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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.

Don goldsberry had been speaking for only a few minutes at the Game Commission’s April 1972 hearing, and already Elizabeth Stanton Lay couldn’t believe her ears. Branding killer whales with dry ice? Burning their skin with lasers? Confining them to pools for research and profit? What kind of men were these? After listening to representatives from the Audubon Society, Friends of the Earth, and the Washington Environment Council voice their opposition, the sixty-year-old Lay rose to speak. “I have never before heard such a frank statement of what seems to me a totally inhumane attitude toward living creatures,” she declared. Marine mammals could do without the type of “research” Namu Inc. proposed. Whales were disappearing around the world, she reminded listeners, and the same could happen to orcas in Puget Sound. “When I was a very little girl, we used to see blackfish out in the bay, and we loved it,” she recalled. Now locals rarely saw the great creatures, except when men like Goldsberry trapped them behind nets. Lay was never one to stand idly by. Named after Elizabeth Cady Stanton, organizer of the 1848 Seneca Falls Convention on women’s rights, she would have made her namesake proud. Born in Tacoma in 1911, she had grown up in the nearby town of Rosedale on Henderson Bay and earned a history degree from Reed College in Portland, followed by a master’s degree in political science from the University of Washington. She studied in Geneva, worked as a journalist in Washington, DC, and served in the new Federal Security Agency during World War II. From the mid-1940s to the mid-1950s, she worked as a historian for the US military, living in Paris, Frankfurt, and Seoul and producing a two-volume account of the Berlin Airlift. By the time of the Game Commission hearing, Lay had retired to Rosedale, where she played the organ at her Christian Science church, promoted forest preservation, and fought to stop orca capture. Her interest in the issue may have started with young Ken Gormly’s 1968 account of the catch in Vaughn Bay.