Phil Gutis's Blog: Reviving the World's Oceans

Best of Green! NRDC Chosen "Best Political Watchdog" by TreeHugger!

2010-04-08T22:55:45Z

On behalf of all of NRDC -- our Board, our Members, supporters and activists and, of course, our staff -- a huge thank you to the editors and readers of TreeHugger. This afternoon, the NRDC family learned that NRDC was chosen as the “Best Political Watchdog” as part of TreeHugger's annual Best of Green competition.

Particularly gratifying was that NRDC was the choice of both the TreeHugger editors and its readers. Also gratifying were the very nice words that accompanied the selection:

The green movement equally needs people storming the barricades and walking the halls of power and working the lobbies in Washington, and there is no better example of doing the latter successfully than the NRDC. As environmental crusader and friend-of-TreeHugger Ed Begley Jr put it, "NRDC has been our tireless architects of change for decades. No one group does more for the environment than them."

What more could we say?

What Are the Whales Telling Us?

2009-07-12T23:53:04Z

I am determined. Next winter, Tim and I will travel to Baja California and Laguna San Ignacio to witness for ourselves a ritual almost too impossible to believe: mother whales encouraging their newborns to interact with humans. NRDC preserved the laguna from development as a salt factory in 2000 and since then my colleagues have reported consistently amazing journeys and opportunities to go eye-to-eye with a whale.

In the New York Times magazine today, journalist Charles Siebert authored a lengthy report on the mysteries of whales. He describes his first trip to view the gray whales at Laguna San Ignacio and writes:

The baby gray glided up the boat's edge, and then the whole of his long, hornbilled-shaped head was rising up out of the water directly beside me, a huge ovoid eye slowly opening to take me in. I'd never felt so beheld in my life.

In his article -- What Are the Whales Trying to Tell Us? -- Siebert asks a marine mammal behavioralist named Toni Frohoff if perhaps the whale interaction at the laguna is somehow a symbolic act of forgiveness for human sins against the species. She replies:

There are reasons why something like forgiveness is a possiblity. And even if it's not that exactly, I believe it's something. That there's something very potent occurring here from a behavorial and a biological perspective. I'd put my career on the line and challenge anybody to say that these whales are not actively soliciting and engaging in a form of communication with humans, both through eye contact and tactile interaction and perhaps acoustically in ways that we have not yet determined.

If indeed the whales are offering us forgiveness, they are a munificent bunch. For while whale hunting is thankfully no longer as common, we continue to torment whales and other ocean creatures with horrific sound in the form of sonar and other human-caused ocean noise.

Siebert credits NRDC with leading a long fight against sonar and notes that one of our legal challenges even made it to the Supreme Court last year. The case, United States Navy v. NRDC, resulted in unfortunate ruling on the facts but Siebert says the "majority's verdict somehow seemed incidental to the greater, tacit victory for environmentalists of having gotten the nation's highest court to even consider the well-being of whales in the context of a debate about national security, something that would have been unthinkable not so very long ago."

Siebert is correct. The movement to protect whales and other ocean critters has come far but much still needs to be done. Please take a moment to watch Lethal Sounds, NRDC's video narrated by Pierce Brosnan on sonar and other human ocean noise, and to take action to further protect the whales.

For while no one knows exactly what the whales are trying to tell us, it is probably safe to say that a vast majority of us hope they are around for a great deal longer to keep trying.

Lobster in a Pot

2007-10-07T02:06:21Z

Hard to believe, but it was almost 25 years ago when my vegetarian voyage started. The journey started in a seafood shop somewhere on the south shore of Long Island. I had just been assigned to cover Long Island for The New York Times and a new colleague had invited me to join him and another new reporter in the bureau for a lobster lunch and insisted that we go to the store with him to pick our own crustaceans.

At that time, I had not ever given a thought to being a vegetarian. I loved hamburgers, hot dogs, bacon, chicken, turkey. And, yes, lobster, shrimp and most other seafood.

But I was stunned that afternoon to learn that lobsters big enough to eat were at least six years old. And many were much older. Somehow it didn't seem quite fair to take a critter that had lived so long on the planet and dump it living and breathing into a pot of boiling water. Giving up lobster soon led to other choices and now I'm a pretty hard core vegetarian. I'm not a vegan, but I won't eat anything that once had a face.

What sent me on this trip down memory lane was a front-page story in today's Washington Post about the death of lobsters in the Long Island Sound.

Over the past decade, the lobster boom here has gone almost completely bust. The die-off has been so severe -- a 70 to 90 percent drop since 1998, according to scientists and state estimates -- that hundreds of lobstermen have been forced out of business. Unable to make a living in waters once as rich as bisque with crustaceans, many have had no choice but to abandon a trade that amounted to more of a cherished lifestyle than a job.

What's killing the lobsters? According to the Post, some point to pesticides that were sprayed in Connecticut and New York to kill mosquitos in 1999. Others, however, point to global warming, a conclusion the Post says is "profoundly controversial on these shores."

One expert, Sylvain De Guise, director of Connecticut's Sea Grant program, told the Post that while a combination of factors has led to the die off, "it's very likely that the impact of warming waters would be seen here first. I'd have to say that global warming, based on common sense, is the strongest argument."

Another expert told the Post that the Sound has been warm before. Lance Stewart, a lobster expert at the University of Connecticut, said: "It's crazy to suggest this is somehow linked to global warming."

Sorry, Lance. I lean toward the common sense expressed by De Guise. Global warming is changing our planet in innumerable ways and, unfortunately, even after we start to deal with the carbon pollution that is poisoning our atmosphere, we're going to see more changes like the lobster die off. The question is how bad we're going to let it get before we take action.

A Dirty Secret

2007-08-21T15:00:00Z

About a week ago, The New York Times published an article by my former colleague Anthony DePalma about what he called one of New York's "dirtiest environmental secrets."

The secret was that whenever there is a heavy rain in New York, the city's sewage system is overwhelmed and polluted water flows into the areas waterways. This recent storm also crippled the subway system, which was inundated with flood water.

When I saw Anthony's article [subscription required], I was transported back to the days too many years ago when I was a Times reporter and covered the rash of medical waste that started to appear on the beaches of Long Island. I was a metro desk correspondent for the Times on Long Island and newsworthy garbage of all kinds kept me byline in the paper. (The other major story of the day was the fight over the Shoreham Nuclear Power plant, but that's a story for another post.)

When I wrote about medical waste in the late 1980s, I remember being amazed to learn that very little rainfall could cause the sewers to overflow. Anthony's article reminded me that it was as little as a tenth of an inch of concentrated rainfall that cause millions of gallons of water mixed with untreated sewage to dump into the Hudson and East Rivers and New York Harbor. In a typical year, 27 billion – that's billion with a b! – gallons of sewage and polluted storm water flow into the water surrounding the city.

Disgusting, isn't it? And not unique to New York. The Times reported that approximately 800 American cities have the same problems. No wonder that NRDC's annual beach report recently found that pollution caused a record number of beach closings nationwide in 2006. The number of closings and advisory days at ocean, bay and Great Lakes beaches topped 25,000 – more than ever recorded in the survey's 17-year history.

The recent Times article quoted city officials describing efforts to build four massive holding tanks where the combined storm water and untreated sewage can be held until treatment plants can handle it. Two of these are completed and two more are under construction.

But are holding tanks the answer? I agree with the guy from Riverkeeper, a colleague organization, who told the Times that the answer ultimately lies in reducing runoff, not only building giant holding tanks. "Green roofs, parks systems, more trees – these kinds of things will at a minimum offset the impact of a big storm," the Riverkeeper's Basil Seggos said.

Plant a tree and keep the subways from flooding. Interesting idea.

A Turtle Visits Miami Beach

2007-08-20T15:00:00Z

I won't go to Canada. Even though I'd love to experience Montreal and head west to Victoria and see the country's natural splendor, I refuse to give the Canadian government one cent of this tourist's dollar.

Why? Baby seals of course. When it comes to animals, I'm a classic softie. From my own menagerie of six dogs and a dogcat named Max to the newly born seals, my heart shreds quickly when I think of animal suffering.

I suppose that's why, a few years ago, I called 911 when I saw a giant sea turtle emerge from the ocean and crawl up the sands of Miami Beach. Yes, Miami Beach. I was there for an ACLU staff conference and decided to take a solitary stroll along the beach in the early evening. (There's nothing like a hotel full of civil libertarians to make you yearn for some peace and quiet!)

Suddenly, out of the corner of my eye, I saw a very big dark shape emerge from the Atlantic. Once I started to breathe again, I realized it was a massive sea turtle and watched with amazement as it moved quickly up the beach, turned itself around to face the water and then just sat there.

My first thought was that it must be sick. Why else would a turtle emerge from the ocean in Miami Beach? And what do you do when you stumble upon a hurt being? Well, you call 911. So I rushed up to one of the hotels and ran for a phone, only to discover that someone had beat me to it and had already called the authorities.

By the time I got back to the beach, the turtle had started digging. And it dug and dug and dug, probably for 30 minutes or more. Then suddenly the eggs started to emerge. Dozens of them.

Soon a crowd had gathered and a truck from the Florida Marine Patrol showed up. As we watched for more than an hour as the turtle laid her eggs and then energetically covered the nest and finally crawled back to the sea, the Marine Patrol staff explained why they would dig up the nest as soon as the turtle left and transport the eggs to an undeveloped section of the beach.

Turns out that when turtles hatch, they are programmed to head for the glimmers of light that form on the crest of waves. But in Miami Beach, the patrol staff explained, the hatchlings get confused and head instead for the lights of the hotels and inevitably drown in the pools.

(They even had a brochure called Turtle Tracks that they gave those of us watching the turtle lay her eggs. And when one of the marine staff found out that I had actually seen the turtle emerge from the ocean, he looked amazed. In 20 plus years of working with turtles, he said, he had never seen one come out of the ocean!)

I was pleased that Florida invested in a Marine Patrol to give these endangered animals a better chance of survival. What with all the political controversy that endlessly surrounds the sunshine state, you don't necessarily think of Florida as a place that cares about wildlife.

Until that night. Since then, I've been back to Florida many times. The state has earned my tourist dollar. Canada, are you listening?