Lobster Sustainability

Saint Barnabas’s Decision on Serving Lobster

Our Summer @ St B’s events feature lobster as an important part of our fundraising and community engagement efforts. Consequently, Saint Barnabas’s Vestry has devoted many hours to understanding the concerns between lobster fishing and North Atlantic right whale mortalities that have come up since last summer. The right whales are on the brink of extinction, and their population has shown a concerning decline since 2017. The leading causes of right whale mortality are entanglement in the vertical lines on lobster gear, and vessel strikes.

Last fall, a federal judge ruled that more protections are needed by the end of 2024, to protect the whales from extinction. We followed the reactions to
that ruling from Seafood Watch, the Marine Stewardship Council, lobster fishing associations, and Congress. We reached out to our community, and Dr. Richard Merrick presented to the vestry his expert synthesis that integrated years of policy, stakeholder work, whale population data, and reporting data. We learned that Massachusetts lobstering has been very proactive in preventing whale entanglements by;

• Closing fishing grounds for 3 months per year, so when the whales are there, the lobster gear is not.
  
• Using break-away lines to prevent heavy gear trapping and drowning a whale.
  
• Piloting new ropeless gear technology with the help of scientists and engineers from our local institutions.
  

From our community and our Creation Care Ministry, we learned that the lobster fishery is one of the most sustainable fisheries in the world, in terms
of sustaining the population of the target species (lobster). Lobstering is a profession frequently handed down from generation to generation – family
businesses sustaining families and communities.

With prayerful deliberation, and a grounding in climate justice, the vestry decided to go forward with serving only lobsters from our local Massachusetts waters at our summer events this year. We are proud to support our local MA lobster fishers for their good stewardship of lobsters, right whales, and their families & communities.