First there was whitewashing — to cover up something.
Then came greenwashing — corporations using green sounding names to deceive the public into believing that the activity is environmentally friendly.
Now comes bluewashing — corporations using blue sounding names to deceive the public into believing that the activity is ocean friendly.
Take the case of the National Ocean Policy Coalition. That’s a front group for the oil and gas industry.
“I understand their perspective,” says David Helvarg, founder and executive director of Blue Frontier. “They want a level playing field when they already own the field.”
Or try the World Ocean Council. That’s the self described International Business Alliance for Corporate Ocean Responsibility.
“But it’s more like blue washing, because there are no standards to join,” Helvarg told Corporate Crime Reporter in an interview last week. “The major partners include Shell and BP and the like. It’s a compliment to the emerging blue movement that you now have blue washing. You are seeing increasing interest by new players who may or may not be productive. We are always open to partnerships. The entrance of the World Bank into the global marine conservation community is interesting and problematic at the same time.”
After spending more than 30 years as an investigative reporter, Helvarg started Blue Frontier ten years ago to help organize the hundreds of ocean friendly groups against what he calls the saltwater special interests — the industrial fishing industry, the Navy, the shipping industry, oil and gas, coastal real estate.
The ocean friendly groups are fighting back, and have had some victories over the past decade. But the state of the oceans is not good.
“The oceans are in a state of collapse,” Helvarg says. “It’s a cascading disaster based around industrial overfishing. Seventy percent of the world’s fisheries are in a state of maximum fishing capacity or collapse. Oil, chemical, nutrient and plastic pollution endangers the reproductive and other capacities of the living seas. You have coastal sprawl and the loss of wetlands and other coastal habitats. Fossil fuel fired climate change which is warming the oceans, raising sea levels, intensifying the impact of hurricanes and extreme weather events in the coastal zone, and on top of all that changing the basic chemistry of the ocean, acidifying the ocean, which may be good for jelly fish but not so good for any shell forming creature from clams to corals.”
“A warmer more acidic ocean holds less dissolved oxygen, which is why we see the opportunity to work with every sector, except oil and gas. Even if oil and gas doesn’t spill, it’s like a product liability issue. This product wrecks your planet and kills your ocean. Last spring, I put together a letter and got about 25 to 30 marine conservation groups to say that we are not going to take any funding from oil and gas companies. But we will and do work with every other sector. We work with progressive elements of the fishing industry, of the shipping industry, we work closely with the Coast Guard and the Navy. The Secretary of the Navy wants the sea services — the Navy, the Marines and the Coast Guard — to be 50 percent fossil fuel free by 2025. It’s an ambitious goal. He’s a lot more ambitious than his boss, the commander in chief.”
As for the commander in chief — President Obama — he has an ocean policy, but hardly ever talks about it, Helvarg says.
“On paper, it has the potential to be good policy,” Helvarg said. “He signed it in 2010 as an executive order. It is supposed to establish regional coordinating bodies where all of the federal agencies work with the states or the tribes and the localities to, in the words of Thad Allen, former Commandant of the Coast Guard, to put urban planning in the water column. Right now, it’s like the Wild West. The first to apply for a permit is the first user out there. The idea is to coordinate all of the agencies and use the ocean in a way that sustains its health. It’s good in theory. And it will work if there is enough bottom up pressure. The first two regional coordinating bodies are meeting in the mid-Atlantic.”
“I just wrote it up in The Hill newspaper the other day. In New England, the states showed up, along with the tribes, and a coalition of fishermen and environmentalists. It has really moved forward. In the mid-Atlantic, it’s still a bunch of federal bureaucrats talking to each other because there is not the transparency and the public engagement.”
Helvarg would like to see the creation of a Department of the Ocean.
“Right now we have National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA),” Helvarg says. “Thirty five years ago, Nixon buried NOAA in the Department of Commerce. The Coast Guard is an institutional orphan now at Homeland Security. Ideally, we should create a Department of Ocean and have an Oceans Act at the level of the Clean Water Act and the Clean Air Act. Then somebody should be in charge and I could imagine a Department of the Ocean with NOAA for science and policy and the Coast Guard for operations and enforcement. It’s not politically realistic today, but it would be in the public interest.”
Senate passage of the Law of the Seas would also be in the public interest. But the US Senate hasn’t ratified it in thirty years. Is that because of corporate pressure? “It’s not even corporate pressure,” Helvarg says. “This is a treaty that has been endorsed by everybody from Greenpeace to Exxon. It is the right wing, the black helicopter crowd, the Tea Party folks, who used to be the Wise Use folks.The fact that everybody in the maritime community supports it is seen as part of the conspiracy and proves that it’s an attempt to undermine U.S. sovereignty by putting up the oceans under the command of UN blue helmets.”
“And yet, there are enough Senators to pass it. I was told that when Jesse Helms retired we would pass the Law of the Seas in the Senate. And then when John Kerry became Secretary of State, he kept saying that he was going to get it passed. It still hasn’t passed. So, we acknowledge the Law of the Seas in our activities, but we still haven’t passed it because you can’t get UN treaties through the Senate anymore.”
[For the complete transcript of the Interview with David Helvarg, see 27 Corporate Crime Reporter 8 (11), February 24, 2014, print edition only.]