Losing Track
jjacquet | January 31, 2009It is already February! And I cannot believe I let so many January stories get away from me. So I would like a recap a few of shifting baselines repute now:
1) This article, Deep Sea-crets, ran in the San Diego Union Tribune about a recent expedition to explore deep undersea mounts in the Gulf of California:
What the scientists found was both exhilarating and disheartening. In some of the deeper and more remote locations, such as Las Animas, a seamount midway between the towns of Loreto and La Paz, marine life was both abundant and diverse.
Researchers recorded prosperous fish populations…
jjacquet | January 5, 2009Check out this magnificent and convincing collection panoramic photographs of receding glaciers over the decades...
rolson | December 20, 2008...That's what you get when the ocean is infer-e-yah.
We sang about it six years ago. In 2002 we made a Flash video in which we said, "A new term for the new millennium:Â Jellyfish blooms." And now our dire predictions appear to be coming true, around the world.
They'll sting your knees, and cause disease.
jjacquet | December 17, 2008I am the lead author of a new study In Hot Soup: Sharks Captured in Ecuador's Waters out in the journal Environmental Sciences. We reconstructed the shark landings for Ecuador from 1976 to 2004 and demonstrated that Ecuador captures more than 3.5 times the number of sharks they officially report catching--or about half a million sharks each year.
The shark fishery of Ecuador is one of many around the world that feeds the growing Asian demand for sharkfin soup. Fishermen catch more than 40 different shark species and one need only visit a few of the fishing ports along the coast to see shark…
rolson | December 9, 2008This is rather distressing. It doesn't sound like there has been any sort of major, published, peer-reviewed, quantitative documentation of this yet. But that said, something is not right when so many sport divers not only count dozens of dead or dying eels (the diver on this blog itemized in detail 50 encounters with dead eels), but even post video footage of one writhing in what looks to be the death throes.
In all the thousands of hours I've logged diving on Caribbean coral reefs I've never once seen a dead or dying eel. It's a rather disturbing mystery for now.
Did we do something…
jjacquet | November 24, 2008A.O. Scott had a nice piece in this weekend's New York Times Magazine on The Screening of America. In spite of all the technological advances, he believes the cinema is far from finished:
What will happen, in the age of iPod, DVR, VOD, YouTube and BitTorrent, to the experience of moviegoing, to say nothing of the art of cinema? The answer does not seem to be that people will stop going to the movies. Nothing has stopped us before -- certainly not the rise of television in the late 1940s or the spread of home video in the early '80s. While both of those developments appeared to threaten the…
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…
josh donlan | June 4, 2008It's often useful to take a long view on change, the environment, and society. Last night, an Afro-american captured the democratic nominee. A monumental event that my parents' generation can appreciate better than mine. Yesterday, GM announced that due to rising fuel prices they will be closing four truck plants and will undertake a "strategic assessment" of the Hummer brand. It might be hard to find a buyer for that one. I can remember 99 cents a gallon in high school; now $4 dollars a gallon appears here to stay. And the Discovery Channel thinks that can make money with a TV channel…
jjacquet | June 2, 2008A student of mine recently sent me this photo of a jellyfish strewn beach with the following text:
I took this picture when I was living in Arica, Chile four years ago. The people who lived there said that it was like this every summer, but it was getting progressively worse each year, not by much, but enough to notice.
jjacquet | May 28, 2008Back in 1966, after decades of whaling (including the Whaling Olympics of the 1930s), humpback numbers in the northern Pacific ocean were at most 1,400 individuals. An article in Nature this week shows that there are now 20,000 humpbacks in that region, the most recorded since 1966. This is great news. However, to know just how happy we should be, we need to know the pre-whaling Pacific humpback population. For comparison, a study in Science in 2003 showed that there were 240,000 humpbacks in the North Atlantic prior to whaling. It's all about the baseline.
jjacquet | May 16, 2008Today is Endangered Species Day, a resolution introduced by Maine Senator Susan Collins and California Senator Dianne Feinstein to help increase awareness about threats to endangered wildlife, fish and plants.
In celebration, let's look at this article in the BBC about how wildlife populations are plummeting.
Between a quarter and a third of the world's wildlife has been lost since 1970, according to data compiled by the Zoological Society of London.
Populations of land-based species fell by 25%, marine by 28% and freshwater by 29%, it says.
Humans are wiping out about 1% of all other species…
jjacquet | May 13, 2008Over the weekend, the Observer's Alex Renton gave it to us straight on how the world's oceans are running out of fish. Here's just a taste:
Unlike global warming, the science of fish stock collapse is old and its practitioners have been pretty much in agreement since the 1950s. Yet Roberts can think of only one international agreement that has actually worked and preserved stocks of an exploited marine animal - a deal in the Arctic in 1911 to regulate the hunting of fur seals on the Pribilof Islands. So why has the international community failed so badly in its attempts to stop the long-…
jjacquet | May 9, 2008Fishermen off of Oregon's coast could go broke sitting, or could go broke working, which is why they're trading in their salmon fishing gear and began outfitting their boats for prawns. This is a classic case of overfishing (as well as other factors that play into the salmon shortage, such as climate change and habitat degradation) and fishing down marine food webs--and the Oregon fleet is trying to diversify under the new regime. Read more on the conversion of a fishing fleet and hard times at the New York Times.
Steve Wilson refits his salmon boat to fish for prawns destined (hopefully)…
jjacquet | May 1, 2008For a baseline to shift, there must be an element of amnesia. To be forgotten, you must first be acknowledged as existing. What of the unlucky mollusks then? Few people know much about these slimy, slow movers. A new article discusses the vertebrate bias in conservation and the grim future for mollusks, particularly terrestrial species.
The decline and loss of mammals, birds, and other vertebrate species is well documented and often brought to public attention as a consequence of recent human impact on environment. It is indeed alarming to realize that we have lost 135 bird species, 70…
jjacquet | April 24, 2008I used to love scratch-n-sniff when I was little. I remember one about a little bear at Christmas and I could smell his hot chocolate, oranges, and pine trees. Well, that was then and this is now. My book about the little bear was really delightful. This new scratch-n-sniff book will not be really delightful. But it will be real and should be manufactured in bulk and distributed freely to all children that they may get an olfactory sense of what the future holds. In "The Future Stinks" children can scatch and sniff smells of garbage, factory farms, sewage effluent, factory farms, and…
jjacquet | April 22, 2008I always say that the shifting baselines syndrome, the tendency for each new generation to accept a degraded environment as normal/natural, is partially a result of the short human lifespan. If we would only live 1000 years, we would do a much better job at taking care of the planet. With the average lifespan in the U.S. at 78** years, I thought it seemed we were heading in that direction. New research shows otherwise.
An article published today in PLoS Medicine shows that life expectancy is not improving for most Americans. Researchers led by Harvard University professor Majid Ezzati…
jjacquet | April 21, 2008In The Seattle Times yesterday, there is an excellent article that talks a lot about shifting baselines in Puget Sound, including issues with population growth, the loss of a healthy marine ecosystem, and the formation of the Puget Sound Partnership. The article is an excellent complement to Randy Olson's recent flash video on Shifting Baselines in the Sound. William Dietrich, the author of the article, also calls for more science to understand baselines:
One of the most difficult things about Puget Sound is how little we still know. We should be able to answer three questions:
1. What was…
josh donlan | April 13, 2008The state of the world can be measured by the state of the wild. The Wildlife Conservation Society takes on that challenge by publishing their annual State of the Wild series with Island Press. The 2008-09 volume is fresh off the presses. This edition considers the integration of wildlife health, ecosystem health, human health, and the health of domestic animals, a "One World-One Health" approach to disease and conservation. The focus is complemented with essays clustered into sections that address other key issues: conservation of species, conservation of wild places, and the art and…
jjacquet | April 8, 2008Last fall I was contacted by the folks at the newly created Puget Sound Partnership regarding the "shifting baselines" predicament they face with Puget Sound. Their phone polling showed that over 90% of the people of Seattle are in favor of protecting Puget Sound, but over 70% think the Sound, as it is today, is pretty much pristine. That is a case for shifting baselines.
So over the past four months we produced this new 5 minute Flash video to help convey the fact that even though, when you stand on the ferry and look out at Puget Sound it all appears flawless, the real situation is…