The health of the oceans — and the Power of Three

Part 2 of 2

To a striking degree, individuals and small-budgeted nongovernmental organizations and individuals have stepped in where governments have feared to tread.

Take the case of a trio of individuals. One is Jean-Michel Cousteau, who in 1999 founded the Santa Barbara-based Ocean Futures Society, which operates on an annual budget of just under $1 million. Another is Dr. Sylvia Earle, a marine biologist and oceanographer who has served as chief scientist of NOAA and who, in 2010, founded the San Francisco-based Deep Ocean Exploration and Research, Inc. and Mission Blue and SEAlliance whose annual budget is under $400,000. The third member of this trio is Elliot Norse, a marine biologist who, in 1996, founded the Seattle-based Marine Conservation Biology Institute, later the Marine Conservation Institute. Its budget is roughly $1.75 million.

In short, these are small fry compared to government bureaucracies. Yet, these three, with an assist from James Greenwood, a former Pennsylvania congressman, a Republican, who had taken up the cause of protecting the world’s oceans and had a good relationship with President George W. Bush, were instrumental in persuading Bush to create, on June 15, 2006, what was then the world’s largest marine preserve — the Papahanaumokuakea Marine National Monument, a 140,000 square mile marine sanctuary near the Northern Hawaiian Islands. (The National Monument designation will protect the area from commercial fishing, seafloor mining, oil exploration and other uses; in declaring the region a national monument, the president was able to use executive powers established under the Antiquities Act of 1906. Thus, congressional approval was not needed.)

The president’s decision, as reporter Craig Welch explained recently in the Seattle Times, was the result of an unusual seminar, set up by Greenwood, during which Bush said he got “a pretty good lecture about life” from Dr. Earle. The meeting also featured a screening of Cousteau’s PBS-KQED documentary “Voyage to Kure,” the name of a remote coral atoll at the extreme northwest end of the Hawaiian archipelago. The island is a nesting area for a wide species of birds, and a wintering area for migratory bird species from both North America and Asia. About 90 percent of Hawaii’s green sea turtles nest in the region, as do nearly all of the world’s population of Laysan albatrosses. Kore also happens to lie in the path of a current that brings great tangles of fishing nets and tons of debris onto the beaches.

During his second term in office, Bush — with the encouragement not only of concerned oceanographers but also of First Lady Laura Bush — created a total of four Pacific marine preserves.

On Sept. 25, President Obama signed a proclamation that will expand his predecessor’s Marine National Monument from almost 87,000 square miles to nearly 500,000 square miles — a huge extension of territory that may prove difficult to oversee and protect.

The United Kingdom’s attempts to protect its marine reserves provide a dramatic illustration of the problems of protection and enforcement of regulations. As George Monbiot wrote in his May 2012 Guardian blog: “A marine-protected area in the United Kingdom is an area inside a line drawn on a map — and that’s about it. In most cases, the fishing industry can continue to rip up the seabed, overharvest the fish and shellfish, and cause all the other kinds of damage it is permitted to inflict in the rest of this country’s territorial waters. With three tiny exceptions, our marine reserves are nothing but paper parks.”

This past August, in Belfast, Scotland, Dr. Norse’s Marine Conservation Institute held a day-long workshop with 19 top marine scientists whose goal was to discuss and develop criteria for a global ocean refuge, as opposed to the present scattered and unscientific system of preservation. GLORES, the acronym for the Global Refuge System, would establish clear criteria for the best locations, effective management of the refuges, and “credible enforcement essential to saving species and their habitats from preventable harm.” At present, Dr. Norse pointed out, most protected areas are protected in name only, while barely 1 percent of the entire ocean is strongly protected, meaning “free from fishing and other extractive uses.” A global refuge system would not only provide refuge for species, Dr. Norse maintained, but would also make the world more resilient to climate change and acidification. And he emphasized that action is urgent if profound changes in ocean ecosystems are to be averted.

On Aug. 15, National Geographic announced the release of a new Netflix documentary called “Mission Blue,” about the life and work of Dr. Sylvia Earle, who has been a National Geographic explorer-in-residence since 1998. In the press release, Earle provides a terse summing up of the problem facing a world whose population keeps growing, whose oceans keep warming, and whose governments seem either paralyzed or perennially preoccupied: “No ocean, no life. No ocean, no us.”

Jon Swan is a poet, journalist and former senior editor of the Columbia Journalism Review. Two years ago, after living in the Berkshires for 40 years, he and his wife moved to Yarmouth, Maine. His poems and several articles can be found on www.jonswanpoems.com.

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