A beacon of hope for an ocean birthright: the once astounding numbers and diversity of marine creatures in the Gulf of Maine have been sadly diminished. One hope for restoring at least a semblance of what was is the creation of marine protected areas and reserves. (Cover Story).

Three hundred and ninety-four years ago, the crew of a small English ship returned from a summer spent exploring the Gulf of Maine, to report the discovery of fishing resources the likes of which it had never seen. In every harbor, crew members caught their fill of cod, haddock, and plaice, and found "that all fish, of what kinde soever we tooke, were well fed, fat, and sweet in taste." Lobsters "very great" could be collected from the shore, or gaffed from a small boat. Salmon choked the rivers, mussels covered the shores, and whales were seen everywhere.

Becalmed out of sight of land, a bored sailor tossed out a line and began hauling up five-foot long cod, one right after the other, as fast as he could get another hook to the bottom. Soon the whole crew was scrambling to haul up these "exceedingly great and well fed cod." One of the mates attached two hooks to a line and pulled up 10 fish in half as many tries, while others pulled up great fish that had snagged their tails or bellies on the hooks as they swam by. When the wind came up, Captain George Waymouth gave the order to set sail for England, but the other officers begged him "to suffer to take fish a while, because we were so delighted to see them catch so great fish."

Today those fish are gone, and the Gulf of Maine's bounty has been radically depleted.

You've probably heard the fisheries story by now. As boats and fishing technology have improved over the centuries, one species after another has been decimated, particularly in recent decades. New England's commercial haddock catch fell from 60,726 metric tons in 1965 to a mere 3,131 in 1999, a drop of 94.8%. The halibut catch fell by 92.3% during this period, the cod by 40%. Parts of Georges Bank have been closed since 1994, in an attempt to spark a recovery of these and other groundfish species. Fishermen started targeting previously undesirable species -- dogfish, wolffish, sea urchins, and juvenile eels -- only to see their numbers crash as well. Today, approximately two-thirds of all federally managed fish species in the Gulf of Maine are officially considered overfished, with another 25% "fully exploited."

An Ecological Crisis in the Gulf of Maine

And the decline of commercial fish stocks is but one symptom of a serious ecological crisis in the Gulf of Maine. Stresses from a wide range of human activities are eroding the Gulf's ability to sustain complex living communities. Farmers and developers have filled in salt marshes that are the nursery habitat for countless marine creatures. Open-ocean salmon aquaculture pens pollute bays with excessive amounts of fish feces and uneaten food. Ships collide with endangered right whales, while sewage and industrial pollutants have closed once-productive clam flats. Worst of all, fishing trawlers are clearly destroying critical bottom habitat over vast areas of the Gulf sea floor.

"Our ability to exploit the marine environment has way outstripped our ability to regulate and protect it," says Callum Roberts, Senior Lecturer in the Environment Department at York, England's University of York. "It's inevitable that once we developed methods to reach further and further into the sea, we would have to extend the regulatory framework we have on land to the sea."

Roberts is one of many scientists who believe that humans need to start regulating and protecting, not just individual species or fish stocks, but entire marine habitats, from the worms in the bottom muck to the corals, boulder fields, and kelp meadows that shelter fish, crabs, and other creatures.

The experience of other countries has shown that establishing a network of Marine Protected Areas can play a critical role in protecting the health and diversity of larger marine ecosystems. The Conservation Law Foundation, the World Wildlife Fund of Canada, and other organizations believe it's time to establish a strong, extensive network in the Gulf of Maine.

"It's remarkable how little attention has been paid to marine biodiversity and habitat," says Priscilla M. Brooks, Ph.D., CLF's fisheries economist, and director of its Marine Resources Project. "We have many types of protection on land -- wilderness areas, national parks, wildlife sanctuaries, or national forests -- but next to nothing at sea."

Like comparable areas ashore, protected areas can come in many types and sizes, from special areas that are off-limits to all activities, to places zoned for industrial use. Some protect an acre or less of especially beautiful coral, or a historically significant shipwreck. Australia's Great Barrier Reef Marine Park stretches for more than 135,000 square miles. Belize's Hol Chan Marine Reserve welcomes divers, snorkelers, and scientists, but is closed to fishing, dredging, and dumping. New England's own Stellwagen Bank National Marine Sanctuary is open to fishing, and its authorizing legislation specifically prohibits only one activity -- sand and gravel mining.

These varied types of protected areas, each using its own terminology, have generated a lot of confusion among politicians, scientists, policy specialists, and the general public. "We haven't had clear definitions of what we are talking about," says Vivian Newman, a Maine-based Sierra Club volunteer who is active in marine habitat issues. "That's led to a lot of confusion and hostility on the part of fishermen, because they assume that all of this is going to be closed to fishing."

Protected areas might utilize the sort of zoning practices used on land. One area might be zoned for aquaculture operations, another for oil drilling and compatible fishing, a third opened and closed to bottom trawling, in multi-year cycles, to allow any one area to recover. There might be an area where a certain set of activities is prohibited at certain times of the year, to protect an endangered species, or the breeding of a threatened fish stock.

"What you zone for is going to depend on what you are trying to protect," says Anthony Chatwin, staff scientist at CLF's Boston advocacy center. "Some [areas] will be there to protect marine biodiversity, others purely for fisheries management purposes, but they will be comprehensively put together."

Fully-Protected Marine Reserves

But experts say that some areas must be designated as a variant of protected areas -- fully-protected Marine Reserves, places that are permanently closed to all activities apart from scientific research and monitoring.

"Setting aside such reserves may be the best way to protect habitat," says Edward D. Houde, a University of Maryland fisheries scientist, and lead author of a recent National Resources Council report supporting reserves. "If you want to maintain the structure and function of marine ecosystems, you have to protect against draggers, dragging anchors, oil spills, and bycatch (the unintended, often fatal capture of juvenile or non-target species in fishing gear)," he says.

There are clear scientific benefits, as well, to establishing reserves. Since, on average, every square inch of the Gulf of Maine is dragged over by fishing gear every year, researchers have nowhere to study what an undisturbed area looks like. (On Georges Bank, prior to the imposition of year-round closures in 1994, any given point on the bottom was disturbed by fishing gear an average of three or four times annually.) With no "natural" areas preserved for study, researchers find it difficult to understand the effects of human activities in the Gulf, or to understand the basic ecological relationships at work there.

"Reserves would provide us with baseline areas and control areas in the ocean to allow us to better understand marine processes," says Chatwin. "Currently there are no such sites."

Bill Ballantine, a marine biologist at the University of Auckland's Leigh Marine Laboratory in New Zealand, and one of the world's leading advocates of reserves, makes a simpler argument. "If you ask people under the age of 17 whether or not there should be a place in the sea where it can just do its thing, first they are surprised by the obviousness of the question. Then they are shocked to learn that there aren't any such places."

Actually, there are a few. A short walk from Ballantine's office on New Zealand's North Island takes one to the Goat Island Marine Reserve. A four-square-kilometer site between a small beach and a nearby island, the reserve was set up at the urging of Leigh Lab scientists 25 years ago. The scientists needed an undisturbed place to do research, but it took them more than a decade of lobbying to get the reserve established, largely because of the opposition of fishermen.

Today, many Leigh-area fishermen support the reserve because they say it has had a spillover effect, improving their catches in surrounding areas. Since the reserve was founded, in 1977, there has been a 50% increase in overall ecological productivity within its boundaries. Over time, the growing stock of large fish began grazing down sea urchin populations which, in turn, allowed seaweed and kelp meadows to rebound; the latter are key habitat for fish and other species, so the overall system has been reinforced. The reserve, which is open for light recreation, annually attracts 200,000 visitors who rent wetsuits and snorkeling gear to see the marine life.

New Zealand now has 16 no-take reserves, encompassing less than one percent of its territorial waters. The government's goal is to increase that network to cover at least ten percent of the country's shoreline by the end of this decade.

"Right now it's like we have a few oases in a desert," says Ballantine, who cites the fact that there are 25 or 30 times as many crayfish and rock lobster inside the Goat Island reserve as there are outside. "If we had an intelligent system, a proper network, then there wouldn't be a great difference between what's inside and out."

The campaign to create a network of reserves and protected areas in the Gulf of Maine also started with scientific researchers' desire to secure undisturbed "control" areas for research.

The Recovery of Georges Bank

In 1994, federal fisheries authorities closed large areas of Georges Bank to ground fishing, following the rapid decline of cod and other groundfish. Since then, researchers have been documenting the recovery of the ecosystem, including record numbers of scallops. Since it can take decades for an area to recover from overfishing and damage from bottom trawls, many scientists would like to make the closures permanent on some parts of Georges Bank. This would allow them to study long-term ecosystem recovery and eventually provide a control area to compare with unprotected areas. By protecting aggregations of juvenile or breeding fish, closed areas may also improve fisheries landings in other areas.

"Portions of those areas that have been closed need to stay closed," says CLF's Brooks, who last year co-authored The Wild Sea, a report that makes the case for marine protected areas in the Gulf. "This is a step we can take right away, one that will give researchers the ability to look at the impact of human activities on bottom habitat."

CLF would ultimately like to see the establishment of a network of reserves and protected areas in the Gulf of Maine, to protect biodiversity, and improve the resilience of the Gulf's ecosystem. The organization has been working with the World Wildlife Fund of Canada to create a detailed "seascape map" of the entire Gulf. This electronic database will combine the best available information on the physical, oceanographic, and ecological characteristics of the 36,000-square-mile Gulf, along with information on shipping lanes, fisheries closures, and other socioeconomic features. When completed, in 2002, the seascape map is intended to provide an informed basis for designating new protected areas.

"Most reserves have been created by local groups, on an ad hoc basis," Brooks says. "We're hoping to be more systematic about it, by providing a sound scientific basis for the designation of these sites." She says CLF is also working to get new state and federal legislation in place that will allow for the creation of new protected areas.

Creating a systemized network of protected areas may provide a rationale for the hodgepodge of existing protected areas, which are administered by a wide range of government agencies and departments. The Gulf of Maine is home to three National Estuarine Research Reserves, the Stellwagen Bank National Marine Sanctuary, a variety of temporary fisheries closure areas administered by the Commerce Department, and seven coastal national wildlife refuges. It's also the site of a national park, a national seashore administered by agencies of the Interior Department, three National Estuary Program sites run by the Environmental Protection Agency, a Canadian national park, and a variety of state and provincial parks and seabird sanctuaries.

"What we do is manage habitat to protect endangered wildlife," says Ward Feurt, manager of the Rachel Carson National Wildlife Refuge, 7,500 acres of salt marsh and tidal flats spread between Kittery and Cape Elizabeth in southern Maine. "But as soon as we get our feet wet we have these blinders on: we're completely ignoring the Gulf of Maine." U.S. Fish and Wildlife refuges in Maine control the ocean bottom down to the low water mark, plus key habitat where many commercial fish species spend a portion of their lives. But they aren't part of a coordinated plan addressing the larger-scale problems of the Gulf.

Creating a network of protected areas isn't easy. Along most of the Gulf of Maine, municipalities control salt marshes and shorelines. Near-shore areas fall under the jurisdiction of Maine, New Hampshire, and Massachusetts, while offshore and Canadian waters are administered by federal authorities in Washington or Ottawa. In many places, enabling legislation doesn't exist.

The Fears of Fishermen

While many fishermen cautiously support the idea of protected areas, they're the cause of considerable anxiety in an already beleaguered industry. "There are no science-based objections to protected areas that fishermen helped create," says Jay Johnson, an attorney who represents recreational and commercial fishermen. "But there's great concern when you start talking about reserves that ban all extractive activities." He worries that environmental groups will have the muscle to push fishermen out of an area, but won't have sufficient leverage to take on oil and gas companies, cruise ships, and other interests.

"Some marine parks can be justified on the same theory as terrestrial parks -- that some particular part of the ocean is so beautiful it shouldn't be destroyed," Johnson says. "But there's going to be resistance to attempts to ban all activities over large stretches of the ocean."

Resistance has grown in some corners following a June announcement by the Washington-based Ocean Conservancy calling for 5% of the nation's territorial waters to be made into no-take reserves. This followed a UN conference in 1997, at which 1,600 marine scientists signed a document calling for 20% of the world's oceans to be protected from exploitation.

The calls for the establishment of reserves raised fears among some fishermen that large areas might be closed arbitrarily, and that conservation advocates were pulling numbers out of their hats. Alaskan fisheries groups and Alaska Senator Frank Murkowski have mobilized against two large reserves proposed for their state. Efforts to permanently close parts of the Gulf of Maine to fishing may also encounter stiff resistance from communities that have fished those grounds for centuries.

"Establishing fully protected reserves is going to be fundamentally a political challenge, not a scientific one," says Peter Shelley, director of CLF's Maine Advocacy Center in Rockland. "You really have to make your case conceptually with the industry groups that are going to get cut out, and on a site-by-site basis."

Shelley tells fishermen that some of the potential reserves will be fairly large and located in highly productive fisheries areas, and that this may cut into some of their potential fish harvests. "We're not trying to gloss over where this is headed," he says. "I don't think it's responsible to say it's going to be win-win for everybody. The country will be asking user groups to give up Something they have in support of the public good. My conviction is that fishermen will benefit from a well-designed system in the long run."

What is clear is that the status quo is failing, and with increasingly severe consequences, not only for the web of life in the Gulf of Maine, but for those who rely on it for sustenance. The Gulf is a unified ecosystem. If we are to restore it, we need to begin managing it as such. Wildlife managers have long known that restoring a given species often boils down to protecting and improving the habitat on which it depends. It's time we start applying those lessons in the Gulf -- to everything that lies beneath the waves.

Colin Woodard is author of Ocean's End: Travels Through Endangered Seas (Basic Books).