The lost forests of Atlantis

It is good to see that keeping the crude habitat-destroying trawlers and scallop scrapers away from our public lands on Georges Bank for a few years has let ecological recovery begin out there. The response we make to the bank’s condition being upgraded from “critical” to “serious,” however, shouldn’t be a return to the failed technology and simpleminded so-called “management” that brought the residents of our offshore public lands to their knees in the first place.

As is painfully obvious from underwater video footage and historical records, a century of continuous scraping by the crude unselective drag and scrape technology has flattened the once complex seafloor environment of Georges Bank almost beyond recognition.

Gone are the thousand-year-old stands of tree coral that covered hundreds of square miles of the Georges Bank plateau, providing safety and food to thousands of generations of cod, halibut and a hundred other fish species.

Gone are the vast meadows of sea anemones and other soft organisms that formed a living seafloor. Gone even are the rolling underwater hills and ridgelines of this wild Atlantis that guided the cod on their historic migrations time out of mind.

All smashed so flat by the thousand-pound steel doors, the chains and dredges pulled across them by the scraper and dragger fisheries that the depths on the navigational charts of Georges Bank have had to be revised downward again and again. Crushed. Leveled down to sand, gravel and mud, except for a few steep areas at the 150 fathom line that the scrapers have been unable to get at.

For the last four years, freed from this century-long scourging, wild nature out on Georges Bank has been restoring its battered, beaten kingdom. Like a bulldozed area does on land, it is going through a succession of plant and animal types that inexorably lead back to a fully stocked ecosystem.

But here’s the rub — the animals that first reclaim Georges Bank’s scraped-over undersea landscape are those heavily armored creatures that can live in such a hostile dragger-blasted environment. Remember, no cover exists, and there is nothing to eat except plankton drifting in on the current. Enter … the sea scallop, the early sucessional “weed” of choice that marine nature prefers offshore.

In a normal world, the healing scab of sea scallops that has begun restoring the sea floor of the Gulf and Bank would peak and then decline. Other sea floor animals would take up the succession that leads to the complicated system of hundreds of different marine species that nature has ordained should be living out on our wild Atlantis.

But nature is no match for the timidity of fishery managers, the cowardice of the so-called conservationists, and the avarice of the investors that drive the seafood markets. Rather than let the successional process go its natural route on the bank and bring plenty to everyone, big industry lobbyists like former congressman Gerry Studds pressured the Clinton administration into allowing the scraper invasion of the partially healed Georges Bank. At 4 years of age the scallops are less than halfway to maturity, but are legally sellable.

What followed has been an unmitigated ecological disaster. Like the Serbians pouring into Kosovo, scrapists in more than 400 ships have invaded Georges Bank. Starting June 15 they have waged a brutal campaign against the sea floor. Ripping away the healing scab from the bank’s sea floor, killing everything they come in contact with. Government “observers” are forbidden to photograph or videotape the carnage, for fear that the public would see the awful truth. The partially healed sea 4loor of Georges Bank is being sent back to the comatose state of four years ago.

Of course, as scraper advocate and New England Fishery Management Council member James Kendall of New Bedford, Massachusetts bragged in National Fisherman Magazine in July, the scrapers had already been sneaking onto Georges Bank in violation of the law and pillaging whenever they could get away with it. That Kendall has not been booted from the council for his public defense of theft of public resources shows how completely off course the system is.

The feds are as guilty as Kendall and his cronies. For example the federal Fisheries Science Center in New England is so cowed that its “scientific” reports of what is torn from the seafloor and brought to the surface by scrapists have only three categories: “scallops,” “flounder,” “trash.” For a scientific review to call the corals, sponges, anemones, sea squirts, barnacles, seaworms and hundreds of other seafloor animals’ “trash” indicates how debased the science has become.

When the scrapers have been driven off Georges Bank, the scallops will rise and, their work done, fall, replaced by the coral forests and other living seafloor features that are capable of providing the limitless bounty of cod, haddock, flounder, halibut and the many other sellable fishes that stunned and delighted the hook and seine fishing fleets of the 16th, 17th, 18th and 19th and early 20th centuries. While Wall Street fumes, the gillnetters, the tub trawlers and the rest of our low-impact offshore fishing fleet will prosper.

Ron Huber lives in Rockland.