On June 4, the Pew Oceans Commission released its three-year report, “America’s Living Oceans: Charting a Course for Sea Change.” The 18-member bipartisan commission included representatives from fishing, government, science, conservation, education, business and philanthropy, including Governors Tony Knowles of Alaska and George Pataki of New York. Leon Panetta, White House chief of staff under President Clinton, chaired the commission. Pat White, CEO of the Maine Lobstermen’s Association, was one of two fishermen on the panel, the other being west coast fisherman Pietro Parravano.
The U.S. controls more than 4.5 million square miles of ocean – an area almost 25 percent bigger than its landmass – in an exclusive economic zone extending 200 miles from the American continent and from island jurisdictions. According to the report, several factors are contributing to a “crisis confronting our oceans,” including overfishing, destruction of coastal wetlands, pollution, the introduction of invasive species, and cumbersome and inefficient government oversight.
The Pew Commission set out to address “antiquated” U.S. ocean policies that date back to a time when exploitation was the priority. The last national review of ocean policy was in 1969, when the presidentially appointed Stratton Commission released its report on how the United States could get the most out of its oceans. Its recommendations to Congress led to coastal zone management and fishery conservation laws and the creation of the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the branch of government most responsible for protecting U.S. oceans. Reflecting the prevailing attitude of the day, NOAA was located in the Department of Commerce, with its emphasis on exploitation and sales.
The Pew Commission wants to modernize 30-year-old attitudes of oceans as containing limitless resources, and as giant sinks impervious to harm. It paid particular attention to fisheries management issues. “If we continue to combine a 19th-century attitude with 21st-century technology, little worth protecting will be left in the oceans,” Commission chair Panetta was quoted as saying. “What’s going on out there is the last buffalo hunt with regard to our fisheries. Overall, we take a kind of boom-and-bust approach to our fisheries.”
The three-year study was privately financed by the Pew Charitable Trusts, a $4 billion foundation created by the descendants of Joseph Newton Pew, founder of Sun Oil Co. (now Sunoco). The goals of the foundation have tended to be activist, focusing on medicine, poverty, rape, an open press and the environment.
Another sweeping study of national marine policy, the U.S. Commission on Ocean Policy, will release its final report this fall. This second federal oceans commission was formed in 2000 by Congress and President Clinton and charged with studying all marine-related issues and the effects of federal ocean-related policies.
Bad News, Good News
People paying attention to news about the status of the seas this spring were caught in a crossfire of conflicting messages. The bad news started when the Canadian government closed its centuries-old northern cod fishery in May. Then the commercially valuable southern rockfish fishery on the West Coast of the U.S. was virtually shut down after it was determined that stocks had been reduced to only a few percent of their historical levels.
The Pew report cites the overfishing of ecologically and commercially important fishes such as marlin, swordfish and cod and calls for greater restrictions in fisheries management. Just in time to bolster its findings, a paper published in the May issue of the scientific journal Nature stated that over the last half-century, 90 percent of large predatory fishes such as tuna, marlin and swordfish have been lost as a result of commercial fishing. The Canadian scientists at Dalhousie University who authored that ten-year study emphasized that it has taken only a few decades to deplete the seas of these large predator species.
Then NOAA delivered its annual report to Congress, the 2002 Status of U.S. Fisheries, offering an upbeat counterpoint to the Pew Commission’s dire assessment. It said fish populations along the U.S. coasts, long threatened by overharvesting, are slowly recovering because of the effectiveness of federal management. Since passage of the 1996 Sustainable Fisheries Act, NOAA said, 25 species are no longer overfished and 70 more continue to recover under federal rebuilding plans tailored to each species. The report also says overfishing is occurring in less than 10 percent of U.S. fisheries, and that the fishing industry and government are working together to bring that to an end.
No sooner had the Pew Commission came out with its report than the National Fisheries Institute (NFI), an industry trade and lobbying group, revved up its public relations machine to refute it. A barrage of editorials, press releases and broadcast appearances had NFI insisting that the system currently in place for the conservation and management of fisheries – while not perfect – is working, and the Pew recommendations are unwarranted. They even claimed that a “unified” oceans policy is already in place – the 1976 Magnuson-Stevens Act. Strengthened by Congress in 1996, Magnuson requires that all ocean resources be used in a sustainable manner.
Commercial fishing has been suspicious of the Pew Commission because of the Pew Charitable Trusts’ affiliation with and bankrolling of environmental groups that brought lawsuits against them. To followers of the Pew Commission’s progress, its recommendations to cut back on fishing effort and to increase closed areas didn’t come as a surprise. Besides reducing the number of fishing vessels, the Pew Commission recommends greater use of no-take zones as a fisheries management strategy by establishing a national system of marine protected areas where fishing would be prohibited. When overfished species are allowed to reproduce and grow, the theory goes, they will replenish nearby areas where fishing is permitted.
The Magnuson-Stevens Fisheries Conservation and Management Act of 1976 focuses primarily on the fish harvesting part of ocean management. The Pew report takes a much broader view of ocean policy. It aims squarely at the effects of pollution and land use far upstream from coastal estuaries, and offers the startling statistic that every eight months, 11 million gallons of oil runs off U.S. roads and parking lots into the sea – the same amount spilled off the coast of Alaska by the tanker EXXON VALDEZ in 1989.
The report also states that 20,000 acres of coastal wetlands and river outlets – critical spawning grounds and nurseries for many of today’s faltering marine fish species – are lost because of poorly planned coastal development every year. Wetlands that remain are increasingly polluted with agricultural runoff and toxins, rendering them biologically less productive. The most glaring proof of this occurs every summer when polluted water flowing off interior lands and down rivers creates an area the size of New Jersey in the Gulf of Mexico. This dead zone where no marine life can survive occurs because the warm waters of the Gulf receive heavy doses of pesticides and sewage that wash into the Gulf through the Mississippi River. Farm fields and urban and suburban stormwater as far inland as Canada contribute, as do septic leachfields and inadequate sewage treatment plant treated discharges.
The Pew Commission points out a “hodgepodge of narrow laws” and at least a half-dozen federal departments and dozens of agencies – many overlapping, often working at cross purposes – overseeing these problems. The agencies include NOAA and the National Marine Fisheries Service, and the EPA, Interior, and Agriculture Departments. The report cites 140 ocean laws and programs relating to the marine ecosystem, enacted over the past 30 years on a crisis-by-crisis, sector-by-sector basis. The result, it says, is a disjointed management system incapable of providing unified goals and clearly stated, measurable objectives.
The Pew Commission recommendation to deal with the mess is its most far-reaching. It calls for a National Oceans Policy Act that consolidates as many ocean-related programs as practicable under one roof, and creates an independent national oceans agency devoted to ocean health free of the political missions and biases of any parent department. This single agency would have regional councils representing fishermen as well as coastal interests to protect each region’s waters and fish. Though roundly criticized by commercial fishing interests as an unnecessary layer of burdensome bureaucracy, this proposal has support in high places. James Watkins, the retired Navy admiral heading the U.S. Commission on Ocean Policy, said that a new “White House oceans council,” headed by a presidential assistant should coordinate government regulation, scientific research and assistance to communities and states.
Finfish Farming Moratorium
Perhaps the most startling recommendation to Mainers was the call for a moratorium on the expansion of finfish farming until national regulatory standards have been established. Sebastian Belle, executive director of the Maine Aquaculture Association, says this is disconnected from what the government is already doing. He says the EPA has completed a national exercise looking at restrictions and guidelines for netpen aquaculture. “For salmon, they would require farmers to use underwater video cameras to monitor feeding. Our guys have been doing that for years,” says Belle, adding that “for a group of 30 or 40 [EPA] scientists with strong beliefs in environmental regulation to go through all of aquaculture and come up only with that speaks to the difference between the facts and the polemics.”
Finfish aquaculture applications must already pass federal oversight through the Army Corps of Engineers permit under the Rivers And Harbors Act, which was originally about navigation but is now the vehicle through which federal wildlife and fisheries agencies comment. EPA discharge permits, delegated to the state and reviewed by the EPA, are also required. “You can have all the state permits you want, but you still couldn’t operate without these,” says Belle. “If you do operate without them you’ll get whacked by the courts, as recent experience has shown.”
Belle concludes that overall, the Pew report is fair, in that it recognizes improvements in a still young and growing industry. “If there’s as much wrong about aquaculture as some of the more strident opponents claim, Pew could’ve said it,” says Belle. “If you have that level of fact-gathering and the conclusions are nowhere near as controversial or damning, it gives the average citizen pause.”
Belle and others did point out some glaring inaccuracies in the Pew report, however. Belle was “shocked” at the statement that Atlantic salmon and Pacific salmon are interbreeding and hybridizing. “That has never been reported in the scientific literature nor in extreme environmental literature, and it’s unfortunate they reported this. It says something about their technical due diligence,” says Belle.
Melissa Field, spokesperson for Atlantic Salmon of Maine, called the Pew Commission to task on another technical detail. A section in the report citing aquaculture’s risk to water quality contains a graph from a report by a Dr. Ron Hardy comparing waste from a salmon farm in municipal sewage equivalents. Though Hardy later issued a revision of his data, says Field, “the original information was concocted by Hardy as a guestimate, but it was presented as science” in the Pew report. “It’s not a big deal but when it gets extrapolated into a big report like Pew’s, I’m shocked. How do you separate the wheat from the chaff?”
John Sowles of the Maine Department of Marine Resources in Boothbay Harbor is more circumspect. “When these big global reports come out people forget that it’s to raise points about what could happen, that you don’t want to let it get out of hand. Small-scale aquaculture isn’t a huge environmental issue, but no one wants it to become one. Because ecological impacts can be severe,” says Sowles. “On balance, it’s fairly fair. Those are legitimate concerns. But the recommendations are global. Maine is actually doing pretty well. I don’t think a moratorium is necessary – I don’t know what it would accomplish.”
Both Sowles and Field expressed disappointment at the Pew Commission’s follow up to their meeting with the pollution technical committee in the summer of 2001. They say the committee seemed more interested in governance than what data Maine’s scientists could offer to help them build their case. “There were no questions about pollution and fecal loading,” says Field. “It was all about governance – who regulates this? It seemed strange that the science and technical committee was asking questions about governance.”
Few will disagree with the basic premise of the Pew commission’s report – that our oceans deserve to be restored to health and sustained for future generations. However, not everyone will want to pay the price. Recommendations for new regulations and limitations on business aren’t likely to be embraced by the Bush administration, which has a proven aversion to such measures. Given the shaky finances of most states and local governments, they may be less than enthusiastic to undertake much on their own.
Protecting coastal waters will not get any easier as coastal communities face an influx of another 25 million people in the next 12 years, as the Pew report predicts. Fishing interests and others may find it easy to criticize the Pew report as having its private agenda. But things will get interesting this fall, when the U.S. Commission on Ocean Policy, the second federal oceans commission ordered in 2000 by Congress and President Clinton to study all marine-related issues and the effects of federal ocean-related policies, issues its report. There will be many similar recommendations, and they will be twice as difficult to ignore.
For more on this topic, see the July issue of Working Waterfront