"Our coral reefs are in crisis," Bodman said. "Around the world, nearly 27 percent of our reefs are already gone. And if this alarming trend persists, another two-thirds will be lost within the next 30 years. Simply dropping an anchor with its cables, chains and other attendant equipment can cause severe and permanent damage."
Annie, while I've got no problem with the decision to place certain reef areas off limits to commercial vessels and other activities, the GOP is not going to do themselves any favors with buereacratic boneheads, like Deputy Commerce Secretary Sam Bodman, making wild, Chicken Little comments like the one above.
I'm in the aquarium industry, and know a thing or two about corals.
Full disclosure: Unscrupulous individuals in other countries (particularly the Phillipines and Indonesia) have certainly damaged reefs while collecting specimens for the aquarium trade. It's in the interests of the industry, and Los Angeles is at the center of Indo-Pacific importation, to discourage such practices as best we can. I can tell you, without going into details, that considerable effort is expended in that regard, though we have a long way to go.
All that said, the idea that reefs can be "permanently damaged" is ludicrous. Given sunlight and clean water, reefs will regenerate. Tropical storms often do enormous damage to coral reefs, and have done so for hundreds of millions of years. Yet we still have reefs. Storms are to coral reefs as lighting-strike wildfires are to forests. As forests naturally regenerate, so do reefs regenerate.
Corals can propagate like weeds. Artificial reefs grow on every well-lit ship or plane wreck in the tropics. Broken corals don't necessarily die, as corals are colonial animals which can reproduce both sexually and by fragmentation.
I'm not saying that reefs don't need reasonable protections and stewardship, but BS notions like "permanent damage" and "nearly 27 percent of our reefs are already gone... another two-thirds will be lost within the next 30 years," are going to come back and bite us later if we allow them to go unchallenged, just as deforestation alarmism has for the past two decades.
BTW, I'll bet the statistics just quoted rely on projections based on El Nino-related coral "bleaching," which has falsely been attributed to the Global Warming Hoax.
Pinging the science list, as I thought this might interest some of you.