Looking back at Midway
Back from Midway Atoll now. These immersive experiences are always intense but wonderful. Since it was my second trip to Midway, I was prepared for most of what we saw – 500,000 albatross, 25 endangered monk seals, endangered Laysan ducks and slowing crumbling infrastructure from 40 years of Navy presence on the Atoll. But what surprised me what the frustration and anger I felt toward the government agencies that manage the place. Sure Bush signed the northwest Hawaiian Islands into monument status. And yes he gave management responsibility to three groups: US Fish and Wildlife Service, NOAA and the state of Hawaii. And yes these three groups have different agendas, different management styles and different political views. Was not smart on Bush’s part. He took the easy way out and now we pay for that. It is hard enough to fix a broken system, almost impossible for three groups to agree on what and how to do it.
Midway is a story about restoration of a wild place by ordinary people. It first served a critical role in WWII that every one respects and understands the sacrifice by American troops. But the real story about Midway is so what happens next? How do humans rebuild a damaged ecosystem both on land and in the sea? How much do they do? When do they stop? Evidence of that struggle was really apparent this year. Monk seal populations continue to decline and there is some evidence that sharks are eating the pups threatening the entire seal population. So what are the management options? Let the seals get eaten? Move the seals to another island? Shoot the sharks? And if we do any of these options for 1 year then do we do them the next year and the next year? Do we shoot all the sharks or just a few? Would we just trap the seals and take them to California to live where most predators are already gone from the ecosystem? We could take them to the Caribbean but wait – Caribbean monk seals are already extinct. There is no line in the sand of where we humans should stop interfering with natural processes when we have the best intentions to fix what we broke.
And the Midway example can be carried to some of the MVF projects here in the US like the Henrys Fork Caldera Project. Do we kill off the swans to protect trout habitat? Do we do major river flow modifications to attempt to improve the habitat? I mean we humans did dam the river and have managed water flows for decades for farmers benefit not swans or trout. Do we change that? Do we let the river take it s course (managed by human demand for irrigation waters) and just get what we get on the fish? What are the priorities? Do trout and swans get a vote on what happens to where they live?
I learned in Midway one simple thing: once an ecosystem has been damaged by human presence, it is almost impossible to return it to its natural functioning state thru some restoration process. And that we, the taxpayers, will have to keep paying year after year to keep fixing/modifying/replacing parts of the habitat in order for the creatures to continue to live there. The scientists and conservationist are working hard to do the right thing. They just do not know what the right thing to do is… This is not sustainable.
The growing mission of Marine Ventures to document and baseline functioning ecosystems is more important today than it was 2 weeks ago. Midway showed me that unless we stop damaging ecosystems with ill-advised development or poorly designed restoration plans that we will destroy the places we love forever. We have to work smarter with better planning and assessment in order to avoid doing more damage.
