They did a moratorium on crab fishing by crab fishermen but allow trawling for groundfish that a) picks up crab as bycatch and b) destroys their spawning grounds.
It’s not a great example of an effective policy response.
Yeah I suspect there's quite a lot of claw back by local government. Fishing is a rare industry where most boats are owner-operated and almost all their revenue is funneled back into the local economy (shipyards, shiphands who are employed on the boats themseves, marinas (usually owned by the city) etc) so for a place like alaska getting rid of fishing is hugely crippling for their local economy and the people who work in those towns. Take away fishing and the economy in these towns stops. There is no Fortune 50 company with infinite pockets to swoop in and "make things right" either via the goodness of their own hearts, or by lawsuits.
And this is the irony of short-termist policy making. By blocking reforms in order to maintain some localized status quo, you are very often dooming the future of that localized status quo. Instead, you should be planning ahead to scale it down or transition out of it entirely, and attempting to help people make that transition smoothly over the course of a generation. Ultimately it's just another form of greed and selfishness: "my desires today are more important than your needs tomorrow."
Yes, and never once did any of these owner-operator fisherpeople say: "Hey, we might be overfishing. Let's fish less." In my whole life, it is 100% opposition to any quotas. They are fishing themselves into poverty. It is bizarre. The future is aquaculture for 90+% of what we eat from the oceans/rivers/lakes.
