GLOUCESTER, MA – July 20, 2010 – By executive order, President Obama has hit the go button for the creation of a political system for writing ocean and Great Lakes usage plans overseen by a new National Ocean Council.
The ideas involved including "marine spatial planning" and "ecosystem based management" have had a champion for years in Jane Lubchenco, a leading academic scientist before her nomination to head the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
Marine spatial planning has its closest terrestrial analog in simple zoning, but as White House officials Tuesday conceded, "instead of mapping it out," as a zoning plan would do, the new bureaucracy — with nine regional advisory committees reporting to the National Ocean Council — would attempt to work out how shipping, commercial and recreational fishing, recreational, aquaculture, mining/drilling and other uses might be fit together, if continued mining and drilling are allowed at all.
"Yes, it's a kind of zoning," said one White House official who briefed the Times on the plan Tuesday. "But it does not control a zoning plan — it's hard to describe."
Read the complete story from the Gloucester Daily Times.