Must Read: “The Ocean Of Life”
If you want to know pretty much everything on how humanity has exploited and damaged the oceans, since the first humanoid fashioned a crude fish spear or fish hook, then Callum Roberts’ new book “The Ocean Of Life” should be next on your book pile.
Here’s a review in the Wall Street Journal, by my friend Bruce Knecht, who, after an introductory quibble, writes:
Having made this point, I need to now jump up and down myself to say that “Ocean of Life” is an excellent and engrossing work. Mr. Roberts, a British professor of marine conservation, has corralled an astonishing collection of scientific discovery, and he conveys it with non-textbook readability.
It must also be said that the unvarnished realities of what has happened to marine life should outrage everyone. Many of the statistics are not new. In the past 30 years, the populations of the largest marine animals have declined by 75%. Some species have been depleted by more than 90%. Other populations are not even counted anymore because they have disappeared entirely. One of the species that now appears to be on a fast track to extinction is the leatherback turtle, the massive reptile that has existed since the time of the dinosaurs. “There is just one leatherback left in the Pacific for every twenty in 1962, the year I was born,” Mr. Roberts writes. [snip]…
…The steady undercurrent to most of this is bad news, and it leads to a disturbing and seemingly inevitable conclusion: The explosion of human populations, our disrespect for ecosystems, and our ever-expanding demand for seafood and everything else will exceed the natural world’s capacities and ultimately put humankind’s survival at risk. Mr. Roberts reminds us that, during the Earth’s more than four-billion-year history, there have been at least five mass extinctions, including an episode of global warming 65 million years ago that killed off the dinosaurs. He believes that we are likely to be heading toward a sixth such catastrophe. This one would differ dramatically from the others both because those who caused it—us—would also be victims, and because the disaster might be avoidable. Mr. Roberts is particularly worried about the possibility of another bout of global warming.
While some say it is not absolutely clear that the current warming trend is a real threat or that it is man-caused, there can be no such doubt about the destruction of ocean life. The traditional belief that the seas are so large as to be impervious to human effects is long gone. The specific problems are mostly familiar: industrial pollution and fertilizer runoffs, the destruction of wetlands and river deltas, rising sea temperatures, and of course too much fishing. Technological advancements have made it possible to scoop up fish far faster than they can reproduce. “Our planetary remodeling did not stop at the shore,” Mr. Roberts writes. “It just came a little later to the sea.”
Okay, so it’s not a very uplifting read, but what did you expect? These are hard times for the oceans. And to the extent the book delivers such a dire prognosis, it is a very helpful reminder that the scale of mitigation we tend to talk about when we talk about addressing climate change and the fate of the oceans is completely inconsistent with the scale of the problem.
We need to amp it up by a couple of orders of magnitude, folks, when it comes to changing the way we live and changing our economies. So thanks, Mr. Roberts, for helping make that clear because so far not that many people seem to be paying attention.
SeaWorld’s Takara No Longer Considered Pregnant
At the risk of over-exciting all my skeptics, who think I pull SeaWorld orca pregnancies out of my ass, I have been getting word that SeaWorld Texas’ Takara is not pregnant. Takara was one of a number of SeaWorld pregnancies that I wrote about last November. All seemed normal, and SeaWorld considered Takara to be pregnant, but in March her progesterone levels dropped below a level consistent with pregnancy. An investigatory sonogram did not reveal a fetus, but it was not clear whether she had lost the fetus (though she had not passed one) or simply had experienced a false pregnancy.
The failure of Takara’s pregnancy raised a question about the sperm of Kshamenk, the male from Argentina’s Mundo Marino, which had been used in Artificial Insemination (AI) procedures on both Takara and Kasatka. Kshamenk’s sperm is one way for SeaWorld’s captive breeding program to get beyond a preponderance of Tilikum genes, so it is important to the future of orca breeding at SeaWorld. But Kasatka’s pregnancy is progressing, with a fetus visible on sonograms, so Kshamenk’s sperm is at least viable.
So Takara will not be giving birth along with Kasatka and Kohana. However, she seems healthy despite the false or failed pregnancy, and SeaWorld plans to try and inseminate her again by mid-summer. Not sure whether they will use Kshamenk’s sperm again. But SeaWorld also has an AI and sperm collection arrangement with Marineland Antibes in France, which used sperm from SeaWorld California’s Ulises to impregnate their younger female, Wikie. That led to the birth of a calf called Moana last year. Marineland Antibes has two males, Valentin and Inouk, who are sexually mature and presumably could also be used as sperm donors for SeaWorld’s breeding program.
SeaWorld Florida also has plans to AI Kayla sometime soon (in March I mentioned she was next on the AI list), though apparently she does not cycle normally, so the timing is a bit tricky.
That’s all the orca pregnancy news I have for the moment. So let the skeptics have at it…
(Don’t) Supersize Me
We’re America, so bigger is better. Except when it’s not, like when it drives up our carbon footprint and consumption without really making us any happier.
YES magazine has some telling charts on the growth of home sizes in the United States.
The biggest appeal to me of downsizing is that it requires getting rid of all the stuff your family accumulates because you have space to accumulate.
Anyhow, here is the extreme counterpoint to the McMansion revolution in America: a tiny house:
In 2004, Williams sold her bungalow, shedding a mortgage payment of over $1,000 per month, and bought plans for an 84-square-foot house on wheels. It cost her $10,000 to build, a quarter of which went for photovoltaic panels that generate her electricity. Now her house is paid for, and her monthly bills total about $8—for heating.
Even with the economic freedom she gained, it wasn’t easy to leave her house. “I loved my house and I liked my community in Portland.” And she knew that day-to-day life in the tiny house would be very different. “I’m going to have to carry water, I’m going to have to deal with my compost toilet, find a place to shower.”
“It was scary,” she admits. “But I also felt like, God! This is so cool!”
Leaving her stuff behind was not that hard for Williams. It was liberating. She got rid of photos, old love letters, her college letter jacket—“all that crap that you have because it reminds you of who you used to be.” Her friends and family have quit giving her things for Christmas, she says, “unless I get some kind of, you know, short fork!” She allows herself to own no more than 300 items, and she keeps careful count. “Not because I have obsessive-compulsive disorder,” she laughs, but because she once bet a friend that she had less stuff than he did. She’s kept count ever since.
I know my wife and kids could not go that low, but it’s an example of how simplicity can work. And how current assumptions about what we think we need are both out of tune with reality, and way, way, off.
Like this:
The Meaning Of A Dead Orca
It’s hard to see the nobility, or the preservation of worthwhile values, in this.
This orca was killed with a harpoon, fired from a speedboat off St. Vincent and The Grenadines. The photo was posted by the West Indian Wildlife Conservation Society (WIWCS), and further disseminated by the American Cetacean Society. According to the WIWCS: “It happens almost on a weekly basis on the west coast of Saint Vincent, however, usually the victims are Pilot Whales. This is the second or third time an Orca has been killed off of St. Vincent.”
It’s of course terrible to see such an intelligent and socially sophisticated animal slaughtered (and the Facebook comments are running wild with opprobrium). But the hard reality is that traditional whale hunts, or the claim of “tradition” to protect whale hunting, will not go away until the economic needs of the hunters are addressed (subsidized Japanese whalers excepted; that’s a whole other twisted national identity issue).
Just one more example of the hard fact that we need to see the world–and its peoples and economies–as deeply interconnected, and act on the enormous disparities in wealth, before we can truly address the cruel practices that poverty breeds.
And, just as an aside, the slaughterhouse and industrial farming practices that produce the meat eaten by many who are outraged by whale hunting, are equally cruel and barbaric. So there is an issue of moral consistency that needs to be addressed, as well.
Like this:
Garbage On The Garbage Patch
Here’s a classic example of a completely failed, even fraudulent, attempt at counterintuitive journalism, courtesy of Gawker: “Lies You’ve Been Told About The Pacific Garbage Patch.”
Hmm, how do the editors deliver on that eyeball-grabbing, page-view-seeking, “lies” headline? Well, the easiest way, it seems, is to create a series of straw men, then knock them down and call them “lies.”
Like: this picture was not actually taken in the middle of the Pacific. Wow, really?
And: there is not actually a solid island of garbage in the Pacific, just an area with lots and lots of pieces of plastic. Phew, glad we got that straight.
And: all that plastic is not killing every marine species out there, just some. Thanks, that’s a relief.
Despite such distractions–denial-mongering in search of chump change–the real news rolls on:
(CNN) — A marine expedition of environmentalists has confirmed the bad news it feared — the “Great Pacific Garbage Patch” extends even further than previously known.
Organized by two non-profit groups — the Algalita Marine Research Foundation and the 5 Gyres Institute — the expedition is sailing from the Marshall Islands to Japan through a “synthetic soup” of plastic in the North Pacific Ocean on a 72-feet yacht called the Sea Dragon, provided by Pangaea Exploration…
[snip]…Leading the expedition is Marcus Eriksen, a former U.S. marine and Ph.D student from University of Southern California. “We’ve been finding lots of micro plastics, all the size of a grain of rice or a small marble,” Eriksen said via satellite phone. “We drag our nets and come up with a small handful, like confetti — 10, 20, 30 fragments at a time. That’s how it’s been, every trawl we’ve done for the last thousand miles.”
Eriksen, who has sailed through all five gyres, said this confirmed for him “that the world’s oceans are ‘plasticized.’ Everywhere you go in the ocean, you’re going to find this plastic waste.”
“Will someone please be sure to mail my carcass to Gawker?”
Like this:
Our Wave, Human Dudes
The Machines Have Won
A searing, hilarious, and sadly accurate cartoon railing against the modern attachment to screens at the expense of real interaction with one another and nature.
This is my favorite panel, but make sure you go read the whole thing.
Like this:
Ummm, Arsenic
Here’s the good news: Maryland is set to ban the use of arsenic-based drugs in chicken feed–which are used to combat a gut-eating parasite, and (apparently this is also viewed as a plus) burst small blood vessels which makes the meat look pinker and more appealing.
Here’s the bad news: Um, there’s been a form of arsenic in your chicken since 1944, and suddenly the FDA, Pfizer and health experts think that might not be such a good thing. And despite this somewhat dilatory change of heart, many states and growers will continue to use arsenic-based feed because, well, they’ll make more money doing it:
Inorganic arsenic has been linked to various human ailments, including neurological deficits in children, said Keeve E. Nachman, director of the Farming for the Future program at the Johns Hopkins University Center for a Livable Future.
Pfizer, which distributes the drug, agreed to voluntarily suspend its sales after consulting with FDA officials following the study. But growers that stockpiled supplies continue to use it.
Del. Tom Hucker (D-Montgomery), who sponsored the House version of the legislation, said the General Assembly was concerned about the levels of arsenic in chicken; about the 30,000 pounds of arsenic added each year to the soil in fertilizer and manure, mostly on the Eastern Shore; and about arsenic washed by heavy rains into rivers and streams that flow to the Chesapeake Bay.
Just one more grotesque insight into the astounding and unappealing practices which constitute our meat production industry. But, never mind, have at those chicken nuggets, friend. They’re cheap and they taste good, right?
Fish Fry
People sometimes ask me whether I eat fish, and when I tell them I don’t they want to know why. My stock answer is that I doubt that any fish are being fished sustainably, or farmed in a way that is net neutral when it comes to the environment and health.
Yes, there are fish guides that supposedly tell you what fish species are “safe” to eat. But then you see gross data, like that contained in this WWF Living Planet Report, which show an unrelenting, and appalling, human devastation of global fish stocks. Against that backdrop, it is simply hard for me to believe that anyone who cares about the future of fish and the oceans should do anything other than stop contributing to the insatiable demand for fish protein that is strip mining the seas. Against that backdrop, it makes sense to be overcautious, to not place our faith in subjective and imprecise assertions that some fish are doing fine. In other words, it makes sense to give fish everywhere a break.
Here’s a graphic from the WWF report, which says it all:
Yep. that’s a lot of red. And it’s not like it doesn’t follow many warnings that humanity’s estimations of “sustainable” fishing are pure fantasy. Here’s one of the best, which is in fact the analysis that prompted me to stop eating any and all fish.
Anyhow, this is the Washington Post‘s take on what has been happening:
Between 1950 and 2006, the WWF report notes, the world’s annual fishing haul more than quadrupled, from 19 million tons to 87 million tons. New technology — from deep-sea trawling to long-lining — has helped the fishing industry harvest areas that were once inaccessible. But the growth of intensive fishing also means that larger and larger swaths of the ocean are in danger of being depleted….
[snip]…Indeed, there’s some evidence that we’ve already hit “peak fish.” World fish production seems to have reached its zenith back in the 1980s, when the global catch was higher than it is today. And, according to one recent study in the journal Science, commercial fish stocks are on pace for total “collapse” by 2048 — meaning that they’ll produce less than 10 percent of their peak catch. On the other hand, many of those fish-depleted areas will be overrun by jellyfish, which is good news for anyone who enjoys a good blob sandwich.
This interactive graphic from the WWF report shows the overall population trends over the past few decades (hint: it doesn’t look very good). But we knew that already. The question is: what are you going to do about it? And what are you going to put on your plate?
Like this:
Racing Class40s In The Atlantic Cup
Late last week, I dropped onto the Class40 “Initiatives,” with Emma Creighton and Rob Windsor, to serve as a media embed in Leg 1 of the Atlantic Cup, which saw 15 Class40s race from Charleston to NYC.
It was a sweet and easy 3 days at sea: short-tacking out of Charleston Harbor, beating toward Hatteras, and then a long downwind sprint past the Chesapeake Bay, Delaware Bay, and New Jersey, to finish off the Battery in NYC at 4 am Tuesday morning. We stayed inshore and finished 10th. Turns out the right move was to sail extra miles to get to the Gulf Stream. Every boat that did that beat every boat that didn’t.
Atlantic Cup is doing a nice job on the media side, and this is the Leg 1 video they put together from the footage all the media embeds shot aboard their boats.
