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. :)

New Marine Reserve Gives Hope

More good news for the seas, often exceedingly rare these days! Australia has proposed to create a new marine reserve that covers a goodly portion of the oceans, although the sheer scale and huge numbers probably seem more impressive than they really are, considering just how much of the Earth's surface is actually ocean. "The proposed Coral Sea Commonwealth Marine Reserve will cover 989,842 square kilometers (around 380,000 square miles) -- an area roughly one tenth the size of the U.S." According to the article, environmental groups applaud the move but are calling for the entire Coral Sea to be protected. Given that this portion has been set aside, I wonder what is preventing the government from just going all the way and protecting the whole thing? Could the other half of the Sea be home to more than just rare corals and fish spawning grounds? Could they, like the Spratleys, be home to deposits of oil and other resources?

Another climate surprise!

For the skeptics at least. New research led by some well-respected scientists from my alma mater are going to be publishing a paper that re-examines world-wide weather data. Their findings? That global warming is indeed happening. Surprise surprise.

Their analysis, using new methodologies that differ from the analyses done by government agencies and the group at the swirling center of "climategate" last year, turned in remarkably similar results. Although the forthcoming paper from the Berkeley Earth Project has not yet been published or peer-reviewed, it seems that the results will turn out to largely be trustworthy. So, I wonder what the "scientists" who disagree with climate change have to say now?

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!

Why you should care about Keystone XL

Our energy policy is a mess. This stems largely from our consumption patterns and from fear-mongering by entrenched corporate interests and the politicians they feed. The on-going debate about the Keystone XL pipeline project in America, which will bring oil extracted from tar sands in pristine northern Canadian lands (and have already extracted giant environmental tolls on the affected areas) is actually a small bit in a much larger debate.

That debate is where our energy future lies.

As many environmentalists have said for years now, we must invest in truly renewable energies. As many industry experts have said for years now, it will be decades before renewable energies can provide the amount of energy that we need. The truth of course, is somewhere in-between. It does not take a genius to see that we cannot ramp up alternative energies at a pace sufficient to eliminate fossil fuel usage in the near-term 5 year range. Duh. Yet, the alternative narrative, that we just don't have the resources to plow into making alternative energies more cost-effective or attractive is false also. We may not be able to generate enough energy in the near term, but it's better to get started on that road now rather than in the future, right?

Instead, there is much money being plowed into alternative fossil fuels. As this article from the BBC on shale gas shows, we should be very wary of our love affair with these sources of energy. These sources do nothing to wean our planet off highly polluting and unsustainable use of fossil fuels, and they are extremely damaging to the environment at the point of extraction as well as through their entire life-cycle too.

The truth is, our solutions lie in reducing fossil fuel usage, ramping up and investing some of those billions of dollars of oil profits into wind and solar technologies (er, tax oil company profits anyone? as opposed to giving tax breaks to them? uh, duh?), and - here is the great big huge grey elephant in the room - change the way we consume energy. The fact is, we have exported a societal paradigm to the rest of the world built upon inexhaustible supplies of cheap fossil fuels, which admittedly contain more energy per unit of measure than just about any other fuel source.

How else do we explain the ridiculous proliferation of automobiles carrying single passengers around glorified moving parking lots (aka roads) around the world? Or the incessant building of concrete boxes with no thought to air flows or self-cooling and require around the clock air conditioning or heating? Or the addiction to plastics and other disposable items made for our "convenience" but that are instead just burying our planet under incredible heaps of wasted resources?

We must address energy consumption. Beyond just cutting personal electricity usage or even mandating better fuel standards, we must acknowledge that the era of cheap energy has passed and realign our societies to accommodate a new reality where we make choices to maximize the efficiency of our energy usage. This is why Keystone XL matters. Instead of acknowledging and putting our money into achieving a standard of living given this vision of the future, the Keystone pipeline is the last gasp of a system clinging desperately to a disappearing reality. Can we access ever more strange sources of fossil fuels and continue our addiction to them for another few decades, damned be the environmental impacts and the viability of the society we leave future generations? Yes, we probably can. But should we?

Are you kidding me?!?!

In one of the few happy posts (well, sort of...) apparently the Israeli Sand Cat has been successfully bred in captivity. Since the animal is already extinct in the wild, captive breeding programs and eventual re-introduction may be its only hope. And what a hope it is. Look at this little guy! How crazy adorable! I don't even LIKE cats very much. Yikes. You can find more photos here.

Coca-cola, advocating!

I was going to a meeting today in a different part of Manila when our driver pointed out a new billboard along EDSA - one of the major (and most congested and therefore most polluted) roads in the city. It was a billboard sponsored by Coca-cola, white and green, with an outline of the iconic Coca-cola bottle. Nothing unusual there - but upon closer look, this billboard was co-sponsored by the World Wide Fund for Nature - or the World Wildlife Fund as we still know it in the US. And turns out, the green parts of the billboard were actually made with plants, not paint. Across the middle of it, read "This billboard absorbs air pollution."

Greenwashing? Sure. Interesting? Yes, also. I'm not sure it's a great piece of advocacy, since I'm not sure what action follows, but it obviously (as proven by my driver pointing it out to me) is a point of conversation for people. Getting people talking about pollution is better than not, isn't it? How many kudos does Coca-cola deserve for doing this though?

Check out a local blog entry (and pictures of the billboard) here.

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.