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Congress acts to protect oceans
By unanimous consent, at the end of June the Senate passed the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act of 2006, which will modestly improve protections for marine life of our coasts. Environment Maine worked with fishermen and oceans groups to strengthen the bill with the help of Sen. Snowe. The bill contains a number of improvements.
There is better guidance on how regional management councils must set annual catch limits and what happens if those catch limits are exceeded; appointments to the regional management councils may be more balanced between commercial fishermen and conservationists in the future; and areas with special deep sea corals will be mapped and possibly protected from destruction by bottom trawling.
More importantly, the bill does not roll back existing conservation measures already in place, unlike its counterpart in the House which had much weaker language on preventing overfishing and taking actions to rebuild species if they are overfished.
House guts offshore drilling moratorium
This summer, the U.S. House of Representatives narrowly voted to allow oil and gas drilling off America’s coasts, after an earlier vote to
maintain the moratorium on offshore gas drilling. Congressmen Allen
and Michaud voted against this dangerous proposal.
Oil and gas drilling threatens to destroy a way of life in Maine’s coastal
communities. Both our tourism and fishing industries will be threatened
by drilling anywhere off the coast of New England in the Gulf of
Maine. This vote could result in both gas and oil drilling as close as
three miles off shore if a state approves it. States would have to jump
through multiple hoops every five years to keep drilling 50 miles off
their coast. And considering that oil spills and drilling pollution do
not honor state boundaries, allowing states to drill off their coasts will
threaten nearby states’ coasts as well.
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