United Front

Local interests are getting closer to a plan to appease the gods of Marine Life Protection

(Jan. 21, 2010) If anyone can join fishing forces with enviro forces and come up with a communal yell, it’s the North Coast tri-county region of Del Norte, Humboldt and Mendocino. That’s what Betsy Watson says. But, even so, nobody says it’s easy.

Watson, a Humboldt State University sociology professor, is facilitating meetings of a working group that’s trying to come up with a single proposal for marine protected areas to submit to the decision-makers in the Marine Life Protection Act Initiative.

North Coast study region. Courtesy of Peter Nelson

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The MLPAI machine — a public-private thing, under the official auspices of the California Department of Fish and Game with private foundation funding — has been working its way along the California coast, creating a network of reserves in state-governed coastal waters in which to protect a variety of marine ecosystems, as required by the MLPA. It’s stirred up some public resentment along the way, with fishermen and other marine resources collectors, including tribes, feeling disenfranchised in some regions.

News of these hard feelings have reached north, and the Tri-County Working Group was formed to offset potential divisiveness among local interests and unite the locals behind a single proposal. They’re nearing the end, and some players interviewed this week say they believe they will pull off the amazing: one map showing where they’ve agreed marine protected areas ought and ought not to go.

“The task is to try to balance the economics and environmental considerations, which is nothing new to those of us living and working in the Tri-County area,” said Watson on Tuesday by e-mail. “In fact, it is so usual that in this process it seems that we are getting very good at working on this balancing act. … The thing that is working well for us is taking a whole-community perspective. This gives us things like commercial fishing folk insisting that Native traditional activities be respected and Baykeeper and Ocean Conservancy insisting on safety zones for fishing boats.”

The group has met four times and has one more session to go before it has to submit a proposal to the decision-makers. According to some off-the-record reports, the group nearly disintegrated recently, but pulled back together.

One big debate has been over the scientific guidelines for mapping out Marine Protected Areas. In other regions, the MLPAI has used the guidelines established by its Science Advisory Team, which suggest that MPAs should be about nine square miles in size and from 31 to 62 miles apart from each other, in order to best enable species’ larvae to pass from one reserve to the other. Many in the Tri-County Working Group believe the guidelines need to be flexible to accommodate the North Coast’s particular layout, said some players interviewed this week. One participant, Humboldt Bay Harbor, Recreation and Conservation District Commissioner Patrick Higgins, went further, suggesting that the actual science behind the established guidelines is bunk.

“I’m advancing the position that the currents here are different,” said Higgins by phone on Monday. He explained that the currents on the North Coast likely have a different effect on larval dispersal than currents elsewhere, thus bringing into question the spacing guidelines.

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