Volume 6, No. 1

Promoting Cooperation to Maintain and Enhance
Environmental Quality in the Gulf of Maine

By Pam Person

The Global Program of Action Coalition for the Gulf of Maine (GPAC) is contacting groups from Massachusetts to Nova Scotia asking them to organize "bottom up" forums to be held this year and in early 2003. The meetings will lead to a "State of the Gulf Summit" in 2003 or 2004, the first region-wide assessment of the Gulf in 12 years. The Gulf of Maine conference in 1989 provided a general assessment of the Gulf and potential threats to its long-term sustainability. Since then there has been a burgeoning of locally-based initiatives that include programs to monitor water quality and restore wetlands, and analyses of the Gulf's fisheries, point source pollution input, coastal degradation and more.

At right: Pam Person. Photo courtesy of Pam Person.

Once again, it is time to bring together available data and information to examine the Gulf of Maine and its watershed, determine what has been accomplished and assess where efforts must be focused in the decade ahead. To do that, we will we need lots of people and organizations to create thought-provoking, informative and educational forums that will eventually pave the way to the larger summit.

The GPAC State of the Gulf Project Planning Committee has identified 16 regional watershed and two coastal areas where we would like to encourage the forums to be held. Each local forum will be different, depending on the organizers and watershed. The first forum will be held in May as part of the 5th Bay of Fundy Science Workshop in Wolfville, Nova Scotia.

GPAC will not be the organizing "host" for any of the forums. However, GPAC hopes to work with conveners to include locally-based organizations, scientists, state/provincial and federal agencies, fishermen, town planners, students and First Nation's representatives from each area. Local knowledge as well as hands-on experience will help us assess each watershed and promote the actions needed to change land-based activities that threaten the marine environment.

GPAC is requesting that each forum ask the following three questions:

1. What do you know about the health of your watershed or coastal area (water quality, habitat and species)?
2. What are the priority issues threatening the environmental and resource sustainability of your watershed?
3. What indicators of ecological health would you select for your watershed?

The answers to these questions will be part of the background paper prepared for the summit. We encourage representatives from each forum to come to the summit to ensure a wider and more diverse group of people with knowledge about their watersheds and ideas to help identify new, cost-effective and creative ways of solving some of the problems.

Janice Harvey, GPAC member and director of Marine Conservation for the Conservation Council of New Brunswick, and Art MacKay, president of the St. Croix Estuary Project, initiated the "State of the Gulf" project last year. Both were concerned that there had not been a thorough assessment of the health of the Gulf of Maine and that, "the public still does not appreciate the interconnections between the greater Gulf and their watershed and vice versa," Harvey says.

In May, Harvey presented the proposed project at the GPAC meeting in Saint Andrews, New Brunswick, where it was enthusiastically endorsed. Since then, she has formed a large planning committee with representatives from a variety of sectors throughout the Gulf.

As a volunteer organization, GPAC needs local, regional and national organizations and agencies to pitch in and help make the summit happen. Says Harvey: "We are now in the fundraising mode. We are looking to all the government agencies with jurisdiction in the Gulf, as well as private foundations and corporations to support the project."

GPAC was initiated in 1996 as one of two pilot projects for the United States, Canada and Mexico in response to the United Nations Global Program of Action to Protect the Marine Environment from Land Based Activities. The Gulf of Maine region was chosen because it had the Gulf of Maine Council on the Marine Environment infrastructure as a foundation. Although the pilot project phase is now over, GPAC is continuing as a multi-sector voluntary organization to improve information sharing and public education.

GPAC wants the forums and summit to begin a process that encourages people to "think Gulf-wide by acting locally." We believe bringing people together can foster tremendous opportunities for local actions as well as regional projects that will increase public awareness and improve the quality of the marine environment. We need your help and resources to make this plan a reality. Please join us. Thank you.

To help plan one of the watershed forums please e-mail one of the following:

Colleen Mercer-Clarke,
GPAC Joint Management Team:
colleenc@cbcl.ca

Peter Shelley,
Conservation Law Foundation,
Rockland, Maine:
pshelley@clf.org

Pam Person is the U.S. chair of the Joint Management Team, GPAC.