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Environmentalists
push for U.S. reef
protection

Interior and Commerce secretaries
are urged move stalled legislation

By Helen Altonn
Star-Bulletin

Seventeen environmental group leaders, including Dave Raney in Honolulu, have urged the United States interior and commerce secretaries to resolve deadlocks holding up a national plan to save threatened and dying coral reefs.

In a letter Monday to Secretary of Interior Bruce Babbitt and Secretary of Commerce William M. Daley, the environmental leaders said:

"We are disappointed to report that coral reef legislation has stalled in both the House and Senate over issues having more to do with protection of agency turf than protection of coral reefs."

Babbitt and Daley were joint chairs of a United States Coral Reef Task Force that adopted a National Action Plan March 2 to protect coral reef ecosystems.

It calls for mapping of all U.S. reefs by 2009 and setting aside 20 percent of U.S. coral reefs as no-take marine protected areas by 2010.

Wrote the environmental leaders: "The Task Force has proclaimed the need to move quickly and decisively to protect coral reefs. It would be tragic indeed if efforts to carry out this mandate founder from a failure of the lead agencies to work out their jurisdictional issues.

"The people and coral reefs of this nation deserve better."

Raney, with the Sierra Club, was Pacific representative to the task force and a member of the Coral Reef Working Group.

He said it was hoped to get legislation to fund the multiyear action plan and move beyond President Clinton's June 1998 executive order establishing the task force.

H.R. 3919, the Coral Reef Conservation and Restoration Partnership Act of 2000, appeared to be a good bill, Raney said. But when environmental groups began to look at the language, "it looked like someone had slipped in an anchor."

Language was inserted giving the Commerce Department exclusive authority for managing fishery resources of coral reef ecosystems. Fishery Management Councils established under the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act would be exempt from the legislation.

The environmental groups said the legislation "should not undermine the Department of Interior's authority to manage coral reefs in National Wildlife Refuges and national parks."

They pointed out that the Interior Department is particularly important in the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands where it manages the National Wildlife Refuge. The islands comprise the largest single area of coral reefs in the nation.

Interior Department attempts to clarify boundaries of the National Wildlife Refuge caused a lot of concern among commercial and recreational fishing interests, Raney said.

"There is a certain amount of fear of the unknown," he said. "Just the word "sanctuary' sounds like all activities will be prohibited. ... Twenty percent may sound like a large area but it says 80 percent is not no-take."

In the Northwest Hawaiian Islands, Raney said, "It's important to keep in mind ... we have endangered species, the monk seal and green turtle nesting areas, and that has to be factored in."