NMFS

In 1970 - the same year that saw the birth of Earth Day - a simple but comprehensive Act was signed into law that would forever alter the federal regulatory process. The National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) established a national policy to protect the environment, calling for government agencies to consider environmental impacts in all decisions that it made.

I'm a little late on this one, but last Friday the National Marine Fisheries Service announced that as of August 25, 2008, 180,000 square miles of the Bering Sea (that's five times the area of California) will be off-limits to bottom trawling.

The folks over at the Outside magazine blog clued me into the news yesterday about new leatherback sea turtle data from Stanford's Hopkins Marine Station.They tracked 46 turtles on their migratory route, and as it turns out, the leatherbacks swam a very specific path, thousands of miles out to an area near the Galapagos known as the South Pacific Gyre -- before returning to Costa Rica to nest.

Fact: All six sea turtle species in U.S. waters are threatened with, or in danger of, extinction. Fact: Bottom trawl fisheries are the single greatest threat to loggerhead sea turtles. This is where we come in...