By David Helvarg
In the future, America’s national parks won’t just be on land; they’ll also be under the waves. California is leading the way.
I was snorkeling the warm, clear waters of the Dry Tortugas off Florida last summer, just as a hard-won deal to turn it into the largest fully protected area of underwater America was being clinched. Shimmering shoals of baitfish, schools of blue-and-yellow striped grunts, and haughty-looking queen angelfish the size of saucepans swam past me. There were brain and rock corals, branching staghorn, and lacy sea fans. I spotted a five-foot nurse shark, and held my breath to hear the big aqua-green, red, and purple parrot fish grazing contentedly on the coral. Above the surface, squadrons of chevron-tailed frigate birds patrolled, searching for flying fish and other easy pickings.
Dry Tortugas is 151 square nautical miles (soon to be 197) in which fishing, drilling, dumping, treasure hunting, and anchor dragging are no longer allowed. Nor is any other activity that threatens the natural wonder of the place, which offers its visitors the genuine National Geo experience. You can come to snorkel, sail, or dive. But take only pictures and leave only bubbles.
If all goes well, Dry Tortugas may be only the first of a string of new underwater wilderness parks. There are projects now afoot to establish fully protected ocean areas in the Gulf of Maine, off Washington State, and elsewhere. But the most promising effort — and the most contentious battle — is taking shape in California. The state already has a few small marine reserves, just two-tenths of 1 percent of its coastal waters. Now, a pro-conservation coalition is trying to win enough popular support to create what could one day be the nation’s most complete network of underwater wilderness.
Yes, wilderness. “I am glad I shall never be young without wild country to be young in,” Aldo Leopold once wrote. “Of what avail are forty freedoms without a blank spot on the map?”
As terrestrial beings, we tend to forget that most of our planet’s surface remains a blank spot. We’ve mapped less than 5 percent of our oceans with the accuracy we’ve achieved in mapping 100 percent of the moon. We’re only now discovering and exploring previously unknown ecosystems, such as deep-ocean coral forests, hydrothermal vent communities, and the craggy slopes of submarine mountains. Yet the oceans contain more than 80 percent of all species and 95 percent of all livable habitat. They represent a second chance to do right by the wilderness that gave birth to us all.
In 1890 the U.S. Census Bureau declared the American frontier closed. But in 1983 Ronald Reagan, in one of his most significant and least noted acts, created a new frontier. Following international precedent, he established a 200-mile-wide Exclusive Economic Zone stretching out from America’s shores, a wild new territory six times the size of the Louisiana Purchase.
For the most part, we’ve continued to treat this blue frontier much as we treated our original frontier — as a place to drill for oil, dump our wastes, and slaughter wildlife. In 2000, however, a National Academy of Sciences report called for wilderness protection for a fifth of America’s coastal waters, in order to sustain dwindling fisheries and wildlife populations. Bill Clinton then issued an executive order establishing the framework for a national system of protected marine areas. He also created the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands Ecosystem Reserve, a vast oceanic extension of the island chain.
But in the mangrove tangle of overlapping jurisdictions and special interests that governs offshore management, protecting ocean wilderness may prove even more challenging than protecting terrestrial wilderness.
You have to balance the interests of the environmentalists with our right to make a living,” says Bob Fletcher, the tall, trim, gray-eyed president of the Sportfishing Association of California. We’re at a sport fishing landing on San Diego Bay, and the docks behind Fletcher are lined with dozens of big party boats emblazoned with names like Top Gun, Prowler, and Conquest.
Recreational ocean fishing is big business in California. In the aggregate, Fletcher and his colleagues make $2.5 billion a year taking their clients out to hunt fish with sonar. The industry has responded to steep declines in California fisheries by redefining trophy fish. In the 1960s, for instance, mackerel was used as bait. Now that many of the big fish are gone, mackerel is on the industry’s list of daily catches. The recreational fishing industry doesn’t sell fish, however. It sells the “experience” of fishing. And many of its clients lack the long-term perspective to notice the changes.
“I think reserves will decrease rather than increase yields,” Fletcher tells me. He argues that closing an area of the ocean to fishing means closing off its contribution to the catch, and he claims that traditional management can restore fisheries. “If we get reserves at the levels environmentalists want,” he warns, “you’ll devastate opportunities for recreational fisheries and anglers.”
What has Fletcher so concerned is the state’s Marine Life Protection Act. Originally supported by NRDC, the Orange County Marine Institute, and other conservation and marine education groups, it was celebrated as a major environmental victory when it became law in 1999. The act called for the creation of a large network of fully protected areas along the state’s 1,100-mile coastline by June 2002.
That’s not going to happen. In July 2001 the Department of Fish and Game released initial maps of the planned reserves. But the maps had been put together with little input from the fishing sector or other stakeholders among the general public — an act of political bumbling that set off a series of angry public hearings. The deadline was rolled back to December 2003.
Today, California is in the midst of a public comment period in which the state must gather input from stakeholders and use it to redraw the maps. The sport fishing industry is the leading force pushing for minimal reserves. “Let’s not alienate everyone,” Fletcher says. “Let’s start small, move [the reserves] away from the coast, and document them over five to ten years.”
It occurs to me that if either side isn’t satisfied with the state’s final recommendations, they might sue. Wouldn’t the result be years of additional delay, I ask Fletcher, with the reserves tied up in court indefinitely?
“I don’t see that as such a bad thing,” he says, grinning. “I’m not against inaction.”
There’s always been this ‘out-of-sight, out-of-mind’ thinking about the sea,” says Gary Davis, senior scientist at the Channel Islands National Park. “Now we’re beginning to understand how people can have devastating effects on marine productivity. We’re fragmenting marine habitats to where they’re not viable.”
I’m meeting with the big, sun-burnished scientist at the park headquarters by the Ventura harbor. Davis is stout, casual, and authoritative, and watching him, I can’t help thinking of the skipper on “Gilligan’s Island.”
The Channel Islands Park, off southern California, is half on land — five windy, rugged islands — and half underwater. The most famous of its marine ecosystems are forests of giant kelp, often called underwater rainforests because they shelter so many species. But even though this is a national park, fishing is permitted in most of it. Since 1999 there have been proposals to greatly expand the park’s few no-take reserves. While the political process creeps on, however, the fishing continues.
“We’re losing species like abalone and rockfish,” Davis laments. “The predators and large grazers are being fished out. Then, when you have storms taking out the kelp, you discover it’s only in the reserves that the kelp forests consistently recover. Because the red urchins and lobsters, and big sheephead and abalones, are still there, keeping the system in balance.”
I’m distracted by the view out his office window. Across the wind-whipped Santa Barbara Channel are the Channel Islands — where six-foot waves mean there’s no way I can scuba-dive Anacapa Island’s famous 37-acre reserve today.
I know what I’m missing. I’ve dived in a few of California’s other small cold-water reserves, including Point Lobos, south of Monterey, where I’ve seen cathedral shafts of sunlight playing through the giant kelp forests. Kelp gardens have an otherworldly, hidden-forest feel. There are translucent stalks and leaves rising above seafloors littered with strawberry anemones, starfish, urchins, and abalones. There are big, spiny, bug-eyed rockfish, so ugly they’re attractive. There are sea otters, seals, and sea lions, sometimes checking you out as if they were acrobatic jocks. On rare occasions, there is a great white shark — the definitive sign of a productive ecosystem. As naturalist Ed Abbey said: “If there’s not something bigger and meaner than you are out there, it’s not really a wilderness.”
Gary Davis thinks most fishermen and fisherwomen will become converts to reserves once they see the “spillover” effect in action. As large fish and other creatures start to thrive in the protected areas, he explains, they migrate out — often right to the traps, nets, and hooks of the fishing boats.
A few days later, at the La Jolla Cove reserve some 200 miles to the south, I see what he means. Just past the yellow buoys at the edge of the reserve, the sea is thick with marker floats for lobster traps. Clearly, lobster fishers have noticed that the fishing is good right by the protected zone.
There’s plenty of evidence to back them up. The first large-scale study of marine ecological reserves, released at the 2001 annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, found higher densities of fish, larger animals, and greater biodiversity in no-take zones. In Florida, world-record catches of three species of sport fish occurred more frequently near Cape Canaveral (off-limits since 1962 for national security reasons) than in all the rest of the state combined. At Georges Bank, a New England fishing ground closed in 1994 due to catastrophic overfishing, the scallop population has grown fourteen-fold, and haddock, yellowtail flounder, and other species have rebounded.
Interestingly, California’s commercial fishing industry hasn’t been as vocal in opposing reserves as the state’s recreational fishing industry. One reason may be that commercial fishermen and fisherwomen are effectively the top predators in the marine ecosystem. When the prey disappear, they feel it. “We’re killing them with our electronics [fish-finding sonar],” one disgruntled fisherman in Bodega Bay tells me. “The fishing grounds are like freeways now, and we’re just wiping them out.”
“Some of our members say, ‘Don’t agree to anything,’” says Zeke Grader, president of the Pacific Coast Federation of Fishermen’s Associations, a commercial fishing group. “But I tell them that if we do right by the resource, we do right by our industry. If you get fishermen involved, they’ll be the ones promoting new reserves and feeling the scientists and others are working for them.”
California environmentalists are cautiously optimistic about the fate of the Marine Life Protection Act. NRDC’s Karen Garrison has seen even the loudest public meetings “get constructive” when fishermen and fisherwomen, conservationists, and scientists come together in smaller groups to discuss specifics. What’s more, other constituencies are becoming more involved.
On a cool December evening, I attend a meeting of San Diego’s Council of Divers. Some three dozen burly recreational divers, men and women in denim, wool, and fleece, have gathered to hear a talk on marine reserves by Scripps Institution of Oceanography scientist Paul Dayton. When Dayton shows a slide of a juvenile abalone hiding under a red urchin, the crowd “Awwws” its appreciation. Only divers could find a baby ab cute, I think.
Dayton calls the kelp forests of today “ghost forests,” because so many of their inhabitants are missing — giant black sea bass, big lobsters, moray eels, billfish. He has slides from a few decades ago showing lobsters the size of bulldogs and black sea bass larger than the men who caught them.
“I just don’t see why there is such opposition to these reserves,” Dayton tells the divers. “In Western Australia, [lobster] fishermen are demanding larger reserves because they’re making so much money off the spillover.”
One diver wonders whether he will ever be able to collect abs in his lifetime. Another speaks of growing up near beaches that were covered with shells when she was a child — but are no longer.
After Dayton’s presentation, the president of the council (the only diver wearing a sports jacket) stands up. He asks the group’s members to voice their opinions to California’s Fish and Game Commission. Tell other members to get involved, he says.
These are only three dozen people, but they represent some 1,500 local divers. In turn, San Diego’s divers are just a sliver of the far larger, disparate group of ocean enthusiasts I’ve encountered who support reserves, from Paul Dayton to weekend swimmers. They are becoming a true grassroots political force in the state — and across the country. I like to call them the Seaweed Rebellion: scientists, surfers, coastal residents, fishermen and fisherwomen, divers, businesspeople, environmentalists, and others, committing to do the right thing for the living seas they love.
The oceans, after all, have given life to our planet. They are the drivers of climate and weather. They give us almost three-fourths of the oxygen we need. Our bodies, like the planet, are 71 percent water; our blood is exactly as salty as the sea. Going to the beach is our number-one outdoor recreational activity.
Giving back a little in the form of marine wilderness would seem the least we could do. Henry David Thoreau wrote, “Heaven is under our feet as well as over our heads…. We need the tonic of wilderness.” I’d just amend that to say: Heaven is also under our flippers. Click Here for Full Article and Pictures
Websites
Channel Islands National Park and Marine Sanctuary www.nps.gov
