by Ryan P. Kelly and Margaret R. Caldwell

This week the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency gave California some tough love in the form of a ghastly report card on water quality along our coasts and in our rivers and streams: the state’s water pollution seems to have gotten much worse, with the number of polluted water bodies skyrocketing between 2006 and 2010.  Some of this change is due to more aggressive testing; the blame for the rest is solely our own.  And while this news is bad enough on its own, what’s often not discussed is that all of that polluted water ends up downstream in the coastal ocean, already hard hit by decades of abuse.

This is killing the goose that lays the golden state’s egg.  Californians depend upon our coastal oceans more than you might realize.  As of 2000, over three quarters of Californians lived in coastal counties, and the state’s coastal economy accounted for $42.9 billion and 700,000 jobs.  These numbers have surely risen since 2000, but we’ve failed to be the stewards of these waters that their value—economic, aesthetic, and otherwise—deserve. 

And the threats to ocean resources keep coming, from climate change to the collapse of so many fisheries stocks worldwide.  One challenge we are just beginning to understand is ocean acidification, a consequence of the fact that the oceans absorb a large fraction of the carbon dioxide we continue to pump into the atmosphere.  This has changed the chemistry of the entire world’s ocean, making it more acidic.  Because this increased acidity dissolves the hard shells of many of the world’s marine creatures (e.g., oysters, mussels, and many forms of plankton), these creatures and the food webs of which they are a part face a difficult future.

The horrible air quality of the 1970s is an obvious analogy to the state of California’s waters today.  While the state still has severe air quality problems in places—Bakersfield, the Central Valley, and the Los Angeles region stand out—three decades of concerted effort to clean up our air has led to significantly improved air quality for most of our state.  And the benefits of such action are enormous: an EPA report earlier this year showed the direct benefits of the 1990 Clean Air Act amendments dwarfed the costs of implementation by a 30-to-1 ratio.  This week’s final EPA report on water quality only confirms what we already know, that California must do better when it comes to our coastal ocean.

Fortunately, the laws already on the books provide many of the tools we’ll need to fix the problem.  California’s Porter-Cologne Act actually pre-dated the federal Clean Water Act, and hands our state water quality regulators significant authority to stop ongoing pollution and to require remedial action.  The Water Boards and the Coastal Commission, as well as the San Francisco Bay Conservation and Development Commission, enjoy broad powers to give extra protection to fragile or important habitat, and to influence land use practices along our coasts that directly impact coastal water quality.  And California’s landmark greenhouse gas law, AB32, together with its land use companion, SB 375, represent major progress towards reducing our own carbon dioxide emissions, the root cause of ocean acidification globally.

We can and must learn to use these and other laws more effectively to safeguard the ocean resources we’ve come to depend upon.  The recent failure of multiple years of oyster crops in Washington state due in part to more acidic oceans, and the much-larger-scale crash of fisheries and the local economies that depend upon them, make clear the economic and social logic for renewed action.  In an era of shrinking budgets and commitment to protecting and creating jobs, we should be acting to revive a priceless asset and proven economic engine: California’s coastal ocean.

Ryan Kelly is Analyst for Science, Law, and Policy at Stanford University’s Center for Ocean Solutions.  He holds a Ph.D. in Ecology, Evolution, and Environmental Biology from Columbia University and a J.D. from U.C. Berkeley’s Boalt Hall School of Law.

Meg Caldwell is Executive Director of Stanford University’s Center for Ocean Solutions and Director of the Environmental and Natural Resources Law & Policy Program at Stanford Law School.  She served on the California Coastal Commission from 2004-2007, including two years as its chairperson.  She holds a J.D. from Stanford Law School.