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Leased out at less than $100 an acre by the state of Washington, the 10-acre plot at the bottom of the bay is hardly expensive or large by the organization’s standards. It’s also anything but pristine—the filter-feeding oysters that once purified the water have all but disappeared under decades of accumulated debris. Even the bay itself possesses at best a compromised beauty. Still, that plot of mud may just hold the future of marine conservation. That future had rather inauspicious beginnings, ecologically speaking. In 1926 the Weyerhaeuser Timber Co. began to construct a trestle, boom and log dump at the entrance of Woodard Bay. The South Bay Log Dump provided a sheltered spot from which to sort, gather and chain logs into rafts before making the three-day tug ride to a nearby mill. From the pier and railroad tracks soaring above the bay, millions of board feet of timber were delivered weekly to the water for the mills that waited downstream. In 1988 the state purchased the former dump, inheriting an ecosystem worn threadbare both economically and environmentally. The bay’s bottom, once fertile and deep enough to drive tugs, was by then too dense with sunken logs for shellfish to survive. But beneath the surface is more than meets the eye. When the Conservancy takes on the lease this summer, the plan is to restore the bay’s health by clearing the sunken debris and reintroducing native oysters. Although the bay’s ecology stands to benefit immensely, more important is the lease itself, which marks the first time that submerged land has been leased specifically for conservation. That innovation offers a whole new way of looking at marine conservation.
For an organization accustomed to buying land in order to protect it, Beck had found a niche in marine conservation that the Conservancy seemed destined to fill. Within three years, Conservancy officials in Long Island had acquired some 11,500 acres of Great South Bay, donated by a local oyster company. Last October, the Conservancy purchased an additional 1,500 acres, bringing the total to 13,000. (See “Restoring Great South Bay,” page 2.) Most of the country’s nearshore waters are owned by the states, not private interests. The Submerged Lands Act, which Congress enacted in 1953, conveys “title and ownership of the lands and natural resources of the three-mile territorial sea to the states.” In essence, the water up to three miles from the coast belongs to the states for public navigation and for the development of commercial aquatic resources. Such control means that states can lease marine plots to private interests. In fact, as much as one-third of the United States’ submerged coastal lands are privately leased or owned—and in some cases, parcels are quite large. Moreover, billions of dollars are spent yearly to lease and develop submerged lands for oil, public marinas, private docks and aquaculture—including the cultivation of salmon, oysters and kelp. In Washington, for instance, the state’s Department of Natural Resources manages 2.4 million acres of aquatic land and has granted more than 3,000 leases for commercial purposes. In Louisiana, the state agency leases hundreds of thousands of acres—including more than 400,000 for oyster harvests. In Texas, 4 million acres of submerged coastal lands are owned and managed by the state. The leasing capability of these three states alone adds up to a landmass roughly the size of Belgium. Beck knew that all the nation’s coastal states lease marine land nearly every day. And the beauty of leasing is that, on paper anyway, it’s so easy. Potential lessees simply submit a plan for production to the state’s department of natural resources and pay a fee—a pittance compared with terrestrial costs. And in most cases, the leases are easily renewed. But until Woodard Bay, the idea of leasing for the sake of marine conservation had not been tried. In most states, ocean-bottom leases are reserved for commercial enterprises in which activities produce a physical product and generate revenue. But even though restoration and conservation increase marine biomass and generally make everything in the water healthier, such “production” isn’t necessarily the sort that’s extractable. As with nearly any innovation, the biggest obstacle facing the prospect of conservation leasing was a conceptual one: Could state governments learn to recognize conservation and restoration leases as viable uses of public lands and justify them as nontraditional sources of production?
With these questions in mind, Beck led a review of state policies to determine where there might be opportunities to engage in conservation-oriented leasing and ownership. The goal was to prove that a lease—one that works within an already delineated state system of aquatic leasing—could be a practical conservation option. Ultimately, the aim was to create a precedent for states across the country. The 10-acre Woodard Bay pilot lease this summer will mark a major achievement for the conservation community, but it is the repeated use of the concept that will, according to Beck, transform the idea from what he calls a boutique approach into one with national ramifications. That idea appeals to the Russell Family Foundation, which has donated $90,000 to the Conservancy’s Washington chapter, most of it designated for this project. Says Nancy McKay, the foundation’s environmental program manager, “Our desire to fund this [lease] program … was so this concept could be used not just once. We’d like to see it developed … and accepted by agencies in authority.” Among the states the Conservancy views as promising for conservation leasing, where policies include environmental preservation and stewardship, are California (where the Conservancy is bidding to lease more than 200 acres of kelp forests), Hawaii, New York, North Carolina, Oregon and Texas. “I think we’ll find that there are three types of states,” says Beck. “Ones that want to lease for restoration. Others that say, ‘Maybe you can sneak it under the wire or make the policy more explicit.’ And those that say, ‘No, it doesn’t fit with our policy.’” In Mississippi, for example, Margaret Bretz, a senior attorney in the state’s public lands division, likes the idea of conservation leasing because it would give form to a philosophy that already exists in that state. “We have a declared public policy that favors the preservation of the natural state of [the] tidelands and its ecosystems,” says Bretz. “That dovetails perfectly with leasing for the purposes of conservation. I think this idea can work and may be the only way to have private conservation efforts on submerged lands in many states, because these lands are held in [public] trust.”
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Copyright
2009
The Nature Conservancy
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northeast of Olympia, Washington, from beneath abandoned railroad tracks and tired-looking pilings, from beneath the surface of water that is the color of the mud below, comes the promise of renewal. Here in Woodard Bay, several hundred yards from shore, beneath the rickety reminders of an industrial past, lies a plot of “submerged land” that may represent one of The Nature Conservancy’s most important investments.
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