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
May 10, 2007
One of our longtime heros of Shifting Baselines is Pulitzer Prize-nominated journalist Mark Dowie. In this recent essay he takes the Bush administration to task over their plans for large scale (too large?) aquaculture. What he notes is that, "while the U.S. Congress recently passed amendments to…
May 10, 2007
About six of these newcomers have been seen roaming around Galapagos. If anyone can identify it, please post a comment.
Photographed at Punta Estrada in Academy Bay off of Puerto Ayora, Santa Cruz by Claudia Molina.
May 10, 2007
The designation of the Galapagos Marine Reserve has not entirely buffered the waters from change. Tom Okey, a former student of Daniel Pauly, showed that the phenomenon of "fishing down the food web" is indeed occurring in the islands (though fishing at lower trophic levels has also yielded bad…
May 9, 2007
It is first worth noting that all Galapagos fishers operate within the boundaries of the Galapagos Marine Reserve (GMR). In 1998 the Ecuadorian government extended the GMR from its 15-mile radius to a 40-mile radius surrounding the archipelago. The reserve now encompasses 133,000 square…
May 8, 2007
In 1792, James Colnett came to Galapagos aboard the HMS Rattler to scout a whaling station. Over the next seventy years, boats from the U.S. and England harpooned and processed whales in the islands. In 1835, Darwin made his famous visit and, six years later, he was followed by Herman Melville…
May 7, 2007
Tortuga Bay is arguably the most beautiful beach on the island of Santa Cruz--with fine sand, perfect waves, and bobbing green sea turtles. It has no road access, which is part of its charm.
In 1988, when Jorge first started working as the Park Guard at the entrance to Turtle Bay, the 2.5 km trail…
May 3, 2007
Tourism is not the only thing growing in Galapagos. The number of inhabitants has grown tremendously over the last 35 years and very few people have lived in Galapagos long enough to discern it. People can only live on five islands (one of which only allows an Ecuadorian military base) of the…
May 1, 2007
In 2001, when I first came to the Galapagos, there were two flights each day. My baseline was, therefore, 14 flights per week. But island old-timers reminisce about the two-flights-per-week-good-old-days. When I flew in today, I was on one of five flights to the Galapagos Islands; there are now…
April 27, 2007
The waters around Galapagos are home to more than 500 species of fish, 17% of which are endemic. In 1998, the Ecuadorian government extended the Galapagos Marine Reserve from its 15-mile radius to a 40-mile radius surrounding the archipelago. The reserve now encompasses 133,000 square kilometers…
April 25, 2007
This week the Vancouver Sun ran a story about the deaths of marine mammals at salmon farms, which smatter the British Columbian coast:
The Living Oceans Society says that within a two-week period a Pacific white-sided dolphin, harbour porpoise and Steller sea lion got entangled and drowned in the…
April 24, 2007
FIRST ANNUAL SB FLIX CONTEST AWARDS GO TO:
"WHAT'S WITH THE WATER," (1ST), "YOUR DINNER" (2ND), AND "OCEAN WAR" (3RD).
The Shifting Baselines Ocean Media Project announces the winners of the first annual SB FLIX Contest, sponsored by Patagonia, Disney Environmentality and Seed Magazine. The cash…
April 24, 2007
Two of my favorite writers of all time, Kurt Vonnegut and now David Halberstam, have died in the past month. In the spring of 1985, as I was a postdoc studying starfish larval ecology in Australia, I read The Powers That Be and it changed my whole perception of the American media world. David…
April 23, 2007
Two seafood companies in Britain were listed yesterday among the top 100 private firms with the fastest growing profits. Increase in seafood demand may lead to decline for wild fisheries stocks but not necessarily for revenue, which is what happened on the East Coast when overfishing of cod and…
April 23, 2007
TUNE IN TOMORROW, HERE, AT NOON PACIFIC STANDARD TIME FOR THE ANNOUNCEMENT OF THE WINNERS OF THE SB FLIX CONTEST!
The votes are in, our celebrity judges have decided, and tomorrow we will announce the top three winners of the first annual SB FLIX Contest.
April 21, 2007
"How inappropriate to call this planet Earth, when clearly it is Ocean."
This famous line from Arthur Clarke, author of 2001: A Space Odyssey (who collaborated with Stanley Kubrick on the film), is one to remember on Earth Day.
April 20, 2007
The first annual Shifting Baselines Flix Contest is coming to a close. The SB Flix Contest was an open call for 1-minute videos with the goal of finding new and creative ways to communicate the glaring demise of our global ecosystem, especially that of the ocean. All of the videos had a lot of…
April 19, 2007
A solution to the energy crisis: NOT efficiency, NOT elimination of subsidies, NOT internalizing externatilities. No, no. The latest solution to the energy crisis to is turn pig fat into diesel. The article was published today at the BBC:
American oil company ConocoPhillips and Tyson Foods, the…
April 19, 2007
The U.S. Magnuson-Stevens Act, key legislation protecting our oceans, was reauthorized in January this year and its first goal is to end overfishing by 2011. It may strike you as ironic, then, that the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) is attempting to change the rules that protect our…
April 18, 2007
This week the winners of the 2007 Pulitzer Prizes were announed. Ken Weiss, Rick Loomis, and Usha Lee McFarling won Pulitzers for their explanatory reporting in their widely acclaimed five-part series Altered Oceans (see blogroll) in the Los Angeles Times, proving not only good reporting but…
April 18, 2007
When the rainforest goes silent...
So whether you want to or not, the sad fact is, in the future, you will all get to know this relatively new term, "shifting baselines." It was coined for the oceans in 1995, but here is an article applying it to the worldwide decline in amphibian populations.
I…
April 17, 2007
An article I wrote about fishmeal and the prospects for turning the industry around is published in the Tyee today. About 30 milliion tonnes--more than one third of all marine fish caught--is ground into fishmeal annually. About two million tons were ground into meal in 1950. Fishmeal is fed…
April 16, 2007
The month to maim marine mammal legislation...
A symposium at the United Nations in New York last Friday opened discussions about whether the Japanese should resume whaling of humpback whales that travel off the coast of Australia. Daniel Pauly was at the meeting and refuted the Japanese argument…
April 15, 2007
The Great Turtle Race, an initiative by ten corporations and institutions to show that science is fun, begins today. Stephanie Coburtle, the turtle named after Stephen Colbert is Shifting Baselines' favored winner in this race from Costa Rica to their feeding grounds in the Galapagos Islands. "…
April 14, 2007
Vanity Fair's latest issue takes a fashionable look at the environmental crisis. As one might expect, the oceans do not receive the same coverage as green consumerism (though these two do come together with Chantecaille's Coral Collection; a portion of the proceeds benefit a research project…
April 13, 2007
So as my Governor was saying, environmental "messaging" (such a foul term) needs to be less nagging and scolding. And Conservation International and friends have nailed it exactly, not just by putting together a very CREATIVE (a good quality to pursue) and fun idea with their Great Turtle Race,…
April 13, 2007
Governor Ahnold has been pushing an environmental agenda in California (in 2004, for instance, he jump-started the process to establish 29 marine protected areas along the coast) and now he's wading into the subject of environmental communication. And he's on the right track (maybe he's been…
April 12, 2007
Kurt Vonnegut visted the Galapagos Islands in the early 1980s and wrote looking back on the future of the islands (shifting baselines). I read Vonnegut's Galapagos while in the islands and my favorte line, then and now, is still:
[The Spaniards] did not claim the island for Spain, any more than…
April 12, 2007
His novels had a big impact on me--who could forget his telling about a character who is at a party for diplomats and meets the embassador from Chile, can't think of a single thing to say to him, and so finally says, "It must be fascinating to be from a country which is so long and thin."
I loved…
April 12, 2007
This month, National Geographic ran an issue on overfishing. In the article on marine protected areas (MPAs), Blue Haven, shifting baselines is discussed, though not explicitly, by the article's author and Bill Ballantine, the director of the University of Aukland Marine Laboratory in New Zealand…
April 11, 2007
Having established the link between overeating and overfishing, it is also worth noting the trend of Fishing Down Marine Food Webs, another phenomenon uncovered by Daniel Pauly and team in 1998. 'Fishing down marine food webs' describes the fishing industry's elimination of top predators in the…