WASHINGTON DC (12 July 2004) -- They call themselves seaweed rebels, their logo an upraised fistful of the stuff that almost militantly declares the oceans an issue that the United States can no longer handle in half measures. They want to start a movement, a blue movement that they hope will give legs to a suite of recommendations from two recent and dismal ocean commission reports. About 250 seaweed rebels from diverse backgrounds and locales as far away as Hawaii are gathering in Washington this week at the first-ever Blue Vision conference. Founder and "Blue Frontier" author David Helvarg hopes the enthusiasm and determination of the group will spill over to government leaders and the public to launch such a movement. He likened the effort to a green movement 30 years ago that led to an environmental ethic in American society. "First we want the movement," Helvarg said. "Then we want people to give voice to the oceans the way they do for the rain forests. We are much closer to the beach than we are to the rain forests." It's a movement toward the middle, where top-down lawmakers meet bottom-up grassroots ocean advocates during the conference in the hopes that they will find some common ground. That would begin to answer, Helvarg says, the grave concerns that The Pew Oceans Commission a year ago and the U.S. Commission on Ocean Policy in April laid out in two reports. Though the two ocean reports had different origins, they came to strikingly similar conclusions about the decline of America's coastal oceans and the world's oceans in general. The Pew report was a privately funded, nonpartisan effort that looked at living marine resources. The U.S. Commission on Ocean Policy arose out of legislation that mandated a similar study and dealt with other aspects such as military and industry uses of the ocean. The reports talked about clumsy ocean management, polluted coastal waters, dying coral reefs and rapidly declining fish stocks, among a host of other problems. | | Red Sea coral in touble In one example of the decline among fish, "Jaws" author Peter Benchley shared with the group recollections from his boyhood of an ocean thick with sharks. There were so many sharks, fishermen couldn't haul swordfish or tuna onto their boats before they were chewed up. Benchley contrasted that image to one he saw years later off Costa Rica where he encountered a sea bottom carpeted with the carcasses of finned sharks. Finning is the practice of catching a shark, cutting off the fins valued for making soup, and tossing the helpless animal back in the sea. A May 2003 study showed that 90 percent of large oceangoing fish have been fished out of the oceans. And that's in light of the recent realization that keystone species like sharks are important to the overall health of the ocean. Benchley said a major challenge for bringing the change that would lead to a new ocean ethic is educating the public. "We have to try to reach the people who don't think it matters to them," he told a standing-room only crowd. "You are the kick-start to what we hope will be a very successful campaign." SOURCE - Naples Daily News |
