I'm under no illusions as to fishery impacts. But exploitation rates now are a fraction of what they were 30 years ago. On some systems, harvest rates of 75% were not uncommon, and escapement goals were met or exceeded every year. Now those same stocks are just maintaining at 5-10% incidental exploitation. The turn happened somewhere in the 90's.
I'm not saying the fisheries don't have the capacity for impacts, I'm saying the bulk of the impacts happen before we get a crack at them. That doesn't mean we shouldn't mitigate the impacts we can control, I just think we need to look beyond the obvious. We are all user groups, we all have impacts, but there is a reason for whats happening, and its a strong bet it happens before the fisheries open up.
