NEWSOCEANS

Hundreds of people around the U.S. have joined Stiv Wilson's petition on Change.org asking the National Park Service to re-instate its plastic bottle ban in the Grand Canyon. But he's not the only person angered enough to launch a petition. Independently of Stiv, others have come to Change.org to launch their own campaigns and are now coordinating their voices. Here are what the petition creators say: 

Deborah Patterson, Artist and Art Teacher, Baltimore, Maryland (Deborah's petition)

Over the years, I have signed many, many petitions to protect and support the environment, but this is the first one I have ever started. When I read that Coca-Cola had actually threatened to reduce or eliminate their support for the National Park system if the Grand Canyon banned the sale of disposable water bottles, I knew I had to do something.  Our national parks are owned by the citizens of the United States, whose taxes help maintain them.  The corporate world has no right to exercise this kind of coercion, which in schools is called "bullying."  At whatever level and in whatever form it needs to stop, and the only way to stop it is to stand up to it.

Devin Saez, Architect, Los Angeles, California (Devin's petition)

Hundreds of people around the U.S. have joined Stiv Wilson's petition on Change.org asking the National Park Service to re-instate its plastic bottle ban in the Grand Canyon. Signers are worried about the effects of plastic litter and pollution, and want the National Park Service to protect the beauty and wildlife of the Grand Canyon, one of America's greatest natural treasures. They are also angered that corporate interests, namely Coca-Cola's desire to keep making profits on bottled water, could take precedent over the public's interest in doing what's best for the park. Below is a statement from one petition signer we'd like to highlight. You can see many others by looking at the petition.

Wayne L. Hamilton, PhD. served America's national parks for more than two decades, as a research scientist at Yellowstone National Park and as a ranger at Zion National Park, among other positions. Since retiring from the Park Service in 1996, Wayne has worked as a research scientist in Baja California. His father, Warren F. Hamilton, was a Grand Canyon National Park Ranger between 1933 and 1940, and served as Superintendent of Everglades National Park and Zion National Park, and as the National Park Service's Assistant Regional Director of the Western Regional Office.

Post by Wayne L. Hamilton:

Hundreds of people around the U.S. have joined Stiv Wilson's petition on Change.org asking the National Park Service to re-instate its plastic bottle ban in the Grand Canyon. Signers are worried about the effects of plastic litter and pollution, and want the National Park Service to protect the beauty and wildlife of the Grand Canyon, one of America's greatest natural treasures. They are also angered that corporate interests, namely Coca-Cola's desire to keep making profits on bottled water, could take precedent over the public's interest in doing what's best for the park. Below is a statement from one petition signer we'd like to highlight. You can find many others by looking at the petition.

Erica Donnelly, Marine Biologist:

"I am a marine scientist in Santa Cruz, California who researches plastic ingestion in birds including Northern Fulmars, Albatrosses, and Shearwaters. We find plastic fragments from a variety of sources (both local and non-local) inside of bird stomachs.  Almost every bird we examine contains internal plastic that can effect the animal directly (internal blockages, abrasions, etc.) or indirectly (chemical toxicity from pollutants that adhere to plastics).

Seabirds are just one example of how are extensive use of disposable plastics is impacting wildlife. Micro-plastic infiltrate our ground water, water ways, and soil creating a national health issue, not just a localized problem on the coast.  We must get to the source of the issue and curtail our dependency on single use, disposable plastics.  Please help make a step in the right direction by banning plastic bottles."

You can join Erica and hundreds of others by signing Stiv Wilson's petition today.

The battle against the environmental impact of single-use plastic bags is a classic David vs. Goliath story: local individuals trying to reduce waste and save the planet are going up against the giants of petro-chemical companies bent on keeping the flow of fossil-fuel laden bags at an all time high. Take, for example, the owner of ChicoBags, a reusable bag company that was recently sued by three of the top US manufacturers of plastic bags—Hilex Poly LLC, Superbag, and Advance Polybag—in an attempt to discredit the reusable bag company's green merits.  (The recent settlement shows the plastic bag company's arguments were as flimsy as their bags).

Then, there are the numerous cities across the state of California that have passed such bans, including San Francisco, Malibu, Palo Alto, and Los Angeles County, but are now threatened with lawsuits by, you guessed it, Hilex Poly. Big time pressure from the industry shut down state-wide ban efforts in California this summer, and thwarted a city ban in Seattle last fall.

Shark fin soup, a delicacy consumed mostly by wealthy Chinese, is leading to the decimation of tens of millions of sharks every year.

But now Toronto, the largest city in Canada and 5th largest in North America, is poised to add some...er, teeth, to a growing movement to ban shark fins from menus around the world.

Today,  any high-end Chinese restaurant or traditional wedding banquet is likely serving shark fin soup. It's an old tradition that has come to be quite the status symbol. But the lofty price tag (up to $100 per bowl) is only part of the high cost—the destruction of shark populations around the globe is the larger cost to society.

Shark finning is an extremely cruel and wasteful practice: Fins are cut from sharks while they are still alive, and the bodies tossed back overboard where the shark sinks and either drowns or bleeds to death. The practice of shark finning has been banned in U.S. waters since 2002, and some international agreements have ended the practice in regions of the high seas. Yet, finning continues in many places, driven by the lucrative trade of fins to supply the soup (a meal that contains hardly any nutritional value, by the way).

Given the increasingly threatened status of shark worldwide, some leaders, such as in Hawaii and the town of Brandtford, Ontario, a city only a short drive from Toronto, have decided to take things a step further and ban the sale, consumption and possession of shark fins—the only real way to decrease the number of sharks slaughtered for fins each year.

With over 80 percent of all fish stocks declared fully exploited or overexploited, it is harder and harder for fishermen to find and catch the last fish. But enormous government subsidies make it not only possible, but profitable, for fishermen to do just that.  The oceans are running out of fish but rather than scaling back, the fishing fleet is larger than ever—like the global nuclear weapons arsenal capable of blowing up the planet several times over, today's fishing fleet can catch 2.5 times as many fish as is sustainable.

A decade ago, the World Trade Organization members agreed that something had to be done to reign in the unsustainable use of government funds to construct more and bigger boats in a sea of shrinking fish populations. But so far, negotiations have run dry, as trillions of dollars continue to poor into an ever-emptier sea. In a series of reports released last year in the Journal of Bioeconomics, researchers noted that U.S. taxpayers foot the bill for an average $713 million in direct subsidies to fisheries every year.

And nearly 60% of global fisheries subsidies go towards increasing the capacity of the fishing fleet.

California's San Jose Sharks are on a tear through the NHL playoffs this month, and so their mascot 'Sharkie' must be keeping seriously busy. Win or lose, when the season is done, we hope that the team can sink its teeth into an important statewide issue that could determine the continued survival of their real-life mascot.

Around the world, shark populations are plummeting due to the continued consumption of shark fin soup, which is viewed as a luxury and status symbol in traditional Chinese culture. The soup is made from fins sheared from live sharks; the sharks are then left to die. Worldwide, every single day, shark fin soup is to blame for 260,000 shark deaths. Every year? Seventy million. Because sharks are top ocean predators, their mass die-off is a dangerous experiment with our larger marine ecosystems.

California is the largest importer of shark fins outside of Asia, so it shoulders major responsibility for the sharks' plight. Luckily, right now the state is considering an important piece of legislation, AB 376, that would change this situation by banning the sale and import of shark fins.  And while the Chinese restaurant lobby and some politicians like to paint this bill as an attack on traditional Chinese culture, the reality is far different. A co-sponsor of the bill is Chinese American, and a new poll just released found that 70 percent of Chinese American California voters support the shark fin ban (compared to 76 percent of total California voters).

In the tragic aftermath of last April’s catastrophic BP oil spill, advocates of a sane national energy policy could take hope that the days of reckless calls for expanded offshore oil drilling might soon be a thing of the past. Against the horrendous images and stories emerging from the Gulf, it became hard to justify the expansion of an industry that was already too big to regulate, and the ranks offshore-drilling-friendly politicians started to thin a little. Indeed, just months after a decision to end a long-standing moratorium on drilling in certain coastal areas, the Obama administration reversed itself and has yet to look back.

Unfortunately, it now appears that the political class's stances on offshore oil drilling can be as vulnerable to oil-price volatility as consumers’ pocketbooks, and there are signs that whatever sanity had crept into the political sphere vis-à-vis offshore drilling may have started a gradual retreat.

California's proposed ban on shark fin sales, proposed in February, has sparked heated debates within the state's large Chinese American population, a culture which traditionally elevates shark fin soup to a status-symbol delicacy.

But nowhere has that become more divisive than in San Francisco, where Chinese restaurants are heavily lobbying local and state politicians to oppose the ban, ignoring the fact that rising shark fin consumption is starting to decimate shark populations worldwide (not to mention it is a terribly cruel practice, in which shark fins are sheared from live sharks, leaving them to die).

Shark fin proponents argue the proposed ban is an affront to Chinese culture, and their voice carries political weight in a city with more than 50,000 Chinese immigrant voters.

Fortunately, some environmentally-minded members of the Chinese American community are proving this argument wrong.

As oil prices rise, Alaskan federal officials are putting more and more pressure on the Administration to open up the U.S.'s "most important and abundant domestic source of future oil and gas" —including that which lies beneath the Beaufort and Chukhi seas.  These officials are busy slashing taxes and pushing through legislation (as well as sending letters to Secretary of Interior Salazar) to make drilling in Alaska as attractive as possible—despite the fact that the Arctic remains a very dangerous place to risk a spill.

As yesterday's anniversary of the Deep Horizon disaster reminds us, spills can and will happen.  And in the freezing, extreme conditions of the Arctic—think extended periods of darkness, fog, sub-zero temperatures, hurricane-force storms, and lots of moving sea ice—clean-up efforts would be nearly impossible.  Just this past February, an oil spill off Norway's only marine reserve proved how difficult clean-up operations can be, even in relatively calm conditions: oil leaked underneath sea ice, where it was impossible to reach, and surface skimming booms quickly clogged with ice, rendering them useless.