|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Agency |
US (mil. acres) |
Alaska (mil. acres) |
% Alaska |
|
NPS |
88 |
51 |
58 |
|
FS |
192 |
22 |
12 |
|
FWS |
94 |
77 |
82 |
|
BLM |
264 |
87 |
33 |
|
Totals |
638 |
237 |
37 |
There is little doubt that Alaskans are intimately familiar
with these lines you cannot see, but nonetheless have
considerable influence on the use of these areas.
In the oceans, there are far
fewer such lines, as least regards areas similar to those
set aside for conservation on land. Lindholm and Barr (2001)
conducted a detailed comparison of terrestrial and marine
protected areas in the US, and reported that while
terrestrial national parks, national forests, and national
wildlife refuges constituted approximately 18 percent of the
land mass of the US, national marine sanctuaries accounted
for only 0.4 percent of the area of the US Exclusive
Economic Zone (EEZ), which encompasses an area roughly
equivalent to the land mass of the US. Additionally, there
are only 13 national marine sanctuaries, but more than 900
terrestrial protected areas. By adding in marine areas under
some other Federal protection, (national parks and refuges
with marine waters within their boundaries; fishery
management areas; and even the 100,000 square nautical miles
of the Northwest Hawaiian Islands Coral Reef Ecosystem
Preserve) the total area protected in the marine realm is
still only a small percentage of the area of the EEZ. This
disparity in part may be just an artifact of the recent
emergence of marine protected areas as a management tool,
about a hundred years after the terrestrial protection
movement, but this can't account for the entire
difference.
From Species to
Habitats
In the past, management of marine resources has been focused
largely on individual species or, in some cases, groups of
species with similar life histories. The most obvious
example of this is fisheries management, where actions
center on limiting the harvest of a species
population or stock, based on stock surveys and
the application of complex mathematical calculations
yielding stock estimates. In its simplest form, if the stock
is declining, harvests are decreased, and conversely, if
stocks are increasing, fishing effort can be increased. This
form of management gives little, if any, attention to the
ecosystem in which those fish live, what we know about the
dynamic nature of ecosystems, or the spatial heterogeneity
of species' use of a region or ecosystem.
There have been efforts by fishery managers to look more closely at the place where fish live. This has been done largely through the establishment of time-area closures. These are biologically important areas for species, such as spawning areas, that are closed to fishing or otherwise restricted for periods when the fish there are most susceptible to adverse effects from fishing activity, either directly from harvest or, more infrequently, when the fishing activity could cause harm to the habitat in which the fish live. There are numerous existing examples of time-area closures in Alaskan waters, and the use of this tool is expanding.
Place-based management is also used to assist in the recovery of endangered species. The Endangered Species Act institutionalizes this approach through the requirement for the designation of critical habitats. The 2001 Harriman Expedition got first-hand experience of this type of closure in our visit to the Steller sea lion rookery on Bogoslof Island. A three-mile zone has been established around Bogoslof Island to prohibit any vessel from approaching the island and potentially disturbing the endangered sea lions and their pups. To visit the island as the 1899 Expedition had done (during which C. Hart Merriam, on impulse, ran full speed at the seals on the beach and chased them into the water ), the 2001 Expedition had to secure a permit from the National Marine Fisheries Service, the office within the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) charged with protecting species listed under the Endangered Species Act. The permit prohibited any landing on the island (presumably to avoid an historic reenactment of Merriam's infamous charge) and required that we approach the rookery no closer than 500 yards. With the assistance of some modern navigation equipment on the Zodiacs, and surveillance of our approach by the ship's radar, we were able to meet the requirements of the permit, avoid disturbing the sea lions, and get a rare glimpse at this important rookery. There are a number of other examples of the use of place-based management regulations to protect endangered species in Alaska, most notably the special restrictions on cruise ship entry into Glacier Bay National Park and Preserve to protect the important humpback whale feeding grounds there.
Single-species management
remains in use today, but resource managers are applying
more and more place-based management. The concept of
ecosystem management (Grumbine 1994) is increasingly being
looked to as a model for a more effective management
strategy. Alaska is at the forefront of these efforts to
evolve toward an ecosystem approach to fishery management,
with groundbreaking work by the North Pacific Fisheries
Management Council (http://www.fakr.noaa.gov/npfmc/ecosystm/ecobased.htm).
Understanding the interactions of species with their
habitats, as well as better understanding the dynamic and
sometimes chaotic nature of the ecosystems in which these
species live, holds the promise of helping to achieve the
holy grail of marine resource management, sustainable
use.
The Emergence of Marine Protected Areas
The issuance of Executive Order 13151 (26 May, 2001) by former President Clinton regarding the establishment of marine protected areas (or MPAs) focused considerable attention on preserving important areas in marine waters (http://www.mpa.gov). This executive order directs federal agencies, under the leadership of NOAA in the Department of Commerce, and the Department of the Interior, to establish an expanded and strengthened comprehensive system of marine protected areas in the waters of the United States. The order has generated great interest in, and its share of controversy about, marine protected areas. Many MPA initiatives have been initiated on both US coasts, the Gulf of Mexico, and the Pacific Islands. The Alaska Department of Fish and Game (http://www.state.ak.us/local/akpages/FISH.GAME/adfghome.htm), the Alaska Marine Conservation Council (http://www.akmarine.org), and others have begun a number of related investigations, including an inventory of existing MPAs (or what could be construed as MPAs depending on the definition being used) in Alaskan waters. With well more than 100 State and Federal sites identified, Alaska is clearly well positioned to move forward if there is consensus that this is an appropriate path.
MPAs are widely regarded as a useful and important tool in the efforts to conserve marine ecosystems worldwide. One of the most well-known and visible MPAs in the world is the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park off the coast of Queensland in Australia. The National Research Council (2001) has conducted a review of the state-of-the-art of marine protected areas management and concluded that based on evidence from existing marine area closures in both temperate and tropical regions, marine reserves and protected areas will be effective tools for addressing conservation needs as part of integrated coastal and marine area management. A large and growing body of scientific literature supports the NRC finding. MPAs have the potential to preserve marine biodiversity effectively, help reverse devastating declines in fish stocks, protect unique areas and biotic communities, support efforts to recover endangered species, and conserve representative habitats of the world's oceans.
While the MPA as a management tool holds great promise, there are many issues to be considered and more research and analysis to be conducted and integrated into the way we approach the design, designation, and management of marine protected areas. As stated in the NRC review, MPAs should be viewed within a context of integrated ocean and coastal management. Ecosystems work on multiple scales, and traditional regional management, such as fisheries management, water quality protection, and the recovery of endangered species is essential as a complement to (or to be complemented by, depending on your perspective) area-based MPA management.
Almost no existing MPA encompasses an entire ecosystem. Even the world's largest, the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park, does not include regulatory control over runoff from the land and must work collaboratively with land-based resource managers to address concerns over the non-point sources of pollution. Therefore, close collaboration with regional resource managers will always be essential to insure that the area surrounding the MPA, or what is sometimes referred to as its management context, is managed in such a way that impacts affecting the MPA resources coming from outside its boundaries are minimized.
There is a consensus emerging that MPA's should be designed and managed, as much as possible, as components of networks. The benefits of networks are numerous and compelling. I summarized these benefits in a recent paper (Barr, in press):
MPA networks can enable ecosystem wide management where MPA designation of an entire ecosystem is impractical, inappropriate, or unnecessary. They can provide a vehicle to conserve and preserve highly migratory species or biological processes that occur over broad geographic areas of the oceans. Faced with the common problem of limited financial resources, the partnering inherent in networks can fuel essential research and monitoring to provide critical, but otherwise rarely available, data and information on MPA resources and the ecosystem processes that sustain those resources. Network partnering might also provide the funding for efforts to educate the public on marine conservation and preservation issues, and build constituencies of support necessary to sustain MPA programs.
Robust science is essential to support the design and
implementation of MPA networks. Ecosystems are inherently
complex, especially diverse and productive areas where
MPA-based protections are likely to be important.
Unfortunately, the science needed is just emerging, and it
may take a few years before we can have the confidence we
need to apply it effectively. If one assumes a precautionary
position, the hedge against an inadequate network design
would be to designate whole ecosystems or very large areas.
However, because their design, designation, and management
are always accompanied by considerable controversy, it is
very unlikely that future MPAs will be large enough to
include the entirety of an ecosystem. History also tells us
that almost no individual site, let alone a network, has
ever been implemented as it was originally conceived. The
public policy process is one steeped in the tradition of
compromise, and the significant controversy that swarms
around MPAs is a model for this tradition. Acquiring and
using the best available science can provide a bottom line
for the implementation process. There will be certain
elements where compromise is possible, and some where it is
not. Only with good science can these thresholds be
articulated. A well-designed but poorly implemented MPA
network can be worse than no network at all because what is
implemented will almost surely fail, yet persist because of
the perception that it could succeed eventually.
One good example of an MPA program that has the potential to
provide a vehicle for place-based conservation in the waters
of Alaska, as it has elsewhere in the US EEZ, is the
National Marine Sanctuary Program. Administered by NOAA, the
National Marine Sanctuary Program has designated sites from
American Samoa to New England and is currently evaluating
the largest of all potential MPAs ever identified in the US,
the approximately 100,000-square-nautical-mile Northwest
Hawaiian Islands Coral Reef Ecosystem Reserve, as a
potential addition to the national marine sanctuary system.
There are, however, currently no national marine sanctuaries
anywhere in Alaskan waters.
The National Marine Sanctuary Program, established in 1972,
serves as the trustee for the nation's system of marine
protected areas, to conserve, protect and enhance their
biodiversity, ecological integrity, and cultural legacy.
(http://www.sanctuaries.nos.noaa.gov)
The program identifies and designates as national marine
sanctuaries areas of the marine environment, which are of
special national significance. Comprehensive and
coordinated conservation and management plans are developed
for each site, articulating a management regime that
complements, not duplicates, existing regulatory
authorities. Research and monitoring is conducted on the
resources that make these areas special, and education and
outreach programs are developed and implemented at each
site. This outreach aims to inform the public to help them
participate in the site's management; to help the public
understand the reasons the site was designated as a national
marine sanctuary, why it is special and deserving of this
enhanced management; and to provide information on how
successful the sanctuary has been in providing appropriate
protection. Sanctuaries are charged with facilitating human
use of the sanctuary where that use does not harm sanctuary
resources. While they may include areas that prohibit most
or all activities marine reserves the goal of
regulations in national marine sanctuaries is to insure that
uses within these special areas of the ocean and coastal
environment are sustainable.
It is clear that marine protected areas will have a role in
the future of the conservation of the Alaskan marine
ecosystem. They are already playing an important role,
supporting and complementing regional resource management.
As to whether national marine sanctuaries will be a part of
future of conservation of Alaska's marine resources, this
will be decided by Alaskans. Anyone who has traveled in
Alaska will agree that many areas, if not the entirety of
Alaskan waters, are of special national significance.
The National Marine Sanctuary Program has much to offer to
help preserve the most special areas in this special place,
but only time will tell if Alaskans seek out such a
partnership.
The Importance of Being
There
One of the most important elements of a national marine
sanctuary, not always true of other MPA programs, is that
each site has a staff located near the sanctuary. Public
facilities, such as administrative offices, research
laboratories, and visitors' centers, are developed at each
of the sites, and a sanctuary advisory council (SAC) is
formed to involve the regional community in the management
of the site.
This presence is essential. The sanctuary staff can become
part of the local community, and the public has the
opportunity to interact with the staff and enjoy the
benefits of the facilities, especially the visitor's
centers. Unlike other Federal agencies, NOAA does not
routinely rotate sanctuary managers, superintendents, or
other senior staff among its sites, so site-based staff and
the local community can build long-term relationships.
Perhaps as important, the local community has a voice in
Washington, where some decisions are made about the policy
directions the National Marine Sanctuary Program and NOAA
may take in managing the resources so important to that
community. During the 2001 Harriman Expedition's brief
interactions with people in communities along the Alaskan
coast, one of the comments we heard most often was that
resource managers, in Juneau or in Washington, didn't seem
to be listening to what the local people had to say. A
national marine sanctuary can be a face for the
faceless bureaucrats who have been given the
responsibility for making resource management decisions and
be a conduit through which local voices are heard.
The active two-way communication also allows the sanctuary
community to appreciate and understand that not every
decision is made locally in national marine sanctuaries and
other federally managed areas. Sanctuaries are stewards of
these public waters owned in common by the American people,
and thus many voices need to be heard before an effective
and appropriate management strategy can be devised.
In all cases, the goals and aspirations of the local
community are given considerable weight in deliberations
over major policy issues as they relate to the management of
sanctuary resources, but the interests of the local
community and the interests of the American people sometimes
conflict with each other. This conflict poses a challenge
inherent in the management of any federal area or resource.
Just as Alaskans have a tangible interest and therefore an
important voice in the way that areas are managed in the
lower 48, the people in Butte, Boise, or Boston must be
heard when the future of federally managed areas in Alaska
is being determined. They may not always have much to say,
but the have the right to make their voices heard. It is the
duty of the sanctuary to seek out these opinions and
actively listen.
It is interesting to note that this issue of being
there was identified as a significant problem for the
1899 Harriman Expedition, a sentiment echoed by the scholars
that followed in their footsteps in 2001. By necessity,
expeditions like ours, covering vast expanses of territory
like the entire coast of Alaska, have very little time to
stay in any one place. Unlike scientists on the 1899
Expedition who were left behind by the Elder to conduct
research and collect observations for more extended periods,
scientists and scholars on our cruise were not able to
engage in similar pursuits.
Yet, expeditions such as ours and research cruises on
government or academic ships collect data and information
that are routinely relied upon by those who formulate major
resource management policy initiatives. Generally involving
even shorter visits, fact-finding missions, blue ribbon
commissions, or the more pejoratively described junkets are
a mainstay of the political and policy processes. Groups of
senior decision-makers descend upon a place and for a short
period of time, hold meetings with local community leaders
and identified experts to get a first-hand look at whatever
controversy has demanded their attention. While many of
these brief visits are successful in both providing
representatives from the affected community the opportunity
to be heard, and gathering information to help resolve the
specific problem at hand, they may never even scratch the
surface of the root causes of the controversy.
Anthropologists learned long ago that to understand a
problem, you must understand the people who are involved and
their culture. The best way, and perhaps the only way, to
gain the level of understanding necessary is to be a part of
that culture. The trust needed to achieve a level of comfort
to openly and unreservedly share information is built over
time, and likely to be a rare commodity on the floor of a
public hearing room.
Of all the 1899 Expedition participants, perhaps George Bird
Grinnell (in his essays regarding the expedition, collected
and published in 1994) expressed the greatest concern about
the ability of the Harriman Expedition to get more than
hasty and superficial observations. Many of the other
scientists on the original expedition held a similar opinion
(Goetzmann and Sloan 1982, Grinnell 1994). Grinnell's
previous and much respected work regarding the cultural
anthropology of the Plains Indians of the western United
States involved many lengthy visits. He lived in encampments
and eventually was adopted by the Pawnee (essay by Polly
Boroughs in Grinnell 1994). So he understood the severe
limitations of the observations of the 1899 Expedition,
especially those involving the lives of the people they
visited, and mentioned those misgivings frequently in his
essays. During the 2001 Expedition, our visits were even
shorter, and like Grinnell and our other predecessors, we
accepted the fact that we would have to be satisfied with
getting the feel of the places we visited. The images we
took away were little more than what we saw through the
viewfinders of our cameras. Determining the deeper
implications of one hundred years of change from such
observations presents obvious challenges.
Community-Based
Management
From the observations through my viewfinder of Alaskan
Natives and native Alaskans, community-based management is a
tool worthy of broader application for marine ecosystem
conservation in Alaskan waters. For community-based
management (see Hildebrand 1997 for a discussion of the
concept and its implementation) of marine protected areas to
be truly successful, however, a strong partnership must be
struck between the community and management staff. Here
again, the need for the presence of site managers in the
community deserves emphasis. Both the community and the
staff must be willing to operate in an atmosphere of trust
and cooperation. No such partnership will form without that
trust, something built over time through open and effective
communication, mutual respect, follow-through on commitments
made, the continual search for common ground, and a
determination to make the partnership work. This level of
commitment will greatly assist the community in
understanding and placing value on the partnership.
Especially on the part of the agency staff, it is essential
to fully embrace the principles of community-based
management, to understand its conceptual underpinnings, to
study other applications, both the successes and the
failures, and perhaps most importantly, to accept the fact
that the power and authority of the agency must be shared
with the community. This power-sharing can be the most
difficult hurdle, especially with agencies that have a rich
tradition of what is called command and control management,
where the agency holds tightly to its authority and makes
most decisions internally. It can be a particular problem
when their agency leadership operates under this model, but
outwardly endorses community-based approaches. However, the
need for all parties to apply wisdom, determination, and
honesty bolstered by discretion must be underscored.
The concepts of transactive planning (Hudson 1979) and
community-based management are relatively new to many
Federal resource management agencies, but it is the
foundation upon which the National Marine Sanctuary Program
is built. As was mentioned previously, it is not an easy
approach to take. The role of government in community-based
management is different from command and control management.
It's something like going from one person doing all the
driving to the driving and the navigating being shared with
all the passengers in the car. The agency not only has to
convene community forums and solicit the involvement of
local communities, but also insure that all appropriate
voices are heard, good science is applied, and monitoring is
conducted to gauge success of the strategy adopted and
insure compliance with education and enforcement. This
changing role of government is not an easy transition for
agencies who have being doing all the driving for so long,
but it can, though not always does, result in greater
successes and higher satisfaction in how the resources are
managed. This is the model being implement at national
marine sanctuaries across the country.
Community-based management is already being implemented in
Alaska's Native communities, where local Native corporations
have taken on the role of assuring community goals and
aspirations are incorporated in resource management
decisions made by state and federal agencies, and through
their own authority. We encountered and observed a number of
other examples of community-based management in Alaskan
coastal communities during the 2001 Expedition.
Partnerships with Native Alaskans especially have the
potential to teach us a great deal. While my time
interacting with Native Alaskans was unfortunately all too
brief, I came away with some impressions that bear directly
on this point. The first is that Native cultures seem to
view their role in the ecosystem in a very different way
than non-natives. As a part of a Judeo-Christian culture
with the concept of dominion firmly implanted, we see
ourselves as something apart from the natural world. We tend
to see nature as something we must control, to dominate, to
conquer. Certainly, E.A. Harriman and John Muir seemed to
personify this cultural conflict over Harriman's
overwhelming desire to bag an Alaskan brown bear on the 1899
Expedition. The notion of stewardship may be one of the more
subtle forms of this thinking, where we are compelled to
take care of natural resources in an almost parental role.
Natives Alaskans, like many other aboriginal groups, appear
to view themselves as part of the natural world, simply
another creature fighting for survival. It is quite possible
that the controversy over subsistence harvest may be rooted
in this differing cultural viewpoint, but this bit of
speculation is likely an oversimplification of a complex
issue. What we might learn from spending some time
considering this alternative way of thinking has the
potential to make conservation efforts more effective.
The other impression I took away from the Expedition was
that Native Alaskans, as well as others in the coastal
communities we visited, have considerable knowledge of the
ecosystem in which they live, work, fish, and hunt. Survival
depends on knowledge, knowledge in many cases ancient,
passed on from generation to generation. A number of our
stops on the 2001 Expedition were villages that have been in
continuous habitation for hundreds of years, with each year
a struggle for survival. This knowledge and experience,
sometimes called traditional ecological knowledge cannot
help but improve our management decisions. This is an
important element of such partnerships, where power is
shared, knowledge is shared, resources are conserved and
preserved, and all move on to the next issue with a growing
sense of accomplishment.
The Emergence of Ocean
Wilderness
Another more recent movement in the MPA arena that may have
relevance to the preservation of the Alaska marine ecosystem
is the emergence of ocean wilderness. To many, Alaska is
equated with wilderness, and the application of this concept
to the waters of Alaska could be very appropriate, though
not without inherent challenges.
Land-based wilderness is obviously not unfamiliar in Alaska.
Bob Marshall, one of the fathers of the wilderness movement,
did much of his seminal work on preserving wilderness and
the values that make an area wilderness in the central
Brooks Range of Alaska (Marshall 1956). Today, Alaska
contains 48 of the 624 designated wilderness areas, covering
about 15 percent of the state, the largest area of any state
in the US (http://www.wilderness.net).
The 48 Alaskan wildernesses range in size from the 32-acre
Hazy Island Wilderness, to the 9.7 million-acre Gates of the
Arctic wilderness, the embodiment of Marshall's legacy.
As I summarized in a recent paper regarding ocean wilderness
(Barr, in press), The Wilderness Act of 1964 (P.L 88-577, 78
Stat. 890; 16 U.S.C. 1121 (note), 1131-1136) is the Federal
statute under which wilderness is designated in the US. The
Act provides this definition:
A wilderness, in contrast with those areas where man and his own works dominate the landscape, is hereby recognized as an area where the earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man, where man himself is a visitor who does not remain. An area of wilderness is further defined to mean&an area of underdeveloped Federal land retaining its primeval character and influence, without permanent improvements or human habitation, which is protected and managed so as to preserve its natural conditions and which (1) generally appears to have been affected primarily by the forces of nature, with the imprint of man's work substantially unnoticeable; (2) has outstanding opportunities for solitude or a primitive and unconfined type of recreation; (3) has at least five thousand acres of land or is of sufficient size as to make practicable its preservation and use in an unimpaired condition; and (4) may also contain ecological, geological, or other features of scientific, educational, scenic, or historical value.
As the definion indicates,
contrary to what one might think, wilderness is not defined
as a simply as a wild area. The word itself comes from the
Teutonic and Norse languages that gave rise to the English
word "will," which in this case is defined as "self-willed,
willful, or uncontrollable. (Nash 1982). This self-willed
character, along with the notion of being untrammeled by
man forms the foundation upon which the modern concept
of wilderness is built.
From the definition in the Act, it is clear that the framers
weren't thinking about the ocean when they crafted the
language of the Act, but there are a growing number of
people who are thinking about it now. In the same paper, I
offered the following as a way to think about ocean
wilderness in the context of the Wilderness Act:
Vast, inhospitable, beautiful, deserted, mysterious, threatening, and undoubtedly containing animals that can kill you. It would seem that the ocean could very appropriately be called wilderness. Even the dictionary definitions mention the sea as one type of wilderness.
However, we know that not all ocean areas are untrammeled by man. While its not as easy to spot as a roadbed or building, man's effect on some ocean areas has been significant. Offshore oil and gas development, commercial fishing, and ocean outfalls for wastewater, for example, have all left their mark, especially in coastal ocean areas. Shipping and other vessel traffic plying designated shipping lanes and customary port-to-port routes are obvious examples of man's presence on the ocean. Boats grounding on coral reefs, and the tremendous damage they cause to reef ecosystems could certainly be counted as trammeling, just as could smaller boats prop-dredging in sea grass beds. The tons of debris that collect on the pristine beaches and coral reefs of the islands in the mid-Pacific are also telltale signs of man's presence. While the ocean may contain wilderness, the dictionary may be overstating the case just a bit.
While the basic concepts underlying ocean wilderness are
still being formulated, Alaska has a head start: Within the
self-identified marine wilderness of Glacier Bay National
Park and Preserve are approximately 215 square kilometers
(53.130 acres) of marine waters that are part of the
National Wilderness Preservation System (Barr and Lindholm
2000). The web site for Glacier Bay (http://www.nps.gov/glba/)
contains the following description: The marine wilderness
of Glacier Bay National Park and Preserve provides
opportunities for adventure, a living laboratory for
observing the ebb and flow of glaciers, and a chance to
study life as it returns in the wake of retreating ice.
Amidst majestic scenery, Glacier Bay offers us now, and for
all time, a connection to a powerful and wild
landscape.
The scientists on the 1899 Expedition's visit to Glacier Bay
undoubtedly observed something more of the ocean wilderness
qualities than was evident to those who visited in 2001, but
thanks to what can only be described as the courageous
stewardship of the National Park Service, many of those
qualities have been preserved. The management of this
wilderness has presented unique challenges and controversy,
including the establishments of limits on the number of
cruise ships entering the waters of the Park, as well as the
particularly controversial action of providing compensation,
when fishing was prohibited, to commercial fishermen who had
fished these waters. However, the National Park Service in
Alaska is breaking new ground, or maybe more appropriately,
exploring new waters, in the efforts to help define and
institutionalize this concept.
Ocean wilderness is exciting new territory for marine
resource managers. It seems an appropriate model to apply to
one of the most difficult tasks ahead, to preserve
biodiversity and ecosystem structure and function.
Preserving these important attributes of marine ecosystems
in Alaska and elsewhere has been particularly challenging
for the existing programs that have a multiple-use
management mandate, including the National Marine Sanctuary
Program. With the recent designation of what is being called
the Tortugas Ocean Wilderness within the Florida Keys
National Marine Sanctuary and the Dry Tortugas National
Park, the National Marine Sanctuary Program and the National
Park Service are moving this concept forward, but
considerably more work remains. Ocean wilderness is the next
frontier for both marine resource managers and the larger
terrestrial wilderness community, who has invaluable
experience and knowledge needed sort out definitions and
management models. Alaska is once again on the frontier of
another wilderness movement.
As I concluded in my recent paper on ocean wilderness:
Americans have a heritage of exploration and a collective
drive toward wild areas. Wilderness is part of who we are as
a people. Oceans are our last true wilderness: inhospitable,
alien, mysterious, and threatening but also beautiful,
friendly, and capable of elevating and delighting us as
wilderness is so eloquently albeit unexpectedly described in
dictionaries. Wilderness, novelist Wallace Stegner has said,
is part of the geography of hope. Ocean wilderness seems to
be unquestionably part of that geography.
Management and Ecosystem
Change
An additional challenge, and certainly not a trivial one, to
be confronted in the quest for effective conservation of the
Alaskan marine ecosystem is that ecosystems change and will
continue to change. This presents a moving target for
resource managers, and it is challenge enough when there is
some stability over time.
Change presents two problems very germane to this topic. The
first is that whatever management models may be applied,
they need to be flexible, and the expectations of the
community and the managers need to have some fluidity as
well. The kind of ecosystem changes that have been observed
over the last ten years in the Bering Sea and Gulf of Alaska
are uncommon, but not at all unique. Ecosystems are dynamic
if not chaotic, and changes, both subtle and otherwise,
should be expected. There are long-term oscillations in both
the Atlantic and the Pacific that obviously, given the
experience in Alaska, can be very consequential, even
catastrophic. Long-term monitoring of ecosystem-scale
changes should be in place and funded appropriately. Marine
protected areas can support such a monitoring program by
making available monitoring sites that are protected in such
a way that confounding influences resulting from human
activities are minimized. Many of the national marine
sanctuaries support and participate in such regional
monitoring programs.
Flexibility should extend to the regulations that afford
these areas protection as well. There has been much written
about the need for adaptive management (Keystone
Center 1996). In its simplest form, this is where a
regulation is imposed, monitoring is conducted to determine
how effective it is, and changes are made to the regulation
in response to the monitoring results, and presumably the
cycle is repeated. While it is an excellent suggestion, the
Federal rule-making process is lengthy and complicated,
largely due to the requirements of public notice and
comment. Under a model of community-based management, there
may be innovative ways to use the active participation of
the public in the management process to avoid the usual
delays in revising regulations, but there are few, if any,
existing models for this. Perhaps the changes involved in
ecosystem-scale processes are slow enough that this might
not be a problem, but it is worth some creative
thinking.
The other big challenge goes back to those imaginary lines.
MPA boundaries historically have been thought of as being
immutable, unchanging. The process involved in designation
of an MPA is fraught with controversy, and no one involved
in the initial effort is likely to enthusiastically retrace
this tortuous route. There is also the issue of the resource
users, who greatly prefer constancy to constant change.
There are currently no real solutions at hand for this, but
there is a growing interest in some creative solution
because of the observed effects of global climate change and
the need for marine protected areas to respond appropriately
to these changes. There has been some talk about the concept
of fuzzy boundaries, pre-identifying areas where a
boundary may have to be moved to account form changing
environmental conditions, but like the name, the concept
remains fuzzy. Our basic understanding of ecosystem changes
and its drivers is incomplete, and therefore our predictive
capacity is limited. Community-based management again has
benefits here because the community, especially the resource
users, can be educated to understand the need for more
frequent boundary modifications. This understanding in turn
may result in minimizing, if not eliminating, the opposition
and controversy that makes boundary modifications
burdensome.
The World is Getting
Smaller and so is Alaska
Alaska is big, remote, and productive, and these attributes
have provided something of a buffer from human impacts
experienced elsewhere. Someone once said of another remote
place, the Baja Peninsula, that it is amazing how much
conservation comes from a lack of roads. But like Alaska,
despite the remoteness and the hardships one may face to get
there, Baja is experiencing significant declines in their
fish populations. The vaquita, a small marine mammal that
occurs only in the Sea of Cortez, is one of the most
endangered on the planet, and commercial salt plants are
threatening the gray whale breeding and calving grounds.
Remoteness may be overrated.
While places like the Bering Sea and the Gulf of Alaska have
been some of the most productive areas on Earth, the regime
shift may have decreased this production considerably. We
once thought you could fish all you could take because the
sea was limitless and there were more fish than anyone could
possibly want or need. I think it's safe to say, looking
around at the many fisheries that have been officially
classified as overfished and depleted, that we were
wrong.
Alaska seems less remote than it ever has been. Thanks to
its very allure, it is now under tremendous pressure from
the burgeoning numbers of cruise ship visits, rising numbers
of tourists generally, and those many visitors who choose to
stay on. I unexpectedly ran into a colleague and old friend
from NOAA during the Expedition's visit to St. George, where
he was directing the cleanup of diesel fuel, a legacy from
the days of the government-sponsored sealing operations
there. During a chat with a Native elder on St. Lawrence
Island, I discovered he was a friend of another academic
colleague of mine who also works in marine conservation.
Small world.
Waiting in Homer to join the Expedition, I went to a
farmer's market and met a resident who had been in Homer for
16 years, before the improved roads and building boom. The
issue of the day in Homer was that the city felt the need to
install a traffic light, the first in Homer, and long-time
residents were lamenting the need for this harbinger of
civilization. This made me reconsider, and raise the issue
for debate during the Expedition, the definition of
conservation. Perhaps conservation, through the
Alaska lens, goes beyond just conservation of natural or
cultural resources to mean something bigger. Maybe the goal
of conservation of the Alaska marine ecosystem should be to
preserve a way of life, a life so connected to that
ecosystem. The Canadians have a number of programs that
focus on promoting sustainable communities that could be
instructive. Examples include the Sustainable Communities
Network of Nova Scotia (http://www.chebucto.ns.ca/Environment/SCN/SCN_home.html)
and Environment Canada's Georgia Basin Ecosystem Initiative
in the province of British Columbia (http://www.pyr.ec.ca/GeorgiaBasin/abi_elndx.cfm).
This may be a course for Alaska to consider seriously. If
this broader conceptualization of conservation is
deemed appropriate, it makes community based management look
even more attractive.
It could be my New Englander's perspective that few things
worthwhile are easily done, but the considerable challenges
of effectively implementing community-based management of
marine protected areas would worth the effort. There are
plenty of talented folks in Alaska and in the lower 48 who
would be willing to help support such new initiatives. Some
relatively new and useful tools are available.
With the additional challenges of regime shifts, declining
populations of many species, and the multitude of other
problems and issues we observed and discussed on the 2001
Expedition, some new approaches are warranted. One of the
other observations I took away from my time in Alaska was
that Alaskans are generally fiercely independent and
perversely proud of it; speak their minds when they have
something to say; believe in integrity, fairness, and
equity; have a strong sense of community; are willing to
face hardships and difficulties head-on; resent outside
interference by non-Alaskans; don't like to be proved wrong;
and have a strong an abiding love of the great state of
Alaska. Seems like a good start.
References Cited:
Barr, B.W. (in
press). Establishing Effective Marine Protected Areas
Networks.
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M. Willison, editors. Terrestrial and Marine Protected
Areas: Globalization, Ecological Integrity and the Human
Dimension. Proceedings of the 4th Int. Conf. On Science and
the Management of Protected Areas, SAMPAA, Wolfville, Nova
Scotia.
Barr, B.W. (in press). Getting the Job Done: Protecting
Marine Wilderness. In Proceedings of the 14th Biennial
Meeting of the George Wright Society, 16-20 April, 2001.
Denver Colorado
Barr, B.W. and Lindholm, J. 2000. Conservation of the Sea
Using Lessons from the Land. George Wright Forum
17:77-85.
Goetzmann, W.H. and K. Sloan. 1982. Looking Far North: The
Harriman Expedition to Alaska, 1899. Princeton University
Press, Princeton, Jew Jersey. 244 pp.
Grinnell, G.B. 1970. Alaska 1899: Essays from the Harriman
Expedition. University of Washington Press, Seattle,
Washington. 355 pp.
Grumbine, R.E. 1994. What is Ecosystem Management?
Conservation Biology 8:27-38.
Hildebrand, L.P. 1997. Introduction to the Special Issue on
Community-based Coastal Management. Ocean & Coastal
Management, Vol. 36, Nos. 1-3, pp.1-9.
Hudson, B.M. 1979. Comparison of current planning theories:
Counterparts and
Contradictions. APA Journal (October), 387-398.
Keystone Center 1996. The Keystone National Policy Dialogue
on Ecosystem Management. Final Report, October 1996. The
Keystone Center, Keystone, Colorado. 43 pp.
Lindholm, J. and B. Barr. 2001. Comparison of Marine and
Terrestrial Protected Areas under Federal Jurisdiction in
the United States. Conservation Biology 15(5):1441-1444.
Marshall, R. 1970. Alaska Wilderness: Exploring the Central
Brooks Range. Second Edition. University of California
Press, Berkeley, California. 173 pp.
Nash, R. 1982. Wilderness and the American Mind. Yale
University Press, New Haven, Connecticut. 426 pp.
National Research Council. 2001. Marine Protected areas:
Tools for Sustaining Ocean Ecosystems. National Academy
Press, Washington, DC. 272 pp.
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For information on the Harriman Retraced Expedition e-mail: harriman2001@science.smith.edu |