Cashes Ledge, an area about 80 miles off Cape Ann and protected from fishing for more than a decade, is home to the largest continuous kelp forest on the Northeastern shelf. Spectacular videos reveal a lush, undulating canopy hosting thick schools of fish, including red-hued cod. Reptile-like wolffish swim through the kelp and sea ravens patrol the sea-star-studded bottoms.

Despite all the fishing that has rendered much of the Northeast a shell of its colonial riches, there remains in precious spots underwater life every bit the rival of the California coast and the Caribbean. Two such areas, Cashes Ledge and the New England Coral Canyons and Seamounts, deserve national marine monument status from President Obama before he leaves office.


The Coral Canyons and Seamounts, beginning about 150 miles southeast of Cape Cod, are an equally spectacular region yet to experience intense fishing pressure. Undersea mountains rise higher than Mount Washington from the ocean floor, with deep-sea corals thousands of feet down and hundreds of years old. The dense sea life in the canyons and Cashes creates hotspots for whales and dolphins. Researchers recently discovered that puffins feast there in the winter. World famous oceanographer Sylvia Earle dived Cashes Ledge and declared it to be a “Yellowstone” of the ocean.

In the Pacific, awe-inspiring atolls, trenches, corals, submarine volcanoes, and the general diversity of life around seamounts persuaded President George W. Bush to establish national marine monuments off Hawaii, the Mariana Islands, and American Samoa. President Obama approved expansions, and there are now about 740,000 square miles of Pacific waters protected from fishing, drilling, and mining.

But there aren’t any such protections in the Atlantic, and groups such as the Conservation Law Foundation, the National Geographic Society, the Pew Charitable Trusts, and the National Resources Defense Council, are campaigning for protection. (Full disclosure: I coauthored a book on Maine’s puffin restoration and discussed the bird’s winter feeding at a CLF luncheon this winter).


Unlike the uncontroversial and bipartisan creation of distant Pacific reserves, the Atlantic campaign is vigorously opposed by fishermen from Maine to Virginia, who hope to eventually get at renewed areas. The White House recently said that Cashes Ledge is not being considered for permanent protection, and Obama’s Council on Environmental Quality refused in an e-mail to say why.

Governor Baker said the state “welcomes” Obama’s decision. The state had written the Obama administration to warn that monument status might “jeopardize already strained relationships with important stakeholders, including commercial and recreational fishermen.” Much of the Massachusetts congressional delegation, which reflexively carries water for the fishing industry, has largely been silent over the decision against Cashes Ledge.

But last week in an e-mail statement, Senator Ed Markey said he was “surprised.” He said that recent sealife hotspot research by the New England and Mystic aquariums “made clear that Cashes Ledge, the Coral Canyons areas, and the seamounts are special places in our ocean ecosystem.”

Obama should reconsider how special these places are. The areas being sought for protection are only a fraction of New England’s waters, and they give scientists an idea of what the oceans once held and perhaps could hold once more with patience and discipline.

These areas should remind us that the fishing industry does not, and should not, own the entire ocean, not after driving cod populations to all-time commercial lows, and scouring the seafloor of untold biodiversity. At this moment, not one pint of water is permanently protected in the Atlantic. The protection should start with the kelp of Cashes and the coral of the canyons.


Derrick Jackson is Globe columnist and a climate and energy fellow with the Union of Concerned Scientists.