| The Magazine of the CALIFORNIA ACADEMY OF SCIENCES |
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habitats In My Backyard, Yes, But Not MeWhen Ed Cooper and Kevin McDonnell first talked about an underwater park off the coast of Monterey Bay they figured it would be an easy sell to their neighbors. "We thought it was a no brainer," says Cooper, a diver who leads tours in these kelp-forested waters. "Who would object to protecting what makes this area so famous in the first place?" Well, nobody. But then again, everybody. In fact, the proposal for the Edward F. Ricketts Marine Park has caused deeper and more painful divisions in this normally tranquil community than any controversy even the oldest- timers can remember. Former friends are exchanging words, threats, and sometimes even blows. The town papers publish angry letters brimming with accusations and personal attacks, and the city councils of both Monterey and Pacific Grove have found themselves forced to side against constituents who have promised never to forgive them if betrayed. The proposal itself is straightforward enough. Three years ago Cooper and McDonnell, an underwater photographer, suggested turning one-fifth of a square mile of water, running from the Coast Guard jetty in Monterey to Lovers Point in Pacific Grove and extending offshore about 200 yards to a depth of 60 feet, into a park that would be off-limits to all "extractive uses." The creation of this park, they hoped, would allow the fish and invertebrate populations that occupy the famous kelp beds of Monterey Bay to regenerate and flourish as they did in the days when marine biologist Edward "Doc" Ricketts wrote Between Pacific Tides, his classic field guide to the Pacific Coast intertidal zone. Although Monterey Bay's variety of underwater life makes it a great place to dive (it was rated as the best shore diving in the United States by Rodale's Scuba Diving magazine surveys in both 1994 and 1995), many old-timers say that the fish and invertebrate life here today are only a shadow of their glory 60 years ago. Exactly why is still unclear to scientists. But to the proponents of the no-take park proposal, it is sufficient to say that since there are far fewer organisms than there used to be, we should stop removing animals from the area. "The concept is very simple," says Cooper. "It's just like a terrestrial park. Anyone can go there and use it as long as they don't kill or catch the animals or cut down the plants." Two years ago the idea was adopted by the Center for Marine Conservation, a non-profit group headquartered in Washington, D.C., which promotes the creation of marine sanctuaries and refugia, and a formal proposal was floated to the city councils of Monterey and Pacific Grove, which control the areas proposed for the park. That's when the "extractive" users began to come out of the kelp forest, each and every one of them lauding the park concept, but demanding an exception for their particular use. The sport fishermen insist that the number of fish they take is insignificant to the health of the ecosystem. Furthermore, they say, fishing is a wholesome sport that's given generations of locals and visitors a point of connection to the natural world. "Don't make my son a criminal by making fishing illegal," pleaded one father at an April city council hearing. "Believe me, you'd rather have our kids fishing from the pier than hanging around on street corners downtown." The commercial fishermen support the park, too, as long as they aren't asked not to fish it. In fact, they already try hard to keep their nets from getting tangled in the kelp beds, which make up most of the park. Occasionally, however, they do fish for squid in a sandy-bottom area within the proposed park boundaries. Though a provision in the park proposal would forgive squid fishermen if their nets inadvertently wandered across the boundary, they will fight for, or at least complain about, the right to come in after the squid as their forbears did. The kelp harvesters, who row out in skiffs and cut off pieces of the fast growing alga, will lose no sleep if the fishermen have to reel in their lines and nets, but an end to kelp collecting in the proposed park boundaries would be, they claim, both environmentally senseless and, for them, economically catastrophic. Cut kelp goes mostly to feed abalone grown in aquaculture facilities nearby, and therefore kelp harvesting (say the harvesters) is exactly the kind of sustainable, bioregional business the area should encourage. Giant kelp (Macrocystis pyrifera), which sometimes grows to be 200 feet long, is the redwood of the underwater world, except that it grows a lot faster; as many as 14 inches a day. Harvesting the kelp forest ("pruning," the harvesters call it) "helps keep the kelp beds healthy," says Pacific Abalone Farm owner Gary Russell. "If we don't cut it off, it just washes up on the beaches and smells bad." Following this timber-company logic, if not "pruned," the kelp beds are also more likely to be torn out by the storms that hit them in the fall. The Monterey Bay Aquarium supports the idea of the park, too, and agrees wholeheartedly that there should be no "extracting" for the crude motivations of recreation and profit. However, they feel the proposal's no-take provision should have an exception for the kinds of exhibit and scientific collecting they do. The value of the environmental education they promote by displaying the specimens collected in the area far outweighs any damage they might do to the ecosystem, say aquarium spokespeople. A letter by executive director Julie Packard to the Monterey Herald stated that the aquarium would stop collecting fin fish in the area, as long as a waiver in the park regulations allowed them to continue to collect invertebrates. To some of the park proponents, the fin fish concession is not enough. "They're damaging the same environment they are trying to preserve," says dive boat captain Phil Sammet about the Aquarium. "But all you'd need is a picket line on one good weekend to have the news media down here and turn this thing around." Many of the scientists at Hopkins Marine Life Refuge are also enthusiastic about the park. Hopkins, a Stanford University research facility, would be bordered to the north and south by the Ricketts Park, and all killing or collecting of animals is already prohibited there--except for research. They have only one little amendment to the park proposal: the scientific collecting they do in the proposed park boundaries should not, of course, be prohibited. That would be "environmental stupidity," says Charles Baxter, a senior researcher at Hopkins. The research conducted there, some of which goes back to the refuge's creation 66 years ago, establishes important baseline data for monitoring the environmental health of the kelp forest community. Even a completely no-take mandate for the Ricketts Park would not affect collecting within the Hopkins Refuge. But some research projects require access to areas within the Ricketts Park boundaries as well, says Baxter. Indeed, much important biological research has come out of Hopkins, some of it directly relevant to the questions at hand. A recent study of the conservation value of the Hopkins boundaries suggests a greater abundance of fish inside the refuge, and the fish there are significantly larger than those outside the refuge. Bigger fish have a greater reproductive potential than smaller ones. This and other studies at Hopkins, and on reserves elsewhere, show that protected areas probably act as both fish stock protection zones and recruitment sources. So, reserves such as the proposed park could bolster the fish populations beyond the park's boundaries, a substantial consolation to fishermen, should they be locked out of the park. It also suggests that sea lions and seals aren't solely responsible for the fish declines witnessed in the area. Fishermen, defending their right to continue working here, have deflected the blame of diminishing stocks to the recovery of local marine mammals since protective legislation was enacted in 1972. But sea mammals don't recognize the Hopkins boundary, and so that can't explain the difference in the number and size of fish inside the refuge. Fishermen, however, do stay out of Hopkins and so are more likely responsible for the difference. However, none of the "extractive uses" of the kelp beds are necessarily responsible for the overall decline in fish numbers. This may indeed be attributable to the larger number of marine mammals in the area or to other environmental factors such as global climate change. One Hopkins study shows the recent northern migration of some species into the reserve, suggesting that warming oceans may be responsible for population changes as well. Does any Hopkins research specifically address the environmental impact of scientific collecting? "No," says Dave Epel, Associate Director of Hopkins. "But we don't collect enough to make a significant impact. We only take about 20 pounds of organisms per year from Hopkins. One sea otter eats 40 to 60 pounds a day." "Just about everyone wants the park, but no one wants to give up their piece of the action to get it," says McDonnell. "None of these people can see beyond the next bucket of specimens and the next load of fish. That's why it's got to be no-take or nothing. If anyone gets an exception, they get a sweetheart deal and that just wouldn't be fair." And just such a sweetheart deal is what "extractive users" say that divers like McDonnell and Cooper stand to gain from the park. Everybody else is being asked to give up something to create this park, why not the divers, too? Surely they have an impact on the kelp communities. The only conclusive studies on diver-caused habitat damage focus on coral reefs, says Jim Watanabe, a dive instructor and lecturer in kelp forest ecology at Hopkins, but divers certainly knock invertebrates off the rocks, tear seaweed, and disturb fish and other creatures in the kelp beds. "Just because divers aren't killing things directly or removing them doesn't mean they don't have an effect. They do, but just how significant it is we don't know," says Watanabe. "It would be hard to measure." Would the scuba diver proponents of the park proposal consider excluding diving from the park boundaries as a way of making sure no one special interest gets an unfair advantage while others sacrifice? Or perhaps diving could be regulated in the park the way it is in the Point Lobos State Reserve a few miles to the south. "Absolutely not!" says Cooper. "This is a park for people. We don't kill the wildlife in parks, but we don't have parks to save wildlife. We have parks for people. If we were going to suggest a refugia, my God we would never put it here. It would be a waste of this incredible access." It's unclear which constituencies the city officials of Monterey and Pacific Grove will be willing to enrage when they make their decision on the park later this summer. Perhaps they'll follow the example of the federal government which, in 1992, when designating the 5,328-square-mile Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary that encompasses the proposed park, watered down wildlife protection proposals by skirting the question of fisheries regulation altogether. That kind of underwater park California could do without. Or perhaps the legislators will follow the advice of the Center for Marine Conservation and exclude all extractive uses except for research collecting that's necessary for promoting or monitoring the environmental health of the Monterey Bay kelp forest ecosystem. Scientists and fishermen, kelp collectors and aquarists would have to go an extra mile to maintain their operations, but all of them would get used to collecting their "resources" someplace else. The divers would get their sweetheart deal. And however distasteful their self-congratulations might be to some, it is hardly sufficient reason to kill the park proposal. As for the mayors and councilmembers, they might not get voted out of office. But even if they do, what better way to go than by making a permanent and deep investment in their community's core resource, a healthy and productive Monterey Bay? Gordy Slack is Associate Editor of Pacific Discovery. |
summer 1997
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