A great PSA print ad from Surfrider

A friend of mine shared this great PSA print ad from Surfrider today on Facebook, and I thought I'd share it here also. Well done, high impact advertisement that really gets people thinking.

New Seafood Watch Guides are Out!

Know more about the seafood you're eating and what you should avoid. Get the new 2012 updated Seafood Watch guides from the Monterey Bay Aquarium here. They have an Android version too! :)

Kudos to Shangri-la

Well it looks like the Shangri-la hotel group is joining the Peninsula in being on the cutting edge of sustainable seafood by cutting out shark's fin and other big-name, big-impact fish like bluefin tuna and chilean sea bass. (Note, who is still serving chilean sea bass?!?! I thought we won that fight 7 years ago! The world-wide popularity of chilean sea bass wreaked havoc on the slow-growing, deep-sea Patagonian toothfish - the real name - fisheries last decade.)

In any case, while it may be a bit late, it is certainly better than never, and I applaud the Shangri-la for taking this step. I think it is ALWAYS important for aspirational brands to take high-profile stands on important issues, as they can help change what we all "expect" the good life to include. In this case, the Shang (and the Penninsula) have definitely sent the message - you don't have to fin to be in.

"Shangri-La Hotels and Resorts today announced its ‘Sustainable Seafood Policy’ including the commitment to cease serving shark fin in all of its operated restaurants as well as accepting new orders for shark fin products in banqueting with immediate effect." Read the full press release here.

Good news for sharks!

Good news for sharks as WWF takes the fight to restaurants, hotels, and corporations that serve as endpoint distributors in the heart of the shark trade, Hong Kong. Their most recent initiative has garnered 112 corporate signatories who pledge "no trade, no promotion and no consumption of shark fin," with another 97 hotels and restaurants participating in their "Alternative Shark-free Menu" program. You can read more about WWF's work here.

Best of all though, is the support shown by the Peninsula Hotels group, who have pledged to remove sharks fin from their menus entirely starting January 1, 2012. I've always thought that it would be nice to be a Peninsula customer and lead the type of wealthy, cosmopolitan lifestyle that accompanies one. While this might go completely against a more muted environmentalist stand, I don't know that environmentalism has to mean a life without luxuries. This is why the support of a high-profile, luxury hotel group like the Peninsula is so important in the fight against sharks fin. Sharks fin is as aspirational a dish as you get - for a billion Chinese people, serving sharks fin is not merely a culinary statement, it is a status statement. So is the Peninsula. So, let's hope that one status statement can help rid us of the other, much less environmentally friendly one! One more reason to be a Peninsula customer. :)

Fish Crusaders

Recently ran across this great article about fish crusaders in the Bay Area who are trying to change the way that  fishermen, restaurants, and diners relate to seafood. It's a very interesting read with lots of good information on why things are so hard and how much further we have to go. However, it's not an article about pessimism. There is hope and a chance, if we all do our part and play our roles.

From the end of the article:
"Lastly, everyone at every step along the way has got to ask more questions. “How was this fish caught?” is the most important one. If the waiter doesn’t know, ask the chef, and if you don’t hear the right answer (and let’s be clear: “I don’t know” is not the right answer), order something else. Let the restaurant know that sustainability matters to you. If enough people start asking the right questions, even indifferent chefs will find their way to people like Belov."

Read the full article here. (You may have to open it a few times, seems their server is constantly having problems.)

Lend your voice to fight trawling

Help leaders understand that hundreds of thousands of people, if not millions or more, care about protecting our vulnerable ocean habitats and support restrictions on destructive trawling. Lend your voice to the cause through this Avaaz campaign and let world leaders know!

The impending disaster in our seas

The information coming out about our ocean ecosystems is getting worse and worse. A couple of weeks ago, an article in BBC highlighted the conditions of worldwide coral reefs, showing that changing carbon conditions were threatening the health of corals, many of which are extremely sensitive to changes in their ocean environment, including temperature and acidity. According to the article: "More carbon in the seas makes water more acidic and threatens the diversity and ability of coral reefs to grow."

Around the same time, closer to my current home, a hugely sad and disturbing piece of news about poached black corals and sea turtles in southern Philippines was also reported. "Experts believe that about 7,000 hectares of a “reef complex” were destroyed when poachers harvested 161 sea turtles and over 21,000 sea shells and black corals off the waters of Cotabato province." 7000 hectares is roughly double the size of Metro Manila - just an incredible level of destruction, by any measure. More recently, reports indicate that coral cover in the Spratly Islands (better known as the islands causing a merry band of David-sized nations to stand up against China's Goliath) are degrading dramatically. "The study noted that only one of the island’s 10 stations had good coral cover at 50.50 percent....They said Pag-asa Island’s low coral cover might be the result of the destructive fishing methods used in the vicinity, as observed by the islanders and local fishermen."

Yet this week brings the most alarming, most comprehensive, most trusthworthy, and thus, most damning alarms of all. The International Programme on the State of the Ocean (IPSO) releases their report from proceedings earlier this year to attempt to get a more holistic view of the state of the oceans, and the results have most definitely NOT been happy. According to TIME Magazine:

"...while news of the Earth's impending doom can sometimes seem exaggerated, there's one environmental disaster that never gets the coverage it really deserves: the state of the oceans. Most people know that wild fisheries are dwindling, and we might know that low-oxygen aquatic dead zones are blooming around the planet's most crowded coasts. But the oceans appear to be undergoing fundamental changes — many of them for the worse — that we can barely understand, in part because we barely understand that vast blue territory that covers 70% of the globe."

The article goes on: "According to the authors, we are "at high risk for entering a phase of extinction of marine species unprecedented in human history." It's not just about overfishing or marine pollution or even climate change. It's all of those destructive factors working cumulatively, and occurring much more rapidly than scientists had expected. "The findings are shocking," said Alex Rogers, the scientific director of IPSO. "We are looking at consequences for humankind that will impact in our lifetime, and worse, our children's and generations beyond that."

Having a high level scientific conference make conclusions of such drastic gloom is unusual, but their conclusions should not necessarily be surprising to anyone who has been paying attention. In fact, the three cases I highlighted above shows that our oceans are facing threats from: climate change, pollution, destructive fishing practices, and poaching and general human folly.

I've been talking about the dangers our fisheries and oceans are facing for the better part of a decade now. Most of the people who meet me are quickly introduced to one of my seemingly stranger quirks - not eating seafood. My own personal form of action-advocacy, my full-scale avoidance of anything from the sea invariably leads to questions about my reasoning and a discussion about the state of the oceans.

Faced with this new report though, my personal-scale crusade to save the oceans seems woefully inadequate, quaint even. It is clear that if there has ever been an area where there is a need for strong multi-lateral international bodies capable of not just making but implementing policy - this is it. Given our recent track record with environmental issues though, you'll forgive me for being pessimistic.

Obviously, I'm going to continue my boycott of seafood and continue with the advocacy that accompanies it. I urge everyone to do the same. While it seems inconceivable that the deep blue abyss really could be in trouble, this indeed does seem to be the case. We must all begin to take the issue seriously and do what we can. Yet with as dreary as the situation is, a simplistic boycott of seafood seems to no longer be enough. There must be more that we can do - indeed, more that we must do. But what? Suggestions please!

For all the diver's out there...

If you love diving, if you love coral reefs, if you love sea life... you should stand up, take notice, and figure out what you can do to help. Listen to the NPR story on the plight of the world's coral reefs: World's Coral Reefs Facing Serious Threats.

But coral reefs are so much more important than most people realize. They are home to incredible amounts of biodiversity density, more than even the vaunted rain forests of the Amazon or Borneo. They support fisheries, marine mammals, crustacean populations - nearly all of sea life itself. They also grow absurdly slowly, are incredibly sensitive to changes in their environment, and are dangerously threatened now. Yes, they are actually living creatures, corals. The only reason we don't care more about them is because most of us never see them, and never see the real impact they have on all of our marine eco-systems (and it must be said, on billions of people around the world who live in coastal regions, consume seafood or marine products, or are somehow connected to either of the above - which is nearly everyone.)

Just because you can't see it, doesn't mean you can't do anything about it.

WHY WHY WHY? A question about fish.

Elizabeth Kolbert, environmentalist and resident New Yorker writer on all things environmental, is easily one of my favorite author/journalists in that magazine. She is also one of the people who depresses me most. Call me masochistic, but I guess I like to be depressed.

A recent article, "The Scales Fall: Is there any hope for our overfished oceans?" is not only depressing, it's downright damning. As most of my friends know, I stopped eating fish around 2002 to try to address the plight of our wild fish and numbingly quickly dying oceans with my meager seafood appetite. In the process, I've managed to spread the no-fish gospel to nearly everyone I've had a meal with (much to the annoyance of many of those people) and hopefully affect how those around me view fisheries.

Yet, as Kolbert points out, "peak fish" - or where global seafood catches hit their peak - occurred in the late nineteen-eighties, and global fish catches have been going down ever since. In the past century, we've witnessed the wholesale collapse or dangerous overfishing of nearly every large predatory fish, including halibut, cod, swordfish, marlin, just to name a few. Estimates - conservative - of the Atlantic Bluefin Tuna fisheries places their numbers at just 20% of what they were a half century ago. We are likely taking at least 100 million sharks out of the ocean each year. The numbers are staggering, and the result of continued fishing at this pace are obvious and unimaginable at the same time: an ocean devoid of life.

This is a problem. There can be no doubt, there can be no arguments, that THIS IS A PROBLEM. So, why, now, in 2010, over 20 years after our increasingly effective technologies, our more global scale, and out greater efforts to catch more fish have actually resulted in decreasing annual catches, do people still not seem to see fisheries as being in crisis? Why do I still get funny looks from people when I tell them I stopped eating seafood because we are over-fishing the oceans? Why do organizations like ICCAT (that is supposed to be managing Atlantic bluefin) end up being corrupt and useless bodies that actually enable countries to empty our oceans?

What will it take to ACTUALLY save our oceans? Yell out suggestions, and let's get it done. I would like to let my grand-kids have the choice of eating a fish. Not sit there and read about them only in books.

Shark's Fin

There are very little things in the world that make less sense to me than shark finning. I am an environmentalist, but I am not an animal rights activist. Unlike many of my environmentalist friends (who likely want to throw things at me) I neither advocate for vegetarianism nor think that the mere act of killing and eating animals is cruel. I am not even 100% against hunting (although, like I've said before, I think if you want to hunt, you should do it with your hands and a dagger - make it a fair fight at least.)

Yet shark finning is ridiculous to me. Finning is basically the act of taking a live shark, cutting off its fins, and more often than not, throwing the shark back in the water to let it drown to death while spiraling down towards the bottom of the ocean. This is, any way you look at it... cruel. Disgustingly cruel. Yet, even for those who don't give a damn about the "feelings" of animals, I think we can all agree that killing an animal for less than 5% of its body mass and then throwing the rest of it away is a horribly inefficient and wasteful use of resources. Even people who like to eat fish - and shark is a type of fish - have to see the idiocy in this practice? For a world in which our seas are in real and serious danger of being exploited to a point where the vast majority of species are very likely facing extinction, the wholesale waste of a practice like shark-finning is mind-boggling.



While the fight against shark finning and against the most common use of it - shark fin soup - has been going on for a long time, there is finally some signs that we've made small breakthroughs in changing people's thoughts. Five years ago, I remember walking through the alleys of Sheung Wan in Hong Kong thinking to myself how sad it was that all of these dried goods stores stocked so many shark's fins. Now, as reported in the New York Times, demand is dropping: "Several vendors of dried seafood in the bustling Hong Kong neighborhood of Sheung Wan said last week that they now sold significantly less than they had a few years ago." Similarly, as mentioned in the article, people are starting to eschew shark's fin at banquets and events where it has been a prestige dish for generations. Just a few years ago, Hong Kong Disneyland put Shark's Fin Soup on their opening celebration banquet menu before a public campaign led by local environmental groups forced them to take it off.

Yet with the current catch of sharks estimated at over 100 million annually, is it too little too late? Hopefully we can still turn the tide and give sharks a fighting chance at survival. Horribly sad and depressing videos such as the one below of a still-live, de-finned, whale shark (the majestic shark that is the holy grail for most divers) that washed up on-shore to die, may help in changing public awareness. We can all do our part too. Boycott anything shark's fin, and start spreading the word today.

A follow-up on Tuna

"Welcome to the strange world of globalisation." That is Roberto Mielgo's response to the fact that it is commercially viable to catch and keep live tuna in off-shore pens - or ranches - in the Spanish Mediterranean and feed them vast amounts of expensive caught fish (around 10kg of feed fish serve to make the tuna put on 1kg of body weight).  

Here is a good article from the BBC that follows-up on the recent set-backs for bluefin tuna conservation, and provides additional reasons why "farmed" and "ranched" fish is actually worse for the oceans.

The Sad Plight of Fish

Conservation virtually always faces pressures from every side and every angle, but few causes seem more hopeless than the plight of the oceans. Despite increasingly loud and well-supported warnings about overfishing and its dire consequences, nations, companies, and consumers remain unmoved. Today, we have yet another sad example of our collective inability to deal with the gross mismanagement of our fragile marine resources - the rejection of a ban on Atlantic Bluefin Tuna which has declined in number by 85% since the advent of industrial fishing.

Sue Lieberman, director of international policy with the Pew Environment Group, suggested lobbying from the fishing industry was ultimately responsible for the defeat. "This meeting presented a golden opportunity for governments to take a stand against overfishing, and too many governments failed to do so," she said. "The market for this fish is just too lucrative, and the pressure from fishing interests too great, for enough governments to support a truly sustainable future for the fish."  (Full article from the BBC here.)

The proposal was to put bluefin onto Appendix One of CITES (Convention on International Trade of Endangered Species) which would lead to a complete ban on trade in the species. Given the proven inability (through years of trying) for current conservation mechanisms and international management to halt the drastic decline in bluefin stock, listing the species on Appendix One seems to be the only reasonable and remaining option left for protecting the fishery. Yet selfish, short-sighted, and - I'll go there - stupid nations and politicians have once again chosen to bury their head in the sand and ignore the problem, thereby likely signing the death warrant for Atlantic Bluefin. Get it while you can folks, because it's going going gone soon! Or better yet, completely boycott the fish and start sending out letters to every world leader you know.

Are you willing to stand idly by while we cause yet another preventable extinction of an animal?