by Dan Bacher
Saturday Oct 24th, 2009 8:54 AM

John Lewallen, highly respected author, environmental leader and seaweed harvester, is calling for a community meeting in Fort Bragg to discuss a plan of resistance to the corrupt Marine Life Protection Act (MLPA) process, funded by a private corporation, the Resource Legacy Foundation. Please read this excellent commentary by Lewallen.

Real environmentalists don’t support Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger’s fast-track MLPA process, the peripheral canal or the killing of blue whales under the guise of “research” and marine “protection.”
Marine Protected Areas, Offshore Drilling, and Ocean Zoning: Proposed community meeting in Fort Bragg Town Hall

–John Lewallen, Mendocino Sea Vegetable Co.

Dear friend,

A few of us ocean food providers here are making decisions now that will affect public access to food from the ocean permanently. I think we need a Fort Bragg Town Hall meeting in November, perhaps sponsored by the City Council. I think full community perspective is needed to deal with the Marine Life Protection Act Initiative (MLPAI) right now.

Despite the outcry of every Northcoast city and county government to suspend the MLPAI process, the Resources Legacy Fund Foundation (RLFF), its controlling entity, is hell-bent on imposing their preordained map of Marine Protected Areas on the whole state before Governor Schwarzenegger and Resources Secretary Mike Chrisman, their rubber-stamp in government, are out of office.

Assemblyman Wes Chesbro knows that a private mob has captured and distorted the 1999 Marine Life Protection Act to suit the needs of the interests financing the Resources Legacy Fund Foundation , a shadowy group which obviously gets a lot of money from the oil industry. MLPAI Director Ken Weisman acknowledged recently that he and his staff “interact” with the RLFF.

In early August we saw the RLFF send their chief man to Resource Secretary Chrisman’s office, leading to a stacking of both the Fish & Game Commission and the South Coast Blue Ribbon Task Force. The man who wrote the plan the RLFF wanted went on the Fish & Game Commission, and the chief oil industry lobbyist for the West Coast was put in charge of the South Coast Blue Ribbon Task Force. You and I are now governed by the Resources Legacy Fund Foundation.

Assemblyman Chesbro has said that as long as Schwarzenegger is backing the MLPAI process, he can’t do anything about it. He suggested we all cooperate and listen to each other.

Recently an Ecotrust Corp. field agent told me that I could be involved in making a local plan for closure of some 20% of public ocean fisheries in state waters, to be offered as an alternative first to the Blue Ribbon Task Force, then to the State Fish & Game Commission. “I know how you feel about the Resources Legacy Fund Foundation,” the Ecotrust man said, “but they are offering $150,000 so you can develop a plan the local commercial fishing community can live with.”

I call this the “gun-to-the-head” plan. How would you like your grandchildren’s access to ocean food, taken for granted here for at least sixteen thousand years, to be shut down in key access areas set up by the mob of oil drillers, marina developers, and otter restoration fanatics who now inhabit the Blue Ribbon Task Force and the Fish & Game Commission?

Or would you prefer the plan we, the chosen few because we scream loudest, come up with? Oh, yeah–our deadline is this December.

In the North Central Coast the local plan was a “clay pigeon plan” to be shot down on August 5 by the shuffled-and-stacked Fish & Game Commission. The same foundations that fund the RLFF also pump money into the Ocean Conservancy and Natural Resources Defense Fund, among others. They finance busloads of “environmentalists” to come to key hearings and demand the preordained RLFF plan be adopted. They can mobilize a thousand letters in support of new Marine Protected Areas.

I’m sure if most of these “environmentalists” knew they were being manipulated by the very interests they are opposed to, it would be the end of this lunatic nightmare of the MLAPI. I do know that ocean food providers need other community members with us at key hearings coming up, and especially the wonderful environmentalists of Mendocino County.

I do believe that our offshore waters are a major near-term offshore drilling target. The leasing process is now open and on-track. The President’s ocean task force is moving toward zoning the ocean, in preparation for this and other ocean industrial projects.

I think these are all connected to this move to get independent ocean food providers out of the picture, because we are the natural allies of true environmentalists who always work for a clean, wild ocean ecosystem. The Marine Life Protection Act Initiative is a very big fraud committed on the environmental community.

I’m looking forward to sharing perspectives on these community ocean issues with others. The struggle between providers of ocean food from clean, wild ocean ecosystems, and ocean industrialists, offshore drillers, and imposers of no-fishing zones, is world-wide. It will pass only when the imperial/petroleum era passes.

For more information, contact me by email at: lewallen [at] mcn.org
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