I dig the Ethicurean; it’s a great blog with a lot of things to say about what we eat and how we eat it. So, I was happy to see them review the new film, The End of the Line, which is about commercial fishing and ocean depletion. A few highlights:
None of these recommendations will come as a surprise if you’ve seen the film — or read about the issue recently — and they’re all worthwhile. But I left “The End of the Line” with a feeling not unlike the one I had at the end of “An Inconvenient Truth,” when I was told that riding my bike more often and switching to compact florescent light bulbs would somehow keep the glaciers from melting like butter.
A full 90 percent of the big fish are gone, the movie reminds us. Three-quarters of the world’s fisheries are now said to be either fully exploited or over-fished. The shift to aquaculture hasn’t ultimately meant less demand for wild seafood, but often more demand, in the form of feed for carnivorous fish. Eating fish from the remaining 7% of the ocean that has been certified sustainable by the Marine Stewardship Council is undoubtedly a step in the right direction. But how on earth, I wondered, can that be good enough?
Go read the rest of the review here. Good stuff, and I can’t wait to see the film.
Professor Gregory Ryskin from the McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Science at Northwestern University in Illinois, US, has defied the long-standing convention by applying equations from magnetohydrodynamics to our oceans’ salt water (which conducts electricity) and found that the long-term changes (the secular variation) in the Earth’s main magnetic field are possibly induced by our oceans’ circulation.
In accounting for Cota’s perplexing confusion, NTSB investigators eventually concluded that “the higher-level cognitive effort and perceptual skills” needed to interpret the Cosco Busan’s standardized radars and maps “were precisely those capabilities that would have been degraded” by the drugs that Cota had possessed. None of Cota’s difficulties using the radar or reading the map would have been expected of any pilot with sober and effective cognitive functions, the investigators concluded. In other words, they concluded, he was tripping on prescription meds.
… Zheng’s watchfulness had helped prevent a catastrophic collision between the soft steel ship and the solid concrete bridge tower that could have ruptured the ship and sent hundreds of thousands of gallons of its fuel into the bay. And what was his reward? As a witness to alleged crimes, he was ordered to surrender his passport and report to a US court. If he entered another state or country, he risked becoming the unemployed target of an international arrest warrant.
…John Cota will be fined and sentenced June 19 to up to ten months in prison, after he pleaded guilty to a pair of environmental misdemeanors under a deal with prosecutors. But his incarceration will be briefer than the Kafkaesque odysseys of Zheng and Li, who were trapped in Northern California for more than twelve months because of the drugstore junkie’s wildly errant orders.
A Hong Kong shipping company has renewed a bid to a federal judge in San Francisco to plead guilty to two charges in the 2007 Cosco Busan oil spill, but has asked for the right to do so in a way that wouldn’t subject the company to potentially millions of dollars in fines.
I am so angry. How freaking DARE they allow what happened to our Bay to happen, and then try to skitter sideways out of their direct responsibility for it?
And this just steams me:
Company attorneys wrote that a multimillion-dollar penalty would be “a huge fine that would potentially cripple Fleet financially as well as fatally damage its reputation in the shipping community.”
Are you FREAKING KIDDING ME??? The penalty would be embarrassing, but the fact that John Cota was on so many drugs I’m surprised he was standing, isn’t??
What a world. What a joke. I hope the judge laughs them out of court. But I’m not holding my breath about it or anything.
To help promote our collective ocean conservation message on and around World Oceans Day, we urge our Partners to “Wear Blue and Tell Two.”
Our recent public opinion research (survey results to be released on June 3) clearly shows that the public is looking to our Partner zoos, aquariums, and museums (ZAMs) to learn more about the issues and ways each person can take action to help our ocean.
Beginning this year we can all start to associate the color blue with World Oceans Day. This event has been unofficially celebrated for more than a dozen years but this year marks the inaugural World Oceans Day, officially recognized by United Nations resolution as June 8th each year.
One easy thing that all Partners and supporters can do is to wear blue in honor of the ocean. Many already do as part of their uniform, but we encourage all ZAM staff and docents as well as those working at NGOs, agencies, and universities and schools, to help spread the blue.
We also suggest that you not only wear blue, but let people know why: tell people two things they likely don’t know about our ocean and how they can help.
So there you have it. Hopefully, blogging this counts as telling at least two. There are two of you out there, aren’t there?
I did some online community consulting for her when she was here, and am handling one shift of doing her website updates per day, so I’m pretty invested in being part of the Team Roz Cheering Section.
You could be, too. People who actually go out and *do* need all the support they can get.
UPDATE: Looks like it’ll be showing locally at Embarcadero Center, San Francisco, CA, on August 8, and at a whole heap of other locations. Check the website!
I’m not sure how I feel about record quests. They drive a whole lot of bad behavior in other sports. I’m figuring that as long as it’s driven by the person themselves, and not by vanity parents, it’s all good. And I’m guessing from the amount of grief Zac Sunderland’s parents have soaked up here, that this kind of thing would really only be possible not-here.
I’m looking forward to keeping track of Jessica’s adventure.