Water Resource Plan Table

·        Create a sustainability plan table using the sustainability plan guidelines following the options.

DECLINING FISH STOCK

[Music]

Fisherman Pete Dupuis is getting ready to go back to work on the Pacific Ocean.

After the albacore season, we’ll go back to longlining and target bigeye tuna and swordfish.

This is both combination freeze and fresh ice.

His boat can easily handle a whopping haul of swordfish. An average catch?

About 20,000 pounds. That could be a couple hundred fish.

Pete is one of the few longliners willing to talk to us these days after a widely-reported study showed that fishing fleets

have stripped the seas of 90 percent of big fish. Pete’s read all about it, but he’s skeptical. He’s still catching as many

fish as ever.

I know this business, and I know it real well. That ocean is big, very big, and it’s going to take us a long time to

really understand it.

Time could be running out. The ten-year study by a fisheries biologist challenges the adage, “There are plenty of fish

in the sea.” Most of the biggest fish have been pulled from the water in the last half century, leaving fishermen to

compete for the remaining 10 percent. This new report is the third major recent scientific study claiming the ocean is

not nearly as resilient as we previously thought. The first was published in 2001 by Jeremy Jackson of the Scripps

Institute of Oceanography in La Jolla, California.

The notion that we can somehow keep hunting and gathering in the oceans without limit to feed six billion people is

just pretty stupid. We will never be able to fish at the level we’ve been fishing.

Narrator: Jackson’s two-year study set out to trace the decline of many ocean species over several centuries.

He and a team of international scientists identified overfishing as more destructive to the ocean than toxic pollution or

degrading water quality.

Is the damage complete, or is there a way to reverse this?

The damage is close to complete, and it’s almost certainly reversible, or at least mostly reversible, but what it requires

is an utterly different attitude about how we use the ocean.

Jackson’s report coincided with a proposed federal law that would limit overfishing, but it has still not received

congressional approval. Jackson says this new report brings the issue to light again, and the next step has to be drastic.

We’ve fished many of these prize fish down to such extraordinarily low levels that I think we have to protect a third or

40 percent or in some cases half of the ocean from fishing for certain species.

Narrator: The off-limits approach will allow fish populations to rebound. The solution is scientifically sound but politically

difficult.

Are we willing to set aside a very large part of the ocean and just not let anybody go there? And it would take all the

navies of the world to pretend to enforce those regulations. We need to have the courage to make difficult decisions

that will hurt people for the protection of the resource for the future.

Pete Dupuis says commercial fishermen will be hurt the most. With swordfish fetching $4 a pound, he has to keep

fishing.

That’s all I know. I mean, I have my life savings invested in this boat. This is it.

And he says that declaring no-fishing zones is the wrong response.

If you have a leak in your water faucet in your house and you hire a plumber, and he says, “I can fix that,” and he

shuts the water off at the street, yeah, he stopped the leak, but he didn’t take care of the problem, and that’s what the

environmental community’s doing now. They’re shutting the water off at the street without taking care of the problem.

Let’s address the problem and take care of the problem, and I don’t think there’s a commercial fisherman that wouldn’t

want to do that, because we want to stay in business, and we want a renewable resource, and it can be one from now

to whenever.

Pete wants more research and a policy that strikes a balance between economic demands and environmental concerns,

but scientists worry that doing nothing will have dire consequences now that a resource once considered inexhaustible

is in real danger of disappearing.

Sustainability Plan Guidelines

Your resource plan must present what, when, and how something is sustained and maintained now and into the indefinite future. Your plan must be submitted in table format. The Corporation for National and Community Service (n.d.) provides the following list of components that make up a sustainability plan that must be included in your table:

1.      Action items: Provide the items that must be addressed or occur. Refer to the following example:

My plan for sustaining clean air in my community is to develop an education program about air-pollution-generating activities and their effects, schedule a presentation day and time, invite community participants, and research the effects of air pollution.

2.      Order of action items: Discuss how the action items will align or occur. One event or activity must occur before another; thus, order the items into steps similar to the following:

1)     Research the effects of air pollution.

2)     Develop an education program.

3)     Schedule a presentation day and time.

4)     Invite the community.

3.      Action steps: Explain how you will conduct the action items. How are you going to make each item happen? Include individuals or groups who will help you conduct these items. Use the following as a guide:

To schedule a presentation day and time, I will attend next month’s community homeowner’s association (HOA) meeting and request permission from the board to add it to the following month’s agenda.

4.      Timeline: Estimate when you will conduct the action items, such as: “In months 1–3, I will complete the research.” If an item or activity does not have a specific conclusion time, indicate that it is “ongoing.”

The following is an incomplete sample of how you might incorporate your resource plan into a table format:

Blank Sample Action Plan

Reference

Corporation for National & Community Service. (n.d.). Sample sustainability plan. In Toolkit for program sustainability, capacity building, and volunteer recruitment/management (Section 4). Retrieved from http://www.nationalserviceresources.org/filemanager/download/online/sustainability_plan.pdf.