The beleaguered bluefin was dealt another blow this week when the European Union, under pressure from France, Spain, Italy and Malta, all of which have a stake in the lucrative tuna fishery, backed down from lobbying for slashing quotas of the eastern Atlantic bluefin tuna at talks this week in Paris.
The EU fisheries commissioner …
Anybody who has been visiting coral reefs for the past 20 years or so will tell you that the scene underwater pales – quite literally – in comparison to what it used to be.
New research published in PLoS ONE yesterday shows that coral bleaching in the Atlantic and the Caribbean in 2005 was the worst bleaching event ever …
Full disclosure: I don’t ‘cruise.’ The idea of boarding a moveable city and being forced to share every meal for a week with friendly strangers does not sound like fun to me. Add ship morgues, and the fact that U.S. ships are now required to have sexual assault forensic specialists on board, and I think we’re dealing with …
All along the northern coast of Sicily there is evidence of organized crime: empty tonnaros, or tuna canneries, that went out of business last century when the massive blue fin tunas they hauled from the Mediterranean for generations finally disappeared. Sicily’s ghostly tonnaros may not have much to do with the Corleones or the
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Sometimes a President can’t catch a break—a lesson the current, beleaguered resident of the Oval Office keeps learning. The latest bit of bad news came from a commission the President himself appointed back in the spring to study the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. President Obama announced the creation of the study group on May …
“Only the sea knows the depth of the sea.” So goes a line from Hindu scriptures, one that well describes the mystery of the ocean depths—and our ongoing ignorance about life beneath the waves. For thousands of years, our knowledge of the seas was limited to surface currents and the fish that we could catch, close to the coast. …
Over in the paper and iPad TIME magazine, I have a long story this week on the oceanographer Sylvia Earle and her mission to save the oceans. I’ve written about Sylvia before on Ecocentric, during our trip to Bermuda—no matter what you think about her very ambitious plan to created vast protected areas across much of the ocean, you …
Over the past few weeks I’ve been immersed in the details of marine protected areas (MPAs) as I prepare a TIME story on the oceanographer Sylvia Earle and her crusade to defend the endangered oceans. Much of that focus has been on the Sargasso Sea in the Atlantic Ocean, where Earle and I visited last week. But as promising as the …
Over on the Time.com mainpage, I have a piece up about my trip to the Bermuda Institute of Ocean Science (BIOS) in, unsurprisingly, Bermuda. The visit was part of a longer reporting trip I took to the island last week with the oceanographer and environmentalist Sylvia Earle, for a piece on ocean health I’ll be writing soon for the …
The anti-whaling movement scored a partial victory today in Tokyo, where two Japanese activists affiliated with Greenpeace were convicted of stealing whale meat, but were given a suspended sentence. Junichi Sato and Toru Suzuki were found guilty of stealing 50 lbs. (23 kg) of whale meat from a delivery company’s warehouse in April 2008, …