The commercial fishing industry has recklessly created fisheries depletion and fisheries bycatch, and is a leading contributor to shoreline and ocean pollution. The industry seemingly has no respect for the sentience of the oceans’ inhabitants, given their barbaric and archaic techniques for capture, and, as the literature suggests, the industry provides food products that contain mercury, microplastics and other toxins.
Yet the Town of East Hampton website promotes commercial fishing via a picture of commercial fishing vessels. Sylvia Overby told me they were part of the Montauk fleet.
The Town of East Hampton should be industry neutral and shouldn’t be promoting any industry on its website, especially an industry like the commercial fishing industry that creates so many negative externalities. The town’s shorelines are polluted with commercial fishing debris and bycatch that I unfortunately come across too frequently, and that no one seems to clean up, not even the Town of East Hampton.
Why doesn’t the town show these pictures on its website? Or clean their shorelines of the commercial fishing equipment debris and bycatch? Could there be a conflict of interest within the administration of the Town of East Hampton with respect to their promotion of the commercial fishing industry? Are any town administrators connected to or involved with the commercial fishing industry in any way?
The Town of East Hampton seems stuck in the past and needs to evolve.
Randy Johnston
East Hampton
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