Tonight's episode of
The Colbert Report will feature the first installment of "Meet An Ally"--Stephen Colbert will be interviewing
Stuart Beck, Palau's Ambassador to the United Nations, and I urge you all to tune in. As the Ambassador said this morning, "I have no idea what is going to happen, but whatever I say, it won't be as bad as Mel Gibson."
While I'm sure Colbert and the producers will have their fun with the interview, there are very urgent environmental issues that Palau is bringing to the UN that must not be lost when the cameras stop rolling. More on the flip...
Palau and its UN Mission (for which I work) has been working for the past two years to come to a consensus at the General Assembly to put a stop to
bottom trawling in international waters. To satisfy just a fractional market in developed countries, and before we can even know what medicines and genetic potential exists in the deep seas, just a few dozen trawlers are razing vast areas of seamounts and their corals by scraping weighted nets across the bottom to catch the fish living in the waters above. We as a planet are facing the choice now to build the force of common will for the conservation and sustainable use of these marine resources, or instead to march down the lonely path of immediate self-indulgence.
Palau has made its choice and seeks the world's company. This is the story of a mouse of a country that is roaring to stand up for the oceans.
In advance of his Colbert Report appearance, Ambassador Beck asked me to post his thoughts on what's at stake:
Surrounded by water, Palauans have developed a life and livelihood that is inextricably linked with the oceans. Recent events beyond Palau's control have threatened our traditional role as ocean caretakers, but Palauans have not lost heart or the political will to make the world a better place for us and our children.
The 1997/1998 El Nino--caused by ocean and global warming--cause the bleaching of much of Palau's soft and hard coral. This was the first time Palau directly felt an environmental impact from human activities elsewhere. Palau is now using these hard lessons about its vulnerability to protect itself from threats arising beyond its jurisdiction. Palau is working closely with scientists to find ways to protect its coral reefs from bleaching caused by global climate change. And while there is much about the deep sea that we still do not know, we know enough to understand the connectedness of ecosystems and the food chain and that, if left unchecked, it is only a matter of time before the destructiveness of bottom trawling is felt by us in concrete ways.
Bottom trawling involves scraping large, weighted nets across seamounts and the seabed to catch fish that rely on vulnerable coral reef habitat. It is not unlike bulldozing a forest to catch a few deer. The UN Secretary-General has recently reported on the impacts of bottom trawling and other destructive fishing practices to deep sea ecosystems. These reports observe that bottom trawlers "pick up these benthic communities as by-catch or otherwise reduce them to rubble"--damage that will take hundreds if not thousands of years to heal. Also noted in the Secretary General's reports, bottom trawling is responsible for 95 percent of the total worldwide damage to seamount ecosystems.
Palau has banned all bottom trawling within its waters and by any Palauan or Palauan company anywhere in the world. Palauan law also obligates Palau to seek an interim prohibition on unregulated bottom trawling in international waters at the UN General Assembly.
It is heartening, therefore, that the Presidents of the Republic of the Marshall Islands (Kessai Note of "RMI"), the Federated States of Micronesia (Joseph J. Urusemal of "FSM"), and Palau (Tommy E. Remengesau, Jr.) at a meeting in Majuro, RMI, have recently called for a temporary moratorium on deep sea bottom trawling in the Pacific and pledged to pursue the issue before the Pacific Islands Forum and the United Nations when those organizations take up the issue in critical negotiations this Fall.
The Majuro Communiqué represents an historic commitment by this region to protect the ocean from creeping destructive fishing practices like bottom trawling that threaten reefs and livelihoods. These small island nations represent more square miles of ocean per capita than any others in the world and take seriously their social, economic, and cultural commitment to being trustees of the seas.
Palau, Tuvalu, FSM, and RMI are also supporting a proposal at the United Nations to prohibit unregulated bottom trawling in international waters until effective conservation and management measures are put in place. This will not be an easy negotiation as certain powerful elements of the fishing industry will be pulling out all the stops to see that this proposal is defeated.
Our proposal in essence calls for extending to international waters the same level of protection that many responsible countries have insisted on for their own waters. In the Pacific, Japan, Mauritius, and Palau all ban bottom trawling within their 200-mile exclusive economic zones. Australia, New Zealand, and Kiribati have also prohibited bottom trawling throughout significant portions of their waters. After careful study, the United States also recently closed more than 135,000 square miles off its West Coast, 140,000 square miles off Hawaii, and 300,000 square miles off Alaska to all bottom trawling.
In Palau it is more than just a saying, "we do not inherit the earth from our parents, we borrow it from our children," it is a deeply held belief. And the Pacific philosophy that the oceans unite us rather than divide us is one which we hope will be borne out in our interactions in the United Nations as we seek real solutions for protecting these most precious of ocean resources.
Mesulang!
H.E. Mr. Stuart Beck
Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary
So, pass the word, watch the show, get involved. Mesulang indeed!