Top Stories
(2008-07-09)
BALTIMORE, MD
(wypr) -
The cry for help tucked in a bottle and tossed into the ocean is a staple in tales of shipwreck survivors. A New Jersey woman has adapted that convention as part of a campaign to win Congressional passage of ocean conservation legislation. She stopped at the National Aquarium in Baltimore yesterday where WYPR's Joel McCord caught up with her.The bottles, tied up in a net bag, are strapped to Margo Pellegrino's slim, yellow outrigger canoe as she paddles for Washington. And they carry a simple message, she says.
SOS is you know, basically, Help! on the water or anywhere, sending out an SOS. And we're sending out our SOS, save our seas because they need to be saved.
The mother of two from Medford Lakes, New Jersey, told a group at the Aquarium yesterday she set out on this journey her second effort to call attention to the declining health of the oceans because many seem complacent.
We are in a dangerous state of complacency. And unless we take drastic action now and do something eye-opening and attention getting, people will not be rocked out of this dangerous complacency as we tumble ever closer to the brink.
Pellegrino and her sponsors, the National Resources Defense Council, are among environmental groups backing a measure called Oceans 21, which establishes a comprehensive federal policy for conserving and managing ocean resources.
The legislation stems from recent studies by the U.S. Commission on Ocean Policy and the Pew Oceans Commission, a non-profit. They found that the nation's management of its ocean and coastal resources is fragmented with 11 cabinet level departments and four independent agencies administering more than 100 laws.
Natural Resources Defense Council lawyer Sarah Chasis said passing the law, which also creates an ocean advisor to the president is only logical.
We have a clean air act for our air. We have a clean water act for our waters; we need an ocean protection act for our oceans. And that's what Oceans 21 does.
Congressman John Paul Sarbanes, a Maryland Democrat, sits on the House Natural Resources Committee, which will take up the bill later this month. He said the law dovetails with Chesapeake Bay clean up efforts.
All our efforts to clean up the tributaries in the bay watershed and to clean up the bay in a sense go for nothing if, when it spills out into the ocean, the ocean itself isn't being looked after as well. So we gotta coordinate the whole thing and I think that impacts everybody.
Pellegrino paddled from Miami to Maine last year to promote ocean stewardship, four times the distance of her 500-mile trip from New Jersey to Washington. But that doesn't mean this trip is a piece of cake, she says.
The challenge is I'm not as fit as I was when I did the Miami to Maine. That was close to 2000 miles and I trained like a I trained.
This year, she took the Delaware and Raritan Canal, known as the DNR, from Long Beach Island on the Jersey shore to Trenton, where as she put it, somebody paved over it.
So she loaded her canoe on a car and drove 11 miles to put into the Delaware, pointed south and paddled past Philadelphia and into Delaware Bay, known for its treacherous tides and currents.
I failed to appreciate the speed at which I was paddling and I almost smacked into a buoy, which would have been a disaster. I was like; WHOA this buoy's coming up fast.
Pellegrino started with bottles from advocates in South Jersey and picked up more along the way.
They're from whomever will give me a message wherever I go.
And it doesn't matter what kind of bottle, either.
Beer bottle, wine bottle, and you know what the best bottles are the ones that you pick up off the ground, that haven't made it into the trash. So if you want to stick a message in a bottle, then grab one that's on the ground, cause you know where it's going to end up if you don't.
She says she'll deliver the bottles directly to Congress before the summer is out.
I'm Joel McCord, reporting from the National Aquarium for 88.1, WYPR.
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