I may or may not have bought a surfboard this week.
GPOY new tattoo edition…
I read many excellent books this summer (including What is the What, Q&A, and Into the Wild), but The Wave might be my favorite.
Your Chicken Nuggets Are Killing Your Crab Cakes
Every year in the Chesapeake Bay, an algae bloom spreads out, sucking oxygen out of the water and destroying fish habitat. This year’s “dead zone” stretches from Baltimore Harbor to south of the Potomac River, the Washington Post reports. It’s on track to become the bay’s largest ever. Already, fully a third of the bay—once one of the globe’s most productive fisheries—is incapable of supporting sea life.
Why such huge dead zones this year? The immediate cause is heavy rains in both the Midwest and the Northeast, which wash vast amounts of nutrients down streams and rivers and into the sea at key river delta areas like the Chesapeake and the Gulf. There, the nutrients provide a feast for algae, and voilà, dead zones.
But the ultimate source of the nitrogen and phosphorus that feed the algae blooms is industrial agriculture: millions of acres of fertilizer-guzzling corn farms in the Mississippi River watershed and massive concentrations of chicken farms right on the banks of the Chesapeake.
As for the Chesapeake, Pew Environment Group has just released a major report called Big Chicken (PDF) that demonstrates the poultry industry’s devastating impact on the bay.
International Unsustainable Overfishing
When it comes to the state of wild fish stocks and especially tuna, one of the organizations created to supposedly address oceans destruction, the International Seafood Sustainability Foundation (ISSF) continues to deny the problems its member companies have created for world tuna populations, the waters in which they live and the people dependent on both.
ISSF is the umbrella group of companies that represents somewhere between 70-80% of world’s tinned tuna brands and claims to work toward science-based and sustainable management of our oceans and improving tuna management at the bodies that regulate tuna fisheries, called Regional Fisheries Management Organisations (RFMOs). So far, the talk to improve management has resulted in little progress in improving the sustainability of the tuna traded and sold by ISSF members.
2012: The last year of the wild Bluefin Tuna
For millennia, mankind has fished for the Bluefin. Some of the traditional fishing techniques are still being used today. But commercial fishing techniques were launched in the Fifties. Ever since, Bluefin tuna stocks have been reduced by 97%.
A new website wants you to know how grim the situation has become for Atlantic bluefin.
Chances are that the last wild Bluefin tuna will die in 2012. If the Bluefin becomes extinct, it could have a major impact on the fragile ecosystems of our oceans.
If you live in an EU nation, it’s worth your contacting your country’s responsible ministry to ask what they are doing to help avoid the extinction of one of the oceans noblest creatures. Also, its critically important to reject bluefin at the market level, particularly in sushi restaurants, to help reduce demand.
Watch the video to learn about the Bluefin’s biggest problems, including economies of extinction (when an exploited species becomes ever more valuable, the rarer it gets), tragedy of the commons , bycatch, subsidies and the wasteful nature of feeding cultured predatory fishes.
Further readings: the Bluefin tuna on Wikipedia, “The Bluefin Bonanza” by Wietse van der Werf, website of ICCAT, website of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES)
