GULF OF MEXICO (Oct. 4, 2003) -- America's sea, the once teeming and vibrant Gulf of Mexico, is gravely sick by any reckoning. Gary Burris, a Gulf fisherman turned environmental documentary filmmaker, is comparing the present Gulf with the one he knew as a fisherman in the 1970s and documented as a filmmaker for CNN in the 1980s. "I'm writing the epitaph," he says of his current work. "We have gone over the edge of sustainability." He says the fishermen who live so intimately with the Gulf, report from up close and in words that are less than scientific that things are bad. Water quality is abysmal. They must work harder for fewer fish, and the habitat for their catch is disappearing at an alarming rate in an industry worth $692 million in 2002. The fishermen were the first to report a mysterious black water event that prompted the Naples Daily News to launch a 15-month look at water quality, industrial pollution, population growth, habitat loss and their effects on the Gulf and the people living along its rim. Jo Ann Allen of Pensacola is among the thousands who live in one of several hot spots for illness around the Gulf, including a region called Cancer Alley. It is the stretch along the Mississippi River between Baton Rouge and New Orleans that is packed with refineries, chemical plants and sick people. Dozens of Superfund sites still dot the Gulf rim, 23 years after the cleanup program began. Ocean dumping still goes on, with Florida officials spraying into the Gulf millions of gallons of a toxic cocktail from a failed phosphate plant near Tampa. Dive shop owner Doc Schweinler in Key Largo has seen the Florida Keys coral reefs reach near-collapse in his lifetime. Schweinler looks down the road to declining reefs in the Florida Keys and declining business to match. Part of what's at stake gulf-wide is a $20 billion annual tourism industry that is growing nervous because of more frequent and intense red tides on every coast. There are also old-timers, aging scientists and others who have seen the destruction firsthand. There are places, as well, that typify a declining Gulf and that stand out in their distress like sores on a sick patient. There is a Dead Zone off the mouth of the Mississippi River that most years is larger than New Jersey or Massachusetts. Its annual summer incarnation suffocates once-abundant life on the sea floor. Because of its size, some consider it the poster child for a declining Gulf. There are many smaller dead zones identified by fishermen and scientists that ring that Gulf and, for at least part of the year, chase sea life to deeper water. Even the most optimistic reports about the Gulf are heavy with words that belie its condition. The problems show up in numbers more starkly: - Compared with 1930, the Gulf has lost 1,500 square miles of salt marshes, 40 percent of which has disappeared since 1984. Other habitat, such as mangrove swamps and sea grass beds, have lost vast amounts of ground to pollution and development, though no one is quite sure how much because no one knows how much was there to begin with. - More than 90 percent of living coral in the Florida Keys has been wiped out. The mere 7 percent left is on America's only barrier reef and clustered in a few places. It is under siege from pollutants whose source is as close as the nearest boat and as far away as the farms in the Ohio Valley that send fertilizer runoff down the Mississippi River to the Gulf. Nearly 40 percent of that coral loss has happened since 1996. - A 16-mile stretch of beach in Texas exemplifies the Gulf's problem with marine debris. Over a four-year study, almost 400,000 pieces of trash were removed from the beach on Padre Island National Seashore. The island is called "the catcher's mitt" of the Gulf because of the way currents carry trash there. - According to Mote Marine Laboratory in Sarasota, red tide hit Florida's west coast in 58 of 152 years between 1844 and 1996. Between 1970 and 1999, red tide was reported every year. - The unknown number of invasive species that enter the Gulf each year through accidental release or discharge from ship ballast water causes concern. The extent of this threat isn't known. The ninth largest of the world's 21 major waters, the Gulf is less understood than even its smaller siblings such as the Persian Gulf and the Black Sea and much less well-known than bigger bodies of water like the Pacific and Atlantic oceans. Evidence of this neglect shows up in the funding, or lack of it, that the Gulf receives. The EPA's Gulf of Mexico Program, a monitoring office patterned after the Chesapeake Bay Program and the Great Lakes Program, gets less money than either of those two, though the Gulf is richer in minerals and sea life than either, and the $20 billion it collects from tourism leaves the other two in the dust. Reflecting this neglect - at least until recently - is the fact that the science community didn't use the term "Gulf of Mexico" in academic papers until the past decade. Before that it was lumped with other water bodies in papers that listed it as "another region/Gulf of Mexico." | | "We don't know very much about how this system operates and what makes it different from an open ocean system," said Tracy Villareal, professor of marine science at the University of Texas in Port Aransas. "There are huge gaps in what we know." What science has learned in recent years is that the Gulf is something of a desert at its center with gyres of water spinning off a loop current that moves north through the Yucatan Channel. Those gyres draw nutrients from the sea floor in open water, moving ecosystems that support all manner of life from plankton to whales and sea birds. Beyond its beaches, diving and fishing, the Gulf offers deep-sea wonders that the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's 2002 Sustainable Seas Expedition recently explored. The expedition found communities of animals deep in the Gulf that live in utter darkness a half mile down and that survive in a food chain based on methane rather than sunlight. Though it is something of a desert in places, there is much left to save from further harm. The Gulf is far from barren. The expedition found black corals unaccustomed to light and wire corals that coil from the sea floor in narrow strands, combing the water for food. It found grouper holes generations old that dot the Gulf plains, also providing habitat for other fish. And there are tilefish that build mounds that other fish use for protection from predators in the open water. With wonders that may be as yet undiscovered, the Gulf is America's sea. Flanked on three sides by the United States, its waters also hit the shores of Cuba and Mexico, where environmental regulations lag behind those of other nations. Along the Gulf's fringes are 3.3 million acres of wetlands, half of the wetlands in the United States, where the vast majority of sea creatures that inhabit the Gulf spend at least part of their lives. Though the Gulf is a mother lode of resources, there is reason for concern. More than a decade after then-President Bush declared 1992 the Year of the Gulf of Mexico, efforts to save America's sea from becoming America's sewer are failing from government cutbacks, lax enforcement and inadequate policies for environmental protection. "It's one of the most important water bodies in the United States," said Cynthia Sarthou, executive director of the New Orleans-based Gulf Restoration Network, a grassroots clearinghouse for local environmental groups battling to save the Gulf. "It's more of America's sea than any other sea, and it's in trouble. It's not in serious trouble because of any one issue. It's in trouble from the death of a thousand cuts." So why isn't everyone who visits the Gulf or who lives around it panicked for a solution? It's a matter of perspective. To someone who only knows the Jersey shore, most Gulf beaches are "pristine." Only they are not. They appear beautiful to these newcomers, but they never knew the original condition. It happens in the Florida Keys all the time. People plunge into the water, see dying coral reefs and think they're gorgeous. The Pew Oceans Commission, in its June 2003 report following a three-year study of the nation's waters, pointed to an astonishing decline in fisheries, habitat and water quality - calling it nothing short of a crisis. It was the first such report since the 1969 Stratton Commission. The bipartisan, 18-member Pew commission recommended that America needs a compass, a chart and wind in its sails for its oceans. That is to say an ocean ethic, a policy that works and the public behind it. More specifically, they recommended that the United States develop a new national ocean policy and regional councils to oversee new ocean policy. As well, they called for a new independent oceans agency to coordinate the ocean policy on a national scale among various agencies in operation now. The commission also recommended the establishment of marine reserves, thought by many to be the last hope for fish and aquatic life from the ravages of overfishing and pollution. Rick Trout, lead rescuer and founder of the Marine Mammal Conservancy, said it's been a record year for him and his group, and that's a telling symptom of a sick Gulf. "The food source, the water supply and sometimes even the air that these animals are breathing is not as healthy as it used to be," he said. "These animals are an absolute indicator that the health of the oceans is something we need to be concerned about." Panhandle fisherman Dewey Destin sees the Gulf's decline as just desserts for an ungrateful America. "It's kind of poetic justice, I guess," he said. "Humans are screwing up what they came here for." SOURCE - Naples Daily Times |
