A Shift in Perspective: Protecting Marine Mammals
diving in a kelp forest in Monterey Bay recently, I watched a tubby 200-pound harbor seal follow a fellow diver, nibbling on his flippers. The diver, a graduate student, was using sponges to collect DNA samples from the ocean floor.Curious seals, he told me, can be a nuisance. When he bags his sponges and places them in his collection net, they sometimes bite into them, puncturing the bags and spoiling his samples.
Under the Marine Mammal Protection Act, coming closer than 50 yards to seals and dolphins is considered harassment, but they’re free to harass you, which seems only fair given the centuries of deadly whaling and seal hunting that preceded a generational shift in how we view the world around us.
the shift took hold in 1969, the year a massive oil spill coated the Santa Barbara coastline and the Cuyahoga River, in Cleveland, caught fire. Those two events helped spark the first earth Day, in 1970, and the shutdown of America’s last whaling station in 1971.Protecting the environment from pollution and from loss of wilderness and wildlife quickly moved from a protest issue to a societal ethic as America’s keystone environmental legislation was passed at around the same time, written by a Democratic Congress and signed into law by a Republican president, Richard Nixon.
Those laws include the National Environmental Policy Act (1969), the Clean Air Act (1970), the Clean water Act (1972) and the Marine Mammal Protection Act (1972), which goes further than the Endangered Species Act (1973) in protecting all marine mammals, not just threatened ones, from harassment, killing or capture by U.S. citizens in U.S. waters and on the high seas.
All these “green” laws and more are under attack by the Trump administration, its congressional allies and longtime corporate opponents of environmental protections, including the oil and gas industry. republicans’ disingenuous argument for weakening the Endangered Species Act and the Marine Mammal Protection Act is that the legislation has worked so well in rebuilding wildlife populations that it’s time to loosen regulations for a better balance between nature and human enterprise. When it comes to marine mammal populations, that premise is wrong.
On July 22, at a House Natural resources subcommittee meeting, Republican Rep. Nick Begich of Alaska introduced draft legislation that would scale back the Marine Mammal Protection Act. Among other things, his proposal would limit the ability of the federal government to take action against “incidental take,” the killing of whales, dolphins and seals by sonic blasts from oil exploration, ship and boat strikes or by drowning as accidental catch (also known as bycatch) in fishing gear.Begich complained that marine mammal protections in