jjacquet | November 5, 2007Despite 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 twenty-somethings Generation Q...too quiet, too online, for its own good, and for the country's own good.
What about the climate? What about the deficit? What about social security? Instead of focusing our attention on studying abroad, Friedman says the younger generation needs to light a fire…
jjacquet | November 2, 2007There 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 exhibit on water. The review and the exhibit (if you're in the area) are probably both worth a visit (as is this article on the recent water shortage in Tennessee).
2) Maureen Dowd handed over her column at the New York Times to Steven Colbert a couple weeks ago and what he wrote just keeps getting…
jjacquet | November 2, 2007Since 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 not worthy of a long profile. Without a doubt, Paul Watson is one of the (if not the) most energetic and outspoken advocates against the wholesale destruction of the oceans, accompanied by some radical gestures. I first heard Watson speak a decade ago and his dynamism attracted me to his cause. I…
jjacquet | November 1, 2007If 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 with bad 80s music stuck in his head while he waited for the birds to display. The footage of the birds of paradise is so special, there is now an imitation display available on YouTube. See both below.
The original:
The imitation:
jjacquet | November 1, 2007Q: 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 agriculture, our unhealthy corn-based diet, not to mention our systematic overfishing (i.e., overeating) of seafood species after seafood species.
The redesign is particularly applicable in the U.S. and other heartily fed countries, where we feast on fat and sugar under the antiquated premonition that…
jjacquet | October 31, 2007You 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 blooms around the world. Listen to the piece here.
jjacquet | October 30, 2007On 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 than not, that individual will be a stranger or of foreign origin." A German's impression of Americans in 1883 found by Dr. Daniel Pauly in a footnote of The Handbook of Climatology (Handbuch der Klimatologie) by Dr. Julius Hann.
NOW (2007): Three out of five Americans are overweight and one in…
jjacquet | October 30, 2007Today 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 between communication, science, and the public. "Film is not an education medium, this is one of the great misconceptions in our society," says Olson. "Film is a motivational medium." Find out more about Olson's films past, films present, and, of course, shifting baselines at Skepticality.
jjacquet | October 29, 2007Two 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) I have THE shifting waistlines quote of the year courtesy of Dr. Daniel Pauly, who found it the obscure German Handbook of Climatology (Handbuch der Klimatologie) by Dr. Julius Hann in 1883. You will NEVER believe how much first impressions of U.S. residents have changed. Check back with Shifting…
jjacquet | October 29, 2007Stand 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 film explores Michael Moore's background and incendiary nature (being fired from Mother Jones after working as Editor for only five months, for instance). And of course, there is the dull irony that the pair (represented onscreen by Debbie Melnyk) was never able to land Moore for an interview (not…
jjacquet | October 27, 2007Africa, 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 documented in Last Chance to See. I fear Adams' sentiments are still relevant--not to me so much as to the researchers operating in those countries who face daily challenges to their work and its advancement.
Like most colonies, Zaire had imposed on it a stifling bureaucracy, the sole function on which…
jjacquet | October 26, 2007People 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 about it.
This is happening for global warming. The actual environmental problem is now here. So is the movie problem.
I don't want to name any specific titles of recent movies, but only say that a month ago at a party I heard a knowledgeable friend say, "the official word in the film distribution…
jjacquet | October 25, 2007Tanzania 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 statistics.
Again, a brief history is useful: In the past, the mainland (called Tanganyika) and Zanzibar were separate countries. Both Tanganyika and Zanzibar fell under German colonial control in 1886 and then to the British in 1920, after WWI. Tanganyika gained independence in 1961 and Zanzibar…
jjacquet | October 24, 2007So 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 hate listening to that.
Here's an op-ed today in the NY Times that plays like music to my ears. In literal terms it's about baseball, but more generally, it's about everything, as indicated by the last paragraph of the piece.
The more society embraces the idea that nobody will do anything right unless…
jjacquet | October 23, 2007Posted 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, Ms. Meyer and Ms. McCaw, a former model, discussed how they would handle being young grandmothers when the children from their husbands' prior marriages had children of their own.
"You'll be the hot grandma, I'll be the kind-of-hot grandma," Ms. Meyer said. [see the picture and judge for yourself]…
jjacquet | October 22, 2007Here 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 last five years (excellent in terms of the quality of the data, not the disconcerting results). She showed 1) the fishery system is dominated now by herbivorous fish (there probably used to be more predators) 2) the majority of all the species caught were juveniles (66-98%, depending on the species)…
jjacquet | October 20, 2007Tomorrow, 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 periwinkles and whelks along the craggy South African coast at least 164,000 years ago. The New York Times has an abridged (and free!) version here.
This is interesting for so many reasons but here are the big ones:
1) Until now, we only knew that the consumption of seafood by early hominids began…
jjacquet | October 19, 2007This 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 Union.
Brief history refresher: The Portuguese colonized Mozambique in the 16th century. In 1962, anti-colonial forces formed the Front for the Liberation of Mozambique (FRELIMO) and initiated an armed campaign against Portuguese colonialism. The country gained independence in 1976, which was…
jjacquet | October 18, 2007After 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-funded by the Sea Around Us project and WWF).
Small-scale fisheries are often overlooked statistically, politically, and in economic terms. This is because small-scale fishers, as Dr. Daniel Pauly once explained during a talk, don't play golf. Their physical and socio-economic remoteness from…
jjacquet | October 17, 2007Our 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," (as a friend said to me yesterday), but if you end up with rotten reviews, everyone says, "Ah-ha, the truth comes out!"