Finding Space for All in Our Crowded Seas | WaPo

The ocean is getting crowded: Fishermen are competing with offshore wind projects, oil rigs along with sand miners, recreational boaters, liquefied gas tankers and fish farmers. So a growing number of groups -- including policymakers, academics, activists and industry officials -- now say it's time to divvy up space in the sea. ...

To resolve these conflicts, a handful of states -- including Massachusetts, California and Rhode Island -- have begun essentially zoning the ocean, drawing up rules and procedures to determine which activities can take place and where. The federal government is considering adopting a similar approach, though any coherent effort would involve sorting out the role of 20 agencies that administer roughly 140 ocean-related laws.

"It's really an idea whose time has come, and it's one of my top priorities," said Jane Lubchenco, who chairs the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. "By focusing on different sectors, nobody is paying attention to the whole -- in particular, the health of the system."

But conducting what experts call "marine spatial planning" presents scientific and political challenges, since so little of the ocean has been mapped in detail, and so many interest groups want to use it. The federal government has mapped only 20 percent of the "exclusive economic zone" that stretches from the U.S. coast out 200 nautical miles, and that's just its geophysical bottom, not the habitats and species that exist at varying levels.