Politics Tuesday: Conventional Wisdom : Shifting Baselines

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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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

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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.