Gloucester Times
By Richard Gaines Staff Writer
By executive order, President Obama has hit the go button for the creation of a political system for writing ocean and Great Lakes usage plans overseen by a new National Ocean Council.
The ideas involved including “marine spatial planning” and “ecosystem based management” have had a champion for years in Jane Lubchenco, a leading academic scientist before her nomination to head the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
Marine spatial planning has its closest terrestrial analog in simple zoning, but as White House officials Tuesday conceded, “instead of mapping it out,” as a zoning plan would do, the new bureaucracy — with nine regional advisory committees reporting to the National Ocean Council — would attempt to work out how shipping, commercial and recreational fishing, recreational, aquaculture, mining/drilling and other uses might be fit together, if continued mining and drilling are allowed at all.
“Yes, it’s a kind of zoning,” said one White House official who briefed the Times on the plan Tuesday. “But it does not control a zoning plan — it’s hard to describe.”
The Executive Order signed by the president Monday said he was providing for the “development of coastal and marine spatial plans that build upon and improve existing federal, state, tribal and regional decision-making and planning processes.”
The eight ocean regions of NOAA Fisheries plus the Great Lakes as a ninth will be organized into regions over which newly established bodies of federal, state and tribal officials preside to debate and decide recommended marine spatial plans.
It is intended that each region has its own unique set of values and uses for the seas — inland or off-shore. But those plans must pass muster for compatibility with the federal policies at the National Ocean Council.
Environmental groups have applauded the executive order, but recreational and commercial fishing writers have been concerned that political power struggles for spatial planning consideration include commercial interests likely to overpower them.
“This appears to be an attempt by the executive branch to circumvent the established legislative process and enact policy that failed as legislation five years in a row,” said Jim Donofrio, executive director of the Recreational Fishing Alliance.
“In a battle of tradeoffs as between oil and mineral extraction, transportation, recreational use, national security, aquaculture, renewable-energy development and most significantly ‘sustained ecosystem functions and services,'” Washington, D.C., lawyers David Frulla and Shaun Gehan wrote in the March issue of National Fisherman. Among their clients is the New Bedford-based Fisheries Survival Fund.
The president last year assigned the Task Force on Environmental Quality to produce an action plan for marine spatial planning, which since its first public iteration has not changed significantly despite thousands of public comments and dozens of briefings by special interest groups.
The National Ocean Council is set up to include the entire cabinet as well as the NOAA administrator, the head of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, the director of national intelligence, the director of the national science foundation, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the national security, the assistants to the president for homeland security, counter terrorism, domestic policy, energy and climate change and economic policy, as well as a federal government employee designated by the vice president.
The co-chairs of the National Ocean Council — the chair of the council on Environmental Quality and the director of the Office of Science and Technology — may also appoint additional members.
Nancy Sutley presided over the deliberations as chair of the Council of Environmental Quality, while John Holdren was selected from the faculty at Harvard to be the president’s director of science and technology.
Holdren and Lubchenco were given joint confirmation hearings by the Senate Commerce Committee in 2009.
“It’s a bottom-up approach,” said one of the White House staffers.
Richard Gaines can be reached at 978-283-7000, x3464, or rgaines@gloucestertimes.com.
1 Comment until now
Dose the Presidents Ocean Initiative bother to address ballast water? The largest elect legislative voice of the people voted bi- partisan 395-7 in 2008 for the change we needed for ballast water standards. This Military study is just to delay action, as the Coast Guard initially purpose a twenty plus year plan to follow an international organization made up of primarily foreign economic interest.(IMO) Industry is wining the battle on ballast water the same way they always have, with the help of this administration, by a myriad of different state laws and various branches of government in charge of different aspects of the same problem, making it impossible to enforce. This is evident by the tar balls in Lake Pontchartrain. Despite repeated warnings to this administration about ballast water being problematic with ocean development, neither the Coast Guard nor the EPA, bothered to enforce the Clean Water Act, even in this time of disaster in the gulf. One can only wonder how well the Department of Homeland Security is bothering to watch for the real possibility of these systems being used by terrorist. As Americans are without work and a study prepared for congress in Dec 2009 suggesting the cost of foreign imports would rise with federal ballast legislation, our president feels negotiating hidden carbon emission and currency manipulation with a communist country is the way to create jobs. This is evident by his public rift with rep Oberstar on how to create jobs. Rep Oberstar was instrumental in ballast legislation in 2008 that passed, bi-partisan 395-7 in the House, only to be killed by one Senator. Senator Boxer, who the president supports for re-election killed this change, over her ideas about state rights. NY’s governor Patterson who has created laws for ballast water that will affect all Great Lakes States in the presidential election year (2012), was ask by President Obama to step aside during mid-term elections. It will be interesting to see how NY’S next governor will defend the work of Governor Patterson. The president ocean initiative policy, plans to follow internatioal laws and treaties that have traditionally been adhered to, as areas of our oceans are divide for development. The Law of the Sea Treaty has provisions for ballast water, that do not address our nations specific currents and the geographical placement of our natural resources, to insure the safe use of ballast systems with ocean development. New ocean development minerals, oil, fishing, exploration all will release substances that will be moved by these system. New chemical technologies used in ballast systems could interact with yet unknown substances released through development. Will the presidents ocean initiatives plan exclude the shipping lanes used to bring foreign goods into our country from our economic development to help create jobs?
Add your Comment!