From the Town Landing: Drawing the line on spatial planning

Managing the nation's ocean waters has got to be one of the most vexing and complicated resource-management tasks governments attempt-and it's about to get a lot more complicated.

Last June the president created the Interagency Ocean Policy Task Force, charged with the modest task of developing "a national policy that ensures the protection, maintenance and restoration of the health of ocean, coastal and Great Lakes ecosystems and resources, enhances the sustainability of ocean and coastal economies, preserves our maritime heritage, provides for adaptive management to enhance our understanding of and capacity to respond to climate change and is coordinated with our national-security and foreign-policy interests."

Sound simple to you?

Naïve zealots might be excited, but however desirable such an undertaking might be, almost everyone else is either worried or daunted. Just imagine a broad range of federal agencies pursuing conflicting goals-with states, regions and the federal government pursuing conflicting strategies and different stakeholder groups pursuing narrow interests; you should be worried, too.

A few years ago the Pew Oceans Commission and the U.S. Commission on Ocean Policy issued dueling reports trumpeting the need for a comprehensive approach to the management of our nation's marine waters. The draft legislation to implement the findings, which never went very far before being quietly forgotten, was distinctly silent about fisheries-meaning how any proposed, new ocean-management structure would incorporate fisheries management. Who, after all, would choose to manage bitter and intractable conflicts between stakeholders by increasing the number of stakeholders?!

Now it's déjà vu all over again. One of the mechanisms proposed by the

Ocean Policy Task Force for implementing its staggeringly broad mandate is marine spatial planning. Old wine in a new bottle, marine spatial planning will use lines on charts to reduce conflicts among the myriad activities carried out at sea. Think shipping lanes, fisheries-management areas, dynamic area-management zones for right whales, offshore energy (wind) farms-all with lines in the water.

Now, with conflicts piling up one upon another, a piecemeal approach of reacting to conflicts one at a time is, more clearly than ever, unworkable. Ironically, the oceans were largely invisible to most Americans until oil spills, medical waste and fisheries collapses shed light on the vulnerability of marine ecosystems. Now, conservation groups are major players in efforts to reform management of the nation's exclusive economic zone with a bewildering variety of well-organized groups that are prepared to go to the mat to protect whales, seabirds and even the Atlantic wolffish, which was recently proposed as an endangered species.

Where have fisheries fit in this history of tension between use and protection of the environment? For the most part, commercial fisheries and fisheries-management agencies have not looked kindly on the interest and scrutiny of conservationists elbowing their way into fisheries-management debates. No one in New England will forget Amendment 13 anytime soon.

The president's task force recently released an Interim Framework for Effective Coastal and Marine Spatial Planning; it envisions "regional planning bodies" that would establish coastal and marine spatial plans for their areas. The areas are very similar to the regions addressed by the fishery-management councils, but the connection between the two efforts, if any is intended, is not spelled out. In fact, the "F word" -fisheries-is mentioned only once in the document, as an example of socioeconomic measures that can be included in the plan. But make no mistake: If implemented, marine spatial planning will have major ramifications for fisheries management.

Consider our national forests: Originally designed to produce timber, they are now subject to "multiple-use management." Remember the spotted owl?

While we support the initiative's goal of reducing conflicts among marine users and developing a more-coordinated federal oceans policy, we fear that it represents a shift toward top-down management of marine resources. Let's not kid ourselves that this is progress if it is at the expense of local management.

Just the opposite, let's make this effort successful by ensuring that it balances national priorities with local knowledge in the implementation of plans that reflect local ecosystems, local knowledge and local capacity for stewardship.

This will mean empowering "communities at sea" to collaborate among themselves to map/chart the most-productive fishing grounds, an activity that has been an anathema to most fishermen for obvious reasons: to protect critical fishing grounds and the livelihoods that depend upon them.

The initiative is a sign of the times: the 21st century will be marked by how well we manage the conflicts among the rapidly increasing number of users of our oceans and the various stakeholders with an interest-good, bad or ugly-in their spectacular productivity.

Anne Hayden is an independent marine policy analyst based in Maine. Philip Conkling is publisher of Working Waterfront and president of the Island Institute in Rockland, Maine.