Channel Islands Update: How We Won a Marine Protected Area

Posted: 22-Nov-2002; Updated: 28-Jul-2009

"It was a real cliffhanger, one of the most stressful public meetings I've ever been through," commented our Marine Advocate Richard Charter, who has seen a lot in his two decades of defending marine life. Charter was referring to the final hearings of the California Fish and Game Commission on October 23 to decide the fate of the Channel Islands' proposed no-take marine reserves in state waters. Despite the years of hard work he and our Marine Scientist Rod Fujita had put into the effort, and despite being convinced that the plan for this ocean "park" was based on sound science and struck a careful balance between all of the many concerned parties, Charter held his breath for the six hours it took the commissioners to decide. He refused to issue a "victory" news release until the final decisive moment: "Until the actual vote I wouldn't have put $20 on the table either way."

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The tension in the room was palpable as the three commissioners spent an inordinate amount of time quizzing representatives from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the National Marine Fisheries Service, and other agencies on such details as the need for reserve enforcement and monitoring. Unhappy sports fishermen waved signs and at one point made the accusation to one of the commissioners that, as a relatively new appointee to the Commission, he was not qualified to make a judgment. The commissioner's response? "You may not like the decision I'm going to make today, but your grandchildren will thank me for it."

There was a moment of levity when commissioner Mike Chrisman viewed a huge pile containing only a portion of the 13,000 letters sent by Action Network e-mail activists that Charter and two "helpers" had lugged in, jokingly moaned, "Do I really have to read them all?"

Finally, at the end of a very long day of deliberations, came the vote by the commissioners: Two-to-one in favor of setting aside nearly 20 percent of state waters as no-take reserves, effective January 2003.  Clearly it was a victory for our ongoing campaign to create ocean reserves that are off-limits to fishing, mining or otherwise taking or harming marine life, thus allowing species and ecosystems to flourish.

Marshalling the Forces

Scores of studies of marine reserves and restoration zones with no-take areas worldwide, including those along the Pacific Northwest coast, have demonstrated their effectiveness. And conveying the value of such reserves as a tool for managing the oceans was critical to winning the Channel Islands reserves victory. For the last 13 years, our own Rod Fujita has been laying that groundwork through research, including the socioeconomic benefits of no-take reserves. Fujita was instrumental in convincing the Pacific Fisheries Management Council to adopt marine protected areas (MPAs) as one of their fishery management tools.

"What Environmental Defense brought to the negotiating table over the Channel Islands reserves was the scientific perspective and a solid case that the long-term benefits for all parties outweighed any temporary short-term economic impacts," said Charter. Also crucial to the win was the huge grassroots and educational effort that we and our dedicated Santa Barbara consultant Jesse Swanhuyser orchestrated in California, which drew large crowds of supporters to hearings and meetings. The thousands of letters from our Action Network activists certainly didn't hurt, either.

Charter has only one regret: "I worked on the creation of the Channel Islands National Marine Sanctuary in 1980. I wish we had then had the foresight to see that this sanctuary would need some additional level of protection and that we had put into place a monitoring system, a kind of thermometer to gauge the health of the biological resources, incorporating a mechanism for increasing the level of protection when trouble became apparent. But in 1980, few of us could envision the kinds of declines that were later to occur in the rockfish complex, and no one could anticipate the virtual extinction of the white abalone." 

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Pehind the Scenes:  Mapping an Ocean Wilderness

The pure beauty of the islands' underwater kelp forests and coral reefs - once resplendent with white abalone and rockfish, cowcod and boccacio, some now at the razor's edge of extinction - seems almost incongruous with the nitty-gritty of the long, painstaking battle to save them.

"Imagine a three-dimensional chess board - because that's what we were really dealing with here," explains Charter. "We had to first consider the three distinct biogeographic provinces and temperature regimes (warm water coming up from the South from Mexico, cold water coming down the coast from Oregon, and the mixing zone where the two currents meet) and the way each of those zones' supports its own range of species, in order to set aside representative habitat types for each.  So that's already three variables to the third power to consider before you even get into the human factors!"

Then, too, there were the 15 different concerned stakeholders' representatives at the table, each bent on keeping what they perceived as their piece of the sea for their own use, including commercial fishermen, conservationists, divers, surfers - and often the most recalcitrant of the group - recreational fishermen (represented by for-profit party boat operators and regional sports fishing associations). "We used an elegant Geographic Information System (GIS) computerized mapping system developed by NOAA to go through all of the data and literally lay it out visually - layer upon layer - so we could see the habitats, the space use conflicts (where and which fish are caught and at what dollar value, for instance), the different water temperatures, all of these spatial considerations, and then we had to literally 'bargain' over pieces of the ocean."

Even though the Commission's final decision protected slightly less than the original 25 percent Environmental Defense and the coalition of groups we worked with had asked for, said Charter, "It is not really about percentages, it is about getting it right.  I think we have now protected the right pieces of state waters containing the right representative habitat, and I think we held onto the minimum that will do the job." But these "right pieces" included a few areas already so bereft of marine life that even the least supportive of the sports fishermen didn't seem to mind if they were protected. "There is one site called the Footprint Reef, which is kind of a beautiful little island under the ocean, a little topographical high, but few boats go there anymore because it was so 'hammered' that it was on the verge of becoming a biological desert, and we said, 'Hey, we'll take that, and turn it into a reserve.' Because with its hard rock substrate and good remaining habitat values, the Footprint appears to have great potential to come back to life. Marine reserves are about protection, but they are also about restoration."

And that's the beauty of marine reserves - that even some of these already-decimated ocean areas stand a good chance of replenishing themselves over time. "There is a very powerful healing engine behind the ocean ecosystem, and this is the fundamental rationale for creating marine reserves. Even a place that is badly damaged, if left totally alone - no fishing or mining or any extraction - will rebuild itself. Certain species may rebound very quickly, perhaps in five or ten years, but it may take 90 to 100 years to bring back the great big female rockfish that were once the base of the reproductive capacity for the area."

 "For centuries, we've had this fundamental belief system that the ocean was a limitless frontier and we could hunt and fish and kill without end, and not hurt anything," said Charter. "But do we really have the right to wipe out certain parts of the ecosystem, particularly within a public trust resource that belongs to all and has been set aside by the American public as a national marine sanctuary? It's a paradigm shift for many - to even acknowledge that human activity has hurt the oceans - and that's a vital first step that needs to be taken by humans to begin the process of recovery for our marine life."

Take Action! Federal waters around the Channel Islands still need protection.

FIND OUT MORE

 

"Victory for Channel Islands Marine Life"

Marine Protected Areas

Channel Islands National Marine Sanctuary - NOAA web site

View a tour of the Channel Island Marine Sanctuary narrated by Ted Danson