Then I got back to work. I had volunteered to help clean-up Shi Shi Beach, a
pristine sea-stacked affair on the northwest corner of the continental United
States, just a four-hour drive from downtown Seattle. While other beach
clean-ups happening around the country on this Earth Day might have focused on
empty beer cans and abandoned beach toys, my work at Shi Shi, three miles from
the nearest road and only accessible via a muddy tromp through verdant
old-growth forest, focused more on debris washed up onto the beach from the
turbulent Pacific. A large piece of broken fishing net. A weathered shipping
palette. An oil can. A mélange of odd-shaped plastic pieces. Each item in my
assemblage represented one or another major threat to the world’s oceans. The
otter was just the coup de grace. “Houston, We Have a Problem…” A lot of people are worrying about the world’s oceans these days. In 2000,
Congress passed the landmark Oceans Act, which called on the President to
establish a commission of experts to assess threats to marine life and resources
and develop recommendations for a new comprehensive ocean policy. While the
legislation was passed in the final days of the Clinton administration, the onus
fell on then-newly elected President George W. Bush to actually set up the
commission and appoint its members. Bush chose retired Admiral and former
Secretary of Energy James Watkins to head the group. Also chosen for the
16-member commission were Bill Ruckelshaus, the nation’s first Environmental
Protection Agency (EPA) administrator, and Robert Ballard, the oceanographer
whose discoveries have reshaped thinking about the ocean floor. Academics and
high-level executives from various maritime industries rounded out the
membership. At around the same time, the Pew Charitable Trusts, a group of foundations
committed to the environment and social welfare, convened its own commission of
marine experts to conduct an independent assessment of the status of the world’s
oceans. The membership of the Pew Oceans Commission was weighted toward
environmentalists and scientists, but also included industry perspectives. Given the different political and professional make-ups of the two
commissions, it would not have been surprising if they came to vastly different
conclusions. But both commissions agreed that the world’s marine environments
are critically endangered due to pollution, development, resource extraction and
myriad other human-induced problems, and stressed that stronger governance and
innovative technological and policy solutions are needed urgently to help avert
a global crisis. Most significantly, both commission reports called on marine policy planners
to manage resources from an ecosystem-based perspective, emphasizing
sustainability over short-term economic gains. “The old bottom line was to
manage the ocean for profit,” says marine biologist Boris Worm, who authored a
2003 study estimating that only 10 percent of large predatory fish are left in
the ocean. “The new bottom line is to manage the ocean for survival.” Former EPA Administrator Ruckelshaus says he’s not surprised that the
findings from the two commissions were so similar. “The facts are there for
everybody to see, and any commission that was straightforward and honest about
it would have found the same thing,” he says. “Our recommendations were a
little different, but not that much. The two commissions were both made up of
people who have had a lot of experience in these areas and they are bound to
come to close to the same conclusions.” Indeed, environmental and ocean activists were optimistic that, in the face
of such dire unanimity, the White House would be hard pressed to ignore calls
for the reform of ocean policies. “The fact that they agreed that protecting
marine ecosystems is essential for our national security and environment put us
beyond denial,” says David Helvarg, founder of the Blue Frontier Campaign, a
network of grassroots ocean activists. Weak Action To environmentalists, the White House plan has few bright spots. Some are
encouraged by the document’s commitment to the beleaguered United Nations Law
of the Sea Treaty, the pledge to develop coral reef conservation strategies with
affected states, and the federal blessing of market-based approaches to reduce
strain on exploited fisheries—but each proposed action invites questions about
both feasibility and motives. Furthermore, activists are incensed at the White
House’s outright rejection of its own commission’s proposal to take $4
billion out of federal off-shore oil and gas revenues to fund an oceans trust
fund. And many environmentalists consider the Bush plan to put the burden of
cleaning up the oceans and reforming marine policy at the state and regional
levels to be a colossal passing of the buck. Even Admiral Watkins, who chaired the federal oceans commission, worries that
the White House is “giving us a menu of all the wonderful things they are
doing right now and saying they believe they can handle it within the current
[government] structure and so forth.” Indeed, while both commissions called
for a fundamental restructuring of ocean governance, the White House plan
directly re-affirms existing structures. To Watkins—who was the highest ranking naval officer in the U.S. before
serving as Secretary of Energy under Bush Sr. and then as founding president of
the Consortium for Oceanographic Research and Education—oceans reform is past
due. He has criticized the current structure of ocean governance as being
decided “one court case at a time.” Undoubtedly, his outspoken views on the
need for more proactive oceans reform—not to mention his advocacy for U.S.
signing of the Kyoto Protocol on global warming—do not make him a popular
figure at the White House these days. Ruckelshaus is not optimistic about oceans reform happening at the federal
level anytime soon, barring some sort of front-page marine disaster. “The two
times in my experience when these issues really moved up on the national
political agenda is during that oil spill up in Alaska and the oil spill in
Santa Barbara in the early 1970s,” says Ruckelshaus. “Those are the kind of
crises none of us like to see, but they move issues up and down Presidential
agendas. The public demands that something be done about them.” Ruckelshaus regrets that “we have to wait for a crisis to do something
about issues of this kind,” but is glad the nation has the work of the U.S.
and Pew Commissions to draw upon. “In the past, when these things have
happened, the work hasn’t been done, so somebody cobbles up a response to it
as quickly as they can,” he says. It’s clear that the Bush administration is at best oblivious to the need
for marine policy reforms. So what’s a country with 140 million people crowded
into 12,000 miles of coastline to do? Despite the gloomy outlook, a network of
unlikely bedfellows has emerged with the shared goals of preserving marine
biodiversity and protecting ocean habitat and water quality. Everyone from
commercial fishermen to renegade governors to energized Congressmen agree that
time is of the essence when it comes to marine conservation, and they are
working from the bottom-up to implement reforms. Managing the Resource Down on the Gulf shores of Texas, Philip Lara is out scouring for shrimp,
even though it’s a Saturday. For the 34-year-old Corpus Christi native,
fishing is in the blood. As a little boy, he would spend every moment he could
out on the water with family members in search of black drum, shrimp and other
Gulf Coast specialties. While he took some time away from the water to attend
college, and then dabbled in land-based businesses along the way, his heart and
soul kept coming back to the water, and in 1994 he obtained a permit and bought
El Compañero, a 34-foot shrimp trawler. Today, with two shrimp boats and two fishing boats under his command, Lara
spends less and less time on the water while he works to navigate his business
through increasingly complex regulatory channels. “We’re hit extremely hard
by times, means and measures—what time we can go, how we can go and where we
can go,” he says. Lara has been rallying fellow fishermen in his part of the Gulf to reform the
way the fishery is managed by dividing up the “total allowable catch”—a
scientifically derived quota that can be harvested without endangering
reproduction and survival—into percentages awarded to or purchased by
commercial fishermen and companies. Under such an “individual fishing quota”
(IFQ) system, shares of the catch can be bought, sold or traded like shares on a
stock exchange, making the concept the darling of conservatives who consider it
a form of resource privatization. Fishermen like Lara like it because it allows
them to harvest their share whenever and however they see fit. “We’re hoping
to regain the freedom to fish where we need to and how we need to,” he says. Lara also likes the IFQ concept because he believes it encourages sustainable
fishing more than existing regulations. He has worked extensively with a
triumvirate of organizations—the Property and Environment Research Center,
Environmental Defense and the libertarian Reason Foundation—in the preparation
of alternative management scenarios to help keep fishing boats in the Gulf and
elsewhere working productively. “Self interest dictates conservation when
fishermen control fisheries,” he says, displaying a long-term approach not
always seen in ocean harvesters. On Alabama’s Gulf Coast, David Walker, owner and operator of a 65-foot
snapper fishing boat, decries the derby system that regulates his business
activities. The result of controlling the red snapper catch by allowing only 10
fishing days out of each month is, according to Walker, “a binge mentality
among fishermen that can’t be good for the reproductive capacities of the
target fish.” This derby system also encourages wasteful fishing practices, as
tons of snapper are thrown out as by-catch (unwanted and discarded, usually
dead, fish and marine life) on the other 20 days of the month. Additionally, the
intense pressure to haul in enough fish during the derby windows means fishermen
must venture out even in bad weather, sometimes endangering their lives.
Further, they might not even find buyers for their catches if the market is
flooded. Walker agrees with Lara that IFQs make sense, and they reportedly have the
support of 80 percent of the other snapper fishermen on Alabama’s Gulf Coast.
“IFQs can extend the season to year-round and therefore eliminate the problems
of the current derby system,” says Walker from underneath his grizzled beard
and weathered Budweiser baseball cap. Given the embrace of IFQs in the U.S. plan, it seems that the White House has
been listening to the likes of Lara and Walker. Indeed, the White House has
promised to work directly with the nation’s eight regional fishery management
councils to implement IFQ systems throughout all American waters. But many individual fishermen, not to mention a growing cadre of
environmentalists, are skeptical of the Bush push for the widespread application
of IFQ systems. A 2003 report by Ecotrust, an environmental think tank based in
Portland, Oregon, considers IFQs to be a catch-22 for fishermen and their
communities, creating as many economic, social and ecological problems as they
solve. Ecotrust studied the implementation of and fallout from what was
considered to be a progressive IFQ-based management system in Canada’s West
Coast geoduck, halibut, sablefish, groundfish trawl and shellfish fisheries. Ecotrust researchers found that the high cost of purchasing a quota in
British Columbia’s fisheries excluded grassroots entrepreneurs who didn’t
have big bucks or who might be just starting out. “A fisherman now needs to be
a millionaire to enter into most fisheries,” report the study authors. Ecotrust also learned that the system’s economic selection hit small
fishing communities hardest. After the IFQ system was fully in place, half of
the commercial fishing licenses sold in rural coastal communities with
populations of less than 10,000—the quintessential fishing ports of British
Columbia—vanished as individual fishermen could not make the necessary
payments, sending some of these small towns into economic tailspins. “Those
communities most dependent on fishing are being squeezed out of BC’s
fisheries,” says the report. The conservation record of privatizing fisheries through IFQs is
inconclusive. Indeed, by giving fishermen a set individual quota, IFQs end the
derby-style “race for fish” as described by Gulf fisherman David Walker.
However, according to Ecotrust, IFQs can also induce unsustainable harvesting,
including quota busting, poaching, throwing back low-priced fish (“high-grading”)
and misreporting catches. So can IFQs be “fixed”? Paul Parker, executive director of the Cape Cod
Hook Fishermens’ Association—and a commercial fisherman himself based out of
Chatham, Massachusetts—is optimistic about Community Quota Entities. Small
fishing communities can band together and purchase a group quota of the total
allowable catch of any given fish species. The community can then dole out
percentages of its overall catch share accordingly, so that local fishermen can
keep working at the only jobs most have ever known. The idea is to harness the
environmentally and economically sound aspects of IFQs while reining in their
ability to shut out individual fishermen. Parker says only recently has he started to think about groups of deep sea
trawl boats, for instance, as fishing communities in their own right, even if
they don’t share far-off harbors. He would like to see such groups push for
their own group shares of the catch. After all, opening up the community quota
concept to all commercial fishermen and fishing companies could aid in the
implementation of conservation measures by motivating every boat out on the
water to take the sustainability of their fishery into account for their own
economic well-being and the long-term benefit of their community. “A community quota has the potential to deliver many of the benefits that
IFQs do and heal many of the social or economic downsides of some IFQ systems,
as well as meet some of the biological and environmental objectives,” says
Parker, who cites the community quota system already in place in Alaska’s
halibut/sablefish fishery as an example of how it can be done right. “It allows communities to make a permanent, or at least long-term
connection between the fishing population and the fisheries resource,” Parker
says. “That’s lacking in an IFQ system in which the permits can be mobile
and will migrate to where it’s most cost-effective.” But Parker is quick to point out that certain factors that make community
quotas work for Alaska’s fisheries—which have a long-standing tradition of
both local rule and federal pork barrel spending—may not apply elsewhere.
Nevertheless, Parker remains optimistic that the concept will catch on in other
parts of the country, and views the special permission granted by regional
fisheries regulators to the hook-and-line fishermen his group represents as a
positive step. “For us, it’s an embryonic concept,” he says. “Our guys are allowed
to catch 11 percent of the cod quota. But they only hold that right as a group,
and that group has ties to this community.” Some 3,000 miles away, the small-boat fishing village of Port Orford, Oregon
is also looking to “capture community quota” for its fishermen, despite
opposition from the trawlers that dominate not only West Coast seafood harvests
but also the regulatory body overseeing the region’s fisheries. In late 2001,
community native Leesa Cobb teamed with Laura Anderson of Environmental Defense
to start the Port Orford Ocean Resources Team. The dynamic duo, along with help
from hundreds of local fishermen and deck hands, are on a mission to get the
Pacific Fishery Management Council (see sidebar) to turn over regulatory powers
on the local fishery to community members with a vested interest in sustaining
the catch, as well as their livelihoods and community values. “Here on the West Coast, first we had the salmon disaster in the late 1980s
and early 1990s, and then in our own fishing community here we had the collapse
of the urchin industry, and now we’ve been through a groundfish disaster,”
reports Cobb. “The way that management is working now isn’t working for us,
as they’re just shoving us into one crisis after another. If we want to stay
fishing, we need to figure out how we can fish sustainably here so we don’t
have any more crises,” she says. “Our vision is to create sustainable fisheries off Port Orford Beach by
empowering fishermen with information and involving them in the management of
the resources,” Cobb adds, pointing out that Oregon fishermen don’t have to
look very far to see what can happen to working stiffs in economies dominated by
dwindling natural resources. During the 1990s, the spotted owl controversy
forced thousands of loggers out of their jobs in the Northwest, decimating
hundreds of small timber towns. Despite her perseverance, though, Cobb isn’t optimistic about the prospects
for the wide adoption of community quota systems on the West Coast. Besides some
Alaskan communities more than a thousand miles away, Port Orford’s fishermen
are unique on the West Coast in pushing for any kind of a community quota
whatsoever. Without broad support, Cobb worries, they stand little chance of
convincing regulators to grant them privileged access to fish harvests off Port
Orford reef. Nevertheless, the White House’s embrace of local rule generally
and IFQs specifically gives the Port Orford fishermen (not to mention fans of
community quota systems across the country), hope that they may be able to
control their own destinies and save their communities. “My California pals talk about the barbeque effect,” David Helvarg of the
Blue Frontier Campaign explains. “People started barbequing in California in
the 1950s and 10 years later everyone across the country was doing it.” When
it comes to ocean policy, California is also leading by example. “But
regarding the oceans,” Helvarg laments, “we don’t have five or 10 years to
do the right thing.” Luckily the Schwarzenegger administration seems to feel the same way. Last
fall, California’s celebrity Republican governor, who had previously testified
before the U.S. Commission on Ocean Policy pleading for stronger federal
reforms, signed the California Ocean Protection Act into law. The legislation,
which comes with $10 million in funding initially, created the high-level
California Coastal Commission and calls for the state to develop a master plan
for the entire length of its 1,100-mile coastline by 2011. Schwarzenegger hopes
his state will implement as many of the U.S. Commission’s recommendations at
the state level as possible, whether or not the federal government goes along
for the ride. But what power does California, not to mention other coastal states, actually
have over ocean resources, which have traditionally been managed at the federal
level? According to writer and fisheries consultant Mike Weber—who worked as
special assistant to the director of the National Marine Fisheries Service in
the early 1990s and now resides on the California coast—a lot: “The state
has power regarding fisheries within its waters, and also it has a very large
role in coastal development, including everything from land-side development to
non-point source pollution to off-shore oil and gas extraction.” And other states are also moving forward on marine policy. Massachusetts
Governor Mitt Romney is optimistic that the state legislature will pass his
Ocean Resources and Conservation Act, submitted last March. The bill calls for
zoning all state waters from three to nine miles offshore. Meanwhile,
environmentalists are holding out hope that similar proposals for the Gulf of
Maine and Long Island Sound will catch on with the public and state politicians. Might As Well Be an Ocean between Them Meanwhile, an oceans reform movement is taking shape in Congress, perhaps
motivated by the vacuum coming from the Bush administration. Congressman Sam
Farr (D-CA) grew up around the ocean in the Monterey Bay area he now represents,
and today is a leading voice for the reform of federal ocean policy from within
the legislative branch. He is a founder and one of six co-chairs of the House
Oceans Caucus, a bipartisan forum within the U.S. House of Representatives that
works to develop ocean policy legislation. Currently 40 out of 435 members of
Congress serve on the Oceans Caucus. Late last session, Farr, along with Jim Greenwood and Curt Weldon of
Pennsylvania (both R-PA) and Tom Allen (D-ME), introduced Oceans 21, a
bipartisan bill aiming to codify into law some of the major recommendations of
the U.S. and Pew Commissions. “You’ve got to look at all of these impacts
based on what they do to the ocean,” says Farr. Despite his energetic backing, even Farr doesn’t seem optimistic about the
prospects for getting the bills passed anytime soon. “There are a lot of
politics here,” Farr concedes. The Oceans Caucus is currently under the
jurisdiction of the House Resources Committee, chaired by Richard Pombo (R-CA),
who harbors a deep-seated aversion to environmental regulations. Any legislation
related to marine conservation is likely to be squashed by Pombo before it can
even get out of the committee. Even so, Farr is optimistic about the long-term
prospects for reform. With evening descending, I wrapped up my work at Shi Shi Beach, marking and
bagging all the debris I had collected for the Olympic Coast Clean-up. As I
strap on my daypack, something moving out in the water caught my eye. It was a
sea otter, not dead this time but living and breathing, frolicking just
off-shore. Can we rise to the challenge of cleaning up the world’s oceans and
protecting marine biodiversity? The otter frolicking out in the waves, not more
than 50 feet from me, was living proof that the efforts to restore at least one
small part of the marine ecosystem were paying dividends. RODDY SCHEER writes on the environment from Seattle.
CONTACTS Ecotrust Cape Cod Hook Fishermens’ Association U.S. Commission on Ocean Policy Blue Frontier Campaign Pew Oceans Commission
Washington's ShiShi Beach, four hours
from Seattle, is impacted by floating ocean debris.
© Roddy Scheer
© Roddy Scheer
Phone: (503)227-6225
Phone: (508)945-2432
Phone: (202)418-3442
Phone: (202) 387-8030
Phone: (703) 516-0605
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