oceans

For want of a reef, the kingdom was lost

Pacific reefs dying faster than previously understood.

Turning the seas into sterile wastelands

I don't eat meat, or fish, or, as a friend puts it, anything with a face. (This comes up because in the Midwest, when you tell your host you are a vegetarian, you will be asked, "What about chicken? Do you eat that?" So you need a quick summary that describes the boundaries of your food weirdness.)

Occasionally people will assure me that I should be eating fish for the health benefits. After watching an extraordinary documentary feature called Deep Trouble by the BBC, I'm content to stay a herbivore. Less mercury that way too.

Deep Trouble is a lengthy, absorbing, and depressing special feature on a DVD that contained two episodes from the Beeb's magnificent Blue Planet series. The DVD I just watched was from Netflix, and it had the "Tidal Seas" and "Coasts" episodes.

One searches for a parallel to the way we're treating the seas ... about the best one I can come up with is the wholesale slaughter of the buffalo (or bison, I can't get it straight in my head) in the 19th-century western U.S. Massive killing to take only the tiniest, choicest morsels, meanwhile denuding the habitat and the creatures that depended on it.

Vegetarianism: not just about saving land animals.

Umbra on salt

Dear Umbra, What’s up with salt, environmentally speaking? Is it good for the Dead Sea if I buy Dead Sea salt (but then it travels halfway around the world)? Am I getting trace amounts of Bad Stuff in any sea salt these days? Is a big box of Morton iodized salt going to overload the […]

Too many boats are fishing for too few fish

Here's a remarkable fact: Global fishery collapse is financed with tax money.

You already know that many nations are failing to enforce the laws that are essential to keeping our oceans healthy and abundant forever. Instead, they are presiding over a global ocean collapse. According to a report in Science, 29 percent of the world's commercial fisheries have already collapsed.

This is terrible news for the billion people who turn to the ocean for protein, the hundreds of millions of people who need the sea for a livelihood, and the countless extraordinary marine creatures that don't deserve to go the way of the buffalo.

Get the facts, dispel the myths

Did you know you're more likely to die from a falling coconut than a shark bite? It's true.

Sharks kill an average of five people annually, which is unfortunate to say the least. But when you think about the tens of millions of sharks that are killed each year for their fins, meat, liver oil, and hides, it's easy to see people are a bigger threat to sharks than sharks are to people.

All this week the Discovery Channel will broadcast special programming about these misunderstood masters of the underwater universe. Some of the footage is extraordinarily compelling. Viewers should remember that they need more protection from us than the reverse.

Smacking down a bad idea

I know you've all been eagerly waiting for this (don't worry, I don't have many more rules). I got sidetracked by last week's offset hearing.

Offset projects should deliver climate benefits with high confidence -- that's a key reason trees make lousy offsets, especially non-urban, non-tropical trees. An even more dubious source of offsets is geo-engineering, which is "the intentional large scale manipulation of the global environment" (PDF) to counteract the effects of global warming.

As John Holdren, President of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, noted in 2006 (PDF), "The 'geo-engineering' approaches considered so far appear to be afflicted with some combination of high costs, low leverage, and a high likelihood of serious side effects."

The worst good news/bad news tale ever told

The bad news is that we're doing it by eating the fish that are eating the concentrated mercury in the food chain, further concentrating it in ... us. Mad as hatters we are!

This could also have been titled, "Another reason that coal is the enemy of the human race (or at least those members of it that like to eat)."

US gov’t siding with foreign shipping companies on protections

The Bush administration is holding up new regs approved a year ago that'd make ships go more slowly in order to protect North Atlantic right whales. (The White House Council of Economic Advisors is now reviewing causes of right whale deaths, a task already done by marine experts.)

Not a big surprise. Saddest part is that it's doing so, it seems, at the request of foreign shipping companies, who don't care about the U.S.' endangered species or laws regarding them. And why should they? There's only 300 of these creatures left, hardly enough to quibble about ...

The new alchemy: Turning iron particles into gelt

Turns out we here at Grist got a preview of his "fringe environmentalist" testimony to Congress.

Too bad the Post didn't mention his cold fusion background; that really puts this scheme into perspective.

It's just the eco-version of the same old same old. (There's one born every minute, and two to take his money ... )