Have you ever attended a planning board meeting?

There has been considerable discussion of "urban sprawl" in southern Maine. Town planning departments and planning boards are where citizens confront these questions of sprawl and manage the effects of development.

But imagine, for a moment, a planning board where all the members happened to be builders and real estate developers. Imagine a housing development up for review by this body -- what sort of standards would they apply.

Sidewalks? -- Too expensive. No one walks any more. Waiver granted.
Extend a water main? -- Home owners can drill wells. Waiver granted.
Wetlands? -- Breed mosquitoes. Drain them -- waiver granted.

You get the idea. Fortunately we don't do municipal planning this way (though some would like to). Land use is strongly tied to community values and the people who make those decisions have to represent the whole community.

"Marine habitat destruction" is the ocean equivalent of "urban sprawl".

A few summers ago I attended a two-day workshop at the UME Darling Marine Center campus in Walpole. Meeting there were US and Canadian planners and scientists looking at human-caused stressors to marine habitats in the Gulf of Maine. They determined that, in every kind of marine habitat, from open-ocean to estuary, the greatest impacts by far come from commercial fishing.

Then they asked the question, "If fishing is altering marine ecology, who manages the impacts of fishing?"

Answer: in US waters the responsibility falls to the New England Fishery Management Council. Hmmm -- not what people expected.

Therefore, today I am attending the New England Fishery Management Council's Habitat Committee meeting. It's not an easy assignment to sit through. The day's discussion is focused on a federal proposal -- guidelines for protecting corals from damage by fishing operations. The chairman, an intelligent, well meaning man, is running the meeting -- he is a charter boat captain. The vice-chairman owns a groundfish trawler. Three members are employees of marine resource agencies in NH, RI and CT.

The final member is an industry trade representative with a large trawler background -- he has been speaking at length against the federal proposal -- specifically, recommendations to close areas where corals are found to many forms of commercial fishing. Listening to him you would understand that bottom trawlers, clearly, are no threat to coral and should not be included on a list of destructive gear-types. "Really. Trawler captains avoid coral areas. They don't want to get into the stuff. Damage to coral comes from lobster traps and gillnets, not trawlers. No need to close them out of these areas."

Okay. Yup. We know how he's going to vote.

Few people realize that there are beds of hard coral in areas of the Gulf of Maine. Cold-water corals that grow in deep basins and canyons along the continental shelf edge. Species which live for 500 years. One pass of a trawl-door or a carelessly retrieved net can wipe out a long biological history in an instant. Scientists estimate that 80% of coral biomass in New England has been lost to interaction with commercial fishing over two centuries, in little bits and pieces over time.

So how long shall we leave a piece of sea-bed undisturbed in order to regenerate coral communities? No one in the fishing industry is going to ask that question. Instead, the debate may be whether to protect some of what is left. And coral is just one of many issues of this sort.

Comprehensive planning for marine environmental quality? No one has invented that yet.

Download more on Cold-water Coral

You have to love those clear hot July days on the water. The boat leaves harbor at sun-up and runs straight out to sea for two hours to a favorite offshore fishing ground. As the morning wears on the sun beats down, the air becomes still and the surface of the water as smooth as glass.

Then you see them. Little dots of color on the horizon. Balloons. Party balloons. Helium balloons that have lost their lift. They float on top of the water barely touching the surface, trailing streamers of colored ribbon like a kite with a tail.

I hate balloons. I especially hate mylar balloons - they don't seem to break down in the environment. I've found mylar balloons floating at sea that had obviously been around for years. The foil and pigment had flaked off, the balloon just clear plastic with algae growing on it.

The Stellwagen Bank National Marine Sanctuary program does research on whales. Last summer, during tagging research, we counted 42 animals one day feeding in an area of two-mile radius. You could stand on top of the boat and see whales everywhere you looked, mouths wide open coming up out of the water.

I picked up half-a-dozen balloons that day from my boat, plus all sorts of other plastic detritus. I'm sure a balloon wouldn't kill a whale if it accidentally shallowed one. It's just the idea of it - plastic litter at sea. It's not right.

People don't hold onto their balloons! That's why I don't like balloons - they have to end up somewhere after they fly away. I suspect that after a good summer's weekend, with kids' parties, weddings, county fairs and sporting events, all the helium balloons in New England end up in the North Atlantic (if the wind's right).

Of course, I don't like parties either. Especially birthday parties. Especially mine.

The International Coastal Cleanup has become a big event worldwide (to learn more about the ICC, click here). Volunteers not only collect tons and tons and tons of trash from beaches and shore lands; they actually inventory the items they pick up. Understanding where the trash comes from is the first step to stopping it at its source.

The single largest category of item collected every year: cigarette butts. Millions and millions of cigarette butts.

It's a big ocean. Cigarette buts are small things. You wouldn't think there would be a significant impact from something so innocuous.

But, catch this news from Down Under. A report from the Townsville Aquarium in Australia of "a green sea turtle that had died of nicotine poisoning after consuming 300 cigarette butts (presumably washed into the sea from storm water drains)."

Storm drains. Someone walking down the street finishing a smoke, crushes the cigarette under his shoe and kicks it to the curb. You've seen it. Just a thoughtless habit. But the next rain - into the storm drain and out to sea.

All pollution makes its way to the sea.

Poor turtle. I tried Skoal chewing tobacco once - it made me green too.

All life on Earth depends on the ocean. Even yours.

I'm often struck that when policy makers worry about Climate Change they don't also talk about Ocean Change. Ocean IS climate - the two are in an inseparable dance that creates the conditions for life on Earth.

We have been hearing news lately about the Russians, and the Scandinavians, and the North Americans all vying for control of Arctic natural resources. I did not realize the immediacy of the competition until I saw this website with graphic video of melting polar ice:

www.livescience.com

The summer of 2008 may be the first time in human history that the North Pole is ice free - meaning that the ice pack is broken up and ships are free to transit Arctic waters, from the Atlantic to the Pacific.

But it's not just about polar bears, folks.

The ocean is the big sink. Ultimately, all the byproducts of our civilization find their way to our oceans - heat, pollution, plastics. But that sink is now filled to the brink and we are starting to discern recognizable change.

As the Pepsi generation is well familiar, carbonated water creates a mild acid. Carbon from the atmosphere is absorbed by seawater. The vast volume of water on earth has been mitigating the effects of our industrial revolution for centuries, but that buffering may now be fizzed out. And a little change goes a long way to tip the balance.

Ocean scientists hypothesize that seawater will become 10% more acid by 2050. That great a change in PH is enough to destroy all the coral reefs on the planet! However, that's not the show stopper. We might not like a world without coral, or polar bears. But we can't live in a world without zooplankton. These tiny animals are the basic food-stuff of the sea, and without them the entire ocean food-web collapses. When you look at zooplankton under the microscopic you see that most of them are tiny crustaceans with tiny calcium shells. Calcium dissolves in high PH.

A marine ecologist friend, who has been working at Biosphere Two, will soon be publishing a paper on primary productivity in the face of elevated seawater acidity. I'll post it when it's out.

Meanwhile, NOAA fishery scientists from Woods Hole, MA recently reported that primary productivity (the food that the fish eat) in the Gulf of Maine appears to be trending down over the last decade. Let's hope that trend reverses sometime soon.

Barak Obama seemed a bit bewildered. I’m sure he hadn’t given it much thought. But suddenly people were asking him “Why don’t you wear a flag on your lapel? Don’t you love your Country?” Of course he loves his Country – it’s a given that anyone who serves in an elected office has to love their country. Why else would one take on the personal sacrifice that comes with public service?

But it has become pro forma today for politicians to wear a flag pin in their lapels. When everyone does it, I’m not sure what it means.

Lapel pins should mean something! They should be a subtle form of expression, sort of like “wearing your heart on your sleeve” only cooler than that. It’s just a small bit of decoration but it can also offer a hint of the individual.

I have two lapel pins – one is a halibut and the other is a humpback whale. When I go to meetings, one other is on my suit coat.

The halibut is a symbol of my work over the last 15 years – to restore groundfish in New England. Halibut are mighty fish – when you catch one you know it. And yet fishermen in dories fishing with hooks collapsed that population in 19th century. It is so easy to underestimate our collective power to do harm.

The humpback is my symbol for the whole of marine life. You would think that an animal that large would be an apex predator, but they are not. They occupy a niche right at the center of the marine food web. Humpbacks are intelligent creatures, minds in the water – they observe, they are curious, they are conscious of what’s around them. We humans harm them in many ways but they don’t fight back (they could) and they don’t run away. They just endure.

So. Perhaps now you have a glimpse of a crusty old guy – all from a small lapel pin.

Maybe I should get a tattoo next.

Recreational fishermen are up in arms! Soon they’ll be protesting in the streets of Augusta, pounding on the doors of the Legislature. Liberté! Equalité! Fraternité! Unite against bureaucracy!

So what’s the fuss? Because a recent federal law now requires NOAA Fisheries to establish a registry of recreational saltwater anglers by 2011. The law empowers NMFS to charge a minimal fee. However, states that have a pre-existing recreational saltwater license system are exempt. In anticipation, the Baldacci administration is proposing a Maine saltwater license, to cost between $15 and $25 annually, which will supersede a federal license. The new state revenues will be earmarked to improve saltwater access and facilities for recreational fishermen.

Good reason to burn the Governor in effigy! Not really. Recreational fishermen, as an interest group, have got to be smarter than this.

The first reason to support the Maine Department of Marine Resources license proposal is just too obvious. If the State does not do this, the Feds will – count on it. A registry is national law. Future fees collected by the Feds will not be spent in Maine – count on that too.

Second reason is that saltwater angling is increasing in popularity. You have to stand in line some days, shoulder to shoulder, to go striper fishing on the Mousam and Ogunquit Rivers – from June right through to October. On weekends there is a virtual boat parade of recreational craft trolling the Saco. Look at the license plates of the cars parked bumper-to-bumper on the shoulders of the road – half of them are from out of state! You can bet that this added traffic costs Maine residents. So why shouldn’t non-residents pony up through a license fee?

The third reason is the most important though. Fact is that saltwater recreational fisheries are growing every year, in size and impact on the resource. The current system for collecting data on recreational effort, MRFSS, is just not working. The polling is too random. Therefore, when fishery scientists do stock assessments on species like striped bass, cod, haddock or black back flounder, they can make a pretty accurate estimate of catch by commercial fishermen, but only a guess of catch by recreational fishermen.

When the numbers are uncertain, science advice to managers is usually very conservative. The law now requires that scientists and managers set firm caps on fishing effort annually. These caps will not be exceeded. In the future, managers will have a pretty good idea of how much catch to allocate to commercial or charter vessels. But unless they have accurate data on recreational landings, the catch limits on personal recreational fishermen will be conservative. That means that in the future, without good data, chances are that recreational fishermen could be bumping up against limits on catch and they wouldn’t have the tools or information to negotiate something more appropriate.

So what’s the cost of ignorance? Compare that to an annual investment in a saltwater license. $15 is less than the price of a tank of gas for an outboard, for pity sake.

Marine fisheries are a multi-billion dollar industry. The New England Fishery Management Council serves, in effect, as the board of trustees for the production line and operations of this industry.

Individually, Fishery Management Council appointees are civic-minded citizens of the fishing community, responsible representatives of the fishing industry, or career employees of the marine resource agencies of five NE states. Without exception, these people serve with the best of intentions. Collectively, however, the group would be laughed out of any corporate board room, as rank amateurs.

Amateurism was in full display when the New England Fishery Management Council met this week in Portland.

The problem for groundfish goes back decades. Too many boats were built to catch fish in the 1980s, before we fully understood the limits on a sustainably managed resource. Managers institutionalized the problem in 1995 by qualifying four-times too many of these vessels for permits to pursue groundfish in a targeted fishery. Meanwhile, from 1990 to 2003, managers consistently ignored or fudged scientific recommendations to curb overfishing, allowing these stocks to descend into chronic depletion.

Then, in 2003, a federal court ruling ordered managers to restore groundfish stocks consistent with scientifically derived standards under the law. Rebuilding must be completed by 2014. That’s the law – but you’ve never seen such foot-dragging!

The final stage of this court-ordered remedial action, a year-five reassessment of stock status and updating, is due for May 2009. The Fishery Management Council this week missed a critical deadline in that process. They stepped away from their collective responsibility under the law, because difficult decisions were outside the comfort zone of too many council members. It's become predictable.

Real businessmen take decisive action when faced with hard choices. In the 1990s, and at numerous junctures since then, real business mangers would have recognized that far too many boats were chasing too few fish. They would have placed a premium on maximizing the value to the industry (and nation) by growing the resource, restoring it to its full potential as quickly as possible.

Skillful planners would have acknowledged the disparity between capital investment and available opportunity. They would have created a master-plan to guide vessel owners on where to invest or disinvest – in effect providing a road-map for an orderly economic progression to a more desirable capital structure over the long-term.

In contrast, for years fishery managers on the New England Council have procrastinated, obfuscated and deflected blame for their collective misjudgment onto the science and law that should serve as their guideposts.

Citizens of Maine are rightfully concerned that groundfishing is disappearing from the Maine coast, and that the supporting infrastructure is collapsing. It’s true. But law and science have not made this tragedy. Years of chronic depletion has deprived Maine fishermen of opportunity far more than conservation measures. Capricious management has perpetuated an unstable and unpredictable business context that has disadvantaged the most capable small-businessmen/fishermen, exhausting their resources.

The lack of professional vision was on full display at the New England Fishery Management Council again this week in Portland. For those who would like to believe in the nobility of governance, it was a sad dereliction of responsibility.

From the deck of a boat it all just looks like water. But from a fish eye view, this is a wonderful place.

Stellwagen Bank National Marine Sanctuary is at the ecological heart of the Gulf of Maine. This is where cold nutrient-rich water, pushed south by the Maine Coastal Current, washes over deep basins, boulder fields, sand banks and dramatically rugged terrain. Plankton blooms support prolific populations of bait fish. Forage draws cod and flounder, tuna, sharks, whales, porpoise, dolphins, seals, sea birds and diversity of species that all come there to feed.

This is the fountainhead for life in the Gulf of Maine.

Nestled into the mouth of Massachusetts Bay, 900 square miles between Cape Ann and Cape Cod, the Stellwagen Bank National Marine Sanctuary is an urban sanctuary. Designated by Congress in 1991, Stellwagen is surrounded by the 6 million persons of the Boston metro-region. One of the ten best places in the world to watch whales is within sight of the Boston skyline.

This is where human population meets ocean wilderness head-on. Industrial development, shipping, and commercial fishing compromise every aspect of ecology. A sanctuary in name only, without protection it is approaching crisis.

Over 200 people have labored for six years to craft management recommendations for Stellwagen. But the management plan has been released without any regulatory proposals. The Sanctuary System will be making a presentation and soliciting public comment on Thursday evening:

JUNE 5 -- 6:30-9:30 p.m.
University of Southern Maine Law School
Talbot Lecture Hall
88 Bedford Street, Portland, ME

This is New England’s National Marine Sanctuary. The planning issues are ones that we will soon confront in coastal Maine as well.

Who owns the fish in the sea? Who owns the whales? Who owns the habitat they live in?

You do. We all do. Fisheries and the marine environment are a public resource trust.

The United States has jurisdiction over 3.4 million square nautical miles of ocean – this exclusive economic zone extends 200-miles seaward from our coasts and the US island territories in the Caribbean and Pacific. This ocean terrain, larger than the land area of all the 50 states combined, makes the United States the largest maritime nation in the world. The resources of this vast area provide for our economy and are under our stewardship. (For more information see: http://oceancommission.gov/)

But for all the wealth at stake, governance of our ocean territories is poorly developed.

Maine is a maritime state – the fourth largest seafood producing state in the US. We have a lot at stake in how fisheries are managed. Living marine resources in federal waters (3 miles out to 200 miles) off New England are the responsibility National Marine Fisheries Service in close working relationship with the New England Fishery Management Council. The Council is an appointed body of eighteen trustees, with fiduciary responsibility to the fish and to our nation. The resources under its management are valued in the billions of dollars.

The New England Fishery Management Council will be meeting in Portland this week, Tuesday through Thursday, at the Holiday Inn by the Bay. The meeting is open to the public – come observe your trustees at work and please share your impressions. (An agenda can be found at www.nefmc.org/calendar/index.html)

Hey! Breaking news bulletin! “16 out of the 21 oceanic shark and ray species that are caught in high seas fisheries are at heightened risk of extinction due primarily to targeted fishing.” www.livescience.com/environment080522-oceanic-sharks.html

Well, actually this shouldn’t be news to anyone interested in ocean ecosystems. Despite their reputation for ferocity, sharks are some of the most vulnerable creatures in the world. They bear live young, have the longest gestation periods in nature (close to two-years), and produce only a few babies at a time. Sharks are incredibly susceptible to overfishing and as the world demands more protein these various shark species are going, going…..soon to be gone.

Porbeagles, makos, blue sharks – we have them here in the Gulf of Maine. They are oceanic sharks, meaning they don’t often come close to shore. I’ve had a basking shark along side of a lobster boat while fishing on Jefferys Ledge – the animal was longer than the boat (42 foot). It’s a plankton eater.

These open ocean predators are becoming relatively rare. What we human beings have done in terrestrial environments around the planet we are also doing in our oceans, which is to relentlessly crop off those species at the top of the food-web. It’s happening around the world, and it’s happening here in the Gulf of Maine.

My wife has a rule in our house – no talking about fish after 6pm.

Good luck, honey. Most evenings that prohibition lasts until about 6:20 and then, somehow, the conversation wanders back into fish, or fishing, or fishery management, or some esoteric related subject. Poor woman – she’s been listening to these rambles for 30 years.

I remember when she first raised this defense. We were living in Juneau, Alaska, sharing a camp with another young couple, on a small lake north of town. Mendenhall Glacier was a grand background. Salmon berries and alders crowded the shoreline, the fir trees hung heavily with moss, and the stream behind the house running down to Auke Bay ran so thick with sockeye salmon sometimes it seemed more fish than water.

My buddy and I had a fishing vessel repair business. We’d spend our days replacing rotten wood with fiberglass, or repairing nets, or out on the boats during the salmon openings. Of course when we did show up for dinner, the topic of immediate importance would be – fish. Most specifically – salmon.

So our wives ganged up on us. No talking about fish, or boats, until we’d socialized with them a bit. About twenty minutes, give or take.

Eventually, Peggy and I came home to Maine. I started fishing out of Kittery. I became enmeshed in fishery management and was eventually appointed to the New England Fishery Management Council, on which I served for nine years. I represented industry in conservation planning for fisheries and marine mammals. I began working with the National Marine Sanctuary system and chaired the Stellwagen Bank Sanctuary’s advisory council.

As my understanding evolved, I gravitated toward environmental advocacy, and found my place working with the Ocean Conservancy, the oldest and largest national environmental organization devoted solely to the health of our oceans.

Now, here I am 30 years later, just as obsessed with fish, where they live, how we value them, and how we value and protect our oceans. I care deeply about the Gulf of Maine and living marine resources. And I’m still talking about fish.

And my wife is still patiently listening, God bless her.