I loved those early morning boat trips (except for the time that I got very seasick -- probably my fault for snacking on Fritos -- and the trip that I'm about to tell you about). The lake was so big that you could barely see the shoreline.
On one occasion, our nets were coming up empty, so my dad's friend steered the boat toward the mouth of the lake where it meets the Gulf of Mexico and ventured into a cove where he hoped to find some shrimp. Soon, the boat started dragging. We feared that the net had gotten snagged on the bottom of the lake. But when they winched it in, the cause turned out to be quite a bit scarier for my 10-year-old self.
The boat had gone right over a school of stingrays, which had probably ventured into the lake from the Gulf, and our net was full of them. As the net came up, it looked like they were going to spill into the boat. My dad and his friend struggled to release them without damaging the boat or the fishing equipment, but eventually they had no choice but to cut the net away.
I watched from the prow as those ghostly stingrays spread out beneath us, silently gliding away from the hapless weekend fishermen who had inadvertently disturbed them.
Drawing food from the sea is one of the most fundamental interactions that we can have with the our oceans, and I'm glad that I have those early experiences in New Orleans to draw upon. The stingray incident taught me a respect for the ocean and its creatures -- and a concern for how we interact with them -- that sticks with me today.
The fish we choose to eat -- and the way we fish for them -- can have a tremendous impact on our oceans. As part of a personal goal to eat healthier, I'm trying to increase the amount of fish in my diet. It's a lean protein with great health benefits. But there are risks, as well: Some types of fish can be contaminated with mercury and PCBs, and sometimes seafood is harvested in a way that's bad for the oceans.
That's why NRDC created a new Sustainable Seafood Guide for consumers. It provides seven basic guidelines that you can follow when shopping for seafood or ordering at a restaurant, to help make the choice of what's healthy for you and the planet a little easier.
We also have specific advice about America's favorite types of seafood, from shrimp to tuna to fish sticks, and a handy list that shows what's OK to eat and what you should avoid. Once you've made your selection, we also have a collection of helpful recipes for serving healthy, feel-good seafood meals.
When working on the seafood guide with NRDC's oceans experts, I was a little disheartened to see that many of my favorite types of fish -- grouper, halibut, orange roughy, cod -- had landed on the recommended "avoid" list. (Pacific cod and halibut are OK, but the Atlantic varieties are badly depleted.) I was aware of the overfishing problems that many species face, but this put it in pretty stark terms.
Today is the first-ever World Oceans Day, designated by the United Nations as an occasion to celebrate and protect the world's oceans. And there are certainly a lot of problems facing our seas -- overfishing, habitat destruction, acidification, water pollution, jellyfish invasions, giant trash vortexes in the Pacific ... the list goes on.
We might not be able to tackle all of those big problems all at once. But as my colleague Laura Pagano suggests, one way that each of us can make a difference right now is to make smarter choices about the seafood we eat and understand its impact on the oceans. We hope that NRDC's Sustainable Seafood Guide will help. Please share it with other seafood lovers!
To learn more about the threats facing our oceans and other ways that you can help on World Oceans Day, visit nrdc.org/oceans.
]]>Sunday’s New York Times was something of a bonanza (albeit a sobering one) for anyone interested in environmental news. In a front-page story, Elisabeth Rosenthal reports from Barcelona on the swarms of jellyfish that are stinging beachgoers in increasing numbers all over the world. “While jellyfish invasions are a nuisance to tourists and a hardship to fishermen,” she writes, “for scientists they are a source of more profound alarm, a signal of the declining health of the world’s oceans.”
As readers of the Los Angeles Times’ excellent Altered Oceans series (which won last year’s Pulitzer for explanatory journalism) are aware, environmental damage to the earth’s oceans is feeding an explosion of primitive organisms in the sea, as well as killing larger marine species and sickening us humans. Jellyfish are stepping (oozing?) into the void left by their overfished predators such as tuna, sharks and swordfish. Rising sea temperatures caused by global warming and oxygen-depleting pollution are also helping the jellies, which the East Coast Times calls “the cockroaches of the open waters” because they thrive in damaged environments where most other species suffer.
The jellyfish boom is just more evidence that our planet’s environmental crisis has unexpected -- and often unpleasant -- consequences. Sometimes it’s not easy to relate to concerns about elevated CO2 levels in the atmosphere, or even the plight of the polar bear as sea ice melts, because those things seems so distant from our everyday lives. But the impact of global warming can also be felt very close to home, like when we go to the beach and find it full of stinging jellyfish, which happened to vacationers in Long Beach, N.Y. (and even participants in the recent New York City triathalon).
On our website right now, NRDC outlines some of the other consequences of global warming and delves more deeply into what it could mean for our health. And you can learn a lot more about the many threats facing the earth's oceans and what can be done to protect them at youroceans.org.
A report by Felicity Barringer in the Times’ National section offers “sobering production figures for those hoping that fuel prices can be lowered” by increased drilling for oil on public lands. Barringer writes:
The Bush administration, in its effort to expand energy production, has issued more than three times the number of well-drilling permits on Western lands as in the Clinton administration’s last six years. But oil production in that region during the Bush years is 12 percent below average levels from the Clinton era, according to federal data.
The piece goes on to detail the “palpable” environmental effects of the increase in federal drilling permits on public land in Colorado, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming.
The expansion of the energy industry has subdivided parts of western Wyoming and western Colorado into a rabbit warren of wellheads and roads. The Pinedale, Wyo., area had its first ozone alerts last winter, thanks to a combination of factors: natural gas flaring from scores of wells, increased vehicle traffic associated with drilling activities and seasonal temperature inversions. One study showed that the mule deer herd that migrates near Pinedale declined by nearly half from 2000 to 2005.
For NRDC’s take on the environmental consequences of drilling on public lands and more productive and immediate solutions to our energy crisis, check out the materials featured in the Oil & Energy section of nrdc.org.
Finally, "Our Towns" columnist Peter Applebome takes readers on a jaunt to Sag Harbor, N.Y., where the Sag Harbor Whaling and Historical Museum is featuring an exhibition on the indispensable fuel of the 1700s and early 1880s: lamp oil made from boiled whale blubber. Applebome asks: “Is the oil business the new whaling business? And, if so, is that a good sign or a troubling one?
Bear with us. Whaling, after all, was one of the world’s first great multinational businesses, a global enterprise of audacious reach and import. From the 1700s through the mid-1800s, oil extracted from the blubber of whales and boiled in giant pots gave light to America and much of the Western world. The United States whaling fleet peaked in 1846 with 735 ships out of 900 in the world. Whaling was the fifth-largest industry in the United States; in 1853 alone, 8,000 whales were slaughtered for whale oil shipped to light lamps around the world, plus sundry other parts used in hoop skirts, perfume, lubricants and candles.
Applebome makes the point that at the height of whale oil’s dominance -- and even in its declining years -- few people could imagine a world without it, and Big Whaling mocked its potential competitors. Sounds an awful lot like the way many of us think about fossil fuels today. And yet as soon as something better came along -- kerosene -- whale oil bit the dust within a couple of decades (although it left behind massive environmental consequences).
The point being that the energy source we’re so dependent on today need not be the energy source of tomorrow, and that change can happen more rapidly than many of us think.
NRDC has been urging Americans to move beyond oil and build a new economy powered by clean energy that offers new jobs and new opportunities. When looked at in light of the whale oil story, it makes you realize that change is not only possible -- it’s inevitable. The trick is to push for the kind of change that makes our economy, our country and our world a brighter place.
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