Articles by Erik Hoffner

Bycatch is the ugliest thing you never see in the fish market

Commercial fishing creates a mind-boggling amount of waste, at least 7.3 million tons (PDF) annually of discarded fish ("bycatch") which are either unwanted, illegal to keep, or mangled in the gear. And this number from 2004 is a conservative estimate, not fully accounting for several major fishing countries.

Marine photographer Brian Skerry has some very intense imagery that illustrates this phenomenon, and he's provided a couple here for your interest (more are at his site: look under portfolios for global fisheries). The first one shows discarded fish raining into the depths from a small vessel: the second, below the fold, shows three shrimp caught in an hour of towing a net in tropical waters: what's under the shrimp is the incredible pile of unwanted critters which died for that meager handful.

Gift idea for the eco-educator on your list

Maybe the kids won't think this is as cool as an XBox ... perhaps it's better for a classroom's holiday wishlist: Keep Cool! is a "Risk"-style board game about "gambling with the climate." (Or put another way: setzen sie das klima aufs spiel! The half-English half-German directions in this are as interesting as the game itself -- the authors are from the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact in Germany.)

Each player takes a role in global climate politics, from nations to economic interests, and aptly, the "ruthless track" of pursuing narrow self-interest results in all players losing.

Commission on bluefin conservation comes up empty again

The following is a guest essay from Carl Safina, the oceans' most articulate defender and director of the Orion Grassroots Network member group Blue Ocean Institute. His books include Song for the Blue Ocean, Eye of the Albatross, and Voyage of the Turtle. His blog also is a must-read.

-----

The story goes like this: It's one of the largest, fastest, most gorgeous fish in the sea. Unfortunately, its extraordinary warm-bloodedness makes its muscle delicious to the strange seafood-loving creatures that live on land. The value of bluefin tuna meat goes up due to global demand for sushi and sashimi. As the price goes up, fishing increases. Too many fish are caught and the population collapses. Over the past 50 years, bluefin fisheries have collapsed off Brazil, in the North Sea, and recently off the eastern U.S. and Canada.

The Commission tasked with managing Atlantic bluefin fisheries is completely broken. The 43-nation International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas met this month in, appropriately enough, Turkey, to discuss the fate of bluefin tuna in the Atlantic. Usually referred to by its acronym ICCAT -- pronounced eye-cat -- it should be called instead ICCAN'T. Or, keep the acronym and change its name to International Conspiracy to Catch All Tuna.

New tool helps groups assess large retail proposals

Big-box stores have significant impacts on a community's economy, environment, and character. The Big Box Evaluator (created by the Orton Family Foundation, which offers numerous programs that aid good land-use planning) is a new online tool designed to help citizens, activists, and municipal officials get the basics on these impacts in an unbiased manner.

It's interactive, and lets you plug in variables like tax rates, community demographics, size of a hypothetical big-box proposal, and much more. The outcome is a well-rounded assessment of probable impacts, the good as well as the bad, which will help its users ask important questions when proposals like this come to town.