Perspectives on Sustainability—America’s Coasts and Oceans

Photo from NOAA Fisheries Collection, Photographer: William B. Folsom, NMFS

One goal of the Environmental Reporting Group at The Heinz Center is to foster the kind of national-scale policy conversation about ecosystem indicators that already takes place around the nation’s well-established economic indicators. In seeking ways to foster use of the Program’s State of the Nation’s Ecosystems 2008 Report, its data and indicators and stimulate interpretive and policy dialogs, the notion of essays from diverse perspectives arose.

This initial set of essays, focused on marine fisheries, is based on indicators from the Coasts and Oceans chapter of The State of the Nation’s Ecosystems: 2008 report. It features perspectives from each of the four sectors, two of the Nation’s three coasts, as well as large and small fisheries. The authors (Jim Gilmore, Ray Hilborn, and Mike Hirshfield; with responses by Jerry Fraser, Paul Howard, and Carl Safina) represent tremendous experience on the water, at the dock, in the lab and in the policy arena. They were specifically asked to use the report’s indicators as the basis for talking about what they view as the “top” ocean story for their sector, and to discuss their views on what the findings mean for policymakers, stakeholders, businesses, consumers and the environment. We then invited other essayists to respond to the opening pieces.

Our hope is that these essays will create a foundation for focusing ocean policy discussion on ecosystem indicators, their desired state, and the means for bringing about desired changes.

Click here to download a pdf document containing all three essays and responses.

Click here to download the Coasts and Oceans chapter from the 2008 Report.