Conservation News
In N.Y., Conservation Goes Underwater - Nature Conservancy Gets Oyster Beds
By Michael Powell
NEW YORK, Oct. 21 -- An environmental land trust has turned its sights to the nation's oceans, acquiring 11,000 acres of Long Island bay bottom that once held some of the finest oyster beds on the East Coast.
The Bluepoints Co. announced that it had bequeathed this watery estate to the Nature Conservancy today.
"A lot of scientists assume that marine conservation must be different because you can't own the oceans," said Michael W. Beck, director of the conservancy's marine initiative. "This is an untried strategy, but we're trying to show you can go underwater to protect marine lands."
This is the next, wet frontier of land conservation. Environmentalists long have wrestled with developers for control of the nation's woodlands and mountains, and now the battle has been joined to preserve the coastal regions and the seas that wash against them. The coasts are already under environmental stress: In another decade, 30 percent of the U.S. population is expected to live near the nation's ocean and gulf shores.
In California, naturalists are weighing leasing the Pacific Coast's famous kelp forests, thick and dark regions that harbor abalones and sea otters and rockfish. In Mississippi, they are eying the offshore lands. In Washington state, the Nature Conservancy recently bought land at the mouth of the Stillaguamish River, habitat for migrant chinook salmon and sea-run cutthroat trout.
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