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Is green the new red?

2008-05-30T23:03:47Z

Kate Wing, NRDC alum

Today, I found out I am a communist. I can't believe my parents never told me this, back when I was playing poker in the front yard and gleefully taking my friends' nickels. Apparently I was supposed to divvy up the pot according to everyone's needs. I didn't, I took the cash and liked it and I'd do it again if I could. But who am I to argue with George Will and Charles Krauthammer? If recycling makes me a communist, then let me learn from the hands of the new "would-be masters." I'm talking about the private firms of Ireland.

Yes, according to a report from Grant Thornton International on Corporate Social Responsibility, private businesses in Ireland are hard at work reducing waste and improving energy efficiency. The survey indicates they're doing so to build their brand, recruit staff, and protect their bottom line, but clearly it's really a move towards communism. According to Inc. magazine (which tipped me off to the study) U.S. private businesses were only half as likely as their global counterparts to report they took these responsible steps to "save the earth." Unlike businesses such as Caterpillar and Wal-Mart, which have clearly capitulated to the Gaia-Pinko manifesto, these private businesses appear to following a different type of green - cash. Which still, somehow, makes them communists.

Let's call this what it is: tired writing. The idea of Communism is an old boogeyman, thrown out by columnists of a certain age who need a story hook. Here's a response to the red flag by my colleague David Goldstein, from his recent book:

"Actually, the facts are almost completely opposite: where socialists have expropriated private industry, they have also operated it in a way that is much more irresponsible environmentally than is the case in market-based economies. Centrally planned economies have the world’s worst record on environmental protection, pollution, destruction of natural environments, and the most hostility for citizen-based environmental advocacy...In other words, a free-market economy subject to the rule of law is a much more fertile field to implement environmental policies than a Communist country."

If you want to pick a fight with the environmental movement, at least get a little more creative, like Nordhaus & Shallenberger do. Or take some time to do some digging into those devilish policies and lay it out for us. Like Andrew Leonard does in this great Salon piece breaking down the price of a gallon of gas in California, including a study showing refinery productivity in LA increased even with new environmental regulations. I know you guys have deadlines to meet, but really, "communists"? In 2008? That's just tired. And this country wasn't built on lazy thinking.

The ballad of the Delta smelt

2008-05-28T20:42:34Z

Kate Wing, NRDC alum

Let me tell you a story
of a fish whose glory
might have just escaped your eye
were it not for the dams
and diversion plans
that stopped it swimming by

For fate had dealt
a cruel hand to the smelt
in the shape of levees and pumps.
Small silvery fishes
with migrating wishes
and numbers down in the dumps.

As a tiny prey,
smelt may lack the cachet
of their anadromous kin.
but their plight was a sign
of the rivers’ decline
and the state the State was in.

Then a judge named Wanger
saw the smelt were in danger
and shut the pumping down.
The little smelt went
(with its cucumber scent)
to become the talk of the town.

The cities and farms
are concerned about harm;
Irrigation canals grow dry.
California’s drought
is not in doubt,
no water falls from the sky.

Will water conservation
be the state’s salvation?
Will we build a big straw to LA?
Or will the Delta Vision
meet indecision
and inertia rule the day?

For the water of the west
Is scarce at best,
On this we can all agree.
How we can share
With the fish and the bears,
That’s the work for NRDC.*

* Note: this work is also being done by the CSPA, CalTrout, Bay Institute, CBD, PCFFA, and many others but I just couldn’t fit everyone into the rhyme.

Best Week Ever (and Last Week Ever)

2008-05-28T00:31:40Z

Kate Wing, NRDC alum

On Switchboard, that is. After eight great years at NRDC, I will be heading out into the wild world of consulting as of Friday. There are so many things I've been meaning to blog about, from my trip to the Grand Hall of Evolution in Paris, to the trash raft, and my long overdue Wave Energy follow-up. I'll get to some of those this week, and I'm taking requests, but after May 30th I'll have to put them up at Blogfish where I am joining Mark Powell to tackle the thorny issues of sustainable seafood guilt and gobies.

Today, I'd just like to highlight this excellent FAQ on white sharks from the California Department of Fish & Game, which I stumbled upon while looking up some rockfish assessments. A recent study in Aquatic Conservation looked at 21 species of oceanic sharks and found that 11 were in trouble under the IUCN red list criteria, including the great white. California has protected great white Sharks, but they're still targets worldwide as trophies and as food. Which makes it all themore important for us to come to grips with our response to sharks, which includes "ooh, that's cool" and "that thing can eat me." Because it can, but it's not likely. DFG points out just how unlikely shark attacks are in California, and that worldwide, we still catch more sharks than sharks catch us.

As one old dive instructor used to say "underwater is the only place where man rejoins the food chain." DFG seconds that with my favorite piece of advice:

"There is only one foolproof method for avoiding a white shark attack: stay out of the ocean."

And miss all the lingcod? The odds are still on our side.

The latest fad in fishing

2008-05-20T19:42:57Z

Kate Wing, NRDC alum

There are fads that come and go -- plastic jelly bracelets, shoulder pads, diatom arranging -- and then there are those that float around for years. Decades, even. In the case of FADs, or "fish aggregating devices," we're talking about stuff literally floating in the ocean. Scientists who work in the bird colonies of the Northwest Hawaiian Islands say FADs from around the Pacific are a big part of the large debris piles they find washed up on shore. The bamboo FAD to the left is a little more biodegradable, but they are often made of old buoys, jugs or barrels, and lashed together with whatever's handy.

FADs do what the name would imply -- aggregate fish so they're easier to catch. Just as natural rafts of Sargassum attract curious fish from the wide blue sea, so does pretty much anything else floating. It's like driving in the desert; you've seen nothing but flat land for hours when you see a sign ahead. Why not stop and check it out?

If you're a fish, stopping risks being caught, and if you're a young impressionable fish, stopping means you may be sucked into the world of artificial islands forever. A new study from France's L'Institut de recherche pour le développement (IRD) found that fish under FADs had emptier bellies. From the press release (which I have to rely on as the full study is in French):

"Drifting FADs therefore appeared to act as super-stimuli, like strong magnets exerting a binding attraction that leads the tuna towards ecologically inappropriate waters with scarcer food supplies."

Fish may stop looking for the best places to eat and for mates, captivated by the shiny lure of the FAD. Just say no, les poissons.

UPDATE: It seems there's a plan afoot to build giant floating solar islands. Will the fish below become very very tan?

If you're in Brussels next week, come talk about MPAs

2008-05-07T00:04:16Z

Kate Wing, NRDC alum

If you happen to be in Europe next week, why not stop by Brussels on May 16th and participate in a conversation between folks in the EU and the US working on marine protected areas, aka MPAs. It's not that odd a time to be in Brussels, the weather is warm and there's a meeting of the Council of the Parties for the Convention on Biodiversity that weekend, so it's possible you were already planning to go. I, for one, am excited to be part of the conference as many of the questions about MPAs are the same whichever side of the pond you're on. Who gets to draw the lines? How do you monitor and enforce them? What makes a public process work, and what's a one-way trip to brawling, catastrophic failure?

Oddly enough, California and the EU are on the same timeline. Governor Schwarzenegger announced he wants the state's MLPA process done by 2010-11, and the Convention on Biological Diversity has a 2010 deadline for a European network of MPAs. It would be great if we ended up with real investment zones, protecting special places like nurseries and sensitive habitats. It would be depressing if the EU ended up with only paper parks, where they have protection only in the name and not in the water.

Salmon flunk

2008-05-02T22:48:22Z

Kate Wing, NRDC alum

The Secretary of Commerce has now officially declared the west coast salmon fishery a "disaster" and a "failure." These dire words have a legal meaning; their utterance opens the door for disaster relief money. Ever since fishery managers made the difficult but correct choice to close the Chinook fishery, we've been waiting for the federal declaration to come through and then the funds that can help allay some of the economic costs and, hopefully, fund research that will help us bring the populations back. Salmon are wild fish, even with our hatchery supplements, and wild things have cycles and fluctuations at the best of times. For years the Sacramento fish were the reliable run, with fish that sustained the boats when the Klamath, Columbia, and Fraser came up empty. It's a bitter year when your reliable source runs dry.

The last one standing

2008-04-24T01:43:02Z

Kate Wing, NRDC alum

It started raining in San Rafael around 5:30 pm last night, right around rush hour, and the 250 people who'd shown up to talk about marine protected areas were getting antsy. They'd been there since 9 am, wearing shirts and hats and stickers, supporting one proposal or another, waiting for their two minutes to have their say and now there were kids to pick up, dinners to get ready, long drives home on the winding, dark, wet roads of Sonoma and Marin. It's not as amazing to me anymore that two hundred plus people showed up at a public meeting on marine protected areas -- we've had at least that many at the final decision meetings for the Channel Islands and the Central Coast -- no, I was amazed by how many were left when public comment finally opened. At 10 pm.

Fifty people were there to talk about their kayak fishing, their time fishing with kids, the marine mammals they see wounded and sick on the beach, the abalone and kelp they see underwater. For the last year, we've had a group of 45 volunteers from all different background and interests, going over the coast with a magnifying glass, looking at the best habitats, the best fishing holes, the most photogenic dive sites. That group came up with three proposals, placing between 9% and 14% of the 760 square mile region in fully protected marine reserves. Since those proposals were announced letters, emails and petitions have poured in to the state and last night was the chance to have your say in person.

Today, the Governor's Blue Ribbon Task Force looked at the menu before them and faced the very hard job of pulling it all together. They picked ideas from each of the proposals to make their recommendation, including places like the Farallons and Point Reyes, where all three groups had virtually identicial suggestions. It's a real compromise, and I expect that for some once the bleariness of the last two days wears off, they'll wake up wondering what happened to my favorite site? What is going on at Duxbury reef? But from my view, it's a hopeful sign. Maybe we can all get along.

Here's a shot by one of the stalwarts from last night, John Albers-Mead of the Friends of Fitzgerald Marine Reserve. A Hermissenda nudibranch making slow and steady progress, like the MLPA.

Fishing makes fish populations unstable

2008-04-21T19:22:32Z

Kate Wing, NRDC alum

I'm always excited to see new papers from George Sugihara's lab, because his group of researchers is applying new math to old problems. Since you can't count all the fish in the sea, regulators rely on estimates produced by stock assessments, which use models to extrapolate an idea of the total population size from a sample of caught fish. The underlying approach to these models has changed little over the decades, even though we've learned much more about how fish and fisheries actually behave. Sugihara brings his background in finance to bear on fish population dynamics, with interesting results.

The latest papers appear this month in Nature and the Canadian Journal of Fisheries & Aquatic Sciences and they look more in depth at the question of what is it about fishing that's driving the instability. In CANJFAS, Hsieh looks at the spatial distribution of 29 species in Southern California and finds that exploited fish populations are more likely to shift their location along the coast in response to changes in ocean conditions. In Nature, they drill down more deeply to the root causes.

Using the fifty year CalCOFI dataset (which is a very long time in ocean science) they looked at three hypotheses:

Fishing pressure varies and that variability is amplified by natural processes, making populations themselves more variable
Fishing pressure drives fish to be smaller and younger, which makes them more sensitive to environmental changes and that causes instability
By changing the age and size structure of the populations, fishing changes the inherent demographics of the population, making it less stable.

#3 won out, which should start pointing our management in a new direction because it says there's a fundamental problem with catching bigger, older fish. It's not just that it exacerbates other problems (hypothesis #2), like changing ocean temperatures or the availability of prey, but it inherently destabilizes the population. Perhaps we should be giving Rainer Froese's ideas a second look and tracking not only the number of fish caught, but the demographics of the population left behind.

SunChips, now with Real Sun

2008-04-19T01:21:15Z

Kate Wing, NRDC alum

I was intrigued by this piece in the NYT this week where pollsters use their knowledge of "microtrends" to associate certain products with the three Presidential candidates. Clinton = butter & fig newtons, Obama = olive oil & soft chocolate chip cookies, McCain = bourbon & Sun Chips.

The lists are heavily weighted towards identifiable brands rather than ingredients, so I don't know who gets the votes of, say, people who like their apples peeled and cut up vs. those who will just eat them whole. But perhaps the Sun Chips fans of any political persuasion will be encouraged that PepsiCo/Frito-Lay is now making them with real sun at their Modesto plant. Kudos to the company for working to get off the grid and reduce energy. No word if Funyuns will now contain actual fun.

Can you hear me now?

2008-04-09T21:51:53Z

Kate Wing, NRDC alum

We at NRDC have a long history of worrying about the sound in the sea. When your life's aquatic, your ability to detect vibrations can mean life or death or lunch. You might even want to make some joyful noise of your own, if you're a toadfish on the make or a cusk eel, and what a shame if that call is drowned out by the roar of a ship engine.

Luckily, more and more scientists are listening to the sea beyond a handful of acoustic oceanographers. Researchers at the Wegener Insititute for Polar Sciences dropped hydrophones under the Antarctic ice as a way to get a baseline of a quiet sea. Only it's not exactly silent. After only half an hour of listening I caught the crash of an iceberg calving, and possibly some animal sounds, though those were hard to make out above the sirens wailing past my office window. Good thing I wasn't using those sounds to navigate.

Alexis Madrigal at Wired points to a few other sites where you can hear underwater sounds, and perhaps the researchers at the Stellwagen Bank National Marine Sanctuary will make their recordings available to the public when their buoys pop up to the surface. SBNMS hopes not only to calculate a "noise budget" in their busy area just off Boston, but also make progress in counting fish with sound. Which is much easier on the fish than catching them.

Jump, tuna, jump!

2008-03-27T05:50:42Z

Kate Wing, NRDC alum

Casual games are all the rage these days, what with Freerice racking up billions of grains. They even have some that make you happy and more confident. But what if you just want to pretend to be a tuna? Now there’s a game for that, too. But Kate, you say, you’re really the target demographic for tuna-centric games. How can I know if I would enjoy this game? Well, that’s why I turned to some trusty game-testing friends. The kind of people who can play Trogdor on Guitar Hero the first time. Here are their reviews:

The whole jumping and swimming interface could use some work. Arrow keys work for some and not others, clicking seems to cause more trouble than its worth, but just moving the mouse around was enough to get my fish leaping over boats. YMMV.
Much debate about catch versimilitude. Game tuna can bounce off the boats – not so for real tuna. Game tuna also get snagged on the edges of nets, which my testers thought was cheating but if it’s a gillnet that’s how they work, snagging the gills of fish that swim past.

Finally, JH says “The music is good. It is clear you will eventually get caught and that every escape is temporary” Ah, the life of a tuna.

On their bellies, sea pigs crawling

2008-03-24T19:13:31Z

Kate Wing, NRDC alum

I usually count on the boys at Zooillogix to post the best news of new creatures first, but I'm disappointed they left out the sea pigs and eelpout in their post on the Tangaroa voyage. Giant starfish and jellyfish? Cool, but let's focus on this horned sea pig, a sea cucumber relative that looks like Satan's finger. Caught almost 10,000 feet below the sea, scouring the seabed for tasty morsels.

Or what about this lyrical discussion of the eelpouts of the Ross Sea? It must be international eelpout week, because AFS just notified me of a new book on a fish I thought was a misprint: The Burbot. Also an eelpout, the burbot lives or once lived in the cold waters of North America. Many burbot populations appear to have been "extirpated", which is usually a fancy way of saying "we ate them and messed up their habitats." I do like that eelpouts look like a bit like pouting eels, and that, according to Wikipedia, they are also called "the lawyer".

I stand corrected: the International Eelpout Festival was in February. Eelpout week is over. Perhaps next year the Antarctic eelpout scientists will make it to Minnesota to show off their 26 species.

Fewer eggs, fewer baskets

2008-03-24T16:36:58Z

Kate Wing, NRDC alum

The idea of a diverse portfolio is a common theme in financial discussions. If you happen to have any money these days, the experts would tell you to spread it around to maximize your returns and reduce your risk. Putting all your money in a savings account is safe, but earns you less interest than putting some of that money in savings and the rest in the stock market. Sinking all your cash into a house in California may have seemed like a wise investment, but now, perhaps not so much. Let’s hope there are some Canadian loonies hiding under the couch cushions.

Animals have evolved similar strategies to cope with the changing environment that affects their most valuable asset – their offspring. Older female Pacific rockfish give their tiny planktonic young more food in the form of a large oil globule, letting the larvae survive longer until they find a suitable rock to call home. Since rockfish are also known to be cannibals, the juveniles don’t always live near the adults. These diversifications have helped many species survive the many milder fluctuations on ocean temperature and productivity. With global warming pushing sea surface temperatures beyond the range marine wildlife has grown accustomed to, animals are reaching their limits. Including the king penguins.

This piece by Le Bohec et al in the Proceeding of the National Academy of Sciences gave me a grave sense of unease. 2/3 of the world’s king penguins live on the Crozet Archipelago where they breed year-round. Penguins need high calorie prey available year-round, preferably close to their rookery. Warmer water temperatures may reduce the extent of the ice shelf, but they also negatively effect the penguin’s prey, making them less numerous and pushing them further offshore. Warmer ocean temperatures are hitting penguins in both the winter and the summer, making it harder to feed their young and harder just to make it through the winter. Previous El Nino events caused lower recruitment and lower adult survival, but as those events were relatively short, colonies could recover.

Here’s a quote from the discussion:

“..according to life history theory in long-lived species, king penguin populations would not be sustained with a 9% drop in their adult survival such as that we show for an increase of only 0.26C in SST.”

They then cite an IPCC that global surface temperature is predicted to increase by 0.2 per decade for the next two decades. There’s not a one to one ratio between surface temperature and SST, but this is not good news for the penguins. They’ve already tried spreading their foraging out over time and space, but those distances are getting longer and the seasons are less productive. There’s only so diverse your survival portfolio can be at the bottom of the world.

Can it, Sony

2008-03-12T15:34:36Z

Kate Wing, NRDC alum

Dear Sony credit card services,

Thanks so much for sending me this great can with your latest unsolicited credit card offer! It's true, I was ignoring those blah envelopes you usually send but how could I just toss this in the bin? For one thing, I can't because it's not recyclable. It's not a real aluminum can, but one of those Pringles-style foil-fused-to-cardboard deals where the only metal is on the ends.

The top warns me to "use caution when opening" as those metal edges are sharp. Perhaps a subtle reminder of the danger of too much debt? Clever, Sony. Inside is a small glossy flier for the new card, so delicate that it could never survive the journey to my mailbox in an envelope. But now it's safe -- safely tucked into my mixed paper bin. Sadly, there were no potato chips.

You know, Sony, we don't consider getting new credit cards often in this household. Lucky for us, you've helped us make a more informed decision by showing us where our interest charges would go if we took you up on your offer. Fake can ads. I'm off to buy my mailman a cup of coffee and some ibuprofren.

--Kate

You can touch this

2008-03-04T18:49:19Z

Kate Wing, NRDC alum

Yesterday, I had the pleasure of seeing "Deep Sea 3D" in its full 3-D IMAX glory. The opening shot is a glowing school of moon jellies floating towards you, and we all reached up our hands to touch the softly, pulsing domes as they drifted by. The divers in the room who'd swum through moon jellies in real life (moons don't pack the same paralyzing punch as other jellies) and were as transfixed as anyone by the virtual school. For millions of non-divers a movie like this may be the closest they ever get to the otherworldy part of our world, below the waves. It's an immersion unlike an aquarium or a Wii game.

But then today brings news of another way to hold the sea in your hands -- with a crochet hook. The Hyperbolic Crochet Coral Reef held a 'knitshop' in New York over the weekend, where scientists and members of the Harlem Knitting Club came together to make sponges, urchins, and corals out of yarn. The reef just finished an exhibition in Chicago and moves to New York in April, by which time it will certainly be larger than its current 3,000 square feet (about 2% the size of the Great Barrier Reef). I'm pretty dreadful with a set of needles but I'm inspired to try a coral, or maybe some irish moss. Or perhaps venture into one of their side projects, like the Toxic Reef, which incorporates trash and plastic into the knitted creatures just as many live sea creatures do by eating the real plastic floating in the sea. Bad for the turtles who mistakenly fill up on plastic bags while seeking jellyfish. Though it appears toxic runoff may have some upsides for sexy males starlings (thanks, BoingBoing). I think I'd rather keep my reefs real and my art an homage to the living sea, not a historic diorama.