Shoring Up Little Slices of the Seas

It is one of those observations that seldom alight in our awareness. A realization too grandiose and, at the same time, too ethereal to take hold. Unless we pause. Then we savor what an astonishing thing is at hand: The greatest of California’s many natural wonders remains hidden at our doorstep.

The largest animals that ever lived, bigger than dinosaurs, are swimming out there now on the other side of Highway 1. Just beyond the beach, a canyon drops away as deep as the Grand Canyon, and barely explored. Within sight of our cities and from fresh-charged currents of seawater as clean as anywhere in the world, hunter-gatherers pursue tonight’s dinner. Beneath, the fuel of our economy has collected in ancient pools of oil just for the taking.

And we must consider ourselves too, the ever-growing millions of people who crowd the shoreline with our homes and farms and industry and diversions. We eat from these waters and play in them. At the same time, we assault their purity with sewage and pesticide and fertilizer runoff. Not so long ago, we deposited worse--our radioactive waste. The heaving surface of this sea is our economic highway to countries of the Pacific Rim.

It is little wonder that California’s tiny claim on the Pacific challenges our capacity to comprehend. Only intermittently do headline events awaken the larger public interest. Like oil spills.

Beginning 20 years ago, Congress and federal regulators were drawn to California to block the spread of offshore drilling. No-oil zones were proclaimed in 1980, 1981, 1989, 1992. National Marine Sanctuaries, these areas were called. From Ventura north to Sonoma County, these four odd-shaped tracts of California ocean encompass almost half of the surface area of the 12 National Marine Sanctuaries designated so far nationwide.

Perhaps if these places had been called “petroleum-free marine zones” matters would have rested. But “sanctuary” is a powerful word. It carries an ecclesiastic promise of protection, refuge, asylum. Sacred ground, as it were.

Congress implied so when writing the sanctuary act. It claimed perpetual guardianship of these waters. But it imposed conflicting requirements too. Fishing, for one thing, was to be “facilitated” at the same time the resource was to be preserved.

It was an artful, please-everyone compromise. These underwater areas were of such importance as to rate the protective aura of national parks. At the same time, commercial and sporting uses would be encouraged, as in national forests.

Sooner or later, the two visions would have to collide.

Today, faster than many ever expected, the Clinton administration is moving to tilt the balance of sanctuaries toward greater preservation. After years of skeleton staffs and modest ambitions, the sanctuaries are growing: bigger budgets, more confidence, sharper teeth. Responding to critics who want more sanctuary in their sanctuaries, the administration and its field managers have embarked on a site-by-site reevaluation of the system, with a promise of making tomorrow’s protected areas of the ocean, somehow, more protected.

Whether too far or not far enough is a matter of rising interest. But the process of re-imagining America’s underwater sanctuaries is underway, and in a fashion so novel and homespun that it could be called an experiment in 21st century postmodern resource governance. That is, the federal government is seeking to rule by consensus instead of by fiat.

“The program is in a process of dynamic change,” says Dan Basta, the energetic director of the National Marine Sanctuaries. “I see the future as helping to take the nation to a new level of protection and conservation of its living marine resources.”

Just as with terrestrial parks, marine sanctuaries arose from two imperatives: nature and politics.

From a naturalist’s vantage, California’s sanctuaries at the Channel Islands, Monterey Bay, the Gulf of the Farallones and Cordell Bank are the underwater equivalent of rain forests. The same as on land, certain marine habitats provide more shelter and better growing conditions than other places. California’s sanctuaries are among the most advantageous areas for sea life anywhere on America’s coasts.

The contours of the bottom are knifed with canyons and studded with seamounts, pinnacles and islands. A narrow continental shelf, swirling currents and prevailing offshore winds combine to draw deep water toward the surface, bathing these regions in the soupy nutrients of life. Groves of kelp harbor teeming colonies of flora and fauna.

The midsection of California also happens to be a convergence zone where warm waters of Mexico meet cold waters of Alaska. Thus, the periodic shifts in ocean temperature that we know as La Nina and El Nino, and the slower-scale cycles of oceanic shifts that are barely understood, bring ever-changing variety to the fish and other pelagic creatures offshore.

Politically, the sanctuaries were created with the National Marine, Protection, Research and Sanctuaries Act of 1972--not as part of the national park or forest services but under the Department of Commerce’s National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. For the first sanctuary, in 1975, the idea was small: to protect the wreckage of the ironclad Civil War ship Monitor off Cape Hatteras, N.C.

In following years, the concept was enlarged to satisfy crusading, if small, local constituencies out to stop offshore oil drilling. These citizens needed no more argument than the memory of oiled beaches and wildlife in Santa Barbara in 1969 and Alaska’s Prince William Sound 20 years later. Sanctuaries thus became no-drilling areas wrapped in the lofty language of conservation. With varying degrees of trepidation, fishermen acquiesced after securing promises that they would not be subject to harvest regulations by a new federal agency.

Once established, sanctuaries kept the lowest of profiles. To make sure, Washington restrained them with tiny budgets and a mere handful of administrators. Sanctuary managers variously imposed limits on dumping shipboard and harbor trash, restricted treasure hunting, directed freighters to voluntarily move farther offshore and encouraged schools to teach about the oceans. But they did not carry the badges of park rangers, nor did they presume license to defend the heart of the resource: its living organisms.

“The program is far from fulfilling its potential,” concluded a 1999 audit by the congressionally authorized National Academy of Public Administration. “Most close observers of the sanctuaries say that the program is uncertain, ineffective and pitifully small.”

In short, the nation’s underwater parks were mostly paper parks. The very idea of “sanctuary” lost its mystique. The oil company Chevron borrowed the word for an advertising campaign, calling its offshore oil platforms marine sanctuaries and “an ideal place for nature to call home.” By the standards of the day, as we shall see, the company had justification for its claim.

But change already was underway. By the time the academy’s audit was issued, the Clinton administration had shifted up a gear. The departing president’s desire to leave an environmental legacy sent the sanctuary budget soaring 85%, to $26 million, with $10 million more for 2001. A new acting director was named: Basta, a savvy career civil servant with a penchant for straight talk. He sounded a do-or-die call for preservation. Staffs grew and so did their ambitions.

The sanctuaries were given the mission to remake themselves one by one, following the example of countries such as Mexico, Cuba, the Bahamas, Kenya and New Zealand. The Florida Keys began first, and now is in the wrap-up stages of sectioning off large and distant tracts of coral reefs as “no-take” zones, off-limits to fishing. The Channel Islands off Santa Barbara now has embarked on a similar quest, reevaluating everything from its boundaries to its overall mission. Next, Monterey Bay will set out to chart a new future. Ditto the Farallones and Cordell Bank.

The original law creating the sanctuaries provides regulators with plenty of running room. True enough, the day-to-day management of sanctuary fisheries is left to state fish and game departments, and in the case of some species, to the National Marine Fisheries Service and a network of industry-dominated fishery councils. Public and private use of these waters, yes, is encouraged. But the law also contains what can be read as an overriding responsibility “to maintain, restore and enhance living resources by providing places for species that depend on these marine areas to survive and propagate.”

Three words appear repetitively in the Sanctuaries Act: comprehensive coordinated conservation. Never had a single agency been entrusted to manage both what goes into the sea and what comes out.

What follows today and Tuesday are visits to each of California’s four National Marine Sanctuaries, south to north. They touch about one-fourth of the state’s coastline and cover 5.6 million acres as measured on the surface, an area only slightly smaller than all the federal government’s terrestrial parklands in California. As it turns out, they are places where nature is gaining and losing ground at the same time. They mock the old wheeze about the American frontier being closed, leaving nothing to discover. They are the greatest wildernesses left to California.

Little more than a generation ago, students were taught that the blue whale was on the verge of extinction. For some children, at least, it was a formative lesson about the consequences of human progress, for the fabled blue--reaching a length of 110 feet and a weight of 190 tons--was larger than any creature known to have lived. No fifth-grader at the time could expect to see such an animal any more than its long-ago and smaller cousin, the brontosaurus.

So it borders on the fantastic to realize blues are back, and here. An estimated 200 of them--protected as endangered species--collect around the Channel Islands during summer, living as close to the urban megalopolis of Southern California as many suburban commuters, spraying the horizon with their 30-foot geysers of steamy seafood breath. Chunky, aerobatic humpback whales too. And sometimes fin whales and orcas, and occasionally even the blunt-headed sperm whale. Gray whales, of course, travel the coastal corridor each year to and from their calving grounds in Mexico.

Those who fear for the oceans can take heart by this proximity of giants. But not all is cause for joy. Far from it.

During the last generation, the succulent white abalone, the aristocrat of bottom-dwellers, was all but wiped out by persistent fishing, slow-to-react management and disease. Once so plentiful that its shells served as throw-away ashtrays, the white abalone was California’s sublime eating pleasure, with meat like lobster, only denser and more refined. It now is headed for the endangered species list, a first for an oceanic invertebrate. An underwater survey last summer by the state Department of Fish and Game found only 150 white abalone over a vast tract of mid-state coast, including the sanctuary. Of those, only one group of four and three groups of two lived close enough to each other to breed.

Once-abundant stocks of rockfish have been shockingly thinned out too, on account of the skill of commercial and recreational fishermen in catching fish and holding sway with fishery regulators. Rockfish--a family of scowling, tubby, big-eyed, spiny-finned fish--has long been a symbol of California’s coastal waters. It’s an old story. The perseverance of fishermen and their political clout, sustained by America’s softheartedness for its salt-of-the-earth individualists, cannot be matched by fishery regulators.

Last year for the first time, rockfish season was closed for two months, but the catch still exceeded 10 million pounds.

One of the region’s foremost rockfish experts, Milton Love, a research biologist at UC Santa Barbara, says it would take “a minimum of decades” for some rockfish, like the bocaccio, to recover--provided the very best of management and ocean conditions, neither of which is certain.

Love is responsible for some of the most convincing evidence of the problem. For five years, he and his team of researchers have been diving around the Channel Islands in a research submersible, counting fish and documenting their findings on video.

Where have they found an abundance of rockfish? Not in the Channel Islands National Marine Sanctuary but under nearby oil platforms, where they are safe from fishermen. If given a vote, the fish surely would side with Chevron on the practical boundaries of sanctuaries, never mind what maps show.

For more than 20 years, Love says, biologists have realized that many slow-maturing and long-lived species of rockfish could not sustain the fishing pressure allowed by regulators. Today, the problem is intensified by a new type of fishery--the “live fish” market. Asian restaurants have created a demand for living rockfish, which are displayed for customers in tanks as evidence of their freshness. Most prized are smaller specimens, which also, unfortunately, are tomorrow’s brood stock.

Traditionally, fishery managers have been prohibited from acting swiftly when science first indicates a problem. Instead, they must carefully quantify fish populations and their decline before taking restrictive steps--a process that has repeatedly proved to be too slow to prevent depletion.

In case after case here as elsewhere, fish populations have been devastated before they were understood. For instance, the historical record of the 500-pound giant sea bass in California is not contained in scientific literature but in fading photographs on the walls of spearfishing and bait shops. Today, with the large ones virtually gone, it is illegal to land them.

But, to illustrate the difficulty of management: a fisherman who unintentionally hooks a juvenile giant sea bass may do it little good by releasing it. If brought up from deeper than 60 feet, the fish’s swimbladder bloats up and it may be unable to get back home from the surface. Some charter boat captains know how to deflate the bladder by piercing it with a needle, but other fishermen may just unhook the fish, not realizing it may perish.

The Channel Islands National Marine Sanctuary rings four islands that lie to the west of Malibu and south of Santa Barbara, and also a small island just west of Catalina, called Santa Barbara Island.

The sanctuary boundary begins at the high-tide mark of each island and extends out six miles beyond their shores, for a total of 1,252 square miles, or an area 60% bigger than Orange County. The average depth is about 280 feet with a bottom of mostly mud and rock.

On a map, the sanctuary appears in the shape of a 70-mile golf course dogleg, with a detached 15-mile-diameter circle about 40 miles to the southeast. One corner of the sanctuary approaches within five miles of the mainland near Oxnard, but nowhere does it touch. For millions of urban residents, it is far enough away to be out of mind. For lack of staff and budget, there are few signs noting its presence, and a tiny visitor center in Santa Barbara is difficult to find. A typical fast-food restaurant along Highway 101 does at least as much to call attention to itself.

A boat is necessary to gain even a passing feel for the place. Today, the sanctuary’s small patrol cruiser leaves the Santa Barbara harbor just as the morning fog shears loose from the water’s surface. An hour later, you approach that invisible boundary marking the sanctuary’s edge.

At the helm is a blond man with broad shoulders, a cheerful angular face and the easy confidence of a beach boy. The son of a Navy oceanographer, Matt Pickett is 36, a lieutenant commander in NOAA’s seagoing officer corps, a pilot and a diver. By chance, he is one of the most important men in marine conservation today. As superintendent, he is responsible for remaking the Channel Islands sanctuary.

Pickett nods to starboard. The ocean begins to boil. Within just moments, the boat is engulfed. A carpet of common dolphins rings the boat and soon extends to the horizon in all directions, perhaps 2,500 or more leaping and frolicking animals, their playful spirits lifting yours, their hydraulic breathing adding a factory noise to the idling of the boat’s engine. Surprisingly, such experiences are not uncommon. One would have to travel to Alaska and search out caribou herds to match the sensation of being surrounded by so many wild mammals in motion.

Within a couple of hours, the Channel Islands reveal what is easiest to see here: humpback whales the size of freight cars, more than a dozen of them in singles and pairs, spouting, lob-tailing with graceful flukes lifting into the air, and sometimes breeching half out of the water, creating splashes that echo for a mile. Beyond them pass two of 800 huge ships that ply the adjacent shipping lanes each month. Farther on, the blocky hulks of oil platforms. Closer to the shore of Santa Cruz Island, a fleet of squid fishermen drops its nets. Never mind that squid fishing is usually undertaken at night. Here it is rich enough to work during the day too.

Smaller boats of urchin fishermen call this home too. The parking lot at the Santa Barbara harbor is sprinkled with fancy pickups belonging to these prosperous fishermen who work underwater, alone, plucking the red-brown pincushions by the truckload for the Asian sushi markets. Many of them used to be abalone fishermen.

A runabout bristling with surfboards knifes toward the southern flank of Santa Cruz Island where there are more empty point breaks than intrepid surfers. Threatened brown pelicans skim in formation inches off the water. Oystercatchers and shearwaters dart through the sky. Rare Xantus’ murrelets bob in the swell. A few sailboats lie at anchor in sheltered coves.

Underwater, with hooded wetsuits and scuba gear, you are immersed intimately in the reason for this region’s vitality: the pea-soup plankton murk that is the foundation of the food chain. Visibility shrinks to the size of a small room.

Even if the water were crystal clear, however, most of the sanctuary remains unseen--beneath the depth attainable by scuba divers.

Six-foot-long jellyfish, transparent except for their shocking orange internal organs, ride the currents and winds, the most entirely footloose animals in the world. Sea lions watch with wet spaniel eyes from the edge of kelp forests, one of five pinniped species in the sanctuary. Clusters of metallic balloons drift on the chilly swells, having blown to sea from a christening on the mainland.

The collision of images again challenges our ability to comprehend. With evidence of human industry everywhere, the character of this seascape remains essentially as wild as when the prehistoric Chumash people occupied these islands and fished these waters thousands of years ago.

“Think of it,” Pickett says as he towels off in the cabin of his patrol boat. “This is the most impressive piece of water I’ve ever seen in terms of diversity and abundance--and that includes Alaska and the Florida Keys.

“Yet, look around you. You’re three miles from one of the busiest shipping lanes in the country, eight miles from an oil platform, 50 miles from L.A., one of the densest concentrations of coastal habitation in the world. You’re on the edge of the Pacific Missile Test Range and 25 miles from the coast highway.

“Within this small patch of ocean is evidence of the consequences of industrialization, and also the possibilities of coexistence.”

Today, the sanctuary imposes only six regulations on activities here: No oil drilling, no flights over the area lower than 1,000 feet, no shipboard discharges except food waste, no scavenging from shipwrecks (150 have been discovered), no cargo vessel traffic and no disrupting the sea bottom. This final regulation has little consequence, because fishermen with bottom-trawling nets are exempt and continue to drag across choice areas of the sanctuary sea floor with evermore sophisticated equipment.

But there is plenty of other government here. Sanctuary waters are subject to international treaties and rules of the U.S. military, as well as county codes, the regulations of the state Coastal Commission, water quality boards, the California Department of Fish and Game, plus the rules of federal agencies from the Environmental Protection Agency to the Coast Guard to the National Park Service, which administers the land and tidal waters around the islands.

In total, more than a dozen overlapping arms of government claim a slice of the sanctuary pie. Only the sanctuary office, however, is charged with overall conservation.

Why does it matter if anyone takes a broad view? A simplified for-instance: The state Department of Fish and Game regulates the squid fishery by balancing the presumed abundance of squid with the economic interests of fishermen. But what of others who depend on the squid, such as the endangered humpback whale? Well, the whale’s interests fall under the National Marine Fisheries Service, which does not control fishing of squid.

In a different age, say a century ago when the national parks were being formed, the federal government might have untangled the jurisdictional web by decree. But Americans are leery of federal power grabs now, even those that might reflect logic or popular will. So Congress burdened the sanctuaries with a New Age, get-along experiment in governance: Rather than muscle them out, other agencies and commercial interests are to be coaxed in and “coordinated.”

The result is another modern marvel of the sanctuary: the bureaucratic. You could liken it to a 1960s commune, with an advisory council, working groups and ancillary committees representing everything from science to tourism, from fishermen to scuba divers, each drawn to the table by the fear of being left out, all of them captive to a hothouse process that is supposed to result in . . . well, a plan.

Should the boundaries of the sanctuary be expanded? Some would like it extended to the mainland. Should cruise ships be restricted? And so forth.

Looming larger than all these questions is a controversial new idea for management of the oceans. That is, setting aside portions of sanctuaries as “no take” reserves. President Clinton’s administration has embraced the proposition. Perhaps such places will be replenishment nurseries for fish. Or benchmarks to gauge the effects of fishing elsewhere in the sanctuary.

“This is only a small slice of the ocean,” sanctuary superintendent Pickett says. “I, for one, will sleep better if we have a little slice of it set aside.”

Under a new law called the Marine Life Protection Act, the state of California is about to embark on a study of the same strategy. One aim of the bill is to reevaluate scores of tiny reserves, a mere 0.006% of state waters, already scattered along the coast.

Combined, the force of the federal and state governments appears destined to create a larger network of true underwater parks--and soon. At the Channel Islands sanctuary, the question is where and how large. By November, a working group of citizens and government officials is supposed to reveal a proposal for public comment.

The task is a biological and political challenge of enormous scope, perhaps impossibly so. No reserve could be large enough to protect the interests of the whale, or even migrating fish such as tuna. On the other hand, abalone could be safeguarded in a single cove--although for scant benefit beyond. Or just consider the spiny lobster: No matter what California does, the fate of this imperial crustacean rests with Mexico, where the animal breeds. Thus, a lobster reserve here may give rise to bigger lobsters but not more of them.

Doubters wonder if, in the end, fishermen can be coaxed into relinquishing any prime waters. Or will they work to ensure that reserves are limited to the least productive parts of the sanctuary? This has occurred elsewhere in experiments with no-take zones.

Some scientists would prefer that the civic energy now being devoted to reserves be expended instead in redesigning the nation’s system of fishery management to put conservation on an equal footing with economics.

Yet, there is an undeniable appeal to bringing so many interests and layers of government together with all the seriousness of global treaty negotiators, each of them made to promise they will not abandon the other in quest of a goal to right past failures of stewardship. One of the oldest cliches in conservation is that people protect best what they love the most. The long-winded deliberations now underway will call the bluff of those who profess just that, offering them a chance to surprise themselves, as well as the cynics.

*

Times researcher Anna M. Virtue contributed to this story.