I don’t get to post good news often, usually it’s some dire tale of oceans swept clean of fish, or someone’s prediction of when all fish will be dead…
California designated 29 marine sanctuaries today, located between Santa Barbara and San Mateo counties (the southern half of the state).
…will include 13 reserves where fishing will be prohibited and 15 conservation areas where some commercial and recreational fishing will be allowed.
State regulators will create additional preserves in subsequent years, the next set will include areas in San Mateo county to Mendocino county. These preserve areas start 3 miles offshore, so bank fisherman will largely be unaffected.
All told, 200 square miles of ocean are off now off limits. Wardens will be patrolling the new areas to ensure compliance.
Scientists say California’s marine protected areas represent a new approach to saving the world’s oceans from overfishing, and hope other states and countries follow suit.
This is an entire ecosystem placed off limits, rather than the traditional approach of protecting a single species. Scientists will be monitoring the wildlife contained in these preserves to confirm the validity of this approach.
It’s something positive, and there has been damn little of that lately.
LiveJournal Tags: marine sanctuary, fisheries management, california marine preserve, fish and game
Hate to say it, but marine sanctuaries are nothing new. The one in place around the Laguna Beach area has existed since the early 60’s, but, of course, its imaginary boundaries have done nothing to prevent the flow of pollution from scouring the Laguna rocks clean
of life. MPA’s are museum environmentalism. A placebo to the uninformed and a way to cover up and avoid the real problems (the power plant at Morro Bay kills a number of rockfish larvae in a single month,that if they’d been allowed to reach maturity: they would roughly equal the entire California commercial rockfish catch for a year!) The foremost problem is the tonnage of pesticide and herbicide washed down from vast California monoculture, chemical farming operations, and the byproducts of our lifestyle washing down drains, continuously killing down the plankton curtain. Closing off areas of the immemorial tao sea to normal human use is questionable, and doesn’t represent a wholistic or realistic approach to a systemic problem that is much deeper than MPA’s can address. And remember: fishermen, like seabirds, are the byproduct of abundance, not the cause of its lack. Fishermen disappear when the fishing gets slow. And there are a hell of a lot of depressing nuances to this MPA idea that I could discuss if you want, but, for now, I’ll just say: Follow the money and it will lead you to the truth.
I’m inclined to agree with you, but it was a tiny positive thing in a dark morass of dreary news – I lunged for it instinctively.
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