On Thursday, September 15, 2017, after weeks of widespread speculation among fishing and environmental groups, the Obama Administration announced its plan to designate an area over 4,900 square miles, encompassing three canyons and four deep-ocean seamounts southeast of Cape Cod, as the “Northeast Canyons and Seamounts Marine National Monument” Obama’s Administration used well-worn provisions within the Antiquities Act (passed in the nineteen-teens, and a bit of a legislative antique in its own right) to designate this large tract of offshore water (south of the Southeast Part of Georges Bank) as a Marine Monument—the first of its kind off New England, within the US Exclusive Economic Zone.
You may recall that the Administration used the same legislative authority to issue an Executive Order that essentially quadrupled the total area of Hawaii’s Papahanaumokuakea Marine National Monument, a reserve created in 2006 by an outbound Bush Administration near the end of Dubya’s second term. Obama’s recent order increased the existing marine reserve from 139,800 to 582,578 square miles, making it the largest ecological management zone on the planet, with a surface area that could conceal 377 Rhode Islands with room to spare.
The latter Hawaiian reserve, well west of the New York border, my sources tell me, out in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, might just as well be on Neptune for all you or I care. But the creation of the Northeast Canyons and Seamounts reserve not so far south and east of Cape Cod brings with it a host of immediate and longer-range worries about the future of ocean policy in our relative back yard. The phrase, “marine spatial planning,” an ominous term that has been kicked around various gatherings of the “true” ocean experts, none of whom tend to be fishermen or other nautical types whose credentials include having actually been to some of the waters policy changes affect.
Thirty seconds of Google work the day of the Administration’s announcement will turn up plenty of enthusiastic commentary from the biggest names in Big Green, including Pew Charitable Trusts, National Resource Defense Council (NRDC), and the Conservation Law Foundation who have long ground the ax of so-called “no-take” marine protected areas as the only true god in ocean policy.
For my part, I don’t have any real objection to the concept of the closed or limited-access areas as valuable fish-management tools, provided such a measures address specific conservation objectives in scientifically defensible ways– protect critical spawning or nursery grounds, sensitive or highly productive benthic habitat, or predictable concentrations of fish stocks that are susceptible to intense, localized fishing pressure.
Obama’s new reserve encompasses three major canyons— Oceanographer, Gilbert, and Lydonia— along the edge where southern Georges drops away into the abyss, as well as four massive seamounts to the south and east, off in the deep.
Sanctuary regulations permit sport fishing, but forbid most commercial gear, fixed gear (notably red crab or lobster pots) and all mobile gear: dredges or otter trawls. These restrictions, plus provisions banning other extractive uses (e.g. oil drilling or gravel mining) aim to protect a hodgepodge of deep-sea corals, various migratory and deep-water fish, sea turtles, an array of marine mammals and sea birds, among other critters great and small.
Sounds reasonable, naturally. After all, saving fragile, impossibly sensitive, wise-looking, and, ideally, super-cuddly marine mammals, or creating safe harbor for major, Blue Planetesque eruptions of marine life out where the Gulf Stream courses up into cold, blue-green nutrient-rich water hauled down from the Canadian Maritimes, through the Gulf of Maine, and southward across Georges Bank by the Labrador Current….I mean, what’s not to feel good about there? Huge, tide-assembled rafts of vibrant sargassum, Iso- and copepods and plankton, sea herring, mackerel, squid, whiting, sand eels, codfish, bluefin tuna—40 pounds and 650—swordfish,blue marlin, leatherback turtles, shearwaters, storm petrels, puffins, humpback, finbacks, minkes, the odd sperm whale, porpoises, mantas—and that’s just the top 200 feet—every living part of the ecosystem in migratory flux in places well over a mile deep. On the bottom half a mile past the last depleted tatters of sunlight—absolute blackness and staggering pressure—large clusters of deep-ocean coral and alien vegetation host scattered nests of tilefish, oilfish, wreckfish, barrelfish, opa, rosies, squid, crabs and lobsters, and lord knows what other seldom- or never-seen residents of the abyss.
I’ve seen in other places the way even small pieces of bottom off-limits to direct fishing effort can, over a surprisingly short period, touch off incredible fishing well beyond the closed area’s boundaries.
What I don’t like or trust is the fast-and-loose legislative grounding for what amounts to a royal proclamation by an outgoing President—what you might call “conservation by edict.” The latter idea has stirred resentment in various corners of both the fishing industry and the management system. Some of my friends, for example, have sunk months into the hot-button issue of deep-sea corals in the Northeast canyons. Their work has been a good-faith effort to examine the issue carefully—determine where the rhetoric ends and ecological reality begins.
Some of the canyons—Various notches in the shelf wall from Munson’s Canyon to Hudson, Tom’s or Lindenkohl, to the west, and others between– represent key winter grounds for the drag fleet in the squid, fluke, butterfish (what’s left of it), and whiting fisheries. Not surprisingly, many of the usual suspects on the anti-fishing end of Big Green have latched onto coral as a possible means to short-circuit mobile gear in the future—a technicality that could well wreak havoc on squid boats as regulators continue to hammer out “Essential Fish Habitat” (EFH) standards, guidelines, and regulations.
Others point to the location and size of Obama’s Northeast Canyons and Seamounts Marine National Sanctuary as being wholly arbitrary—not a carefully-executed attempt to solve tangible, immediate fishery problems, but rather a feel-good measure, based largely on vague, sensationalized threats—the Climate Change Boogeyman and the deplorable state of all the globe’s oceans thanks to bloodthirsty republicans— right from the Big Green playbook.
I can’t imagine a scenario where putting gear restrictions on a relatively remote 5,000 square-mile stretch of bottom south of the Southeast Part of Georges Bank could actually hurt any part of the marine ecosystem s within its boundaries.
But I see all too clearly ways the designation of the area as a marine monument/sanctuary sets some disturbing precedents for future political forays into marine policymaking. For starters,take a closer look at the Antiquities Act (an antique in its own right, having been signed into law in 1906 by President Teddy Roosevelt), and then a bit of its history—the ways 100 years worth of former Commanders-In-Chief have harnessed it.
The Antiquities Act was enacted to let government move swiftly and decisively to protect historically, scientifically, or geologically important sites—which were being unearthed at a furious clip with westward expansion in high gear in the 19-aughts. In general, the spirit of the Act is to identify one reasonably specific geological feature or object of serious historical importance that warrants formal protection or celebration. Think in terms of the wreck of the Civil War Ironclad, Monitor, the focal point of an older Marine Monument off Hatteras in North Carolina.
That monument’s creators took seriously a key provision of the Antiquities Act, namely that the area of the monument be confined to the smallest area that will allow effective restoration, maintenance, and protection of the items or natural features designated as monument-worthy. The Monitor site consists of a one-mile circular buffer zone around the vessel.
By comparison, the Northeast Canyons and Seamounts Marine National Monument (surface area: 4,913 square miles) foillows more of a “go big or go home” rationale. Ostensibly, the site highlights three large canyons and four huge seamounts that rise from the deep water off the edge of the continental shelf. Unfortunately, you’d be hard-pressed to observe any of these subsea geological features. Strangely, though, the press materials for the monument’s formal designation seem to center on various coral heads, which lie, scattershot along the seabed in pitch blackness at depths pushing a mile or more. In reality, the sprawling watery site is unlike anything I’d
recognize as a “monument.”
It’s the vague and seemingly fluid focal point of the new site that makes me worry about its future. Given the major environmental groups’ fervent and decades-old crusade to create marine reserves in New England, where fishing traditions have long trumped the Big Green agenda. Some part of me thinks this new so-called “Marine National Monument” is indeed a Trojan Horse that is smuggling PEW and CLF and NRDC into our home waters, a part of the watery world hitherto impenetrable where Big Green’s most powerful and most scorned players were concerned. Something has just changed.
Maybe I’m just paranoid. Maybe the Obama Administration, which has used the act more aggressively than any other previous President, has, presumably after years in policy Purgatory with the Do-Nothing-Ever Congress, discovered the particular joys of getting things done by albeit by royal proclamation, as monarchs, dictators and Benevolent Leaders have for time out of mind.
Trouble is that, while industry, academia, government scientists, and politicians have spent 15 years trying to build trust and learn the finer points of collaboration, the Executive Order approach imposes unilateral measures that send all the sub-divisions of user groups with wildly conflicting ideas and agendas scattering back into tiny splinters of self-interest. The worst piece of the closed-loop process that designated 5,000 square miles of blue water and deep-ocean benthic habitat as a monument without signage—a contentious piece of fishing grounds few if any of the folks most directly invested in its creation have never so much as steamed through those waters—is how quickly one stroke of a pen winds back good will.
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