University of Canberra Fisheries management emeritus professor Bob Kearney's recent nit-picking of a document prepared by the NSW Marine Parks Authority has led to the information being removed from their website. You can still download this important paper titled "Review of benefits of marine protected areas and related zoning considerations" below. HCEC believe that while the paper does include some minor errors, it documents the benefits of marine protected areas well and should be available to counter the spurious assertion of the lunatic fishing fringe that there is no scientific basis for marine sanctuaries.

 

Who is this Professor Kearney and why is he against Marine Protected Areas?

 

 

Bob Kearney - Emeritus Professor of Fisheries at the University of Canberra – recently launched a stinging attack on a paper published by the NSW Marine Parks Authority (MPA), and by implication, the Zoning Plan for the Batemans Marine Park. His address was not published in any pier reviewed journal but an excerpt ran in the November 2007 issue of the commercial fishing magazine Ausmarine, as well as various marine industry and fishing websites (see for example www. baird –online.com).

His address however has been criticised by another marine scientist as “very unimpressive as a scientific critique”. Professor Kearney wisely passed up the opportunity to have his address published in a scientific journal that would have drawn further criticism for his transparent bias and lack of scientific rigour. Indeed, it is highly questionable whether such an address would have passed the scrutiny of a scientific journal.

Recently Prof Kearney has focused his attention on recreational fishing. With such titles of recently authored papers as Fisheries property rights and recreational/commercial conflict and Evaluating the Benefits of Recreational Fisheries, as well as having represented the fishing industry on the Federal Biological Diversity Advisory Committee, it is not surprising that Prof. Kearney has taken such a position (see appendix 1 for a critique of selected recent papers).

Prof. Kearney helped develop, supports and still promulgates the old approaches to fisheries management that have been criticised by many younger and more creative thinkers. Critics suggest that the old fisheries management assumptions, that Kearney staunchly defends, have failed. New approaches to fisheries management and marine conservation are urgently needed to stave off the ecological impacts that are emerging in our oceans and estuaries.

At a time when diversity and abundance of marine species are in decline, the current unsustainable fisheries management practices and techniques that people like Kearney stubbornly maintain, cannot rely on old assumptions that are seeing a continued decline in fished populations. As most fisheries depend on harvesting wild populations whose productivity is derived from biodiversity, fisheries scientists like Kearney can no longer strive simply to maximise yield while ignoring biological interactions. It is unprofessional for any scientist to form an attachment to an industry to the point where they are prepared to become its advocate. While it is conceded that fisheries generate a great deal of funding for scientific work, this should not be a determining factor within a transparent scientific debate.

While his address to The Australian Society for Fish Biology was a stinging attack on the Marine Parks Authority, Prof. Kearney admitted that there is an emerging consensus that Marine Parks “can be effective tools for conserving biodiversity and assisting with fisheries management,” that “sanctuaries can provide protection for critical activities of some species” and that “the most effective measures to counter identified threats may well be area management” such as Marine Parks.

Kearney also admited that “there are almost certainly marine areas, species and habitats in the Batemans region that require protection and many that would benefit from efficient area management.” He includes examples such as “the closure of all inshore areas to fish trawling, and reduction in threats from introduced pests, such as aquatic weeds.” The fact that the Zoning Plan for the Batemans Marine Park succeeded in removing all trawling and can help reduce the spread of aquatic weeds into and out of areas zoned as sanctuaries is ignored by Kearney.

Largely an exercise in nit-picking, his critique of the Marine Parks Authority paper may be of academic concern in respect to accuracy, but in no-way discredits the Batemans Marine Park, the credibility of the Marine Parks Authority or the justification of existing and proposed marine parks in New South Wales

Everyone with a stake in the health of marine ecosystems should be given the opportunity to provide input into the process of determining areas suitable for protection and this applies to fishing advocates such as Professor Kearney.

A telling omition of Kearney was how best to situate santiary zones and habitat protection zones to increase fisheries benefits. Despite the lack of constructive critisism by Kearney, Marine Parks continue to find favour with tourist operators, divers and most importantly marine biodiversity.

 

Appendix – Critique of selected recent paper by Bob Kearney.

 

In “Recreational Fishing: Value is in the Eye of the Beholder”, Robert Kearney presents his rather subjective view on the value of recreational fishing. The paper, presented in the book “Recreational Fishing: Ecological, Economic and Social Evaluation (eds. Pitcher, T.J and Hollingworth, C., 2002), purports to review the ecological, economic and social issues that impact the value of recreational fishing.

Kearney argues that “Evaluation is complex and imprecise, even in the few situations where catches are known”. This does not, however, stop Kearney from concluding that “While we procrastinate, others are gaining more securely defined rights, which are increasingly assuming the characteristics of either private property rights, legislative restrictions zones or politically correct restraints on practices.” The subjectivity evident in Kearney’s position is in stark contrast to accepted scientific evaluation techniques. Nevertheless, Kearney positions himself as a recreational fisher with a very blunt axe to grind. The evaluation begins with the value-laden assertion that “Recreational fishing is fun.” While this assertion is not substantiated in the paper, Kearney cites like-minded “fisheries scientists” in a self-reflexive manner, who assert that while 4000BP Egyptian murals depicting pole fishing “may have been for food, ‘ …it certainly looks fun’” (Pitcher and Hollingworth, 2002).

In his paper, further self-reflexive analyses emerge with Kearney citing himself as lamenting “the lack of scientific rigour in Australia’s approach to assessing recreational fisheries (Kearney 1999a)”. Though this may be an inescapable conclusion, it does present an opportunity for a recreational fisher such as Kearney to impose unsubstantiated value-laden assertions that leave the non-fishing reader doubting whether any rigour will ever emerge for a serious and objective assessment. The paper Kearney is responsible for adds nothing to the existing corpus of understanding relating to recreational fisheries assessment. It does, however, clearly attempt to explain why recreational fishers value their “sport.” Such analyses are more correctly placed within a Cultural Studies or Sociological context than a scientific one. Kearney ignores such disciplinary boundaries and boldly continues by including a paragraph relating to factors influencing angler satisfaction that concludes: “…there is a large number of reasons why people go recreational fishing and many factors which influence the priority given to individual reasons. Consensus on why is elusive..." Other than a further unsubstantiated “ecological balance sheet for recreational fishing” (Table 2.1), readers are left with little objective analysis of accepted ecological impacts. The balance sheet provides a number of positive and negatives of recreational fishing.

The positives of recreation fishing to ecology, according to Kearney are as follows:

• Education,
• Promotes environmental responsibility
• Aids environmental monitoring
• Engenders support for restoration
• Data collection
• Aids surveillance of environmental vandalism.

Kearney devotes only seven lines (of 14 pages) to a brief and perfunctory evaluation of the ecological impacts of recreational fishing – almost as an aside. Rather than citing any peer-reviewed papers that assess these impacts (of which there are multitudes) Kearney cites a series of studies commissioned by the Fisheries Co-Management Council of Victoria to support the assertion that “environmental damage by either group [commercial and recreational fishing] was not great but pollution from bait wrappers and fuel emissions from recreational sector were of concern (WBM 1997)”.

Kearney asserts that recreational fishing is in competition and conflict with conservation imperatives. While supporting the contention that Marine Protected Areas should be seen as a benefit to the long-term security and quality of recreational fisheries, he focuses more on the conflicts and short-term impacts on the “sport”, arguing that: "…governments are pushing ahead with restrictions on the use of marine areas because of their need to be seen to be acting to conserve biodiversity when their efforts to restrict terrestrial activities have been singularly unsuccessful because of the relative strength of property rights for farmers and graziers”.

The incontrovertible truth that Kearny avoids in his diatribe on fishing restriction, is that terrestrial conservation has had a far greater affect in respect to the security of ecological communities due to tenure based National Parks and Reserves that far more easily lend themselves to protected areas than the marine environment. Further, it is arguable whether farmers and graziers would agree with Kearney that restrictions on terrestrial farming activities such as land clearing, in-stream water access, effluent runoff, harvestable rights, carrying capacity and other successfully introduced land use regulations on private land have been “singularly unsuccessful”.

This assertion by Kearney, not only reveals his lack of understanding of the issues surrounding terrestrial conservation biology, but also his misunderstanding of marine tenures in NSW. Does Kearney expect us to accept that activities that are carried out in our public marine jurisdiction should be provided with some kind of private property right? If so, Kearney exists in a bubble created by his one-eyed view that fishing somehow has developed into a fungible right, rather than a privilege tolerated by the broader community only if and when it is conducted sustainably.

However, by far the most comical assertion made in his paper (in the section devoted to the history of recreational fishing) is that: "Good fishers were likely to have more offspring who could, in turn, be anticipated to have a greater chance of survival and procreation. Genetic selection for fishing commitment and aptitude seems inevitable". This, Kearney would have us believe, supports a notion of a genetic superiority of fishers over the lowly landlubber whose reproductive success was limited through competitive fisher pressure.

This thread continues in Kearney’s conclusions: "There can be little doubt that the first human attempts at fishing would have been for food. It is also given that success would have brought pleasure, even enjoyment. Once success became less precarious one can assume at least some participants found it fun."

Kearney asserts that such a historically and genetically programmed predilection for fishing “fun” connoted a fishing fun tradition. This assumed traditional right to largely unrestricted access to fish resources, Kearney claims, has led to a defence by “recreational fishing community” against : ...customary resource users and owners, preservationists and conservationists and animal rights activists.

Kearney clearly aligns himself within, or at least alongside, the so called recreational fishing community in his statement: "In preparing this defence we have become aware of the diversity of ecological, economic and social reasons why fishing is values, or disliked, by individuals in the broader community. … Yet if we remain divided on what we value and why we deserve to be involved in management processes the balance sheet will not be one of which we can be proud, or on which we can rely."

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