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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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February 29, 2008

Animals and Urban Sprawl: Are the Two Compatible?

Category: Losing Track

NPR has a great story today about what happened in one Nevada neighborhood after new suburbanites complained about an old neighborhood resident--a braying donkey named Gambler. Gambler was shipped out of town and his 4-acre pasture might now be sub-divided...

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February 28, 2008

Shifting Prisoners...

Category: Losing Track

Holy moly! Check out this article in the New York Times reporting on a study that shows today 1 in every 100 Americans are behind bars (the overall number of prisoners has tripled since 1987)....

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How about a Pliosaur Baseline?

Category: New Research

Norwegian scientists have just unearthed another pliosaur fossil and this one is the largest on record. This Jurassic sea reptile measures 50 ft. and its jaws were strong enough to "to pick up a small car in its jaws and...

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February 27, 2008

The Environment & Mod Squad

Category: Ocean Politics

Posted by Jack Sterne, jack@oceanchampions.org As this Wall Street Journal piece points out, Rep. Wayne Gilchrest's primary loss two weeks ago accelerated the decline of another endangered species: the Moderate Republican. Organizations like the Club for Growth, which raised and...

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And More Baselines...

Category: Losing Track

Andy Revkin also has a great blogpost at the New York Times on Our Exhausted Oceans. With opposition to aquaculture by many scientists as well as support for more marine protected areas, Revkin asks where we think seafood will come...

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February 26, 2008

Baselines, Baselines, Baselines

Category: Losing Track

Three shifting baselines to note today: 1) An article in today's New York Times by Andrew Revkin discusses how "scientists are setting baselines to gauge future effects on the seas." The article is a nice summary of some of the...

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February 25, 2008

From Randy Olson: Interview with Matthew Chapman on How Science Debate 2008 Kicks Ass

Category: Communicating

I spend a lot of time complaining about the ineptitude of the science world when it comes to mass communication and function in mainstream society. But all of a sudden here is this Science Debate 2008 effort that is being...

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Endless Ocean

Category: Solutions

It's not suprising that the only place you'll find a title like Endless Ocean is in the virtual realm. Endless Ocean was released last year for Nintendo Wii. In the game, players go diving to all sorts of nooks and...

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February 22, 2008

More Jellies? Fill Your Belly

Category: Seafood

This week, the New York TImes ran the Op-Ed How to Handle an Invasive Species? Eat It by Taras Grescoe, who is author of a new book about ethically eating seafood. "One of the great unsung epics of the modern...

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Diver Profile

Category: Fishing Culture

This week, the L.A. Times ran an interesting profile of a sea urchin/sea cucumber fisherman from California. Though the author pushes us to feel sympathy for the aging diver and a declining fishery, any fisherman who was able to send...

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