josh donlan | November 5, 2008During Clinton's 11th hour, he initiated a number of policies that protected the environment; some of those regulations have remained in force, including the protection of almost 60 million acres of roadless areas. According to an article in Nature this week (and the OMB Watch, a Washington DC-based advocacy group), Bush is gearing up to do the exact opposite. On the list for potential midnight rollouts of new [anti] environmental regulations include the following:
1) New environmental regulations for factory farms. The EPA says that the regulations would curb the amount of nitrogen,…
jjacquet | November 4, 2008
The New York Times ran an excellent profile of naturalist and local Vancouver legend Alexandra Morton. She has spent her life studying orcas and salmon near the Broughton Archipelago off the coast of British Columbia. But over the last decades, her attention was forced toward fish farms and sea lice, which threaten the future of both salmon and orcas. This profile documents her battle against fish farms and her increasingly credible science.
Sea lice, prolific around fish farms, infect wild salmon as they travel by...
jjacquet | October 30, 2008"A new global deal on climate change will come too late to save most of the world's coral reefs...major ecological damage to the oceans is now inevitable." This according to The Guardian, which reports the finding of a new study in Geophysical Research Letters. The authors of the study found that the risk posed by carbon pollution to coral and marine life could justify a carbon stabilisation goal "lower than what might be chosen based on climate considerations alone". I feel paralyzed by this type of news. The only thing I feel I could do is abandon all responsibility and spend the next…
jjacquet | October 27, 2008Last week, a smack of moon jellies jammed the Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant off the California coast. The rise of slime and the closure of power plants. Just another shifting baseline.
josh donlan | October 22, 2008
I just returned from the World Conservation Congress in Barcelona, where 8,000 of conservation's "best and brightest" (along with plenty of the "most important") gathered to discuss, talk, and work toward a more diverse and sustainable world. I wish I had good news to report - but it is mostly more along the lines of "it's worse than we predicted". Some highlights:
1. Of the 223 species listed on IUCN's Red List whose status has changed since last year, 82% are now closer to extinction.
2. 22% of the world's mammals are threatened with extinction.
3. 31% of the world's amphibians are…
jjacquet | October 21, 2008The mislabeling and renaming of fish is a problem. It means that consumers are often paying more than they should for their seafood. Plus, it impedes the consumer's ability to make environmentally or health conscious choices.
I also really like the twin problems of renaming and mislabeling because they are unconventional sources of signs of overfishing. Fish species are given new names because their original name is unappetizing--a reminder that no one thought those fish would be eaten. Read more on renaming in my latest piece Tried the Slimehead? Delicious at The Tyee.
josh donlan | October 18, 2008Every year Houghton-Mifflin puts out a edited volume entitled "The Best American Science and Nature Writing". The latest volume looks like some delightful bedtime reading (although I may be biased because I was chosen as one of the authors). It includes works by Freeman Dyson, Edward Hoagland, David Quammen, Oliver Sachs, and many others. Editor Jerome Groopman pulls from a variety of publications including the New Yorker, Outside Magazine, and Scientific American. He suggests "the articles...draw the reader more tightly into the web of the world. They forge links in unexpected ways. They…
jjacquet | October 16, 2008Say hello to delecata, a high grade specially filleted piece of North American farmed catfish. This new name was created with hopes of boosting the profile and profits of a struggling industry. In The New York Times Magazine, Paul Greenberg tells the story of U.S. southern fish farmers competing in a global marketplace and a catfish by any other name.
You can put lipstick on a catfish but it's still a catfish. A new name, though? That's another matter...
jjacquet | October 14, 2008Pollock, the poster child for sustainable fishing, appears to be on the brink of collapse. I have more on the state of Bering Sea pollock fishery in my guest post at the Gristmill...
jjacquet | October 12, 2008In 1992, Consumer Reports published an article titled, "The label said Snapper, the lab said baloney". Fifteen years later, the mislabeling of red snapper is, if anything, more widespread. A 2004 study in Nature showed 75 percent of red snapper sold in the U.S. is some other fish.
Menus offer up red snapper despite that it has been overfished for the last half-century. Red snapper mysteriously existing in restaurants but not in the sea is resolved by mislabeling, which prevents us from perceiving red snapper is actually in trouble. It's as if we are eating some ghost of bygone years, when…
jjacquet | October 8, 2008A lowdown of what's happening with the oceans and the people that care about them:
1) Dr. Jeremy Jackson delivers a lecture on the Brave New Ocean tonight at Harvey Mudd College.
2) Oceana is again running their Freakiest Fish contest. Check out their site and vote for your favorite freak fish. Currently the vampire squid is in the lead.
3)Another deep-sea dwelling fish that is "surprisingly cute" (and thus not up for freakiest fish) has been filmed for the first time by a Japan-UK team. It is suspected Pseudoliparis amblystomopsis is the deepest living fish found to date. Watch footage…
jjacquet | October 6, 2008Today in Barcelona, Dr. Daniel Pauly, who, among other things, is the brain behind the term 'shifting baselines', was awarded the Ramon Margelef prize in ecology.
jjacquet | October 1, 2008I recently bought a new wooden toilet seat at Target for five dollars. Five dollars! It wasn't even on sale and I thought to myself, "What a steal!" I should have known that was probably, literally the case. My toilet seat was probably illegally logged in Russia. In this week's issue of The New Yorker, Raffi Khatchadourian (who also wrote the great profile of Paul Watson) writes about the illegal logging market. The article is not quite online yet, but check out this short video where he discusses how a tree illegally logged from halfway around the world becomes a toilet seat at your…
josh donlan | October 1, 2008I am hastily heading to the World Conservation Forum in Barcelona, which starts next week. Here, more than 8,000 of the world's leading decision makers in sustainable development will convene: from governments, NGOs, business, the UN and academia. Together in one place for 10 days, they will to debate, share, network, learn, commit, vote and decide. Their objectives: ideas, action and solutions for a diverse and sustainable world.
Many of the session will be streamed live, including dozens of marine-focused sessions. Here is a link to those sessions.
jjacquet | September 30, 2008The latest video from Randy Olson's Shifting Baselines Ocean Media Project is here and highlights the differences between two sailors' experiences: one describing his voyage in 1958 and one (the leader of the junk raft expedition) describing the exact same voyage but 50 years later. You can probably discern from the video title that the results aren't pretty. Also, Andy Revkin has a more detailed post on the project at his New York Times Dot Earth Blog and will post a short interview with Olson later today...
jjacquet | September 28, 2008The New York TImes reviewed the new Sant Ocean Hall, which opened this weekend at the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History. The new exhibit on the oceans is the largest renovation in the museum's century-long history and it sounds and looks promising. I wonder what the child's perspective is on it...
jjacquet | September 28, 2008With jellies on the rise and overlapping with more and more people, it is good to know how they got their sting. According to some new research, it seems ancestor jellies might have gotten their defense capabilities from a bacterium via horizontal gene transfer. Read more at Nature.
jjacquet | September 27, 2008For those of you who watched the first Presidential debate last night, you know that the state of the U.S. economy was the first and central topic discussed by Presidential candidates John McCain and Barack Obama. You also might have heard Senator John McCain, in his first few minutes of answering the question on what do to about the U.S. financial crisis, criticize the U.S. government for spending $3 million to study the DNA of bears in Montana. Later in the debate, McCain did go on to talk about defense spending. Still, it bothered me that the first attack and hard figure he put out there…
josh donlan | September 26, 2008
In this month's issue of Wired Magazine, Andrew Curry writes about rewilding projects around the world. In particular, he describes the wonderful efforts going on in the Netherlands.
josh donlan | September 22, 2008Economist Raghuran Rajan (past Chief Economist for the International Monetary Fund and Professor of Finance at University of Chicago) has an insightful view on the current financial crisis. He also asks what seems to be an important question that no one is asking: Why are we (the US Government) bailing out the system before the shareholders are asked to do so first? He argues that asking the shareholders to put up more capital to rescue the system should be the first thing to try. Government intervention is actually the third of three options.
Given that a $700 billion - $1 trillion bail out…