December 19, 2016 — For more than a year, the Virginia Aquarium & Marine Science Center built a case for naming a vast canyon in the Atlantic the next national marine sanctuary. There were dozens of meetings held, hundreds of letters written and thousands of signatures gathered from supporters on a petition.
Suddenly and quietly last month, however, an aquarium task force that had been pushing to make the Norfolk Canyon a sanctuary put everything on hold indefinitely.
To make a long story short, what happened was Donald Trump.
The Republican presidential candidate was elected, and the chances for a lot of conservation initiatives suddenly looked much iffier.
“We’re not really sure where this new administration is going to go with environmental protection,” said Mark Swingle, the Virginia Beach aquarium’s director of research and conservation. “The timing just doesn’t look right now. So we just decided to take a pause here to see what’s going to happen.”
Trump has said he favors oil and gas drilling in the Atlantic – something that would be prohibited in and around the 35-mile-long canyon if it were declared a sanctuary. He also has promised to roll back government regulations, particularly those of environmental agencies.
In general, he’s positioned himself to be a president whose administration will be much harder to persuade on environmental initiatives than that of President Barack Obama.
That could make it tougher to build a consensus for widening the government’s protective reach, whether it’s on land or 70 miles out in the Atlantic, where the Norfolk Canyon begins.
“We really did not want to push through this process right now with the uncertainty on whether we’d have the broad type of support we wanted,” Swingle said.