jjacquet | June 6, 2008I have also imagined that high levels of mobility exacerbate the shifting baselines syndrome since the baseline would then be spatially inconsistent. But there is hope: humans don't move too much. A new study published in Nature and written up in The New York Times tracked the movements of 100,000 Europeans via their cellphones and found that they don't move far from home. This is good news in terms of being able to recognize change in one's environment. It also inspires me because travel might not add to much to our quality of life since, on average, we seem to naturally be homebodies.…
rolson | June 4, 2008Last year Jeremy Jackson went to South Africa to collect a big prize at a conference. While there he met a young nature writer/photographer named Adam Welz. A few weeks ago Adam was ambling down the west coast of the U.S. and stopped by to visit for a day. In addition to breaking the news to me that more than half the plants in my yard are introduced species from South Africa (where the climate is so similar), he also is a great storyteller and amazing nature photographer (see the beavers).
If you have a few minutes and care to read some excellent natural history writing and see some amazing…
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…
rolson | June 2, 2008I put together this short video of yesterday's departure of Junk Raft. An amazing fellow showed up for the festivities--Redondo Beach resident Don McFarland who in 1958 sailed a similar sized raft along the same course from LA to Hawaii with three other men. Two of them were mormons and did it to prove their idea that Hawaii could have been colonized from America. He said anthropologists at the Bishop Museum had recently said there was simply no way indigenous people from North America could have crossed the distance. It took them 69 days at sea, but they proved them wrong (and he said…
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.
josh donlan | May 30, 2008I just returned from Asia. Nepal is a country the size of Arkansas with 30 million people; the GDP per capita is less than US$1000. Nepal is one of the poorest countries in the world. It is also rich in culture and biodiversity, a place where Buddhism blends with Hinduism. A place with tigers and 8000m peaks. For me, Nepal removed all doubts that Conservation is by people, for people, and about people. And there is alot of work to do in Asia.
After a month of walking the country, I spent Vaishakh Poornima, Buddha's birthday, in Kathmandu with tens of thousands Nepalis and Indians in the…
jjacquet | May 30, 2008At the Fisheries Centre, we always talk about how an increase in fuel price will lead to less fishing (less flying, less driving, etc., too). The annual fuel subsidy to fishermen globally is $6.3 billion annually and, without it, many overfished species might experience reprieve. But today, an article about European fishermen challenges this assumption. Fishermen have been throwing a tantrum about the high cost of fuel and blocked port traffic in the English Channel in France. According to the article:
Some officials ruled out fuel price subsidies and said the protests had highlighted a…
rolson | May 28, 2008Environmentalism needs what Dr. Marcus Eriksen is embarking upon this Sunday.
When I first saw the photo of their raft, I balked. I thought to myself "Doesn't that look a little risky?" and "What if the raft should be lost at sea?" So I sat down with him and asked ten simple questions addressing my concerns. What I concluded is that this project is about what's most essential to the success of environmentalism, which is "the human spirit."
You can organize all the workshops, conferences, protests, get togethers and beach walks you want, but to truly motivate people, you have to have an…
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.
josh donlan | May 25, 2008Back in 2005 when my colleagues and I proposed using closely related species to ecological replace extinct large North American animals, there were many who cried foul. Too risky, won't work, impossible to measure - were among the top of the list.
Danish ecologist Dennis Hansen and his colleagues just provided some data to suggest otherwise - at least on islands. Using giant tortoises from a nearby island to replace extinct tortoises on the island of Mauritius in the Indian Ocean, Dr. Hansen found that the tortoises increased the survivorship of a critically endangered plant by dispersing its…
rolson | May 25, 2008Okay, I'm going to give this one last shot. Regardless of whether I know what I'm doing as a filmmaker, what I do know is that in the spring of 2006 I spent two weeks at the Tribeca Film Festvial meeting with theatrical and home DVD distributors along with my sales agent, Jeff "The Dude" Dowd, the guy who sold the Coen Brother's first film, "Blood Simple," and they based the Jeff Bridges character, "The Dude," in "The Big Lebowski," on him.
Two things that Jeff said from the outset, over and over again, is that first, "home DVD is your cash cow -- its the biggest revenue stream for most any…
rolson | May 24, 2008For anyone who knows me, you know that's the highest compliment I could ever pay a communicator.
There are two fundamental errors to consider in the mass communication of science: errors of inaccuracy, and errors of boredom. It's a lot like Type I and Type II errors in statistics. And just like with statistics, there's a tendency to focus on one more than the other. With science communication, accuracy is usually held up as the be-all-and-end-all, for good reason. But good communicators know you not only need to get things right, they also need to be readable.
It's obvious PZ gets things…
rolson | May 23, 2008This is such a great article. It's about the gargantuan con job advertisers have pulled on the American public over the past four decades. For those of us who grew up in the sixties and drank water from supposedly dangerous public water fountains (like the author of the essay), it will remain forever baffling how we turned into a society that now prefers to pay for what was once free.
It's such a simple and important essay. To her credit, the author concludes by mentioning the term "shifting baseline," as well as Bill McKibbon's term of "hyper-individualism." And one wonderful additional…
jjacquet | May 22, 2008This short video from KQED discusses how and why Stanford researchers, including tuna specialist Barbara Block, are tagging ocean inhabitants.
jjacquet | May 21, 2008This month, WIRED magazine offers 10 green heresies, such as the suggestion to buy conventionally grown foods over organic ones and to embrace nuclear power, to save the planet. I certainly support their efforts to bring attention to some fallacies of the green-marketing movement (the authors suggest, for instance, buying used cars over hybrid vehicles) but I also realize, once again, that one needs a Ph.D. in ethical consumption to be a proper environmentalist these days. Furthermore, many of their suggestions focus superficially on energy/carbon issue while ignoring other issues, such as…
rolson | May 19, 2008A six-week drift to Hawaii will call attention to plastics in the sea
Yesterday Dr. Marcus Eriksen, his expedition partner Joel Paschal, and their land-based support coordinator (and fiancee of Dr. Eriksen) Anna Cummins took the newly built "Junk Raft" on a trial run to Catalina and back. All systems are go, so they're now scaling up for the big departure on Sunday afternoon, June 1, at 3:00 p.m. from the Long Beach Aquarium. If all goes according to plans, about six weeks later they should land on the Big Island of Hawaii. It's a straight shot over, mostly along the 25th parallel, just…
jjacquet | May 19, 2008A couple weeks ago, Greenpeace invaded the Brussels Seafood Expo and hung signs calling attention to the dismal state of tuna fisheries. Just a week later, Greenpeace-USA announced its forthcoming publication that ranks U.S. supermarkets in terms of procuring sustainable seafood. This is an analogue to the U.K. campaign that has so far been one of my favorite market-based seafood initiatives (read about it here) because it uses negative messaging to affect reputation.
Last week, I spoke with Greenpeace-USA's John Hocevar, who is spearheading the U.S. initiative. He revealed Greenpeace's…
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 14, 2008Today, my review of Taras Grescoe's recently published book Bottomfeeder: How to Eat Ethically in a World of Vanishing Seafood is up at The Tyee.
When Taras Grescoe declares he will try anything on his voyage around the world in search of ethical seafood, he means it. He eats poisonous pufferfish, morally questionable shark fin soup, and potentially dangerous oysters during months without r's. He even samples fishmeal (yuck). After 18 months of eating his way up and down the marine food chain, Grescoe exits a bottom-feeder -- committed to consuming fish lower on the marine food web, with the…
jjacquet | May 14, 2008Polar bears are threatened with global climate change and, in recognition of this, were just listed as 'threatened' under the U.S. Endangered Species Act. Read more here.