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
October 19, 2007
This evening I met with Joaquim Tenreiro de Almeida, former Secretary of State for Fisheries in Mozambique during the 1980s. He kindly provided feedback on the Mozambique catch reconstructions and some interesting insights into a couple allegations about Mozambique's involvement with the Soviet…
October 18, 2007
After 19 hours via London (where I had the unfortunate Sea Cow sighting), I arrived (and felt like I put the 'poo'ped) in Maputo, Mozambique. Tomorrow I deliver a talk to the Mozambique Fisheries Division on the fisheries catch reconstructions I recently completed as part of my Ph.D. research (co-…
October 17, 2007
Our home video version of Flock of Dodos came out a month ago. I've been following the sales and customer reviews on Amazon. The hilarious thing about Amazon is that if you end up with a bunch of great customer reviews, everyone says, "Ha, those were all written by the filmmaker using fake names…
October 17, 2007
What if you live in a neighborhood where you've got a lot better chance of getting killed by a passing shooter than a melting glacier? Then you're going to get nowhere with the alarmist messaging commonly adopted by many environmental groups. "And without bringing America's underclass into the…
October 17, 2007
Getting an honest answer to that question is not easy. Two weeks ago, I learned that the National Fisheries Institute (which, despite its official title, is a lobbying group for the fishing industry) was putting $60,000 into promoting seafood as healthy. I wanted to look into the issue more and I…
October 16, 2007
Posted by Jack Sterne, jack@oceanchampions.org
Just when it looks like the Law of the Sea Treaty (LOST) might actually get through the Senate, the black helicopter crowd is at it again, claiming that ratifying the treaty would give the U.N. control over practically every activity the U.S. could…
October 16, 2007
I just passed this seafood restaurant in London called The Sea Cow. Business must be good because The Sea Cow's interior is being remodeled, which meant that I could not stop in to inquire why they would name a fish bar after the only vegetarian mammal in the sea.
October 15, 2007
One of the more amusing/annoying things to observe in film school was all the anxiety of very bright students who just wanted to know "the rules" for making good movies. When it came to editing class, they would literally ask things like, "just tell us the rules for how to edit a montage." And…
October 11, 2007
The Nobel Prize is everywhere. From the unimpressed response of Doris Lessing to the nine errors a British judge ruled Al Gore made in An Inconvenient Truth. Everywhere I turn it's Nobel, Nobel, Nobel. As the prize with the greatest piece of 'cultural capital' one can hope to accrue, it is no…
October 11, 2007
Speaking of awards...Though Daniel Pauly has recently won so many awards I had to recommend to him The Economy of Prestige (which he read and enjoyed), this latest award was a particular honor as he received it alongside Al Gore. Last Friday, in Santa Monica, California, Pauly received the Ocean…
October 10, 2007
I have a few thousand complaints against the Al Gore movie An Inconvenient Truth and yet, there's no denying it was the right movie at the right time. And if the criteria for the Nobel Peace Prize is to have "made a difference," then he is solidly deserving. The announcement comes on Friday. Here…
October 10, 2007
If you're headed to Paris anytime before January 13, 2008, be sure to check out the Giuseppe Arcimboldo exhibition at the Musee du Luxembourg. The 16th century painter is famous for his portraits from mosaics of fruit and, in this painting (Water, 1566), aquatic animals (Arcimboldo looks to have…
October 9, 2007
Posted by Jack Sterne, jack@oceanchampions.org
If you were wondering why we've been pushing red tide legislation on Capitol Hill, check out this story about Nassau County, Florida declaring a state of emergency due to a severe outbreak of red tide along the northeast Florida coast.
It got so bad…
October 9, 2007
Last week I attended the Jackson Hole Wildlife Film Festival and had the chance to see a sneak preview of the film about E.O. Wilson titled The Naturalist. Though the film had a few technical issues (I thought the sound mixing and camera work was at times poor), it was overall a wonderful…
October 8, 2007
For the past five years my good friend and film school classmate Jason Ensler has been a loyal team member of the Shifting Baselines Ocean Media Project. He's attended all our events, helped recruit celebrities, and generally taken a genuine interest in the plight of the oceans. Just last month,…
October 5, 2007
Planet Ocean: Photo Stories from the 'Defending Our Oceans' Voyage by Sara Holden was recently released. It's a coffee table book that brings together beautiful imagery as well as the human impacts imperiling that beauty and, in this case, what Greenpeace is doing about it,including scenes from…
October 3, 2007
When I was a photo-id intern at the Florida Marine Research Institute, I got my hands on some footage from a program on manatees. One scene featured a blonde presenter in the necropsy lab saying, "This manatee is so badly decomposed, it's actually hissing from the gases." Just then, the surgeon…
October 3, 2007
Yesterday, a team of scientists that use NASA satellite data to study climate and pollution's effects on the oceans wrote to NASA and NOAA to voice their concern over the future data collection system designed by the two agencies. Here are a few interesting lines from the letter:
High quality ocean…
October 2, 2007
Posted by Dave Wilmot, dave@oceanchampions.org
Throughout last week in Washington, DC members of Congress, philanthropists and ocean advocates emphasized the importance of bipartisanship when it comes to protecting the oceans (and commended Ocean Champions for leading the way). I didn't…
September 30, 2007
Because this is Shifting Baselines, where we recognize the need for a historical perspective to understand the 'baseline' and what is deemed 'pristine', it seems fitting to give a brief history of Carnival of the Blue. The brainchild of Mark Powell at Blogfish, Carnival of the Blue is an ocean…
September 28, 2007
Dr. Randy Olson brought a couple very interesting articles on China to my attention this morning. Both have to do with climate and each have a different element of Shifting Baselines.
The first, Doha and Dalian, by the New York Times' Thomas Friedman, explains why Friedman remains skeptical of…
September 27, 2007
This week, Canadian wildlife officials caught three men smuggling large amounts of Queen conch shellfish, an endangered species, before exporting some of it to the U.S. The smugglers imported an estimated 263,958 pounds (!) of conches, with a value of $2.6 million, from the Caribbean and South…
September 26, 2007
Anyone out there wondering what Randy Olson, Head Dodo was up to in 1991? Before his debut on Showtime, Dr. Olson was making rock videos about barnacles. Sheril Kirshenbaurm at the Intersection recently persuaded Randy to put his vintage work on YouTube...
September 25, 2007
The contentious certification of New Zealand hoki by the Marine Stewardship Council (MSC) just got a little more dubious. Yesterday, according to news from Intrafish, New Zealand cut its hoki catch quota 10% from 101,040 metric tons to 91,040 metric tons. The fishery was certified by the MSC back…
September 25, 2007
Posted by Jack Sterne, jack@oceanchampions.org
For those of us who follow the world of ocean politics (and politics generally), Leon Panetta is the closest thing we have to a rock star. Panetta served as the chairman of the Pew Oceans Commission, and prior to that was President Clinton's Chief of…
September 23, 2007
When I was a student at USC Cinema School in the mid-90's I had a discussion with the Dean, Elizabeth Daly, in which she told me her theory of learning film. She said that film is a language which virtually everyone learns to read at an early age -- a one year old child quickly learns how to make…
September 23, 2007
A federal report shows that loggerhead sea turtle populations, listed as 'threatened' under the Endangered Species Act, are decreasing. The news is particularly disappointing because the last report showed that from 1989-1998, the number of nesting sites had increased about 4% each year.…
September 21, 2007
The Canadian government has decided to cut spending on Environment Canada programs that address climate change by 80 percent. This budget cut comes in spite of "...poll after poll show[ing] environment and climate change are top of the list of Canadians' concerns." Read more here.
September 20, 2007
Yesterday, the E.U. announced its decision to close the bluefin tuna fishery in the Mediterranean (that once vibrant, now empty) Sea for the remainder of the year. The decision is not particularly surprising because the fishers had already reached their quoto of 17000 tonnes and the Atlantic…
September 18, 2007
An estimated 7,000 languages are spoken around the world today. In 14 days, there will be an estimated 6,999. One language goes extinct about every two weeks, which is a faster rate of exinction those for plants, birds, fish, and mammals. New research reported at the New York Times found the five…