Ocean science and conservation, like any human enterprise, is subject to its fair share of internal messiness from time to time.  As someone whose expertise and experience intersects several discrete domains (coral reefs, sharks, marine protected areas, and policy), I’ve witnessed plenty of dust-ups, arguments, and spats over the years.  And this week’s flurry of discussion instigated by a New York Times editorial on ocean protected areas is just the latest kerfuffle. In his op-ed, Bigger Is Not Better for Conservation, coral reef scientist and California Academy of Sciences curator, Dr Luiz Rocha, argues that large-scale, remote marine reserves are a disservice to ocean conservation.  It’s Dr Rocha’s perspectives, however, that seem more damaging.

Rocha’s argument hinges on four key points:

1. The current tally of big, remote marine reserves is in low-conflict, easy to protect (ie, low-hanging fruit) areas of the ocean where human reliance upon them is negligible and therefore government willingness to protect is strong;
2. There’s nothing worth protecting in these big, remote areas;
3. More important, smaller, near-shore ocean areas with high levels of human use are in dire need of protection;
4. Marine protected areas should be science-based (eg, protected zones should be guided by “sustainable catch limits” of commercially targeted species).

Let’s go one-by-one to see if any of these points hold water. [Note: For the sake of brevity, I’ll be using the acronym MPA frequently in this piece for “marine protected area,” but it will also serve as shorthand for “marine reserve,” “protected area,” “locally managed marine area,” or “marine managed area.”  I recognize that an MPA may not be managed or enforced, but let’s forego that technicality for the moment.]

POINT 1: “Big MPAs are easy and less consequential.”
As of today, there are approximately 20 large-scale protected areas across the ocean (ranging from tens-of-thousands to millions of square kilometers in protected area).  This includes a range from the Marianas Marine National Monument’s 16,400 square kilometers to the 1.15 million square kilometers of the Papahānaumokuākea Marine National Monument in Hawai’i.  These MPAs may consist of fully-protected, no-take (no fishing/extraction) designation to protection that still allows multiple uses.  According to the folks at MPA Atlas, there are approximately 15,000 small, coastal MPAs around the world.  Some of these, like Cordelia Banks off the island of Roatan in the Bay of Honduras, encompass only 17 square kilometers.  Many are even smaller.  Totaling all of the massive/remote and small/near-shore MPAs together gets us to approximately 2% of the ocean under some form of protection.

The International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) World Conservation Congress, held in Hawai’i in September 2016, called for member nations to set aside “30% of each marine habitat” in “highly protected MPAs and other effective area-based conservation measures” by 2030, with the ultimate aim being ”a fully sustainable ocean, at least 30% of which has no extractive activities.”

For rhetorical effect, I’ll reiterate that as of March 23, 2018, only 2% of our global oceans is protected, and 2030 is only twelve years away.

As someone in the MPA biz, I can testify that there are at present a small handful of big, deep-pocketed, international NGOs working on big international MPAs: The Pew Charitable Trusts, Conservation International, Oceana, and National Geographic. These folks have the gravitas, influence, and resources to capture heads of state attention and convene forums necessary to get things done.  You can bitch all you want about the pros and cons, but this is the reality.  Alongside the big NGOs, there are tens-to-hundreds of small to medium-sized NGOs that are working simultaneously on everything from big/remote MPAs to smaller/near-shore MPAs.  Sometimes the big NGOs work in concert with the smaller ones.  Sometime not.  It’s all site dependent.

Having worked on everything from massive MPAs to tiny MPAs over my career, I can say that none of them were “easy wins.”  So-called “low hanging fruit” may represent a unique opportunity in time.  You may have a receptive government or local community that welcomes the process.  It’s always easier to work with the willing than the resistant.  But every MPA effort in which I’ve participated involved strategy, identifying champions, public consultations, negotiations, community organizing, building political will, battling nefarious characters, rebooting strategy, sweating-out votes, and of course finding funds to support all of this.  If there are “easy wins” out there, big or small, I sure would appreciate someone pointing me in that direction.

Protecting big/remote areas or smaller/near-shore areas is not an either/or game.  This is not a binary proposition of doing one or the other.  It’s a yes/also.  We need to protect small, not so small, medium, larger, big, bigger, and massive tracts of the ocean.  We need to protect what is easy to protect, and what is harder to protect.  We must gather every bit of low-hanging fruit, and plan to reach the currently out-of-reach fruit.  MPAs occupy a spectrum or continuum, and we need to be prepared to work with everything along that spectrum.  Some NGOs will have a mandate (and talent) for pursuing big swaths of ocean.  Others are more tuned to work on local needs.  But there is a lot of real estate between the biggest and smallest MPAs for organizations, individuals, and yes, even FUNDERS to find their niche.

POINT 2: “There’s nothing worth protecting.”
This is just wholesale wrong.  What is Rocha considering as “worth” protection?  Certainly, there are species whose entire life cycle may be captured by the boundaries of an MPA.  Other species may only spend a portion of their lives within the boundaries of protection.  Protected areas are designed to factor in these variables.  But not all MPAs are envisioned around biological significance alone.  The Monitor National Marine Sanctuary in North Carolina, the very first marine national monument designated by the United States in 1975, honors the historic significance of the shipwreck of the famed Civil War ironclad, USS Monitor.  Similarly, the Papahānaumokuākea Marine National Monument and the entire Northwestern Hawaiian Islands, including the 110 seamounts, open waters, and all life in that area are considered biocultural resources and linked to the Hawaiian people through environmental kinship.

The ocean as a cultural seascape is vital to Hawaiian identity, their being, and essential dimension to their cognitive understanding of the world.  The ocean waters in Papahānaumokuākea were an ancient pathway for a voyaging sphere that occurred between this region and the main Hawaiian islands for over 400-500 years (ca. AD 1300-1800).  The practice of traditional wayfinding and voyaging—recently popularized in the film Moana and which is one of the most unique living traditions of the world—requires protection of the entire marine environment and open waters, not just the islands and reefs, because it relies on biological signs and natural phenomenon, such as winds, waves, currents, and the presence of marine life and birds at key moments and locations.

At the same time as Papahānaumokuākea was successfully expanded in 2016 by President Obama, the State of Hawai’i also supporting the establishment of small, coastal community-managed makai areas, driven by and for the community.  Yes, both can happen at the same time and using the same human capital, as many of the same people fought for both the small makai areas and the big Papahānaumokuākea effort.

POINT 3: “There are more important, smaller places to protect.”
Importance is relative and subjective.  It is place-driven and context-heavy.  What is important to someone in Brazil, might be less so to someone in Hawai’i.  So instead of casting stones at our neighbors, perhaps we should recognize that there are seriously limited resources, conservation bandwidth, and political will, and try to triage our priorities.  I recognize that the reality is that not all NGOs/organizations like to play-well together.  Furthermore, some places and approaches are simply not tenable due to practical considerations and political and social realities.  Again, this is a reality of modern conservation.  But as I mention above, effective MPAs do not occupy one half of a binary state.  It’s not either small or large.  Remote or near-shore.  Fully managed/enforced or paper parks/un-enforced.  Every single MPA in existence occupies a position somewhere along a continuum of effectiveness.  Even an un-managed, unfunded, and unenforced MPA is a work in progress along that continuum.

POINT 4: “They’re not science-based.”
Science should help inform MPA zoning and designation.  No questions or arguments here.  But the science needed may at times be incomplete or lacking.  Many decisions around the world, particularly in developing nations, on “sustainable catch limits” are not acted upon because data is deficient.  Should we be expected to wait for the science to be decided and settled (whatever that might mean) before action/conservation measures can be activated?  And science is but one arrow in our quiver that we should use to scope, establish, and manage MPAs.  The social sciences and economics are also driving MPA priorities and planning.

Finally…
I find an editorial like Rocha’s to be, quite frankly, dangerous.  Staking-out a claim on one side of a false dichotomy or constructing straw man arguments is the purview of graduate school.  I get it… Rocha would like to see more love shown to near shore/coral reef areas (including where he has worked in Brazil).  But what is the benefit to conservation as a whole to publish these half-baked propositions that large, remote MPAs are a waste of time in the pages of The New York Times and under the banner of an august and internationally recognized organization like the California Academy of Sciences?  We are not currently living in normal times, and this sort of rhetoric plays right into the hands of those keen to see less ocean protection, not more.

For the first time in US history, an administration is rolling back protections on national monuments, both land and sea.  Australia just this week has announced the possibility of cutting in half the protections for the Coral Seas MPA.  Conservation in one place in the ocean is not the enemy of conservation in another place.  And MPAs are not a binary switch of either big or small…  Local or remote…  Fully protected or not.  If we are going to get to the IUCN recommended target of 30% of our oceans under strong protection by 2030, we need to ramp up protections everywhere along the MPA continuum.  Yes/Also should become our mantra!  We must embrace a process of continuous improvement in our MPA work, not display a reflex of undercutting other conservation efforts.  And we need to keep our focus and attention on the real threats to a healthy ocean: over-fishing, illegal fishing, pollution, climate change, and lack of political will for action.

The post Embracing Yes/Also: Marine Protected Areas Are Not An Either/Or Proposition first appeared on Deep Sea News.

Eric Heupel is a graduate student at University of Connecticut in Oceanography. He keeps a personal blog at Eclectic Echoes and Larval Images, and used to be part of The Other 95% team along with me before we closed shop. You can find Eric tweeting as @eclecticechoes.

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A few weeks ago there was an op-ed piece in the New York Times by Prof. Ray Hilborn which asserted that people should eat more fish, and do it without guilt. I agree that people should eat fish. I know I enjoy it weekly. I also agree with many of the points he brings up, but I have to disagree with a few key assertions he makes and I come to an entirely different conclusion about the state of American fish stocks.

Prof. Hilborn points out that many stocks and the management of fisheries have improved drastically over the past decade (true) and that, as an example, Acadian redfish and haddock from the New England Coasts groundfish fisheries have had six fold abundance increases (again true). He acknowledges that these two species are part of the complex mutli-technology multi-species groundfish fishery, which also includes cod and four species of flounder (among others), whose stocks have not improved and remain classified as overfished. This fishery is dominated by demersal trawlers, which drag otter trawls across the bottom. While there are mesh size limits, the otter trawl is a very unselective method of fishing, bringing up any fish in the way, target and non-target species. Some of the non-target species include cusk and wolffish, two species that many have recently argued should be listed as endangered species and are currently classified as species of concern under the Endangered Species Act. There are new trawl net designs which will target haddock preferentially over cod, flounder and several other groundfish based on different flight responses to trawl net approaches, but they have not yet been widely adopted. While the groundfish fishery is dominated by trawlers (80%), there is also a hook and line fishery for haddock. The hook and line fishery is very selective. If you want a haddock for dinner, the hook and line caught haddock is a great choice.

Interestingly, Prof. Hilborn points to the Fishery Stock Sustainability Index (FSSI) to make the claim that, “Few if any fish species in the United States are now being harvested at too high a rate, and only 24 percent remain below the desired abundance.” Even if I could come to the same conclusion from reading the latest FSSI, his statement would mean, to me, that the management improvements of the past 10-15 years are starting to work, and now we need to improve as much of the remaining 24 percent as we can. Unfortunately the FSSI does not say this. First, Prof. Hilborn states that only 24 percent of the stocks remain below desired abundance, yet the FSSI states we don’t even know if 53 of the 230 (23%) tracked stocks are overfished or not and only 110 stocks of 230 (48%) are at or above the maximum sustainable yield (the desired “abundance” for most stocks).

The FSSI is basically a fisheries management report card evaluating 230 key recreational and commercially important marine fish stocks and their management. Each stock is graded from 0 to 4 based on 5 criteria – 0.5 points for the “overfished” status being known, 0.5 points for the “overfishing” status being known, 1 point if overfishing is not currently occurring, 1 point for stocks with biomass above the overfished level defined for that stock, and finally 1 point for species with biomass above the maximum sustainable yield at or above 80% of the biomass maximum sustainable yield. Stocks which were previously classified as overfished do not receive the final point until they are considered “fully rebuilt” by reaching biomass maximum sustainable yield, a condition mandated by the Magnuson-Stevens Act.

With 230 stocks evaluated, the maximum score is a 920. The most recent quarterly evaluation (pdf file) (Jan to March 2011) yielded a score of 583 or 63%. If we use the report card analogy and assigning a letter grade, that would be a “D”. While I applaud the recent gains in stocks and the management methods that have helped bring them about, I don’t think a D is a grade to celebrate. Prof. Hilborn appears to be saying, ”Thats good enough! Time to return to the more lenient management of the 80s and early 90s.” I wish we were there, and we could be in another decades or so, but sadly we really aren’t there yet. We certainly won’t get there if we start fishing more too soon.

All of this assumes that our current management schemes and the way they are evaluated are working towards the appropriate goals. I am not convinced that we are managing for the right goals. Most of our fisheries management is for single stocks. Even in the multi-species stocks, the management of the collected stocks is for the biomass or abundance of the individual species, because they are most often caught together with non-specific gear. There has not been, until very recently, any substantial effort to protect essential fish habitat, or to examine the ecosystem implications of fisheries beyond the target species.

The Magnuson-Stevens Act (MSA) was enacted to “take immediate action to conserve and manage the fishery resources found off the coasts of the United States.” The definition of “conserve and manage” includes the explicitly listed requirement to assure that “(ii) irreversible and long-term adverse effects on fishery resources and the marine environment are avoided” (16 U.S.C. 1802, MSA Section 3(5)(B)(ii)). President G.W. Bush’s Stewardship of the Ocean, Our Coasts, and the Great Lakes executive order further explicitly stated that “it is the policy of the United States to: (i) protect, maintain and restore the health and biological diversity of ocean, coastal and Great Lakes ecosystems and resources; (ii) improve the resiliency of ocean, coastal and Great Lakes ecosystems, communities and economies.” While I agree it may never be possible to make the oceans pristine again (shifting baselines – we’ve forgotten what pristine is anyways) it seems clear to me from these documents that we must continue to do everything possible to protect not only individual fish stocks and fisheries, but the biodiversity of our seas and ecosystem health of our seas as well. This is something that has only recently been able to be implemented into fisheries management at all.

Prof. Hilborn concludes his editorial by throwing up a false choice between easing fishing regulations now or accepting terrestrial habitat loss, more dead zones, and water pollution: “environmental costs of producing meat on land are much higher than accepting fewer fish in the ocean”. Of course, we have regulations (Clean Water Act) to limit industrial run-off, including from meat production, which covers all of the impacts he points to except one: habitat. Interesting. Does fishing not destroy habitat then? The truth is that it does, especially trawling. I would suggest that part of our improved ecosystem and biodiversity management needs to be a focus on marine habitat. We need to set aside many more areas explicitly to protect the range of benthic habitats, especially those which include sensitive and vulnerable benthic species such as cold water corals, sea pens, etc. The beautiful part is, protecting these habitats (and allowing those that are impacted to fully recover), is not only protecting biodiversity and improving the health of the local marine ecosystem, but it will also improve the health of many fish stocks as well.

I agree, eat fish, and do it guilt free by using guides from Monterey Bay Aquarium’s Seafood Watch or the Blue Ocean Institute’s Seafood Guide or looking for the MSC certification logo. Far from being time to revise the MSA to relax policies, I think it is time to continue to implement the full definition of “conserve and manage” to include ecosystem health and the protection of biodiversity.

The post Scientist in Residence: Is It Time to Relax Fishing Regulations? first appeared on Deep Sea News.

Mr. Fleming, who says he became committed to Ms. Cobb “before her high-priestess phase,” describes their conflicts as good-natured — mostly.

But he refuses to go out to eat sushi with her anymore, he said, because he cannot stand to hear her quiz the waiters.

“None of it is sustainable or local,” he said, “and I am not eating cod or rockfish.”

That’s so sad. The guy lives in Santa Barbara CA and he can’t find tasty seafood to eat? (Also, cod and rockfish are not necessarily sustainable.) I’m no fan of preachiness, but what surprised me about this article was how trivial all the disagreements were. He can’t stand to have his girlfriend ask where the seafood comes from? Another woman’s sister can’t be bothered to recycle cardboard? Someone’s mother won’t eat off reusable plates? This isn’t exactly selling all of one’s possessions and living off the grid in a van down by the river.

But maybe that’s just my delicate ladybrain talking, since according to the article:

Women, Ms. Birkhahn said, often see men as not paying sufficient attention to the home. Men, for their part, “really want to make a large impact and aren’t interested in a small impact,” she said.

How can men make manly large impacts? The NYT doesn’t say, but somehow I doubt that the people in this article spend all day writing their representatives and hand-feeding injured sharks. Perhaps the only kind of conservation that really sells is the dinosaur-riding ass-kicking kind.

The post Seafood Watch breaks up another relationship first appeared on Deep Sea News.

[sic]

To whom it may concern,
After reviewing your comments concerning the Sea Shepard, it is quite apparent that you do not appose the killing of whales by the Japanese!! It is also apparent that you support such actions by these savages!! The efforts that the crew of the Sea Shepard have put into such a mission, I’m sure is more then any of you have accomplished in a lifetime. It’s to bad there are poeple like you who only bring negativity through the media. Their couragous fight will continue!!!!

With Much regret,
D.L. [full name removed]
[location removed]
Animal and Marine Advocate

We always appreciate our readers emailing us and expressing their opinions. Ad hominem attacks not so much.  There is no doubt that our Sea Shepherd post has energized a certain contingent.  What continues to bother me is that people believe certain that topics or institutions are above critical examination.  You cannot critique religion or church, United States government, conservation organizations, nonprofits, and many others.  To do such is to be labeled antireligious, unamerican, a commie pinko bastard or, as purported by D.L., a person supporting whaling  by the Japanese.  But a firm commitment to any cause, including conservation, is a consistent reexamination to ensure that goals are being met.  T0 proceed in an ineffective manner that wastes time and funds, or is even detrimental to the cause, does a disservice to stakeholders, donors, and those dedicated to the particular mission at hand.

To not regularly reexamine an organization’s actions means you deteriorate the very cause you are working for. Sea Shepherd consistently dodges criticisms and point to anecdotes that favor its positions without providing evidence that can be corroborated by an uninvolved party.  Currently, there is more support for whale conservation than ever among the public.  You would be hard pressed to find someone who says “Let’s kill the whales!” A thoughtful and strategic plan that capitalizes on this growing public support is likely to make great advancements.  Yet Sea Shepherd has adopted an ecoterrorism approach instead of environmentalism, polarizing the public much the same way PETA and the Animal Liberation Front do.  A peer-reviewed, academic paper written by experts on global terrorism trends and Sea Shepherd  found it difficult to classify the organization

“… we also note that on the one hand, it may be possible to argue that in some respects the Sea Shepherds may constitute either a “blind spot” in the literature on terrorism and political violence, because its actions could in some circumstances be considered activism, militant direct action, piracy, vigilantism, terrorism, or eco-defense, which makes it very difficult to classify. On the other hand, that both the Sea Shepherds and the whalers may both engage in illegal activities, but are not prosecuted, may indicate that states and the international community may have neither the will nor the means to enforce laws against them. Therefore, they may be turning a blind eye to their actions.”

The authors concluded that

“Despite the ambiguity surrounding their legal status and academic interpretations of their actions, the results of nearly three decades of the organization’s activities, including its 2007 campaign to disrupt Japanese Antarctic Whaling, suggest that the Sea Shepherds may be best categorized as a vigilante group, because they claim they are seeking to enforce a legal status quo because of states’ and the international community’s inabilities or unwillingness to do so.”

If we look at the United Nations Convention on the High Seas (Article 101) and the Convention on the Law of the Sea the definition of piracy is

(a) any illegal acts of violence or detention, or any act of depredation committed for private ends by the crew or the passengers of a private ship or a private aircraft, and directed

(i) on the high seas, against another ship or aircraft, or against persons or property on board such ship or aircraft
(ii) against a ship, aircraft, persons or property in a place outside the jurisdiction of any State;

(b) any act of voluntary participation in the operation of the ship or of an aircraft with knowledge of facts making it a pirate ship or aircraft.

Sea Shepherd are pirates (and characterize themselves as such), and many countries (Canada, Britain, Australia, New Zealand, Belize, United States) now have revoked registry for the group.  Sea Shepherd cannot fly several countries’ flags in disregard of maritime law.

GreenPeace has even criticized Sea Shepard:

Paul Watson became active with Greenpeace in 1971 as a member of our second expedition against nuclear weapons testing in Amchitka, and went on to participate in actions against whaling and the killing of harp seals.  He was an influential early member but not, as he sometimes claims, a founder. He was expelled from the leadership of Greenpeace in 1977 by a vote of 11 to one (only Watson himself voted against it). Bob Hunter (one of Greenpeace’s early leaders, after whom a Sea Shepherd vessel was named) described the event in his book, the Greenpeace Chronicles:

‘No one doubted his [Watson’s] courage for a moment. He was a great warrior brother. Yet in terms of the Greenpeace gestalt, he seemed possessed by too powerful a drive, too unrelenting a desire to push himself front and center, shouldering everyone else aside… He had consistently gone around to other offices, acting out the role of mutineer. Everywhere he went, he created divisiveness… We all felt we’d got trapped in a web no one wanted to see develop, yet now that it had, there was nothing to do but bring down the axe, even if it meant bringing it down on the neck of our brother.”

Watson founded his own group, Sea Shepherd, in 1977.

• in 1986, Sea Shepherd carried out an action against the Icelandic whaling station in Hvalfjoerdur and sank two Icelandic whaling vessels in Reykjavik harbor by opening their sea valves;[1]
• in December 1992, Sea Shepherd sank the vessel Nybroena in port;[2]
• Sea Shepherd claimed to have sank the Taiwanese drift net ship Jiang Hai in port in Taiwan and to have rammed and disabled four other Asian drift net ships;[3]
• a Canadian court ordered Watson and his former ship, the Cleveland Armory, to pay a total of $35,000 for ramming a Cuban fishing vessel off the coast of Newfoundland in June 1993;[4]
• in January 1994 the group severely damaged the whaling ship Senet in the Norwegian port of Gressvik.[5]

Each of the whaling ships noted above was refloated and refitted for continued whaling…Although Paul Watson is a vehement anti-whaling activist, he regularly lends his support to attacks on Greenpeace — some of them organized by the whalers themselves. [8]…We passionately want to stop whaling, and will do so peacefully. That’s why we won’t help Sea Shepherd. Greenpeace is committed to non-violence and we’ll never, ever, change that; not for anything. If we helped Sea Shepherd to find the whaling fleet we’d be responsible for anything they did having got that information, and history shows that they’ve used violence in the past, in the most dangerous seas on Earth. For us, non-violence is a non-negotiable, precious principle. Greenpeace will continue to act to defend the whales, but will never attack or endanger the whalers.We differ with Paul Watson on what constitutes violence. He states that nobody has ever been harmed by a Sea Shepherd action.  But the test of non-violence is the nature of your action, not whether harm results or not.  There are many acts of violence — for example, holding a gun to someone’s head — which result in no harm.  That doesn’t change their nature. We believe that throwing butryic acid at the whalers, dropping cables to foul their props, and threatening to ram them in the freezing waters of the Antarctic constitutes violence because of the potential consequences. The fact that the consequences have not been realized is irrelevant. In addition to being morally wrong, we believe the use of violence in protection of whales to be a tactical error. If there’s one way to harden Japanese public opinion and ensure whaling continues, it’s to use violent tactics against their fleet. It’s wrong because it puts human lives at risk, and it’s wrong because it makes the whalers stronger in Japan…Disabling a ship at sea in the Antarctic, regardless of how much one may object to its activities, is not only a callous act of disregard for human life — it’s courting an environmental disaster in one of the most fragile environments in the world. (see article at GreenPeace for information on footnotes, especially [8])

From a New York Times article

In “Earthforce!,” Watson advises readers to make up facts and figures when they need to, and to deliver them to reporters confidently, “as Ronald Reagan did.” Several years after ramming the Sierra, Watson gave himself the title of captain, though he does not have a captain’s license. “He loves to dress up in uniform, as ‘Captain Paul Watson,’ and suddenly there’s enough gold braid on his shoulders to skipper the Queen Mary,” David Sellers, an old friend and former Sea Shepherd crew member, told me. In the eighties, Sellers and Watson fought so bitterly over the seaworthiness of Watson’s ship that they did not speak for fifteen years. (Sellers, a licensed captain, had insisted that it was not safe for ocean travel.) Many of Watson’s colleagues from the seventies and eighties no longer work with him; they have grown tired either of the campaigns or of Watson’s style of leadership—“anarchy run by God,” a longtime volunteer called it. “He doesn’t like people who disagree with him.”

Watson’s brand of truthiness is often criticized by other conservation organizations and conservationists. Even among organizations who have similar end goals, they are deemed as destructive to the overall cause of conservation. Yet those opposing Watson’s acts, people often very committed to the ultimate cause, are demonized by the organization’s supporters.  The general public is often turned off by the extremism.  Reducing your support, dividing your base, making enemies of your compatriots, and relying on blind faith is not effective conservation.

Whether we here at DSN have accomplished anything for marine conservation through our writings, research, volunteering, support of effective organizations like MCBI, Oceana, or CORAL, is for our readers to decide. We may not be experts in how to accomplish conservation, but we are certainly knowledgeable enough to understand how to not achieve said goals.

Nagtzaam, G., & Lentini, P. (2008). Vigilantes on the High Seas?: The Sea Shepherds and Political Violence Terrorism and Political Violence, 20 (1), 110-133 DOI: 10.1080/09546550701723658

-Signed Dr. M and Kevin Z

The post We Get Mail – Sea Shepherd Shenanigans Edition first appeared on Deep Sea News.

Consider Through the Sandglass, for example (my favorite story on the Sandfish here). The blog by Michael Welland offers “musings on sand grains.” The author writes brief essays on news related to the biology, geology, and climatology of sand, with subjective insights from a knowledgeable expert. I like it. Its seems to be the epitomy of a niche blog. Subjective information from a knowledgeable expert… hmm. Its practically the opposite of mainstream media.

Can we really call Through the Sandglass a niche blog? Silicon is the second most abundant element on Earth. The warm desert is the largest terrestrial biome on Earth. Add sand from the world’s beaches, rivers, and continental shelves, and pretty soon you will find that Sandglass covers a good part of Earth (even other planets). The oceans cover a large part of Earth, too, most of which  is deep-sea. Like our motto says “we bring you all the news on the Earth’s largest environment.” Hardly a day goes by without something happening in the desert or the deep blue sea.

So, who are you calling niche blog, Mr. Reviewer Person? All you do is reviews? Compare the scope of the deep-sea or sand to the scope of the New York Times or the Washington Post. Their stories are just … all humans, all the time.  If you’re looking for the full story, niche blogs provide a good complement to contemporary media.

The post Who are you calling a niche blog? first appeared on Deep Sea News.

New York Times Live Presents

Stories from a Changing Planet

A TimesTalk Event

WHAT:

Watch a dynamic multimedia presentation of Polar-Palooza, which brings to life the latest research on Earth’s past and future climate from scientists just back from the Poles and hear from climate change and environmental experts.

WHO:
Andrew Revkin, New York Times environmental reporter and blogger for NYTimes.com’s Dot Earth, will moderate this discussion with

Richard Alley, Penn State glaciologist and co-author of “Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change” (the IPCC was awarded the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize with Al Gore)

Mary C. Albert, U.S. lead scientist on the 2008 traverse of East Antarctica

Michael Castellini, seal and penguin expert

Orville Huntington, an Athabascan Indian from interior Alaska, who sees climate change every day as he hunts and fishes.

WHEN:
Saturday, Feb. 7 | 4:00 – 6:00 PM

WHERE:
The Times Center, 242 West 41st Street, between 7th and 8th Avenues, New York City

TICKETS:
Tickets are $30 plus handling fee. Seating is first come, first served. Tickets are mailed approximately two weeks before the event; there are no refunds. TimesTalks programs are subject to change.

Order tickets online at www.TimesTalks.com or call (888) NYT-1870 to order tickets by phone.

The post Polar-Palooza in NYC first appeared on Deep Sea News.

Other scientists dismissed her work as “girl talk,” but she refused to back down — and changed the way we see the planet.

You can also read more about her here. In the words of the late James Brown, “This is a man’s world, this is a man’s world, But it wouldn’t be nothing, nothing without a woman or a girl.”

The post Marie Tharpe first appeared on Deep Sea News.