Tag: global warming

Bookshelf: 50 Ways to Save the Ocean

50 Ways to Save the Ocean – David Helvarg

50 Ways to Save the Ocean
50 Ways to Save the Ocean

Effective pro-ocean activism is something that everyone who cares about the marine environment can engage in. This is the strong message of the most recent of David Helvarg’s books, Saved by the Sea, and of this short volume, too. It is illustrated by Jim Toomey, creator of Sherman’s Lagoon.

Rather than being overwhelmed by ocean-related doom and gloom, there are very simple actions that we can incorporate as part of our everyday lives that have a direct impact on the health of the marine environment. The Two Oceans Aquarium does a great job of speaking about this aspect of responsible citizenship on their blog and on Twitter – you should follow them if this is important to you.

Some suggestions for simple actions that can make a difference include:

  • Don’t use single-use plastic bags
  • Say no to straws and balloons
  • Drink only tap, not bottled, water
  • Put cigarette butts in the bin
  • Cut all loops of plastic and other non-biodegradable materials before throwing them away (this prevents entanglement by seals and other marine life if/when the material ends up in the ocean)

Many of the actions that Helvarg suggests entail simply enjoying the marine environment, and this is a profound but familiar idea. When we care about something, we will protect it, and by enjoying the sea through diving, visiting the beach, or riding on a boat, we will come to care about it and its inhabitants. The emphasis in many of the sections is also on safe enjoyment of the ocean. Helvarg does not explain his focus on safety, but one reason I can think of for encouraging careful and safe enjoyment ocean-related activities is to ensure that these activities will remain available to everyone. Bad publicity after marine accidents can drive people away from the beach!

50 Ways to Save the Ocean connects patriotism and pride with care for the environment, which is an excellent approach for robustly patriotic people like Americans. For South Africans, whose feelings towards their country are – for historical reasons – often a little less straightforward than those of your average flag-waving American, this approach may not be the best one. Helvarg also provides the contact details of a large number of US-based organisations that espouse the values he advocates and engage in the kinds of conservation activities he describes. Someone needs to write a version of this book for South Africans!

This is the kind of book you could go through with a relatively young child, and decide together which actions you’re going to implement together. The reading level isn’t complex.

Get the book here, here or here (if you’re in South Africa).

Bookshelf: The Man Who Ate His Boots

The Man Who Ate His Boots: The Tragic History of the Search for the Northwest Passage – Anthony Brandt

The Man Who Ate His Boots
The Man Who Ate His Boots

The Northwest Passage  is a sea route (routes, actually) running between Canada and Greenland, across the top of the North American continent through the Canadian Arctic Archipelago, and through the Bering Sea between Alaska and Russia. At its end is the Far East, for hundreds of years the destination of the thousands of sea voyages that made their way around the Cape of Good Hope, and later through the Suez Canal. Its existence was an enormously appealing idea to Europeans, because if the east could be reached by sailing along the top of the world, great savings of sailing time and expense would result.

For a long time the existence of the Northwest Passage was merely a hypothesis, and in the 1800s the British expended vast quantities of energy exploring the Canadian Arctic in search of a sea route. The passage was first traversed in 1850-54 by Robert McClure, by ship and sledge. Roald Amundsen traversed it entirely by ship in 1903-1906.  Until this century, the route was not navigable for most of the year owing to the presence of sea ice. Now, thanks (?) to climate change, there is far less ice to contend with.

Sir John Franklin was one of Britain’s most eminent Arctic explorers. He made several trips to the Arctic in search of the Northwest Passage. His final expedition, starting in 1845, ended in the disappearance of his two ships (HMS Erebus and HMS Terror), Franklin himself, and all 128 of the men with him.

The story of his expedition, and the searches for evidence of its fate (upwards of 30 expeditions were mounted to look for him), and the subsequent discovery of what had happened (no spoilers here – it was awful) is related in gripping detail in The Man Who Ate His Boots. Brandt also provides ample historical context, describing prior expeditions which serve to illuminate the British motivations behind their exploration of the Canadian Arctic.

There was a curious mixture of stoic heroism and wild arrogance at work during this period of British history. The rigors endured by early Arctic explorers cannot be overstated – the environment is almost entirely hostile to human survival. The British did not believe that there was anything to be learned from the Inuit, indigenous people who live widely spread across the area, and suffered as a result. As one of the Inuit pointed out when the awful lengths Franklin’s men had gone to in order to try to survive were revealed, his people “know how to starve.”

There is a strong thread throughout this book relating to the colonial attitude towards colonised peoples. A belief prevailed in Britain that, equipped with a shotgun and a good pair of shoes, an Englishman could survive anywhere, and that his Christian piety would serve to protect him and speed his endeavours. (On one of Franklin’s earlier expeditions, which was a complete fiasco largely owing to poor planning, the British officers survived whereas the mixed-race local fur traders – who were doing all the manual work and carrying the supplies – perished. This was attributed to the protective influence of the Christian beliefs of the British men.) It was further reckoned that there was nothing to be gained from studying the techinques of the Inuit. Eyewitness accounts from Inuit turned out to hold the key to the fate of Franklin’s party, although their account was not believed initially (they were dismissed as habitually lying “savages”).

Last year, one of Franklin’s ships, HMS Erebus, was discovered by Canadian archaeologists in Queen Maud gulf, where it sank after being trapped in the ice. They are still studying it (the area is only accessible a few months each summer), and I am watching this story with intense interest. There’s more on the discovery at National Geographic.

You can read reviews of The Man Who Ate His Boots at the New York Times, Washington Post, and The Guardian. If you enjoyed Endurance, then I recommend you investigate this book. In light of the developing findings of the excavation of HMS Erebus, the material has refreshed relevance today.

Get the book here (South Africa), here or here.

Want more Arctic? Check out True North. There’s also this article on what lives under the ice, and this one on what happens on top of it!

Bookshelf: True North

True North – Gavin Francis

True North
True North

Let us continue our armchair travels in the Arctic, among polar bears, icebergs, misty bays where compasses fail to find north, and tundra inhabited by indigenous peoples. Gavin Francis is the author of Empire Antarctica, and in True North (which he actually wrote first) he travels to all the places I’d like to see in the Arctic circle.

He starts in the Shetland Islands, and progresses to the Faeroe Islands, Iceland, Greenland and Svalbard. He concludes in Lapland. Like Antarctica, the Arctic is cold, snowy, and hostile to life. Unlike Antarctica, however, it is home to several indigenous peoples, for the most part wonderfully adapted and exquisitely attuned to their environments. These people are also greatly challenged by the pace of change in the modern world, and by changing climate, and Francis describes a fierce intensity characterising the societies he encounters in Greenland and Iceland, in particular.

There is also the magnificent landscape, and a surprising (to me) depth of history to be found above the Arctic Circle. Francis proves an adept travel guide and historian, referring always to the writings of the explorers and travellers who first ventured into this part of the world. For most of his journey he backpacks, pitching his tent where he can. If you are planning a trip (real or imagined) to any of the places Francis describes in this book I would strongly recommend you read his account.

You can get the book here, here or here (South Africa).

Southern African Shark & Ray Symposium 2015 – first day

The view from the top of Red Hill, over SImon's Town
The view from the top of Red Hill, over Simon’s Town

Earlier this week I had the great privilege of attending the 3rd Southern African Shark and Ray Symposium, which was held from 7-9 September at the Blue Horizon Estate above Simon’s Town. I am not a shark scientist (these days I am probably best described as a lapsed mathematician) but have an interest in the subject so I went to listen. If I had to provide some bite-sized takeaways from the first day of the symposium, jotted down without applying any of the science communication principles I learned at the workshop yesterday, it would be these:

  • Shark mitigation – avoiding negative interactions between humans and sharks – is HARD and a lot of smart people are working on the problem.
  • The City of Cape Town is a world leader in shark mitigation efforts, along with Shark Spotters. They really think about the problem, and care about both people and sharks.
  • If you are not blessed with high coastal terrain and surface-swimming sharks (which would permit a shark spotting program like Cape Town’s one), other shark mitigation measures are in the pipeline… From orca-patterned surfboards (and wetsuits?) to shark exclusion nets to large-scale electrical repellent cables.
  • The KZN Sharks Board catches a lot of sharks, rays and other animals in their gill nets and drum lines, and this is upsetting and far from ideal. But they facilitate an incredible amount of scientific study, too – their catches do not go to waste.
  • The KZN Sharks Board is committed to finding measures other than gill nets and drum lines to keep bathers safe, and they are actively working on the problem (refer to the electrical shark repellent cable I mentioned above).
  • Sometimes scientific research doesn’t look the way you expect or imagine. Ruth Leeney of Protect Africa’s Sawfishes spent months on the ground interviewing Mozambican villagers in the far north of the country to assess the population status of sawfish in Mozambique. She collected data that no one else could have obtained by other means!
  • Smaller, less charismatic sharks, like catsharks, need more love. There are also whole families of sharks that divers don’t see (such as dogfish) and hence aren’t really aware of. They are caught prolifically as by-catch and not much is known about them. But some smart people are working on this!
  • There are motivated, talented scientists working hard in South African government departments to protect our marine resources and making recommendations to manage them sustainably. (There’s also many a slip ‘twixt cup and lip, but they are trying very hard.)
  • Technology – be it cameras, software, or tags – is enabling great leaps in our understanding of what’s out there, which will enable us to protect and conserve things better.
  • Ocean acidification as a result of climate change could affect sharks directly, by actually wearing away their denticles (tooth-like structures on their skin). Denticles protect sharks and help them to swim faster.

I was tweeting from the symposium twitter account, and along with some of the other attendees we produced a fairly comprehensive summary of each talk, along with some visual media. Here’s a link to the day one compendium on Storify, and it is embedded below:

Bookshelf: The World Without Us

Today we continue the theme begun yesterday: our impact on the planet. Instead of thinking about things on the scale of the individual, this book forces us to think on a far larger one.

The World Without Us – Alan Weisman

The World Without Us
The World Without Us

The World Without Us is a three hundred page Gedanken or thought experiment in which the author imagines what would happen on earth if all human beings disappeared. The means of the disappearance is not important, but obviously if humans disappeared because the entire earth was annihilated, the thought experiment would be entirely pointless. So Weisman assumes that earth is left pretty much the way it is now, just without people.

This is an entirely speculative work, as we have very little to go on when trying to figure out how an ecosystem will recover or how an urban metropolis will decay in the complete absence of human intervention. I found most interesting the information about the properties of materials and structures – how long they will last, what causes them to break down, and so on – as well as the often obscure case studies that Weisman unearths in order to illustrate a point, and the fragments of pristine environments that he writes about (like the Białowieża Forest in Poland).

Weisman moves from ecosystem to ecosystem, considering forests, farmland, cities, and the ocean. He finds experts in fields you don’t even know exist. He speaks to archaeologists, zoologist, everyone in between. It’s tricky to explain how the book is written; it is not a series of abstract imaginings, but rather a series of vignettes and interviews that Weisman pulls together to make a point. It’s easy to read short sections at a time, but hard to put down. In the ocean chapter, he writes about Kingman Reef, which is our best guess at what an untouched coral reef ecosystem should look like (spoiler: LOTS of sharks). Some things, such as plastic in the ocean, are unfortunately forever.

Despite the apparently gloomy subject matter, I found the book hopeful. It appealed to me as someone who cares about the environment (and if you think that people care too much about the environment, then this book will probably enrage you). I enjoyed imagining my office building with trees growing from the windows on the upper stories, and the parking areas filling with water. After a few good nights’ sleep, I find it hopeful less because it enabled me to imagine my corporate workplace being absorbed by nature, and more because it describes the resilience of the planet. Some environmental disasters, such as the destruction of most coral reef ecosystems as the ocean warms and acidifies, are most likely a foregone conclusion unless an incident of the type upon which this book is predicated takes place and prevents us from adding more carbon dioxide to the atmosphere by destroying humanity entirely. Other predicted environmental catastrophes, however, are not a shoo-in, and can still be avoided or recovered from with some decisive action.

The book seems to have stirred a bit of controversy among reviewers, some of whom were disturbed by the absence of a human perspective or gaze by which to orient the narrative. This bothered me not at all, and I didn’t try and extract anything profoundly philosophical from that aspect of it. I quite enjoy imagining what the Cape Peninsula looked like when it was pristine, before we built the three Disa Park towers on it – one of my favourite photographs is this one, of mist covering Cape Town below Table Mountain. I like to imagine that this is how it looked (minus the boats) before there were any people here.

A blanket of mist below Table Mountain
A blanket of mist below Table Mountain

Reviews of the book from the Washington Post, New York Times (also here) and the Guardian may assist your decision on whether to read this book. I hope you will read it. 

 You can get a copy of the book here (South Africa), otherwise here or here.

Video (TED): Camille Seaman on photographing icebergs

In this very short talk, Camille Seaman, photographer and author of Melting Away, talks about her approach to iceberg photography, and shows some of her pictures.

Saeaman also photographs storm clouds; she started storm chasing in 2008. Depicting these clouds is another way for her to illustrated how everything in nature is connected.

Bookshelf: Melting Away

Melting Away – Camille Seaman

Melting Away
Melting Away

I first saw Camille Seaman’s photography in a feature on Wired.com. She is thinks about photographing icebergs the way one would photograph a person of advanced age: with respect and reverence.

Melting Away is a book of magnificent photographs taken in the Antarctic and the Arctic. Seaman worked as a resident photographer on cruise vessels taking passengers to each end of the earth, and over a ten year period was able to take portraits of icebergs, each of which has its own character, and to observe the changes that are taking place at the poles as a result of climate change.

A feature on Seaman in the New York Times explains how her Native American heritage influenced her connection to nature and her ability to observe it closely. Her grandfather taught her to recognise trees as one would a person, and to be consciously quiet and observant in the natural world.

The text interspersed between the photographs is surprisingly personal and autobiographical. Seaman writes about her childhood, her aspirations, and the formative experiences that have brought her to where she is: a world-renowned photographer with a unique perspective on the impact humans are having on our planet. I found this part of the book to be fascinating, and would recommend it particularly to young women, especially those who might feel they don’t fit or conform, who are needing hope that somewhere in their future they will find their calling.

You can follow Seaman on instagram for photographs of her travels, and check out a slideshow of her images on The Telegraph website. An interview with Seaman can be found here; she talks quite a lot about her upbringing.

Get a copy of Melting Away here if you’re in South Africa, otherwise here or here.

Article: Phenomena on ocean calamities

The news article/paper that we read yesterday was a serious, yet hopeful assessment of the current and future state of ocean animals. Today’s article is also by Carl Zimmer, writing for Phenomena, and covers an opinion piece that appeared in Bioscience. A group of marine biologists criticises the tendency of scientists to generalise local effects into a supposed global “ocean calamities”. This breeds pessimism and inaction, as the general public is assailed by one apparent disaster scenario after another, and a point of fatigue is reached. The authors contend that

… the marine research community may not have remained sufficiently skeptical in sending and receiving information on the problems caused by human pressures in the ocean and that there is a need to revisit the process by which potential or isolated problems escalate to the status of ocean calamities.

It must be tempting, as a conservation biologist or environmental activist (two different professions) to talk up the dire threats facing coral reefs, or sharks, or whales, in order to attract attention or funding. But it is important to keep things in their proper context and perspective. Furthermore, all of us have a duty to remain skeptical, to investigate claims that seem extreme, and to do a little research beyond the headlines, tweets and facebook status updates. Make no mistake, this is not about being skeptical of science and its capacity to assist us in understanding the world around us; it is about being skeptical about how facts are presented, paraphrased, and – after enough repetition – possibly distorted.

Read Zimmer’s full article here. As an aside, he mentions his New York Times article on the Science paper concerning the health of the world’s oceans that we discussed yesterday. He asked the authors of the ocean calamities paper whether the Science paper was overstating the threats to marine life. Their response was that the paper was balanced and an accurate assessment of the current state of affairs.

I also encourage you to check out the original paper that Zimmer is writing about, which runs through several well-known “ocean calamities” (jellyfish blooms, harmful algal blooms, overfishing, invasive species, etc) and assesses the extent of the evidence for each one to qualify as a global threat to the oceans.

Article: New York Times on the health of the ocean

Humans began adjusting ecosystems on land thousands of years before they were able to do significant damage to the ocean, but in the last five hundred years or so we have been catching up in the marine environment. If you think that five hundred years of significant human impact on the oceans sounds too long and the number should be more like 50 years, read Callum Roberts’s book Ocean of Life – in fact, do that anyway.

In this vein, Carl Zimmer wrote for the New York Times about a recent paper (paywalled on Science) about extinctions and reduction in numbers of animals in the world’s oceans. The article received a large amount of attention and was featured prominently, which is great for science and for the ocean.

When writing about conservation issues it is a challenge to maintain an air of hopefulness, in order to spur the reader on to positive action rather than smothering them in despair. Many books about the health of the world’s oceans struggle to walk this line. Authors sometimes appear unnaturally chirpy about terrible subjects, or to change their minds three quarters of the way through the book, becoming a cheerleader after seven chapters of doom and gloom. Unusually, Zimmer’s article (and, by extension the paper it stems from) are genuinely hopeful, because the paper’s authors sincerely believe there is something that can be done.

(The timeline below is from the paper; click on the image to go to the original on the Science website.)

Timeline of animal loss
Timeline of animal loss

While the paper sounds a warning that “today’s low rates of marine extinction may be the prelude to a major extinction pulse, similar to that observed on land during the industrial revolution, as the footprint of human ocean use widens” and “the terrestrial experience and current trends in ocean use suggest that habitat destruction is likely to become an increasingly dominant threat to ocean wildlife over the next 150 years”, the authors are convinced that prompt and decisive action can make a significant difference. The action would need to be primarily in the form of massive marine protected areas, strategically located, as well as a decrease in carbon emissions.

Zimmer’s full article can be read here. One of the authors of the paper he reviews is Stephen Palumbi, whose Extreme Life of the Sea is an excellent introduction to the entire ocean ecosystem, written in bite sized chunks with the flair of the Guinness Book of Records (but more academic prowess, obviously).

 

 

Article: New York Times on the wreck of the Kulluk

We are far enough south that – to me at least – discussions on the subject of oil companies drilling in the Arctic, much of which is now conveniently ice-free in summer, don’t register as viscerally as things that are physically closer to home. But there is a principle at stake here, and a set of risks that corporations have not fully comprehended. The Arctic is a sensitive, valuable ecosystem, and – unlike the populous coast abutting Gulf of Mexico – there are few human settlements and no infrastructure. If something goes wrong with an oil rig or a spill takes place, help is far off and difficult to obtain.

A New York Times article that appeared at the end of last year goes into detail about the consequences of a poorly-planned and executed, premature attempt by Shell to locate oil reserves north of Alaska. The Kulluk was a drill barge, and Shell planned to tow her into the Arcitic so that she could do exploratory drilling for oil.

The emphasis below is mine:

Even with permission, getting to the oil would not be easy. The Alaskan Arctic has no deepwater port. The closest is in the Aleutian Islands at Dutch Harbor, a thousand miles to the south through the Bering Strait. In the Inupiat whaling villages dotting the Chukchi coast, only a handful of airstrips are long enough for anything other than a prop plane. There are few roads; human residents get around in summer by boat, foot or all-terrain vehicle. Shell was trying the logistical equivalent of a mission to the moon. During the short Arctic summer, when the sea ice made its annual retreat, Shell would have to bring not only the Kulluk but everything else: personnel, tankers, icebreakers, worker housing, supply vessels, helicopters, tugboats, spill-cleanup barges and a secondary rig to drill a relief well in case of a blowout. In the wake of Deepwater Horizon, Shell would build a $400 million Arctic-ready containment dome, an extra layer of spill protection that it would also need to drag north.

Predictably, things went badly wrong. The chain of events reads like one of those Reader’s Digest “Drama in Real Life” stories that gripped my sister and me as a child.

Read the full article here.