Uh oh. There goes the neighborhood…

Francisco Goya – Saturno devorando a su hijo

Back around the turn of the century, our National engagement with the Sea started coming up on everyone’s sonar. For the majority of our Nation’s history the ocean was considered “immeasurable” and thus treated both like an infinite larder and a bottomless toilet. But twenty or so years ago human impacts on the sea were increasingly becoming evident: The collapse of the Atlantic cod fishery, hypoxic zones the size of small states showing up with regular frequency, and of-course the ever-mounting catastrophic strandings of marine mammals due to Naval sonar.

In response, Pew Trusts funded the Pew Ocean Commission, chaired by Leon Panetta, who in 2003 published a critique on the state of the ocean and called for a coordinated ocean management plan.

Unfortunately, in 2003 the Bush Administration was not too interested in Ocean Policy. Karl Rove notoriously dismissed the Pew Ocean Commission Report as “a nice coffee table book.” Fortunately, there were some adults in the room who saw a need for a coordinated ocean plan, because ocean management had been haphazardly devised to address (mis)management issues as they arose – resulting in a patchwork of some 26 ocean agencies, each with their unique, but overlapping ocean remits.

Some of those adults assembled under the rubric of “The US Commission on Ocean Policy” (USCOP) chaired by Admiral James Watkins. Some of us in the conservation community were skeptical; US Navy participation was to be expected, but the commission also included some industrial representatives, including a fellow who had garnered the dubious distinction of “Driller of the Year” from a Petroleum Industry association.

But much to our surprise the USCOP report complimented the Pew Report – to the extent that respective chairs Panetta and Watkins took the documents on the road to lobby with State, National, and Industrial interests about the importance of crafting a cohesive National Ocean Policy.

In 2006 Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-CA) took up the task under her National Ocean Policy Act – (to which I contributed to a section on ocean noise pollution). The complimentary House bill, “Oceans 21,” was shepherded by Ocean Champion Congressman Sam Farr (D-CA17). That both the House and Senate passed these bills did not assure that melting these bills into a National Ocean Policy would be easy. And it remained unlikely that the Bush Administration wanted to have a sensible ocean management plan when so many of Bush’s pals were benefitting from the “Wild West” mosh-pit of ocean regulatory disarray.

It took a few years to bring the bills together. Some 4000 pages came out of Boxer’s 10,000-page bill. I’m sure that Oceans 21 was equally contorted. But the ocean is big, and it is complicated, and all voices needed to be heard – from the Oil Industry, all the way through to the Sovereign First Nations people. So it was finally in 2012 – a decade after the process began, that a National Ocean Policy was signed into law.

That all changed on Monday when, with a stroke of his little pen, the President signed an Executive Order, rescinding the National Ocean Policy act of 2010. Ignoring the consolidated efforts of State Governments, scientists, industry representatives, commercial and recreational fishermen, the US Coast Guard, Fisheries Management Councils, conservation organizations, the US Navy, marine and coastal tourism interests, and First Nations people. All of this work scrapped to cast the care of the ocean under the “management” of an Ocean Policy Committee consisting entirely of Presidential Cabinet members.

This is a dangerous consolidation of power under one branch of our government. It promises to hand the ocean over to extractive industries and the military at the expense of all other interests; the health and safety of American citizens and businesses, and the long-term health of our planet.

Predictably, there is no mention of climate resilience, sea level rise and ocean acidification, wildlife conservation, social justice in coastal communities, or environmental stewardship of our ocean and Great Lakes. Instead, the thrust of this Executive ocean policy is to extract as much wealth out of the sea as fast as possible, without regard to any long-term consequences.

This is not a path to “Energy Security” or long-term economic stability, rather it is a roadmap to cash-in on all of the conservation advances made over the last 40 years, leaving the ocean a stripped carcass, polluted for the growing and future generations.