Thank Goodness for the Plastic Bag Challenge

In 2004 two oceanographers from the British Antarctic Survey completed a study of plastic dispersal in the Atlantic that spanned both hemispheres. “Remote oceanic islands,” the study showed, “may have similar levels of debris to those adjacent to heavily industrialized coasts.” Even on the shores of Spitsbergen Island in the Arctic, the survey found on average a plastic item every five meters.

Back in the 1980s, the specter of fouled beaches was a recurring collective nightmare. The Jersey Shore was awash in used syringes. New York’s garbage barge wandered the seas. On the approach to Kennedy Airport, the protagonist of “Paradise,” a late Donald Barthelme novel, looked out his airplane window and saw “a hundred miles of garbage in the water, from the air white floating scruff.” We tend to tire of new variations on the apocalypse, however, the same way we tire of celebrities and pop songs. Eventually all those syringes, no longer delivering a jolt of guilt or dread, receded from the national consciousness. Who could worry about seabirds garotted by six-pack rings when Alaska’s shores were awash in Exxon’s crude? Who could worry about turtles tangled in derelict fishing nets when the ice caps were melting and the terrorists were coming?

Then, too, for a while it seemed as if we might succeed in laying this particular ecological nightmare to rest. In the mid-1980s, New York’s sanitation department began deploying vessels called TrashCats to hoover up scruff from the waterways around the Fresh Kills landfill. Elsewhere beach-sweeping machines did the same for the sand. In 1987 the federal government ratified Marpol Annex V, an international treaty that made it illegal to throw nonbiodegradable trash — that is, plastic — overboard from ships in the waters of signatory countries. The good news for the ocean kept coming: in 1988, Congress passed the Ocean Dumping Reform Act, which forbade cities to decant their untreated sewage into the sea. In 1989 the Ocean Conservancy staged its first annual International Coastal Cleanup (I.C.C.), which has since grown into the largest such event in the world. But beautification can be deceiving. Although many American beaches — especially those that generate tourism revenues — are much cleaner these days than they used to be, the oceans, it seems, are another matter.

Not even oceanographers can tell us exactly how much floating scruff is out there; oceanographic research is simply too expensive and the ocean too varied and vast. In 2002, Nature magazine reported that during the 1990s, debris in the waters near Britain doubled; in the Southern Ocean encircling Antarctica the increase was a hundredfold. And depending on where they sample, oceanographers have found that between 60 and 95 percent of today’s marine debris is made of plastic.

Plastic gets into the ocean when people throw it from ships or leave it in the path of an incoming tide, but also when rivers carry it there, or when sewage systems and storm drains overflow. Despite the Ocean Dumping Reform Act, the U.S. still releases more than 850 billion gallons of untreated sewage and storm runoff every year, according to a 2004 E.P.A. report. Comb the Manhattan waterfront and you will find, along with the usual windrows of cups, bottles and plastic bags, what the E.P.A. calls “floatables,” those “visible buoyant or semibuoyant solids” that people flush into the waste stream like cotton swabs, condoms, tampon applicators and dental floss.

The problems are global because the sources of plastic pollution are far-flung but also because, like emissions riding the winds, pollutants at sea can travel.

Do your part, cut down your plastic.


Learn More at the NYTimes

Was that Fish Stick Line-Caught, Sustainably Harvested and Domestic?

He's hard to resist...

The Conserve Our Ocean Legacy Campaign NYC launched Ocean Action Month on March 13, 2008. The month is dedicated to promoting community activism and ocean conservation in New York. Right now our oceans are in trouble. Commercial fishermen with nets a football field size wide and several stories tall are sweeping up fish populations faster than they can reproduce. Overfishing has already declined large fish stocks like tuna and swordfish by 90% in the last 50 years. If left to continue along with other environmental stresses scientists predict that by 2048, global fish stocks could collapse. The National Marine Fisheries Service is releasing a critical rule about overfishing in the next two months and the public needs to be ready and informed to comment in the face of powerful commercial and political opposition.

This campaign aims to:

1-Establish conservation of ocean ecosystems as the primary responsibility of fisheries management

2-Require ecologically sustainable fishing practices to stop overfishing and rebuild depleted populations of fish

3-Reform the institutions responsible for managing fisheries to ensure that their decisions reflect the needs of the entire ecosystem.

Sounds good, right? We think so too. Keep the oceans full of diversity by signing their online petition

learn more at Ocean Legacy

To download a handy guide telling you what fish is okay to order when you're out to eat or at the market, visit Monterey Bay Aquarium

Annual International Boston Seafood Show

This year, the captains of the global seafood industry are showing signs of movement toward sustainable fishing practices -- and at least the trappings of concern for the ocean as an ecosystem, not just a place for harvesting profits. All of that was on display in a session called "Sustainability: Where to Get the Answers." The panel focused on sustainable aquaculture -- fish farming. Panelists grappled with the difficult question of how to define sustainability.

Moderated by David Beard of The Boston Globe, panelists discussed establishing guidelines for sustainable aquaculture, and agreed that creating effective standards depended on transparency about the process; input from all stakeholders; rigorous, science-based information; emphasis on continuous improvement; and international acceptance. Aquaculture now provides about 45 percent of the world's seafood. Given that volume, issues include: the use of wild fish as feed for farmed fish, feed conversion ratios (i.e., some fish grow well on less feed than others), the treatment of effluent water, energy use, and life-cycle analysis, and overall carbon footprints for aquaculture operations. The panelists also touched on escape of exotic species, exposing wild fish to disease, and the densities at which farmed fish can be raised. One panelist, pointed out that mass-scale aquaculture is a relatively new phenomenon, adding that as producers gain more experience with it, they'll prove to the public that fish farms can be sustainably managed.

Many spoke about the need to educate the public in order to create a demand for sustainable seafood. If the public is upset at the environmental cost of poorly managed farms or harvesting practices, it will impact sales. The seafood industry has taken stock of the grave state of the ocean's health and ability to produce seafood for human consumption.

Source: Grist

Download a mini-guide to safe fish eating here

visit http://www.oceanfutures.org/ to learn more