Where's Mark?

And what happens next?

Tweet

Don't be such a scientst

Finally, reason for hope. There's a new book coming that would have saved the Roman Empire if it were written in Latin, published 2000 years ago, and if someone taught Caligula to read.

It's 'Don't Be Such A Scientist' by filmmaker and scientist Randy Olson. It's all about how to reach people with information that matters but usually comes cloaked in scientific mumbo-gumbo.

It'll be great, and you can pre-order here.

Of course, I don't really believe any of this, I'm just trying to butter up Randy and save $19.95 plust tax by getting a free copy to review if I promise sycophantic praise a la Hollywood.

Tweet

200,000 visits to blogfish

Thanks to YOU, blogfish logged visit number 200,000 on Sunday morning. Who knew we'd be at it things long together, you and me?

Here's how I celebrated the blessed event (photo at right). The water was a balmy 48F, visibility 8-12 feet, calm wind, and overall it was a great swim.

Here's a photo (below) of the ocean off Fletcher Bay on Bainbridge Island, on this perfectly calm day, with the Olympic Mountains just peeking out of the clouds in the background.



Now let's dig in and build ocean connections even higher, on our way to the next 200,000 visits!!

Oh, just for fun, visit number 200,000 came from Salt Lake City at 6:36 am PDT.

Tweet

Don't try this at home

Fish are smarter than people. Or at least that's how it looks when you compare the picture on the left to this very sad story: a deckhand on a charter boat choked to death in front of a bunch of kids when he put a baitfish in his mouth.

Fish can do it, but people shouldn't try.

Tweet

Why we surf

Beautiful words from Florida surfer Dan Reiter on why we surf.

"We surf because we love the feeling of motion. The push and pull of the sea, the breathless drop into the deep, round lean of a bottom turn; the speed of the high line, the glide along the shoulder; the transcendental, weightless discharge of the barrel — these things fill us with an animal joy. To fly, pelican-like, over the shimmering surface of the sea, to soar through section after section as the sky unfolds and the universe courses through our bodies is to feel as one with the whirling cosmos. The power of the ocean compels us onward. It is a bodily lightness, and yet a connection to the water at the same time. When we surf, we are literally pouring forward, a sensation that cannot be replicated on dry land.

We surf to maintain balance, both in our bodies and in our souls. Though it might seem a stretch to compare surfing to yoga or martial arts, the act of riding a wave, of paddling, duck-diving, even the simple feat of sitting on your board without tipping over requires a certain symmetry and stability that can only be trained, and which grows more natural with time. In fact, surfing is very similar to the martial arts, in that the masters of both display a sense of equilibrium, a consciousness of form, and a physical artistry seldom displayed in other sports."

Tweet

Vegansexuals

The latest way to change what other people eat? Refuse to have sex with people who eat things you don't like.

Vegansexuals are vegans (people who eat no animal products) who refuse to have sex with non-vegans. One vegansexual stated that she wouldn't want to have sex with someone who ate animal products because that person's body is made up of dead animals:

"I would not want to be intimate with someone whose body is literally made up from the bodies of others who have died for their sustenance"

How is this being received? Check the video clip below for an answer:

Tweet

Peter's excellent deep sea adventure

Blog maven Peter Etnoyer actually did some real work, and he's getting some fanstastic results and real-world respect. So much for the stereotype that bloggers are do-nothings.

Here's his description of the new species he discovered, a new species of deep-sea bamboo coral, a calcareous sea fan called Isidella.

Even more stunning, here's a YouTube video of the actual moment of discovery. Set to music, it's a poignant chronicle of the great passion of discovery, and the clumsy, robotic moves involved in plucking a specimen off the sea bottom and pocketing it for later study.

Tweet

Fish without a doubt-a new cookbook from super chef Rick Moonen

This is my new favorite cookbook. Seriously. I'm a seafood lover and ocean guy and I thought I was pretty good with seafood. But now, just been a couple of weeks after picking up Fish Without a Doubt, I'm already branching out to new ideas with increasing confidence.

And, as you'd expect from super chef and sustainable seafood advocate Rick Moonen, the seafood in Fish Without a Doubt is chosen with sustainability as an essential ingredient. Some unsustainable choices are left out entirely, and for fish where there might be doubt, there is good advice on choosing the most sustainable sources.

But sustainability, while important, is only part of the picture here. Fish Without a Doubt inspires even this seafood-loving veteran to try some new and different things.

Thanks to Rick Moonen and coauthor Roy Finamore, I'm now hot on slow roasting. That's cooking fish in an ordinary oven at temperatures as low as 170 F. The slow roast recipe in the cookbook says 250 F, but I asked pushy questions after eating slow roasted wild Nunavut Arctic char from CleanFish at Rick's restaurant RM Seafood in Las Vegas last week, and I was told they used 170 F for the char.

Fish Without a Doubt has detailed and comprehensive sections on all aspects of preparing and loving seafood, from equipping your kitchen, shopping for and preparing your fish and shellfish (e.g. shelling and deveining shrimp), and how to tell when it's done (a very important and sometimes overlooked part of cooking seafood). Then there are the recipes and enticing pictures. Enough to spend years digging exploring.

I'm now resolved to go through Fish Without a Doubt and try new fish and shellfish prepared in new ways. I had planned to review this cookbook after I'd done a bit more sampling, but this blog post just popped out of my head and I couldn't stop it. It's going to take a year to do what I had hoped, really get a feel for what's inside Fish Without a Doubt. Meanwhile, I already this cookbook is a success and I want to tell you. Thanks to Fish Without a Doubt I'm opening up to new possibilities, and I'm loving it.

Fish Without a Doubt is a winner, and the first place I'm going to turn when I want to enliven my dinners. Thanks to Rick Moonen and Roy Finamore for a great cookbook! Let's see...next I think I'll try the oil poached salmon, and there's some great Washington wild coho on special for only 7.99 per pound at Town & Country Market in Bainbridge.

Photo, left to right: Mark Powell, Rick Moonen, Polly Legendre (CleanFish), and Tim Thornhill (Mendocino Wine Co.), after a CleanFish/Mendocino Wine/RM Seafood/Ocean Conservancy benefit dinner at RM Seafood, Rick Moonen's fabulous restaurant in Las Vegas.

Tweet

Carnival of the blue 14

Is now available for your blue pleasure. Go to Blue Economy for this month's best in ocean blogging.

Or...miss it and you might wither and die from a lack of brain food.

Tweet

Whales, love them and abuse them

Are whales stealing food from people, or does it go the other way?

According to marine biologist Daniel Pauly, it's "cynical and irresponsible" to argue that whales eat fish which could feed the world's hungry people. But this is exactly the claim made by Iceland, Norway, and Japan, in their quest to increase whale hunting. Now let's see...are these three whale-hunting countries perhaps biased on this issue?

Meanwhile, it will probably be harder for whales to get full bellies in the next few decades because of climate change. Whale feeding areas in the Antarctic are predicted to shrink and move further south, forcing whales to travel farther and concentrate in smaller feeding zones.

The news for whales is just not so good. We have an international deadlock on whale hunting and evidence of cheating (killing too many whales) in the Japanese phony "scientific" whale hunt.

All this for creatures that we love and admire? No wonder it's hard to get people to conserve cold-blooded, wet, and slimy fish.

Tweet

Catching crabs from your living room

Living La Vida Deadly just got easier, thanks to The Deadliest Catch for Xbox 360. Now you can face life as a crab boat captain, with real world challenges like:

"Captain, you've got help me. I've got a girl in my bunk and my girlfriend just showed up. Can you keep her busy?"

Who knew that king crab chic would reach such heights?

Tweet

Doubt and uncertainty in writing the future

I woke up this morning and didn’t know where I was. A strange place, but where? DC? No. Far from home…Europe? No. Scan the mental list, a slug of confusion and some seconds that seem like minutes, then oh yeah, Boston. Some stinking hotel in a random town on a freeway that could be anywhere. Ugh.

I’m in the middle of a haze, cross-country travel for 35 hours in Boston. A redeye flight and two days of work on one night’s sleep before flying home. Can this possibly be worthwhile?

The task is good. How shall we save the world’s oceans? Are there some evildoers we need to fight? Or is it a matter of gentle persuasion and seeking shared goals? And what’s to be our relations with the grand beasts of the sea who do nothing more than get in the way?

OK, awake and oriented, so now what. It’s 730 by the clock, but what good is that since it’s always 730 somewhere.

What shall we do? Who knows at this rotten 730. Maybe it’ll make sense after a coffee and bagel…oh what’s that?…some nice lox. Here’s a dilemma waiting to happen. Can I possibly scoop up this seductive slice onto the breakfast buffet toasted bagel? It looks good with capers. It has the right color, even if it comes from pigment-laced pellets. It’s salmon alright and a quicktaste says it’s good. Now it’s most assuredly not of the prime variety, sustainable wild Alaskan salmon caught by an enlightened Proust-reading calloused crew of cavaliers. No, more likely it’s the wrong kind, farmed Salmo salar grown in a netpen. But it’s the closest thing to an anchor that I can see and as I sink my teeth into the savory flesh I feel good about the choice. It’s food of the ocean and the fog begins to clear and I can see a way forward.

Thank you salmon, for salmon you are. Farm-raised or not.

Is it glamorous and fun to fly allover with my frequent flyer card and spout opinions on this and that? Absolutely. Is it a pain in the ass too when it comes with a 10:30 pm flight east and trying to sleep on a plane with one of those stupid eye masks, earplugs and a sleeping pill? Yes. Is it frustrating when my Great Wisdom fails to save the ocean overnight. Of course. Am I optimistic that we’ll bumble through and find a way to make tomorrow’s ocean better than today's? Believe it or not, I am. Now that I’m flying home over one Dakota or another, with a milelong list of what to do tomorrow, would I do it again? I suppose so.

What is this nutty addiction? Is it really Doing Good? I sure hope so.

Tweet

The quest for sustainable fish

It can be hard to find sustainable fish. A story in the Miami Herald says the search "leaves this convert to sustainabsle seafood high and dry" (and needing new approaches).

Enrique Fernandez found too few certified fish and rejected the $30 per pound price for certified salmon. He tried Fish Phone, texting in his triggerfish dinner but they had no information. If you want to eat sustainably-caught fish, you have to do a lot of work on your own.

We've failed if the search for sustainable seafood is this challenging and unrewarding. We need a new approach.

image: Miami Herald

Tweet

The goal of environmental awareness

We started something here, questioning environmental doom and gloom, and Rick has an interesting answer over at Malaria, Bed Bugs, Sea Lice, and Sunsets. Along with a provocative picture (left), seeming to accuse me of dodging problems and spouting happy talk. In the comments on Rick's post, Max makes claims about my unconscious(?) motivations?? Oh really?

What is the gist of this dispute? I think this is a debate over the purpose of raising environmental awareness. Let's explore this with two unrealistic and extreme straw people.

1. The goal of talking about ocean environmental problems is to motivate people to fix them.

Or

2. The goal of talking about ocean environmental problems is to get people to understand them.

These two are not mutually exclusive, but they are different goals. I don't give a @#*&@^#*&^ whether or not people can pass a quiz on the real facts on ocean decline. I want them to get motivated to fix the problems. And I don't think redundant doom and gloom will build motivation, witness the Seattle Times opinion editorial that raised this.

Now I don't think Rick or anyone else actually wants people to pass a quiz, but sometimes enviros seem to act like that. We dump too much information on people trying to get them to understand too much about the issues. The view seems to be that people have to understand the threats pretty well in order to get motivated to solve them. And it's interesting to see complaints if people get motivated by celebrities or some other so-called fluffy approach that is emotion-heavy and fact-light.

This is what I'm after when I rail against too much enviro doom and gloom. We need to focus on building motivation, and scaring people with impending floods and storms is just not a good way to motivate environmental conservation. Our crises are slow and just not that scary. Extinction in 100 years for a whale? Yawn. Storms will get worse and they might flood your house. Click (the sound of the channel being changed). Scare tactics work better for things that are imminent. It worked (for awhile) regarding terrorism after 9/11, because we saw the threat was all too real.

Building environmental solutions over the long term will not happen through fear and scaring people. Sorry, not gonna happen. We need something better.

It's ironic that people can talk about how it's wrong to "soften" the message or otherwise focus on building motivation rather than delivering doom and gloom. What's the goal anyway?

This is not to pick on Rick. He has the right idea, and we're really pretty close in what we'd prescribe. But he does let the "don't soften the blow" criticism infect his message, and that's one place where I think he's a bit off track.

Tweet

Tourists sample the Deadliest Catch

Tourists go out on commercial crab boats in Alaska, paying big bucks to get a personal taste of "Deadliest Catch." It's catch and release commercial fishing, where the ticket price pays the costs and the catch is for the tourists to look and and dump back into the ocean. Is this the future of fishing? Maybe ocean animals are worth more alive than dead.

Unbelievable. I guess it just goes to show the power of tv.

Tweet

Return to the outdoors

As part of our ongoing effort to search the world and bring you the best of what we choose to bring you, here's another one.

This video is part of an effort called "Return to the Outdoors." If you can't tell what it's about, read it again. One of the message in this campaign is: Have you given back to the places that move you? Nice.

About this clip...it's amusing to see that this crusty character talking about one of his places has a bit of a Walter Cronkite look going on now.

This is an example of an environmental message without the doom and gloom. There's not a strong call to action, but I think the inspirational tone is a benefit to the cause of conservation. It's not a complete solution, but it is a part of good conservation advocacy. And...it's a part that is often neglected.

Tweet

Ocean bloggers summit

Which ocean bloggers met in DC today? After torrential rains and tornado warnings were imposed, in a futile attemp to hinder our nefarious plots at world domination, we had a fun meeting.

The cell phone picture is rotten, making the intrigue even more intriguing. First correct guess wins a free subscription to blogfish, and some really good advice on which fish to eat.

Hooray for Capitol Hill Oceans Week.

Did I mention that I got to shake hands yesterday with Jim Fowler? Jim was at the CHOW awards dinner, and we recognized him when he entered the reception. If you don't know who that is, you've missed something. Do the words "Wild Kingdom" ring a bell? It was a TV show where Marlin Perkins talked while co-host Jim Fowler cuddled, cajoled, and coerced a thousand different wild animals to have their pictures taken for the TV show. Later, Jim was the host.

Thanks Jim, for a lifetime of memories!

Tweet

i'm in yer oshunz

This is too much. Rick over at Malaria, Bedbugs, Sea Lice, and Sunsets has raised the ante on lol oceans. I have to reprint, since all is vanity, no?

Carnival of the Blue daddy, Mark Powell, over on blogfish trotted-out those ubiquitous LOL Cats--this time in service to ocean conservation. Well done, Mark. I've had an LOL love-affair going for some time with my Hawaii field manager, Liz Foote. Unfortunately, I can't print most of our creations for fear of losing our jobs (or public lynching).

So here's one just for you, Mark. Our new ocean poster child?

Thanks Rick, for taking the bait. Now I have an excuse to do another one.

Tweet

i can save seas?

LOL ocean conservation, anyone? Here's entry #1 from Pepijn Koster over at My Favorite Places. Who has the nerve to try to beat this one?


Who knows, this could get big, like LOL cats,or i can has cheezburger, or the walrus bucket thing. If you've never yet seen LOL cats, or the whole "kitty pidgin" humor, shame on you. Go here for the wikipedia explanation.

Tweet

Is wilderness a place or a feeling?

Some people define conservation as saving the wildness in places. I want to save the wildness in people. I know who's winning this debate these days, and it isn't me. But I'm right and you'll all agree eventually.

To enter this deep subject, consider what motivates conservation. Often it can be feelings of reverence for special places or animals, usually because of memories of special experiences in the past. These feelings often get attributed to "sacred places" and people want to protect such places so others can have a chance for the same transcendant experiences.

This wilderness protection effort goes astray when we focus our protection on only the most special and pristine places, forgetting that special feelings for nature often arise from youthful experiences in barely-wild places.

It's the special feelings for nature that we all need to foster, nurture and protect. If we protect pristine places and forget to nurture special feelings, then we're failing to build a constituency for pristine places.

Justin Van Kleeck is posting on Sensory Flashbacks, Sacred Places, and Environmentalism over at sustainablog, and you ought to read what he has to say, not least because of his reference to Proust and sensory flashbacks. He talks about sacred feelings, and I found his words in a series of posts to be moving and insightful. Especially his personal testament on the healing power that he found in barely-wild nature.

These ideas aren't new, William Cronon has talked about "The Trouble with Wilderness" and argued that wildness lives in US, in the hearts of people, more than in special places.

Does any of this matter in practical conservation work? Yes, I think it matters a lot.

I've sat in debates over "Ocean Wilderness" protection, and argued for a program that emphasizes people's special feelings for oceans, often derived from exposure to nearby oceans, not special pristine locations.

I've mostly lost those debates, and watched programs get designed to focus on protecting the most pristine places remaining in our oceans. Such programs often undermine their own objectives by failing to honor the people we hope to recruit to our cause.

The root cause of this mistake? Failing to notice that it's the wilderness experience we need to protect, and that feeling most often occurs outside of perfectly pristine ocean places.

How can we fix this wilderness mistake? We need to get people exposed to our oceans, get them to experience the wonder and majesty, and then celebrate those feelings. Even if they happen when a person is holding a fishing rod or driving a motorboat.

Tweet