Turning the Tide, Surfing Salvador, Killing Swords for Couch Potatoes and more.
Sept. 18, 2009
By David Helvarg
“A Sea Change We Can Believe In”
That is how NOAA Administrator and chief science mermaid Jane Lubchenco put it at a press conference Thursday Sept. 17 held near the San Francisco waterfront. She, White House Council on Environmental Quality Chair Nancy Sutley, Coast Guard Admiral Sally Brice-O’Hara and other Ocean Policy Task Force members had just released their interim report to the President (See Blue Notes #62 & 63). It calls for a National Ocean Policy that: Takes an ecosystem based approach to managing the nation’s public seas, uses Marine Spatial Planning to resolve user conflicts (See Blue Notes #62 for a definition), focuses on building resiliency based on healthy non-polluted habitats and bountiful wildlife – and adaptation (planning for the worst) to respond to impacts including ocean acidification and Arctic ice loss brought on by climate change.
On my way from the press conference to the Task Force’s public “listening session,” with a guy from Earthjustice we ran into a Michael Moore rally on the Embarcadero Plaza held for his latest movie, ‘Capitalism, a love story.” “Participation is what democracy is all about,” he told the large lunchtime crowd. At the back of the crowd were over a dozen dolphin, turtle and rockfish costumed seaweed rebels (marine grassroots activists) also on their way to the Task Force hearing at the Hyatt hotel. Some 500 people participated on a workday afternoon saying Yes to the promise of a new (first ever) national ocean policy to protect, explore and restore our last great and endangered frontier. Some 160 people gave testimony that, after two panels of experts, was limited to two minutes per speaker, kind of like speed dating for the ocean. Most of the speakers represented West Coast elected officials such as Senator Boxer and the West Coast Governors who strongly endorse the plan along with environmental advocates ranging from fishermen, scientists and surfers to sea otter and clean ocean energy advocates. 
In my 120 seconds I thanked the Task Force for implementing what many before them including two major ocean commissions that reported in 2003 and 2004 have called for without result, a coordinated federal approach to support sound oversight of our living seas. I also suggested that just as the Department of Interior was created in 1849 to oversee the Western frontier, our oceanic Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ) that is six times the size of the Louisiana Purchase ought to have its own place at the cabinet table. I’m thinking if you took the Coast Guard, our nation’s multi-mission maritime operator on the Ocean and Great Lakes and pried it from the Department of Homeland Security and took NOAA, the lead civilian agency for marine science and management, out of the Department of Commerce where Richard Nixon sank it back in 1970, you’d have the makings of a pretty decent Department of the Ocean that could oversee and help restore the blue in our red, white and blue. And yes, I did have to talk fast.
The Task Force itself is moving on a fast current with its next (and only Eastern Seaboard) meeting in Providence RI on Sept. 24 to be followed by a Honolulu meeting Sept. 29 followed in October by two more meetings in New Orleans and Cleveland. Their final report is due December 10. We’ll be meeting and strategizing in D.C. before then.
The Blue Beat
The NY Times recently reported some things many of our highly informed readers may already know. On Sept. 10 William Broad reported on how Hoki is the latest slow growing deepwater fish to be overexploited by the same (New Zealand) folks who crashed Orange Roughy not too long ago. As with almost all new commercial fisheries, Hoki created a global boom that’s probably killed 90 percent of its biomass and now government fisheries managers realize it’s time to regulate the last 10 percent to make it “sustainable.”
,p.The next day Andy Kramer and Andy Revkin reported on the first commercial ships (German) to take advantage of the melting, increasingly ice-free Arctic to use emerging northern shipping routes between Europe and Asia that fossil-fuel fired climate change has opened up for the first time in thousands of years. 25 years ago I was bodysurfing El Salvador as a war reporter figuring with so many bodies it was a natural (and a way to escape the daily horrors). My photographer friend John Hoagland loved surfing the left break at La Libertad till he was killed while shooting the war for Newsweek in 1984. On Sept. 13 the Times Travel section reported the emergence of post-war El Salvador as a cool new surfing destination. John would have liked that. Speaking of killings, the Discovery Channel, having made a hit of crab fishing in Alaska (‘The Deadliest Catch’) has a new show ‘Swords’ that profiles long-line fishing for Atlantic Swordfish in the same light, without mention of the global decimation long lining has caused marine wildlife or the toxic mercury loads top predators like swordfish carry in their flesh. Next likely Discovery series: Pirates, the story of the heroic hard working boatmen of Somalia who risk their lives to hijack monster ships for the fabulous ransoms they can earn.
And finally, hot off the press, the National Climatic Data Center reports worldwide sea surface temperatures this summer were the warmest since records were first compiled in 1880. It’s like that experiment where you put a frogfish in the ocean and slowly turn up the heat…
Oceanic Inspiration
Having finished writing my ‘Saved by the Sea’ book (St. Martin’s 2010) I’d like to start including a Blue Notes section of inspired words and poetry about our mother ocean. This week it’s lyrics from Australian Folkie Paul Kelly. Feel free to send in your own suggestions and we’ll try and post them.
Deeper Water — Lyrics and music by Paul Kelly
On a crowded beach in a distant time
At the height of summer see a boy of five
At the water’s edge so nimble and free
Jumping over the ripples looking way out to sea
Now a man comes up from amongst the throng
Takes the young boy’s hand and his hand is strong
And the child feels safe, yeah the child feels brave
As he’s carried in those arms up and over the waves
Deeper water, deeper water, deeper water, calling him on
Let’s move forward now and the child’s seventeen
With a girl in the back seat tugging at his jeans
And she knows what she wants, she guides with her hand
As a voice cries inside him – I’m a man, I’m a man!
Deeper water, deeper water, deeper water, calling him on
Now the man meets a woman unlike all the rest
He doesn’t know it yet but he’s out of his depth
And he thinks he can run, it’s a matter of pride
But he keeps coming back like a cork on the tide
Well the years hurry by and the woman loves the man
Then one night in the dark she grabs hold of his hand
Says ‘There, can you feel it kicking inside!’
And the man gets a shiver right up and down his spine
Deeper water, deeper water, deeper water, calling him on
So the clock moves around and the child is a joy
But Death doesn’t care just who it destroys
Now the woman gets sick, thins down to the bone
She says ‘Where I’m going next, I’m going alone’
Deeper water, deeper water
On a distant beach lonely and wild
At a later time see a man and a child
And the man takes the child up into his arms
Takes her over the breakers
To where the water is calm
Deeper water, deeper water,
Deeper water, calling them on
