By Andrew Christie, Chapter Director
I was standing in the crowd at the press conference that Congresswoman Lois Capps held today on the Pismo Pier to announce that she has formally asked the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) to begin the designation process for the Chumash Heritage National Marine Sanctuary, when a thought occurred to me.
I thought that when I got back to the office I should probably start printing out and collating e-mails and put them in a folder with meeting agendas, memos, articles, drafts of public testimony, scrawled notes and other ephemera of the last several years, which, if gathered in one place, would help tell the story of how this effort began and progressed; an inventory of the actions that led up to this day.
Because this is starting to feel historic.
Last week, I sat in the offices of the Northern Chumash Tribal Council with five other people -- most of the same folks, give or take, who had first gathered in a living room in Shell Beach two years ago (three years ago…? Gotta start collating those e-mails) for the first meeting to discuss how we were going to go about making 10,000 square miles of ocean into a marine sanctuary for the Central Coast.
Then came NOAA’s 2014 announcement that for the first time in nearly twenty years, they were reviving the moribund selection process for marine sanctuaries, but in a new way: taking nominations from local residents of coastal areas. Previously, potential sanctuary sites had been selected by NOAA administrators. This was to be a grass-roots nomination process.
Seven months after NOAA announced the new sanctuary nomination process, our grass-roots group of collaborators sent them a formal nomination for the Chumash Heritage National Marine Sanctuary.
They rejected it, saying it lacked sufficient detail.
Eight months later, our undaunted band of nominators sent version 2.0 – about three times the size of the first one, with more than a dozen letters of support from academics, NGO’s, local businesses and elected officials, and more than 600 listed individual supporters. NOAA accepted it.
One key date I can remember easily: January 6, 2016, the night NOAA came to Morro Bay for a town hall meeting to explain exactly what the national marine sanctuary program is about and how sanctuaries work.
It was a dark and stormy night, and it was Waterloo for sanctuary’s implacable opponents, who for months had been holding forth at local government meetings and plastering The Tribune with cock-eyed op eds and poorly informed letters to the editor. They sallied forth that night to hurl their arguments at NOAA… only to find out what happens when ignorance meets knowledge, rumor meets experience, anecdote meets authority, etc.
Slowly, surely, for the residents who packed the room, and more watching the video coverage at home, the light began to dawn: A national marine sanctuary is the best thing that can happen to a coastal community. Those that have one want more of what they’ve got, per the recently granted request by the residents of Marin, Sonoma and Humboldt Counties to expand the area of the Cordell Bank and Gulf of the Farallones sanctuaries, fully protecting their coastal waters from the threat of future offshore oil and gas leasing.
Today, the Central Coast came a big step closer to joining that reality.
NOAA still has to agree to Congresswoman Capps’ request. (You can help them do so right here.) Then, once the designation process begins, there will be more than a year of oral and written comments and lots more local meetings -- official, transcribed, and part of the administrative record. At the end of that process, NOAA will make a final determination.
The implacable foes will surely show up. But their numbers will be smaller, their arguments already publicly debunked. They will be greatly outnumbered by all of us – that’s you, dear blog reader, and all your friends and neighbors, asking NOAA to give us the final link in a spectacular necklace of natural gems, filling in the gap that is the Central Coast and granting California’s priceless coastal waters sanctuary protection from Point Arena to the Channel Islands.
When we speak in those meetings and submit those comments, whether we say it or write it or just hold it in our thoughts, let’s remember the most important comment of all:
“Thank you, Lois Capps.”