A Dream Coming True for Sonoma Coast

By Richard Charter, Defenders of Wildlife

Gerstle Cove, Sonoma County. Photo: FMSA

For more than a quarter of a century, residents of California’s spectacular North Coast have had a dream.  They dream of gaining truly permanent protection for a wild and dramatic coastline with a world-class marine ecosystem driven by one of the four most productive ocean upwelling systems on the planet. 

At this unique coastal upwelling near Pt. Arena, nutrient-rich waters rise from the deep ocean as a result of seasonal winds, feeding a lush web of marine life extending southward along the coast to the Farallon Islands and beyond, at least as far as the northern edge of the Monterey Canyon.

During the late 1970’s, former President Jimmy Carter’s Secretary of Interior, Cecil Andrus, tried to promote offshore drilling off the California Coast.  After learning more about the fragile ecological setting and encountering the strong public sentiment that lingered long after the infamous 1969 Santa Barbara oil rig blowout, Jimmy Carter withdrew his support for drilling on the North Coast.  

Ronald Reagan, as President, through the often-hilarious anti-environmental antics of his own Interior Secretary James Watt, tried relentlessly to push drilling rigs here again, only to be thwarted yet again, this time unintentionally initiating the national backlash of an annual bipartisan legislative coastal drilling ban that has since been renewed by Congress every single year for the past 27 years.

A new Secretary of Interior, Donald Hodel, in 1985 solemnly promised to protect the Mendocino and Sonoma coasts “forever”, negotiating a clever deal with Congress that would allow Big Oil to instead drill off of Humboldt Bay, but Hodel inexplicably reneged on his own agreement only three months after making it.  The mid-1980’s precipitated the largest public hearing in the history of California, held in Ft. Bragg and lasting over 26 hours.  After two continuous days of heartfelt hearing testimony, the exhausted Interior Department officials gave up and fled back to Washington when they learned that over 700 people were still lined up outside to testify in favor of protecting their coast permanently.

In 1991, the tide turned when the first President Bush, George H. W.  Bush, decided to leave the Northern California coast alone, and acted to set it off limits to drilling at least until 2002.  President Clinton subsequently extended this executive protection until 2012. Now, in 2008, this widely-held California dream is finally well on its way to becoming a reality. 

A bill, HR 1187, would extend the permanent protection from offshore drilling afforded by our present national marine sanctuaries and expand its coverage northward up to Pt. Arena, from the current boundaries near Bodega Bay.  Representatives Lynn Woolsey and Mike Thompson have now been joined by 51 of their colleagues in the House of Representatives as co-sponsors of the bill. This bill has finally made it through subcommittee as well as the full Resources Committee. Meanwhile, in the U.S. Senate, California Senators Barbara Boxer and Dianne Feinstein have teamed up to co-sponsor a companion version of the same bill.

The next step, of course, is consideration on the Floor of the U.S. House of Representatives. Many Members of the House, particularly those from California, are still in shock over the tragic November 2007 oil spill from the container ship Cosco Busan, which clearly demonstrated that even small spills cannot be effectively contained or cleaned up, even in the relatively-sheltered waters of San Francisco Bay.  One shudders to imagine the extent of the damage that a much bigger oil spill would wreak on our rocky shoreline, delicate estuaries, and sensitive wildlife and fisheries.

Fortunately, the coast of Northern California is now much closer to achieving the long-sought collective dream of permanent protection than at any time in the past 25 years. We invite you to share this dream, to bring this vision into focus, and to enjoy the inspiring reality of the North Coast when you next visit these soon-to-be-protected ocean waters in the near future.