Cleaning Up the Oceans: A Global Ethical ChallengeThis article is based on a Regan Lecture at the Markkula Center for
Applied Ethics, April 29, 2003. Included are edited transcripts of remarks
by: LEON PANETTA: The reality is that when we talk about protecting our oceans, we are talking about ethical values. We are talking about the value of protecting the resources that God gave us and trying to ensure that those resources are there not only for ourselves but also for our children and their children and their children. There is perhaps no more important ethical value than being good stewards of these resources. That is our obligation, our responsibility. The Earth, as you can see looking at those pictures of it from space, is really constituted of about 70 percent water. You can see the interrelationship between the land and the sea. Unfortunately, we forget that. For that reason, while we have made a greater commitment to protecting the resources on our land, we have not made the same commitment to protecting our oceans. The purpose of the Pew Commission is to look at the crisis facing our oceans. About 30 years ago, the Stratton Commission looked at the challenges to our oceans, but they were primarily worried about the invasion of our fishing grounds, so their concern was how to protect those resources from foreign fleets that invaded our coastline. They recommended a number of steps, including the establishment of the National Geographic and Atmospheric Administration. Stratton was a successful commission, but it dealt with threats that were beyond the boundaries of this country. What we on the Pew Commission thought was important was facing the threats that come from all of us acting on our oceans now. There was a lot of pressure to establish a commission, but it was delayed in the Congress, so the Pew Foundation decided to establish an independent commission that would go ahead and look at our living resources in our territorial waters. If you look at our waters within the 200-mile territorial limit, you are looking at a territory that is almost double the continental United States. The commission was very independent and included a diverse group: people from the political world, Governor Tony Knowles from Alaska, Governor George Pataki from New York, Mayor Joseph Riley from Charleston, myself. We had people from the environmental community: Roger Rufe from the Ocean Conservancy and John Adams from the National Resources Defense Council. We had Julie Packard from Monterey Bay Aquarium, and two fisherman, Pietro Parravano and Pat White, who was a lobsterman from Maine. We had people from the scientific community: Jane Lubchenco from Oregon State University, who is a renowned scientist on the oceans, Charles Kennel, who is director of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography. And we had people from the private sector; David Rockefeller and Marilyn Ware who represented the American Water Works. We spent almost three years holding hearings across the country, from Monterey to Maine, from Hawaii to Alaska, from the Gulf to Charleston. We visited almost every area of our coastline; Pietro and Pat White met with fishermen in a number of areas. We even had a hearing in the middle of Iowa to look at pollution run-off down the Mississippi that, in fact. gets to the Gulf. The result of all those hearings and the testimony we received and all the scientific papers that we wrote was to confirm that our oceans are in crisis. Our ocean ecosystems, whether it is our coral reefs or kelp forests or estuaries or wetlands, are all in a state of almost virtual collapse—endangering such diverse ocean life as whales, sea turtles, seabirds, and the fisheries that are a part of our oceans. This tremendous crisis affects the very essence, the very beginning of life itself, in our oceans. What are some of the specific findings that we were able to determine? Let me go over these very quickly, and then I will try to indicate some of the recommendations we have made to deal with them. Ocean governance, which is a particular problem, is chaotic and uncoordinated between the federal, state, and local levels. There are something like 140 federal laws that pertain to the oceans and coasts, and if you add what the states do, and what the localities do, you can see that a huge number of laws that impact on our oceans. Almost 16 committees of the Congress deal with the oceans. Each has a particular jurisdiction, and there is very little coordination. About 40 federal agencies are involved with the oceans one way or another. Because of the lack of coordination, there is no clear guidance, no clear direction with regards to ocean policy. Many of the issues that affect our oceans wind up in federal court with the federal court district judge making decisions that creates haphazard policy in relation to our oceans. So one of the things we determined was that the governance of our oceans is dysfunctional, and we need to have greater coordination. Fisheries are obviously in deep trouble. I was born in Monterey, which is one of the reasons ultimately I really became involved in ocean issues. As a child, I saw what happened to the sardine industry in Monterey. When I was a boy, the sardine industry was the central industry of Monterey—that's what people depended on, it was their economy. As a result of over-fishing and climate changes-the sardine industry collapsed. At the time, I said to myself, "I don't want to see this happen anywhere else." But the reality is that it has. It happened with cod in New England, halibut, yellow-tailed flounder. It's happened again here on the West Coast where there are severe restrictions on depleted rockfish species; it's happening with salmon. So what we are seeing is that our fisheries are being depleted. Almost one third of the commercial fishing stocks in United States waters have been determined to be overexploited. Only about 22 percent of managed fish stocks are being fished on a sustainable basis. Not only is over-fishing a problem, but of all the boats with sophisticated gear, a lot of noncommercial fish are caught that are thrown back in the ocean. Twenty five percent of the catch in the world is basically discarded, which means it's not commercially valued—it dies and is thrown back in. So we are killing the support system of the life in our oceans by doing that. In addition, there is very attention governing the oceans in relation to the land. Coastal sprawl and coastal development are another problem. Fifty percent of our population lives along our coast. We expect about another 25 million to live along our coast in the next 15 years. A result, we are consuming our estuaries and our wetlands. Between our marshes, our floodwaters, about 20,000 acres per year are disappearing. Louisiana alone has lost about half a million acres of wetlands since the 1950s. So the very fish nurseries are being destroyed by urban sprawl, which obviously worsens the fisheries problem. Marine pollution is another issue. Two-thirds of our estuaries and bays are severely degraded by excess oxygen, which is being produced in our waters. The National Academy of Sciences estimates that the oil running off of our streets and driveways—ultimately flowing into our oceans—is equal to the Exxon Valdez oil spill every eight months. About 10.9 million gallons of oil is going into our oceans by virtue of the sprawl problem. Obvious dead zones are appearing in the Gulf as a result of fertilizer and other pollution going down the Mississippi. We see a dead zone in the Gulf the size of the state of Massachusetts—there is no life in that zone. And we are seeing that start to happen not only in parts of the West Coast but in other areas of the East Coast as well. Cruise ships have contributed to the problem of pollution as well. A 3,000 passenger cruise ship generates about 210,000 gallons of sewage, about 1 million of what is called gray water, and about 37,000 gallons of oil ditch water. Alaska passed legislation to try to deal with that problem, but very frankly, most states have not really confronted it. We are also seeing problems with invasive species brought in by tankers. There are close to 300 invasive species in San Francisco Bay, which may ultimately consume the natural marine life. The bottom line is that we obviously face a serious crisis, and it must be confronted. Let me just mention briefly some of the recommendations we make. Number 1, we think that the country has to pass a national oceans policy act that commits this country to protecting our oceans—that creates a National Trust. We did that 100 years ago under Teddy Roosevelt with regard to protecting our land; we need exactly the same kind of trust for our oceans. Secondly, we need to approach the ocean on a ecosystem basis—relating what happens on the land and on the rivers to the ocean. To do that, we need regional councils that bring together federal, state, and local officials as well as fishermen, scientists, environmentalists, and business leaders in order to develop a plan. In America's fisheries, we need to redefine the principal objective of fishery management, which should be to protect, maintain, and restore marine ecosystems because that is what our fisheries depend on. We need to establish a separation between conservation—how many fish we catch—and the allocation system—who catches them. Right now the fisheries councils basically do both, and it does not work very well. We need to confront our coastal sprawl by improving the planning that goes into habitat protection. Congress should ensure that federal funding for road building and development is consistent with trying to protect the wetlands and marshes that are important to those fisheries. On marine pollution, we need to do everything possible to protect against non-point pollution. Right now, the Clean Water Act deals well with point pollution, but not very well with non-point pollution and that is something we need to address. Let me just conclude by saying that this is a crisis. I've often said that we govern in this country either through leadership or crisis. We often need to have a crisis to drive policymakers to do the right thing. Now we need to alert the American public that the oceans are in crisis. Of course, we have many problems from Iraq to North Korea to a slowing economy. But we need to make people understand that life itself is dependent on how we treat our oceans. Our health, our nutrition, our economies, our communities, are dependent on whether or not we are able to restore our oceans. If we can convince the American people that, truly, this is an issue of national trust, then I think ultimately we can be good stewards for our oceans so that we can pass them on to our children. ROB WILDER: Its been more than 30 years since our nation last reviewed America's Ocean Policy. The Stratton Commission finished its seminal work thinking that it had created a very good blueprint for smarter in-depth ocean policy, but look at what's happened since that time: We've lost marine biodiversity across levels of genome, species, and habitats. Ocean pollution has increased in many places, while regionally essential coastal habitats have been drained, filled, and otherwise lost. Important fisheries such as cod, haddock, and flounder on the East Coast, and abalone and rockfishes on the West Coast among many others, have seen marked declines. I now see that Canada just declared an end to its once-world-famous cod fishing. Perhaps the most interesting thing, is that today, the key causes for these losses are pretty well-understood, and solutions for conserving and restoring biodiversity are well-known. What's required, most of all, is the political will to put the solutions into practice. Putting them into practice will, I realize, be very hard to do. I personally attended the landmark, or seamark, National Oceans Conference not long ago, in Monterey, Calif., and from what I saw there, the event might have been subtitled: The Oceans: What Good Are they to Us? It was a vivid display of what scholars here at the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics, might call the Utlilitarian Approach to the sea. The Navy clearly spoke of environment dozens of times in its fine presentations, and indeed it's helpfully become far more ecologically-aware of its impacts. But the sea remains for the Navy primarily a means—for hiding subs beneath its waters, for transporting ships on the surface, or putting distance between us and our enemies. For the many commercial interests at National Oceans Conference, again seas are important for their use to us. While I wasn't surprised—after all, it's not a primary task of the Navy or industry to clean up the Oceans—the other voices I wanted to hear were relatively absent. Rather than the Utlitarian Approach, or the Rights Approach to ocean, I wanted to hear robustly there, voices for the other four ethical approaches: Common-Good These four weren't prominent. Now, when I look at the make-up of the new National Oceans Commission, I see again much heavier representation from the Utilitarian Approach than from the latter four approaches. This isn't to say the results from the National Ocean Commission won't display a strong conservationist intent, but we do need to firmly keep in mind the that latter four ethical approaches are much-different from the Utilitarian Approach. The parallel Pew Oceans Commission does reflect, I think, the latter approaches more in its make-up, and we are all looking forward to the release of both these reports this summer. What then, are the sorts of solutions that we know are needed, but have eluded our grasp so far? We need to be much more integrative in ocean governance. Activities on land that lead to marine pollution must be more directly addressed than they have been in the past. This requires legislation, and support from the executive branch; thus as I mentioned, we need greater political will. In the conservation community, we need to learn to work better with the fishing community. Fishermen and women ought to be a natural constituency for cleaning up the sea. We need to expand constituencies and build partnerships...Not enough people CARE about what happens in the ocean...and those who do are busy fighting with each other rather than working together (e.g fishermen/conservationists). We need to find common ground, to build on areas of mutual interest and recruit more people who care. We haven't been particularly good at this. And I fear that even these two coming reports will fail to gain the broad media, and so public, attention necessary for this matter to reach the presidents desk. To me, it's a matter of Homeland Security! But only some see it this way. We can't limit ourselves to just a few restorative actions, such as to Marine Protected Areas, or to addressing over-capitalized fleets, or to restoring essential wetlands habitats alone. These are each doubtless necessary and very important areas for action ahead, but they are, standing alone, only a portion of what needs to be done to conserve marine biodiversity. Those actions may be politically doable, such as restoring more wetlands, but that doesn't mean they are what the sea needs. I called my book Listening to the Sea, because that's something we haven't done well. Cleaning up the seas means doing the hard things, as well as the easy. Look back, and the Stratton Commission failed marine biodiversity. It did so because it never considered the idea of biodiversity. From the start, they took a Utilitarian Approach embodied in ideas like "maximum sustainable yield" that push marine resources to the limit from the start. We must hope the forthcoming ethical approach to cleaning up the oceans embodies newer ideas like the Precautionary Principle. And accounting for scientific certainty, in a truly science-based approach to resources management. And humility, preserving resources. And biodiversity for future generations. This would be dramatically new, but an idea whose time has come. Again, it will not be easy. The release this summer of two important reports will not in itself cause agencies to suddenly change behavior, or laws to be re-written, or oceans to be healed. But what they can do is help generate the political will needed to focus a spotlight on the health of the seas, on the need to move beyond the Utilitarian Approach and bring to our hearts, the Common-Good Approach that's fundamental to ethical decisions about the oceans. Now, let me say a final word. Being a respondent to Leon Panetta is an especially interesting task, because here is a key decision maker from the highest level who gets it. I quoted from Leon's work extensively in my book, because his views were so spot-on. But that said, I hope that I've provided some points for thought, recognizing in broad strokes the road ahead. PIETRO PARRAVANO: When I was first asked to talk to you about this, I thought it would be very difficult to keep my thoughts limited to a 7-minute presentation because I feel that ethics and fishing should be synonymous, and I can think of many examples. When I first starting fishing over 20 years ago, words like ecosystems, socioeconomics, and coastal zones were not common. Before I became a fisherman, I spent my time completing my undergraduate and graduate studies in the classroom and the laboratory, focusing on theory and performing experiments. Now, as I go to work, I look at the Ocean as a laboratory. As we know, the ocean environment and our coastal zones are being challenged by issues that have not received top priority by policy or government. Now we have issues like depleted stocks, coastal pollution, mercury, oil, coastal development, destructive fishing methods, increasing human population, climate change, and invasive species. As a fisherman and as a scientist, I believe we can no longer allow for these problems to continue without addressing them. It is our responsibility that we use our respective roles to ensure that our coastal zones and marine environment are managed by credible science in collaboration with stakeholders. Looking back at how the oceans were first used, we see that fisheries and transportation were top priorities. Today, unfortunately, we see the oceans being used as a cheap way of disposing of human and industrial waste. Also we see that many, but not all, of our nation's fisheries are being mismanaged, leading to another form of waste. We also see an increasing competition of uses within the ocean's realms. From the perspective of a professional fisherman, I want to discuss an ethical vision for sustainable fisheries, which, by its very nature, means healthy habitats for both fish and humans. The state of our fisheries is a key indicator of the state of our oceans. Thriving fishing communities depend on abundant fish stocks, which in turn depend on healthy marine ecosystems. For fisheries, environmental productivity and economic prosperity are one and the same. Looking at our fisheries obviously the first thing that we have to do is to control our own activities. That means fishing within the biological limits of a fish population and assuring that the gear does not destroy habitats. Today many stocks are just hanging on because of regulations that were inadequate or not enforced. I have spent much time advocating the professionalization of our fishing men and women. During the hearings of the Pew Oceans Commission, we heard from many the need to implement a national program that establishes guidelines for fishing men and women to be recognized as professionals. Society has assigned significant ethical value and appreciation for those who bring them food. Programs for professionalism can provide training and continued education. Let us encourage children who grow up in fishing families to continue their education so that they can become the brains of the industry, the brains that will help us adapt to a constantly changing world. Another foundation for sustainable fisheries is protection of habitat. As we have found in so many fisheries, merely controlling fisheries is not enough. Habitat destruction is not only about the physical loss that may come from the destruction of a reef or the damming of a river, but also from pollution, diverted stream flows, and even the introduction of invasive species. Our oceans can no longer be viewed as a dump. Protecting habitat means that the water that flows into the ocean from all sources including storm drains and agricultural run-off be clean. It means we're re-thinking about how we treat wastewater. The enlarging dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico is a result of pollutants that are carried in the Mississippi River from the years of agricultural run-off. The destruction of habitat also destroys biological diversity, which is a cornerstone of a productive ecosystem. While we have done much to control fishermen, we have done little to control those who have destroyed fish habitat. We need to protect our fishing grounds, not lock them up. Protecting our oceans and coast is more than stopping pollution and regulating fishing. It means controlling our activities onshore, controlling coastal development for example. We know that 85 percent of all commercially valuable fish are dependent upon wetlands during some part of their lifecycle. Yet, in California, we have lost 95 percent of our coastal wetlands. The diversion of massive amounts of water from our rivers and streams has taken a devastating toll on salmon fishing which occurs all along the West Coast. Our coast and the quality of life in these communities are affected not only by habitat losses from spills or dumping or development but also by divergence hundreds or even thousands of miles away. It's all connected. Speaking about being connected, this movement that we call globalization, is connecting countries and creating negative impacts on coastal communities around the world. I have traveled to India, Chile, and Europe, and I have heard directly from indigenous fishermen that the trade agreements to support globalization are preventing them from their cultural access to fishing grounds. Also they watch from their communities the large foreign trawlers that are allowed to fish in their traditional areas and take this fish back to the trawlers' industrialized country. They are allowed to do this because fish now is treated as a form of currency between nations. There is a global agenda to privatize fishing resources by limits and quotas. These quotas can be bought and sold on speculation so that when the stocks go down in one region of the world, the fleet can be shipped into another region. The concern that small-scale fishermen have is that once these quota systems are implemented, access and control of all the world's fisheries will be concentrated in large, distant, financial institutions and multinational corporations. This is the very opposite direction of the demands of fishing communities worldwide to recognize rights to traditional access. Lastly, in our vision of sustainable fisheries and coastal communities, we need to increase our knowledge of the oceans. This means more collaboration between fishermen and scientists, those who harvest from it and those who study it. Indeed we have a number of leading marine institutions along the coast. Let us be a leader in bringing the fishing and academic institutions together to expand our knowledge of this vast unknown so that we can better protect habitats. When we protect habitats for fish, we also protect ourselves. It is my belief that fishing communities are the best gauges of the health of the oceans and of the coast. Fishing, the most ancient and noble of human endeavors, will be the measure of how well we protect our oceans and our quality of life along our coast. To have a vision, one must be a visionary. I urge all of you to be visionaries
about our coasts worldwide. Make it a place where there are fishing communities,
fishing boats, productive ecosystems, where the water supports diverse
populations of marine life, where fishing men and women work together
with those exploring the ocean's mysteries, a place where our children
and generations to follow can find happiness, solace, and a connection
with nature. I sure have! |
