Shifting Baselines : Politics Tuesday: Conventional Wisdom

The Shifting Baselines Blog

Jennifer 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.
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.

Scientist 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

Online Resources and Blogs

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Politics Tuesday: Conventional Wisdom

Category: Ocean Politics
Posted on: February 12, 2008 3:54 PM, by Jennifer L. Jacquet

Posted by David Wilmot, dave@oceanchampions.org

2008 is not shaping up to be a good year for conventional wisdom. The New York football Giants beat the record-perfect New England Patriots in the Super Bowl in an upset that can best be measured by the surreal fact that Las Vegas Casinos lost money on betting. One can only hope the Casinos and Vegas find a way to recover.

On a somewhat less viewed but arguably more important stage, the race for the Presidency of the United States is thwarting conventional wisdom. I'm not exactly sure where conventional wisdom can be found or how it is measured, but I am not alone. Pollsters, political handicappers and pundits have been searching in vain this election season. What happened to the good old days when you knew who the kingmakers were. Of course, it's a lot more energizing not knowing the outcome of every race before you pull the curtain closed at the voting booth.

At a meeting last week in southern California it was a foregone conclusion that the California Coastal Commission would approve a proposed toll road connecting Orange and San Diego counties. Yet a funny thing happened after Governor Schwarzenegger threw his support behind the project and personally lobbied each Commissioner.

A record crowd of 3,500 people showed up at the Del Mar Fairgrounds in Southern California (a record for a Coastal Commission hearing not the fairground) to tell the Commission exactly how they felt about the proposed project. Ocean enthusiasts of every stripe including waves of surfers combined with many constituencies to voice their opposition. This predominately volunteer crowd (many of whom took a day off work!) put an exclamation point on their activism. To understand their passion you need to know that the toll road project would cut across a habitat reserve and state park and endanger one of the most hallowed surf breaks in the world - Trestles. Some tremendous grassroots activism by Surfrider Foundation and a number of other groups turned the tide and lifted the "Save Trestles Campaign" to victory. The final vote was 8-2 AGAINST the project . While this battle is not over (they rarely are...), this proves that a people-powered victory can undulate conventional wisdom.