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Foreword Rachel Carson once observed that, “The human race is challenged more than ever before to demonstrate our mastery—not over nature but of ourselves .” Fifty years later, it is clear that we have failed to meet that challenge with respect to the marine environment. Our oceans are in trouble. Evidence of this sad truth can be found on the ocean bottom, in the diminished number of once-storied fish stocks, in the uncertainties faced by those who make their living from, live near, or otherwise enjoy coastal and ocean resources. We have shifted, irrevocably, from the luxury of treating the ocean as vast and limitless to the hard reality that we must restrain ourselves if we hope to continue to use the attractive array of goods, services, and intangible “quality of life” benefits that coastal and ocean environments provide. The situation we are in is not surprising or unusual. For generations we humans have maintained a predictable relationship with the natural world. We discover, explore, utilize, exploit, divvy up, and partition. More people want more natural resources and develop increasingly sophisticated ways to access and process those resources. The result is strained and depleted ecosystems , direct contact between previously isolated users, and an accompanying ratcheting up of law and management to divide the shrinking pie and resolve conflicts. Today, the expectations of abundant ocean resources, unrestricted activity , and limited government are being replaced. Just as we no longer traverse the American West in horse-drawn wagon trains observing herds of wild buffalo , we no longer fish from sail-powered boats nor witness the abundance of marine life that was one of the signature features of the New World. We now struggle to protect endangered marine mammals while developing more seafood for a hungry world. We also want renewable energy from the ocean. But we still lack basic information about what lies beneath the surface and how marine ecosystems function, while facing the urgent reality that climate change will further stress these already vulnerable systems. The issues we face today demand a strong legal and management response. viii Foreword However, ocean law and policy are in many ways playing “catch up” to the demand for more intensive management. The laws governing ocean activities are fractured among different agencies with different mandates. Among the current smorgasbord of ocean-related laws is one that sounds deceptively simple: the National Marine Sanctuaries Act. Whenever I talk with people about National Marine Sanctuaries, they almost always assume that these places are fully protected marine equivalents of terrestrial wilderness areas, with little human activity or resource exploitation allowed. This is a logical conclusion, based on our understanding that a “sanctuary” is a place of refuge, as well as our collective experience with land-based parks or wilderness areas, where human use is regulated according to a site’s unique set of qualities and sensitivities. Regardless of their level of understanding about the ocean, people are surprised to learn that National Marine Sanctuaries are not marine wilderness areas and they are not uniformly managed, with some Sanctuaries providing very little protection to resources within their boundaries and others providing much more. Like many pieces of legislation, the Sanctuaries Act contains ambivalent or apparently contradictory language. Legislation is often drafted in attempts to please many constituents and win passage, ultimately posing more questions than providing answers. The burden of interpretation is then on administrators , who are vulnerable to both internal and external politics, and interest groups, which expend great energy in attempting to influence outcomes . When significant energy goes into arguing about what a law ought to be instead of actually applying it to resource management issues, citizens become confused, frustrated, and ambivalent, and managers become preoccupied with defending themselves. This has been the situation at the Gerry E. Studds Stellwagen Bank National Marine Sanctuary. Application of the Sanctuaries Act is growing increasingly important, as we confront the truth that the ocean is no longer an endless expanse, and is in fact getting increasingly crowded. So we begin exercises in oceanic line-drawing, identifying which places are open or closed or somewhere in between, who’s in and who’s out, which activities are allowed and which are prohibited. In fact, the Sanctuaries Act provides important guidance for just such line-drawing or zoning exercises. We have seen the Act applied at the Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary and the Channel Islands National Marine Sanctuary, where areas with varied levels of protection, including “notake ” zones, were successfully...

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