Thus spake some dude: we should get rid of all predators

OK, this is a bit of a detour, but sometimes a man just runs across something that is so crazy that he has to address it on his organization's blog. 

Over at the New York Times, a professional philosopher has written a piece so ridiculous - nay, ridonculous - that it pretty much defies explanation or analysis. The gist of it:  "Suffering is bad and we should prevent it whenever we can.  Predators cause pain, which equals suffering.  Hence, we should make predators go extinct."

I jape you not.

Pity the idiotfish. Someone has to.

There's a fish out there that's not doing too well. I'mma let you get some tissues, because you're going to be using them. Take a good look at this guy, and then commence sobbing.

My life is so hard.
Image: NOAA via Wikimedia Commons

Which is worse for the oceans - eating meat or eating fish?

It's a commonly-encountered sentiment amongst people who care about oceans: many marine ecosystems are in trouble; fisheries are a primary cause for much of this trouble; ergo, to help the ocean a person should stop eating fish.

This seems like a fairly straightforward argument. However, it gets murky very quickly if the person replaces seafood with meat from terrestrial production systems. Consider this: the UN FAO estimates that 18% of global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions are attributable to livestock production. Read that again - 18% of all anthropogenic GHG emissions are associated with livestock production. This is more than the share attributable to transportation. (Read the FAO brief here).

Fisheries heavyweights pound MSC

Today, Marine Stewardship Council finds itself where it doesn't want to be: in the spotlight taking a public whuppin' from some smart people in the journal Nature.

Heads-up: rally against tankers and Enbridge on Tuesday

Quick heads up: if you're in the region on Tuesday August 31, head over to one of these two rallies being held to protest Enbridge's Northern Gateway Project and its tanker traffic.

No Tankers Rally (VANCOUVER)
Date and time: Tuesday, August 31, 2010 at 12 Noon
Where: Burrard and Pender (Meet across street from Enbridge HQ and march to Art Gallery)
For more information, contact jolan@forestethics.org 

Pipe Up Against Enbridge rally (KITIMAT)
Date and time: Tuesday, August 31, 2010 starting at 11:00 am
Where: Kitimat, B.C.
For more information, contact info@pipeupagainstenbridge.ca
Details: Come out to this family-friendly gathering outside the Riverlodge Recreation Centre. Listen to speakers from across the Northwest and hear live music from the incredible Rachelle van Zanten.

Check out Dogwood Initiative's information on the rally here.

You can still make some noise if you can't make the rally: send an Action Alert to the Prime Minister to ask for a permanent ban on oil tanker traffic off of the B.C. coast.

Don't be like this guy - educate yourself about sushi.

The other day on the Face-Book one of my brothers was all "Hey man, I ate some tuna, hope it was OK LOL LOL."

Mistake. There's no "LOL" involved when it comes to tuna. I immediately disowned him and wrote him out of my will, which, since his name is Will, was a bit confusing grammatically. Luckily it's no skin off my teeth as he was one of the minor brothers. He played no major role.

And good riddance to you, sir.

Don't let this happen to you! Educate yourself before your next trip to the sushi restaurant.

Challenging our basic assumptions is healthy

If you ever realize that you are not as bright as you thought you were and you want to keep the world from finding out, the best things to do are:

1. Keep quiet most of the time, unless you've really thought your stuff through
2. Grow a beard, unless you are a lady in which case you will be forced to go into the carnival  business
3. Pay attention on the rare occasions in which bright people give a glimpse into the mechanism of how they think, and try to copy to the best of your ability

I largely succeed on the first two. The third...not so much. 

Oil, plastics, and oceans: news from around the webs

Oceans-related internet news, sliced thin and served raw with dried seaweed, rice and avacado:

From the Tyee : when American cruise ships on the Seattle-to-Alaska beat are in Washington and Alaskan waters, they are subject to waste-disposal regulations with real teeth. So what do they do? They cross their legs until they hit Canada: American cruise ships are using British Columbia's waters as one huge outhouse. I'm going to lean out the window and give the finger to the next one that goes by. That'll show 'em.

King Rat: the spotted ratfish will outlive us all

Behold the glory of Puget Sound: the spotted ratfish. 

"I'm the glory of the what now?"
Photo: Wikimedia Commons

I've been planning on doing a blog post on these guys, but the Seattle Times beat me to it with an article that puts the little-known spotted ratfish into the limelight. And rightfully so: ratfish are the dominant vertebrate life form in Puget Sound, and one of the most dominant in the state of Washington: the article mentions that Puget Sound holds an estimated 30 ratfish for every single human in the state!

Knee-jerk hypothesis Monday

Happy Monday all ya'll.

Today, I would like to share a haiku about coffee that I am making up on the spot:

Black coffee tastes great,

Makes me cheerful, and keeps me

 From killing people 

FYI - while I was only innocently counting the syllables on my fingers, I have found that if you mutter "kill...ing...peo...ple" while staring at your moving fingers, your co-workers will leave you alone.

Lots of interesting news has accumulated over the past few days.

Bright Side Wednesday delayed: Suddenly all oil spills are really easy to clean up

What happens to a Bright Side Wednesday deferred? In order of occurrence, it:
     1. Dries up like a raisin in the sun
     2. Festers like a sore and then runs
     3. Stinks like rotten  meat
     4. Crusts over like a syrupy sweet
     5. Sags like a heavy load
     6. Explodes

Obviously, it's an unpleasant experience for me and for onlookers.

So yes, it's not Wednesday and therefore I shouldn't  be looking on the Bright Side. But there's awesome news out there: oil spills are apparently really, really easy to clean up! Yep, while just one week ago it seemed like every man-made Earth pore was spewing the stuff all over the place, this week authorities are falling over themselves to report that not only are the leaks all stopped, but they're all practically cleaned up already! Let's do a rundown of the success stories:

Obama administration repeatedly warned Enbridge prior to spill

Heading out on a paddle towards Robson Bight (which recently had its own brush with spilled hydrocarbons) in just a few moments, but before I leave I want to share a new bit of information about Enbridge's most recent oil spill: the Detroit Free Press reports that the Obama administration "repeatedly warned" Enbridge about the pipeline in question, and even summoned its officials to Washington earlier in the year to a meeting on "a series of major failures." The Free Press goes on to quote a federal official as saying that Enbridge was warned "in no uncertain terms that it needed to get its act together".

So there you have it. Make what you will of it, but methinks that if the U.S. federal government can't get Enbridge to fly straight, the "little people" (in BP-speak) in B.C. won't stand much of a chance of having their voices heard if Enbridge's Northern Gateway project is ever put in place.

Summer breeze

Back where I grew up (rural Ohio), on still summer days, you get this certain kind of breeze. It arrives by itself, usually sometime in the afternoon, out of the clear blue sky as it were, and does little more than shake a few leaves before leaving as quietly as it came. It's very easy to  miss. However, to people who live in the country, these breezes carry a lot of meaning - they often foreshadow big storms.

Does the same hold true for human storms?

Ecological and Political Fallout from Enbridge Oil Spill

A ruptured 30-inch pipeline owned by Enbridge has released as much as one million gallons (3.7 million litres) of oil into the Kalamazoo river in southern Michigan. Dozens of residents have been evacuated along the river, and local officials have called for the evacuation of several dozen homes (to prevent residents from inhaling benzene) and for other residents to avoid drinking or cooking with well water. Containment efforts have been focused on keeping the oil from entering Lake Michigan, which the governor of Michigan warned would be a 'tragedy of historic proportions'. At the moment, federal EPA officials are declaring that the spill has been contained, well short of reaching Lake Michigan - an account challenged by at least one emergency response official. 

Bright Side Wednesday: Oil Spills

I'd like to introduce you to a new feature on this here blog: Bright Side Wednesdays.

Most days start off the same. You lie in bed and think about your failures, the lifetime's worth of burned and never-built-in-the-first-place bridges, and the evil in the world, and the dwindling number of days separating you and the moment when you're pulled from the game by the Pale Gym Teacher and told to hand in your earthly gym clothes and hit the eternal locker room, and so on. At about 11:00 am you pull yourself together enough to finally get up and make scrambled eggs, but you don't do a very good job at that either.

But not on Wednesdays, brother. Wednesdays, we wake up early and hit the coffee hard. Wednesdays, we look on the Bright Side.

Pictured: the bright side of things
(note: Photo taken in May. Flowers are now wilted and dead. Like the disappearing dreams of yesterday)

Monday morning coming down

Well, another weekend comes and goes and Water Blogged can only look back fondly, recalling late-night homemade pizza, a great and greasy Sunday morning breakfast, and a rocky paddling trip that nearly made us Water Logged, yet became very much worth it when it yielded an enchanting encounter with a juvenile gray whale.

You have to have money to make pizza and greasy breakfasts on weekends, however, so WB returns to the working world on Monday to find that scientific progress has not stopped. For example, it now demonstrates what should be starkly obvious: virtually all climate scientists agree on the basic concepts of anthropogenic climate change, and those who dispute anthropogenic climate change tend to have "substantially" less expertise and profile than their counterparts.

Draft standards for organic aquaculture contain a lot of bull sediment

When faced with managing serious impacts of important oceans industries, the Canadian government sometimes pulls out their weaksaurus. Unlike a normal thesaurus, the weaksaurus doesn't give you synonyms. Instead, it kind of gives you words that vaguely convey a weaker version of the original word. We'll call them weakonyms. For example: if you look up the word "prevent" in a normal thesaurus, you get responses like "prohibit" and "stop". You know - synonyms. Government's weaksaurus, however, gives you the weakonym "mitigate", which kind of changes the meaning of the thing that you're doing but whatever. That's just an example that I've seen first-hand.

The recently released draft standards for organic aquaculture, put out by the government of Canada (the Canadian General Standards Board and DFO), have some great weakonyms, most of which serve to weaken the language in the standards for fish aquaculture. For example: while it says that invertebrate aquaculture has "waste" that must be collected and disposed of properly, it says that open net pen finfish aquaculture apparently only has "sediment", the buildup of which on the seafloor must only be "minimized". Excellent use of the weaksaurus!

While I was gone

Well, we here at Water Blogged are back from a great low-cost west coast vacation and have only an unpacked backpack of dirty clothes, a memory card with hundreds of photos, and a car of declining health to show for it. Also, I have a hard-earned FYI: you may think it would be faster and easier to cross the border late at night due to a lack of crowds, but brother, let me tell you: you do not want to be the only source of entertainment for a group of border agents working the graveyard shift.

"And here's where I told him that importing more than 1 kg of cantaloupe
put him in violation of Subsection 31.1a of the 'Enemies of the State" Act!'"

And now WB returns to face a week's accumulation of ocean-related developments:

More evidence that we barely know anything

Just like your uncle Jerry, the ocean smells salty, has a thing for driftwood, and overall is a pretty reliable source for bizarreness. For instance: who would have thought that coral larvae - which the LA Times memorably described as "tiny hair-covered sacs of cells" - show a very strong attraction to the sounds of coral reefs when they are choosing a place to settle. Let me repeat that: these little things, which are tiny larvae in the Phylum Cni-freaking-DARIA, pretty much choose their home based on the quality of the neighborhood jams. Maybe not the most mature way to choose a home, but then again...they are larvae.

Maiden Voyage

So this here is Living Oceans Society's new blog. My name is John, and I'm honored to be the guy tasked with not mucking this up.

You're busy, I'm busy, so I'll get to the point: oceans are amazing things. They are where things like this guy  live, where this guy used to live, where Kevin Costner's career went to die:

And, incredibly, where it also may be reborn.

Bizarre! And the mystery of the oceans extends even beyond its yin-yang relationship with Kevin Costner's fortunes. We know so little about oceans that virtually every day brings some new insight or discovery into their workings - or about how we are thoroughly fouling them up. One of the best parts of my job is that I get to keep up on these new developments, and that is what we will share on this blog - the latest oceans news and discoveries, whether they be fascinating, heartbreaking, frustrating, encouraging, or just really, really cool.