Testing the Waters in Marine Protected Areas

Amid environmental rollbacks on overfishing, wind energy, deep-sea mining, Tribal collaboration and more, National Marine Sanctuaries and Marine National Monuments weather turbulent times

By Kate Gonzales
Conservation
Mar 26, 2026

Calm seas belie uncertainty around Nīhoa, Hawai‘i (above, photo by Ian Shive/Tandem Stills + Motion)—part of Papahānaumokuākea Marine National Monument, where previous research subjects included endemic limpets, such as the yellow-foot ‘opihi (below, photo by David Fleetham/Alamy).

WHEN KANOE‘ULALANI MORISHIGE STEPPED INTO HER ROLE as a Native Hawaiian program specialist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) in 2021, “I was just excited to continue building equitable, reciprocal and ethical research partnerships,” she says, “in ways that mentor the next generation of Native Hawaiian, local and Pacific Islander students.”

First as a student and then later leading research expeditions, Morishige drew on expertise within the Indigenous community—for example, in a NOAA-sponsored study of intertidal ecosystems in Papahānaumokuākea Marine National Monument, in the northwest waters off Hawai‘i, where the team tracked populations of endemic limpets known as ‘opihi. A Ph.D. in marine biology from the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa, Morishige absorbed lessons of her Native Hawaiian heritage alongside the tools of Western science.

“It’s been long overdue, but there was a lot of support from Biden’s administration to uplift Indigenous Peoples and communities and equally value Indigenous knowledge systems,” Morishige says of her work at NOAA. “We were gaining a lot of momentum,” she recalls. “Then January [2025] came, and everything changed.”

An image of yellow-foot ‘opihi clinging to rock in a tide pool.

Beginning on the first day of his second term, President Donald Trump has issued more than a dozen executive orders and proclamations rolling back landmark environmental regulations that have protected people, wildlife and natural resources for decades. These reversals could have devastating effects for federal Marine Protected Areas—including the United States’ 18 National Marine Sanctuaries, a designation that requires multiple rounds of public input and takes years to receive, and five Marine National Monuments, protected by presidential proclamation—particularly against the backdrop of last fall’s government shutdown and staffing cuts at NOAA, which oversees the areas.

“It’s far more aggressive than the first term and far more impactful, I would say,” according to Wade Crowfoot, California’s natural resources secretary. “A lot of forethought had gone into attacking these environmental protections.”

But community pushback—in the form of lawsuits, state action and regional solutions—could slow threats to federally protected waters.

“It makes us fight harder for what we love or what we want to protect,” says Jonee Peters, executive director of the 75-year-old Conservation Council for Hawai‘i, a National Wildlife Federation affiliate. That’s true today, she says, even if “it’s a harder battle.”

An image of a southern sea otter in a kelp bed.

Federally threatened southern sea otters reside in Chumash Heritage National Marine Sanctuary.

Excluding inclusion

Among his Inauguration Day actions, Trump pledged to root out the government’s “forced illegal and immoral discrimination programs” under the diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) umbrella. The two newest National Marine Sanctuaries illustrate the promise of collaboration between Indigenous Peoples and the government in federal waters—and its potential breakdown.

Upon its designation on November 30, 2024, the 4,543-square-mile Chumash Heritage National Marine Sanctuary—which stretches about 3 miles off California’s Central Coast—became the first Indigenous-nominated marine sanctuary in the United States. The process began about a decade prior, when the Northern Chumash Tribal Council launched a campaign along with the Sierra Club and Surfrider Foundation. Over the years, Fred Collins, the council’s late chair, and Violet Sage Walker, his daughter and current chair, built support at community meetings and church gatherings, translating outreach materials for the region’s Spanish-speaking populations.

“We’re on a journey in state government to support Tribal leadership as the state of California never has before,” says Crowfoot, who backed the Chumash designation.

That support extends to wildlife. Chumash is on the migratory path for populations of gray, blue and humpback whales—all listed as endangered under the federal Endangered Species Act. These waters also nurture populations of threatened southern sea otters, a keystone species that helps maintain crucial carbon-storing kelp and seagrass, as well as threatened snowy plovers, and endangered black abalone and leatherback sea turtles.

But Trump’s pledge to eliminate DEI programs, including “environmental justice offices and positions,” challenged the ethos of Indigenous co-stewardship, and the 43-day government shutdown paused progress. While the Chumash sanctuary in September named an advisory council—including members of the Northern Chumash Tribe of San Luis Obispo County and the Santa Ynez Band of Chumash Indians, as well as fishing and recreation representatives, among others—additional steps outlined in the sanctuary’s 81-page management plan were delayed. In December, the council elected officers who planned to form an Indigenous cultures working group, as well as a framework for Indigenous and NOAA co-stewardship of the sanctuary.

“Tribes are showing that we can lead the way,” Walker says. “Conservation cannot be stagnant. It can’t be protecting something and locking it away behind closed doors.”

For inspiration, she and others leading the Chumash campaign had looked to the co-management plans of Papahānaumokuākea Marine National Monument, which now faces its own hurdles. Established as a Marine National Monument by President George W. Bush in 2006, Papahānaumokuākea gained sanctuary status in 2025—a rare overlap in federal protections.

That was a bright moment in what Morishige describes as a tough year. After January, the work she and NOAA colleagues had done to build trust with Indigenous communities was de-emphasized.

“We had to censor a lot of words that were on our website, or we were told to kind of keep a low profile when it comes to Indigenous engagement,” she says. Indigenous efforts, spearheaded by groups like the Papahānaumokuākea Native Hawaiian Cultural Working Group for more than 20 years, became characterized as “community engagement,” and Morishige says progress slowed on “implementing concrete strategies to prioritize Indigenous engagement” across sanctuaries.

“I was very concerned that my job wouldn’t last very long at NOAA,” she says.

“The sanctuary designation process is very community driven,” says Jessie Ritter, NWF’s associate vice president, water and coasts. “The fact that these special places are facing such scrutiny right now really is a shame.”

An image of Gloria Lopez and Ray Ward dancing during a celebration.

Gloria Lopez and Ray Ward, both Chumash, dance at an October 2024 ceremony celebrating the Chumash Heritage National Marine Sanctuary’s designation.

Buoying commercial fishing

While critical of equity and inclusion, the Trump administration has expressed support for opening protected waters to commercial fishing—including three actions last April alone. First, an executive order called for a federal review of all Marine National Monuments’ suitability for commercial fishing, with a goal of becoming “the world’s dominant seafood leader” through increased harvesting and expanding into conservation waters.

The same day, a presidential proclamation deemed the prohibition on commercial fishing within the nearly 500,000-square-mile Pacific Islands Heritage Marine National Monument burdensome, stating that the region’s vulnerable coral habitats and species are already adequately protected under federal law. And later in April, NOAA issued a letter green-lighting commercial fishing within that monument for permit holders in the Western Pacific region.

Commercial fishing—heavily regulated by legislation including the 1976 Magnuson–Stevens Act and the 1996 Sustainable Fisheries Act—is managed regionally by NOAA’s eight fishery councils, with goals “designed to prevent overfishing, rebuild depleted fish stocks, and ensure sustainable fishing practices,” according to NOAA. Some commercial practices—including the type of industrial fishing that drags metal trawling nets along the seafloor—are known to be devastatingly destructive to habitats and responsible for the deaths of large numbers of animals, including endangered hawksbill sea turtles in Hawai‘i.

Commercial harvesting in the Pacific has led to the overfishing of tuna and swordfish, which in turn affects predators, such as the endangered false killer whale, and the entire food web, including nearly 200 species of corals, plus vulnerable coconut crabs, reef sharks, pearl oysters and more fish, birds, plants and mammals found nowhere else on Earth.

In response to a lawsuit brought by the Conservation Council for Hawai‘i and others, a federal judge nullified NOAA’s April letter authorizing commercial fishing in the Pacific Islands monument.

“When I was a kid, the fish were bountiful,” says Peters, who grew up in O‘ahu and sees lawsuits as necessary to protect the endemic species of her state, which is frequently referred to as the endangered species capital of the world. “At this point in the game, I think that’s the only way,” she says.

And yet commercial fishing in monuments continues to inch toward reality. Last fall, NOAA’s regional councils submitted reviews of all monuments’ suitability for commercial fishing, in compliance with Trump’s executive order. Despite pushback from Indigenous advocates, Peters and Morishige among them, the Western Pacific council moved forward in December with proposals to resume commercial fishing in marine monuments. And this February, Trump signed a proclamation opening Northeast Canyons and Seamounts Marine National Monument to commercial fishing. As of press time, all other monuments remain under consideration for commercial fishing.

Corals including cup and bubblegum—two varieties found in Northeast Canyons and Seamounts Marine National Monument, which Trump moved to open to commercial fishing—provide habitat for a quarter of the world’s marine life.

Selective energy support

Like the Pacific Islands monument, the 4,913-square-mile Northeast Canyons and Seamounts Marine National Monument—130 miles off Cape Cod, Massachusetts, and the only marine national monument in the Atlantic Ocean—is rich in coral. Along with sponges and anemones, this coral provides food and habitat for “vibrant deep-sea ecosystems,” which the 2016 presidential proclamation designating the monument calls “extremely sensitive to disturbance from extractive activities.”

NOAA regulations state that “exploring for, developing or producing oil, gas or minerals (with a grandfather clause for preexisting operations)” is one of four prohibitions typical for many sanctuaries. In April 2025, however, Trump issued an order opening the U.S. Outer Continental Shelf to the private sector for “exploration, mining and environmental monitoring” of copper, cobalt, titanium and more. The order directed federal agencies to indicate which minerals could be used for defense infrastructure, manufacturing and energy—and where in the coral seabeds they’re located.

Then in November, the administration reversed Biden’s January 2025 withdrawals from areas off the Pacific and Atlantic coasts, the Gulf and portions of the Arctic, reopening them to proposed oil and gas leasing. The federal government also proposed the sale of 34 leases in waters off California, Florida and Alaska, totaling nearly 1.3 billion acres. “That means unique marine habitats now are under threat of adverse impacts from both oil and gas operations and extractive deep-sea mineral mining, which can upset the entire ecosystem,” says Lindsay Gardner, NWF’s director of marine conservation.

While NOAA’s Office of National Marine Sanctuaries declined to discuss internal matters, environmental organizations see further reversals afoot. “Sanctuaries and monuments are all being considered for oil and gas drilling and mining in a way that they never have been before,” says Brad Sewell, managing director of oceans at the Natural Resources Defense Council. NRDC and others filed an ongoing suit in February 2025 after Trump announced his plan to restart oil and gas leases in federal protected waters.

Even as he boosted extractive energy on day 1, Trump ended federal support for offshore wind—an energy source the conservation community generally considers less harmful to the environment than extractive drilling—by halting the practices of leasing federal waters for offshore wind energy and permitting projects in existing lease areas, pending federal review. In response, NRDC, NWF and others filed a legal brief against the federal offshore wind ban, in support of a lawsuit brought by 17 states and the District of Columbia.

Amber Hewett, NWF’s senior director of offshore wind energy, calls responsibly developed offshore wind one of “the nation’s largest untapped clean energy solutions that’s commercially available.” She says the leasing process includes rounds of public input designed to safeguard communities and wildlife. And yet, “the Trump administration this time around has been unequivocal in their opposition to offshore wind,” she says. “They wasted no time.”

Hawksbill sea turtles are endangered in part due to industrial fishing.

What’s next

Against the deluge of rollbacks, some are striving to shore up marine protections. Months before Trump took office, Walker helped negotiate a deal temporarily shrinking the Chumash sanctuary by roughly 3,000 square miles to make way for a wind transmission line that will deliver cleaner power to more than 1 million California homes. That line is “definitely not on hold,” she says, adding that California leaseholders are “continuing on their current course of action"—although at least one leaseholder told National Wildlife that no survey work was planned.

And when the Trump administration announced its plans to drill offshore for oil, including along the California coast, Governor Gavin Newsom responded. “California has stood firm in our opposition to new offshore drilling, and nothing will change that,” he said. “We will use every tool at our disposal to protect our coastline.”

The 17-state lawsuit challenging the offshore wind ban saw a win in December, with a federal judge calling that portion of the order “arbitrary” and “contrary to law.” In February, the federal government filed a notice of appeal.

Morishige, who left NOAA last fall for an assistant professor position in the University of Hawai‘i’s new sustainable fisheries management program, says she remains hopeful about teaching the next generation. She’s excited to work on Indigenous affairs from outside the federal government and to become the advocate her elders, or kūpuna, dreamed of.

“We need these areas more than we’ve ever needed them,” she says. “They safeguard these intact and healthy and thriving ecosystems in a world where these areas are becoming few and far between. … The time is now for us to act.”

NWF Priority

Systemic Support

The National Wildlife Federation’s longtime support for Marine Protected Areas includes advocating for the designation of Northeast Canyons and Seamounts Marine National Monument; supporting the creation and strong co-management of Chumash Heritage National Marine Sanctuary with local Tribal members; urging for the expansion of Papahānaumokuākea Marine National Monument; and protecting sanctuaries from mining and commercial fishing. Each year, NWF works to secure critical federal appropriations that fund the National Marine Sanctuary System.

Kate Gonzales is a writer and editor based in California.