A Green Wave

I’ve had a bit of a lay-off from posting in this young blog, but while work and travel and such have kept me from writing, I have been stockpiling links. And those links will seed a series of new posts over the next week or two. But as I collect these articles, the number of environmental news stories appearing in a variety of media outlets recently has me thinking that we might be entering the next “green” revolution. As one sign that we might be entering this new era, consider the shift in attitudes toward hydropower dams in the Columbia River system that seems to be emerging. Replacing hydropower with wind farms and transporting agricultural products via rejuvenated railways rather than along artificially flattened rivers would largely eradicate the sea lions-salmon-fishermen tensions addressed in my last post. Another positive sign is the U.S.’s largest automaker joining the U.S. Climate Action Partnership.

If a transformative moment is upon us, it will have been several decades in the making. The last period of major environmental policy action in the United States took place in the 1960s and 1970s when Congress passed the Clean Air Act (1963, with a major amendment in 1970), Clean Water Act (1972), Endangered Species Act (ESA; 1973), and the Fisheries Conservation and Management Act (FCMA; 1976). Since that time, important environmental progress has been made, but there have arguably been no changes as sweeping as these. And their effects have generally been profound. The air is cleaner today than it was 20 years ago, water is cleaner in many places (though not all), and species protected under the ESA more often than not show dramatic improvements.

Of the four issues addressed by the acts listed above, fisheries have arguably experienced the least progress since passage of the landmark legislation. All of these laws (and, indeed, most environmental laws) strive to find some balance between economic and environmental needs (although the true revolution will come when we realize that this is a false dichotomy, but that is for another day…). However, the FCMA seems to tip the scales more toward economics than conservation relative to the other two, perhaps because its original mission had more to do with excluding foreign fleets and protecting the American fishing industry than it did with establishing sustainable fisheries. Compounding this imbalance, fisheries are assaulted by a range of impacts beyond simply fishing pressure. Two milestone reports, one from the independent Pew Oceans Commission and one from the federal U.S. Commission on Ocean Policy (now unified as the Joint Ocean Commission), addressed the full suite of threats, governance challenges and research needed to reverse the decline in ocean health. Implementation of those recommendations, coupled with major new policy initiatives on climate and energy, have the potential to spawn a new green revolution.