Jennifer Jacquet
I am an American post-doc based at the University of British Columbia, where I also completed my Ph.D.
jjacquet
Posts by this author
November 17, 2007
An international conference that ends tomorrow in Turkey could help to rescue the bluefin tuna, according to an opinion piece published in the New York Times today. The U.S. apprently went to the conference with the hopes of banning Atlantic bluefin fishing in the Atlantic and the Mediterranean.…
November 16, 2007
The American Dream might be wearing a little thin. In Rags to Rags, Riches to Riches from June's Atlantic Monthly, Clive Crook describes how most researchers now give America much lower marks than they used to for intergenerational economic mobility.
Before the 1990s, researchers tended to put the…
November 15, 2007
They look as appetizing as a cactus and taste like low tide, but not even that has been enough to keep New Brunswick's green sea urchins out of a prickly predicament.This was the lede to an interesting story on urchin overfishing in yesterday's Seafood News. The article goes on to explain the sea…
November 14, 2007
I was recently interviewed for an article for the new Granville magazine here in Vancouver (I enjoyed the experience and odd coincidence that I was also born and raised in Granville, Ohio). The author, Isabelle Groc, did a great job exploring the complications of sustainable seafood in an…
November 13, 2007
Posted by Jack Sterne, jack@oceanchampions.org
While many in the blogosphere celebrated the announced retirement last week of Rep. Jim Saxton (R-NJ), we had the opposite reaction. Ocean Champions has built a fantastic relationship with Saxton over the last few years, and he has been a staunch…
November 13, 2007
Watch the 2-hour special tonight on PBS. Tomorrow we'll twalk amungst ourselves about it.
November 12, 2007
This past weekend I attended the UBC Future in Science Journalism conference. It was a very well-organized (thanks Eric), cozy potpourri of scientists, journalists, editors, and authors (and I burned zero carbon to attend). I wanted to share a few things from BBC environmental correspondent…
November 11, 2007
On November 7, 2007 (i.e. last Wednesday) a container ship knocked into a tower of the SF-Oakland Bay Bridge and spilled 58,000 gallons of oil. On November 10, 2007 (i.e. three days later) the San Francisco Ocean Film Festival announced a competition for the best short video clips related to the…
November 9, 2007
I went to the Vancouver screening of the film Earthlings last night. Narrated by Joaquin Phoenix, the film is an indictment of the pet, food, clothing, entertainment, and medical industries in their brutal treatment of animals. It has all the elements of a horror film: blood, guts, fear, screams…
November 8, 2007
Good news from Kazakhstan. Borat says if you can make it past the land mines, there are no dangerous (or any other kind of) marine animals beyond their beaches. From a recent interview for his new book:
Q: Which country to do you prefer -- Kazakhstan or the USA?
A: "I very much preferring…
November 7, 2007
Holy Shifting Tastebuds! For a story right up there with deer meat sushi comes this little article about fake shark fins made from pork. The artificial fins were developed due to the high price of real fins (the rising price being a market response to scarcity--i.e., overfishing). The price of…
November 6, 2007
Posted by Dave Wilmot, dave@oceanchampions.org
No, we won't be electing a new president today (unfortunately) and the House and Senate candidates have 12 more months of campaigning, yet there are a number of state and local elections today. New Jersey, for example, is holding elections for every…
November 6, 2007
Researchers just published their discovery of four types of well-preserved fossil jellyfish in the open-access journal PLoS ONE (go Bora). The jellies are from about a half a billion years ago and not much seems to have changed in their physiology. Utah, of course, is no longer under the sea. See…
November 5, 2007
Despite her corny conclusion, Courtney Martin's article Generation Overwhelmed does make a point: The world became too big and brutal, and we haven't figured out a way to process it all.
That is, in essence, her response to Thomas Friedman's recent Op-Ed in the New York Times. Friedman calls the…
November 2, 2007
There is some unfinished business worth mentioning and stories quickly aging, so I want to get those out there:
1) Just when you thought another vacuous museum exhibit would go unnoticed, comes a refreshingly critical review in the New York Times of the American Museum of Natural History's newest…
November 2, 2007
Since Watson did not have authority, he made use of what he did have: publicity. For those of you who know Paul Watson, founder of Sea Shepherd Conservation Society, you won't be surprised to see this photo and long profile landed a cover story in this week's New Yorker.
Not that Paul Watson is…
November 1, 2007
If you haven't seen the stunning footage friend and cameraman Paul Stewart shot of birds of paradise for the BBC series Planet Earth, it really is a must. So are the "Diaries" that follow each program where you get a behind-the-scenes look at filming, including Stewart's endless hours in a hide…
November 1, 2007
Q: Which parts of the human body could you design better?
A: I would redesign the human appetite to prefer food high in fiber and vitamins rather than our well-evolved craving for sugar and fat. The consequences of this vestigial appetite include our current unsustainable model of industrial…
October 31, 2007
You might think that being heartless would be a prerequisite for pretty much any campaign of world domination. But brainlessness and spinelessness?
This is the introduction to today's radio program on CBC's The Current, which features Dr. Daniel Pauly and his assessment of the increase in jellyfish…
October 30, 2007
On this eve of a national gorging on junk food comes a quote from a Halloween past...
THEN (1883): "One of the physiological traits of the American is the absence of obesity. Walk the streets of New York, Boston, Philadelphia: of 100 individuals you will meet hardly one who is obese and more often…
October 30, 2007
Today Randy Olson took the Shifting Baselines phenomenon to the radio waves. The crew of Skepticality, the podcast of Skeptic magazine, spent almost an hour with Olson discussing shifting baselines, boredom, The Daily Show, and "Dodos on Global Warming". The show is full of insights the interface…
October 29, 2007
Two things.
1) Though it's never been considered a compliment to be called a Neanderthal, I am quite proud to learn that I might look like one. A study in Science this week analyzed ancient DNA and reveals that at least some Neanderthals had red hair and fair skin (photo credit: John Gurche).
2)…
October 29, 2007
Stand on the shoulders of giants. Or stomp on them. That seemed to be the only way Canadian filmmakers Debbie Melnyk and Rick Caine were going to make a film suited for the big screen. So they made Manufacturing Dissent about documentary filmmaker Michael Moore, which I just saw in London.
The…
October 27, 2007
Africa, as we all know, is a wild continent that tugs at our existence. The people are wonderful and warm. The art is stunning. But I can't help closing my trip to Africa, which this time consisted of meetings, meetings, meetings, with a passage from Doug Adams about his visit to the Congo…
October 26, 2007
People are always warning environmentalists about the risks of "crying wolf" too much with their alarmism. But why doesn't anybody point out the more serious risk -- the fear that so many BORING films about a problem get produced that by the time the problem finally arrives, nobody wants to hear…
October 25, 2007
Tanzania used to be two countries. Now, Tanzania still has two sets of fisheries data and two options for reporting their fish catch: report it all (accurate) or report only half (inaccurate). Currently, only the mainland reports their fish internationally; Zanzibar's fish are missing from the…
October 24, 2007
So much of environmentalism these days has come down to people asking, "How can we change the public's behavior?" When this topic crops up, there is always a group of hard core cynics who say, "The ONLY way you'll ever get anyone to change their behavior is if there's a profit incentive." Ugh. I…
October 23, 2007
Posted by Jack Sterne, jack@oceanchampions.org
Sunday's N.Y. Times carried a story, "Washington Feels Hollywood's Heat", about entertainment industry "eco-wives" descending on D.C. to lobby for strong climate change legislation.
Despite the inclusion of passages like this:
On Wednesday morning,…
October 22, 2007
Here at the WIOMSA conference. This morning a woman delivered a nice talk about artisanal fishing in Rodrigues. My first thought: Rodrigwhere? (Turns out, Rodrigues is an autonomous island of Mauritius.) She studies the seine fishery in one of the lagoons and had an excellent data set for the…
October 20, 2007
Tomorrow, bright and early, I am headed for the South African shore. For me, unlike (what might be) my distant relatives, this journey is not a matter of survival (but to attend WIOMSA in Durban). Last week, an article in Nature showed that Homo sapiens developed a taste for brown mussels, giant…