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Shifting Baselines

The Cure for Planetary Amnesia

The Shifting Baselines Blog

JacquetSEED.jpgJennifer Jacquet is a Ph.D. candidate with the Sea Around Us Project at the UBC Fisheries Centre. She works closely with Dr. Daniel Pauly, who coined the term Shifting Baselines, the syndrome on which this blog focuses. <img alt=
Josh Donlan
is a conservation scientist and a Visting Fellow at Cornell University. He often hides out in the backcountry of the Teton Mountains, pondering bygone giant beavers and ground sloths. He also is also the founder and Director of Advanced Conservation Strategies and has a habit of restoring remote islands.

RODodos.jpgScientist turned filmmaker Randy Olson, founder of the Shifting Baselines Ocean Media Project is also a blog contributor.

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New Projects & Publications

April 2008: Randy Olson and the Puget Sound Partnership release the flash video Shifting Baselines in the Sound.

April 18, 2008: Jennifer Jacquet gives the talk "Market Inefficiencies: Why Do We Waste Good Fish on Pigs?" at a forage fish workshop hosted by the Marine Fish Conservation Network.

April 15, 2008: Josh Donlan gives a invited talk in New York at Wildlife Conservation Society's annual meeting, Gateways to Conservation 2008: The State of the Wild.

April 5, 2008: Randy Olson delivers the Claude Bernard Distinguished Lecture at the American Physiological Society meeting in San Diego, titled, "Don't Be Such a Scientist: Talking substance in an age of style."

March 15, 2008: Josh Donlan is selected as a 2008 Kinship Conservation Fellow. He will join 17 others from around the world to explore business and economic tools for biodiversity conservation gains.

March 6-13, 2008: Josh Donlan co-directs a working group at the US National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis in Santa Barbara. The group is exploring biodiversity offsets and market-based instruments as solutions for biodiversity-fishery bycatch offsets.

Mar. 25-27, 2008: Randy Olson presents his films and his "Don't Be Such a Scientist" lecture on science communication at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama.

Mar. 2008: Dr. Josh Donlan joins the Shifting Baselines blog.

Jan. 2008 Jennifer Jacquet launches the Eat Like a Pig Seafood Wallet Card EatLikeaPigHalf.jpg

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August 31, 2007

Shrimponomics

Category: Seafood

And speaking of shrimp, Steven Levitt over at the New York Times blog Freakonomics has a great post analyzing different responses to his question: Why are we eating so much shrimp? He found, in conjunction with another hypothesis, that non-economists...

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Shrimp Boat Captain Delivers Baby Onboard

Category: Fishing Culture

The Houston Chronicle ran a nice story about a shrimp boat captain who had to deliver a baby onboard while 30 miles offshore. Though she wasn't due until September, Cindy Preisel's water broke Wednesday. What was a shimp boat captain...

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August 30, 2007

Good News, Bad News

Category: Losing Track

The good news: The white-beaked, nearly blind bajii dolphin was spotted in the Yangtze river relieving fears that it had gone extinct. The New York Times has more on the sighting but the elements of shifting baselines are here: In...

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August 29, 2007

Cod Swallows Man's Head: 7th Anniversary

Category: What the...?

Some stories are worth repeating. Seven years ago (to the day), the BBC ran the story Giant cod conceals ghastly secret. After centuries of humans eating cod, the predator-prey relationship was reversed... And speaking of predator-prey reversal, last week a...

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August 28, 2007

Politics Tuesday: Who Cares About the Ocean?

Category: Ocean Politics

Posted by Jack Sterne, jack@oceanchampions.org I'd like to go a little farther with points that both Dave and Randy have made in the last week, and that's the relationship between a mobilized constituency and our ability to achieve real political...

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August 27, 2007

From Randy Olson: Al Gore Understands What Ocean Conservationists Didn't

Category: Communicating

In November, 2002 I gave a talk at a biodiversity workshop at Scripps Institution of Oceanography. In the audience was at least one ocean conservation patron worth hundreds of millions of dollars. I said in my talk, "invigorating a mass...

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Has Wyland Sold Out?

Category: What the...?

Wyland has been described as the "Marine Michelangelo". He has painted nearly 100 murals of whales around the world. We even have one here in Vancouver (see photo). I am crazy about Wyland murals. My loved ones know this and...

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August 24, 2007

From Pribilof Canyon

Category: New Research

Remember Greenpeace's John Hocevar? He made an appearance here on Ocean Day and then in post about his upcoming Bering Sea research. He reported in from the field a couple weeks ago but his message and photo was temporarily lost...

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Sustainable Seafood: Here Are Your Options

Category: Seafood

I recently came across the 2005 Greenpeace report A Recipe for Disaster, which aims to improve seafood buying behavior by supermarkets in the UK. The report makes a few points worth noting here. First off, in regards to shifting baselines:...

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August 23, 2007

Shifting Baselines in the Gulf of California

Category: Communicating

Check out this website (in English as well as Spanish) on shifting baselines in the Gulf of California, Mexico. There are three recently published papers featured, too, each documenting some consquence of the shifting baseline syndrome (and each led by...

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