ML138481
People
Contributor
Date
Location
- Age
- Not specified
- Sex
- Not specified
- Playback
- Not specified
Media notes
Subject: (Interview). Subtitle: Elliott Norse. Timecode In: 00:00:04. Timecode out: 00:55:45. Notes: Olympic Coast National Marine Sanctuary; National Marine Sanctuary history and politics. Equipment Notes: Stereo=1; Decoded MS stereo. NPR/NGS RADIO EXPEDITIONS OLYMPIC COAST NMS DAT #14 - DAY 5 INTERVIEW WITH ELLIOT NORSE (EN) M/S 1:06 EA -what is your knowledge of the whole beginning of this -when it was a kernel of an idea -when it just started EN -first of all the idea sounded ridiculous to me -the idea of protected areas in the sea made no sense -I mean -the sea is so vast and it is so lacking in boundaries and to be perfectly honest it is so healthy compared to the land why would one need protected areas -how could you do it on one hand and why would you need it on the other. And -you might say that the most important things that I have learned in the 25 years since the sanctuary program has existed is that the sea is a lot smaller than we think -or at least the world is a lot smaller than we think and the sea is most of the world. There is no place where we have not felt the hand of humankind. The deep sea -when Bill Broad wrote his new book, In the Deep Sea, he describes going down in the Alvin and seeing a Nike sneaker sitting on the sea bed on a place a thousand miles -or thousands of miles from the nearest land. So there is no place where our influence hasn't been felt. And it not just that we throw garbage overboard, it is that we throw polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) and DDT and vast numbers of discarded fishnets and we fish. And we change the climate. And we introduce alien species. And we have profoundly changed the sea. And yes, there are borders in the sea. And the borders aren't the same borders that we are used to on land. We are not attuned to those borders and so we have to learn what they are -but they are there. As a matter of fact there are 2 kinds of borders in the sea in a sense -there 3 kinds of borders in the sea! I won't go above 3. There are 3 kinds of borders in the sea. One is you can see that a coral reef has boundaries just in the same way a patch of forest has boundaries. That is the easiest kind of boundaries to see. More subtle are the vertical boundaries because sea water is often layered. You know on top there is a layer -well the upper most layer, and it is warmer and it is better lighted than any of the others. And then that sits on top of slightly heavier water that is cooler and it is much much darker and that sits on cooler water still. So the sea is stratified like a layer cake. And so that is the second kind of structure. But the 3rd kind of structure is that much of the sea consists of water masses. And the idea of a water mass is bizarre but a water mass is an identifiable piece of water with in which conditions are pretty much the same. But as soon as you go across the border to the next water mass the conditions are much different. And the funny thing is these water masses change on a hourly and daily basis. They wiggle as the winds change, as currents change, etc. so that a marine ecosystem might be in one place on one day, and the next day its boundary might have moved a hundred miles. 4:48 so the sea is really different for those reasons and for many many other reasons. And one of the things I have learned in 25 years is wow, we really need to have marine protected areas. The Sanctuary program is for better or for worse is the best we have got right now and I think it needs to be bigger and stronger and better. 5:10 5:11 EA -what was your understanding of what the ideas was at the outset? 5:19 EN -I can give you a cynical view. I think the idea was we have protected areas on land, we should do it on the sea too. It was a sort of me too after the thought exercise. You know what happened -the Marine Sanctuary program began one hundred years after the Nati... (Notes truncated)
Technical information
- Recorder
- Microphone
- Accessories
Archival information
- Cataloged
- 15 Apr 2005 - Ben Brotman
- Digitized
- 14 Apr 2005 - Ben Brotman
- Edited
- 15 Apr 2005 - Ben Brotman