Given both agencies many regulatory and oversight failures — failures that led directly to the current crisis in the Gulf — the MMA and NOAA are now seen by an increasing number of Americans as being little more than the lap dogs of powerful international petroleum interests.

So what does that have to do with fishing here in Gloucester? Some say nothing, others everything.
But here, such actions also suggest that NOAA and the NMFS may have some even bigger fish to fry — those fish being the full-scale exploitation of a far more profitable resource: the rich reserves of petroleum and natural gas that lay deep beneath the coastal waters of New England