Mindful of history, commercial fishing officials offered few objections. The plunge in sardine stock has been so drastic that there are fears that overfishing could lead to a lengthy downturn in sardine fishing off the Golden State, as happened in the 1950s, prompting the closing of Monterey’s famous Cannery Row, the setting for John Steinbeck’s 1945 novel with the same name. The industry didn’t recover for nearly 40 years.

Writing for the Environment 360 website affiliated with Yale University, veteran science journalist Elizabeth Grossman says there’s reason to worry that just such a scenario is likely to play out again:

Many fisheries experts, including some scientists working for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), think the fishery closure has come too late.

 

Sardine populations rise and fall naturally, cycling as ocean temperatures shift. But, says Tim Essington, a University of Washington professor of aquatic and fishery sciences, “Fishing makes the troughs deeper.” In a paper published in March, Essington showed that overfishing worsens the magnitude and frequency of the cyclical declines of sardines and other forage fish, such as anchovies. 

 

“The reason I wrote the paper is that I was tired of being in rooms where people say, ‘It doesn’t matter what we do in fishing — it’s all about the environment,’” says Essington. “But we’ve failed to respond quickly and that’s pushed these fish to lower levels.”

Scientists’ 2012 warning was ignored

There is a perception in some California business circles that environmental regulators are too eager to take big steps to prevent risks that are only theoretical or potentially only minor. But when it comes to sardines and overfishing, federal officials didn’t take dramatic action until this spring — even though two respected scientists working for the federal government warned of the coming sardine wipeout three years ago.

In 2012, two federal fisheries biologists — David Demer, senior scientist at NOAA’s Southwest Fisheries Science Center and NOAA fisheries research biologist Juan Zwolinski — warned that fishing pressure on Pacific sardines was unsustainable given that cool ocean conditions were also depressing sardine numbers. They said it was “alarming” that the fishing industry was once again responding to a declining sardine population with “progressively higher exploitation rates targeting the oldest, largest, and most fecund fish.” The pair predicted an “imminent collapse” of sardine stocks.

That’s also from Grossman’s reporting. She notes federal officials decision to disregard Demer’s and Zwolinski’s warming has has produced second-guessing:

Some fisheries biologists believe that in the face of evidence that Pacific sardine populations were steadily declining since 2007, a fisheries ban should have been imposed earlier. Despite the decline in sardine numbers, for example, fisheries managers allowed 100,000 tons of sardines to be caught off the U.S. West Coast in 2012. 

 

“It stands to reason that if you lay fishing on top of various vulnerabilities to changes in conditions, you make things more vulnerable,” says Carl Safina, an ocean ecologist and president of the conservation group the Safina Center. “It takes out a certain amount of resilience.”

Sardine wipeout linked to malnourished sea lions

Further underscoring the slowness of federal regulators to act is that concerns about the sardine wipeout having a dire effect on the ocean ecosystem were already widespread in the winter of 2013-14 — long before the moratorium was ordered. This is from a story in the Jan. 5, 2014, Los Angeles Times:

In recent years scientists have gained a deeper understanding of sardines’ value as “forage fish,” small but nutrition-packed species such as herring and market squid that form the core of the ocean food web, funneling energy upward by eating tiny plankton and being preyed on by big fish, seabirds, seals and whales.

 

Now, they say, there is evidence some ocean predators are starving without sardines. Scarcity of prey is the leading theory behind the 1,600 malnourished sea lion pups that washed up along beaches from Santa Barbara to San Diego in early 2013, said Sharon Melin, a wildlife biologist at the National Marine Fisheries Service.

 

Melin’s research indicates that nursing sea lion mothers could not find fatty sardines, so they fed on less nutritious market squid, rockfish and hake and produced less milk for their young in 2012. The following year their pups showed up on the coast in overwhelming numbers, stranded and emaciated.

 

“We are likely to see more local events like this if sardines disappear or redistribute along the coast and into deeper water,” said Selina Heppell, a fisheries ecologist at Oregon State University.

 

The Pew Charitable Trusts issued a report offering similar conclusions in December 2013.

New York’s decision to ban fracking for health reasons could reverberate beyond the state, bolstering other efforts to limit the controversial method of drilling for oil and natural gas.

While two dozen U.S. municipalities and at least two countries, Bulgaria and France, have also adopted bans, states have been slower to act. Fracking opponents say New York, which surprised them Wednesday with the boldest move of any state so far, will change that.

“It definitely has a national political impact … It really has a domino effect,” says Deb Nardone, director of the Sierra Club’s Keeping Dirty Fuels in the Ground initiative.

She and other activists say the measure could intensify pressure to roll back nascent fracking plans in California, Illinois, Maryland, and North Carolina, and to help secure a permanent ban in the Delaware River Basin, which supplies drinking water for nearly a thousand community water systems in the mid-Atlantic region. It could also buoy efforts in various state legislatures, many of which return for a new session in January.

Anti-fracking measure succeeds in Central Valley

There is little question that California greens will mount an intense new effort to ban fracking. They were intensely disappointed in Gov. Jerry Brown’s seeming agnosticism on whether fracking was bad for the environment when a compromise state law was passed in 2013. Rules stemming from that law will go into effect in July 2015.

Greens’ success last month in getting rural San Benito County to ban fracking, however, could lead to a statewide ballot initiative — not to a new fight with Brown, Republican lawmakers and oil lobbyists over legislation in Sacramento. The victory of the ban in the poor, mostly Hispanic, heavily Democratic county was unsurprising, especially because of the local arguments that suggested fracking would take even more water away from the Central Valley.

A silver bullet to boost Dem turnout?

But one element of the ban’s victory was extremely heartening for Democratic strategists in a constant struggle to find new ways to excite the base and increase turnout. This is from The Los Angeles Times:

Fracking opponents here were vastly outspent by oil companies that fought a measure to ban well stimulation techniques such as fracking, acidizing and steam injection, along with conventional drilling in some areas. With just $130,000, the homegrown campaign managed to draw 57% of San Benito County voters to the polls in a low-excitement midterm election. They held off oil companies that spent nearly $2 million opposing the initiative.

If fear of fracking is such a powerful tool to generate Democratic turnout in a small agricultural county, imagine its potential power to get out college students and marginal voters in a big urban area. Democratic officials are likely to support placement of an anti-fracking measure of some sort on the November 2016 ballot even if they think it goes too far or even if they, like the Obama administration, believes fracking is just another heavy industry.

This strategy isn’t just likely in California but in states across the nation.

But now frack phobes are borrowing a tactic from anti-fracking activists in Colorado and New York state and focusing on county-level moratoriums. This is from KQED, the San Francisco PBS station and website:

In May, Santa Cruz County supervisors voted to pass a fracking ban. Voters in San Benito and Santa Barbara counties will vote on bans in November. Activists in Butte and Mendocino counties are still working to qualify ballot measures.

But activists don’t just want to ban fracking, which uses underground water cannons to blast through rocks and access oil and natural gas reserves. They’re also targeting another drilling technique, KQED notes. Armen Nahabedian of Citadel Exploration says that his company …

… doesn’t use fracking, but it does use another oil extraction technique that the initiatives would ban, called cyclic steam injection. Oil in California is heavy, so producers inject steam underground to loosen it up.

“Steam injection is an old technique,” he says. “We’ve been using it in the industry since the early 1960s. It’s not much different than cleaning a dirty engine block.”

About 60 percent of oil produced in California is extracted with steam injection and similar methods, making it more common than fracking. Nahabedian says banning steam injection would mean the state’s refineries would have to look at importing oil from outside the state.

The inclusion of steam injection in the fracking ban is awfully telling. It shows that the real goal of anti-fracking activists is shutting down fossil fuels in general, not just allegedly protecting the environment.

KQED’s story helps foster this movement, as do the California media in general, by never noting that the Obama administration — the greenest administration in history — considers fracking safe.

What few [Californians] seem to understand, and what the media have rarely emphasized, is that the Obama administration dismisses [environmentalists’] alarmism about fracking … .

This is why the president’s first energy secretary, Steven Chu, said: ‘”We believe it’s possible to extract shale gas in a way that protects the water, that protects people’s health. We can do this safely.”

This is why the MIT physicist the White House recently nominated to succeed Chu, Ernest Moniz, described the risks to water posed by fracking as “challenging but manageable.”

This is why the president’s first Environmental Protection Agency director, Lisa Jackson, told a House committee that she was “not aware of any proven case where the fracking process itself has affected water.”

More on this angle here.