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                                                   Precaution                      HOME

 1:-A comprehensive national strategy is crucial for reversing the rapidly accelerating decline in marine life.

For centuries, humanity has seen the sea as an infinite source of food, a boundless sink for pollutants, and a tireless sustainer of coastal habitats. It isn't. Scientists have mounting evidence of rapidly accelerating declines in once-abundant populations of cod, haddock, flounder, and scores of other fish species, as well as mollusks, crustaceans, birds, and plants. They are alarmed at the rapid rate of destruction of coral reefs, estuaries, and wetlands and the sinister expansion of vast "dead zones" of water where life has been choked away. More and more, the harm to marine biodiversity can be traced not to natural events but to inadequate policies.

The escalating loss of marine life is bad enough as an ecological problem. But it constitutes an economic crisis as well. Marine biodiversity is crucial to sustaining commercial fisheries, and in recent years several major U.S. fisheries have "collapsed"experienced a population decline so sharp that fishing is no longer commercially viable. One study indicates that 300,000 jobs and $8 billion in annual revenues have been lost because of overly aggressive fishing practices alone. Agricultural and urban runoff, oil spills, dredging, trawling, and coastal development have caused further losses.

Why have lawmakers paid so little attention to the degradation of the sea? It is a case of out of sight, out of mind. Even though the "Year of the Ocean" just ended, the aspiration of creating better ocean governance has already fallen off of the national agenda. Add a general lack of interest among the media and annual moratoria against offshore oil drilling as a panacea for ocean pollution, and most policymakers assume there is little need for concern.

This myth is accompanied by another: that policymakers can do little to safeguard the sea. Actually, a variety of governmental agencies provide opportunities for action. State fish and game commissions typically have jurisdiction from shorelines to 3 miles offshore. The Commerce Department regulates commerce in and through waters from 3 to 12 miles offshore and has authority over resources from there to the 200-mile line that delineates this country's exclusive economic zone. The Interior Department oversees oil drilling; the Navy presides over waters hosting submarines; and the states, the Environmental Protection Agency, and the Coast Guard regulate pollution. The problem is that these entities do little to protect marine biodiversity and they rarely work together.

At fault is the decades-old framework that the state and federal powers use to regulate the sea. It consists of fragmented, isolated policies that operate at confused cross-purposes. The United States must develop a new integrated framework-a comprehensive strategy-for protecting marine biodiversity. The framework should embrace all categories of ecosystems, species, human uses, and threats; link land and sea; and apply the "precautionary principle" of first seeking to prevent harm to the oceans rather than attempting to repair harm after it has been done. Once we have defined the framework, we can then enact specific initiatives that effectively solve problems.

Better science is also needed to craft the best policy framework, for our knowledge of the sea is still sparse. Nonetheless, we can identify the broad threats to the sea, which include overfishing, pollution from a wide variety of land-based sources, and the destruction of habitat. To paraphrase Albert Einstein, the thinking needed to correct the problems we now face must be different from that which has put us here in the first place.

Holes in the regulatory net

Creating comprehensive policies that wisely conserve all the richness and bounty of the sea requires an informed understanding of biodiversity. Marine biodiversity describes the web of life that constitutes the sea. It includes three discrete levels: ecosystems and habitat diversity, species diversity, and genetic diversity (differences among and within populations). However, the swift growth in public popularity of the term biodiversity has been accompanied by the incorrect belief that conserving biodiversity means simply maintaining the number of species. This is wrong and misleading when translated into policy. This narrow vision focuses inordinate attention on saving specific endangered species and overlooks the serious depletion of a wide range of plants and animals that are critical to the food web, not to mention the loss of habitats critical to the reproduction, growth, and survival of numerous sea creatures.

Protecting marine biodiversity requires a different sort of thinking than has occurred so far. Common misperceptions about what is needed abound, such as a popular view that biodiversity policy ought to focus on the largest and best-known animals. But just as on land, biodiversity at sea is greatest among smaller organisms such as diatoms and crustacea, which are crucial to preserving ecosystem function. Numerous types of plants such as mangrove trees and kelps have equally essential roles but are often overlooked entirely. We look away from the small, slimy, and ugly, as well as from the plants, in making marine policy. The new goal must be to consider the ecological significance of all animals and plants when providing policy protections and to address the levels of genome, species, and habitat.

Moreover, focusing on saving the last individual of a species misses the more basic problem of the causes of the decline. We can do great harm to the system without actually endangering a species, by fundamentally altering the habitat or the system itself. This much more general impact often goes unnoticed in most of the current regulatory framework. We need much more holistic and processoriented thinking.

Fishing down the food chain

Although a new policy framework must protect the entire spectrum of biodiversity, it also must target egregious practices that inflict the greatest long-lasting damage to the web of life. One of the worst offenders is fishing down the food chain in commercial fisheries.

Fisheries policy traditionally strives to take the maximum quantity of fish from the sea without compromising the species' ability to replenish itself. However, when this is done across numerous fisheries, significant deleterious changes take place in fish communities. Statistics indicate that the world's aggregate catch of fish has grown over time. But a close look at the details shows that since the 1970s more and more of the catch is composed of the less desirable species which are used for fish meal or are simply discarded. The catch of many good-tasting fish such as cod has declined and in some cases even crashed. Several popular fish populations have crashed off the New England coast this decade and have not since recovered.

Thus, although the overall take of biomass from the sea has increased, the market value of total catch has dropped. Why? The lowvalue fish have increased, precisely because so much effort is aimed at catching the more valuable predators. A scenario of serial depletion is repeatedly played out: Humans fish down the food chain, first depleting one valuable species (often a predator) and then moving on to the next (lower down the food chain). For example, as the cod and haddock populations are reduced, fishermen increase their take of "trash fish" such as dogfish and skates. Catch value falls. Worse, the ecosystem's ability to recover is weakened. Both biodiversity and resilience decline as the balance of predators disappears.

The federal Endangered Species Act (ESA), which is the only current avenue for salvation of a threatened species, misses the issue of declining populations and has done very little to prevent habitat destruction. The ESA is triggered only when a species is almost extinct, something very difficult to detect in the sea or comparatively rare there because of typical reproductive strategies. What does happen is that stocks plummet to levels too low for viable fishing. The species may then survive in scarce numbers, but "commercial extinction" has already taken place and with it, damage to the food web.

Better approaches are needed to address the fishing down of the food chain. Horrific declines such as that of white abalone illustrate the fallacies of the old assumptions. The release of millions of abalone gametes (eggs and sperm) helps to protect the species against extinction, but adults must exist in close proximity for fertilization to occur. Patches of relatively immobile animals must be left intact. Regrettably, these patches are easily observable by fishermen and tend to be cleaned out, leaving widely dispersed animals that are functionally sterile.

2:- Protecting Whales from Dangerous Sonar
Following a historic victory, NRDC steps up the campaign at home and abroad to regulate active sonar systems that harm marine mammals.

Even as evidence of its threat to marine life continues to mount, the use of deadly military sonar in the world's oceans is spreading.

An NRDC-led coalition of wildlife advocates succeeded in restricting the U.S. Navy's use of a powerful active sonar system known as SURTASS LFA in 2003. But the fight is hardly over; other nations are developing LFA-type systems of their own, and sonar testing in coastal waters -- using the same mid-frequency systems that have been implicated in numerous strandings of whales -- is actually on the rise, putting more and more marine mammals and fisheries at risk. And the Bush administration is now appealing the legal victory that compelled the Navy into compromise.

In response, NRDC and its partners have redoubled our campaign, both at home and abroad, to control the spread of this harmful technology. Internationally, NRDC has begun to raise awareness of the problem of ocean noise. NRDC and several other international conservation groups -- together representing millions of members -- are pressuring international institutions to reduce sonar's harm to whales and other marine life, and getting results:

• In October 2004, in response to urging by this new coalition, the European Parliament called on its 25 member states to stop deploying high-intensity active sonar until more is known about the harm it inflicts on whales and other marine life.
• In November 2004, the World Conservation Congress of the IUCN approved a resolution calling for international action to address the problem of ocean noise, including military sonar.
• In February 2005, the coalition petitioned NATO to use simple safety measures to protect marine life from needless harm during sonar exercises.

Some nations, like Spain, have already begun to change their sonar practices, prohibiting exercises in certain sensitive areas.

Here at home, NRDC has continued to support the agreement limiting deployment of the Navy's LFA system, and has also sent the Navy a demand that it stop testing mid-frequency sonar in ways that needlessly endanger populations of marine mammals and fish.

Active Sonar: How It Harms Marine Life

Military active sonar works like a floodlight, emitting sound waves that sweep across tens or even hundreds of miles of ocean, revealing objects in their path. But that kind of power requires the use of extremely loud sound. Each loudspeaker in the LFA system's wide array, for example, can generate 215 decibels' worth -- sound as intense as that produced by a twin-engine fighter jet at takeoff. Some mid-frequency sonar systems can put out over 235 decibels, as loud as a Saturn V rocket at launch. One hundred miles from the LFA system, sound levels can approach 160 decibels, well beyond the Navy's own safety limits for humans.