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  • Ask Umbra on celebrating World Oceans Day

    Some water over the rainbow … maybe there isn’t an oil spill.Photo: Sean Linehan, NOAAAhoy, mateys! Today is June 8th, and it’s one of my favorite holidays: World Oceans Day! World Oceans Day was officially declared a holiday last year by the United Nations. This year, I’m celebrating by taking a moment to consider the […]

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    VIDEO: Is Gulf seafood safe to eat after oil spill?

    New Orleans is world-famous for its seafood, but the Gulf Coast oil spill has left the future of the industry and those who rely on it for their livelihoods in jeopardy as fishing grounds close and diners fear for the safety of their meals. In this video, OnEarth magazine examines the impact of the Deepwater […]

  • Louisianans take a break from oil-spill angst to celebrate local seafood

    Seafood abounds at the Plaquemines Parish Seafood Festival.Photos: Emily PetersonThe sixth annual Plaquemines Parish Seafood Festival, held this past weekend, had the usual fixings one would expect at a South Louisiana festival: fried seafood, a solid lineup of live local music, and plenty of cold beer to beat the high humidity and 90-degree temperatures. One […]

  • Mercury pollution from dental offices is contaminating your seafood

    It seems innocent enough. Your dentist is giving you a new filling. You get some of those little metal slivers in your mouth and he tells you take a swig of water. Rinse and spit. No problem, right? Unfortunately, each one of those slivers is about half mercury. Multiply that simple routine millions of times, […]

  • Pasta con sarde: the gateway drug for sardine obsession

    Sardines at a market in Portugal. We’re wasting this magnificent resource on low-quality, mercury-laden farmed salmon? Not in Tom’s Kitchen! In Tom’s Kitchen, Grist’s food editor discusses some of the quick-and-easy things he gets up to in, well, his kitchen. Forgive him for the lame iPhone photography. —— A while ago, my colleague Jon Hiskes […]

  • Ask Umbra dives deep with ocean advocate Sylvia Earle

    Water, water everywhere, but is it on the brink? Not if oceanographer Sylvia Earle has anything to do with it. Dearests, meet Ms. Earle, an aquanaut, author, and one of today’s greatest advocates of the ocean—also, I suspect, a direct descendant of Poseidon. (I’ve asked for funding from Grist for a DNA test to be […]

  • A Seattle chef proves that traditional sushi and healthy oceans go hand-in-chopstick

    Scallop and dungeness crab salad wrapped in prosciutto topped with lumpfish caviar and avocado: A Hajime creation. Photo by Phu Son Nguyen of sushiday.comGrowing up in small-town Montana, two things just made no sense: vegetarians and sushi. Why eat tofu, or raw fish, when you could just as easily have a big juicy steak? Coming […]

  • Antibiotic-resistant salmonella burgers, with a side of flame retardants

    A Colorado company recalled the equivalent of 1.86 million Quarter Pounders. In Meat Wagon, we round up the latest outrages of the meat and livestock industries. ————————————— Sometimes I think I write a little too much about the meat industry. But the news it generates is so consistently grave, and so generally underreported, that I […]

  • Privatize the seas? If only solving overfishing were so easy

    School of hard knocksIn this month’s Atlantic, Gregg Easterbrook writes that privatizing the seas through use of individualized transferrable quotas (ITQs) is the solution to the grave problem of overfishing. Recently, NOAA Administrator Jane Lubchenco came out strongly (PDF) in favor of ITQs (which the agency is calling “catch shares”), and has committed her agency […]