Waterworld

ast winter, the El Nino ocean-induced weather phenomenon turned federal marine experts into media celebrities. D. James Baker, head of the Commerce Department's National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, even turned up on the Larry King Live show.

The United Nations has declared 1998 the International Year of the Ocean, to "focus the attention of the public, governments and decision-makers on the importance of the ocean and marine environment." The White House will host a National Oceans Summit in June.

In February, Baker told a meeting of scientists that NOAA was launching a project called the State of the Coast report to identify problems in coastal and marine ecosystems. He said the 20 agencies that oversee oceans will try to develop a comprehensive research and management policy.

Ocean resources and coastal areas are increasingly important to the U.S. economy, representing directly or indirectly over-fishing, pollution, oil spills, coastal growth and the prospect of rising sea levels. At the same time, new technologies, many resulting from Cold War efforts to track Soviet submarines and recover sunken ships, are making deep-sea mining, oil exploration and even biological prospecting feasible within U.S. waters.

Marine scientists, federal officials and some lawmakers are hoping that the new focus on the seas will bring major changes to the federal government's approach to marine management. Some policy makers are even talking of creating an independent Oceans and Atmosphere Agency in the hopes that it would become a "wet NASA," mobilizing public interest and drawing federal dollars the way the space agency did three decades ago.

Who's in Charge?

The Senate got a jump on ocean fever last year, passing the National Oceans Act, sponsored by Sen. Ernest Hollings, D-S.C., which would create a presidential Commission on Oceans Policy with a two-year charter to study coastal and ocean issues and make policy recommendations. The bill also would create an interagency National Ocean Council to advise the President on marine issues. A companion House bill, co-sponsored by Rep. Sam Farr, D-Calif., and Rep. Jim Saxton, R-N.J., has strong backing among both Democrats and Republicans.

In proposing his legislation, Hollings pointed out that it has been almost 30 years since the last presidentially commissioned broad-based review of this nation's relationship with the oceans. That review, headed by Ford Foundation chairman and former Massachusetts Institute of Technology President Julius A. Stratton, is legend in the oceans community, as it led to the creation of NOAA in 1970 and the enactment of the 1972 Coastal Zone Management Act.

The Stratton Commission strongly advocated consolidating and elevating oceanic research efforts. But today it's still not clear who's in charge of those efforts. NOAA, the National Science Foundation, the Navy and the Interior Department's U.S. Geological Survey share oceanographic research and mapping duties. The Coast Guard has a number of interdiction, enforcement, patrol and scientific responsibilities. The Army Corps of Engineers has a hand in near-coastal navigation. The Environmental Protection Agency has a primary role in protecting estuaries. The Interior Department's Minerals Management Service regulates offshore mineral, oil and gas development. And the State Department holds sway over international issues, such as adherence to the still unratified Law of the Sea Treaty.

"There are a lot of disjointed agencies operating out there who are not cooperating with each other," says Roger McManus, president of the Center for Marine Conservation. "There is fundamentally a bunch of little fiefdoms out there."

In one example of the turf wars, a dispute between NOAA and the White House Council on Environmental Quality, on one hand, and the State and Defense departments, on the other, over who would have greater influence in the proposed National Ocean Council reportedly held up action last year on the Hollings bill. Ultimately a provision designating the Commerce Secretary as the council's chair was dropped from the bill.

"The Navy has gone way overboard in claiming jurisdiction on these issues," argues McManus. "It is comparable to the Air Force saying they should be in control of civilian air traffic instead of the [Federal Aviation Administration] and clean air enforcement instead of EPA."

Expanding U.S. Territory

Adding to the complexity of the intergovernmental relations issue is the fact that under U.S. law, coastal states control the three nautical miles that extend from the shoreline into the sea, and the federal government takes jurisdiction from that point on to a boundary 200 nautical miles from shore. The federal boundary came into existence in March 1983, when President Reagan signed a proclamation declaring that the United States would adopt an "exclusive economic zone" extending into the seas beyond their coasts.

Reagan acted to assert U.S. sovereign rights over the fisheries, minerals and other potential wealth of the seas in the face of potential exploitation by foreign fleets. He also effectively doubled the size of the United States, an act potentially as important as the Louisiana Purchase. Robert Ballard, who discovered the wreck of the Titanic, certainly thinks so. "We are in the Lewis and Clark phase of undersea exploration," Ballard said in recent CBS News interview.

NOAA's Baker, whose office is filled with paintings of famous oceanographic vessels from years gone by, agrees. Pointing to the unexpected discovery of deep sea volcanic vents that are teeming with life forms, Baker said, "They are a great example of what you can find if you have a device that actually scoots along the ocean floor and looks for things, as opposed to [examining] a fixed habitat."

"This issue of how you protect [habitats] and what's going to happen is really important," Baker says. "In fact, the mining of organic materials from deep sea vents may be the next big thing in deep sea mining. It may be where you really find new kinds of compounds for drugs, new ways of looking at chemistry."

The federal government isn't prepared for such a situation, argues the Center for Marine Conservation's McManus. "There is no regulatory regime for harvesting pharmaceuticals from the sea and protecting the habitats they come from," he says. "Right now someone could scoop up as many invertebrates as they wanted in the Gulf of Mexico to find out what is out there, and no agency would have any say over it."

Such issues wouldn't have come to the fore if it were not for decades of unpublicized Navy ocean research designed to guarantee that we maintained an advantage over the Soviet Union on-and underneath-the seas.

Retired Adm. James Watkins, a former Secretary of Energy who now heads up the Consortium for Oceanic Research and Education, says these efforts "helped win the Cold War, because the Soviet Union could not match our ocean research. It was that vital."

But the end of the Cold War changed everything, Watkins says. "In the early 1980s oceans sciences represented 7 percent of the total federal basic research budget. Today it's down to 3.5 percent," and yet with the end of the Cold War, we are finding now that research in the oceans is every bit as important to mankind as it was in the contest between the two super-powers.

One effort to address that situation is the National Ocean Partnership Act of 1996, sponsored by Rep. Curt Weldon, R-Pa., chairman of the House National Security Subcommittee on Military Research and Development. The objective of the legislation is to establish formal coordinating and leveraging mechanisms for U.S. federal, private sector and academic oceanographic research efforts. In last year's Defense bill, $7.5 million was funneled into the National Oceanography Partnership Program to allow Navy contracting with the University National Oceanographic Laboratory System to help reduce a backlog in obtaining oceanographic survey data. For fiscal 1999, the President is requesting $10 million for the partnership program.

"I found out in my committee work that there were nine separate agencies doing work on the oceans and none of these agencies were coordinating their work," Weldon says. "I thought, 'Why don't we provide some coordination in what they are doing and encourage partnerships between the agencies and the academic community?' "

Ocean Commerce Issues

As the government's ocean agencies begin to work more closely together, they face a series of ongoing challenges.

First of all, even in this era of pinpoint satellite-aided surface navigation, NOAA has significant catching up to do in providing users with accurate maps of the ocean's bottom. "We are probably about 50 years behind in mapping," Baker acknowledges. "As marine transport increases, you have a move towards bigger and bigger ships. And bigger ships hang lower in the water. . . . So we are trying to map all around the U.S. in the critical areas where the actual transport is and where the ships tend to sit."

In the fiscal 1998 budget, Congress gave NOAA $14 million for additional work in measuring the shape of the ocean bottom. But Baker says that even with improved sonar equipment, it will probably take 20 to 30 years to get all the areas critical to shippers surveyed.

Related to the mapping issue is the state of American ports. Charles Bookman of the H. John Heinz III Center for Science, Economics and the Environment, located in Washington, who is conducting a series of Year of the Oceans policy studies, says there is a huge need for modernizing our port infrastructure. A ship that sails into Singapore, he notes, enters a completely integrated traffic management system after scheduling its arrival days in advance. In the United States, on the other hand, Bookman says, "our ports are shallow-the channels, the depths, the dimensions are not in keeping with latest generational vessels. The land-side access to the intermodal rail and highway system needs lots of attention."

Another longtime marine management issue is management of America's coastal fisheries. The predecessor of NOAA's National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS), the U.S. Commission on Fish and Fisheries, was created in 1871 to deal with declining fish stocks. Today, nearly one-third of marine species in U.S. waters are still designated as "over-fished" or approaching an over-fished condition. Last Dec. 31, Commerce Secretary William Daley, acting to halt an ominous decline in cod, ocean perch, rockfish and other popular species on the Pacific Coast, slashed catch limits on eight commercially valuable species by as much as 65 percent.

Regional fishery management councils set up under a 1976 law proved unable to protect domestic fisheries, so revisions to the law two years ago required councils in over-fished areas to come up with management plans to restore fish populations to sustainable levels.

The process is working, Baker argues. In Alaska, he says, a council has "put together a plan where every day the commercial fishermen call in and say, 'Are we doing OK? What should we be doing?' And NMFS will say 'Slow down, speed up' or whatever, and they work very well together." But Hollings says disgruntled fishermen tell him they now "need a law degree to go fishing."

Baker says fisheries face several other problems besides over-fishing. The Chesapeake Bay, for example, is threatened by air pollution deposits and waste from agricultural operations. These wastes are possible sources of pfiesteria piscicida, the "cell from hell" that has killed millions of fish and caused illnesses in fishermen on the East Coast. Agricultural runoff from farms in the Mississippi River watershed is also blamed for a "dead zone" filled with oxygen-consuming algae in the Gulf of Mexico.

Baker argues that the pressing need to deal with these and other inland sources of ocean problems underscores how a reorganization of the government's ocean agencies may not in itself solve all the ills of the seas. "I wouldn't see restructuring as the highest priority" for a new presidential commission on oceans, he says.

A 'Wet NASA'

Whether or not such a commission undertakes to reorganize the federal marine management structure, many ocean experts think it would serve to raise the visibility of ocean issues.

"NOAA is probably one of the lesser-known government entities," Rep. Farr says. "If you ask members of Congress what department it is in, probably nine out of 10 don't know it is in Commerce, and that it has the biggest budget in Commerce."

Weldon says the answer may simply be turning NOAA into an independent agency. "I think NOAA's status would probably be enhanced if it is independent," he says. "NOAA has a much broader objective than just to function as a part of Commerce."

But others, such as Law of the Sea Treaty negotiator John Moore, who now teaches at the University of Virginia, argue for a broader restructuring of organizational roles. "I have favored the idea of an Oceans and Atmosphere Agency," Moore says. "I could imagine something that brings together NOAA, the Coast Guard and the Maritime Administration, so you would in essence have a real oceans agency. It would not be a small agency. It would be about the size of NASA, if not larger. I think the Navy oceanography department is different in that you have to have within the Navy its own oceanography capability, and I would also not move over the Army Corps of Engineers. But I think most of the other oceans functions should be moved over."

McManus strikes a more cautionary note. "What matters during the Year of the Ocean," he says, "is, will they do anything? There have been a number of commissions since Stratton that haven't done anything."

Whatever the outcome of the current debate, Baker is confident NOAA's work will be critically important in the new millennium. "The really exciting thing about the oceans," he says, "is what we don't know about them and what we can find if we give them the right investment."

Edward Goldstein is a Washington freelance writer.