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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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November 2008 Jennifer Jacquet is lead author of the study In hot soup: sharks captured in Ecuador's waters published in Environmental Sciences.

November 27, 2008: Jennifer Jacquet gives the talk "Why Consumers Alone Can't Save Our Fish" at 1pm at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, B.C.

August 2008: Josh Donlan is co-author on a new paper titled Integrating invasive mammal eradications and biodiversity offsets for fisheries bycatch: conservation opportunities and challenges for seabirds and sea turtles published in Biological Invasions.

August 2008: Jennifer Jacquet is co-author on a new paper titled Funding Priorities: Big Barriers to Small-Scale Fisheries published in Conservation Biology.

August 2008: Josh Donlan is an author on a new paper in Journal of Applied Ecology titled Diversity, invasive species, and extinctions in insular ecosystems.

July 26, 2008: Randy Olson's film Sizzle premieres on the East Coast at the Woods Hole Film Festival in MA.

July 24, 2008: Josh Donlan gives a talk on biodiversity offsets to The Alcoa Foundation and the Alcao Intalco Aluminum Plant in Bellingham, Washington.

July 22, 2008: Jennifer Jacquet gives the talk "A Way Forward in a Sea of Market Based Initiatives to Save Wild Fish" at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, CA.

July 19, 2008: Randy Olson's film Sizzle premieres on the West Coast at Outfest in Hollywood, CA.

July 17, 2008: Jennifer Jacquet gives the talk "In Hot Soup: Shark's Captured in Ecuador's Waters" at the Society for Conservation Biology Annual Meeting in Chattanooga, TN.

July 9, 2008: Jennifer Jacquet gives the talk "Flawed Data, Reef Fisheries, And Food Security: A Close Inspection Of Marine Fisheries Catches in Mozambique, Tanzania, Fiji, And The Solomon Islands" at the 11th International Coral Reef Symposium in Ft. Lauderdale, FL.

June/July 2008: Josh Donlan attends training for his Kinship Conservation Fellowship in Bellingham, WA.

May 2008: Josh Donlan is an author on a new paper in Ambio titled High impact Conservation: Invasive Mammal Eradications from the Islands of Western Mexico.

May 15, 2008: Jennifer Jacquet reviews Bottomfeeder: How to Eat Ethically in a World of Vanishing Seafood at the Tyee.

April 2008: Trade Secrets: Renaming and Mislabeling of Seafood by Jennifer Jacquet and Daniel Pauly is published in Marine Policy.

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

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

« Exploding Manatee Heart | Main | From Randy Olson: Shifting Baselines team member Jason Ensler is director of tonight's "Chuck" »

Review: Planet Ocean

Category: Communicating
Posted on: October 5, 2007 7:49 AM, by Jennifer L. Jacquet

41gLNy8YxbL._AA240_.jpgPlanet Ocean: Photo Stories from the 'Defending Our Oceans' Voyage by Sara Holden was recently released. It's a coffee table book that brings together beautiful imagery as well as the human impacts imperiling that beauty and, in this case, what Greenpeace is doing about it,including scenes from their most recent expedition. On behalf of Greenpeace, Holden argues that 40% of the oceans should be set aside as marine reserve, which would cost an estimated $12 billion per year. If this seems like a lot, Holden is quick to point out that we spend $20 billion each year in the U.S. on ice cream.


Other revealing sections of book include photos on the foreign fleet sex trade, new research underway (such as the debris sampler), and the section on Greenpeace's defense of the ocean (including a great photo of survivor-suited activists contorted on the ice into the cry: Help End Whaling!). I wish the chapter on Greenpeace's campaigns had been longer and included a historical perpsective (the organization began in Vancouver in 1971). I also found the book lacked the edginess I've come to expect from Greenpeace.

But Holden does present some great anecdotes, that are also relevant to Shifting Baselines, such as this perspective of technology from a long-lived Orange roughy:

A 150-year-old Orange roughy fish alive today has survived 30 U.S. Presidents, 39 British Prime Ministers and 11 Popes. In that span we have gone from horse and cart to walking on the moon, but it is only in the last 70 years that we have had the technology to truly understand the sheer scale of the grand canyons, vast mountain chains, waterfalls, volcanoes, forests of coral higher than ten storey buildings and underwater caves deep below us.

Planet Ocean brings us images from the ocean's depths, not unlike those from Pribilof Canyon as well as photographs of the problems and the activists inspired to solve them. I am still most inspired by those determined activists that capture that 1971 spirit of Greenpeace and continue to protect our oceans on behalf of the future and the voiceless.

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