Last year, FERN editor-at-large George Black became convinced that there was a story to be done about fishing in the Gulf of Mexico, given the controversies over bluefin tuna, the BP oil spill, and various other conservation issues like the dead zone that FERN has covered. So he enlisted Barry Yeoman to dig in. The result is our latest story, “The Gulf War,” produced with Texas Monthly magazine. For a longer version, go to FERN’s site.
What Yeoman found was that there was an issue in the Gulf, around coveted red snapper, the buttery and delicious fish that had been harvested to levels that almost ensured its demise. What Yeoman also found was that a federal fisheries regulation in 2007 had helped the snapper bounce back, but in such a way that local anglers felt shut out by the commercial fishing industry. The anglers fought back, winning support from the state. Now everyone in the commercial fishing industry — from boat captains to wholesalers to chefs — wonder if the angler’s end game is to completely shut them out of the snapper fishery altogether.
This is a colorful story, redolent of the salty Gulf, with anglers accusing the commercial fishermen of practicing sharecropping when they rent out rights to fish, and boat captains accusing anglers of denying snapper to grandmothers who shop at fish markets. It’s also the kind of story we love — an important battle over a scarce resource that everyone appreciates.
In fact, looking back over five years of stories, such as this one, we realized that we have a definitive body of work that is worth celebrating. So for our fifth birthday, we’re producing a FERN collection, The Dirt: Dispatches from the front lines of food and farming 2011-2016. For a hundred-buck donation, you can lock in a copy of this limited-edition print anthology, edited by me, with a foreword from Michael Pollan. We hope you’ll consider it, as it will help us produce more of the stories you value.
One final bit of news: We welcome aboard our intern Eliana Block, a journalism student from the University of Maryland, who has joined us for the summer to help out on the Ag Insider daily policy briefing.
Best Regards,
Sam Fromartz
Editor-in-Chief
Food & Environment Reporting Network
@fromartz
@FERNnews
Photo by Kathy Anderson