By Julia Robins, Staff Writer
There are different ways of saying the same thing—I say tomato, you say tomahto—but in the case of fisheries and land-use planning, saying things differently has big implications.
Land-use planners make decisions that affect nearby waters and the fish that live there. For instance, shad and river herring swim upstream along the Eastern coast to spawn but run into dams, turbines, power plants, and other land-use implementations along the way. These land-based decisions will change the options these fish have. They’ll also change the options fisheries managers have for managing fish.
To better understand the level of communication and understanding between these groups, Dr. Troy Hartley, Director of Virginia Sea Grant, and a research team of William & Mary law school students, Julie Cook and Jessica Hou, compared the terms used in fisheries management plans with those used in local land-use plans at seven different localities. What they found was a potential serious breakdown in effective communication between fisheries scientists and local land-use management groups.
“Just getting both sides to understand each other better is a challenge. We’re still at a very fundamental level of mutual understanding,” says Hartley. About 80% of the time, these groups are using different terminology when referring to the same topic.
This disconnect in language is not surprising. Terms used in fisheries are not related to land issues, but rather marine concepts. Local governments and planners generally make land-based plans and decisions. However, the consequences of this lack of overlap extends beyond fish, managers, and planners to individual watermen and others who depend on natural resources to make a living.
To work together, fisheries managers and land-use planners will need to start from square one, and both will need to take extra efforts. There is no jurisdictional mandate for local governments to include fishery management terms in laws, and no clear legal structure to encourage communication between these two groups.
Even without a legal requirement in place, there are still opportunities to improve the situation.
The Virginia Chapter of the American Planning Association, for instance, has meetings annually, at which they often host workshops that offer a chance to comprehensively explore new issues with implications for planning. During interviews with the research team, planners suggested inviting fisheries managers and researchers to host their own workshops, sessions, or presentations at the 2015 meeting.
Likewise, fisheries managers “are really thirsty to understand land-use managers and why they pursue the land-use policies that they do,” says Hartley. Getting these groups together is just the first step.
“It’s not necessarily about talking to each other more,” says Hartley, “but how we talk to each other and whether we are talking to each other in a language that each of us understands.”
