Climatide

The 2011 Coastal Communities Conference about coastal and ocean use planning got underway last night with a screening of the documentary Ocean Frontiers: The Dawn of a New Era in Ocean Stewardship. Turns out it was the ‘world premier.’

The film walks through four examples (all success stories) of planning for multiple ocean-based activities using a consensus-building process that involves all interested and/or affected parties. Massachusetts features heavily, with a story of scientists, Boston Harbor port officials, cargo shippers, and liquified natural gas shippers working together to reduce the incidence of ships hitting and killing endangered whales. Other examples came from the Florida Keys, Oregon, and Iowa. Yep. You read that right. Iowa.

Iowa farmers have been working with a consortium of Gulf Coast states to reduce nitrogen and phosphorus from agricultural run-off that eventually makes its way, via the Mississippi River, to the Gulf of Mexico, where it contributes to the ever-growing low-oxygen dead zone there. It was, by far, the most dramatic example of what Joe Famely from Woods Hole Group said was the theme that stood out most to him:

One noteworthy thread that developed through many of the storylines was that to protect their waters, people realized they needed to look to their lands.  Ocean management planning reached well up into the watersheds in order to resolve conflicting uses – from the Redfish Rocks Marine Reserve up to the coastal mountain streams of Oregon, from the fishing grounds of the Mississippi Delta up to the cornfields of Iowa.

While land-sea connections are an undeniable and crucial part of ocean management, the thing that struck me most about the examples in the film was the development of long-lasting trust and respect. People who had participated in one of these stakeholder-driven, collaborative process said they came out of it with a greater feeling of trust and respect for the other parties and would be more willing to work with those parties again in the future. Whale advocates trusting cargo ship pilots, fishermen trusting regulators. In a time when our society is so fragmented and polarized, those are outcomes that, to me, are far greater than any single ocean management plan.