Well offshore from the coastal waters used by New England's and Atlantic Canada's fiesty and independent lobster fleet, the offshore border wilderness is the brainchild of offshore scallop fishermen and Nova Scotia scientist Martin Willison, who realized that if the sea scallops and other natural residents of the Gulf of Maine were allowed to live to full maturity, the narrow protected area would act as a tremendous nursery for those tasty bivalves as well as groundfish and other wild animals and plants that once thronged the Gulf of Maine. As the industry quickly learned, this 'dumbed-down' ecosystem is highly unstable and prone to population crashes. Martin, along with such leaders of the American marine biology community as Dr. Peter Auster of the National Undersea Research Center , Dr. Les Watling and Dr Robert Steneck of the University of Maine School of Marine Sciences, concluded that, without a fully protected area that includes all of the offshore Gulf of Maine's marine environments, there would be no 'baseline' or 'control areas'. These communities, and the wildlife of these vast undersea public lands, deserve better. In addition to the fact that the two nations' Gulf of Maine border crosses every type of offshore marine habitat, the scientists and conservation groups chose the offshore border for protection for the very practical reason that it is the only place in the Gulf of Maine that is already patrolled on a constant basis by air and by sea by both nations' Coast Guards.
All vessels are free to pass through the border wilderness area.
But no removals of living or non-living resources from within that area. Let's hope the Prime Minister and the President will show a similar collective intelligence and quickly, permanently, protect this offshore border area. It will take centuries to grow back. Let's start, here and now. These items are posted to our site unedited and unsupervised.