Fishermen facing the Blue Economy are frequently fighting turf battles with wind farms, aquaculture, Marine Protected Areas (MPAs), and more. The 2026 Pacific Marine Expo is offering several valuable educational programs, including a panel discussion titled “Save the Catch & Hold Our Ground.”
“We’ll be looking at lessons learned, particularly in California,” says panel moderator Noah Oppenheim, principal of Homarus Strategies, a Maine-based consulting firm. “We’re going to talk about the legal options and pathways that the industry has to protect access to the ocean commons—outside of a privatization model.”
Oppenheim notes that there will be California fishermen on the panel, mostly from the Santa Barbara area, and the discussion will look at their engagement with wind farms for starters. “We’ll talk about federal and state regulations as well as individual states’ conditioning authority to make sure the construction is consistent with state regulations,” Oppenheim notes; however, if states take too strong a stance on controlling the development of wind farms, it could cause friction with federal agencies that are pushing these projects.
“The fishing industry in California had long discussions with the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) about how NEPA—the National Environmental Policy Act— applies in the case of wind farms, and where it is not possible to avoid and minimize impacts, the discussion goes immediately to mitigation, and our panelists, particularly those from Santa Barbara, will be talking about what that can look like.”
One aspect of California law that Oppenheimer highlights is the California Coastal Act, which requires the California Coastal Commission to analyze the cumulative impacts of multiple projects on resources and communities. “This is kind of unique,” says Oppenheim. “This is a robust law that requires the state, when looking at new developments, to consider them within the context of other developments and their cumulative impacts on the culture, history and economy of a community.”
With all the Blue Economy development projects demanding ocean space, Oppenheim notes that California fishermen are having some success using the California Coastal Act to force state agencies to see how bad these cumulative effects have gotten for fishermen. “The panel will talk about how fishermen in other parts of the country can use what has been learned in California,” he says.
Among the success stories, California fishermen who were initially excluded from the formation of MPAs under California’s Marine Life Protection Act are now part of the siting process, and in 2020 the Ocean Protection Council that oversees the MPAs included the “advance of sustainable seafood and thriving fishing communities” in its policy goals.
At the Pacific Marine Expo, the Saving the Catch & Holding Our Ground panel will offer fishermen ideas and blueprints for accomplishing those objectives in an increasingly competitive environment.
