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Published in Spring 2003
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Local projects seek borderless protection for grey whales
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By Jamie Bowman
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The entire pod of grey whales seemed to be celebrating the new births, playfully frolicking in the protected waters of Magdalena Bay, one of the species’ three main calving sites in Baja California.
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© Keith "Baja" Jones, www.greywhale.com
This baby grey whale in Baja California, Mexico, will soon be ready to migrate north to the Bering sea. |
“Some of them seem to be so friendly, it makes you feel like you want to be very close to them,” says Rueben Lara, director of operations in Northwest Mexico and the Sea of Cortes for Pronatura, the oldest environmental NGO in Mexico.
In the sheltered lagoon, the newborns are relatively safe. But before long the young grey whales will be joining their relatives and going coastal—all the way to the Bering Sea in Alaska.
Human activity, however, continues to imperil marine biodiversity and habitats along the Pacific coast. And while the number of western Pacific grey whales is steadily recovering from the brink of extinction, conservationists seek to ensure their future.
“Less than one per cent of the Baja-to-Bering coastal waters enjoy protected status,” says Sabine Jessen of the British Columbia Chapter of the Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society (CPAWS). “We don’t want to wait until there’s a crisis in this population. We’re acting now.”
CPAWS launched a trinational effort in May 2000, with local groups like Pronatura and the Center for Marine Conservation, to create an international network of linked marine protected areas (MPAs) along the Pacific coast.
Recognizing the potential in such wide environmental collaboration, the Commission for Environmental Cooperation agreed in 2001 to fund CPAWS with a C$40,000 grant from its North American Fund for Environmental Cooperation (NAFEC).
The grant is helping CPAWS and its partners promote their efforts and provide networking opportunities with local MPA projects throughout Canada, Mexico and the United States.
“In this project, we were trying to show that we should be looking beyond the political boundaries we always use to protect things,” says Natalie Ban, the Marine Campaign Coordinator for CPAWS. “The current system in the Pacific Ocean is a big gyre; essentially the oceanography connects the areas.”
In California, the first plank in the bridge of a Baja to Bering network of MPAs was put in place last fall. The California Fish and Game Commission approved
a joint state and federal plan to create a network of marine reserves that will ultimately fully protect
nearly a quarter of the waters in the Channel Islands Marine Sanctuary.
It will be the largest marine reserve network in
the continental US.
An earlier national marine sanctuary designation around the islands only restricted oil and gas drilling, not commercial or sport fishing. Then came the collapse of important species around the islands, including white abalone and some types of rockfish.
Getting full protection was a big prize, but it took Environmental Defense years of work, including public education, stakeholder meetings and three years of intense negotiations.
There were so many competing and complex interests to be addressed that the meetings “were like playing three-dimensional chess,” says Richard Charter, the marine conservation advocate for Environmental Defense’s oceans program.
“The Channel Islands is a very successful fait accompli,” he said. “And now, in the context of the network along the Pacific Coast, the Channel Islands stands as a monument and a model for how this could be done elsewhere.”
In Baja California, Lara is willing to be patient: “Building awareness in Mexico takes time. It’s not easy. We are very far away from Central Mexico. And Mexico is a country where the decision-making process is still very centralized. But things are getting better.”
Having the CEC follow environmental threats has “been helping a lot,” he says, particularly with an improved communicating relationship between NGOs and the government.
“There’s still a lot of work to be done,” concludes Ban. “Marine preservation is about 100 years behind terrestrial preservation. Right now, we have very few real MPAs on the Pacific Coast. Only a handful are fully closed areas.”
NAFEC funding is awarded to environmental projects in Canada, Mexico and the United States that complement the CEC's work. This year's theme is environmental monitoring and assessment related to human health. For details and guidelines for applying, please visit our web site at <www.cec.org/grants>.
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