Fish and Game’s Great Library Is Endangered

One of society’s major problems is the misplaced priority.

The misplaced priority can take any number of forms, from dreadful, like sending arms to Iran, to harmlessly stupid, like watching a television game show while the stew overcooks.

Probably the most fertile area for the misplaced priority is government bureaucracy.

From that general observation, I shall now become specific:

The state Department of Fish and Game’s attitude toward its excellent, but slowly deteriorating, Marine Resources Library at the department’s Long Beach office. The official attitude toward this library, the state’s greatest and most sizable library of its kind, is an example of a deplorable misplaced priority.

A spokesman for the DFG in Sacramento, Marilyn Bonin, confirmed over the phone to me that the library was in jeopardy. She said it was a question of competing priorities, “a question of where you put your money and staff.” The austerity climate of today’s state government dictates, she said, that “all of us must do more with less.”

The DFG’s Marine Resources Department, according to Bonin, offered the library lock, stock and files to California State University, Long Beach two years ago. The university had agreed to acquire it. To meet a DFG stipulation that the library be made electronically available to the DFG staff, the university applied for a grant. The funding has not been forthcoming.

Meanwhile, this great resource of marine biology, history, fisheries and oceanography is suffering from lack of acquisition of contemporary material in these important areas, owing to funding cutbacks. Space is also at a premium.

Two of four library staff positions have been, in government parlance, “redirected.” This means these people have been given the opportunity to move to other positions in government.

Also, meanwhile, the DFG Marine Resources Department is looking for a solution, to “transfer” the library (meaning get rid of it), but so far they have none.

The office of DFG Director Jack Parnell had directed my inquiries about the library’s status to Bonin, who, I was assured, knew all about the library. The implication was that Parnell didn’t know much about it.

Bonin told me later on that there were far more pressing priorities than a marine library for Parnell to worry about. For instance, she said, there’s the important problem of reconciling the positions of the commercial gill-netters and the sports fishermen. The sports fishermen want to see more DFG observers aboard gill-net vessels to find out, say, how many porpoises and marlin swordfish are caught and killed indiscriminately in the gill nets. She pointed out that all this costs money, and there is a budget limit to think about. I agreed the gill-net business is important, but so is the library.

Our conversation had nearly ended by this time, and it was beginning to dawn on me that I was not talking to somebody who knew all about the library, and, presumably, one who was sympathetic to the library’s plight. I asked her if she were the head librarian? Apparently, that position had been redirected someplace. There was no such breed in Sacramento’s DFG. None in Long Beach either now. The professional head librarian there had left. No, she said, she was the DFG’s public relations officer.

I said I thought so. She didn’t sound very bookish to me.

She laughed, and asked me how I would arrange the DFG’s priorities?

That stimulated me into a long distance tirade that made her wish she’d never asked. A greatly boiled-down version of it went like this:

First, I’d put a career marine biologist in the top position of DFG director. If I were the governor making such an appointment, I’d be darn sure the director was research oriented. I’d want to see the DFG’s biologists establishing, as the result of their research, realistic quotas or closures on fish harvests, and then have them backed up by the wardens, the director, the commission and the state Legislature. I’d remove politics as much as possible from the science and practice of marine biology and fisheries management.

And, I’d make dead sure the marine library, used extensively by the biologists and the public interested in this area, was given a top “save” priority. After all, a library like this is beyond price. It is enlightenment. So how do you budget enlightenment in your list of priorities?