When California’s then-governor, Grey Davis, signed into law the sweeping Marine Life Protection Act in 1999, state wildlife officials knew they’d have a fight on their hands.
The act was designed to simplify and strengthen a byzantine array of existing marine reserves and fishing regulations to create a coherent “ecosystem-based” policy of marine protection meant to allow fish populations, which have been in severe decline, to recover.
Later, the Arnold Schwarzenegger administration divided the state’s 1,100-mile coast into five regions and encouraged the participation of stakeholder groups that would hash out the location, size and scope of the reserves. Conservationists, scientists, fishermen, policy-makers and the public weighed in on the new regulations, each pushing hard for varying degrees of protection.
The meetings were often contentious, with commercial and sport fishermen claiming that the reserves would spell doom to their way of life. Some saw an aggressive green agenda at work.?
