Search Results

We propose an additional, bold focus for the centennial of the US National Park Service: to make protection of special places in the ocean as important as it has been on land. This vision reflects the fact that 55% of the United States by area is in the ocean, but only 15% of the US ocean is strongly protected. Marine protected areas vary greatly in extractive activities permitted, ranging from fully protected marine reserves that allow no destructive activities to multiple use areas that are zoned to permit different kinds of extractive uses. Ocean protected areas have grown rapidly from 0.08% of the global ocean coverage a decade ago to 1.8% today. Little of the open ocean is protected because the legal tools for creating protected areas reside within individual countries. Using top-down authorities have led to many of our most beloved large, blue parks, but most existing coastal protected areas are small and were developed from combined efforts of diverse stakeholders. We discuss pathways to ocean protection in the United States, review the scientific lessons learned over the past century of park management, and propose a focus on “blue” to complement the first century’s focus on “green” protected areas.

This chapter focuses on the recent expansion of fisheries for sharks and rays, and the decline of the populations of sharks and rays in the world's oceans. It describes historical examples of the collapse of shark fisheries; the methods of managing elasmobranch fisheries including recent regulations; and the recent establishment of reserves to protect sharks and rays. It suggests that the factors which made the sharks, rays, and chimaeras so successful over time also have made them very vulnerable today in a world dominated by humans.

By 1992, overfishing along the South American coast prompted a large migration to Galápagos of fishers, middlemen, and buyers, who began a “gold rush” harvest of brown sea cucumbers (a spiny marine organism) for the lucrative Asian market. Attempts to regulate that harvest by the government of Ecuador and the Galápagos National Park Service provoked more than a decade of protests and violence, which were only curbed when fishers were given an effective role in decision-making. But because the brown sea cucumber requires a minimum density for reproduction—an example of the Allee effect—it proved too challenging for the first participatory management system, which failed, but it led to a simpler system that continues successfully today. Galápagos is proving to be a showcase not simply for genetic evolution but also for the cultural evolution of new forms of governance, ideally including sustainability that it can then model for the world.

This chapter summarizes past and current case law concerning one of the last-born colonies of our times, the British Indian Ocean Territory (BIOT). Created—and depopulated—for the sole purpose of accommodating a strategic US military base, the territory has since generated extensive litigation in the national courts of the United Kingdom and the United States, as well as proceedings in the European Court of Human Rights, an ongoing arbitration under Annex VII of the Convention on the Law of the Sea (Mauritius v. UK) and a potential dispute over continental shelf claims (the United Kingdom, Mauritius and the Maldives). The principal actors, besides the governments involved, have been the Chagos islanders, whose exile from their home archipelago has now lasted more than forty years. The material analysed and referenced in this note covers a range of legal and historical sources documenting the underlying disputes.