During the last few years, there has been increased interest, primarily in the environmental and academic communities, in the use of Marine Protected Areas (MPAs) as a device to manage and restore marine fisheries. With opinions ranging from complete acceptance to adamant denial, this review addresses the history of MPAs as we know them and proposes a course of action to better define them and provide guidelines for their use.

What are MPAs?

At this point, MPAs are not well defined. To many fishery managers and biologists, MPAs are a reasonable fishery management tool that has been used in both freshwater and saltwater. Time and area closures to protect spawning aggregations and to eliminate the use of destructive gear types are the best known and most effective uses of MPAs. Time and area closures have been proposed and supported by Coastal Conservation Association (CCA) for a number of conservation problems and are broadly supported by the recreational community. Recently, some people in the environmental community have proposed using no-take MPAs to close all fishing access in large areas of prime fishable waters. They regard these no-fishing zones as clean and efficient ways to manage fishery resources by excluding all uses, including fishing. The logic behind this argument is that the administrative creation of vast no-fishing areas will enhance stock recovery and protect large portions of the biomass, without having to subject these proposals to public process or comment. In May 2000, President Clinton announced a new federal policy for the management of the nation's ocean resources - MPAs. The President signed an executive order which, on its face, did little other than establish a policy to encourage and promote the use of MPAs. Some environmental groups heralded the executive order as a new day for ocean management and announced their objective of establishing 20 percent of the nation's oceans as MPAs. This campaign has accelerated since with specific no-fishing zone proposals in Florida, California and New England. Currently, there is nothing that clearly defines the types and uses of MPAs. More importantly, there are no hard guidelines and standards for implementing, evaluating, monitoring and removing closures of this nature.

What is the problem with MPAs?

MPAs, as proposed by many in the environmental community, limit recreational access to a public resource without any demonstrable benefit to the health of most fishery resources and, so far, with little public involvement in their creation, implementation and monitoring. Historically, recreational fishermen have led the fight to conserve America's marine fisheries. Striped bass, weakfish, redfish, Spanish mackerel, king mackerel and Atlantic shad are all recovering as a result of the conservation initiatives and efforts of recreational fishermen. Without the stewardship of recreational anglers, it is questionable if any of these species would have been pulled back from the brink of collapse. Recreational anglers have successfully worked inside the existing management system to restore and conserve the resource, and have become one of the largest and most successful advocates for the resource. Recreational fishermen have worked for years to provide enhancement of and better public access to the resource. Millions of anglers' dollars have been spent through the Wallop-Breaux program to fund resource enhancement programs and projects while increasing angler access to America's fishery resources. This public involvement has introduced a level of stewardship and vision to local, state, national and international fisheries management not seen in prior decades. Where once fish were valued solely in price-per-pound, now these same fisheries are measured in the aesthetics of the fishing experience and have created billions of previously unseen dollars for coastal and inland economies. CCA is working to ensure that Americans continue to have access to a healthy, renewable public resource. By working with the Bush Administration and Congress, CCA is trying to better define MPAs and to work on a process that will ensure greater public involvement and transparency in the use of this management tool. CCA supports the concepts contained in the Freedom to Fish Act (the Act), which has been introduced in both the House and the Senate (S 1314 and HR 3104). The Act provides reasonable guidelines for the use of MPAs by fishery managers and restricts the use of no-fishing zones for recreational fishermen to instances where all other fishery management tools have failed to fix the problem. It also requires the resumption of recreational fishing once the resource problem is corrected. Science supporting the benefits of broad-based no-fishing zones is largely based on a single study in Florida of a small area closed to provide security for NASA base operations at Cape Canaveral. The study concludes that if an area is closed to all fishing, the fish in the area will grow larger and the stock will be enhanced. But it ignores the benefits of other conservation efforts in the area, primarily Florida's commercial gill net ban, that were spearheaded by recreational anglers. The study has little scientific basis to conclude there is any benefit to the overall stock or adjacent fishing areas from a no-fishing zone. Most marine fish migrate, and to make a no-fishing zone an effective tool, it must be excessively large. This conclusion is what has lead to the immense proposed closures off the southern California coast (both inland and offshore) and the extreme proposal to close virtually every deepwater canyon off the Eastern Seaboard. The study of the Florida security closure also does not address the impact of displaced fishing effort on areas adjacent to these closures. If a large percentage of the public is excluded from traditional angling areas, those anglers will either concentrate in outlying areas and likely create new conservation issues or leave the fishery altogether. Neither of these scenarios is a positive conclusion.

What is the solution?

The CCA National Board of Directors has concluded that the time to address no-fishing zones is now, before the concept gains greater acceptance and specific proposals are imposed on recreational anglers in multiple states. What we have seen in the closures on the West Coast of Florida and the Channel Islands of California is that once a specific proposal is put forward, it is very hard to stop. In addition, the Administration is committed to working with us to address our concerns. CCA is committed to passing legislation that will define what MPAs are, require federal fishery managers to restrict recreational effort only when traditional regulations (bag, size and seasonal restrictions) are not effective and, when a no-fishing zone is required, to ensure that a measurable standard is established to remove the restriction when its science-based conservation objective is met. Passing federal legislation to protect recreational anglers' freedom to fish, which at least at the moment is being opposed by both the commercial and environmental lobbies, is not the only place MPAs and freedom to fish issues will be addressed. Our nation's court systems are already loaded with marine conservation related issues, and this trend is not going to abate anytime soon. CCA has a legal defense fund that allows members to be represented in these critical battles. With victories to maintain bycatch reduction devices in Gulf of Mexico shrimp trawls to and, more recently, a favorable settlement on a landmark recreational fishing access case off the Florida coast, this fund is paying off in the proper conservation of our fishery resources. This year's legal defense fund request should arrive soon. CCA asks for an annual contribution to fund the mounting challenges that face our coastal resources and involvement of recreational anglers who enjoy them. The debate about MPAs and freedom to fish issues will likely not be solved in one gleaming moment. Like many significant fishery issues, it will play out in Congress and our courts. Your contribution to this campaign will help recreational anglers' voices continue to be a guiding light for focused management.