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Friday music blogging: Bruce Springsteen

People in my, ahem, age cohort were first exposed to Bruce Springsteen via his 1984 album Born in the USA, which came out when I was 12. As a result, for most of my formative years I thought of Springsteen as a bland “adult contemporary” VH1 rocker along the lines of, I don’t know, Tom […]

Better management is needed before closing fisheries is the only option left

About thirty years ago, diners around the world developed a taste for the low-fat white meat of a large pelagic fish known as a slimehead. The name was changed to orange roughy, and a delicacy was born.

Unfortunately for the orange roughy, its long lifespan (a hundred years or more) and its late arrival to sexual maturity (at 20 years or more) has made it vulnerable to overfishing. As its popularity in fine restaurants has grown, orange roughy populations have nosedived. And just this week, Australia and New Zealand (the world's largest producer of orange roughy, while the U.S. is the largest consumer) agreed to close a large orange roughy fishery in the Southern Ocean, with managers saying they're not sure when or if the area may ever reopen to fishing because of the damage done.

It doesn't have to come to this. With responsible fishing techniques and sustainable quotas, rare and increasingly rare commercial fish like the roughy, bluefin tuna, Patagonian toothfish (Chilean sea bass), and more can thrive.

Landmark energy bill stalls in the Senate

Today, Senate Republicans blocked efforts to push through the landmark energy bill that was passed by the House yesterday. To cut off debate on the bill and avoid a filibuster, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) needed 60 votes; he got only 53. Republican leaders in the Senate now hope to strip out two key […]

‘Live like a subsidized farmer but on a Hill salary’

This rather droll ad appeared in Roll Call yesterday:

Mexican police conduct anti-logging raid in butterfly habitat

Hundreds of Mexican police raided illegal sawmills near a monarch butterfly reserve yesterday in “the largest seizure of illegally logged wood in the country’s history,” according to the attorney general’s office. Millions of butterflies travel some 2,500 miles each winter to spend the cold season in the Mexican forest, where illegal logging is rampant. The […]

Barge collides with tanker, spilling 2.7 million gallons of oil off South Korean coast

A barge collided with a massive oil tanker this morning about five miles off the coast of South Korea, damaging the tanker’s single hull in three places and resulting in an oil spill estimated at about 2.7 million gallons. The over four-mile-long oil slick is slowly making its way toward what were once probably some […]

China’s population rapidly rising

The population of China is projected to grow to a staggering 1.5 billion people by not-so-far-off 2033. And they’ll be staggering because they can’t breathe the air.

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NASA has bold plans to … send rodents into orbit

A while back I blogged on the folly of NASA's Moon-Mars program, and how it's killing real science the agency could be doing. Yesterday I received an email from NASA alerting me to a new funding opportunity:

Part of “Healthy Forests” law struck down by court for skirting eco-reviews

A key part of the Bush administration’s “Healthy Forests” law, passed in 2003, was effectively struck down this week by a federal appeals court. The “hazardous fuels reduction” rule let the U.S. Forest Service get out of analyzing the environmental impacts of timber sales up to 1,000 acres in size and prescribed burns up to […]