Conservation & Environment

In pre-interviews for last April’s Heart of Green Awards, Ted Danson joked with the staff of The Daily Green that he wanted to call his upcoming book Danson on Water. Well, the book has just arrived, though the final title is Oceana: Our Endangered Oceans and What We Can Do to Save Them.

Produced in association with the nonprofit advocacy group Oceana, the book is stunning, filled with spectacular color photos, wonderful illustrations, heartwarming vignettes and lots of celebrity and expert testimonies from the likes of Sylvia Earle, Robert Kennedy, Jr., Philippe Cousteau, Jr. and Spanish sea captains.

At a recent press and VIP launch at the swank 21 Club in Manhattan, Danson explained that the book is really the culmination of more than two decades of his passionate activism for the oceans, a hopeful, digestible summary of everything he has learned from those on the frontlines of marine protection.

Earth911 was on hand to report Danson’s words, and to ask the actor a few questions about his work.

Read the complete story from Earth 911.

 

 

 

 

 

In arguments made today before Federal Judge Rya W. Zobel on the federal lawsuit regarding the New England fisheries management system known as Amendment 16, Conservation Law Foundation senior counsel Peter Shelley defended the process in which the new rules were developed and agreed upon at the New England Fishery Management Council and re-affirmed CLF’s support for the Amendment.

Shelley stated, “This lawsuit is not so much about the specific merits of Amendment 16, but more about the integrity of the process by which the new rules were developed and vetted and set into motion. The process, which involved all of the fishing interests, including some who today decry it and the outcome it produced, was fair, rational and legal.

New Bedford’s interests were directly represented in those lengthy deliberations and the Commonwealth of Massachusetts participated actively in both the Amendment 16 science decision-making and the policy development. This is the New England Council’s plan, not a National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) plan.”

Read the complete story from The Conservation Law Foundation.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Actor and environmental activist Ted Danson joins Morning Joe to talk about his new book "Oceana," and the global problem of 'bycatch,' which refers to marine life unintentionally caught by fisheries.

See the video from the Mother Nature Network.

 

 

 

 

 

 

A plan for community catch share programs in fisheries nationwide was unveiled in Washington D.C. by a panel of fishermen and environmentalists Tuesday morning. Brought together by Eco-Trust, an environmental investment think-tank based in Oregon, the panel sought to present a framework on how communities can benefit from catch-share fisheries management.

Download the .mp3 audio from the Alaska Public Radio Network.

 

 

 

 

 

 

On the same day New England groundfishermen entered a federal courthouse in Boston to challenge the U.S. Commerce Department over implementation of catch shares, an environmental group conducted a conference call with national media, promoting its release of a report supporting the catch share system.

Ecotrust, based in Portland, Ore., said the timing of its release was coincidental.

The report was issued by an 11-member panel that included one representative from New England, Paul Parker, who is director of Cape Cod Fisheries Trust, a pro-sector group.

Read the complete story from The South Coast Today.

 

 

 

 

 

 

NEW BEDFORD — The first meeting of the governor's Fisheries Working Group on Offshore Renewable Energy nearly became the last.

About 30 members of the fishing industry met with state officials Monday in the Wharfinger Building, expressing deep skepticism and often open opposition to the idea of putting as many as 800 wind turbines on a 3,000-square-mile swath of Atlantic Ocean south of Martha's Vineyard and Nantucket.

Bill White, assistant secretary of federal affairs for the state's Executive Office of Energy & Environmental Affairs, became frustrated that the meeting wasn't generating comments to submit to the Interior Department during what is an extended comment period.

"If you want to say 'no,' we don't need to meet again," White said at one point.

"We're not saying 'no' to anything. These are quick, initial recommendations to submit to the feds. We're sending them during the comment period to make recommendations to minimize impacts."

Yet several people expressed worry that participating in the review process is tantamount to endorsing the idea of wind farms atop a fishery and a critical habitat for spawning fish.

Read the complete story from The South Coast Today.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Lobster populations across all of southern New England, from the elbow of Cape Cod to the Sound, have sunk to what fisheries biologists consider dangerously low levels. Meanwhile, their kin to the north flourish, accompanied by a healthy fishery for this favorite culinary crustacean.

When the waters of the Sound and elsewhere in southern New England warm to 68 degrees Fahrenheit, and stay there for two months or more – a condition occurring more frequently with climate change – lobsters, it seem, become chronically distressed. The gills on their undersides flutter rapidly, they don't draw in the oxygen they need from the water and their off-kilter respiration leaves their blood saturated with carbon dioxide. Adding to that, warm water holds less oxygen than colder water, so the lobsters are working harder for less.

"They start to pant, just like a dog," said Howell, showing a slide of data correlating lobster respiration rates and water temperatures during her presentation at the Connecticut Conference on Natural Resources last week at the University of Connecticut in Storrs. "They have no other way of cooling themselves off. This causes respiratory stress."

"This is not a linear effect," Howell said. "Lobsters are very tolerant (of changing water temperatures) until they can't tolerate it. It's a threshold effect."

Read the complete story from The Day Publishing Company.

 

 

 

 

 

Bird’s testimony will also emphasize the importance of allocation; highlight the federal government’s failure to implement the national recreational registry program by 2009, and review well-known current and pending fisheries debacles including South Atlantic red snapper, black sea bass, dolphin, wahoo and cobia. “These problems are creating a damaging rift between conservation-minded anglers and the federal agencies charged with managing our fisheries. It is critical that before annual catch limits are imposed on data-poor fisheries and fisheries that have had no assessments, the Congress must require the stocks actually be assessed,” Bird said.

Among other issues, the 2006 amendments to MSA included a provision requiring “annual catch limits” or ACLs that must not be exceeded for every federally managed fishery. However, accurate data is clearly a prerequisite for establishing an ACL and that accurate data has been sorely lacking for the recreational sector.

“Recreational fisheries that have suffered for years from a complete lack of federal management cannot now be expected to implement arguably the most aggressive legal fishery management requirement ever established,” said Bird. “Without a recent, accurate stock assessment and good catch data, there is no way to meet the legal requirements of the 2006 Reauthorization of MSA. It is the legal equivalent of requiring drivers to not exceed the speed limit while driving cars without speedometers.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

EPA talks a great deal about environmental justice. In "EPA speak" this means the protection of minorities and lower income families disenfranchised from the regulatory (e.g., siting of landfills and factories) process.

Seems to me that what is going on right now is the disenfranchisement of the local fisherman from the regulatory process. Biologists and regulators are trying to save the Chesapeake Bay, but in doing so they are endangering the local waterman to such a degree that by the time the Bay is saved the fisherman will be gone.

There are similar stories about oysters on the Eastern Shore. The bottom line is that the Maryland Department of Natural Resources is enforcing the law. The State Legislature needs to get its arms around a solution that preserves some semblance of the industry that is the real reason we want to cleanup the Chesapeake.

Read the complete piece by Gary Liberson, PhD from The Huffington Post.

 

 

 

 

 

 

At The Pet Shop in Allston, next to goldfish, blue tetra, and cichlid varieties of fish, is a tank of cardinal tetra. These fish, natives of the upper Orinoco and Negro rivers in South America, are only about an inch long, and are characterized by red bodies and a long silvery blue stripe.

Pet shop owners sometimes prefer tank-raised fish instead of wild-caught fish because wild fish are much more sensitive since they live in very specific natural environmental conditions. These conditions—a certain amount of sunlight and water with a specific level of acidity, among other things—are hard to replicate and add an extra burden to the shipping costs of wild cardinal tetra.

At every transition point in the shipping process, the fish must be re-acclimated to their new environment, according to Gentile. This conditioning puts undue stress on the fish and makes them more vulnerable to disease, he said.

Tank-raised fish do not have these same problems, and are not as likely to get sick during and after the shipping and reconditioning process.

Read the complete story from The Boston Globe.