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Keysnews.com           April 25, 2004

Steps to save our oceans should reflect lessons learned

In the Florida Keys, we have always been sustained by the sea. For nearly two centuries, people here have built their lives around salvaging shipwrecks, fishing, sponging, shipping or, these days, tourism.

The sea brings us bounty, both in economic terms and in ways more difficult to quantify but perhaps even more important.

Whether your love for the sea is based on fishing, diving, sailing or simply gazing at our endlessly variable waters, your life as a Keys resident is improved by our incomparable location, dangling off the Florida peninsula between the mighty Atlantic and the encircling Gulf, with mainland America's only living coral reef running alongside.

We are not alone in our love for the ocean. While counties along the U.S. coastline make up only 17 percent of the nation's landmass, they contain more than 53 percent of the population, according to a comprehensive new report just released by the U.S. Commission on Ocean Policy. The report also cites predictions of an additional 3,600 people moving to coastal counties every day, with an expected total population of 165 million by 2015. And those figures don't include the 180 million who already visit the coast each year.

The U.S. Commission report arrived this week at the desks of governors of America's coastal states. Those governors have one month to respond before the report is forwarded to the Congress and, ultimately, the President. It is the first comprehensive government review of U.S. ocean policy in more than 30 years. The last one, completed in the 1960s, resulted in the formation of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the system of fishery management we know today.

Many of those who know the ocean best — especially longtime fishermen and scientists — have been saying for years that our oceans are in trouble. Overfishing, overdevelopment and increasing pollution from cities and farms are devastating our ocean wildlife and causing the collapse of ocean ecosystems.

If you're so inclined, you can wade through the scientific studies or read news reports summarizing their results. You can also look at the old photos on the walls of our local restaurants, talk to old-timers about the former abundance of fish, lobster, and conch. You can ask people who learned to dive in scuba's early days about their first impressions of Sand Key or Looe Key or John Pennekamp State Park.

The damage has been going on for a long time, locally and around the nation. It's too easy to look at the flat surface of the ocean and imagine an infinite world underneath that we couldn't possibly be harming. Because we can't see where the fish live, breed and swim, we don't realize the effect that removing them by the boatload has on the complex and interrelated world they inhabit.

And as the coastal population numbers cited above show, there are simply more of us. The Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary has 600 reported boat groundings every year. More than 3 million people visit the Keys each year, each adding to the pressure on the oceans whether through direct interaction, or in ways that are harder to see but are still all too real, such as the wastewater and stormwater that have been shown scientifically to be polluting our nearshore waters.

Fortunately, workable solutions are available if our leaders have the political will to implement them. In the Florida Keys, we have good reason to be proud as national leaders in an ecosystem approach to the ocean. Our national marine sanctuary was the first to have a zoning plan and a water quality protection program. The Tortugas Ecological Reserve is a significant achievement that both Gov. Jeb Bush and his brother, President George W. Bush, have praised in the last week. And at long last we are tackling our wastewater treatment problems — slowly and with many painful mistakes, but tackling them nonetheless.

At Oceans Day in Tallahassee last week, Gov. Bush outlined some plans for improving ocean conservation in Florida. They are good moves, but as the Tortugas proved, we can do better and apply real protection to irreplaceable ocean assets. The governor's comments on the U.S. Oceans Commission report should reflect the lessons we've learned in the Keys and map out some ways to apply them to other areas of this great ocean state. Florida's future inhabitants deserve a chance to see and enjoy the wondrous life-filled inlets, bays, estuaries, mangrove shorelines and coral reefs that surround the state and sustain us economically, even as they bring meaning to our lives.