"Launching a Counterattack Against the Pathogens of Global Commerce"

At the outset, let me congratulate the conference sponsors. You are taking the initiative in a much neglected field. Marine bioinvasions have large consequences for our food supply, our economy, our fishing industry, and human health. These invasions also threaten to degrade and homogenize coastal waters in every corner of the seven seas.

Ten years ago, just after midnight on March 24, the Exxon Valdez crashed into a reef in Prince William Sound. Eleven million gallons of crude oil poured into the pristine waters, casting a shroud over hundreds of miles of shoreline. Television crews on the scene broadcast images of seabirds, otters, and sea lions, slicked black with oil. Those images fixated the world on the dangers of oil spills and led to many new laws and regulations designed to prevent another such tragedy.

Yet the biological spills taking place in Prince William Sound from oil tankers go virtually unnoticed. Just over a year ago the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service discovered four new species of zooplankton spreading through the sound, released from ballast water brought by tankers from East Asia via San Francisco Bay. In the long run, these zooplankton, feeding on phytoplankton utilized by the Dungeness crab, may change the sound more extensively and permanently that any oil spill. And no one has a clue -- or a dime -- to contribute toward a massive "clean up." Were that even possible.

With just four, small bioinvasive species, Prince William Sound is relatively lucky. So far. But look farther south, where a prolific, and hungry European stowaway has disembarked. The green crab has begun to infest Pacific coastal waters, devouring anything, from commercially valuable oysters and clams to barnacles, algae and snails. And it's not alone. In the northwest nearly forty percent of all aquatic species are exotic, including the spartina that has choked Willapa Bay and decimated the shellfish industry. This particular invader came from our own Atlantic coastal estuaries.

It gets worse inside the Golden Gate. There, as Interior Secretary, I have worked with environmentalists, irrigation farmers and cities to get more freshwater down California's main rivers into the Delta and San Francisco Bay. Our goal is to help restore endangered native fish like chinook salmon and Delta smelt. Only now I know that it is not enough to ensure healthy flows downstream; our real threats may be coming upstream.

Specifically, some 30 species of exotic fish -- Asian goby. Atlantic shad, Mississippi catfish, carp, bass, perch, sunfish...goldfish -- are swarming the bay, a veritable marine zoo. An additional 200 bioinvasive species suffocate native fisheries and helped drive the thicktail chub to extinction. Those are only the documented cases, with new arrivals every ten weeks.

Moving eastward, the Gulf of Mexico is being mugged by the brown mussel, which displaces native mollusks, threatens mangroves, and fouls water intake systems. In the Chesapeake, a hotspot for over 150 documented bioinvasive species, oyster beds now succumb not only to polluted runoff, or overharvest, but to the new arrival of a predatory whelk. I'll let the courageous researchers detail what's happening less than a mile away from here, in North America's oldest coastal port and fishery. It's too depressing for me.

It might be easier if we could simply blame the rest of the world for our troubles. But the truth is ballast water sloshes both ways. In the early 1980s, a small, luminescent blob called Leidy's comb jelly was pumped aboard ships along our coast, then discharged weeks later into the Black Sea. With no predators, it mushroomed into one of the most intense marine invasions ever recorded, nearly wiping out anchovies and other fisheries. Zebra mussels exchanged for jellyfish: the maritime law of reciprocity at its darkest.

No place on earth is immune from the twin threats of extinction and alien invaders. In the mid-nineteenth century, when wooden whaling ships cris-crossed the seas in bloody pursuit, Herman Melville pondered: "whether Leviathan can long endure so wide a chase and so remorseless a havoc; whether he must not at last be exterminated from the waters." He took note of how we were pushing the buffalo to extinction on the prairies, but dismissed it as impossible on the high seas, rationalizing that, surely, whales could escape to polar regions and thus become "immortal in his species."

Mankind never used to navigate such frozen regions, even though the fouled wooden hulls like Ahab's surely carried a few unwelcome guests. To be sure, bioinvasion from ships is as ancient as the Vikings and the Phoenicians. Even when ballast consisted of stones, dirt and iron, some exotic bioinvasive species hitchhiked along.

What has changed in the past half century is the rate of spread, leading to faster, wider, more complex dispersal. We reach remote ports on a weekly, daily, hourly basis. From more diverse trade routes. Loaded with much larger volumes of ballast. Discharge of that ballast is nothing more than "point source pollution" and must be treated as such.

Global aquaculture -- shrimp farms, public fish hatcheries, commercial oyster beds -- also bears responsibility for the spread of epibionts, parasites, predators and pathogens. So does the aquarium industry. The outbreak of giant African snails in Florida or the caulerpa taxifolia clone, an alga taking over the Mediterranean, originated not in ballast, but from aquarium tanks.

All these sources must be included in our response, policy and research. But at a more immediate level, we must grasp the root of the problem. That root lies not in isolated incidents, but in scope: the dramatic rate of spread, the increasing vectors of pathogens that carried cholera to Alabama and seem to multiply toxic "red tides" around the world.

As a very crude rule of thumb, ten percent of invasive species will establish breeding populations; ten percent of those will launch a major invasion. At first, that "one percent" factor seems negligible. Then consider how San Francisco Bay is approaching 300 exotics.

Consider also that ships this century have grown from 3,000 tons to 300,000 tons, and the volume of ballast water slurry -- pumped and sucked at 20,000 cubic meters an hour -- has kept apace. Faster crossings let more species survive, reproduce, make connections, and take baggage. The fall of trade walls brings global exposure to once quiet seaside ports, and vice-versa. In the ballast water of timber cargo ships traveling between Coos Bay, Oregon and Japan, researchers found 367 species of living animals and plants.

That's a single route. Consider how larger ports, say Norfolk and Baltimore, receive more than 12 million metric tons of foreign ballast water per year, originating in 48 different foreign ports, and 90 percent of them carried live organisms, including barnacles, clams, mussels, copepods, diatoms and juvenile fish. Worldwide, it is estimated that tens of thousands of ships carry several thousand species daily.

Let me put this another way: In the time it takes me to deliver this speech, two million gallons of foreign plankton will have been discharged somewhere in American waters. We'd better get busy. And fast.

How? What is our response? So far it has been pitiful. Frankly, in light of the economic and ecological devastation, we have been too timid. We restrain ourselves with voluntary guidelines, a scattered approach and limited, unenforced codes. No longer.

In 1997, President Clinton, responding to concerns of scientists like yourselves, asked the Departments of Interior and Agriculture to draft an executive order for his consideration. That order, which is now before the President, will contain two broad initiatives. First, it will require federal agencies to review their existing authorities and activities to reduce the risk of bioinvaders. Second, it will create an interagency working group to draft a plan -- possibly including regulatory and legislative change -- necessary for a coordinated response to bioinvaders.

What will this look like in practice? I'll sketch the rough outlines in pencil. For there are existing models, and while there is still much to learn, we do know this: the first and best line of defense against bioinvaders is to keep them out in the first place. Period.

Not one marine bioinvasive species, after it has taken hold, has ever been eliminated or effectively contained. There is simply no silver bullet. This is a sobering fact. It means our efforts must be focused primarily on prevention. And that, in turn, means effective regulation and enforcement.

In 1990, in response to the damage caused by the zebra mussel in the Great Lakes, the Congress enacted Nonindigenous Aquatic Nuisance Prevention and Control Act. Among other provisions, the Act now requires ballast water exchange at sea rather than in the Great Lakes system. We should now move toward mandatory ballast exchange for not just the Great Lakes, but for all shipping in all American ports. In California water districts whose systems are threatened by invaders working their way upstream out of San Francisco Bay have begun to call for ballast water regulation by federal and state agencies.

We need to mount a coordinated research program to better understand the threats posed by alien invaders including fish, crustaceans, mollusks and pathogens and to guide programs of prevention and control. Perhaps we can find economical and safe means to decontaminate ballast water and sediments in situ. The Agricultural Research Service and APHIS in the Department of Agriculture, the Coast Guard, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and the Biological Research Division of the United States Geological Service should mount a coordinated effort to understand agricultural threats, threats to natural ecosystems and new methods of prevention and control.

Does this mean our agency budgets must catch up to, and keep pace with, the ecological devastation they target? Yes. Because that devastation is economic as well. Vast as they are, the Great Lakes are easy compared to the task ahead, and offer few unqualified success stories. Yet as a case study, it makes a strong case why an aggressive, well-funded public response to bioinvasion is well worth the expense and effort.

We spend several million dollars a year sterilizing, catching, poisoning, putting up barriers to suppress the sea lamprey. Well, it's still there. And it may never go away. But for every dollar we invest, the Great Lakes earn $30.25 in increased fisheries revenue. Your stock portfolio should perform as well.

Global cooperation is an imperative. Our joint efforts with Canada on the Great Lakes provides and example. Two global entities -- the Convention on Biological Diversity and the World Trade Organization -- should play a major role in international cooperation. The Convention on Biological Diversity is the place to begin, and indeed preliminary discussions pursuant to section 8 of the Biological Diversity Treaty are underway. Those discussions underline the need for Senate ratification of the Biodiversity Treaty. The World Trade Organization must also take an active role in the movement to develop and harmonize regulations in this area.

Let me conclude on a cautious note of hope. You've all heard that the flip side of crisis is opportunity? Well, the Exxon Valdez crash gave us such an opportunity. It led Congress to require double hulled tankers and stiffen training, navigation and technology within the shipping industry. It prompted state, federal and private agencies to establish habitat restoration programs, and undertake comprehensive research on the North Pacific ecosystem.

We face an even greater opportunity now. The time is at hand for scientists, policy makers, and industry and the public to join together for an intensive coordinated counterattack on the threat of bioinvasions. You have initiated that process, and we in the public sector must now respond in kind. Thank you.