On Tuesday the Bush administration announced plans to create the world’s largest marine protection area in the Pacific Ocean.
It’s a big deal. Huge even. Progressives like Jonathan Stein are rightly shocked and excited.
Remember though, an attitude of utter cynicism toward the Bush administration has served as an unfailingly accurate guide for eight years now. Let’s not be too quick to give it up.
After all, there’s this:
Two years ago with fanfare, President Bush declared a remote chain of Hawaiian islands the biggest, most environmentally protected area of ocean in the world.
It hasn’t worked out that way.
Cleanup efforts have slowed, garbage is still piling up and Bush has cut his budget request by 80%.
And one wonders just how a cash-strapped federal government plans to police this brand new marine sanctuary. Turns out, Jim Connaughton, Chairman of the White House Council on Environmental Quality, was asked just that earlier this week during a press briefing:
Q: Two questions. One, you mentioned monitoring. You also mentioned how remote this area is—and I have actually fished this area quite a bit. And my question to you is, monitoring is one thing, but enforcement is an entirely different issue. And I don’t honestly see how you can enforce any of this out there with the amount of government-based traffic that you have in the area. How do you plan to enforce these laws?
CHAIRMAN CONNAUGHTON: Well, let’s begin—first, this is our experience—these are challenging areas to get to, so there’s an embedded enforcement of just the difficulty of getting to these areas. Two, we operate from the presumption that most people who care about the resource, including your constituency, are law-abiding citizens, and so we expect that there will be a fair amount of increased awareness of the importance of the resource, and certainly that the boating community is very good about staying up to date on charts, especially the adventurous boating community, and staying up to date on—just for safety purposes—the conditions with respect to these remote areas.
Now, is there the potential for some Chinese commercial fishing fleet to come in and intrude the area? The answer to that is yes. And so one of our goals is through the management planning, and through several years of building out capacity, to also build out our capability to enforce.
So, the president’s plan is to someday get around to have better enforcement. As to monitoring, Connaughton had this to say:
Well, that will evolve over time, both with people in and about the resource, but also with advances in technology. So we begin to lay down the marks, we begin to put more monitoring systems, including passive monitoring systems that don’t require people. And then people pay more attention, because when you draw these lines, as we’ve learned from Hawaii and people enter the resource, important questions are asked, as, what are they doing there? Is this innocent passage? Are they there for scientific reasons? And then people just have a heightened level of awareness.
We know that over time this evolves well because our experience with marine sanctuaries has shown that after time people become quite invested in the conservation program, and you get a lot of just personal self-policing. And with things like Google Maps and Google Earth, our capacity only increases. And to me, what’s important is also let’s learn more about what’s happening under the water. Often we tend to focus on the surface or the very shallow coral systems, but these areas are an opportunity really to sort of revisit and reenergize our desire to learn about the depth of our world, even as we work on trying to get to Mars.
The government plan is to use Google Maps and Google Earth? Sigh.
Meanwhile, The New York Times’ editors think Obama should improve on Bush’s marine sanctuaries: “It will be up to President-elect Barack Obama to take it from here. He should expand the monuments to the 200-mile limit and give them full protection against fishing and other exploitation. His administration should also work to create and expand marine protected areas closer to our shores.”
James Bond calls for more marine protected areas
Comments
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kmp Posted 8:37 am
07 Jan 2009
"We will deploy sharks, ill-tempered sharks, with miniature solar-powered lasers strapped to their dorsal fins. The lasers will be programmed, through sophisticated microchip technology, to disengage upon recognition of chocolate-frosted cupcakes. It is our recommendation that anyone traveling to the area on legitimate business carry a supply of cupcakes at all times."
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Sam Wells Posted 9:11 am
07 Jan 2009
Commercial fishing vessels all have a VMS, for vessel monitoring system. This tracks the boats and if they "go over the line" they get in big trouble. Gosh, nobody said that?
The Coast Guard and Department of Defense already have a thicket of air, ground based radar, photography, and other instruments as well. They are especially thick in the Hawaiian Islands because it is a strategic part of the world (e.g., missile defense). How do you think that the Coast Guard busts drug and fishing boats in the first place? By waiting for them to do something bad? By having NMFS patrol boats anchored over the reefs? Get real.
And then there is the "feel good" aspect of enforcement - like using speeding on the highway as an example. Even with the best surveillance programs, only about one in ten perps are both caught and convicted, emphasis on the conviction.
Sorry to be strong willed about this, but with satellites and all the hi-tech stuff, they know exactly what is going on in these marine protection areas (MPAs). The question is, is somebody awake at the switch who can make a decision for an interception and boarding? That question is problematic because the Coast Guard and NMFS have conflicting missions - not because they are underfunded. Many Coast Guard ships that could be running blockade in the MPAs are stuck in the hell hole known as Iraq. The NMFS is building a few research vessels though, and it would be a good idea to give the Hawaii fish & game officials a few million for them to help as well. -sammie
Onward through the fog
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biodiversivist Posted 10:31 am
07 Jan 2009
http://z.about.com/d/gohawaii/1/0/E/e/greenville.jpg
The cold war is over. Put these things to use saving the planet.
In the end, it all comes down to biodiversity. Poison Darts--Protecting the biodiversity of our world
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Glenn Hurowitz Posted 11:41 am
07 Jan 2009
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Tasermons Partner Posted 12:23 pm
07 Jan 2009
Most (but not all) of the areas he put under protection are extremely, deep.
We're talkin' deeper underwater than the Himalayas are tall.
With all the pressure, isolation, and dangers associated with waters so deep, even being able to find minerals or oil would've been a challenge.
Actually mining or drilling it for anything close to a profit would be near impossible.
As for fishing, they'd actually haveta enforce that.
And we have enough troubles with enforcement of commercial fishing in waters close to the US mainland, just how we're supposed to protect auch a large area an ocean over with our current funds/resources is beyond me.
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biodiversivist Posted 3:24 pm
07 Jan 2009
In the end, it all comes down to biodiversity. Poison Darts--Protecting the biodiversity of our world
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Kevin N Posted 3:01 pm
08 Jan 2009
It shouldn't have come as a surprise. This message has been on the Republicans for Environmental Protection web site ( http://www.rep.org/ )for a couple months:
"President Bush is considering designation of two very large marine national monuments before he leaves office on January 20, 2009. The monuments, in the western and central Pacific, would protect hundreds of millions of acres of marine habitat for coral reefs, marine mammals, migratory birds, and sea turtles. Designating the monuments would be a spectacular conservation legacy. Please contact the White House and urge President Bush to follow through on the marine monument proposals."
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