Today marks a momentous and long-awaited milestone for true ocean policy geeks: at noon the National Ocean Council released a draftImplementation Plan for the National Policy for the Stewardship of the Ocean, Our Coasts, and the Great Lakes! If this announcement makes you yawn, you are not alone. But wait! This new Plan could be truly significant for anyone who cares about ocean ecosystems and resources or coastal communities. Let me explain.
As most readers of Southern Fried Science probably know, the last decade has produced many depressing stories about declines in ocean health: overharvested fish stocks, waning biodiversity, “dead zones,” invasive species, oil spills, etc. It has also produced a number of studies and high-level Commission reports suggesting solutions to these problems, most notably the U.S. Commission on Ocean Policy’s “Ocean Blueprint for the 21st Century,” released in September 2004. (Full disclosure: I served as Senior Advisor to the Commission.) The Blueprint provided lots of recommendations (212 in all) about controlling pollution, managing fisheries, protecting shorelines, and addressing other specific problems. But its major theme and most significant contribution was to emphasize the need to fundamentally change our approach to ocean management and governance.
According to the Washington Post, the US has overcome bipartisan politicking long enough to enact amendments to the Magnusen-Stevens Act that puts all fishery stocks into management – not just those threatened by overfishing. In practice, that means each stock has an absolute maximum catch limit for 2012. Perhaps the most resounding success of this policy is that it actually addresses scientific criticism of current management (covered fairly well by MAST) that implementing catch limits for one species just shifts fishing effort to other species – which then must have yet another species-specific policy put in place after overfishing occurs. Implementing fishery management plans for all fishery species at once eliminates the by-the-seat-of-your-pants feeling that previous US management conjures.
How much of the world’s food supply is locked up in a few crops – corn, wheat, rice (for example) – and even fewer livestock – cows, pigs, chickens? Of the major commercial food production industries, only fish, and even then, only some fish, are still hunted. In a very real sense, fish are the last wild food. That may be changing. In Four Fish: The Future of the Last Wild Food, published last year, Paul Greenberg highlights the ways in which commercial fishing is becoming less like hunting and more like agriculture, with a few, often farm raised species, dominating the market.
Greenberg, a native of Long Island Sound who fished there since the 1970′s, documents the changes in four major fisheries – salmon, sea bass, cod, and tuna – and the changing attitudes of the (mostly) men who catch them. He travels to Alaska to meet with First Nation salmon fishermen, to Greece to visit groundbreaking aquaculture facilities, he charters a tuna boat to experience the fight first hand, and across the world he talks to those of whom fishing matters most, including himself. At times, the book becomes autobiographical, focusing on Greenberg’s personal journey – but this is a book about fish and fishermen, and he is, if only recreationally, a fisher.
While the Republican presidential candidates threaten to dissolve the Environmental Protection Agency at the federal level, struggles at the state and local levels show building blocks to such an action were stacking for years.
When asked who is primarily responsible for protecting water quality, many citizens in North Carolina respond “don’t we have a department of water quality for that?”. Those citizens are not wrong, but they are placing a large suite of issues on the shoulders of a single agency. And that agency is losing funding and staff.
Defining responsibility for water quality starts with defining the term. As anyone who has thought about water quality and habitat issues knows well, it’s not as simple as dipping a thermometer in a stream to determine water health. Aquatic ecosystems don’t run a fever when there’s something wrong; issues are far more subtle than that.
When asked to define water quality, a leader at the Division of Water Quality (DWQ) who does not want to be quoted by name, stated:
“We try to prevent pollution from affecting our streams and rivers so that we can enjoy them for recreation, we can enjoy them for drinking water purposes, the fish can survive in them … water quality is that which enables all the uses to be continued to be made of those water bodies.”
For the agency in charge of protecting water quality, traditional uses serve as indicators of the water’s health. Note the definition’s focus on pollution prevention as the means to protect these various uses. Continue reading Water Quality in the Era of Small Government
Every once in a while, with predictable regularity, I will encounter a call to be more interdisciplinary in order to fully understand the many aspects of a given issue. The world forgot to compartmentalize its problems for ease of solution. Solutions require scientists to think big and basic at the same time – recent estimates that 7 billion people will roam the planet by the end of this year – and that creates a big demand for resources such as food, water, fuel, and fiber. Ecologists clearly have something to say on the matter and designated 2011′s meeting theme “Earth Stewardship”, meant as a way to kick off new thinking on research process and connecting research to problem solving.
Yesterday, the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries Council voted to reduce the catch of Menhaden by as much as 37%. Menhaden, often referred to as the “most important fish in the sea” have been declining precipitously over the last several decades, due largely to the Menhaden reduction industry, which is now supported by a single company. Several graphs have been produced recently to illustrate this decline, including this incredibly informative illustration. Despite this attention, most of these reports have missed the big picture. Amy and myself have been thinking quite a bit about shifting baselines recently, and Menhaden represent what may be the most extreme example of this phenomenon.
The population of Menhaden along the eastern seaboard crashed in 1879 a full century earlier than the decline documented here. In it’s heyday, the menhaden industry was catching seven hundred million fish annually. Last years harvest was barely 450 million. These numbers belie a massive ecologic change. While the historic menhaden industry was based north of Cape Cod, our current menhaden production focusses on the mid-Atlantic seaboard and is slowly moving south, chasing the remaining fish. The population that today has finally received protection is a remnant of the once massive foundation of the pelagic ecosystem.
Reprinted below is our original article, the Menhaden of History.
#SciFund is a month-and-a-half long initiative to raise funds for a variety of scientific research projects. Project leaders post a project description and an appeal for funds, and members of the public are invited to make small donations to projects that they deem worthy. Donations come with rewards such as access to project logs, images from fieldwork, your name in the acknowledgements of publications, among other possibilities. Many of these projects are marine or conservation themed. Over the next week, we’ll highlight some of our favorites. Please take a look at these projects and, should you so desire, send some financial support their way. If you do make a donation, let them know how you found out about their project and leave a comment (anonymous if you’d like) on this post letting us know.
This pilot study, led by an interdisciplinary team from the University of California and French Polynesia, will send a graduate student to the island of Moorea to interview stakeholders around the island in order to understand how residents understand and experience climate change. They will also produce a map of climate change “hotspots” areas that are exceptionally valuable and exceptionally vulnerable to climate change.
I like this project because it involves local researchers in French Polynesia, the support they’re asking for directly contributes to a graduate student’s thesis work, and they clearly have a vision for a much larger project that this will feed into. Go take a look at their project page and consider contributing to a worthy study.
As Halloween welcomed the world’s seven billionth person, there has been renewed interest in meeting the food, shelter, and water needs of a large and growing global population. One recent article in the Washington Post (10/30/11) attempted to make 7 billion a tangible number that kids can wrap their minds around by describing 7 billion M&M’s filling three Olympic-sized swimming pools. While I think this is a useful exercise, when thinking about 7 billion people, not all people can be counted equally. In terms of resource use, each of the over 300 million United States citizens are like bloated, entitled M&M’s squeezing their smaller brethren out of the pool.
Protests at Esquel, one of the communities examined in the article. Thanks articles.riderdownload.com
Buried within the depths of Andean geology lie small seams of gold tempting worldwide investors. These money-lined pockets aid the development of new extraction methods that dissolve gold from the mountains using cyanide. Cyanide is a metabolic poison, shutting down cellular respiration. In the wake of cyanide leaching stand piles of rubble and contaminated rivers where forested mountains and their people once stood. Surprisingly, Andean residents are willing to entertain the possibility of gold mining by this poisonous method, but oppose current mine development on environmental justice measures. A recent study by Urkidi and Walter in the journal Geoforum documents the emergence of justice narratives from mining conflicts in the Andes and predicts impacts on future development planning. Continue reading The Curse of Gold: Dimensions of Injustice in Gold-Mining Communities
Challenge: find a map of the Pacific Ocean that includes both Japan and California. Or that focuses on any of the island nations in between.
One of the casualties of mapping a three-dimensional planet on two-dimensional paper is the part of the world that is split between the edges of the paper. Usually, this is the Pacific. As Sarah Palin made famous in the 2008 presidential campaign, as an Alaskan, she can see Russia from her house. While I admit that for Palin, this is an exaggeration, but for the residents of St. Lawrence Island, this view is a reality. In fact, they are as likely (if not more) to speak Russian than English and have the capability of kayaking to Russia if so desired. But your average world map makes that distance look infinite.
Andrew is a freelance marine biologist in North Carolina focused on population and conservation genetics in hydrothermal vent communities.
Today marks a momentous and long-awaited milestone for true ocean policy geeks: at noon the National Ocean Council released a draft Implementation Plan for the National Policy for the Stewardship of the Ocean, Our Coasts, and the Great Lakes! If this announcement makes you yawn, you are not alone. But wait! This new Plan could be truly significant for anyone who cares about ocean ecosystems and resources or coastal communities. Let me explain.
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