jjacquet | November 20, 2007The Japanese government has decided to go hunting for humpbacks, something they have not done since the 1960s. People here and at Deep Sea News don't seem too happy about the hunt. Some people are also discomforted by Paul Watson and his group, Sea Shepherd. In reponse to the recent decision by Japan, Sea Shepherd has launched Operation Migaloo. You can argue his tactics, you can argue his style. But what you can't do is show me someone aside from Watson and his team who is doing anything about the humpback hunt on the water.
jjacquet | November 19, 2007Chuck Hesse wrote to the Tallahassee Democrat this past weekend about shifting baselines and Wakulla Springs, FL. Here is what he wrote:
Shifting baselines erase natural beauty
Each individual has a baseline, or initial image, which is set the first time an area is seen; so your first visit to Wakulla springs, your first trip to the woods, your first fishing trip to the gulf, etc. sets your personal baseline. As time passes small changes occur. These small changes are usually accepted as the cost of progress or for the good of the community. However, when changes are accumulated over time…
jjacquet | November 19, 2007Kits = Kitslano = Hipster neighborhood lining beautiful False creek here in Vancouver, aka "Hipslano". Manhattan has Prada, Beverly Hills has Louis Vuitton and Kitslano has Lululemon. Lululemon Athletica is high-end designer yoga wear and, since it went public in July, its shareholders have been saying a lot of 'namastes' to Lulu customers across the continent. But a friend pointed out a recent scandal (thanks SCS) that "has Kits in a sweat" (and it's not from too many sun salutations).
On Friday, The New York Times uncovered that Lulu's lines, VitaSea, supposedly made from seaweed, looked…
jjacquet | November 19, 2007I am nearing the end of Naomi Klein's The Shock Doctrine, which I was at first reluctant to read. Though I found the topic compelling (and thoroughly admired No Logo), I had heard Klein speak on the subject at Seattle's Town Hall and found her disappointingly short on information (very unlike her book). (A friend and I played Buzzword BINGO during the event, as Klein repeated the words: exodus, dystopia, dictatorship, shock and awe, agenda, Chicago, revolutionary, Haliburton, terror, and torture.) But I picked up a copy of the book (gave it a few curls; it's heavy) and haven't put it down. I…
jjacquet | November 18, 2007Last week, I heard zoologist Chris Harley speak on how climate change will affect intertidal diversity along our rocky shores. There was a typo in his poster ("acification" instead of "acidification") and he said he would like to officially coin assification for what we're collectively doing to the oceans (climate change, pollution, overfishing, etc.). Well, today there is greater consensus for ocean acifidication and, therefore, ocean assification.
A report completed yesterday by the official Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) shows that increasingly acidic oceans due to…
jjacquet | November 18, 2007According to BBC news, a Japanese fleet has instructions to kill 1,000 whales, including 50 humpbacks, which have been spared from hunting since the 1960s. A 2003 study in Science estimated there used to 240,000 humpbacks in the North Atlantic pre-whaling. Now there are 10,000. Can anyone help me understand why a nation with so much wealth needs humpback meat (especially since its people haven't eaten it for forty years)?
jjacquet | November 18, 2007The video of the Polish immigrant Robert Dziekanski, age 40, being tasered to death at the Vancouver airport was released this weekend. I'd expect something like this to come out of the U.S. (certainly the U.S.-led occupation in Iraq) but to see this man tasered to death by the RCMP in Canada is astonishing (Dziekanski's own actions are also unsettling). The footage was captured by a civilian with a camcorder that was then taken by the police, who refused to return the tape. This was then followed up by a threat of lawsuit before the video was released, three weeks after the incident.…
jjacquet | November 17, 2007An 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.
We know the tuna are in real trouble--worldwide, the bluefin population has plunged more than 90 percent in the last 30 years. But the question is who has the authority to stop the plunder and how. It will have to be a global effort since, as the Times points out, the blame is also global:
Blame for…
jjacquet | November 16, 2007The 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 correlation between parents' incomes and their children's at around 20 percent, implying a high degree of mobility between generations. In the 1990s...experts tended to put that figure at about 40 percent. Recent estimates run as high as 60 percent.
Mobility has not necessarily fallen, but…
jjacquet | November 15, 2007They 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 urchin fishery off of New Brunswick and how the Japanese penchant for sweet urchin gonads (sometimes called 'roe') are leading this urchin to an overexploited status.
[Green sea urchins] were once considered a nuisance by some of the same men who now pursue them. Indeed, lobster fishermen once…
jjacquet | November 14, 2007I 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 information era. She touches on the fact that sustainable seafood is currently only for yuppies (a waitress she quries about sustainable seafood tells Groc she might have better luck "at the more fancy restaurants") and that seafood is wildlife (a chef she interviews says, "[Salmon are] not like cattle. It…
jjacquet | November 13, 2007Posted 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 advocate for ocean conservation.
Indeed, we consider Rep. Saxton as one of the true success stories of Ocean Champions. For years, Mr. Saxton had been extremely responsive to a highly vocal, but not very conservation-oriented, group of recreational fishermen in his district. We knew Mr. Saxton to be a…
jjacquet | November 13, 2007Watch the 2-hour special tonight on PBS. Tomorrow we'll twalk amungst ourselves about it.
jjacquet | November 12, 2007This 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 Richard Black that might interest sciblings and their readers most. First off: the least trusted of all media sources is blogs. Have a look at this graph as well as the poll behind it:
Blogs are, unsurprisingly, the least trusted media outlet. That said, ScienceBlogs was repeatedly singled out at…
jjacquet | November 11, 2007On 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 spill for their festival in February, 2008.
Unlike the cast of Monty Python's Life of Brian who assembled a committee to discuss the idea of assembling a committee to look into the possibility of the Romans attacking, the folks at the SFOFF simply acted, immediately, to encourage rapid communication…
jjacquet | November 9, 2007I 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. But one distinctly different emotion emerges: shame. After watching Earthlings, I felt nothing but shame to belong to the human race.
There is only one moment of justice in the film: a scene with circus elephants that retaliate against the Big Top and wreak havoc. It ends badly, as one might…
jjacquet | November 8, 2007Good 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 Kazakhstan - it nicest place in the world! Please, you must look on my guidings book and then come visit. Bring your whole family and stay at Astana Funworld Resort - it have beautiful beaches, almost totally free of landmines and the sea is guarantee to have no jellyfish, shark, or any other marine life."
jjacquet | November 7, 2007Holy 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 the pig gelatin fins are one-tenth that of the real deal.
For more than 400 million years, sharks have survived the world's seas. But over the last couple decades, the wasteful practice of shark finning has become a global concern, particularly as shark populations show declines and the demand…
jjacquet | November 6, 2007Posted 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 single seat in the state legislature. Ocean Champions Voter Fund has teamed up with local New Jersey ocean conservation leaders to bring a bold new strategic political approach to protecting New Jersey's coastal and ocean environment.
Ocean Champions isn't alone on the ocean political front lines…
jjacquet | November 6, 2007Researchers 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 if you prefer this image from the journal:
Or this image from The New York Times: