When survival of endangered species collides with working for a living, the easy solutions are the most extreme: stop the work, or write off the species. The first is usually unnecessary and the second is not legal.

The National Marine Fisheries Service is developing a plan that will ensure safe passage of migrating, endangered whales along the eastern seaboard and allow fishing to continue. That result is not easy to negotiate, but that is our goal.

The proposed rules for managing this situation are controversial and rightly so. They are not final. Let me be clear. If they won’t work for whales and continued fishing, they won’t be the final rules.

To get rules that will work, NMFS is actively engaging those interested in an ongoing planning process that has been messy, controversial, and quite public over the past nine months. Beginning in August 1996, a 37-member team worked for six months to develop a plan. The proposed rules incorporate virtually all the consensus recommendations of that team, which represented a cross-section of people knowledgeable about fishing, whales, and management. The next steps include 11 upcoming public hearings from Machias to Ocean City, Md., consideration of collected comments, and publication of final rules in July.

People who fish are som of our most inventive, and we believe a solution can be found, not by resisting action, but by working together to take action. The resulting measures may not be without cost, but they could very well be less costly and more effective than those in present proposal, which were based on the many recommendations received during and after the take reduction team’s discussions.

The plan currently includes recommendations from the team that all can accept, some of which are already being pursued; improving the whale disentanglement network, more gear development, expanded knowledge of whale distribution and their regulatores to reduce collisions with whales, working with Canada to reduce whale takes in their commerical fisheries, and improving the transfer of information between the fleet and managers regarding both whales and fishing practices.

It is true that NMFS rejected recommendations that no action be taken regarding this gear in the Gulf of Maine because the law, and whale recovery, require action. Reducing takes of right, fin, and humpback whales in lobster pots, sink gillnets, and drift gillnets from Maine through Florida must be part of any solution.

There are right whales, fin whales, and humpback whales throughout the Gulf of Maine during various times of the year. All of these animals are on the endangered species list and are known to entangle in lobster and gillnet gear. Much of the nation’s lobster gear and substantial gillnet gear is deployed in the Gulf of Maine. It is simply impossible to ignore these facts and still comply with the Marine Mammal Protection Act, the law which directs us to reduce such takes.

But it is more than a legal issue. Protecting whales, particularly endangered ones, is not only the law, but also a national and international concern. No one — fishermen, school children, lawmakers, or consumers — wants to associate seafood with whale entanglements.

Finally, there will probably be lawsuits over this issue whether this plan, another plan, or no plan is implemented. The key is to meet the Act’s requirements with reasonable success. Which brings us back to the beginning; there are easy but extreme solutions allowable under the law; and there are better, but more difficult to obtain, solutions as well.

I urge everyone with specialized knowledge to read the proposed rules, understand the legal requirements for take reduction, and make constructive criticism of the proposal at one of the public hearings or by written comments to NMFS by May 15.

Andy Rosenberg is the Northeast regional administrator for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration National Marine Fisheries Service.