Stellwagen: The Making and Unmaking of a National Marine Sanctuary

11: The Plan

Chapter 11 The Plan In the opening scene of Samuel Beckett’s famous play Waiting for Godot, a tramp by the name of Estragon is sitting in a wasteland beneath a dying tree trying to remove his boot. He continues to struggle throughout much of the first act while chattering gibberish with his companion Vladimir. At one point he mutters, “Nothing to be done.” Eventually, he succeeds, looks into the boot, and finds nothing. The two men spend two days waiting for someone named Godot who never arrives and may not even exist. The only action in the play is waiting. The metaphysical implication, as one critic put it, is that “the act of waiting is never over . . . nothing is completed because nothing can be completed.”1 It has been sixteen years since Congress created the Stellwagen Bank National Marine Sanctuary and laid out the basic purposes for which it should be protected and managed (see chapter 3). The enabling legislation— which identified the area as being of national significance for its biological productivity, uniqueness, and diversity—specifically prohibited sand and gravel mining, an imminent threat at the time, and identified a number of other activities that might be subject to future regulation. The assumption was that the National Marine Sanctuary Program (NMSP) would take further action to protect the sanctuary once it became organized and was able to set its priorities. That was 1992. The waiting public, like Estragon, has been staring into an empty boot ever since. Management Plan Review (aka, “the Process”) By law, the NMSP is required to review its management plans for each of its thirteen sanctuaries every five years. The first management plan for the SBNMS was issued in July 1993. 112 S T  r T I N g O v E r The first sanctuary manager and one of the authors of the 1993 management plan was Brad Barr, a marine ecologist who had served as the critical areas coordinator for the Massachusetts Office of Coastal Zone Management. Barr’s attempt to start the management plan review process in 1998 was nothing short of a disaster. Advance publicity was meager, notice was short, and the venues were less than ideal; even the weather was foul. One hearing had the misfortune of being held at the Cape Cod Community College in Barnstable during a winter rain storm. Either campus security was not notified in advance or the storm knocked out some of the outdoor lighting leading from the parking lots, but for a half hour some of those who showed up wandered through the darkness looking for the hearing room like mariners lost in the fog. The symbolism was unnerving. The second round of scoping hearings more or less covered the same ground as the hearings that preceded passage of the SBNMS five years earlier . Supporters of the sanctuary generally complained that nothing had been accomplished in the first five years. Opponents, notably a handful of commercial fishermen, used the occasion to debunk the sanctuary idea altogether and to publicly accuse recently retired congressman Studds of reneging on his “promise” not to further burden fishermen with regulation, a relic position of many of the region’s mobile-ear fishermen who view the sanctuary as just another layer of meddlesome bureaucracy.2 Many who attended simply asked, What marine sanctuary? Muchliketheownersofafailingballclub,theNMSPdecidedtoreplacethe manager.Barrwasreassignedtoapositioninheadquartersandalengthysearch beganwithintheNOAAbureaucracyforasuccessor.Unlikeotherestablished serviceagenciesliketheNationalParkService,thesanctuaryprogramdidnot have a large pool of experienced sanctuary staff to draw from. After three tries and some pressure from Representative Bill Delahunt, Gerry Studds’ successor to the 10th Massachusetts congressional district, NOAA hired Craig MacDonald . A native New Englander, MacDonald had been working in Hawaii for the state as manager of ocean resources development. In that capacity, he workedcloselywiththeHawaiianIslandsHumpbackWhaleNationalMarine Sanctuary, which was created at the same time as the Stellwagen Bank sanctuary , and was an author of the state’s ocean resources management plan, at the time one of only two such state ocean policy plans in the nation. By the time MacDonald took over as superintendent in 2000 (the position was upgraded from manager to superintendent to conform to the National The Plan 113 Park Service internal bureaucracy), the sanctuary was nearly eight years old and not a day closer to knowing how it would manage and protect its resources. Rather than drafting a revised management plan based on the public comments collected in 1998, the national program office required Stellwagen to waitwhileitdevelopedastandardizedmanagementplanreviewprocessbased on lessons...