With November elections upon us, we’re deluged with political speeches promising us happier and healthier lives, better jobs, a cleaner environment, and so on. It’s easy to get caught up in the political rhetoric, but it is also critical to step back and consider the source. In a speech given on the 25th anniversary of Earth Day, its founder drew a direct link between economic and ecological vitality. “The wealth of a nation is in its air, water, soil, forests, minerals, rivers, lakes, oceans, scenic beauty, wildlife habitats and biodiversity … that’s all there is,” said Sen. ... Read More
Trash Free Seas Alliance Takes Aim at Great Pacific Garbage Patch
October 16, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
Normandy's windswept beaches have been quiet since the Allied invasion in 1944. Now the desolate coastline plays host to a different, more insidious attacker: plastic trash. Nestled in the coarse sand and tangled among pieces of driftwood lie the detritus of the industrialized world, an army of plastic bottles, discarded fishing lines and floats, crushed buckets, flip-flops, broken chairs, and bags. The English Channel is not the world's sole depositor of plastic debris. Lonely beaches all over the world — ones you’d expect to be devoid of human influence — teem with wildlife, but ... Read More
Three Reasons for Creating a Single Ocean Health Index
October 11, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
Just over 75 years ago, there was no easy way to track how well a nation’s economy and its people were doing. Data from all kinds of measures existed, but it was hard to interpret what they all meant. Responding in part to the dramatic declines of the Great Depression, the U.S. Congress in 1934 asked renowned economist Simon Kuznets to develop a method for gauging the condition, or health, of the United States. He came up with what we now know as the gross domestic product, or GDP. Although criticisms abound about its utility or appropriateness as a measure of national well-being ... Read More
Setting Targets in the Ocean Health Index
September 13, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
Almost a month after his plane plunged into the Pacific, U.S. Army Air Force bombardier Louie Zamperini was weary of sharks circling his life raft. As Laura Hillenbrand details in her New York Times bestseller Unbroken, dozens of sharks were tracking Zamperini's every move, waiting for him to fall in the water and become their next meal. That was in 1943. Since then, the number of sharks in the world's ocean has declined by as much as 90 percent, and being adrift at sea isn't quite as scary a prospect as it would have been three-quarters of a century ago. So, which ocean is the healthy ... Read More
Profile: Reddy Stayed Steady During Gulf Oil Spill
August 29, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
Last November, a half year after the BP oil spill, as Christopher Reddy sat in a Mobile, Ala., restaurant, he overheard a customer at a nearby table ask a friend if he would order fish. "The other customer said, 'No, thanks, I don't like my fish with a side order of cancer.'" Reddy, a marine chemist, pondered telling them that scientific data from the Food and Drug Administration and other government agencies indicate that eating fish from the Gulf of Mexico after the April 20, 2010, spill wasn't dangerous. "But I had a failure of nerve. I wish I had spoken to them." He increasingly ... Read More
Ocean Index Navigates Between the Politic, the Pristine
August 8, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
Differences in perspective shape the way we see the world. Toddlers see nothing but joy in a mud puddle, while parents see piles of undone, badly stained laundry. The sheer cliff face that screams adventure to a climber instills sheer panic in others. Such differences plague the relationship between scientists and policymakers, making it difficult for them to connect in meaningful ways. We repeatedly hear from national and international groups (like the 2002 World Summit on Sustainable Development or the 2004 U.S. Commission on Ocean Policy) that the oceans are in trouble and that we need ... Read More
The Making of the Ocean Health Index
July 12, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
If all goes well, when a scientific paper is published and the media pick up on the story, a lot of effort gets boiled down into a soundbite. New cure for cancer discovered. Water found on Mars. Fish stocks disappearing from the world's oceans. This focus can be a good thing for communicating science to the public, but it masks a lot of what was necessary to produce that result. Often, the story of how, and why, science gets done is as interesting and important as the actual result. Indeed, the decisions about what does not belong in the soundbite are as critical as the decisions about what ... Read More
Life Under Constant Pressure
February 4, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
Feeling under pressure? Try being a mile underwater. More than 70 percent of the earth is ocean floor, an environment as lethal to human life as outer space. With pressures hundreds of times stronger than on the surface, no sunlight, and near freezing temperatures, it is hard to imagine that anything could survive on the bottom of the ocean. Dr. Craig McClain, a marine biologist at the National Center for Evolutionary Synthesis, has taken robot submersibles to the ocean floor. He discovered an astonishing number of species thriving on the seafloor: a comparable number of animals to what ... Read More
Punta Cabras and a Shipwreck
May 27, 2010 • By • 3 Comments
El Hippo continues it's journey south, finding an overturned fishing boat that comes to symbolize the plight of the world's suffering fisheries. Location: On a sandy bluff next to a fisherman's house in Punta Cabras, a few hours south of Ensenada. Conditions: Hot and dry. The swell is smaller than yesterday, when the panga capsized. Discussion: The open fields were golden in the afternoon light, when we arrived in Punta Cabras. Further from the coast, the earth seemed to warp into hills and mountains, like a wrinkled carpet that a little boy pushed together as a landscape for his ... Read More
What About Spilled Oil That Doesn’t Reach Shore?
May 11, 2010 • By • 1 Comment
As the oily goo from the massive spill in the Gulf of Mexico begins to come ashore, the immediate concern is for the devastating effects it will have on the shore birds and sea life in the coastal regions. But what of the long-term effects on the ocean itself? David Valentine, a biologist with the University of California, Santa Barbara, worries as much about the effects of the hundreds of thousands of gallons of crude settling on the sea floor, where much of the gushing oil is likely to settle. While the obvious immediate danger is to the coastal areas — and oil has already started to ... Read More
