We defend marine species and habitat from overfishing, offshore oil drilling, climate change and ocean acidification, plastic pollution, and a host of other threats. The impacts of our work stretch from the Gulf of California to the Gulf of Mexico and the Atlantic, the Hawaiian archipelago 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. Destructive large-scale commercial fishing sweeps life out of the seas at unprecedented rates — depleting fish populations and severely injuring or killing thousands of sea turtles, seabirds, and marine mammals annually.

Meanwhile the oceans are rising, warming, and becoming more acidic because of people’s overreliance on fossil fuels. Offshore drilling fuels climate change and threatens marine life and coastal communities. Plastic pollution fills the oceans, choking wildlife and carrying toxins throughout the food web — yet industry is increasing U.S. plastic production using an oversupply of fracked gas.  

We're working to tackle some of the biggest threats with strategic campaigns.  

HOW WE DO IT

• Scientific analysis
• Petitions and litigation to list species and protect critical habitat under federal law
• Policy reform through advocacy and litigation
• Strategic litigation to address threats to marine biodiversity and public health
• Communications and media outreach
• Organizing campaigns for change

MILESTONES

The Center's Oceans program has ...

• Helped protect endangered beluga whales, sea otters, Rice’s whales, sea turtles, and other species from dangerous oil and gas activities by winning lawsuits against the federal government’s efforts to expand offshore oil drilling off Alaska and the Gulf of Mexico —  including by winning a precedent-setting lawsuit blocking the first and only offshore drilling development in federal Arctic waters because the feds didn’t properly consider its impact on endangered species and climate change.

• Secured protections for sea otters, leatherback sea turtles, Hawaiian monk seals, humpback whales, and North Atlantic right whales from dangerous fishing gear such as gillnets, trawls, longline hooks, and pot fisheries that were capturing and entangling these endangered species.

• Won safeguards from the most destructive fisheries — gillnets off California, trawling in the Gulf of Mexico and Alaska, longline hooks and crab pots in the Pacific, and lobster traps in the Atlantic and Hawai‘i — for federally protected sea otters, leatherback and loggerhead sea turtles, Hawaiian monk seals, and humpback, blue, and North Atlantic right whales.

• Won Endangered Species Act protection for Southern Resident killer whales, Southwest Alaska sea otters, Cook Inlet beluga whales, bearded and ringed seals, 22 species of corals, the chambered nautilus, Taiwanese humpback dolphin, white abalone and black abalone.

• Secured critical habitat protection of 120 million acres for polar bears; 685 miles of beaches and more than 300,000 square miles of ocean for loggerhead sea turtles; 7,000 square miles for Hawaiian monk seals; nearly 40,000 square miles of the Atlantic Ocean for North Atlantic right whales; 36,000 square miles of the Bering Sea for one of the world's most endangered whales, North Pacific right whales, and 6,500 square miles for threatened corals in Florida, Puerto Rico, the U.S. Virgin Islands, Navassa Island and the Flower Garden Banks in the Gulf of Mexico.

• Launched a national campaign for heightened regulations and limits on plastic production and blocked the construction of one of the world’s largest plastic-making plants in Louisiana’s “ Cancer Alley,” where polluting facilities endanger an already overburdened community.  

• Filed a lawsuit against the federal government resulting in a moratorium on fracking off the California coast, as well as a suit helping force the disclosure of offshore fracking’s environmental impacts; organized grassroots resistance against Southern California fossil fuel development.

Check out our press releases to learn more about actions by Center's Oceans program.