How To Protect The Ocean
SUFB 054: The Need for Marine Planning
Marine Planning allows us to plan all the activities that occur in the ocean. Marine planning is absent in many jurisdictions around the world, which is crazy to think when most counties/municipalities, states/provinces and countries have plans for terrestrial areas, both environmental and business.
Listen to why I think Marine Planning is important and what you can do add more marine plans in your oceans.
Shop for the Ocean:
http://www.speakupforblue.com/shop
10 Ocean Tips to Conserve the Ocean:
http://www.speakupforblue.com/wordpress/sufb_optinpdf
Show Notes:
http://www.speakupforblue.com/session54
>> Welcome to the Speak Up for Blue Podcast, session 54. All right, so this today on the podcast, I'm going to go through a bit of a rant. It's a bit of a rant on something that I've been wanting to do for a while. So stay tuned for this. It's not going to be too angry, but it's going to be more of we need to do this. So listen to today's podcast, it's coming up in just a sec, so just stay tuned. >> Welcome to the Speak Up for Blue Podcast, helping you get involved in ocean conservation. And now here's your host, he shakes his head at politicians, Andrew Lewin. >> Hey everybody, welcome back to another episode of the Speak Up for Blue Podcast, your voice for the ocean. I am your host, Andrew Lewin, founder speakupforblue.com, marine ecologist and self-proclaimed ocean praner. Now that's right, everything I do as an entrepreneur, which I am and I love the fact that I am an entrepreneur, is for the ocean. I am a social entrepreneur, but because I do stuff for the ocean, I guess I am a social ocean praner, is what I, it's the term that I come up for myself because I love to do business and I love to mix business with my passion, which is everything about ocean conservation. Anyway, today on the episode, I am going to talk about planning and in specific marine planning because I don't see it often enough and I think we need it. So I am going to give you sort of a bit of brief breakdown, hopefully my rant is not too long, but a brief breakdown on what we need to do, why we need to do it. It's not going to be very technical, it's going to be more of an overview of what we really need to do and why just because, well, we all know why. However, before we do, I want to ask you a question. Listening to this podcast or reading anything on my website on speakupforblue.com or anything else that you read on the internet or hear from the internet or anywhere else on the radio, do you ever, especially when it comes to the ocean, do you ever feel that big overwhelm of ocean issues where you start to really understand what's happening to the ocean and all of a sudden you're like, holy geez, what am I going to do? How do I protect the ocean when there's all these issues affecting it? What am I supposed to do? I'm just one person. Well, that's what speakupforblue is here to do and I've come up with a specific tool that you can right away have an impact on ocean conservation. This tool is an online shop. It's an online shop for speakupforblue merchandise. Essentially, what we have is I've set up a shop with Spreadshirt.com, a great social enterprise that allows me to put up designs on shirts, iPhone cases, iPhone cases, what else, hats? I don't have hats out yet, no, shoot. But first, I want to ask you a question. Do you ever feel this major overwhelm when you read speakupforblue.com or listen to this podcast and you hear nothing but ocean issues that you have this week? And you're just like, holy cow, what do I do? I want to help so badly, but I'm just one person. What can I do? Well, that's what I'm here to do. I'm here as someone who's traded this whole speakupforblue.com talking about ocean issues, but we also help you implement solution. We tell you about the solutions and we help you implement it. One way is to buy merchandise off our online shop, the Speakup for Blue online shop, which you can get at speakupforblue.com/shop. All you have to do is go to that website, buy merchandise, and right away, you're helping ocean conservation. What we do at this shop is any item you purchase, whether it be a t-shirt, an iPhone case or a phone case, a travel mug or a home mug, whatever you purchase, all the proceeds go to Sea Turtles Forever, our partner, which is a charitable nonprofit organization that helps Sea Turtles and cleans up microplastics from beaches and has a specific tool that does this and helps other state governments and other governments implement this tool as part of their beach cleanup. They have some major, major impacts. I've never seen an organization that's small in terms of the number of people that work for it or volunteer for it and has such a great impact. So I went up to Mark Ward, who's the president of this of Sea Turtles Forever, and I said, "Hey, as part of Speakup for Blue, I want to become a partner, so not only we can help on your projects, but we can help fund you guys so that you can expand your programs, hire people, and expand your programs so that you can have more of an impact." And I wanted to give a chance to the Speakup for Blue community, the community that I've built based on people who want to help out in ocean conservation, to do this kind of stuff, you guys get to do this. So we get to do this together as a community. So all you have to do is go to speakupforblue.com/shop and buy any or every emergency you see there. And you help this, you basically help this organization do what they want to do, what they need to do to protect Sea Turtles and clean up beaches, which, by the way, also protects Sea Turtles and other marine organisms and animals. So go to speakupforblue.com/shop and you can get any merchandise that's on there, it'll get delivered right to your door and you will right away help a ocean conservation organization. So thank you for that. For those of you who are buying and who will buy and who have bought already, I really appreciate it and let me know how you feel about the items in that store. So let's get to today's rant. Yay, it's Thursday. Let's get to today's rant. And this is a rant basically about marine planning. For those of you who don't know me that well, my master's degree was sort of indirectly in marine planning. I was looking at the size and number of marine protected areas that need to be implemented on the Scotian shelf, the Nova Scotian continental shelf and the Bay of Fundy for basically macro invertebrates. Lobster, shrimps, crabs, any kind of invertebrates, so squid, any kind of that's sort of like a larger invertebrate that's actually caught commercially or even just caught as research. And to find out how many we need, how many marine protected we need and where and what size should they be, almost where should they be placed and what size should they be. It was a project that was with World Wildlife Canada that we're looking to implement a network of marine protected areas along the Scotian shelf. So I kind of have a background of networks of marine protected areas. It's something that I love to do. It's something that I'm really interested in and in fact, I'm a vice president on the board of an organization called Pac-Marah, the Pacific Marine Research Analysis, Marine Research and Analysis Association and that's what we do. We actually train people in ocean planning and we help support a community of ocean planners. And it's just, and I want to do this a little bit of a rant because I don't see marine planning done enough and essentially what I mean by marine planning is taking a piece of ocean that people have jurisdiction over so governments would have jurisdiction over. So say like within the 200 nautical mile which is usually the federal limit of where a lot of governments or a lot of countries have jurisdiction. So 200 nautical miles from their shore. And it really just sent out a plan, almost like a business plan or environmental plan or both of how they're going to use the ocean for the next 30 to 100 years, really just for the next long term, five, 10, 15, 20, 30. So that we can really know what's happening with the ocean, where things are occurring, what things should be going where, what our future plans are, what things need to be protected, what things need to don't, and everybody who's involved in using the ocean, so ocean users or stakeholders will have a say and will have a part and will understand other people, the other stakeholders part in the ocean. And the reason why we need to do this is because right now the ocean really is a wild, wild west in many areas. There's really not a lot of planning. There's not a lot of zoning in the marine protection, in the economical zone, where certain things can happen. Certain users can do things. And what I mean users, I mean I'm talking about recreational users, so like boaters, recreational fishermen, scuba divers, snorkelers, surfers, all those guys, all the recreational sides, plus the commercial side. You've got commercial fishing, you've got oil and gas, you've got mining, pipes and stuff like that. All that kind of stuff needs to be planned. There needs to be zones laid out, where certain uses can happen, some in tandem, some in isolation. And then there needs to be plans when those uses, especially human interest uses, go wrong. So the example that I like to take is BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. When that happened, not only did it affect the environment, which is kind of considered a user. So it destroyed a lot of the environment in the area, and it's still destroying it to this day and will for decades. But it almost collapsed, virtually collapsed, many fisheries and many livelihoods of fishermen in that area, that fish in the area, because you can't fish in an oil infected waters. Nobody's going to buy fish from there. The fishermen will never be able to sell anything from there. And of course, they're zoned to specific areas that they can fish. Their quotas are zoned for specific areas that they can fish. So they got affected. Recreational industry got affected. The tourism industry, you're not going to go diving in an oil and fast water. You're not going to go snorkeling in oil and fast water. You're not going to go recreational fishing in that area. You're just not going to be in that area in general. So all the activities that went on in that area were affected. Now, if a marine plan, a proper marine plan, have been put in place, we would have known a lot of the resources that are there. So in terms of environmental resources, we would have had a good monitoring program set up. We would have understood that maintenance of specific actions and maintenance of specific users, such as the oil and gas industry, were very important, such as maintaining pipelines and valves and whatnot in the deep sea horizon, so that maintenance was properly done. Because the reason why this oil spill happened is because maintenance was not properly done. Because one, they didn't really know how to work in those depths that they were in. So they couldn't really maintain anything. Let's be honest here, but they couldn't maintain it. So the parts eventually go to crap and things happen as disastrous as the BP oil spill. So if a proper plan had been put in place, other users could have piped up and said, "Hey, what are you doing for your maintenance? I want to make sure you're doing something proper. What is your plan?" That's all laid out. It's all transparent because it's a government thing. Everybody should be doing their own thing to make sure that everybody can use the ocean, including the species who live in it and depend on it, which we depend on it as well. So certain areas I would like to see rain plants, of course, everywhere in the ocean, the economic zone, the Atlantic coast, the Pacific coast, the Arctic, Gulf of Mexico, everywhere in those areas. The Great Lakes. Yes, they are not considered oceans. However, they are large bodies of water that we use frequently. We have transporters. We have the recreational industry all up in there. We have a lot of commercial fishing that goes on or not a lot, but there is some commercial fishing that goes on in there. There's a lot of users. There's a lot of people on land, a lot of businesses on land that use the water. One for drinking water. We use it in residence. I live on the Great Lakes. I do not want my drinking water contaminated. Luckily, we have programs in there that make sure on the Canadian side, at least that make sure this drinking water hasn't been contaminated. All these things that are going on in the Great Lakes have not been managed together. They've been managed separately in separate entities, but they haven't been managed together together. There are no zones set up for specific uses or non-uses or protection. It just hasn't happened because the government's haven't gotten together and done that. There have been plans together to do something like that. It just hasn't gone through. I feel that every government that has a body of water that's dependent on by the citizens or dependent on by multiple stakeholders should have some kind of plan. The reason I say this is because we have it on land. The city you live in, if you live in North America, there is a big chance that your city or town or village has some sort of plan. They have a green plan. They have a zoning plan where you can only have commercial area. You can only have residential areas. They have that plan. There's plans where you do not build here because there are specific trees or specific habitat that we want to protect. We want to green the area, so we want to make sure that we don't get rid of our parks. We don't get rid of our greening areas. Cities, counties, municipalities, regions, they all have their plans. Their environmental plans, their city plans, they have them all set out. Why don't we have one in the ocean? We should have one, at least one for the area and all at different scales, a plan that allows different stakeholders to use specific areas. Sometimes multiple stakeholders can use the same area, but at least we know who's using it, how it's being used, and how the interaction of one or more stakeholders can actually affect the overall habitat. Then we actually start getting a grasp on how the ocean is being affected by humans in each and every area. That's why we need a marine plan. The way we get marine plans is talk to your government official, because it comes from the government. Talk to your local or regional or federal or international organizations, non-profit organizations and NGOs that are lobbying the governments for this kind of stuff and say, "What can I do? How can I help? How can I help you get these plans in place? This is what we need to do. This is what we need to do to protect our oceans. We need to control and manage the human uses in our oceans so that we actually can get a a grasp on what we're doing to them and reduce our negative influence on them, our impact." That's my rant, really, is we need to get these marine protected areas in place, these networks in place, but really a zone of planning for all the oceans in the economic zone. Every part of the economical zone, we really need to figure that out. That's my rant. I hope you enjoy your Thursday. The weekend's almost coming. We got an ocean talk Friday tomorrow. I'm always looking forward to that. Not sure exactly what we're going to put on it, what articles we're going to put on, but we'll see what happened in the news this week. That is that. I hope you enjoyed the show. Check out our shop, speakupforblue.com/shop and help out Sea Turtles Forever. Help us and you help Sea Turtles Forever help. Let them help us and let us help them and get Sea Turtles protected. Let's clean up our beaches or microplastics and all that good stuff. Speakupforblue.com/shop and you can buy items in there and it'll be their great prices. They're not expensive. I try to make it as affordable as possible with helping out these organizations. I have two of the shirts and I love them. I'm ordering more, but once I get some new designs in it. By the way, have a great day. I don't really know how to end this properly. I'm going to be honest with you, but that's really all for me today. You've been listening to Speakup for Blue Podcast. My name is Andrew Loon. I'm your host. Happy conservation. [Music]