In a historic report released on Wednesday, June 4, the Pew Oceans Commission, a blue-ribbon panel made up of national leaders and chaired by Leon Panetta, makes a firm call for a total re-do of our national ocean policy.
Titled "America's Living Oceans: Charting A Course For Sea Change," the 145-page report depicts a large scale crisis in a vast, natural and strategically important resource that has been misunderstood and abused through the 20th century.
The Pew Commission speaks with bipartisan authority. Its 18-member panel has as members a former Coast Guard admiral who now heads the Ocean Conservancy; the first female NASA astronaut to walk in space; the chair of the nation's largest drinking water utility; Governor George Pataki of New York; Julie Packard, founder of the Monterey Bay Aquarium; two commercial fishermen; former and current government officials, and several scientists.
They've spent the last two years crisscrossing the nation talking to various fishermen, scientists, officials and regular citizens and returned to find the outlook for our seas bleak unless major changes are made quickly.
As the report states simply out the outset, "America's oceans are in crisis and the stakes could not be higher."
Although it's hard to imagine in 2003, picture the bountiful Monterey Bay devoid of life. Replace the bay's sea otters, whales and squid with a clogging of plankton and goo. And lots of nasty, bubbly brown foam.
It has happened, even if it hasn't happened here. The Monterey Bay sardine fishery did crash in the 1940s after years of baffling abundance, but the bay didn't become swarmed by plankton or choked with crap. But the Chesapeake Bay did.
The industrial removal of oysters early in the 20th century left the majestic Chesapeake without its natural filter. Heaping scads of oysters had for years cleaned all the microscopic junk out of the bay's waters. But when New Yorkers developed a taste for the oysters, and the baymen of Maryland and Virginia figured out how to break apart and efficiently remove the massive oyster colonies using steam shovels, the ecosystem shifted.
The water went dirty without its oysters. Their food source, plankton, thrived. Jellyfish followed, creating a hypoxic area, or dead zone. Later, industrial pollution from poultry farms on the Eastern Shore exacerbated the problem. A once thriving and productive bay became home to lowlife marine creatures, with oysters at one percent of historic levels.
Jeremy Jackson, a marine biologist, studied the Chesapeake 30 years ago, and he uses that place as example of just how quickly and seriously unintended consequences can be created by hungry, well-equipped people. Now he's a leading advocate for restoring ocean health.
In the coming months we are likely to hear a lot from Jackson and others like him, as a convergence of efforts and campaigns to repair a badly damaged ocean gets underway.
The Pew report is the first major reassessment of the U.S. policy on oceans in 30 years. It comes out at a time when the public is increasingly aware of serious effects on ocean life caused by human use and abuse. Locally, rules on the management of the Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary are being overhauled. At the national level, the Pew report will call for major revisions: drastic measures like no-fishing zones that will be very controversial. A congressionally appointed commission will release its own report later this year.
Globally, the effect of industrialized fishing is being acknowledged such that the United Nations recently resolved to return fish stocks to sustainable and healthy numbers.
One of the clearest voices calling for the same will be and has been Dr. Jackson. The director of the Geosciences Research Division at Scripps Institution of Oceanography and a senior scientist at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, Jackson is living in Pacific Grove this summer to finish a book called Brave New Ocean, about severe human abuses on ocean life and its widespread and compounding consequences. His work is important and timely, but he says people don't necessarily pay attention, or even care.
He's trying to change that. Last week, he was in Los Angeles to make public service announcements for a campaign called Shifting Baselines. Through the Internet, film, television and other media, it tries to get people to realize that what we have in the sea today is faint echo of the life it used to hold, before industrialized sea harvesting crushed fish stocks and scraped the ocean floor, and before pollution and bad policy created vast dead zones in places like the Gulf of Mexico and the San Francisco Bay.
The science can be complicated but his message is clear. And blunt.
"The ocean is really, really [screwed] up, and people don't know it," he says. "If you tell them it is, they immediately think of pollution because it's easy. But they don't realize the really insidious thing we're doing is harvesting it down to the last fish."
He has a point. It's hard to understand there's a crisis when you can go to Costco and buy fish from a big, fully stocked freezer. It's not even that expensive and some cuts, like ahi tuna, are huge. But at Monterey's Costco--a five-minute walk from the ocean--the lobster comes from Australia, the prawns are from Indonesia, the halibut is from Alaska and the salmon is from a farm.
And according to fresh studies, the industry that puts those fish in that freezer is wiping the oceans out.
There is a gap between what's real and what's realized. In the same way that we have facsimiles of places that once were--a housing development called Elk View in a place where there were once elk but no more--Jackson's contention, after years of study, is that we don't know what we're missing. And it's not for us that we should care but for the health of the earth.
Jackson's an advocate for the creation of zones in the sea called "marine reserves." He points to scientific findings that call for "extraction bans." His recommended solution is simple, and, again, blunt: no-fishing.
This notion is extremely controversial and disputed at every turn. Still, the evidence that humanity must completely rethink our ideas about the ocean is being steadily accumulated, by Jackson and others.
The Pew Commission's findings were preceded by more bad news. A major report using 50 years worth of records kept by various fishing fleets around the world, published in the May issue of the journal Nature, asserts that 90 percent of the large oceangoing fish, such as bluefin tuna and albacore, are gone due to the relentless harvest by industrialized and heavily subsidized fishing fleets.
Technology and government subsides have allowed fleets to travel thousands of miles from homeport, find schools of fish with various sensors, and essentially shovel aboard every swimming creature.
This has created a weird situation. If humans are at the top of the food chain, we have removed some of the fattest links, leaving us to, as Jackson says, harvest the "dandelions" left behind. Jackson compared it to slaughtering buffalo on the America prairie in the 1800s. He and others say it's time for drastic changes.
"We don't need to keep studying these places. We already have the examples. We don't need to spend another dollar. We don't need to spend another penny. Like a farmer setting aside fields to be fallow we have to set aside huge, huge parts of the ocean so fish populations can rebound.
"It's going to ripple through society. It's going to be a war. We always do these things but if we do them late the consequences could be vastly worse than if we'd done them on time."
The Pew Commission report follows 30 years after a document called the Stratton Commission report. It was published in 1969 and characterized the ocean more as a resource that needs to be used than one which needs protection. Things have changed.
The Pew report is the product of two years of work by the commissioners, who traveled from coast to coast talking to scientists, commercial and sport fishermen, tour operators, government officials and regular citizens. They toured commercial fishing plants in Alaska, listened to shrimp fishermen in Louisiana, held a hearing for lobstermen in Maine and so on in 15 different venues.
The report identifies major threats to the nation's oceans from coastal development, overfishing, climate change, pollution, invasive species, fish farming, unintentionally caught fish (known as bycatch), and habitat alterations.
It cites countless examples of destructive practices, some of which begin inland. (The Commission made a stop in Iowa to examine farming practices.)
As in the example of the Chesapeake Bay, the depletion or removal of one species has a ripple effect on others, as the various lifeforms rely on each other in the ecosystem. The Pew report identifies such crisis areas such as the so-called "dead zone" in the Gulf of Mexico, which is as large as New Jersey. The devastation in the barren offshore area has been blamed on farm run-off pollution pouring into the sea from the Mississippi River, water that's channeled by levees and ducts built by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. According to the Pew report, that channel system has also led to erosion and saltwater intrusion that's destroying the Mississippi Delta.
The report documents a similar man-made disaster has happened even closer to home. The Bureau of Reclamation drained wetlands around Sacramento, wiping out 95 percent of the Sacramento River Delta and knocking back winter Chinook salmon runs by 90 percent. Now the government is spending $20 billion on a restoration project in the San Francisco Bay.
The list goes on and on and on. Detailed is the list of recommendations for protecting the national marine ecosystems for the future.
Panetta and the commissioners call on the nation to take a number of major steps that make ocean health a national priority. Much of the weight falls on the federal government.
The Commission recommends that the government enact a National Ocean Policy; set up ocean management councils with the ability to enforce the rules; create an independent ocean agency rather than have it as a branch of the Department of Commerce as it is now; and perhaps most controversial, "establish a national system of fully protected marine reserves."
There are recommendations for restoring fisheries, such as requiring monitoring of commercial fishing vessels for "bycatch." It calls for limiting coastal development and revising and bolstering laws to prevent pollution run-off. The report says the country also needs to "address unabashed point-sources of pollution, such as concentrated animal feeding operations and cruiseships." (As it is now, federal regulations are so lacking, measures are taken at the local and state level. The Monterey City Council had to pass its own cruiseship pollution ordinance recently, although it technically has no jurisdiction.)
It also calls for a policy on fish farms and other aquaculture operations, and a doubling of government funding for "basic ocean science and research."
Whether any of it happens will be a huge political battle, a battle that's being mirrored right now locally.
The Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary is now undergoing its management plan review process. Under it, the rules and the laws that regulate activity up to 50 miles out to sea from San Francisco to San Luis Obispo are being examined and revised.
Later this month, a committee of citizens and stakeholders known as the Sanctuary Advisory Council will review preliminary findings from the initial scoping period. Everything is on the table, from setting up no-fishing zones off the local coast, to expanding the boundary of the Sanctuary to include the massive, undisturbed underwater peak off the coast of southern Big Sur known as the Davidson Seamount. After another round of public hearings and reviews, the new rules will be finalized right around the 2004 presidential election, making it--and the Pew report recommendations--a political football for whichever candidate picks it up.
That's not soon enough for those who have seen and studied massive-scale devastation to the ocean in relatively brief period. The Pew report is aimed at what the U.S. can do to fix what we've broken. It's focused here, rather than pointing at other nations with equally rapacious appetites for fish and likely less ambitious attitudes about preservation.
For his part, Jeremy Jackson believes the United States needs to take the lead and set an example for other nations without waiting for global consensus.
Based on the way the current administration handled such global environmental actions like the Kyoto protocol, it's going to take more than a sea change to make waves. It's going to take a regime change.
It's a matter of political will whether or not our nation protects its own ecosystem for the future. Of course, in an election year, anything can happen. Though it seems unlikely now, the political juice that comes with doing something environmentally popular would be hard to resist, even for George W. Bush. After all, his father's adoption of the proposed Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary helped George Bush Sr. win California in 1988 [See sidebar, page 17].
Dr. Jackson says America can rise to the challenge: "We have the power to take over another country and make it our own gas station. We certainly have the power to protect our coastal waters. We have the power to protect our fisheries. We don't have to wait for international agreements."
Ocean Facts
* The oceans cover 70 percent of the planet. US waters account for 4.5 million square miles, or an area 23 percent larger than the total national land area.
* Half the US population lives in coastal counties. By 2015, 25 million more people are expected to live along the coasts.
* Overfishing by industrial fishing fleets has been blamed on the removal of 90 percent of the ocean's large fish, such as tuna, billfish and swordfish. Depletion of fish stocks has spread from coastal seas to the ocean around the globe.*
* Twenty-thousand acres of sensitive coastal wetlands habitat disappear in the US every year.
* Eleven million gallons of dripped and leaked oil--the equivalent of Alaska's Exxon Valdez spill--run off America's streets into drains, and eventually into the sea, every eight months.
* Sixty percent of American coastal rivers and bays are "moderately to severely degraded" by fertilizer runoff from farms, feedlots and other sources that cause "dead zones" where marine life cannot survive.
* In 2001, 13,000 beaches were closed or put on pollution advisories.
* Only 22 percent of US fisheries are being managed sustainably. Some fish stocks--such as New England cod and yellowtail flounder--have been almost totally depleted. In the Monterey Bay, the nearshore fishery was shut down for certain rockfish.
* Commercial fishermen discard 25 percent of what they catch. In U.S. fisheries that's estimated to be 2.3 billion pounds a year of wasted fish, marine mammals, turtles and birds.
Source: "America's Living Oceans: Charting a Course for Sea Change," released June 4, 2003 by the Pew Oceans Commission.
* Source: "Rapid worldwide depletion of predatory fish communities," published in the May issue of Nature magazine.
Illustration (A school of fish.)
