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Steps to save our oceans
should reflect lessons learned in the Keys
In the Florida
Keys, we have always been sustained by the sea. For nearly two
centuries, people here have built their lives around salvaging
shipwrecks, fishing, sponging, shipping or, these days, tourism.
The sea brings us
bounty, both in economic terms and in ways more difficult to quantify
but perhaps even more important.
Whether your love
for the sea is based on fishing, diving, sailing or simply gazing at our
endlessly variable waters, your life as a Keys resident is improved by
our incomparable location, dangling off the Florida peninsula between
the mighty Atlantic and the encircling Gulf, with mainland America's
only living coral reef running alongside.
We are not alone
in our love for the ocean. While counties along the U.S. coastline make
up only 17 percent of the nation's landmass, they contain more than 53
percent of the population, according to a comprehensive new report just
released by the U.S. Commission on Ocean Policy. The report also cites
predictions of an additional 3,600 people moving to coastal counties
every day, with an expected total population of 165 million by 2015. And
those figures don't include the 180 million who already visit the coast
each year.
The U.S.
Commission report arrived this week at the desks of governors of
America's coastal states. Those governors have one month to respond
before the report is forwarded to the Congress and, ultimately, the
President. It is the first comprehensive government review of U.S. ocean
policy in more than 30 years. The last one, completed in the 1960s,
resulted in the formation of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric
Administration and the system of fishery management we know today.
Many of those who
know the ocean best — especially longtime fishermen and scientists —
have been saying for years that our oceans are in trouble. Overfishing,
overdevelopment and increasing pollution from cities and farms are
devastating our ocean wildlife and causing the collapse of ocean
ecosystems.
If you're so
inclined, you can wade through the scientific studies or read news
reports summarizing their results. You can also look at the old photos
on the walls of our local restaurants, talk to old-timers about the
former abundance of fish, lobster, and conch. You can ask people who
learned to dive in scuba's early days about their first impressions of
Sand Key or Looe Key or John Pennekamp State Park.
The damage has
been going on for a long time, locally and around the nation. It's too
easy to look at the flat surface of the ocean and imagine an infinite
world underneath that we couldn't possibly be harming. Because we can't
see where the fish live, breed and swim, we don't realize the effect
that removing them by the boatload has on the complex and interrelated
world they inhabit.
And as the
coastal population numbers cited above show, there are simply more of
us. The Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary has 600 reported boat
groundings every year. More than 3 million people visit the Keys each
year, each adding to the pressure on the oceans whether through direct
interaction, or in ways that are harder to see but are still all too
real, such as the wastewater and stormwater that have been shown
scientifically to be polluting our nearshore waters.
Fortunately,
workable solutions are available if our leaders have the political will
to implement them. In the Florida Keys, we have good reason to be proud
as national leaders in an ecosystem approach to the ocean. Our national
marine sanctuary was the first to have a zoning plan and a water quality
protection program. The Tortugas Ecological Reserve is a significant
achievement that both Gov. Jeb Bush and his brother, President George W.
Bush, have praised in the last week. And at long last we are tackling
our wastewater treatment problems — slowly and with many painful
mistakes, but tackling them nonetheless.
At Oceans Day in
Tallahassee last week, Gov. Bush outlined some plans for improving ocean
conservation in Florida. They are good moves, but as the Tortugas
proved, we can do better and apply real protection to irreplaceable
ocean assets. The governor's comments on the U.S. Oceans Commission
report should reflect the lessons we've learned in the Keys and map out
some ways to apply them to other areas of this great ocean state.
Florida's future inhabitants deserve a chance to see and enjoy the
wondrous life-filled inlets, bays, estuaries, mangrove shorelines and
coral reefs that surround the state and sustain us economically, even as
they bring meaning to our lives. |
