Earth & Sky

Transcript of Today’s Interview with Dr. Rosenberg:

ES: Thanks for speaking with Earth and Sky today, Dr. Rosenberg. Can you give me some background about the Ocean Commission and what you’ve been doing recently?

AR: The Commission was created by the Oceans Act of 2000, which is an act of congress to ask an independent commission to make recommendations concerning all aspects of U.S. ocean policy except for national security. Congress set up the commission in a bipartisan fashion, with a formula for appointing members nominated by a congressman, and appointed by the President. We’ve been working for two and a half years and just released our preliminary report which, under the Oceans Act of 2000, goes to the governors of each of the states for comment for thirty days, before we finalize the report and submit it to the White House and to Congress for their consideration and hopefully action. The commission was made up of sixteen commissioners from a very broad range of expertise and interests. Some academics, like me, my field of work is in fisheries and ocean ecology as well as ocean policy. But we also had people from industry, other academics who worked in other fields, people from other parts of the government, some very senior people like our Chairman, Admiral James Watkins, who’s a former Secretary of Energy and former Chief of Naval Operations. William Ruckelshaus was former Director of the Environmental Protection Agency, Bob Ballard is an ocean explorer, and so on – a broad range of expertise and interests in the commission.

Across the commission, though, we came across some very strong conclusions by consensus. And that is that while we’ve made some very important efforts in managing, we’re not doing enough and the oceans are in serious trouble. Our management is insufficient and fragmented, and unfortunately, different pieces of management, and different parts of ocean activities are disconnected from one another. We don’t have sufficient investment either in the management and policy implementation, or in the science or education of both the next generation of ocean scientists – if you like – or of the public, related to ocean issues. The oceans are an enormous driver for the American economy as well as important for American quality of life, and in fact quality of life on the planet as a whole.

So if we don’t address some of these problems, we really are in serious trouble. Not only over the very long term, through things such as climate change, but even in the short term, through things such as loss of fisheries, beach closures, polluted coastal waters, and so on. The commission then made almost 200 recommendations in detail, but in terms of the over-arching themes, we’re recommending that we take an ecosystem based approach to management, and that we do that by trying to connect the pieces of management. In other words to do in our management and policy what ecologists have known for a a long time happens in nature – and that is that everything is connected to everything else.

If you study biological systems as I do, then you know that really there aren’t such things as entirely independent processes. Everything is connected to everything else. If we don’t connect the management pieces together, in other words connect our management of pollution to our management of coastal development and habitat, to our management of fisheries, then we’re unlikely to be successful. And so the commission calls for what’s called ecosystem-based management, that is managing all of the human activities and their impacts on the ocean, together, looking at ecosystem boundaries as opposed to artificial, political boundaries.

We’re also calling for a doubling of the federal ocean science budget over the next five years. That seems like a big number, but actually the federal oceans science budget is less than a billion dollars, nationwide, and that is a very small number compared to things such as the National Institute of Health, which is 27 billion. And we’re calling for a doubling of that ocean science budget to 1.2 billion over a five-year period.

And then we feel that there’s an incredibly strong need to improve ocean education, or understanding, not only in schools, but also amongst the public – not only of the importance of the ocean to the country and the world, but how does the ocean work? We know less about the ocean than we know about a lot of other places. And we invest less in understanding the ocean, even though it’s 70% of our planet. And it’s vital to climate and sustaining life on Earth. It has the highest biodiversity of any habitat or set of habitats in the world. It has certainly much higher biodiversity than terrestrial ecosystems, and so on. So, we actually need to improve not only our scientific understanding, but also public understanding of the role of oceans. Everything that people do on land, even if they’re not near the coast, impacts the oceans in some way, because all water ultimately ends up in the ocean.

ES: What is your background in, and what did you bring to the commission?

AR: My background is in biological sciences and marine biology, primarily related to fisheries resources and fisheries management. I’m trained in what’s called quantitative science, that is trying to model mathematically and statistically populations of animals. And I’ve applied that primarily to fisheries resources. I’ve also spent a lot of time working on applying, developing and implementing policy. So while I have a traditional academic training and a Ph.D. in biology, I also was a resource manager. I was a regional administrator for fisheries in the federal government in the northeast for four years, and then was the deputy director for the National Marine Fisheries Service, the federal agency that manages fisheries and things such as whales, sea turtles, and so on. I was the deputy director of that agency for two years before moving back to an academic environment.

So one of the things that I brought to the commission when I was appointed in 2001 was not only a science background, but a practical experience of actually trying to implement management plans. I spent a lot of time working on management plans to recover the fisheries in the New England region, with some success – and some areas that we weren’t successful. That’s an ongoing process.

I think it has been important in the commission to have that practical agency implementation perspective in our discussions. In other words, how do you actually do things in government? It’s hard because you have to balance a lot of competing interests.

But the most important thing is that you pay attention to the science all the way through. I think it’s very clear from the commission work that we’ve had some success, but we also have a lot of failures in many of the things that we’ve tried to manage. In other words, we’ve had some success in rebuilding fisheries, and some fisheries that have been managed sustainably. We have a lot of fisheries that have been overharvested and have failed to sustain themselves and have declined or even collapsed. Coastal pollution and water pollution in general is a huge problem particularly nonpoint source pollution. We haven’t been able to implement the systems necessary to try to prevent that nonpoint source pollution from spreading widely. And, in fact, all around the coast, while we have programs in place to try to either slow or manage coastal development to protect habitat, we’ve lost an enormous amount of wetlands in coastal habitat. We have beach closures and the like. So we haven’t succeeded there either. These are difficult problems. It’s not because people are doing things badly or are not trying very hard. They’re incredibly difficult problems that have economic and social, and political dimensions that are really hard to come to grips with. What the commission is trying to recommend is a new way to approach those problems.

We have to take a very different perspective on our ocean policy. I’ve done some academic work on what’s called the precautionary approach to management. In other words, trying to approach resource management issues from the standpoint of precaution. You should first try to protect the resource, and then try to decide whether it’s reasonable to try to utilize that resource, or to allow a particular level of activities that are going to be impacted. That’s complete reversal from the way we do things now. Now, we allow any activity unless we’re absolutely sure that we need to restrict it or prevent it. And, ultimately that means that an awful lot of activities we find out far too late have been doing substantial harm. And, we’re trying to change the perspective in how we view and utilize our oceans such that they become a place that we care for, not just a place that we use.

ES: How is ecosystem-based management going to be different than what we’re doing now – in light of the recent 30th anniversary of the Endangered Species Act? What’s the matter with what we’ve been doing so far?

AR: As you note, many of the principal environmental laws enacted in this country were enacted in the 1970s. And in some sense, they have served us well. And there is some really good and strong legislation, such as the Endangered Species Act and the Marine Mammal Protection Act, and even the fisheries law, which really is a strong basis for management.

There are three major areas of problems though. The first is political. It’s extremely difficult to deal with the political pressures to continue to develop or to continue to allow activities to go forward. And, therefore, it’s extremely difficult in some cases to apply the full concept that’s in the laws, because the politics are really hidden from the public view. And they’re hidden from the public view mostly because most of the public don’t know or are really not interested in the issues that are dealt with on a daily basis.

If you take my own field of fisheries. Well, most people would say that they want the ocean to be healthy and they want abundant fish stocks, and they want to be able to go recreational fishing, and they want to be able to buy fish that’s caught in the U.S., or comes from a local fishery when they go to a restaurant or they go to a fish market. I don’t think that anyone wants the ocean depleted of all life. On the other hand, when it comes to specific management of a fishery resource, the only people who are really speaking out are the industry. They’re not doing anything wrong, they’re saying that we don’t want to be restricted, because we want to make our businesses work as best as they possibly can, make as much money as we possibly can. That’s a natural reaction. But there isn’t that counterbalance in most cases that says, well – this is a public resource and we actually want greater restrictions because we want to protect that resource for the future. It’s very hard to balance those short and long term needs of the future with the needs of a business.

And the same thing is true under the Endangered Species Act, or under any of the other environmental laws. So one of the important things that the commission is recommending, again, is public education and public engagement so there’s better understanding that this stuff does actually matter to individuals throughout the country. It’s not just a matter for the fisherman, or a matter for individual farmers or loggers in a particular region. It is a matter of public resource that is held in the public trust. And the only way that the political pressure comes to bear to actually protect those resources if is the public is engaged. That’s why education is so important. It’s not simply a motherhood and apple pie issue.

Another reason that’s it’s been so difficult to make those laws as effective as they really should be if you read them on their face, is that we don’t have the resources dedicated to either implementing the laws, or doing the science we need to actually know what needs to be done in many cases to protect ocean resources, and for that matter resources on land. We just have never dedicated the resources in this country – or in any country – to doing the things that need to be done. Whether it be scientific studies, or whether it actually be the management actions, the development of management actions and implementation that needs to be done.

And the third thing that is a major issue is the fact that each of the laws are in some way disconnected from one another. In other words we manage fisheries, and we manage pollution, and we have coastal zone management act, and a marine mammal protection act – but we don’t try to figure out how do they interact with one another, how can they leverage one another, to get better results, or how they sometimes conflict with one another so that you get results that really don’t make much sense. And the commission is recommending, not only in our implementation of the laws, but actually in the ways that we implement our management and interact at the federal agency level – that we try to bring those mandates under different laws together, because we believe you have to manage on an ecosystem basis, and not one piece of the ecosystem at a time.

ES: Can you apply ecosystem-based management to a particular case, say the quandary we find ourselves in trying to manage wild salmon?

AR: Salmon are a really good example, particularly salmon in the northwest – although you could also look at Atlantic salmon in Maine as another example. So let’s talk about northwest salmon first. Salmon in the northwest transcend from high up in the river systems all way to Idaho, up into Canada, certainly, and through Washington and Oregon, or into California for other stocks, all the way out into the north Pacific gyre, in the middle of the north Pacific. And many of those stocks of salmon, because salmon are home to their individual rivers, are currently endangered – they’re listed under the endangered species act, which again is a very powerful tool to try to reverse the decline of salmon stocks.

But the decline of salmon stocks is due to a whole set of factors, and we usually talk about the four H’s: harvest (catching of salmon), hydropower (which is damming of rivers, it blocks salmon moving upstream), hatcheries (which produce salmon, if you like, artificially, or in a farm sense and then release them out into the ocean and they mate compete with wild stocks), and habitat (the amount of area for salmon to actually spawn in fresh water, grow up in as juveniles). If you actually look at the law, the endangered species act says you need to do something about each of them. But the fisheries law is a separate law that manages fisheries directly. So should we be managing fisheries under the endangered species act, which calls for something totally different from what the fisheries law calls for? Should we be managing the habitat separately from the Clean Water Act, which actually is the law which tells you how to deal with wetlands and how much water should pass through the rivers and so on. Or the Federal Power Act, which is again a separate law that manages the hydropower program, and so on.

What ecosystem-based management would say is you need to actually sit down and put all of those things together. And there’s been great strides made in trying to do that in the northwest. But you need to do it for the watershed as a whole, understand all of the human activities within the watershed as far as you can, and then start to put the pieces together in a coherent way, such that the management actions for fisheries and for hydropower, and for water management, and for habitat actually fit together. They have a clear scientific basis and ongoing science program to see whether they’re working. And, then the management gets advised as to whether it’s actually working on a regular cycle, as opposed to trying to implement clean water act actions in one place, and fisheries actions in another place, and hydropower actions in a separate place. You’re bringing them together so that you’re doing comprehensive or integrated management. That would be an example in the Pacific Northwest.

In the Atlantic, for salmon, entirely different species and genus, we have endangered salmon stocks. The last remaining wild salmon stocks are in some rivers in down East Maine. They’re affected by many of those same factors. They don’t happen to be affected by hydropower in this case. But they’re affected by agriculture and forestry and watershed management and aquaculture – again the release of farm fish that may interact with wild fish and undermined the ability of the wild population to maintain itself much as we see on land with introduced species like english sparrows driving out wild birds and so on. Same thing happens in the ocean, except that now we’re talking about wild salmon and farm salmon that are introduced. So again, you need to look at all of the pieces of the management puzzle, as opposed to just saying, well, under the Endangered Species Act we should just stop everything. Clearly, you can’t do that. You need to use the tools the tools that are available, but you need to use them together, as opposed too individually. Again, from an ecological basis it makes sense because things are connected to one another.

ES: So what are some of the difficulties you expect in trying to change the way our oceans are managed?

AR: First of all, you have to recognize that, when people are being told that they can’t do things, they tend to be unhappy. Nobody wants to be told, no, you may not go recreational fishing, or no, you may not draw water from a river to irrigate your farm. So, in some sense you have to live with some unhappiness.

But the way that you try to manage these issues in concert has been used in the northwest, and to some extant in Maine in the two examples I gave you, by utilizing what are called watershed councils. In other words, you try to get people all around the table, in a watershed council, to look at all of those activities and at least listen to one another. And ultimately, there needs to be a bottom line, and the government needs to set that bottom line, of saying, these are the things we need to accomplish, and while you want the local groups and residents to figure out how to accomplish those, there has to be a clear mandate that you must proceed. You can’t just hope that the problem just goes away. But, it’s worked very effectively in some cases, where you actually give a clear call for action. Give the authority to a local group, and then allow them to develop the solutions that work. It doesn’t work very well if you only give the authority to one group – well, OK, let’s only talk to the farmers, let’s not talk to the people who are recreationally fishing or let’s not talk to the native American tribes that work in that same area. They’ll talk in a different room. Well, if people are separated in that way, they don’t hear one another and they don’t actually come to some appreciation of alternative views. That’s a very difficult and very contentious process. But it’s about the only way that you’re going to get some common direction from the people who work within a watershed.

So the commission is recommending that we utilize regional councils and watershed councils to try to figure out what the solutions are on a local basis, but with a very, very clear mandate from the federal government and the state government, and so on, so that it’s clear that, yes, we have to accomplish something. This isn’t a mechanism for just talking. It’s a mechanism for problem solving.

ES: Could you describe what are the biggest problems the oceans face?

AR: Three big problems. Nonpoint source pollution of nutrient pollution – I don’t mean pesticides and nasty chemicals – I mean even just nutrients, nitrogen and phosphorous. Runoffs from land, either coming from agricultural land or coming from waste from either animal waste or human waste. That produces a huge over-nutrient supply in the coastal zone. That’s caused things like the Dead Zone in the Gulf of Mexico, an area of water in the Gulf of Mexico that’s the size of the state of New Jersey that basically is devoid of life because it’s depleted of oxygen because of excess nutrient input, over-stimulation of plant growth, those plant die decay, and then therefore deplete the oxygen. That also occurs in other coasts, not just the Gulf of Mexico. It occurs in near-coastal environments all around the country. It’s really a result of runoff, because we’re just over-fertilizing the coastal ocean because we’re not managing that nutrient input very well. You need to improve sewage treatment. You also need to improve the treatment from nonpoint sources, reduce the amount of nutrients that are spread on land and just runoff, reduce the input from private septic systems, and so on. There’s a whole range of things that need to be done there. That’s one huge problem the coastal ocean is currently facing.

Overfishing is another big problem. And although we’re managing some fish stocks moderately well now, we have many fish stocks that have collapsed, are starting to recover, but are recovering from very low levels. And, so again we have a major area where we need to do a better job of protecting marine life, because we’re not only overfishing stocks, but in some cases, disturbing or destroying habitat that makes those stocks more productive.

And then, perhaps an even bigger problem is the loss of coastal habitat itself – the loss of wetlands, the loss of marshlands all along the coast, due to increasing development, landfill, and so on. That’s reducing the productivity of the coastal ocean, and ultimately the ocean as a whole, because we’re losing that environment.

There are other problem areas, like invasive species, toxic substance inputs, and so on. But that at least give you some sense of the big problem areas that are facing the ocean now.

ES: Okay, how do these things affect someone who might not think they interact with oceans very much?

AR: Half of the gross domestic product of the United States comes from coastal counties, or coastal communities. Pretty soon, half of the people of the country will live within 100 miles of a coast. And even those people who don’t live near a coast, who live in the Mississippi basin, which is most of the country, the things that happen upstream in the Mississippi are what’s causing the Dead Zone in the Gulf of Mexico that I mentioned. So what happens in Iowa, or what happens in the middle of the country, all along the Mississippi watershed, actually has a major impact on the Gulf of Mexico and further on out into the ocean itself. That’s true throughout the country. It’s not just a matter of those people who like to go to the coast. It’s a broader issue. In addition to that, most people, even if they don’t have much connection to the ocean, they do have connection to those activities that impact the ocean, whether that be from concentrated animal feeding operations from farming in the Midwest, or from other agricultural practices in the Midwest, or just from water use and pollution control throughout the country. That goes beyond those people who just like to eat seafood and go to the beach.

ES: What were some of the things the commission recommended to do?

AR: The major recommendations are to form a National Ocean Council, to actually coordinate the ocean-related activities and policy at the federal level, and then to form regional ocean councils on a voluntary basis, within each of the regions, to try to develop this watershed-based local approach that I described.

Secondly, to double in the next five years the ocean research budget for the nation to develop an integrated ocean observing system, so that we start to obtain information on what’s happening in the ocean, much as we do weather forecasts in the atmosphere. But to develop that system, develop it now, and have it be part of the international system.

And, then to develop a national educational program to coordinate the education efforts, so that people have a better understanding of what’s occurring on the ocean. We’ve recommended in the reports some funding mechanisms to do that, utilizing revenues from use of off-shore waters, but the most important thing is that we make a start now at consolidating our ocean activities, trying to implement ecosystem-based management so that we fit the pieces together, and that we be much more precautionary in the way that we utilize ocean resources. In other words, we think first about how to conserve what we have, before we just go ahead and allow activities or use.

ES: Would you say most scientists agree with taking a precautionary approach?

AR: I think that most scientists do agree, and that the commission agreed that when we defined a precautionary approach in a way that we believe is workable. It doesn’t say, don’t do anything under any circumstances until you are absolutely sure that it will have no impact, because everything has impact. It says, approach the permitting of activities cautiously, and make sure that you don’t have any irreversible outcomes, and that you always keep in mind the need to conserve resources.

ES: So what are some examples of irreversible outcomes that we should avoid?

AR: Well, I mean the ultimate long-term irreversible outcome is climate change, of course, which the oceans have a big role in. But one of the irreversible outcomes is wetland loss. We don’t know whether wetland loss is irreversible or not. We don’t know for certain stocks, for things like marine mammals and sea turtles, whether if we deplete them to a certain level, they will be able to come back. And so, many of the impacts that human activities have from fishing, to wetlands loss, and coastal development, to pollution, in the extreme, could be irreversible.

ES: What kind of response did you get on Capitol Hill to your report?

AR: The overall response has been extremely positive. That includes in the House and Senate, when we did debriefings in Washington a couple of weeks ago, and ongoing briefings, to the briefings that we’re going to be doing with governors all around the country, the non-governmental organizations and industry organizations, and so on. We’ve had a very positive response. And that response has really related to – we need to change direction. We are not doing what we need to now, we need to do a better job. Again, people may say, well, I don’t think I want to do it exactly like this, or like that, but the overarching recommendations have been received very positively, so I’m very hopeful that we’ll have some real action.

ES: Thanks again for speaking with me. Is there anything else you’d like to share with the listeners of Earth & Sky?

AR: I guess I would just like to re-emphasize that point, that it really is actually important to change the political dynamic here a little bit, so that we view the ocean as this incredibly important public trust, and that people care about it, because it’s theirs. It doesn’t belong to any one industry or any one group of users or either people who happen to be on the beach that day. It belongs to the public. So, the only way that the political dynamic will change one day is if the public cares and gets engaged, and says, this is ours. We want it to be healthy. We want it to be protected. We want it to be conserved. We want to have access to it. All of those things.

The following person was interviewed for today’s program. Our thanks to:

Dr. Andrew Rosenberg
Professor of Natural Resources
Institute for the Study of Earth, Oceans, and Space
University of New Hampshire
Durham, NH