By Jack Clarke

As the new legislative session begins, Bay State lawmakers should protect commonwealth waters from a rising tide of conflicting, competing, and often-dangerous uses. And they need to do so quickly by ensuring that the Romney administration makes good on its promise to develop a plan for effectively managing marine industrial development and better protecting coastal ecosystems.

A healthy ocean contributes $3 billion dollars annually to the state's economy. To protect that investment, the legislature should adopt a Comprehensive Ocean Resources Management Act that established a blueprint for the management of ocean waters and submerged lands within three miles of our coastline - the limit of state jurisdiction. This would be the commonwealth's first major environmental law since an act to protect Massachusetts rivers was adopted nearly a decade ago.

The ocean floor is a tangled web of gas pipelines, fiber optic cables, and phone and electric lines. It's littered with lost lobster traps and fishing nets, unexploded bombs, low-level atomic and hazardous waste, and thousands of shipwrecks. Mixed in are sites used for dredge disposal and sewage outfall.

Additionally, commercial fishing, shipping and recreational activities navigate these man made shoals.

Overlaid are proposals for wind farms, wave energy generators, and fish farms.

Off the coast of Gloucester, a liquefied natural gas off-loading facility is contemplated. Last summer a major oil spill occurred in Buzzards Bay, and the National Petroleum Council recently called for reopening Georges Bank to oil drilling.

Secretary of Environmental Affairs Ellen Roy Herzfelder likened this picture to "the Wild West (where) everyone is trying to put their stake in the ground."

As navy veteran Fendall Hawkins pleaded while heading into Nantucket Sound to confront a grounded Soviet sub in the 1996 film The Russians Are Coming, The Russians Are Coming: "We've got to get organized."

Governor Romney should be our man with the plan - a multiple-use plan for the sea. In some instances we need to separate our waters' many uses. In others we need to better coordinate them and in still others we need to prohibit them entirely.

We also need to protect the very nature that exists where these uses occur. State waters are habitat for a rich diversity of marine life - from whales, to striped bass, to phytoplankton.

An ocean act would require regional ocean plans adopted by the governor's environmental chief before permits could be issued. These plans would protect fisheries; preserve public access; enhance biodiversity and ecosystem health; address climate change and sea level rise; and foster the sustainable growth of marine industries, trade, and necessary economic infrastructure. They would guide activities and uses by defining areas in which they would take place.

The current single-sector-oriented approach to ocean management does not fully allow for the protection of marine biodiversity or historic resources from other potentially conflicting uses. Ocean plans would identify the need to restrict certain activities in discrete areas for the protection of important fisheries, sensitive habitats or species, scientific research zones, and submerged cultural artifacts such as shipwrecks.

Plans would also include performance standards to guide marine industrial development and mitigation measures to offset harmful effects. They would further direct state agencies to reform their permitting requirements for activities that are consistent with approved plans and prohibit those that are not.

An ocean act would advance the recent recommendations of the Massachusetts Ocean Management Task Force, the US Commission on Ocean Policy, and the Pew Oceans Commission. It would also make Massachusetts among the first in the nation in managing and protecting its ocean waters.

For the benefit of its citizens, the Commonwealth holds in trust the ocean and its resources within the three-mile boundary. An ocean act would reinforce the ethic of stewardship that protects this community trust while encouraging public participation in decision-making.

Oceans embody complex environments that are constantly influenced by a combination of natural forces and human activities. Healthy ocean ecosystems are vital to human health and welfare. Human activities above, below, and on the ocean surface should be managed to allow both use and protection of ocean resources.

For over two hundred years, the sacred cod has hung in the State House as a fitting tribute to the importance of an abundant sea for our commonwealth. Let us move forward to ensure that as a symbol and species, the cod and its waters remain sacred for our children and theirs.

Jack Clarke is director of advocacy for Mass Audubon and a member of the Massachusetts Ocean Management Task Force.