor
Gray Davis, succeeded by the even more anti-fishing
Schwarzenenegger administration in 2003, have closed
more fishing areas and destroyed more fisheries than all
of the previous administrations, Democratic and
Republican, combined.
Fishing closures
that have taken place under the Bush and Schwarzenegger
administrations include the following:
• The complete
closure of the continental shelf in federal waters to
rockfishing, due to federal and state mismangement of
the groundfish fishery for nearly a decade by the PFMC.
• The adoption
of severely restricted fishing seasons for rockfish,
lingcod and greenling in recent years, along with early
closures this year and last based on the rebuilding
paradox: canary and yelloweye rockfish are rebounding,
so anglers have more contact with them!
• The fast tracking of the MLPA process by Schwarzenegger, resulting in massive no fishing zones off the Central Coast, and looming closures on the North Central and South Coasts.
• Increasing closures of bank fishing access on roads, maintained with public funds, on levees along the Sacramento River and throughout the Delta. This started with the closure of the Sacramento River below Freeport and the closures have expanded to include vast areas of public trust access to navigable rivers in Solano, Yolo, Contra Costa and San Joaquin counties. Local reclamation districts, in collaboration with state and federal governments, have fenced off vast tracts of land on the Delta. The Prospect Island fish kill of November 2007, when tens of thousands of striped bass, Sacramento blackfish, Sacramento splittail and other species perished after a levee repair by the Bureau of Reclamation, occurred on federal land that was closed to public access and would probably not have been exposed unless two duck hunters had trespassed on the land.
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