After two years of study, 15 public hearings and months of deliberations, the U.S. Oceans Commission has released its long awaited and much anticipated report on the state of the nation’s oceans. If you are a little confused in believing that this important event had already occurred, you are forgiven. Almost a year ago amid much publicity, a parallel report from the privately funded Pew Oceans Commission released its report decrying the sad state of America’s oceans. But the Pew Oceans Report was easily dismissed by many in Congress and by various spokespersons for the industries, fisheries and otherwise, that were singled out for criticism, for its supposedly slanted environmental agenda. Now that the more broadly based and politically connected U.S. Oceans Commission has reached many similar conclusions, the combined force of these reports may actually lead to some important changes in how our oceans are managed.
What, if anything, is likely to change – and what will any changes portend for the Maine coast and island communities?
The description of the problems is now widely agreed upon: 20 federal agencies administer 140 laws relating to America’s oceans. These agencies and their state counterparts, by patchwork design, work at cross-purposes and in isolation from one another. The laws to protect fish nurseries in coastal estuaries, for example, work in isolation from coastal development laws that are not required to consider the effects on those delicate parts of the marine system. Despite our best efforts over 30 years of pollution control laws, the sheer number of us living on the coast stresses even the best managed coastal waters. The “dead zone” in the Gulf of Mexico at the mouth of the Mississippi River now exceeds 8,500 square miles – but closer to home the estuaries of many of Maine’s once productive commercial fish and shellfish nurseries are significantly degraded.
The Oceans Commission’s solution: establish a National Ocean Council to oversee ocean policy and coordinate federal agencies. Hmmm…this solution seems only remotely likely to produce any real change, at least here in Maine, and certainly not immediately. (The Pew Commission solution was to create a new Ocean Agency to coordinate all the laws, but this recommendation, however devoutly to be desired, is widely regarded in Washington as roadkill.)
Both reports highlight the deficiencies of the current federal fisheries management system where regional councils, traditionally dominated by powerful fisheries interests such as those in New England, have successfully avoided implementing the recommendations of their own scientific panels.
The solution(s): The Pew Commission would abolish the regional councils in favor of more widely constituted representative bodies, including presumably more environmentalists, but this recommendation, too, is not likely to pass “Go.” The Ocean Commission report recommends weakening the power of regional councils by requiring them to rely on the scientific advice of their panels to determine fish harvest levels (as a lawsuit brought by the Conservation Law Foundation of New England currently requires). If this sounds like common sense to you, perhaps it actually has a chance of becoming law in the next several years. Such a change would enshrine for the nation what the lawsuit has established: a precedent for many New England and Gulf of Maine fisheries that once helped sustain many island and small fishing villages. If so, the law and the lawsuit may one day hasten the rebuilding of sadly depleted inshore stocks and lead to a rejuvenation of working waterfronts now almost wholly dependent on the successfully managed lobster fishery. I like to think I am not too old to witness that in my lifetime…but I don’t know. Certainly, Newfoundland’s “outport” communities where cod fishing collapsed more than a decade ago offer little reason for hope.
Both ocean panels have strongly endorsed changing the fundamental underpinning of the nation’s fisheries paradigm from single species management (based on supposedly objective measurements of “maximum sustainable yield”) to an “ecosystem based” approach. Neither commission is entirely clear on what this means (no one is) – except that decision-makers would have to be more explicit about how decisions regarding one part of the system will affect other parts, so that a variety of well managed individual pieces won’t fail to protect a whole system of marine biodiversity. What this means should be close to common sense: managers cannot both maximize the number of predators that can be caught – cod, haddock and giant bluefin tuna, for example, in the Gulf of Maine – and at the same time also maximize the number of herring on which these predators feed. The whole does not equal the sum of the parts.
This kind of recommendation has been and will continue be dismissed by those who say we don’t know enough about marine systems to manage them on an ecosystem basis. The same could have been said a century ago about managing the nation’s forest resources on an ecosystem basis when most people began to understand that clear cutting followed by devastating fires squandered the nation’s wealth and public trust. When there is a serious problem for which there is only a conceptual solution, you have to start somewhere to make incremental progress. The thousand-mile journey begins with a single step.
Perhaps the most far-reaching and radical proposal contained in either report comes from the more politically conservative U.S. Oceans Commissions, chaired by retired Admiral James Watkins: to create an Ocean Policy Trust Fund. Such a fund, modeled on the Highway Trust Fund, would use royalties from oil and gas drilling to implement the Commission’s recommendations. Now that would be a real and significant change, resulting in putting $3 or $4 billion of the public’s money per year where the national mouth is.
Right now that’s the recommendation to watch as Maine Sen. Olympia Snowe’s Senate Oceans and Fisheries Committee and Maine Rep. Tom Allen’s Ocean Caucus begin public hearings and debates over the reports’ recommendations. As Washington’s Deep Throat once so succinctly put it, “Follow the money.”