What do outside authorities have to say about the state of swordfish stocks?
In 1998 Rebecca Lent, then director of the Highly Migratory Species Division of the National Marine Fisheries Service (which regulates commercial fishing) told The Dallas Observer: “Swordfish are not considered endangered. Current international quotas are set at levels that should allow the stocks to stabilize and even begin to rebuild.” SeaWeb’s campaign started later that same year. In 2002 the International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas reported that swordfish populations were at 94 percent of what conservationists consider to be “healthy” levels. And since swordfish are a highly migratory species, it’s likely that their numbers were always robust, but difficult to track. Linda Greenlaw, likely the only American woman to captain her own swordfishing boat, was described in Sebastian Junger’s bestseller The Perfect Storm as “one of the best captains, period, on the entire East Coast.” In Greenlaw’s book The Happy Ocean, she writes: “I have always been happy to comp
