The
Recreational Fishing Industry, Something of
Value?, pp. 291-301. An
analysis of the sport and commercial industries.
Publicly employed natural resource economists
state that the economic value of our publicly
owned fishery resources is maximized by sharing
them between the commercial and recreational
industries. Sharing also has environmental
benefits: The commercial producers harvest
food and export it from their rural communities,
bringing in, simply, money. The recreational
industry brings in people, spurring coastal
real estate development and pollution.
By their
failure to control, or even consider, limits
on “growth,” those in tourist-based
industries, including recreational fishing,
frequently profane and destroy that which
made a location attractive initially. In this
case, the attraction is the abundance of fish
reared in Louisiana’s lightly populated
expanse of coastal wetlands.
It's
Not Me, It's Him!, pp. 303-320. Private
sport fishermen number in the millions with
each angler allowed to bring in relatively
few fish. Professional commercial fishermen
number in the hundreds, but as food providers,
they can each bring in a boatload. Contrary
to popular perception, the cumulative harvest
of recreational fishermen is frequently far
greater than that of the food fishermen.
While the
recreationals introduced their 1991 gamefish
bill to the Senate Natural Resources Committee,
a commercial fisherman and an elderly Lake
Charles angler argued outside in the hallway.
The angler sported a GCCA redfish nametag.
“How can you say we have anything to
do with it?” he asked incredulously.
“Where do they get those figures? I’ve
fished 50 years and never been checked by
a biologist….Only one in 10, one in
100, one in 1000 sport fishermen catch any
fish. Hardly anybody catches their limit….Huh?
The fishin’ out my way? My wife and
I once caught 1,250 pounds of redfish without
even movin’! One on every cast. We was
just athrowin’ them big fish in the
boat.”
Roy
Lee Yeomans, pp. 321-337. In his
own words, an old-timer talks about his youth
in the Everglades, re-locating to Louisiana
and putting a lot of fish on our tables, until
government destroyed his industry.
A lot o’
people just don’t understand what the
law people are tryin’ to do to the poor
people. They just don’t understand at
all.
But if you explain
it to ‘em, how they’re takin’
it all away from you, and you can’t
make a day’s wages, I wouldn’t
be up there lookin’ for your danged
job. I’d be down here, I wouldn’t
ask nobody for nothin’. If you’d
just leave me alone, I’d go trout fishin’,
come back, sell my fish, come home, go to
bed and go to sleep, and that’s how
I’d live the rest o’ my life.
That’s all I’d ever do, because
that’s a good livin’. But I can’t
even do that.
Now I got to
turn around and horn in on some o’ your
crabbin’. Now, whenever this crabbin’
gets bad I got to go and try to get me a boat
for oysters and dredge ‘em. I’ve
got to try to accumulate enough money to get
in on your oysterin’, ‘cause that’s
the onliest thing I know to do, is to make
it out o’ the water.
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