I snuck out last week and headed off to Washington DC. There is no pending legislation, but we were offered support from “DCO2” – Don’t Cage Our Ocean – who are working on legislation against industrial fin-fish farming.
This is something we do occasionally; some ocean conservation organization gets funds to push an issue up on the legislative calendar and they sponsor a pile of folks to pad around the Hill and “polish the marble” on the issue with congressional members and their staff.
We’ve done this before on behalf of the Marine Fish Conservation Network, who, with funding from Pew, Packard, and others, regularly brought a pile of fishermen and women, policy specialists, and ocean conservationists, to advocate for sensible provisions in the quinquennial reauthorization of the Magnuson-Stevens Fisheries Act.
These organizations recruit (and sponsor) us to carry water for them, and in exchange we get to share our concerns with Representatives, Senators, and their staff – usually not in that order (although we did spend some chewy moments with Senators Warnock and Markey).
There are many advantages of this arrangement – in addition to getting some of our expenses defrayed. Representatives and Senators are typically disinterested in meeting with anyone outside of their district or state, because they are not on any ballots we get. But when we come representing thousands-to-millions of constituents, it perks up their interest a bit.
With the DCO2 message, I consider advocating against Industrial Fish Farming an easy sell; when you have Corporate Agriculture (Cargill), Pharmaceuticals for bacterial and parasitic antibiotics (Merck), and wholesale food distribution (Sisco), wrapped into legislation that would privatize our national offshore resources and hand them over to corporations who don’t know how to fish, you are not doing any local economies any favors. These entities and their techniques are despoiling the ocean and poisoning our food supply – with the objective of concentrating their corporate wealth-extraction activities at the expense of local fisheries.
No thank-you…
The offices we visited were coordinated by DCO2. They were filtered by being sympathetic to the DCO2 message and by default interested in ocean conservation. So in the meetings, I would wrap it up speaking about the offshore wind issue – handing them our ‘collateral’ on the OSW issue.
Again, there is no pending legislation on either the Industrialized Fish Farms, or the Offshore Wind issues, but they are both seriously playing at the perimeters of our concerns.
And one of the more effective ways of getting the conversation tilted in our direction is to inform the legislators and their staff about issues that will soon be coming up on their screens in the rapidly approaching future…
It is for this that we take these opportunities to head through the center of our national democracy – to at least provide narratives not generated by the machine and targeted to some odd idea that success equals “more, cheaper…”
