Losing Track
jjacquet | November 19, 2007I am nearing the end of Naomi Klein's The Shock Doctrine, which I was at first reluctant to read. Though I found the topic compelling (and thoroughly admired No Logo), I had heard Klein speak on the subject at Seattle's Town Hall and found her disappointingly short on information (very unlike her book). (A friend and I played Buzzword BINGO during the event, as Klein repeated the words: exodus, dystopia, dictatorship, shock and awe, agenda, Chicago, revolutionary, Haliburton, terror, and torture.) But I picked up a copy of the book (gave it a few curls; it's heavy) and haven't put it down. I…
jjacquet | November 16, 2007The American Dream might be wearing a little thin. In Rags to Rags, Riches to Riches from June's Atlantic Monthly, Clive Crook describes how most researchers now give America much lower marks than they used to for intergenerational economic mobility.
Before the 1990s, researchers tended to put the correlation between parents' incomes and their children's at around 20 percent, implying a high degree of mobility between generations. In the 1990s...experts tended to put that figure at about 40 percent. Recent estimates run as high as 60 percent.
Mobility has not necessarily fallen, but…
jjacquet | November 9, 2007I went to the Vancouver screening of the film Earthlings last night. Narrated by Joaquin Phoenix, the film is an indictment of the pet, food, clothing, entertainment, and medical industries in their brutal treatment of animals. It has all the elements of a horror film: blood, guts, fear, screams. But one distinctly different emotion emerges: shame. After watching Earthlings, I felt nothing but shame to belong to the human race.
There is only one moment of justice in the film: a scene with circus elephants that retaliate against the Big Top and wreak havoc. It ends badly, as one might…
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 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 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 | 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 18, 2007An estimated 7,000 languages are spoken around the world today. In 14 days, there will be an estimated 6,999. One language goes extinct about every two weeks, which is a faster rate of exinction those for plants, birds, fish, and mammals. New research reported at the New York Times found the five regions where languages are disappearing most rapidly: northern Australia, central South America, North America's upper Pacific coastal zone, eastern Siberia, and Oklahoma and the southwestern United States.
Researchers are currently traveling the world and making recordings of dying languages. As…
jjacquet | September 15, 2007I don't eat fish (as has been established) or any meat so I find I get served a lot of mushrooms, which I don't mind. I recently enjoyed some hand-foraged chanterelles from the B.C. forest at Vancouver's Pair Bistro so much that I asked myself: Why? I think this is the reason: mushroom and fish are the two last wild food sources consumed with any regularity by Westerners. I don't eat the latter, thus fungus is my only source of savage food.
Like most things, the U.S. is also eating more mushrooms. U.S. per capita consumption of mushrooms has quadrupled since 1965 while per capita seafood…
jjacquet | September 12, 2007For unknown reasons, I found myself reading a USA Today from last Wednesday (Sept. 5). In it, there is a nice little article that reports on the decline in milk deliveries. The reporter 'frames' the story in a positive light: milk deliveries have not declined any further since 2001--they've stabilized at a paltry 0.4% of the U.S. milk market. Anecdotal evidence suggests milk deliveries might even be increasing. But at less than one percent of market share, it seems silly not to reminisce. Back in 1963, milk deliveries accounted for nearly one-third of the milk we drank.
Milk delivery is…
jjacquet | September 10, 2007The grey whale is always held up as an icon of success of the Endangered Species Act. While it's true that gray whale numbers have rebounded from near extinction to 22,000 whales today, a new study released today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences shows that the grey whale population before whaling was 96,000 animals, three to five times greater than it is today. What is the baseline for success?
It comes as no surprise Stanford University's Steve Palumbi is a co-author of this study, given his participation in the 2003 paper in Science that showed North Atlantic whale…
jjacquet | September 9, 2007The New York Times has an article today on the 4000 artificial reefs sunk off the coast of New York and New Jersey. Barges, cranes, subway cars, army tanks, ice cream trucks, human ashes lovingly encased in concrete: they're all down there, providing footholds for coral and tiny shellfish and havens for bigger fish and lobster, which in turn draw anglers and scuba divers by the thousands.
The article has some useful historical information about arificial reefs:
Man has been creating reefs to make the seas more productive since at least the 17th century, when the Japanese sank building…
jjacquet | August 30, 2007The good news: The white-beaked, nearly blind bajii dolphin was spotted in the Yangtze river relieving fears that it had gone extinct. The New York Times has more on the sighting but the elements of shifting baselines are here: In the late 1970s, scientists believed several hundred baiji were still alive, but by 1997 a survey listed just 13 sightings...China has set up a reserve in a lake in Hubei Province but has found no baiji to put in it.
The bad news: Mexican police forces just seized a group of six men with more than 57,000 turtle eggs, representing around 570 endangered olive ridley…
jjacquet | August 12, 2007In today's New York Times, Paul Greenberg has a marvelous article with a marvelous lede about a sportfishing trip he took to Kona, HI: A few months ago I took the most expensive nap of my life, and when it was over I decided it was all Hemingway's fault. Hemingway was an avid sportfisher and Greenberg loosely calculates that Hemingway's personal kills have resulted in the absence of 78,000 blue marlin and 18,000 bluefin tuna today.
The essay is playful in tone but does not quite let Hemingway off the hook--delving into not only the author's fishing records, but his tendency to overstate his…
jjacquet | August 9, 2007In 2002, when Randy Olson wrote an Op-Ed for the L.A. Times one of the ways he described the shifting baselines phenomenon was in terms of weight: If your ideal weight used to be 150 pounds and now it's 160, your baseline -- as well as your waistline -- has shifted. And indeed it has.
One-third of American women over 20 are now classified as obese--the only thing is, most of them don't know it. Rueters has the article Americans see fat as normal as weights rise, which briefly describes how obesity and our perception of obesity has changed over the last three decades. Shifting waistlines,…
jjacquet | August 1, 2007Daniel Pauly just pointed me toward a story that will compete with Deer Meat Sushi as the Shifting Baselines story of the year. The Sunday Times ran A Trimmer Gun to Spear Smaller Fry about how there is finally a speargun sold in the U.S. to hunt smaller fish. Americans are known for hunting big fish (because we had some) with bulky spearguns. But lately there seems to be a growing vogue among American speardivers for smaller fish like croakers and snappers (decide for yourself whether it's because the fish are getting smaller).
The new line of spearguns--called the Euro Series-- is…
jjacquet | July 31, 2007The New York Times ran a nice article yesterday on the northward expansion of the hefty (up to 100 lbs.) Humboldt squid. Scientists are queried why the Humboldt squid has, over the last ten years, made a home in Monterey, California (it wasn't because of low taxes). A study of squid stomachs (not quite published) shows one of this this fierce-looking cephalopod's favorite food is hake, one of lead roles in a favorite act: surimi.
The squid have also been migrating south into Chile. Scientists in the article postulate overfishing and climate changes have influenced the Humboldt squid's new…
jjacquet | July 25, 2007Who: Surimi
Here Spanish surimi poses as baby eels, which have been overfished (photo courtesy of M. Hirshfield).
What: A pulverized fish product that has been shaped, texturized, and flavored to resemble some other fish product. Gobal surimi production is estimated to be between 550,000 and 600,000 tonnes, with approximately half of all surimi made with Alaska pollock. Other species used for surimi include mackerels, hoki, blue whiting and cod.
When: According to Wikipedia, surimi was developed in East Asia 900 years ago. Japan industrialized the surimi process in the 1960s. Over the…
jjacquet | July 12, 2007The shifting baseline of northern fur seal ecology in the northeast Pacific Ocean was recently published by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and the authors discuss using baseline information as a way to understand fur seal distributions. Northern fur seals range from southern California to the Aleutian Islands. Today they breed almost exclusively on offshore islands at high latitudes (two-thirds on the Pribilof Islands alone) but in the past there were large populations off of California. The California population appears to have collapsed between 800 and 1000 years ago…