We defend marine species and habitat from overfishing and a host of other threats from the Sea of Cortez to the Gulf of Mexico and the Atlantic, the Hawaiian archipelago to Japan, and Antarctica north to the Arctic Circle.

ABOUT OUR OCEANS WORK

Ocean waters cover three-quarters of the globe and are vast, mostly undiscovered havens for mysterious and diverse life. But the open oceans are also a free-for-all, barely regulated or policed. International laws to protect them are drastically inadequate to address threats like large-scale commercial fishing, which sweeps life out of the seas at unprecedented rates — often only to discard the unusable “bycatch.” Tragically, that discarded bycatch includes thousands of severely injured or slain sea turtles, seabirds, and marine mammals annually.

HOW WE DO IT

• Scientific analysis
• Petitions and litigation to list species under federal law
• Litigation to establish critical habitat for species
• Fishing policy reform through advocacy and litigation
• Strategic litigation to protect habitat
• Public education

MILESTONES

The Center’s Oceans Program:

• Shut down the most destructive fisheries in the Pacific for endangered species — among others, the set-gillnet fishery off central California, including Monterey Bay, which drowned sea otters, harbor porpoises, elephant seals, sea lions, and seabirds; the California-based swordfish longline fishery, which killed leatherback and loggerhead sea turtles; and a lobster fishery that was starving Hawaiian monk seals.

• Secured federal protection for white abalone and elkhorn and staghorn corals, the first-ever marine invertebrates protected by the Endangered Species Act.

• Forced designation of 36,000 square miles of the Bering Sea as critical habitat for the world’s most endangered whale, the North Pacific right whale.

• Filed a groundbreaking petition to regulate carbon dioxide impacts on the ocean under the Clean Water Act. CO2 is making ocean water acidic, posing huge threats to marine species and the ocean web of life.

• Achieved Endangered Species Act protection for the Puget Sound orca and Southwest Alaska sea otter, as well as a current proposal to protect the Cook Inlet beluga whale as an endangered species.