Earth Blog

Jaymi Heimbuch over at treehugger posted a little bit about her experience at Midway Atoll National Wildlife Refuge where over 2 million seabirds live and the effects of the Pacific Garbage Patch are evident. The atoll might be remote but our plastic trash is still managing to ride the waves out to a part of the world most of us will never visit.

Heimbuch wanted to see firsthand what she had only seen on the Internet -the sad photographs of decomposing birds with the contents of their stomachs exposed.  Shards of plastic and even more identifiable objects like lighters, bottle caps, toothbrushes and fishing wire have all been found in birds that wash up on the island’s shore or die on the island.  That's why the Midway bird images are a poignant teaching tool: almost everyone that looks at the image can see something they have once used.

Over the weekend Whole Foods Market announced that they would be making a major change to their seafood departments. They are going to stop selling certain species of fish because they are unsustainable. This new policy comes a whole year before Whole Foods’ original deadline to begin the practice.

The change will start on April 22nd or Earth Day and it means there will no longer be red-rated, wild caught fish sold in their stores. Examples are: Atlantic halibut, grey sole, and skate. Instead customers will be directed to purchase fish that are similar but sustainable like Pacific halibut which is a Marine Steward Council (MSC)-certified fish. The MSC-certification is on any wild caught, sustainable fish that doesn’t have the color-coded label the store also uses.

The seafood departments stoplight colored rating system, which works well at a glance for quick decision making, was set forth in 2010 by Whole Foods and two non-profit organizations: Blue Ocean Institute and Monterrey Bay Aquarium.

The sad deaths of 108 dolphins due to stranding along Cape Cod on the east coast isn’t this year’s only news of marine mammals dying in “unprecedented” numbers. The west coast is looking at a dwindling
sea otter population that is for once not due to anything humans have done.

Just in time for Spring Break a new federal regulation will prevent certain boats from discharging sewage -whether or not it’s treated- into California’s marine waters.  The sewage ban will create the largest “No Discharge Zone” (NDZ) in the country stretching from Mexico to Oregon and includes waters around major islands. The ban will stop an estimated 22 million gallons or more of treated sewage from being dumped into the oceans, bays, and estuaries each year along 1,624 miles of coast. Under the Clean Water Act the state of California was able to ask the EPA to approve the NDZ to help restore water quality.

“This is an important step to protect California's coastline. I want to commend the shipping industry, environmental groups and U.S. EPA for working with California to craft a common sense approach to keeping our coastal waters clean," said California’s Governor Jerry Brown.

The Pacific Ocean covers a third of the Earth’s surface. As the world’s largest ocean it must hold deep secrets. Secrets that might help us understand not only the ocean and its inhabitants but what role it plays in the environment. Since the year 1513 when the Spanish explorer Vasco Núñez de Balboa first saw the Eastern shore of what he called Mar del Sur, what we now call the Pacific thanks to Ferdinand Magellan, conquistadors and explorers have been navigating the cold waters in search of new worlds and glory.

Manned watercraft can only travel so far before needing to stop to refuel or to give the crew a break. Liquid Robotics Inc. has a little machine they call a Wave Glider, an unmanned vehicle pushed along by the waves and aided by the sun to collect scientific data. If all goes as planned Liquid Robotics will go down in history just like Balboa and Magellan.

Kids always have and always will get embarrassed or annoyed when their mothers make a big deal about them leaving or express suffocating levels of worry about their children’s safety. But a techie/slightly geeky father’s concern for his child’s welfare tends to translate a bit differently than that which is expressed by mothers. When it was time for me to hit the road from the middle of upstate NY out here to Sunny San Diego, my dad gave me a GPS to take along since I was making the trek on my own…here’s your GPS, now go west young man!