Pew Fellows in Marine Conservation

At first glance The Pew Fellows program seems one of the less important parts of the massive, foundation-funded effort to revolutionize the way the U.S. public looks at and the U.S. government manages fish aand fishing. However, anything more in-depth than a cursory examination will show that among the 160 recipients of these $150,000 fellowships are the leaders or the "stars" of the foundation funded "blame it all on fishing" movement.

A demonstration of how effectively the Pew Fellows can be used was in the report to the Pew Oceans Commission titled Ecological Effects of Fishing. From an critique of the Pew Oceans Commission I wrote about this report:

Right off the bat, two of the three authors who contracted with the POC to prepare the report were also recipients of Pew Fellowships. And of the 179 references cited, well over a third had one or more authors who could be directly connected to Pew Trust funding (we emphasize here that we only sought “first generation” funding connections; we didn’t attempt to ferret out all of the authors who were working for organizations, institutions or individuals receiving Pew funds). And when we looked only at those references cited that were authored since 1995 (about the time that the folks at Pew apparently decided that millions of their dollars should be spent to save the world’s oceans from commercial seafood harvesting), almost half were connected to Pew by funding. (A table listing all of the references cited in the report that have authors with obvious Pew connections, what those connections are, and links to web pages showing those connections is available at http://www.fishingnj.org/impactsreferencestable.htm).

Among the recipients of Pew Fellowships are NOAA head Jane Lubchenco (link), Blue Oceans Institute founder Carl Safina (link), head of Stony Brook University's Pew funded Institute for Ocean Conservation Science Ellen Pikitch (link), Environmental Defense Senior Scientist Rodney Fujita (link), head of Pew funded Marine Conservation Biology Institute Elliot Norse (link) and Conservation Law Foundation (link) lawyer/founder of the Northwest Atlantic Marine Alliance (link) Peter Shelley.