here's always been this 'out-of-sight, out-of-mind' thinking about the sea," says Gary Davis, senior scientist at the Channel Islands National Park. "Now we're beginning to understand how people can have devastating effects on marine productivity. We're fragmenting marine habitats to where they're not viable."
I'm meeting with the big, sun-burnished scientist at the park headquarters by the Ventura harbor. Davis is stout, casual, and authoritative, and watching him, I can't help thinking of the skipper on "Gilligan's Island."
The Channel Islands Park, off southern California, is half on land -- five windy, rugged islands -- and half underwater. The most famous of its marine ecosystems are forests of giant kelp, often called underwater rainforests because they shelter so many species. But even though this is a national park, fishing is permitted in most of it. Since 1999 there have been proposals to greatly expand the park's few no-take reserves. While the political process creeps on, however, the fishing continues.
"We're losing species like abalone and rockfish," Davis laments. "The predators and large grazers are being fished out. Then, when you have storms taking out the kelp, you discover it's only in the reserves that the kelp forests consistently recover. Because the red urchins and lobsters, and big sheephead and abalones, are still there, keeping the system in balance."
I'm distracted by the view out his office window. Across the wind-whipped Santa Barbara Channel are the Channel Islands -- where six-foot waves mean there's no way I can scuba-dive Anacapa Island's famous 37-acre reserve today.
I know what I'm missing. I've dived in a few of California's other small cold-water reserves, including Point Lobos, south of Monterey, where I've seen cathedral shafts of sunlight playing through the giant kelp forests. Kelp gardens have an otherworldly, hidden-forest feel. There are translucent stalks and leaves rising above seafloors littered with strawberry anemones, starfish, urchins, and abalones. There are big, spiny, bug-eyed rockfish, so ugly they're attractive. There are sea otters, seals, and sea lions, sometimes checking you out as if they were acrobatic jocks. On rare occasions, there is a great white shark -- the definitive sign of a productive ecosystem. As naturalist Ed Abbey said: "If there's not something bigger and meaner than you are out there, it's not really a wilderness."
Gary Davis thinks most fishermen and fisherwomen will become converts to reserves once they see the "spillover" effect in action. As large fish and other creatures start to thrive in the protected areas, he explains, they migrate out -- often right to the traps, nets, and hooks of the fishing boats.
A few days later, at the La Jolla Cove reserve some 200 miles to the south, I see what he means. Just past the yellow buoys at the edge of the reserve, the sea is thick with marker floats for lobster traps. Clearly, lobster fishers have noticed that the fishing is good right by the protected zone.
There's plenty of evidence to back them up. The first large-scale study of marine ecological reserves, released at the 2001 annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, found higher densities of fish, larger animals, and greater biodiversity in no-take zones. In Florida, world-record catches of three species of sport fish occurred more frequently near Cape Canaveral (off-limits since 1962 for national security reasons) than in all the rest of the state combined. At Georges Bank, a New England fishing ground closed in 1994 due to catastrophic overfishing, the scallop population has grown fourteen-fold, and haddock, yellowtail flounder, and other species have rebounded.
Interestingly, California's commercial fishing industry hasn't been as vocal in opposing reserves as the state's recreational fishing industry. One reason may be that commercial fishermen and fisherwomen are effectively the top predators in the marine ecosystem. When the prey disappear, they feel it. "We're killing them with our electronics [fish-finding sonar]," one disgruntled fisherman in Bodega Bay tells me. "The fishing grounds are like freeways now, and we're just wiping them out."
"Some of our members say, 'Don't agree to anything,'" says Zeke Grader, president of the Pacific Coast Federation of Fishermen's Associations, a commercial fishing group. "But I tell them that if we do right by the resource, we do right by our industry. If you get fishermen involved, they'll be the ones promoting new reserves and feeling the scientists and others are working for them."
alifornia environmentalists are cautiously optimistic about the fate of the Marine Life Protection Act. NRDC's Karen Garrison has seen even the loudest public meetings "get constructive" when fishermen and fisherwomen, conservationists, and scientists come together in smaller groups to discuss specifics. What's more, other constituencies are becoming more involved.
On a cool December evening, I attend a meeting of San Diego's Council of Divers. Some three dozen burly recreational divers, men and women in denim, wool, and fleece, have gathered to hear a talk on marine reserves by Scripps Institution of Oceanography scientist Paul Dayton. When Dayton shows a slide of a juvenile abalone hiding under a red urchin, the crowd "Awwws" its appreciation. Only divers could find a baby ab cute, I think.
Dayton calls the kelp forests of today "ghost forests," because so many of their inhabitants are missing -- giant black sea bass, big lobsters, moray eels, billfish. He has slides from a few decades ago showing lobsters the size of bulldogs and black sea bass larger than the men who caught them.
"I just don't see why there is such opposition to these reserves," Dayton tells the divers. "In Western Australia, [lobster] fishermen are demanding larger reserves because they're making so much money off the spillover."
One diver wonders whether he will ever be able to collect abs in his lifetime. Another speaks of growing up near beaches that were covered with shells when she was a child -- but are no longer.
After Dayton's presentation, the president of the council (the only diver wearing a sports jacket) stands up. He asks the group's members to voice their opinions to California's Fish and Game Commission. Tell other members to get involved, he says.
These are only three dozen people, but they represent some 1,500 local divers. In turn, San Diego's divers are just a sliver of the far larger, disparate group of ocean enthusiasts I've encountered who support reserves, from Paul Dayton to weekend swimmers. They are becoming a true grassroots political force in the state -- and across the country. I like to call them the Seaweed Rebellion: scientists, surfers, coastal residents, fishermen and fisherwomen, divers, businesspeople, environmentalists, and others, committing to do the right thing for the living seas they love.
The oceans, after all, have given life to our planet. They are the drivers of climate and weather. They give us almost three-fourths of the oxygen we need. Our bodies, like the planet, are 71 percent water; our blood is exactly as salty as the sea. Going to the beach is our number-one outdoor recreational activity.
Giving back a little in the form of marine wilderness would seem the least we could do. Henry David Thoreau wrote, "Heaven is under our feet as well as over our heads.... We need the tonic of wilderness." I'd just amend that to say: Heaven is also under our flippers.
