From The Boston Globe
By Derrick Z. Jackson

Jane Lubchenco’s tenure at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration will be a good place to gauge how much lost ground can be reclaimed for science. Her appointment by President-elect Obama to run the administration will be particularly interesting since NOAA is under the Department of Commerce, which will have many lobbyists surely fighting any environmental regulations that come from scientific assessments. It will be challenging because even though the Obama administration is science-friendly in appointments, research funding remains questionable because of the recession.

Lubchenco, a marine scientist at Oregon State, has been president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the International Council for Science and was on the Pew Oceans Commission and the National Science Board under President Clinton. In 1995, she warned that a proposed massive congressional cut in nondefense science funding “has very profound implications for the future of the country.” She told the Oregonian newspaper, “The consequences are likely to be a massive dismantling of a research system that has served us very, very well.”

In 1997, evidence of global overfishing, coastal development and pollution was so profound that a panel of marine scientists that included Lubchenco proposed that 20 percent of the world’s oceans be designated as marine preserves. Only one-quarter of one percent of ocean surface was under protection. Lubchenco, who by then was warning of “ecological tsunamis” in the oceans, said the level of existing protection was “a drop in the bucket, especially relative to the magnitude of the changes that we humans are causing.”

It was no surprise that she was a critic of a Bush administration that denied for eight years the magnitude of human impact on the planet. In 2003, when the Pew Oceans Commission said overfishing and the degraded conditions of America’s rivers and coastlines constituted a “crisis,” Lubchenco said, “We have squandered their natural bounty.” She added, “The system is broken. It’s not working for the fishermen; it’s not working for the fish.”

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