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Article snippet: There has been recent criticism of the Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership’s support of the Modernizing Recreational Fisheries Management Act of 2017, even suggesting that we have somehow done an injustice to the legacy of our organization’s namesake. In a recent opinion piece for The Hill, angler Mark Eustis praised the TRCP in general, but decried the organization for our positions on federal management of saltwater recreational fishing and painted us as a latecomer to ongoing conversations around the Magnuson-Stevens Act, the federal law governing marine fisheries. Eustis, in fact, mistakenly links one of these examples — the recovery of striped bass — to the success of the Magnuson Act, when truly this species bounced back through collaborative alternative management efforts. In 1984, Congress passed the Atlantic Striped Bass Conservation Act to allow joint state and federal management of striped bass, overseen by the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Commission — not the federal regional council, as the Magnuson Act requires for most saltwater fish. A fisheries management plan was devised for stripers that allowed for separate approaches to managing the commercial and recreational fisheries while improving data collection by relying on state fisheries agencies to conduct annual stock assessments. By the late 1990s and early 2000s, striped bass had recovered from near collapse thanks to this alternative approach. The legislation before Congress wo... Link to the full article to read more