A lesson from my Oregon Summer Scholar Fellowship

At the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife (ODFW), I’ve learned about the bureaucratic process necessary to make changes to rules and policies. The Oregon Fish and Wildlife Commission (OFWC) is the entity responsible for creating new policies concerning the recreation and harvest of natural resources. However, ODFW does have an important role in providing background, evidence, and advocating for (or against) rule changes. The process can be summarized briefly by the flowchart below: 

Rule making can also be initiated by the public through a proposal (for sport rule changes) or testimony/comment.

This bureaucratic process can be tedious and slow, but if rushed, can lead to misinformed decisions. Data collecting over time using both fisheries dependent data and fishery independent data (in SEACOR’s case) allows for better informed decisions based on science for management of natural resources. An example is that of the Bay Clam Fishery in 2016 where the cumulative pounds of harvested bay clams in the last years were hitting the limit within the first months of the season, shown through data collected by ODFW. In response, the regulatory rules of bay clam harvesting were adapted by OFWC from their last change 20 years ago to reflect the new data of changing harvest patterns, newer clam stock assessment data, and differences with recreational users. 

The SEACOR team’s stock assessment data is vital for benchmarks on whether these regulatory rules were a success or not. The longer a study goes on, the more reliable the results can be. In this way, ODFW plays a role of environmental steward; I can definitely see myself in a similar role investigating populations of species in marine and coastal areas. I also realize that conservation scientists and regulatory agencies such as ODFW cannot be the only stewards affecting the policies that govern how we interact with our environment. The more people involved and educated on their state’s and county’s natural resource policies as well as the more people who interact responsibly with nature, the better we can connect and take care of our environment. Aldo Leopold, a champion for the idea of stewardship, put it best when he wrote

“I have purposely presented the land ethic as a product of social evolution because nothing so important as an ethic is ever ‘written’… It evolves in the minds of a thinking community.”

Thanks for reading!