Beneath the waves: CLF charts the course for a network of ocean conservation areas.

• Author: Stein, Melanie
• Position: Conservation Law Foundation of New England

CHILDREN AND THEIR PARENTS WHO HAVE READ The Lorax by Dr. Seuss take to heart the sad result of the unsustainable exploitation of nature and the ecosystem destruction that follows. "And at that very moment, we heard a loud whack! From outside in the fields came a sickening smack of an axe on a tree. Then we heard the tree fall. The very last Trufulla Tree of them all!"

The Truffula Trees disappear, and with them the homes of the Lorax, the Brown Bar-ba-loots and the Humming-fish. Mismanagement of a natural resource not only negatively affects plants and animals living nearby, but also can leave humans without the very products they sought for consumption. So it goes for our ocean resources, seemingly limitless, though increasingly stressed.

But the clear moral of a children's story is somehow out of our grasp when it comes to the ocean. Deep beneath the impenetrable surface of the sea, similar destruction of our ocean ecosystem has been happening. Only these changes are not visible to the naked eye. We begin to see the ocean's destruction in another way: the disappearance of marine animals that once lived there. Fish, corals, whales and other marine life can no longer thrive because humans have ravaged so much of their environment.

In New England, our marine ecosystems are suffering an onslaught of ecological devastation. Centuries of economic and cultural prosperity based on the rich fisheries in the Gulf of Maine and on Georges Bank are teetering on the edge of collapse as the current populations of many marine organisms decline to dangerous levels or disappear.

Pollution continues to gush from our rivers and streams, dumping toxics and nutrients in the ocean and degrading near-shore food webs. Foreign chemicals are now suspected of interfering with the hormonal systems of marine organisms, causing reproductive abnormalities in fish. Dams and other obstructions block fish passage, choking the annual cycles of river-run fish that have historically fed massive populations of coastal fish.

The whaling industry so integral to the history of New England and eastern Canada is gone. The North Atlantic right whale is nearly extinct, with only 300 whales left. Historic salmon and herring runs have all but vanished. Groundfish populations, like New England's signature cod, have never fully recovered from the crash in the mid-1990s. Georges Bank cod hover at a mere 10 percent of what is considered a healthy population level.

Today much of the sea...