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By Sarah Chasis
June 8 is World Oceans Day, dedicated to celebrating our beautiful, mysterious, and life-giving oceans.
As our oceans make up more than 70 percent of the earth's surface, their health drives the future of our planet. Oceans give us every other breath we take, provide a critical source of protein and a way of life for billions of people, contribute trillions of dollars to the world economy, and are home to 50 percent to 80 percent of this planet's life.
They are also time-honored places to escape the stresses of everyday life. To play with our families under the warm sun, beside the crashing waves. To wonder at the horizon and imagine the varied sea creatures swimming deep below the waves. Our oceans are cause for celebration, even when it may be difficult to celebrate.
To learn more about the link between climate and ocean health, watch NRDC's short film, Our Ocean Planet, narrated by Sigourney Weaver. The film premiered at the Global Climate Action Summit.
This year has been one of bombshell environmental reports. Decades of gloomy climate change predictions couldn't prepare us for the latest IPCC report's screeching siren. We've disrupted the planet's climate through our fossil fuel addiction and only by slashing carbon emissions immediately do we have a shot of avoiding catastrophic effects — more superstorms, more drought, more extinction, more lives lost.
Last month's U.N. biodiversity report didn't offer up any silver linings, with the news that up to a million species are at risk of extinction, many within decades, because of human activity. Climate change wasn't even a leading cause of extinctions — habitat loss and overfishing edge out climate impacts … for now.
It's a harsh message — decades of chronic overfishing, pollution and habitat destruction have stripped our seas of much of their diversity and abundance. Industrial and military ocean noise is on the rise, upsetting the ocean's delicate acoustic habitat and challenging the ability of marine wildlife to mate, find food, migrate, and, ultimately, survive. Carbon dioxide emissions have made oceans more acidic, which makes it harder for shell-building organisms like oysters and scallops to grow their protective coverings and survive, and climate change's warmer waters bring coral bleaching, mass marine wildlife migrations, an increase in dead zones and deoxygenation as we suffocate marine life. Unless we act, ocean ecosystems will continue to deteriorate or, in some cases, collapse entirely, and the consequences will reverberate through human society.
It's more than a bit scary and uncomfortable to think about.
But we can imagine another, better future where we protect nature — and, in turn, nature protects us. If we act now we can slow, stop, and reverse biodiversity loss. And healthy oceans will help buffer against climate change. There are solutions — they're tried and true. We must cut carbon emissions, protect significant areas of land and ocean and eliminate unsustainable fishing practices.
We know change is possible because we are making it happen. NRDC is securing protections for our oceans and the life it supports. Day after day, we'll keep fighting to protect whales, sharks and other endangered sea life, to secure our ocean sanctuaries, to fight harmful offshore drilling and stop overfishing.
Watch this short film of just some of this year's victories:
Just like our amazing blue world, these achievements are worth celebrating.
And help us fight for our oceans' health. We can do this, together.
What if We Treated Our Oceans as if They Matter? https://t.co/5QV5EPP5Vt
— The YEARS Project (@YEARSofLIVING) April 14, 2019
Sarah Chasis is senior director of the Oceans Division, Nature Program at the Natural Resources Defense Council.
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Tuna auctions are a tourist spectacle in Tokyo. Outside the city's most famous fish market, long queues of visitors hoping for a glimpse of the action begin to form at 5 a.m. The attraction is so popular that last October the Tsukiji fish market, in operation since 1935, moved out from the city center to the district of Toyosu to cope with the crowds.
gmnicholas / E+ / Getty Images
Kristan Porter grew up in a fishing family in the fishing community of Cutler, Maine, where he says all roads lead to one career path: fishing. (Porter's father was the family's lone exception. He suffered from terrible seasickness, and so became a carpenter.) The 49-year-old, who has been working on boats since he was a kid and fishing on his own since 1991, says that the recent warming of Maine's cool coastal waters has yielded unprecedented lobster landings.
The climate crisis is getting costly. Some of the world's largest companies expect to take over one trillion in losses due to climate change. Insurers are increasingly jittery and the world's largest firm has warned that the cost of premiums may soon be unaffordable for most people. Historic flooding has wiped out farmers in the Midwest.
Hawaii's Kilauea volcano could be gearing up for an eruption after a pond of water was discovered inside its summit crater for the first time in recorded history, according to the AP.
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'We Should Be Retreating Already From the Coastline,' Scientist Suggests After Finding Warm Waters Below Greenland
Andrew Yang's assertion that people move away from the coast at the last Democratic debate is the completely rational and correct choice for NASA scientists in Greenland.
By Johnny Wood
The Ganges is a lifeline for the people of India, spiritually and economically. On its journey from the Himalayas to the Bay of Bengal, it supports fishermen, farmers and an abundance of wildlife.
The river and its tributaries touch the lives of roughly 500 million people. But having flowed for millennia, today it is reaching its capacity for human and industrial waste, while simultaneously being drained for agriculture and municipal use.
Here are some of the challenges the river faces.
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Leaked Audio Shows Oil Lobbyist Bragging About Success in Criminalizing Pipeline Protests
By Jake Johnson
As a growing number of states move to pass laws that would criminalize pipeline protests and hit demonstrators with years in prison, an audio recording obtained by The Intercept showed a representative of a powerful oil and gas lobbying group bragging about the industry's success in crafting anti-protest legislation behind closed doors.
Speaking during a conference in Washington, DC in June, Derrick Morgan, senior vice president for federal and regulatory affairs at the American Fuel & Petrochemical Manufacturers (AFPM), touted "model legislation" that states across the nation have passed in recent months.
AFPM represents a number of major fossil fuel giants, including Chevron, Koch Industries and ExxonMobil.
"We've seen a lot of success at the state level, particularly starting with Oklahoma in 2017," said Morgan, citing Dakota Access Pipeline protests as the motivation behind the aggressive lobbying effort. "We're up to nine states that have passed laws that are substantially close to the model policy that you have in your packet."
Big Oil is now using its political power to try and criminalize protests of oil & gas infrastructure.
— Friends of the Earth (@foe_us) August 19, 2019
"This legislation has potential to punish public participation and mischaracterize advocacy protected by the First Amendment."https://t.co/bmiHjONEhy
The audio recording comes just months after Texas Gov. Greg Abbott signed into law legislation that would punish anti-pipeline demonstrators with up to 10 years in prison, a move environmentalists condemned as a flagrant attack on free expression.
"Big Oil is hijacking our legislative system," Dallas Goldtooth of the Indigenous Environmental Network said after the Texas Senate passed the bill in May.
As The Intercept's Lee Fang reported Monday, the model legislation Morgan cited in his remarks "has been introduced in various forms in 22 states and passed in ... Texas, Louisiana, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Missouri, Indiana, Iowa, South Dakota, and North Dakota."
"The AFPM lobbyist also boasted that the template legislation has enjoyed bipartisan support," according to Fang. "In Louisiana, Democratic Gov. John Bel Edwards signed the version of the bill there, which is being challenged by the Center for Constitutional Rights. Even in Illinois, Morgan noted, 'We almost got that across the finish line in a very Democratic-dominated legislature.' The bill did not pass as it got pushed aside over time constraints at the end of the legislative session."
Many of the state bills restricting the right to protest have been "drafted by companies and passed through groups like ALEC, the secretive group of corporate lobbyists trying to rewrite state laws to benefit corporations over people." @greenpeaceusa https://t.co/ZxpTjWdrwT
— Stand Up To ALEC (@StandUpToALEC) May 6, 2019
Reposted with permission from our media associate Common Dreams.
Wildfires raging on Gran Canaria, the second most populous of Spain's Canary Islands, have forced around 9,000 people to evacuate.