What’s at Stake?

In my last “Ocean People” column, before Christmas, I wrote about how I applied, along with many others, to be a “member-at-large” of the Advisory Council of the Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary, and how surprisingly I was chosen and later elected Chair.  It turned out the staff had thought (mistakenly) that I, as a minister, would somehow help this very contentious group get along better and figure out how to balance commercial and conservation interests in this huge ocean protected area.  Instead I just rolled up my sleeves and jumped into the fray, mostly on the conservation side. I’ll be spending a couple more columns on the personalities of this 25- member “stakeholder” group and the issues it confronts.  Today – some thoughts on what’s at “stake?”

• Who owns the ocean?
• If the ocean is “public property,” can anyone at all simply “stake” a claim to use ocean waters for some activity, be it commercial, like fishing, or recreational, like jet skis, or should there be some rules?
• What happens when staked claims conflict, like noisy jet skis scaring away fish? Or when the conflict is that a claim staked by human beings (this is my ocean oil drilling platform) might harm the ocean and its plants and animals?
• Can we assume that people will exercise care and caution in their staked claims?  Will the profit motive outweigh the uncertainty principle?  (The Monterey Bay National Marine Sanctuary was designated for the express purpose of prohibiting oil and gas drilling in the oil rich waters between San Francisco and Cambria, 300 miles of coastline, and for the general purpose of “resource protection.” Staff seeks community input on management decisions.)
• Can the ocean itself, or its many life forms stake a claim?  Can nesting birds or migrating whales or microscopic plankton say, no, this is my part of the ocean?
• If we were going to get a group together to advise staff on some of these questions, who should have a seat at the table?  Those named above: fishermen, ocean recreators, business and industry, ocean conservation groups, government agencies?  Who else?
• How do we decide who should have a seat at the table?  Who has a “stake” in the ocean, a claim on the ocean and its management?
• The word “stake” is used in two different phrases related to these questions, “staking a claim” and “being a stakeholder.”  Government agencies and businesses have in the recent past started using the idea of “stakeholder groups,” as important decision advisors or makers. Is there a difference between “staking” a claim, and “holding” a stake?
• What is “at stake” for the oceans and how can marine sanctuaries and sanctuary advisory councils, made up of ocean stakeholders, impact the ocean’s “stake?”

Easier to ask these questions than answer them.  Nine years as a Member-At-Large on one such Sanctuary Advisory Council led me to ask these and lots more questions.  In this column I will suggest a couple answers, or ways I chose to answer them, and how I came up with my answers. 

First, a little word history, about “stake.”  Sometimes I find it helpful to learn the language history of a word or phrase.  Where did it come from?  Does it mean the same thing today? 

To “stake” a claim is to pound a big strong stick, a stake, in the ground and say, “This land is mine.  These stakes mark its boundaries.”  Metaphorically it has become “I stake my life on this.” “Here I stand, I can do no other!” Luther staked this claim, as he put a small stake (a nail) in the door.

“Stakeholder” is a little more complicated.  Etymology accounts suggest that in English gambling, a stick/stake was used to indicate how much someone had bet, what “stake” they had in the game.  If the bettor had to leave the gaming table, they would hand that stake to someone else, their representative, to hold for them, to keep the claim.  The rep was their “stakeholder.”  They represented/held the interests of the one who had put money into the game.

So the first thing I would do at a meeting of the Advisory Council, when confronted with an issue about conflicting claims, would be to follow the money.   “Stake” language is about money, either a staked land claim or an absent gambler.  California is the land of gold rush and tech boom because of many bold and sometimes reckless entrepreneurs.  Like John Sutter, who discovered gold on the Sacramento River, aggressively staked his claim and change history.  Likewise Steve Jobs, who brashly founded Apple, quit, came back, was fired, left others to hold his gambling stick, but ultimately returned to cash in the chips and claim his billion dollar stakeholding.

At first I found it odd that the Marine Sanctuary Program is part of the federal Commerce Department.  That’s because it’s under NOAA, the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (and a pun on the Biblical mariner NOAH).  Shouldn’t ocean concerns be in an environmental agency, like the Department of the Interior, or the Environmental Protection Agency?  Why Commerce, whose job is to promote economic growth?  Well, historically, most commerce happened on the sea - it’s called shipping.  But still, following the money, there’s lots and lots of money to be made today in trade, tankers, oil and gas, commercial fishing, aquaculture, even cruise ships.  Ocean trade, ocean extraction and ocean recreation generate billions and billions of dollars.  Our local university has a Center for the Blue Economy, the business of ocean and the business oceans generate.  So it’s highly appropriate to use language about staking a claim; the ocean is like a gold mine.  It’s the wild west, the ocean is the frontier, and there are fortunes to be made.

On the Advisory Council the biggest money makers from the sea were represented by the Fishing and Agriculture Seats.  Both reps opposed most regulations of their business, from catch limits to water quality issues resulting from ag pesticide runoff. Fishing and Ag often sided with each other in votes.  (Of the 15 National Marine Sanctuaries in the Atlantic, Pacific, Gulf, and one in the Great Lakes, only Monterey Bay has an Agriculture seat on its Advisory Council – the other sanctuaries are remote or off shore.)  These two often dressed casually, cowboy or sweatshirt, masking the multimillion dollar industries they represented.  Fishermen gamble more than farmers do, who have some control over their water, and like our etymological gambler, fishermen are often gone at sea for long periods.  But both are sort of individualistic loner occupations; they grumbled about meetings and the slow pace of decision making. 

The farmers seemed a little more interested in their public image and took some initiative to reduce phosphate runoff into the rivers and estuaries.  The fishermen complained more about being victims of over regulation.  They also claimed our then congressman Leon Panetta, who shared the Sicilian heritage of many of the fishermen, had made them a “promise” that the Sanctuary would have no effect on fishing.  But such a promise never appears in writing and while Leon tried to downplay the idea, he never denied it, either because he is a good politician or because he feared some kind of Godfather type retaliation. 

The Harbors rep was always in the fisherman’s corner, and would try to argue that Monterey and Santa Cruz were primarily fishing and boating communities, when the three biggest regional economies are tourism/hospitality, agriculture and education.  All three of these commercial reps would also say their vote was more important than the other members’ because people’s jobs depended on them, claiming that those conservation or recreation people (and even the government agencies it seemed) didn’t have real jobs.  Getting a salary from the Ocean Conservancy or a dive shop wasn’t as important as bringing in the catch or the crop.

You can tell I was not too sympathetic to the commercial interests, primarily because in the Sanctuaries Act it states very simply that the purpose of Sanctuaries, besides prohibiting oil and gas development, is “resource protection.”  Ideas like resource protection, conservation, preservation, ecosystem management are not about maximizing profits. (Except, as we would argue, that managing resources today improves the odds there will be fish to catch in years to come.  This argument did not seem to make sense to them.)  The commercial reps were there to represent their “stake” but I’m not sure they had read the Sanctuaries Act.  They would go on and on about the “promise” and about promoting “multiple use,” but resisted the widely accepted use of “ecosystem management.”

I favored the conservation side because of a second idea raised by the concept “stake.”  “Stake” is not just an economic term, it’s not just about ownership and profit. I too have a stake in the ocean, as does every person.  I have a stake in the ocean because I need it to live: three out of four breaths I take come from the oxygen made by ocean plants.  I have a stake in the ocean because all weather is born there.  I have a stake in the ocean because it feeds my soul.  I have a stake in the ocean because I believe in science and research.  I have a stake in the ocean because I don’t believe anyone can own it, so everyone must care for it.  Like Aldo Leopold, I believe that nature is not a commodity that belongs to us, but a community to which we belong.  That was the sermon I tried to preach as a Member at Large.

Ok, a little more sermon:  You can’t mark the ocean off with claim stakes at the corners and hog it all for yourself.  Even with international conventions about nations “owning” the waters 3 miles out or 100 miles out and economic influence zones and the Law of the Sea (ie nations have tried to put down some stakes,) it’s all connected, pole to pole.  Whales and tunas carry no passports, rogue factory ships from other nations steal “our” tuna, and when one member suffers, it all suffers, just think Exxon Oil Spill.  That’s the claim I stake and the stake I hold.

I am simplifying this a bit, for there were often more than two sides on an issue, but many times it was commercial versus conservation, and the debate would remind me of the difference between Republicans vs Democrats.  The commercial reps’ style was a combination of bragging and moaning, at the same time, the way Republicans will brag about how strong and moral they are, but at the same time how they suffer so much, and act like victims. 

Also like Republicans, these commercial reps often had a sharper killer instinct with no interest in compromise or finding common ground.  They would independently fly to Washington and lobby against the Sanctuary (the Harbor seat using city funds to do that.)  Like our current administration, they were obsessed with how votes are counted, saying their votes were more important since poor families depended on them. They would also claim that their constituency was larger than anyone else’s so should carry more weight.  They often tried to introduce new rules that would eliminate the Members at Large because they said we had no constituents.  How could our “stake” have any legitimacy?  One of my fellow Members at Large came up with a great response; since it is a National Marine Sanctuary, we represent the entire 200 million US citizens, making ours actually the largest constituency.  But I always felt depressed during the arguments about whose was biggest.

The conservation types (Conservation, Recreation, Diving, Education, Members At Large, Research) were like the Democrats.  We assumed that government had a role and that it was mostly helpful (we weren’t Libertarians).  We are aware that commercial interests, ie greed, can blind people to the need for care and caution.  We remembered well the Santa Barbara Oil Spills of the 70’s that first motivated years of citizens advocating for Sanctuary protection and many of us had been part of that effort.   We cared for those without a voice or vote, marine mammals and fish and plants.  We approached issues as systems, interrelated ecosystems and we cared about long term consequences, not the bottom line.  We compromised way too much.  When I was chair I went around and visited everyone, including the commercial types, at their workplace and asked them about their families and tried to find common ground.  I managed to get the Advisory Council to make most of its decisions by consensus, rather than voting, to reduce the divisive attitude, but that only worked until it didn’t. 

There were some folks in between.  Tourism and Business (two different seats, not sure why that was the case) went back and forth.  Tourists want healthy ecosystems, to see whales, not dead zones from ag runoff.  But the fastest growing industry in the county is the wineries. They call themselves farmers, and they really don’t like regs.  The government reps (Coastal Commission, Cal EPA, State Parks, Fish and Wildlife, local government) usually voted more on the conservation side, but if it got too hot they would abstain.

So how did we get anything done?  Some would say we didn’t.  We often voted for pretty weak protection or government-ese studies.  But we had some huge successes.  We enlarged the boundaries to include the largest undersea mountain in the Eastern Pacific. We put some limits on the huge krill fishery.  We prohibited cruise ships from dumping all their waste (including human, also film development chemicals) in Sanctuary waters. (They just wait until they pass the stake marking the claim.)   And when I went to a recent meeting I was amazed to see a unanimous vote for more general protections, because even the commercial interests oppose how the Trump administration is breathing down its back and panting to open up the ocean for oil drilling and other extraction. 

More on that and other ocean issues at “stake” here on the West Coast in my next column.  Take four breaths and thank the ocean for three of them.  Stay tuned.

Copyright © 2018 Deborah Streeter