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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

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

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Why I Regret My New Toilet Seat

Category: New Research
Posted on: October 1, 2008 9:22 AM, by Jennifer L. Jacquet

I recently bought a new wooden toilet seat at Target for five dollars. Five dollars! It wasn't even on sale and I thought to myself, "What a steal!" I should have known that was probably, literally the case. My toilet seat was probably illegally logged in Russia. In this week's issue of The New Yorker, Raffi Khatchadourian (who also wrote the great profile of Paul Watson) writes about the illegal logging market. The article is not quite online yet, but check out this short video where he discusses how a tree illegally logged from halfway around the world becomes a toilet seat at your local Wal-Mart (or Target, I'm sure).

Comments

#1

Oh, come on. How can you put toilets and illegal logging in the same post.

I'm not even sure what illegal logging is - forgetting to flush afterwards?

Posted by: Bob O'H | October 1, 2008 11:13 AM

#2

I didn't even know what some of our toilet seats were made of. This site says they are made of either plastic -- easy to identify -- or wood flour and melamine, combined at high temperatures to create a kind of molded wood: www.madehow.com/Volume-5/Toilet.html The wood flour comes from sawdust and there is plenty of sawdust, so it is good that it gets used. I've never seen a real wood toilet seat made of pieces of wood instead of the above "molded wood." This article talks about sawdust and its uses: www.agmrc.org/agmrc/commodity/biomass/sawdustshavingswoodwaste/sawdustprofile.htm Why is it cheaper to get wood from Russia than to use recycled sawdust here at home?

Posted by: Geoff | October 7, 2008 6:02 PM

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