http://www.chagos-trust.org/news.asp
Many people have asked about the newly declared Chagos Protected Area, what differences it makes, and so on. In order to help clarify several issues, answers to some of the most common questions are on the site link above.
http://www.bluefront.org/files/saved_by_the_sea.php
Saved by the Sea Tour
Blue Frontier Campaign President David Helvarg’s latest ocean book, a memoir titled Saved by the Sea – A Love Story with Fish will be released by St. Martin’s Press on May 11 2010
Some comments to date:
“Helvarg offers us a glimpse not only of his own amazing and often heart-rending adventures in and around the ocean but also gives insight into the human condition…A great read from an outstanding writer.”
–Philippe Cousteau, Ocean Explorer
“Read Saved by the Sea for pleasure, read it for adventure, read it because it conveys the gift of being allowed to slip into David Helvarg’s world and view the ocean, and humankind, with profound new understanding. But beware: This book has the power to change the way you think about the world, about yourself, and the future of humankind.”
–Sylvia Earle, Ocean Explorer; Author, The World is Blue
” In this powerful story of love, loss, and resolve, Helvarg bares his heart and takes us through his life and across the oceans, letting us see that the antidote to all is simply to have something to believe in, and a cause to serve.”
–Carl Safina, Author, Song for the Blue Ocean
Blue Frontier Campaign will be sending David on a ‘Saved by the Sea’ tour this spring and summer from Boston to San Diego to Seattle and points beyond. The hope is to not only do bookstore appearances but to work with seaweed groups and organizations to stage book parties and media events that can also highlight the work they do every day to protect and restore healthy oceans and coastal communities from sea to shining sea. A dozen blue groups have partnered to date.
Below is the schedule so far:
Boston, MA May 10-11 (Mon, Tue)
May 11 New England Aquarium – 7PM
Mystic Seaport, CT May 12 (Wed.)
Blunt Building – 6:30 PM
New London, CT May 13 (Thur.)
U.S. Coast Guard Academy – Lunch Talk
Providence, RI May 14 (Fri.)
University of Rhode Island – Bayside Campus – Noon
Books on the Square – 7PM
New York City, NY May 15 – 19 (Sat. – Wed.)
Event TBA
Washington D.C. May 20 – 25 (Thur. – Wed)
May 21 Politics & Prose Fri. – 7PM
May 25 NOAA Library, Silver Spring MD – Noon
Denver/Boulder, CO May 26 – 29 (Thur. – Sat.)
May 26 Ocean First Divers, Boulder – 7PM
May 27 Tattered Cover Bookstore, Denver – 7:30 PM
S.F. Bay Area, CA May 31 – June 2 (Mon. – Wed.)
May 31 Coppersfield Books, Petaluma – 7PM
June 1 Keppler’s Books, Palo Alto – 7:30 PM
June 2 Book Passages, Marin – 7PM
San Diego, CA June 3 – 5 (Thur. – Sat.)
June 3 Warwicks Bookstore, La Jolla – 7:30 PM
Los Angeles, CA June 6-8 (Sun. – Tue.)
June 8 Event World Ocean Day TBA
Monterey/Santa Cruz, CA June 10 – 12 (Thur. – Sat.)
Bookshop Santa Cruz – June 10 (Thur.) – 7:30
Portland, OR June 14 – 15 (Mon. – Tue.)
Powell’s Bookstore Monday June 14 – 7PM
Seattle, WA June 16 – 19 (Wed. – Sat.)
Elliott Bay Bookstore – 7PM Thur. June 17 JUNE 17
Petaluma, CA June 24 (Thur.)
Coast Guard Training Center
Honolulu, HI June 28 – July 4 (Sun. – Sat.)
Events TBA
New York, NY July 8 (Thurs.)
South St. Seaport Museum – 6:30 PM
New Jersey July 9 (Fri.)
Clean Ocean Action – TBA
San Francisco, CA July 14
SF Main Public Library – 6 – 7:30 PM
Long Beach, CA July 28
Aquarium of the Pacific talk – 7PM
If your group would like to work on the tour, do an independent book event or have David speak about how he was, ‘Saved by the Sea,’ please contact us at info@bluefront.org
Alternet.org
Unfortunately, when it comes to climate change legislation, all signs are pointing to system failure.
April 15, 2010 |
If that plucky, animated, singing scrap of paper from Schoolhouse Rock!–“(I’m Just a) Bill”–were around today, he’d be begging us to keep him out of the Senate. That’s where good ideas go to get their teeth knocked out, to get fattened with pork and disfigured with loopholes, coming out the other end as Frankenstein versions of the initiatives they once were. We’re left asking, Is this creature something we can live with and improve over time, as was the case with healthcare reform? Or is the result so hopelessly compromised that it ought never see the light of day?
Unfortunately, when it comes to climate change legislation, all signs are pointing to system failure. Congress urgently needs to pass a comprehensive climate bill, but the current Senate proposal, spearheaded by senators Kerry, Lieberman and Graham, threatens to do more harm than good. It is not only inadequate to the task of curbing climate change; it could curtail the power of the EPA and state governments to regulate greenhouse gases–the best avenues for action in the face of Congress’s failures.
The cap-and-trade bill that Obama originally proposed was by no means perfect. It did not even try to meet the target of reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 25 percent below 1990 levels by 2020, what the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says is minimally necessary from industrialized nations to avoid a chain-reaction climate catastrophe. But it did include a key mechanism that environmentalists regard as essential for cap and trade to work effectively: it would have auctioned off 100 percent of carbon credits, rather than giving them away, thereby raising funds that could be used to offset the burden of higher energy prices on low- and middle-income families and be invested in renewable energy.
By the time the 1,427-page Waxman-Markey bill squeaked through the House last June, however, those crucial elements of the Obama proposal had been eviscerated. Waxman-Markey would sell only 15 percent of carbon credits at an initial auction, with the rest doled out to polluters, free. Waxman-Markey also includes other concessions to the fossil fuel industry–most alarming, stripping the EPA of much of its regulatory power over greenhouse gases (see Christian Parenti, “The Case for EPA Action,” in this issue).
The outlook in the Senate is, if anything, worse. At this writing, its final details have not been released, but from early reports it appears that the Kerry-Lieberman-Graham bill would keep and extend the worst aspects of Waxman-Markey: inadequate emissions-reduction targets (only 3 percent below 1990 levels by 2020), too many free permits and too many allowances for carbon offsets, which are of dubious value in fighting climate change (see Heather Rogers, “Offset Buyers Beware,” in this issue).
Kerry-Lieberman-Graham would by-pass an economywide cap-and-trade system, opting instead for a bundle of separate energy bills that would slowly phase in emissions reductions sector by sector. Some of these pieces of legislation may pass; others may fail; all are ripe for gaming by corporate lobbies. Kerry-Lieberman-Graham would also skew subsidies in the wrong direction, throwing billions at “clean coal” technologies, nuclear power plants and offshore drilling, a questionable gambit favored by the Obama administration to garner support from Republicans and representatives from oil-, gas- and coal-producing states.
Perhaps most troubling, Kerry-Lieberman-Graham would not only gut the EPA of its regulatory power but could also pre-empt regulations on greenhouse gases from states and municipalities. This would undo the considerable progress made by states like California–which have pioneered emissions reductions for automobiles, and regional cap-and-trade systems–and thwart the efforts of cities and towns to require developers and businesses to adopt clean energy technologies.
In the face of such maneuvers, some green groups, like Bill McKibben’s 350.org, are pushing instead for the CLEAR Act, written by senators Maria Cantwell and Susan Collins. The CLEAR Act’s cap-and-dividend system, which works by capping CO2-producing fossil fuels at the source or point of import, is an elegant idea; but its mandatory emissions targets are weaker than what’s needed. It covers only CO2 (not all greenhouse gases), and one of its prime virtues–that it’s just forty pages long!–means that it leaves a lot of vital details out of the picture. Still, it doesn’t pre-empt the EPA or state regulations, and its leanness means that it’s not laden with pork and industrial giveaways.
Between the two, the CLEAR Act is preferable, on the grounds that it would do less harm and possibly as much or more good. But let’s be very clear: our legislative process–which allows parochial short-term interests and massive corporate lobbies to undermine the long-term common interests–has proven shockingly inadequate to the monumental task before us: the preservation of the conditions of life for much of the human species. For that we will need action on more than just the Congressional front. The vigorous grassroots movement to halt the construction of new coal-fired plants–which Robert S. Eshelman profiles in “Cracking Big Coal,” in this issue–offers a model of what determined, savvy activists can accomplish in the absence of national leadership. But we also need action from the executive branch, from states, cities, businesses and citizens. As it stands, the Kerry-Lieberman-Graham bill would vitiate many of these forums while strengthening the position of the nuclear, natural gas and coal industries. For that reason, we regretfully urge its defeat.
http://www.sfbg.com/2010/04/13/drowned-out
The reason I posted this is because it has implications for dolphins as well as whales. Dolphins are found in the same tropical waters as coral reefs. DeeVon
San Francisco Bay Guardian
Drowned out
GREEN ISSUE:
Endangered whales may be threatened by a noisy side-effect of globalization
04.13.10 – 4:24 pm | Rebecca Bowe | (0)
Ships create a two-pronged threat to whales, creating noise pollution and sometimes ramming them to death
PHOTO BY JOHN CALAMBOKIDIS/CASCADIAN RESEARCH COLLECTIVE
rebeccab@sfbg.com
GREEN ISSUE The tiny, rigid-hull inflatable boats that researchers at Scripps Institution of Oceanography use for whale tagging are a mere fraction of the size of the blue whales they are deployed to search for. But Scripps PhD candidate Megan McKenna says there’s no reason to worry about the mammoth creatures – which can weigh as many tons as 27 elephants put together – bumping up against the boat when she reaches overboard with a pole to tag them.
“They’re just pretty mellow, I guess,” McKenna says. “There’s no flailing or anything. Some barely even notice that we’re there.” For two summers, she’s ventured out in pursuit of the endangered whales, popping short-term monitoring tags on them to learn how they behave when massive cargo shipping vessels motor past.
It’s an important question for a couple of reasons. Government funding was provided for the Scripps study after two blue whales were struck and killed by commercial shipping vessels in 2007, tragedies magnified by the fact that the marine mammals are still struggling for survival. If even two die in such collisions every few years, the entire species could be imperiled, McKenna says.
At the same time, a less-understood phenomenon has marine scientists worried that the deep-blue giants’ survival is being undermined by a subtler problem, that Jackie Dragon of San Francisco-based Pacific Environment likens to “death by a thousand cuts.” Noise generated by whirring ship propellers registers at the same frequency as the low tones whales use to communicate and forage for food, and researchers are concerned that the constant interruption is affecting their ability to engage in basic survival behavior.
Put together with an array of concerns including chemical pollution, marine debris, over-fishing, and ocean acidification, noise pollution is just coming onto the sonar of local marine sanctuary councils and federal environmental agencies, and proposed solutions are only in the fledgling stages.
Pacific Environment is one of several environmental organizations advocating for shipping vessels to travel at slower speeds, a quieter practice that also reduces the chances of hitting a whale. Despite growing evidence that noise pollution and ship strikes pose big problems for the planet’s largest mammals, it’s likely to be an uphill battle in an growing global industry where time is money, and on-time delivery is paramount.
Endangered whales favor the Gulf of the Farallones and Cordell Bank sanctuaries, not far from San Francisco, so Pacific Environment has chartered a catamaran to take ecologically-minded whale watchers out to what Dragon dubs the “Yosemites of the sea.” Using hydrophones, they capture the deep, rumbling whale calls. They also pick up noise generated by commercial ships, whose designated lanes cut directly through the protected areas.
Under just the right ocean conditions, the low, eerie mating call of a male blue whale off the coast of California can be heard by a female off the coast of Hawaii. “That just has to do with the physics of sound in the ocean,” McKenna explains. “They’re vocal animals. You can think of sound in the ocean as our vision. Sound travels so much better in water than light does, so it’s really an acoustic environment that they’re living in.”
McKenna is working with whale researchers John Calambokidis of the Cascadia Research Collective and John Hildebrand of Scripps Institution. While they’ve observed that some whales linger at the surface longer than usual after a ship has passed, leaving them vulnerable to a strike, there are no conclusive results as of yet.
To explain the noise impacts, Dragon uses an analogy of trying to communicate in a crowded bar where it’s difficult to hear. “In the ocean, sound is king,” she says. “This chronic, noisy, foggy environment … has a masking effect. It might mean whales will not be able to navigate correctly, or may not be able to communicate with mates or offspring.”
The Gulf of the Farallones National Marine Sanctuary supports a rare concentration of blue whales, partly because the water is rich in nutrients, biodiversity, and tiny, shrimp-like creatures called krill. Blue whales and endangered humpbacks forage there from April through November, the colossal blues consuming an astounding 4 tons of krill each day.
At an April 8 joint meeting between the Gulf of the Farallones and Cordell Bank marine sanctuary advisory councils, the groups discussed creating a working group – bringing together stakeholders from the U.S. Coast Guard, shipping industries, and others – to establish a set of recommendations for how to regulate noise pollution in the sanctuaries.
“The purpose is to better understand the issue from the standpoint of the sanctuary,” explains Lance Morgan, who chairs the Cordell Bank council. “Ideally, we’d produce a report that says, here’s what we think the issues are.”
Yet Morgan acknowledges that it won’t be easy to get the federal government to impose new sanctuary regulations since there are still so many outstanding questions. “We’re learning a lot about the acoustic environment,” he says. One concern is whether whales are actually able to perceive the sound of the giant shipping vessels, he notes, since the environment has become so noisy. If they can’t hear the ships, they’re at a much higher risk of collision. “We certainly know we can drown out whale calls in certain situations,” he says, “but what does that mean in the long term?”
There are around 14,000 blue whales left across the entire watery globe, according to the most optimistic estimates, just a sliver of the estimated 300,000 that lived before they were nearly harpooned to extinction during a ruthless whaling era. Scientists are encouraged that their numbers have climbed since the mid-1960s when they were listed as endangered.
Yet even with this mild success story as a backdrop, there is growing concern about potential long-term effects of underwater industrial noise. Navy sonar, military air guns, and blasts from seismic surveys all contribute to the problem at varying frequencies. The collective din of ocean noise has doubled every decade since the 1950s, and the shipping business is only expected to grow.
Maersk, the world’s largest shipping company, runs weekly container ships from Hong Kong to ports in Oakland and Long Beach, a journey lasting more than two weeks. Getting the goods there on time is “the most important thing to our customers,” says Lee Kindberg, the company’s environment director.
The container ships arrive crammed full of everything from electronics – which require special climate-controlled containers – to clothing, bath products, household items, and pharmaceuticals. Perishable items are transported in refrigerators, consuming a third more energy and powered by auxiliary engines. Up to 8,000 containers can be packed onto a single ship, and the average vessel size has expanded around 20 percent in the past five years. More than 90 percent of the world’s traded goods are transported by water, with shipments on container vessels increasingly rapidly.
If ever there was an icon for globalization, and all that the buy-local and sustainability movements rail against, it would be a diesel-powered container ship transporting heavily packaged stuff halfway across the globe.
Special thanks to Richard Charter
http://www.sfbg.com/2010/04/13/dawn-earth-day
San Francisco Bay Guardian
The dawn of Earth Day
GREEN ISSUE: The largest secular holiday in the world was born in 1970 – and its chief organizer has lessons for the movement 40 years later
04.13.10 – 3:56 pm | Tim Redmond |
GREEN ISSUE
The heavens welcomed Earth Day to America. All over the country, April 22, 1970 dawned clear and sunny; mild weather made it even easier to bring people into the streets. The Capitol Mall was packed, and so many members of Congress were making speeches and appearing at events that both houses adjourned for the day.
Mayors, governors, aldermen, village trustees, elementary school kids, Boy Scout troops, labor unions, college radicals, and even business groups participated. In fact, the only organization in the nation that actively opposed Earth Day was the Daughters of the American Revolution, which warned ominously that “subversive elements plan to make American children live in an environment that is good for them.”
By nightfall, more than 20 million people had participated in the First National Environmental Teach-In, as the event was formally known. It established the environmental movement in the United States and helped spur the passage of numerous laws and the creation of hundreds of activist groups.
It was, by almost all accounts, a phenomenal success, an event that dwarfed the largest single-day civil rights and antiwar demonstrations of the era – and the person who ran it, 25-year-old Denis Hayes, wasn’t happy.
His concern with the nascent movement back then says a lot about where environmentalism is 40 years later.
Gaylord Nelson, a mild-mannered U.S. senator from Wisconsin, came up with the idea of Earth Day on a flight from Santa Barbara to Oakland. Nelson was the kind of guy who doesn’t get elected to the Senate these days – a polite, friendly small-town guy who was anything but a firebrand.
A balding, 52-year-old World War II veteran who survived Okinawa, Nelson was a Democrat and generally a liberal vote, but he got along fine with the die-hard conservatives. He kept a fairly low profile, and did a lot of his work behind the scenes.
But long before it was popular, Nelson was an ardent environmentalist – and he was always looking for ways to bring the future of the planet into the popular consciousness.
In August 1969, Nelson was on a West Coast speaking tour – and one of his mandatory stops was the small coastal city that seven months earlier had become ground zero for the environmental movement. Indeed, a lot of historians say that Earth Day 1970 was the coming out party for modern environmentalism – but the spark that made it possible, the event that turned observers into activists, took place Jan. 28, 1969 in Santa Barbara.
About 3:30 on a Tuesday afternoon, a photographer from the Santa Barbara News Press got the word that something had gone wrong on one of the Union Oil drilling platforms in the channel just offshore. The platforms were fairly new – the federal government had sold drilling rights in the area in February 1968 for $603 million, and Union was in the process of drilling its fourth offshore well. The company had convinced the U.S. Geological Survey to relax the safety rules for underwater rigs, saying there was no threat of a spill.
But shortly after the drill bit struck oil 3,478 feet beneath the surface, the rig hit a snag – and when the workers got the equipment free, oil began exploding out. Within two weeks, more than 3 million gallons of California crude was on the surface of the Pacific Ocean, and a lot of it had washed ashore, fouling the pristine beaches of Santa Barbara and fueling an angry popular backlash nationwide.
Nelson received an overwhelming reception at his Santa Barbara talk – and horrified as he was by the spill, he was glad that an environmental concern was suddenly big news.
But, as he told me in an interview years ago, he still wasn’t sure what the next steps ought to be – until, bored on an hour-long flight to his next speech in Berkeley, he picked up a copy of Ramparts magazine.
The radical left publication, once described as having “a bomb in every issue,” wasn’t Nelson’s typical reading material. But this particular issue was devoted to a new trend on college campuses – day-long “teach-ins” on the Vietnam War.
Huh, Nelson thought. A teach-in. That’s an intriguing idea.
Hayes was a student in the prestigious joint program in law and public policy at Harvard. He’d been something of a campus activist, protesting against the war, but hadn’t paid much attention to environmental issues. He needed a public-interest job of some sort for a class project, though, so when he read a newspaper article about the senator who was planning a national environmental teach-in, he called and offered to organize the effort in Boston. Nelson invited him to Washington, was impressed by his Harvard education and enthusiasm, and hired him to run the whole show.
The senator was very clear from the start: the National Environmental Teach-In would not be a radical Vietnam-style protest. The event would be nonpartisan, polite, and entirely legal. Hayes and his staffers chafed a bit at the rules (and the two Senate staffers Nelson placed in the Earth Day office to keep an eye on things), and they ultimately set up a separate nonprofit called the Environmental Action Foundation to take more aggressive stands on issues.
Meanwhile, Hayes did the job he was hired to do – and did it well. Everywhere he turned, from small towns to big corporations, people wanted to plug in, to be a part of the first Earth Day. Many wanted to do nice, noncontroversial projects: In Knoxville, Tenn., students decided to scour rivers and streams for trash to see if they could each clean up the five pounds of garbage the average American threw away each day. In dozens of communities, people organized tree-plantings. In New York, Mayor John Lindsay led a parade down Fifth Avenue.
A few of the actions were more dramatic. A few protesters smashed a car to bits, and in Boston, 200 people carried coffins into Logan International Airport in a symbolic “die-in” against airport expansion. In Omaha, Neb., so many college students walked around in gas masks that the stores ran out. But it was, Hayes realized, an awful lot of talk and not a lot of action. The participants were also overwhelmingly white and middle-class.
Hayes wasn’t the only one feeling that way. In New York, author Kurt Vonnegut, speaking from a platform decorated with a giant paper sunflower, added a note of cynicism.
“Here we are again, the peaceful demonstrators,” he said, “mostly young and mostly white. Good luck to us, for I don’t know what sporting event the president [Richard Nixon] may be watching at the moment. He should help us make a fit place for human beings to live. Will he do it? No. So the war will go on. Meanwhile, we go up and down Fifth Avenue, picking up trash.”
Hayes finally broke with the politics of his mentor early on Earth Day morning when it was too late to fire him. The next day, the National Environmental Teach-In office would close and the organization would shut down. From that moment on, he could say what he liked and not worry who he offended.
“I suspect,” he told a crowd gathered at the Capitol Mall, “that the politicians and businessmen who are jumping on the environmental bandwagon don’t have the slightest idea what they are getting into. They are talking about filters on smokestacks while we are challenging corporate irresponsibility. They are bursting with pride about plans for totally inadequate municipal sewage plants.
We are challenging the ethics of a society that, with only 6 percent of the world’s population, accounts for more than half the world’s annual consumption of raw materials.
“We are building a movement,” he continued, “a movement with a broad base, a movement that transcends traditional political boundaries. It is a movement that values people more than technology and political ideologies, people more than profit.
“It will be a difficult fight. Earth Day is the beginning.”
I first met Hayes in 1990, near the office in Palo Alto where he was planning the 20th anniversary of Earth Day. He’d continued his environmental work inside and outside government, at one point running the National Energy Laboratory under President Jimmy Carter. Earth Day 20 was shaping up as a gigantic event, one that would ultimately involve 200 million people around the globe. Earth Day was becoming the largest secular holiday on the planet.
Hayes was excited about the event, which he was running this time without the moderating influence of a U.S. senator. And he was aiming for a much more activist message – in fact, at that point, he was pretty clear that the U.S. environmental movement was running out of time.
“Twenty years ago, Earth Day was a protest movement,” he told a crowd of more than 300,000 in Washington, D.C. “We no longer have time to protest. The most important problems facing our generation will be won or lost in the next 10 years. We cannot protest our losses. We have to win.”
And now another 20 years have passed – and by many accounts, we are not winning. Climate change continues, and even accelerates; an attempt at a global accord just failed; and Congress can’t even pass a mild, watered-down bill to limit carbon emissions.
And Hayes, now president of the Bullitt Foundation, a sustainability organization in Seattle, thinks the movement has a serious problem. “Earth Day has succeeded in being the ultimate big tent,” he told me by phone recently. “To some rather great extent, is had some measure of success.”
But he noted that “in American politics these days, it’s not the breadth of support, it’s the intensity that matters. Environmentalists tend to be broadly progressive people who care about war and the economy and health care. They aren’t single-issue voters. And somehow, the political intensity is missing.”
Hayes isn’t advocating that environmentalists forget about everything else and ignore all the other issues – or that the movement lose its broad-based appeal – but he said it’s time to bring political leaders and policies under much, much sharper scrutiny and to “stop accepting a voting record of 80 percent.”
It’s hard today to be bipartisan, and compromise is unacceptable, Hayes told me. “I was probably right [in 1990],” he said. “If what you’re aspiring to do is stop the greenhouse gases before they do significant damage to the environment, it’s too late.” At this point, he said, it’s all about keeping the damage from turning into a widespread ecological disaster.
“I would like to see Earth Day 50 be a celebration,” he said. “I would like to see by then a real price on carbon, nuclear power not proliferating, and a profound, stable investment in cost-effective, distributed renewable energy.” But for that to happen, “we need to have a very intense core of environmental voters who realize that these threats to life on the planet are more important than a lot of other things.”