jjacquet | October 17, 2007What 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 green movement, it's going to get nowhere, too," as Thomas Friedman explains in his excellent Op-Ed/profile of social activist Van Jones in today's New York Times article The Green Collar Solution.
Using his little center in Oakland, Mr. Jones has been on a crusade to help underprivileged African-…
jjacquet | October 17, 2007Getting 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 was in luck because the details were canned and served by Marian Burros at the New York Times in this article Industry Money Fans Debate on Fish.
I'll just add a small tuna-related health story to the mix. In the U.S., consumers have been warned about canned tuna and told that albacore tuna,…
jjacquet | October 16, 2007Posted 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 ever want to undertake anywhere, at any time.
In the face of a concerted effort by the Bush Administration and the extractive industries that would benefit from the treaty to get it passed, those who fear a "one world government," are putting up a valiant effort, led by Sens. Vitter (R-La.), DeMint (…
jjacquet | October 16, 2007I 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.
jjacquet | October 15, 2007One 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 over and over again USC would bring in famous editors who would explain that there are no hard fast rules. Yes, there are some general rules of thumb, like cutting on action, but as soon as you look at the work of truly brilliant editors, the first thing you see is them throwing out all the…
jjacquet | October 11, 2007The 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 surprise everyone fawns over the Nobel.
But has news of the Nobel left you unsettled? Are you feeling cultural anxiety at the prospect of living a life of prizelessness? Here at Shifting Baselines, we are most interested in time series trends and, with the world humming this week with Nobel news,…
jjacquet | October 11, 2007Speaking 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 Hero Award, given to those who make contributions through their professional work to improve the health of our oceans (previous recipients include Jean-Michel Coustea and Julie Packard), while Gore received the Partners Award. Both awards are sponsored by Oceana. Their awards were designed by one of…
jjacquet | October 10, 2007I 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's to hoping he gets to add it to his trophy shelf.
And after watching a very vacuous environmental movie recently, I walked out with three times more respect for Al for his having had the guts to put real data in a movie. He showed, once again, there are no rules when it comes to making movies,…
jjacquet | 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 been a low trophic feeder).
jjacquet | October 9, 2007Posted 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 that the Today Show even talked about the outbreak as an extreme weather event on October 1. Here's an excerpt from the story:
On Sept. 26, the Nassau County Health Department announced water samples had tested positive for Florida red tide, Karenia brevis, a large grouping of microscopic algae that…
jjacquet | October 9, 2007Last 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 depiction of E.O. Wilson's life and contributions to the field of biology and sociobiology.
The film began comparing E.O. Wilson, eminent Harvard ant biologist, to Charles Darwin, which at first I considered a stretch. By the end of the film, I was thoroughly convinced because the film ultimately showed the…
jjacquet | October 8, 2007For 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, while directing a television show in Vancouver, he entertained Jennifer with tales of our hard times in Hollywood.
And now tonight he is the director of the third episode of NBC's, "Chuck" which has been critically praised and sounds like much fun. Here's a little background for you in case you haven'…
jjacquet | October 5, 2007Planet 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 their most recent expedition. On behalf of Greenpeace, Holden argues that 40% of the oceans should be set aside as marine reserve, which would cost an estimated $12 billion per year. If this seems like a lot, Holden is quick to point out that we spend $20 billion each year in the U.S. on ice cream…
jjacquet | October 3, 2007When 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 made his first incision. Using that footage, Ty Carlisle and Randy Olson of the Shifting Baselines Ocean Media Project and I cut this little video. It's a dire time politically for manatees. Have a look.
jjacquet | October 3, 2007Yesterday, 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 color observations have applications such as detecting and monitoring changes in water quality, tracking harmful algal blooms, assessing underwater visibility for divers, and a variety of other applications related to ocean ecosystems, carbon and elemental cycling, coastal habitats, and coastal…
jjacquet | October 2, 2007Posted 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 necessarily expect it. You don't have to be a political insider to know that Washington, DC is many things but bipartisan isn't one of them. Yet, while our bipartisan approach is rare today, it may come as a surprise to some that the current polarized alignment, especially in the House of Representatives,…
jjacquet | September 30, 2007Because 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 version to parallel Carnival of the Green, which travels from blog to blog each Monday as a summary of the best 'green' blogging over the last week. In this spirit, each month a different blog hosts Carnival of the Blue as a synthesis of the best ocean-related blogging over the previous month. Without…
jjacquet | September 28, 2007Dr. 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 proposed mitigation strategies for climate change, mainly because of the pace in demand in places like Qatar and China for fossil fuel (a parallel to my skepticism about seafood awareness campaigns in the face of the increasing Asian demand for fish). Demand for oil since the 1990s has risen 22% in…
jjacquet | September 27, 2007This 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 America between late 2003 and the end of 2006. The mollusk is protected by an international treaty but used in Asian and Caribbean cooking. The shipments were mislabeled as whelk, another large shellfish that is not endangered. This conch case is a reminder to never doubt the power of an individual (or…
jjacquet | September 26, 2007Anyone 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...