The North Pacific Fishery Management Council, the government body charged with administering Alaskan waters, has announced that all U.S. waters north of the Bering Strait may soon be closed to commercial fishing. The Council has voted unanimously in Seattle today to close 196,000 square miles (507,600 square kilometers) of ocean to any fishing.
Jim Ayers, vice president for Pacific and Arctic affairs at ocean conservation organization Oceana, explained that this will close the Arctic to all commercial fishing. He added that this is the beginning of a concept of large protected marine areas. He told that these seas—U.S. territorial waters in the Chukchi and Beaufort seas—are not currently fished, but sea ice melt and the northward migration of certain fish species, such as salmon, raises the possibility that they would be in the not too distant future.
According to marine scientists there is at present too little known about how marine ecosystems function in the Arctic, let alone how they will respond to the dramatic changes in progress, to prescribe safe harvest levels for living marine resources in the U.S. Arctic. The vote requires the National Marine Fisheries Service, part of the National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), to issue a report and the Secretary of Commerce is expected to officially seal the deal as early as this fall.
It is fact that the Bush administration sold leases for oil and gas exploration in the Chukchi Sea to Shell, and global warming is wreaking havoc by melting sea ice, softening permafrost and even eroding villages and towns.
