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Aquaculture Shock
Farmed-fish supply rises, but still may not match demand Farmed fish have nearly caught up to wild-caught fish as a source of the world’s seafood, reported the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization yesterday. In 1980, just 9 percent of human-consumed fish came from aquaculture; now the number is 43 percent. “Catches in the wild are […]
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Pulp Non-Fiction
Lax enforcement allows toxic sludge to overrun Chinese village Here’s China’s environmental situation in a nutshell: In 2004, after a toxic spill into the Yellow River, two Chinese paper mills were fined $300,000 and ordered to install water-recycling and treatment equipment. They didn’t. Instead, city officials built temporary wastewater containment pools beside the river. An […]
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Me not working. Good things happening. Coincidence?
"No Day at the Beach: Bloggers Struggle With What to Do About Vacation"
While I was on vacation, California committed to signing a landmark climate bill, the National Park Service committed to emphasizing conservation, and my own neighborhood of Ballard committed to becoming the nation's first carbon-neutral community.
I should go on vacation more often.
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Searchable database of green homes, apartments, condos, and products
I just had about two hours of my time sucked up by Vivavi's Modern Green Living Home Directory. (It just launched this past Friday.)
I really want to live here.
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A roundup of forest-fire news
An association of fire ecologists have issued a five page warning:
Currently, we are observing wildland fire conditions previously considered rare, such as extreme wildfire events (e.g. high heat release and severe impact to ecosystems), lengthened wildfire seasons, and large-scale wildfires in fire-sensitive ecosystems (e.g. tropical rain forests and arid deserts).
And here, palm-oil plantation owners and entrepreneurs are being taken to court for setting fire to their forest holdings -- a cheap way to clear land for palm oil plantations to grow food for our cars.
The Indonesian government plans to sue three oil palm plantation firms and one oil palm entrepreneur for allegedly starting fires in their concessions that grew into massive forest fires in Riau province, a newspaper said Saturday.
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Not if you are dark-skinned, live in the South, or vote Republican.
Not if you are dark-skinned, live in the South, or vote Republican. Also not you if you're a woman, earn more than 60K a year, or prefer the Weekly Standard to the New York Times. These statistics (not verbatim, mind you) are the findings of a paper in the latest issue of Science Communications.
The authors write that the Pacific Northwest boasts the highest rate of environmental news coverage (70% of papers and 21% of TV stations have devoted staffers) of any region of the country. Only an abstract is available online, but Framing Science over at Science Blogs delivers a better-than-average digest -- which is great, because according to the survey, environmental reporters list "time constraints" as the greatest barrier to covering the green beat. Gotta run.
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And the challenges of enforcing environmental regulations
50,000 protests last year over pollution in China. Even the inward-looking U.S. press seems to be picking up at least weekly stories on the latest Chinese environmental accident. The New York Times has a nice piece highlighting the challenges of enforcing environmental regulations while the drive for economic growth remains king.
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A response to a plan to dramatically increase the scope of whaling
Earlier this summer Japan, Norway, and Iceland announced that they planned to dramatically increase the scope of whaling, extending it to species that currently aren't hunted. (They were eventually rebuffed by a small margin.) Upon learning this, I remember experiencing a strong sense of anger and frustration. Part of this was due no doubt to my recent trip to Hawaii and the opportunity I had to get up close to humpback whales, which were slated for slaughter by the Japanese. These magnificent creatures pose no threat to humans, are highly sentient (their famous songs are as complex as symphonies), and every year take part in the longest migration on the entire planet.
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‘Tis the Season (for the last of the big summer BBQs and family reunions)
Over the 4th of July weekend, I traveled from Boston to western New York to see my uncle and many of my cousins. I'd been there before but couldn't recall the route from memory, so I quickly printed the directions from a website, never thinking that there could be two different ways to get there when one route is so obviously superior. I hopped into my car and set off.
About an hour after I passed a turn-off for Albany, I thought to myself, "These rolling hills and grazing cows look different." Then I told myself that I was being absurd and that there was no way that a city mouse like myself could tell one set of rolling hills and grazing cows from another, but in fact I was right. These weren't my beautiful rolling hills, these weren't my beautiful grazing cows. My inner GPS told me that I was on a much more southerly route, and my choice of CD, the Dixie Chicks' "Long Way Round," suddenly seemed painfully apt.
