Photo courtesy ricardodiaz11 via Flickr

The Alliance for Sustainable Fisheries has released the results of an environmental poll, conducted by Responsive Management, which finds “the public strongly wants the ocean to be protected, but not with total marine closures.”

The sponsors are upset about the establishment of some new protected ocean areas where all fishing — both recreational and commercial — is banned. It’s a quality poll, but there are no real surprises — the main findings in the research echo other environmental polls and surveys:

“An overwhelming majority of U.S. residents support (90%) legal recreational fishing in general, with most of that being strong support. Additionally, large majorities of U.S. residents support legal recreational fishing in National Forests (80%), National Parks (78%), and Wilderness Areas (72%).”

And also…

“Among U.S. residents, support for protecting U.S. ocean waters and ocean life is nearly unanimous: 78% strongly support doing so, and another 17% moderately support it, for a sum of 95% in support.”

The finding worth discussing is this:

Disagreement is particularly high (86%) with the statement, “All U.S. ocean waters should be fully protected with no human use allowed.”

In market research, the public routinely rejects absolute statements of any kind, from any side of the issue, about any nature protection or pollution control topic. By honing in a the complete closure aspect of the marine protected areas, the Alliance has found the one aspect of the marine protected areas plan that a significant majority of individuals would object to. That’s another poll that goes on the pile in support of this word that works: balance.

Also noteworthy, there is some shoptalk in some of the questions — and this degrades the reliability of some of the findings. For example…

The survey asked respondents if they agree or disagree that some change to the natural
biodiversity in U.S. ocean waters is acceptable to guarantee a continued food supply through fishing and shellfishing: agreement (71%) far exceeds disagreement (20%).

Given the substantial number of people who don’t understand what biodiversity is, I’m not sure if this particular finding (in an otherwise solid environmental poll) can be trusted.