Stellwagen: The Making and Unmaking of a National Marine Sanctuary

13: Vision and Goals

Chapter 13 vision and goals A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community . It is wrong when it tends otherwise. —Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac, 1949 Compatible with what? This is a question the sanctuary has been asking itself since its creation. Congress did not provide much guidance when it comes to determining what activities are compatible with Stellwagen Bank’s sanctuary status, a criticism that applies to one extent or another to the entire sanctuary system. Instead of adopting a methodology for determining compatibility as the Department of the Interior has for the National Wildlife Refuge System, the National Marine Sanctuary Program has dealt with unanticipated uses or threats to sanctuaries on a case-by-case basis. Some might prefer to call it crisis management, with the outcome invariably compromising the purposes for which the sanctuary was first created. The Prime Directive The Sanctuaries Act, written twenty years ago, states only that the Secretary of Commerce is “to facilitate to the extent compatible with the primary objective of resource protection, all public and private uses of the resources of these marine areas not prohibited pursuant to other authorities.”1 And while the mission of the Stellwagen Bank sanctuary found in the Oceans Act of 1992 (“to ensure the protection and management of the conservation, recreational, ecological, historical, research, educational or esthetic resources and qualities of the area”) reemphasizes resource protection, it offers little guidance on how this should be carried out.2 Judging from some of the actions and 134 S T  r T I N g O v E r inactions of the sanctuary over its first fifteen years, resource protection has been carried out more as a balancing act than as a prime directive consonant with a clear vision of what the sanctuary ought to be. The only use of the term “multiple use” in the Sanctuaries Act is in Section 1445A(b) in reference to advisory council members being persons “interested in the protection and multiple use management of sanctuary resources.” But the mandate to “facilitate . . . all public and private uses . . . not prohibited pursuant to other authorities” sounds very much like the language in the Multiple Use Act of 1960 that gave official sanction to the principle of multiple use on national forests, stating: “The Secretary of Agriculture is authorized and directed to develop and administer the renewable surface resources of the national forests for multiple use and sustained yield of the several products and services obtained therefrom.”3 Four years later, in the Multiple Use Reclassification Act, which applies to lands administered by the Bureau of Land Management (BLM), Congress defined multiple use to mean “the management of the various surface and subsurface resources so that they are utilized in the combination that will best meet the present and future needs of the American people.”4 Implied in this definition is the principle of sustained yield, but throughout the 1960s and 1970s, land managers either felt they had license to authorize uses far in excess of what the land could bear or succumbed to the pressures of leaseholders and their congressional allies. In response to public outcry over what often was often called “multiple abuse,” millions of acres of public land eventually were reclassified as primitive and wilderness areas. Tension continues over public land management policies to this day, although a gradual adoption of a more holistic approach to management issues has begun to take effect, as a new generation of land managers educated in the principles of conservation biology has risen through the ranks. Still, it is hard not to draw comparisons between the Forest Service and BLM of a generation ago with the national marine sanctuary program of today. Despite general dissatisfaction over the sanctuary’s failure to fulfill its conservation mission and occasional threats by some commercial users to de-list it, the Gerry E. Studds Stellwagen Bank National Marine Sanctuary survives. It survived the political strife of the Gingrich era, during which Gerry Studds wasstrippedofthechairmanshipoftheMerchantMarineandFisheriesCommittee , and a concerted effort was made to repeal or weaken key provisions of the Endangered Species and Marine Mammal Protection Acts. It survived the vision and goals 135 anti-environmentalism and stupor of the Bush administration. And, despite the numerous shortcomings of the 2008 draft management plan, a vision of the sanctuary not unlike the one Gerry Studds first espoused is beginning to...