Aleutian sanctuary application rejected

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has rejected a nomination by a group of environmental organizations, requesting that NOAA designate all federal waters around the Aleutian Islands as a national marine sanctuary. NOAA says that the nomination has failed its sufficiency review, an initial screening that NOAA conducts to ensure that the nomination includes the all of the information needed for a subsequent more in-depth review of the designation proposal.

In a Jan. 23 letter to Richard Steiner, a member of the board of the Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, the organization that led the nomination effort, Daniel Basta, director of NOAA’s Office of National Marine Sanctuaries, said that the nomination’s main deficiency was a failure to demonstrate widespread community support for the Aleutians marine sanctuary concept.

“Keep in mind that the nomination process is a community-based process and hence the demonstration of wide community support weighs heavily within management considerations,” Basta wrote.

Basta also said that the nomination did not clarify the level of support from federal and state agencies.

“It is equally important to identify any offers of partnerships from tribal governments, local jurisdictions, non-governmental organizations or universities to assist in managing this area,” Basta wrote.

Other deficiencies identified consisted of a lack of a description of how the marine sanctuary designation might provide opportunities for education, and the inclusion of sites in state waters as well as federal waters in a listing of locations with historical, cultural or archaeological significance.

Basta suggested that, given the significant challenges of trying to organize support for a sanctuary designation for the more than 550,000 square miles of federal ocean around the entire Aleutian Islands, it might be more practical to nominate a smaller area or a series of areas around specific resources that the applicants view to be of especially high value.

The applicants for the marine sanctuary had claimed that the seas around the Aleutians support one of the world’s largest populations of marine mammals, seabirds, fish and shellfish.

- Alan Bailey