jjacquet | April 23, 2007TUNE 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.
jjacquet | 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.
jjacquet | April 20, 2007The 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 effort put into them, and some had a unique combination of creative insight and powerful imagery. You can watch the ten finalists on YouTube.
We plan to announce the winners on Tuesday, April 24th. The winners will be selected by celebrity judges Zooey Deschanel ("Failure to Launch"), Gregory Itzin ("…
jjacquet | 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 world's biggest meat producer, have announced that they will produce diesel from pork fat.
Pigs, as discussed in the Save the Oceans, Eat Like a Pig post consume about 25% of all fishmeal produced or about 7.5 million tonnes of fish. Essentially, the corporate world's greatest new idea is to turn…
jjacquet | April 19, 2007The 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 ocean fish. NMFS is revising its process for environmental review of fishing activities and for public comment on fishery management. If the current process is watered down, the public will not have a voice in managing our ocean ecosystems. The National Environmental Trust is working hard to get…
jjacquet | April 18, 2007This 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 worthy subject matter.
jjacquet | 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 suppose you could also call it the, "What's missing from this picture?" syndrome. The day will come when people will walk through relatively quiet rain forests and think they are seeing pristine nature, yet not even notice the absence of frog croaks, bird songs, and howls of monkeys. It's about…
jjacquet | 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 to an ever-increasing number of farmed fish, pigs, and chickens. It helps pigs and chicken (AND herbivorous fish) grow faster than their historical grain-based diets.
But the fishmeal industry also turns into powder fish perfectly edible by humans. The article explores a new initiative in Peru,…
jjacquet | 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 that humpbacks have been pushing minke whales (currently hunted) to poorer feeding grounds. Pauly also dismissed the Japanese argument that whales are the cause for fish collapses. The Japanese case to resume whaling was later dropped.
Also last week, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service leaked an…
jjacquet | April 15, 2007The 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. "Normally, I'm no endangered species hugger..." said Colbert on his show. But his heart softened to these "eagles of the sea" after the Great Turtle Race not only made a name for Colbert but made conservation likeable.
jjacquet | 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 examining global warming's effect on coral reefs [is there still some doubt as to what will happen?]). But there is a photo shoot with "The Minds Aquatic" that highlights a number of dedicated researchers at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Instituition and at the Scripps Institute of Oceanography (Nancy…
jjacquet | April 13, 2007So 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, but then managing to score huge follow-through on Wednesday when Stephen Colbert opined hilariously on his show about the turtle named after him. That is the way to do it. One major mass media score like that is equal to five thousand well intentioned brochures left on the floor at environmental…
jjacquet | 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 reading Nisbet and Mooney's editorial on Framing Science).
In a speech yesterday at Georgetown University he scolded environmentalists for their basic style of communication, saying the environmental movement needs to get to the point where it's "no longer being seen as a nag or a scold" (hitting some…
jjacquet | 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 they would have claimed hell for Spain.
Today, we all have a different impression of Galapagos. The Galapagos Marine Reserve is one of the largest in the world and the archipelego has been named a World Heritage Site. The BBC and National Geographic just released a three-part series that captures…
jjacquet | April 12, 2007His 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 his simultaneous joy for humanity, and...overall long term cynicism. This was reflected in his recommendation that we carve into a wall of the Grand Canyon a message for flying-saucer creatures one day that says, "We probably could have saved ourselves, but we were too damned lazy to try very hard…
jjacquet | April 12, 2007This 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.
Marine reserves are an antidote to this collective amnesia. They provide a scientific benchmark against which changes in the wider ocean--the exploited ocean--can be measured. "If nothing is left intact or pristine, how can you know that damage has occurrred?" Ballantine asks. Indeed, how do you…
jjacquet | 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 marine system over the last fifty years. Since these top predators are unable to reproduce quickly, the fishing industry targets the next biggest fish, and so on and so on, down the marine food web.
A recent article sent to us by Mike Hirshfield of Oceana fits neatly into 'fishing down marine food…
jjacquet | April 9, 2007The discussion generated around these two extreme positions has been very provocative and we plan to let the comments keep coming a couple days more. Both Randy and I agree that it is heartening to see so much support for the ocean and its inhabitants. We will wrap up the seafood discussion later this week, with excerpts from our favorite posts, so please continue to weigh in on: To Eat or Not To Eat.
jjacquet | April 8, 2007YES, SAYS RANDY OLSON: Until There Is Effective Leadership, There Is Little Point in Making Sacrifices
I say we should not be expected to stop eating seafood until there is a clear strategy that will make use of individual efforts -- namely boycotts. Asking people to make sacrifices in the absence of organized efforts is asking them to make gestures that are more symbolic than real. That, in my opinion, is essentially religious behavior.
Let me describe a similar situation. I support in general the idea of a reasonably high tax burden in our society with the intention of funding an…