Via Ron Bailey, I see that Obama’s choice to head the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (which is, I should note, my weather-junkie wife’s very favorite federal agency and her most-trusted source for daily weather) is a declared supporter of the use of property rights to restore fisheries, a promising strategy that I wrote about for Culture11 a few months ago. Here’s her statement from a 2007 panel discussion:

There are a lot of different variations on this thing, but the idea is that instead of every fisherman just fishing like crazy until the total allowable catch has been caught in any particular season, the idea is to guarantee or to allocate the total catch to individuals based on their history or some other rational way of doing it, so that they have a guaranteed fraction of the catch, regardless of what the total catch is and that, in fact, changes the dynamics because they then have incentive to make sure that there are enough fish to be caught next year, and the next year, and the next year. So it enables them to take a long term perspective and have the value of their portfolio grow through time not just to be exploited this year and so I don’t want to go into more detail about this except to say that there are some very innovative, new ways of restructuring fisheries to align fishermen’s interests with conservation interests that are economically profitable over the long term not just the short term and that that is being actively performed by science and that is actually a good thing, it’s a nice tool that has complimented marine reserves that I think will provide for hope for the future of oceans.

Here’s hoping she makes it happen.

     Filed under: environment, food, government/law