Marine protected areas focus of Yale series : The Gulf of Maine Times: Vol. 5 No. 4

"Kapu" is the Hawaiian word for the death sentence meted out to tribal fishermen in a bygone era who breached the "no take" zones their communities had established to preserve marine resources. "Because the islanders' lives depended on those resources," said James Bohnsack in a recent talk at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut.

Bohnsack, a research fishery biologist with the National Marine Fisheries Service, wasn't necessarily advocating bringing back kapu. But he and the other speakers at a lecture series sponsored by the School of Forestry and Environmental Studies' Center for Coastal and Watershed Systems did advocate that marine protected areas be established to truly safeguard fish and other sea life before their numbers plummet to the point of no return.

The series, called Marine Protected Areas: Translating Science into Practice, featured 12 speakers over the fall semester.

A U.S. Executive Order signed by then President Clinton in 2000 and endorsed by the Bush Administration, defines marine protected areas (MPAs) as "any area of the marine environment that has been reserved by Federal, State, territorial, tribal or local laws or regulations to provide lasting protection for part or all of the natural and cultural resources therein." Several MPAs have been set aside, some dating back many years, but there is no consistency on which activities are allowed and which are prohibited. Lack of effective enforcement of existing regulations is also a big concern, several speakers noted.

A major theme running through the talks is that fishing - not pollution or any other factor - is the most widespread cause of disturbance to the aquatic ecosystem.

Trawler fishing, in which huge nets are dragged along the sea floor and pull up everything in their path, is the biggest culprit. The non-target catch is then discarded - sometimes amounting to 95 percent of what's brought on shipboard.

Bohnsack said the goal of MPAs is not to create oases in the desert of otherwise depopulated seas, but rather to create a healthy relationship between the reserves and the fisheries. He said the benefits of doing so would be the protection of ecosystem structure and function, increased scientific understanding of those systems and increased public education and appreciation for life in the seas.

He said the fishing industry would also benefit from creation of a reserve by allowing more and bigger fish and other aquatic species to thrive, which, when they left the boundaries of the MPA, could be legitimately caught.

Bohnsack described his design for successful MPAs as a geographically dispersed, self-sustaining, permanent network of replicated sites that include all representative habitats and encourage public access to promote non-extractive recreation and education.

Peter Auster, a Gulf of Maine expert, was among the speakers at the Yale MPA lecture series this fall. Photo: Melinda Tuhus.

Peter Auster, science director of the National Undersea Research Center at the University of Connecticut and another of the speakers, said that in addition to fishery communities, environmental organizations and other constituencies must be involved in planning successful MPAs. He added that referring to marine biota as "wildlife" rather than "stocks" is key to developing a marine conservation ethic.

Auster showed before and after slides to impress on his audience the devastating impacts of trawler fishing on the sea floor. "Before" pictured a thriving ecosystem of great diversity, while "after" revealed a barren stretch of sea floor that very much resembled a desert. The research coordinator for the Stellwagen Bank National Marine Sanctuary and expert on the Gulf of Maine, he said every part of the U.S. Gulf had been trawled at least once a year in the 1980s, which led to the emergency closures of Georges Bank to fishing in the 1990s.

Elliott Norse, president of the Marine Conservation Biology Institute in Redmond, Washington, was trained and worked most of his career as a marine biologist, but he took a detour for a few years to research old growth forests and the threats that logging posed to them. That led him to a comparison between bottom trawling and clear-cutting. In their disregard for and devastation of intact ecosystems, they are similar, he said. But the scale is vastly different, Norse added: "While, according to the UN's Food and Agriculture Organization, 100,000 square kilometers of old growth worldwide are clear-cut annually, the area trawled annually is 150 times as great." Another critical difference is that people can see forests and the aftermath of their destruction, which has led many to oppose clear-cutting, while the vast majority of the world's people have no idea what's under the surface of the water covering three-quarters of our planet.

"When you look on a globe or a map, there is no topography on the water, no boundaries, no place names," Norse said. "Until we have a sense of place regarding the seas, we probably can't change things."

Melinda Tuhus is a regular contributor to the New York Times and other publications. She lives in Hamden, Connecticut.