[Congressional Record Volume 155, Number 2 (Wednesday, January 7, 2009)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Pages E32-E33]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                 ``BRIAN ROTHSCHILD: MAN OF THE YEAR''

                                 ______
                                 

                           HON. BARNEY FRANK

                            of massachusetts

                    in the house of representatives

                       Wednesday, January 7, 2009

  Mr. FRANK of Massachusetts. Madam Speaker, after the congressional 
redistricting of 1992 and the subsequent election, I won the great 
responsibility and challenge of representing America's most prosperous 
fishing port--the City of New Bedford and the Town of Fairhaven. Over 
these past sixteen years I have worked very hard in conjunction with 
the people in the fishing industry to help create the conditions in 
which they can do their work which is so important not just to the 
region in which they are located, but to the entire country. As we 
stress the importance of people eating in a healthier manner, the role 
of seafood becomes all the more important, and preserving the ability 
of people in the fishing industry to perform this service they do for 
the rest of us is a major part of my job.
  In some cases, our advocacy can be fairly easy, as a matter of 
principle. But there are also cases in which mastering a very complex 
body of data is essential if we are to do our job right. We are of 
course in the Congress assisted in doing that by the extremely talented 
and dedicated people we are lucky enough to have on our staffs, but we 
are also in need of help from outside. In the case of the fishing 
industry, no individual during my career has been as important as Dr. 
Brian Rothschild of the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth.
  Brian Rothschild combines in an extraordinary degree technical 
expertise, practical knowledge, political savvy, and an ability to 
understand all viewpoints and articulate his own that makes him an 
enormous asset to those concerned with the fishing industry. He is a 
model of how public policy discussions should be conducted. Not 
surprisingly, the New Bedford Standard Times recently named him their 
South Coast Man of the Year, an honor that is beyond dispute an 
extremely well deserved one.
  Madam Speaker, I ask that the article from the New Bedford Standard 
Times chronicling the extraordinary work of Dr. Rothschild and his 
importance to the fishing industry be printed here, since this is an 
industry which is greatly impacted by our activity and about which the 
Members should know a great deal.

                 [From South Coast Today, Jan. 1, 2009]

                      A Big Fish in Marine Science

       Teacher, fisherman, furniture maker, marine scientist--
     there isn't much that University of Massachusetts Dartmouth 
     professor Brian Rothschild can't do and do well.
       Luckily for the city of New Bedford, sometime in the 1990s 
     he set his mind on seeking ways to save the local scallop 
     fishery. A little over a decade later, scallops have made the 
     city the biggest fishing port, in terms of dollars worth of 
     seafood caught, in the United States.
       Around the same time that Dr. Rothschild, now 74, started 
     studying scallops, he also started building up the faculty 
     and facilities at the UMD Center for Marine Science and 
     Technology (SMAST), making it into one of the nation's 
     quality schools of ocean science. He was dean of the marine 
     school from 1995 through 2006, the school's formative decade, 
     when it first began attracting a world-class faculty.
       For his efforts on behalf of the fishermen of New Bedford 
     and the seafood economy to their fisheries, and for his 
     efforts in making UMass Dartmouth a growing center of marine 
     science and research, Brian J. Rothschild is The Standard-
     Times 2008 SouthCoast Man of the Year.
       Nominations for the award came from the community and 
     members of the newspaper staff. Recipients were selected by a 
     newsroom committee.
       ``He's really made a big difference in the fishing industry 
     in New Bedford,'' said Rodney Avila, the owner of two scallop 
     boats and the city's representative to the New England 
     Fisheries Management Council (a coalition of industry, 
     conservation, and government officials that recommends 
     regulations for the region's fisheries).
       Dr. Rothschild and UMass Dartmouth professor Kevin 
     Stokesbury developed a system of counting scallops by using 
     an underwater camera to photograph their beds at the bottom 
     of the ocean.
       Previously, the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) 
     had estimated scallops by the numbers caught in fishing nets, 
     a method that invariably led to undercounting, Dr. Rothschild 
     said.
       Dr. Rothschild and Dr. Stokesbury proved the government 
     conservationists' methods of measuring scallops were wrong.

[[Page E33]]

       The underwater camera, in addition to being able to count 
     scallops not caught in nets, was also able to count scallops 
     in ocean areas that federal regulators had closed to 
     scallopers. They found the scallop numbers in the closed 
     areas were also greatly underestimated.
       ``I've always supported the idea of controlling fishing, 
     but I also support the idea of the best science,'' Dr. 
     Rothschild said. ``What we did was really good science.''
       Jean MacCormack, the chancellor of UMass Dartmouth, noted 
     the singular nature of Brian Rothschild convincing a federal 
     regulatory agency to change its practices.
       ``It's pretty unusual,'' she said, ``to develop a 
     methodology that NMFS accepted.''
       ``NMFS was saying there were no scallops and they proved 
     them wrong,'' Mr. Avila said. ``That was one of the main 
     components of the rejuvenation of the scallop industry.''
       New Bedford Mayor Scott Lang is unqualified in his praise 
     of Brian Rothschild.
       ``I think he's the difference between the scallop industry 
     prospering, as they have in the last decade, versus being in 
     the same situation as groundfish,'' he said.
       The mayor was referring to the fact that the New Bedford 
     groundfishing industry has suffered from stringent federal 
     fishing regulations.
       New Bedford was the nation's busiest port last year, for 
     the ninth year in a row, with 60 million pounds of fresh 
     seafood landed, with a value of $281 million, principally due 
     to the scallop catch.
       Dr. Rothschild stresses that he's a big supporter of 
     conserving fisheries but, because fish live below the 
     surface, they aren't easily measured. He thought that if he 
     could improve the science, he could benefit both the fishery 
     and the fishermen.
       ``There was some resistance from the fisheries service. And 
     some of the conservation groups thought our estimates were in 
     error, but it's a solid scientific process we went through,'' 
     he explains.
       Dr. Rothschild subscribes to a view of ocean ecology that 
     the fishermen, and their fishing efforts, are themselves an 
     integral part of the ocean ecology of a given area.
       ``You have to look at a balance between the substantial 
     effects that humans have on the (fish) populations and the 
     productivity of the populations. That's what conservation is 
     in this day and age.''
       Because fishing species, under certain conditions and to a 
     certain extent, proliferate in the wake of a fishing effort, 
     Dr. Rothschild set out to balance the maximum amount of 
     fishing effort needed to benefit human beings with the 
     maximum amount of fishing effort needed to benefit the 
     population of fish species.
       Currently, SMAST is studying counting methods for 
     groundfish (which unlike scallops, move around in the ocean). 
     The objective is to obtain more accurate counts of the 
     groundfish (haddock, cod, yellowtail flounder) in the New 
     England fishery.
       Because the federal government's currently accepted methods 
     of counting groundfish counting show the stocks are 
     depressed, NMFS intends to further restrict the fishing 
     effort--which is already a barely profitable industry--next 
     year.
       The failure to find a better method for integrating the 
     effects of fishing and groundfish proliferation has had 
     devastating effects on the local industry, Dr. Rothschild 
     said.
       ``You can see all this happening in New Bedford. The (fish) 
     populations are being managed biologically yet there's a 
     tremendous amount of economic grief,'' he said. ``The 
     societal grief won't be realized until these contemplated 
     cuts (in the fishing effort) take place.''
       People will be displaced from their jobs and end up on 
     government ``welfare,'' dependent on the taxpayers, he said.
       In addition to his professional fields of expertise, Dr. 
     Rothschild is an active advocate for area fisheries and his 
     research on important government and quasi-government boards 
     and commissions. He worked for the National Oceanic and 
     Atmospheric Administration in the 1970s as a senior policy 
     adviser so he well understands how the regulatory bureaucracy 
     works.
       Presently, he chairs New Bedford's Ocean and Fisheries 
     Council (an advocacy group for the city's fishing interests), 
     co-directs the Massachusetts Marine Fisheries Institute (a 
     research partnership between UMass Dartmouth and the state 
     Division of Marine Fisheries) and chairs the Scientific and 
     Statistical Committee of the Mid-Atlantic Fisheries 
     Management Council.
       The goal is to bring fishing regulations more into line 
     with statistics that better reflect ocean science, including 
     in the economics of the fisheries, he said.
       ``One measure of performance is overfishing, another is 
     optimal yield (of fish), another is minimal angst among the 
     people that are regulated,'' he said. ``I think we could do a 
     much better job so we need to increase the dialogue with the 
     agency. (That's) a step that Barney Frank and the mayor and I 
     have been involved in.''
       Congressman Frank, who along with Sens. John Kerry and 
     Edward Kennedy, has long advocated for the city's interests 
     in Washington, said Dr. Rothschild has been very helpful in 
     making the scallop industry more successful.
       ``The beauty of Brian is that he knows the scene better 
     than anybody else,'' he said.
       Dr. Rothschild's reputation as a scientist has given his 
     studies credibility with the federal government, said Mayor 
     Lang.
       A former professor at the state universities of Maryland 
     and Washington, Brian Rothschild is the author of nearly 100 
     papers and books and is an acknowledged expert in fish 
     population dynamics, biological oceanography, and natural 
     resources policy. Next year, in collaboration with several 
     West Coast fishery scientists, he will publish a book on the 
     future of fisheries science in North America.
       Mayor Lang calls him the perfect expert on the Magnusson-
     Stevenson Act that governs American fisheries.
       ``He understands how it relates to species and he 
     understands how it relates to human beings,'' he said.
       Dr. MacCormack noted that even though Dr. Rothschild has an 
     international reputation as a scientist, he is completely at 
     home with the fishermen and fishing boat owners on the New 
     Bedford docks.
       ``When you see him present a paper to academics, he speaks 
     their language, but he can go to the fish auction and speak 
     their language, too,'' she said.
       Boat owner Rodney Avila gave a similar assessment.
       ``He doesn't talk down to fishermen, he talks with them. 
     That's important,'' he said.
       ``He's a good, all-around man,'' said Mr. Avila.
       Brian Rothschild has dug deep into New Bedford in the 13 
     years he's been at UMass Dartmouth.
       He and his wife, Susan, have refurbished one of the long-
     neglected Victorian houses in the city's West End and he has 
     a studio in the North End where, in his spare time, he builds 
     replicas of 18th century furniture.
       He has traded in the sailboat he first came to New Bedford 
     in for a 40-foot ``Novi,'' a recreational fishing boat where 
     he and Susan fish for local fish that make good eating: 
     stripers, fluke and whatever else in local waters that might 
     taste good.
       His wife, like himself, loves fishing and ocean studies so 
     it makes for an interesting crew, he said, the dry sense of 
     humor he's well known for coming through.
       Dr. Rothschild said he hopes his New Bedford legacy will be 
     the use of ocean science to continue the revival of the 
     fishing industry, and he hopes that SMAST can continue to 
     build the quality of its faculty so it becomes one of the 
     nation's elite marine science schools.
       It may be, however, that Dr. Rothschild's biggest legacy 
     will be tied to the people of New Bedford themselves.
       He admits that his survey is unscientific but he says the 
     city has changed since 1995 when he first arrived, sailing 
     his own boat from Maryland to the city, passing Cuttyhunk and 
     then finally coming up a foggy Acushnet River.
       ``When I moved here, the houses were, in general, in a 
     state of disrepair. The economy looked bleak,'' he said. ``As 
     the economy and the fish auction developed, the community 
     seemed brighter and better furbished and more prosperous.''
       That's not a bad legacy, for an ocean scientist who sees 
     local fishermen as part of the sea's ecology.

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