Myths and fallacies exposed, part 4 Dissected by Dr J Floor Anthoni (2003) www.seafriends.org.nz/issues/cons/myths4.htm The black or red text is the original text. The blue comments are ours. Reply by the Director General of Conservation, Hugh Logan. 4 June 2003. Campaign for more reserves. Forest & Bird's campaign is not respectful of the truth. Feb 2002. Ocean life crisis. Barry Weeber, Forest & Bird magazine 306, November 2002

This letter from the Director General of Conservation (DG) is in reply to an e-mail by [name suppressed], the content of which becomes clear by reading this reply. Read this carefully because the DG is pivotal in the process of creating marine reserves. Discover how poorly informed this man is. Read the process flowchart for more detail.

Thank you for your email of 1 May 2003 regarding the establishment of marine reserves and other marine protected areas in the Auckland region. It is true that a number of marine protected areas are being proposed in the wider Auckland region at present. I am pleased that my Department is proposing to establish a marine reserve on the north-east coast of Great Barrier Island and am also happy to see that non-government organisations in Auckland also believe our marine environment is worth protecting.

It is a pity that these non-government organisations are so poorly informed about the plight of the sea. The DG refers to the NZUA and Forest&Bird. Fishermen too believe that the marine environment is worth protecting, but knowing more about this environment, they disagree on placing, method, process, urgency and other issues. It pays for the DG to listen and learn.

Obviously, the Government and the DG have not sufficiently considered the consequences of their actions., which includes less fish caught, displacement of fishermen and economic loss to those affected in particular and to the country as a whole. The DG fails to mention that the Government believes that no-take marine reserves are the only means offering sufficient protection. Although this belief is wrong, it empowers, indeed instructs DoC to create the necessary number of marine reserves, since only they administer marine reserves. A large vote of money has been set aside from the vote for Biodiversity, to assist DoC.
But more important is the fact that this Government very UNdemocratically accepted the Biodiversity Strategy pushed down its throat by the United Nations whereas the public has never been able to vote  for it. It was not even informed. So the plan for 10% is undemocratic and fascist. To push it before 2010  can only be called heavy-handedness.

There exists no disagreement about the 90% left for fishing. The whole issue is with the 10% which is based on flawed reasoning, lacking sufficient evidence or proof. See FAQs.

Why is the DG not forthright? There are plans for more reserves in the Auckland region. It is true that this is so far the only site proposed by DoC. In all other instances, DoC hides behind non-government organisations like the NZUA or Forest&Bird. We have by now seen and experienced what a thorough consultation process involves.

1.  Yes, the Department has carried out research into the social, economic, environmental and cultural well being of communities affected by the establishment of existing marine reserves, including the following:

a. Taylor, N; Buckenham, b. 2003: social impacts of marine reserves in  New Zealand. Science for Conservation 217.p 58.

This recent report (May 2003) examines Goat Island, Tonga Island and Pohatu (Flea Bay) marine reserves. It does not examine control sites such as Omaha Beach, and similar places. As a result it is inconclusive of how much benefit arises from people visiting clean beaches and clear water, and how much is attributable to marine reserves. It does however identify that Tonga I and Pohatu have not attracted business or ecotourism or education for their marine reserves. The report also identifies issues such as poor consultation prior to and management after the creation of a marine reserve.

DoC has a number of consultancy reports, to which it refers often, but which are kept hidden from the public. We have attempted many times to obtain these reports but our requests have met with stubborn refusal. What are they hiding?

2  No, it is not the Department's intention or policy to destroy the recreational fishing Industry. The Department is the Central Government organisation charged with conserving the natural and historic heritage of New Zealand and includes conserving our coastal and marine environments.

This is just a case of the one hand not knowing what the other does. It has been a major mistake charging DoC with the protection of the sea. It is doing nothing to the sea's largest threat, land-based pollution. Is it interested in protecting the sea or its hierarchy?

DoC's own handbook for applicants states that if any proposal receives major adverse reaction, it must be abandoned. (See process chart) The DG is wrong. Any idea can be declined.

True, there is no such government policy.

Partly true. A reserve with clear water near a populated area can promote recreation for people who love fish watching. These places must also be provided for. However, the sea is usually very polluted near urban centres. An exception is Wellington, located at the Cook Strait. Here a marine reserve is being created very close to a large urban population. However, its waters are rather cold and still polluted for most of the year.

"An area of sea especially dedicated to or achieving the protection and maintenance of Biodiversity, and managed through legal or other effective means. Marine protected areas would therefore include marine reserves and could also include the following fishing exclusion zones: mataitai, taiapure, marine parks, marine mammal sanctuaries, wildlife sanctuaries, cable protection zones, sites protected under historic places legislation and coastal management tools available under the Resource Management Act 1991.

4 April 2003. Emma Rush (Public Relations Officer DoC) said in an e-mail: "It is not envisaged that this 10 percent will be totally made up of marine reserves - marine protected areas can include marine reserves but also other marine protection mechanisms such as world heritage sites, taiapure, seasonal closures and area closures to certain fishing methods etc." This would imply that it includes trawl exclusion zones (possibly the most effective protection mechanisms short of no-take reserves), scallop dredge exclusion zones, set net exclusion zones and so on. It would also include existing mammal sanctuaries. When these are all added together, a totally different picture emerges.

The DG is very vague in his assertions. If cable zones may protect, then why have these not been studied with the highest priority, before warring for new marine reserves? What is this protection threshold? Who determines it? What criteria are applied? If there is no fishing, is that not enough? What extra does a marine reserve provide that is not also provided by a no-fishing no-anchoring cable way? What is wrong with the Tawharanui Marine Park which enjoys total protection under the Fisheries Act? Why is this not sorted out first? Why is the NZ public left in the dark about this? Why do we learn of this only now?

Will the DG please explain what is the difference between the two?

As mentioned above, the 10 percent target may include other mechanisms than just marine reserves.

Why not begin the marine reserves process by explaining precisely what is meant here. Then add up the total area already preserved by other mechanisms.

The financing of opposition is really a matter of equity or fairness. What is fair about Goliath beating David? DoC is extremely well funded from a vote of the Biodiversity Strategy, whereas the public is not. Many donate precious time and private resources to fight this unequal battle, which is so unfairly driven by an ideology which does not survive scrutiny, being flawed from top to bottom.

DoC is well out of its depth on this. Everywhere in the world, research points to local co-management as the best option for a reserve's success, acceptance and compliance. DoC as a centrally led autocratic bureaucracy has alienated almost everyone they have dealt with, and deservedly so. When do they realise they are wrong?
The N Taylor report mentioned above quotes: "Efforts should be made towards co-management, building responsibilities of the local community towards resource management. Co-management moves beyond consultation and liaison to community-based conservation of the marine environment, where communities are fully involved both in identification of the need for conservation and development of solutions (Luttinger 1997). . . It is important that local people be involved as participants in management, not just representatives of wider interest groups". When does DoC get the message?

Note the careful circumnavigation of the word proposal, replacing it by application. The Department's own handbook states: "The proposal must be abandoned in view of major adverse reaction". It does have a policy and so it should. It is simply untrue that the Department cannot abandon a proposal or even an application. If this were true, the Act or whatever they hide themselves behind, must be changed. The Great Barrier northeast coast proposal is a case in point. It has been abandoned twice, once in 1991 and again in 1994 in view of fierce opposition.

a. Interfere unduly with any estate or interest in land in or adjoining the reserve,
b. Interfere unduly with any existing right of navigation,
c. Interfere unduly with commercial fishing,
d. Interfere unduly with or adversely affect any existing usage of the area for recreational purposes,
e. Otherwise be contrary to the public interest.

Objectors clearly voice the public interest and should be listened to. The word unduly must be defined. It is because of all these vagaries that the public has lost confidence in the impartiality of the process. History has also shown that strange things have happened behind closed doors. Part of the present opposition to ALL marine reserves is the public's desire to a transparent process and better consultation and participation. But first of all, the lies, propaganda, myths and fallacies must end.

The most important criteria should be:
e. The application must have overwhelming support from the public, particularly those most affected.
f. The Minister must be satisfied that the marine reserve is sustainable and that it will achieve its objectives (biodiversity, research, education)  and that it will not degrade.

Yours sincerely
Lilie Craig For
Hugh Logan, Director-General

Although more species can be found in the sea due to its large size and many phyla, most of these are not unique to New Zealand, being found over large areas of the sea where environmental conditions are almost constant. This contrasts starkly with NZ's native flora and fauna which have very high endemic content. It is true that only 0.1% of the territorial sea around the mainland is protected in marine reserves, but an area twenty times this size has been set aside in cable ways and ammunition dumps, effectively as de-facto marine reserves. Also substantial areas have already been protected as marine mammal sanctuaries. Why are these never mentioned?
The 10-25% claimed protected in national parks and other reserves is still under threat from introduced predators, grazers and invasive plant species, which is much less the case in the sea.Why do these protagonists keep repeating the same lies?
The coastal seas are not threatened by degradation from fishing, mining and marine farming. To say so is a blatant lie. The only kind of fishing that could damage the sea bed is trawling, but around the mainland no such damage can be demonstrated, because the seabed is subjected to high natural perturbation. There are some places where shallow rock protrudes from the bottom, but once found, these can be protected by excluding them from trawling.Besides, no fisherman likes to damage his expensive gear on such road bumps.
There is no place along our coast where the sea is threatened by mining. The oil and gas platforms do not cause demonstrable damage. The mining of sea sand and iron ore is also of little consequence to the sea bottom habitat. What's more, marine reserves are not of any help here.
Marine farming, although unsightly, consists of two entirely different activities: salmon farming and mussel/oyster culture. Mussel and oyster farms very efficiently convert the oversupply of nutrients in our coastal waters into healthy edible biomass. Their influence on the environment is beneficial and they earn high export incomes.

When one does not understand the differences between land and sea, one is bound to make misleading statements. Although national parks protect against logging, they do not protect against natural fires, acid rain or global climate change. In the sea, the kelp forests have never been milled nor burnt. They are in a much more natural state than the land, but they are threatened considerably by mud from land erosion. Marine reserves simply do not help against such threats.
The no-take argument is also false. To protect biodiversity, one must retain viable populations of all species. In the sea, natural predation is much more prevalent than on land such that wise exploitation does not affect biodiversity. The sea recovers very quickly from overharvesting, contrary to the land which needs a few centuries to recover from burning and logging. Hunting is still allowed and is even necessary in national parks, which can therefore not be compared with no-take marine reserves. The taking of animal pests is also common practice.
 

Wrong. Conservation responds much better to 80% protection at 20% of the cost, rather than 100% at 100% of the cost. In nature, unexploited species simply do NOT exist

Fishing is severely depleting fish stocks around the world and destroying marine ecosystems such as seamounts and sponge gardens. More protective measures, such as marine reserves, are urgently required if we are to avert the loss of fish stocks and the extinction of more sea species.

Time and again we hear the scare-mongering news about fishing. Yes, some fish stocks around the world are overfished, and they need time-out to recover. But whenever Greenies mention overfishing, they also mention 'fully exploited stocks', which is precisely the aim of fishing and not a mistake. However, here in New Zealand's seas, fishing is strictly controlled by the Quota Management System, which is beginning to show results.
Fishing can damage seamount life but broken corals continue to liveand reproduce. The intention of fishing sea mounts is not to snag one's net and lose it in the deep. But some collateral damage is unavoidable. NZ has 19 of the most accessible seamounts fully protected in large marine reserves. Until research can evaluate what difference these make, it makes no sense to protect more. Where significant sponge gardens are found, these can be protected by excluding trawlers. But remember that inside the full protection of the Goat Island marine reserve, sponge gardens are also disappearing.
Nowhere in the world have fish stocks been lost. In all cases the stocks have been able to recover, although a very few took over one decade to do so. No commercially fished species have become extinct, and there is no knowledge of other species having become extinct in this way. Turtles, lizards, dugongs, manatees which are threatened, are not a New Zealand problem.

This Government has made a thoughtless mistake by declaring an intention of protecting 10% of the sea by 2010. It springs to mind that they may have been advised by the likes of Forest&Bird. The main threat to our mainland seas comes from landbased pollution, against which marine reserves do not protect. Most of our marine reserves are degrading year by year. What a nice gift this is for our children!
Think for one moment that these applications are held up for good reasons.

Objectives of Forest and Bird's marine reserves campaign include:

• Raising public awareness of marine reserves, and gaining support for 20% of New Zealand's marine environment to be protected by a comprehensive network of marine reserves by 2020.

If the 10% claim is madness already, what would a 20% claim be? The threat to our seas is not cured by marine reserves, and these cannot be sustainable inside our coastal seas which remain severely threatened by degradation. The network idea lives only in the minds of protagonists, and has not been substantiated scientifically or practically.
• Government approval of all eight existing marine reserve applications by November 2002.
• A Governmment commitment to developing and implementing a comprehensive network of marine reserves protecting 10% of our mainland waters by 2010.

The Government already has this commitment, but no more noises are being heard about it recently. It is becoming clear that there are better ways to save our seas.
• The creation of new marine parks and reserves in Fiordland, Auckland's Wild West Coast, and a Ramsar site for the Kaipara Harbour.

Read about the fallacies in Forest & Bird's westcoast proposal.

It is quite irresponsible for a large organisation like Forest & Bird to leave its members in the dark about the real issues surrounding marine reserves and the threats to our coastal seas. The article exposed above is just one example of the kind of disinformation it spreads. Why does this group fail to focus on the real threats from soil degradation and erosion? Why does it fail to be honest?

It so happens that all 4 million inhabitants of NZ live on the few islands whereas none lives in the sea.

People fish the sea for food. Fish feeds us and pays for the things we import. We should be proud of the people who risk their lives to fish for our needs. What's wrong with that? The 600,000t fish appears to be NZ's sustainable maximum catch. Every year it is being replaced by Mother Nature. The author is a bit naive here in thinking that fishing can selectively target one species. The net goes down and the net comes up. What happened in between is anybody's guess. The net catches everything exceeding its mesh size. The author is also naive about birds and seals and mischievous by mixing world statistics with local ones. Although birds can live to a ripe old age, most by far don't, which reduces their average life expectancy to one year or two. Natural mortality is very high, particularly for juveniles. The same goes for seals. However, the author also forgot to mention that fishing provides birds and seals with food, making their lives easier while they learn how to raid nets and bait. It must also be noted that the total numbers of sea birds and seals has not reduced (due to fishing).

Although the sea has many species, most of these are not endemic or native to NZ, occurring over a wide area. Almost all recent discoveries are species of the deep sea. The author is naive again about the scraping of the sea floor. Nets avoid unnecessary by-catch such as starfish and the photos with the article clearly show that no such benthic animals are part of the catch. The author is plain wrong about extinctions in the sea. No fish species is known to have gone extinct (by fishing). Such scare-mongering rhetoric amounts to deliberate disinformation of the public.

NZ's domestic fishery has seen rather large shocks since the introduction of the EEZ, when foreign fishing stopped, but it has now stabilised. The author should be fair about the orange roughy fishery which was scientifically managed, yet went wrong. Scientists were at fault, not fishermen. It should have been known from ecological principles that deepwater fish have very low productivity. The author is also ignoring the fact that most knowledge of the sea is provided by fishermen who find stock, catch it and then show that there are problems (or not). How could one have known in advance that a stock is easily overfished? Once the problems were known, the fishery was managed with much more caution, even stopped altogether. The trial-and-error kind of adaptive management is a very valid, effective and cheap form of fisheries management.

Quite wrongand unforgivable really. A trawl net does not operate like a grader. The midwater trawls do not even touch the bottom. Normal trawl nets slide on otter boards over the bottom, drawing two shallow furrows. But collateral damage does happen, particularly on low rock protruding out from the sandy bottom. Where currents run (in all the places mentioned), rich communities of filterfeeders can be found. It is fair to say that the fishermen found these first; then they became concerned; then the scientists stepped in; then the environmentalists became concerned. These places are easily protected by the Fisheries Act, as shown for the areas concerned, but they cannot be protected before they are found first.

In other times, we would have been proud of this performance and efficiency. The fact of the matter is that fish are usually scarce in the blue sea, making big nets necessary. In some places dense populations occur but these need to be targeted precisely.

The Fisheries Act was used to protect the seamounts. To mention these areas as a percentage of the total EEZ is unfair, since a large part of it consists of very deep ocean which may never be fishable. Every application for mining goes through the resource consent process which offers sufficient protection of the environment. There is no potentially greater damage than fishing. Show us where the threats are and which sea mounts are threatened by mining.

The author hits the nail on the head here by demonstrating that the Marine Reserves Act and the Marine Mammals Protection Act were unnecessary and costly pieces of legislation, ill thought out and worthy of complete abolishment. The Fisheries Act has all the clauses for adequate and effective protection. Those who fish know best how to avoid damage to the environment.

The whole idea is to set overall goals and outcomes and let the industry work within these. It is not important HOW the goals are met. Fishing is already highly meddled with by Government, compared with farming and manufacturing. It is not necessarily a bad idea to have fisheries make their own plans, to be ratified by the public.
The concern in the last sentence flows from the inadequacy of the MRA.

The author is a bit out of his depth here, mixing various concepts. Many examples exist of 'best practice' plans, like that of the fertiliser industry and many others. Retention of control can happen at many levels, but that which leaves most freedom is having control over outcomes, rather than processes. Administration is an activity which does not achieve anything for the environment although it must guarantee reliable data handling. The public cannot plan because it is ignorant of the sea and its resources, which are usually encountered by accident. Research and monitoring can be done and should be done by Government, as well as enforcement. It is very important that Government enforces the law and temporary fishing measures in order to make these work in an otherwise open, free-access fishery. All the obtained data and reports, including that of scientists, should be made available free of charge on Internet.

It is not helpful to linger in the past for too long, since major improvements have been made in recent years, in functionality, sustainability and consultation with others.

In 2001 Forest and Bird and ECO jointly undertook consultation on the proposals for the Ministry of Fisheries' environmental management strategy. This work was funded by a Green Party initiative in the 2001 budget. The key issues identified were:

• limited opportunities for public participation in fisheries management
• gaps in information, monitoring and research capacity
• lack of precaution and environmental assessment in decision making
• lack of spatial and ecosystem-based management
• dominance of private property rights over other interests and the environment
• lack of recognition of non-extractive use values - the Ministry of Fisheries considers it doesn't have to consider such conservation values.

 

 
 
 
 
 

Hardly any news at all, see below.

Damning criticisms, but let's see who would be able to answer these concerns better in their own activities: Fletcher Challenge? Shell Oil? Any dairy farmer? Any city council? Above all, the sea is a wild frontier of which we know preciously little. But is this enough a reason to stop fishing altogether? More importantly, can fishing be done sustainably without actually knowing whether today's catch is sustainable in the long run, or what interrelationships exist between species? It has done so for thousands of years.

Tangata Whenua has its settlements and rights to a part of the total catch, but the public has not. This is what the recreational fishermen through Option4 are fighting for.

The cost of fisheries research even when involved with only few species, has been of major concern to the fishing industry. It is not likely that more research will deliver more of what is needed. So we may need to look at the fishermen and what they know from actually doing it, all their lives. It is of no use that an environmental community is worried when it does not really know what is going on.

This catch phrase 'damage to the environment' transfixes the environmentalist's thinking. Life in the sea consists of many tiers of fish-eat-fish food chains. Fishing by humans is just a part of it, bringing certain change to the environment as it shifts the balance in some stages of this food chain. But is this the same as 'damage'?
The mentioned examples cover a range of possible causes, that are not at all understood. To mention gemfish and orange roughy in one breath with the others is just mischievous and Hector's Dolphin is beset by entirely different problems.

It is wishful thinking that more red tape can do better what is already provided for in the Fisheries Act. What is needed is the integration of scientist and fisherman to make optimal use of what we already know, and to be able to react in time, with enough precaution.