Welcome to my site. The best way for me to describe the main theme of what I do is to say that I write and speak about ‘How the ocean is changing and what it means for wildlife and for people.’ But I’m interested more broadly in our relationship to the world and to each other. Human dignity and nature both require each other.
FishPhone
People who want to make a difference often ask, “What can I do?” Because most people’s main relationship with the ocean is through the seafood we eat, knowing about sustainable seafood is one of the things we can do. So to help lighten our load on the ocean, Blue Ocean Institute has created an iPhone app called FishPhone http://www.blueocean.org/fishphone.
You’ve heard of “early adopters?” I am the last adopter. Last person to get everything. I carried the same reliable old cell phone for about 7 years, until people started pointing and giggling. Still I resisted. But then we put our Ocean Friendly Seafood Rankings into an iPhone “app” available on iTunes. With support from Brancott Vineyards, we created the searchable seafood app, and we were also able to include wine pairings for seafood on the good side of our scale. And, for the more environmentally friendly choices, our resident chef Barton Seaver provides recipes. Not long ago I had the distinct pleasure (read: performance anxiety) of cooking lunch for Barton and Blue Ocean’s staff in my home, and it went so well that my recipe for “striped bass casa allegra” is also included. Lotsa fun for me to see “my first published recipe.”
I miss my old phone. But I gotta admit, I dig the colors. I like some of the features. My old phone certainly couldn’t show me the weather-radar to help me decide whether it was really safe to take my boat outside the harbor after a storm seemed to pass.
And our app rocks. You can search by seafood name, by best-to-worst, learn fishing terms, learn the answer to, “is seafood good for me” (and when it isn’t), and basically dazzle your friends at dinner.
If you don’t have an iPhone, you can still get our rankings from any cell phone by texting the message FISH and the species in question to 30644, (So for instance, “Fish yellowtail” or “Fish clams”). Blue Ocean Institute replies in under ten seconds with our friendly advice. Users can opt-in to receive ocean-friendly updates by texting BLUE to 30644, (The text service was developed with the support of the Waitt Foundation and the National Marine Sanctuary Foundation).
There are lots of ways of answering the question ‘What can I do?’ and not all of them are this easy. You can read about other ideas on our website. But having a nice example in the palm of my hand to show and share makes it almost worth giving up my old reliable 7-year-old phone.
– Carl Safina
The following op-ed by Carl Safina appeared on CNN.com July 28, 2010
Editor’s note: Carl Safina writes about how the ocean is changing and what it means for wildlife and for people. A MacArthur fellow, Pew fellow and Guggenheim fellow, he is adjunct professor at Stony Brook University and president of Blue Ocean Institute. His next book, “The View From Lazy Point; A Natural Year in an Unnatural World,” will appear this fall. He is working on a book about the oil blowout.
(CNN) — The blowout is stopped. The oil disaster that began with an explosion 100 days ago has not ended by any means. But we seem to be seeing a murky ending to the beginning of the crisis.
We have an enormous amount of floating oil, and Gulf waters polluted by oil and dispersant.
Most estimates range from 2 million to 4 million barrels (84 million to 168 million gallons). The higher end would make it the largest unintended release of oil ever. (In 1991, Saddam Hussein’s army intentionally released about 400 to 500 million gallons into the Persian Gulf to slow American troops.) Added to the Gulf of Mexico’s troubles: about 2 million gallons of dispersant, a major intentional pollution event in itself.
What now? As a naturalist, I’d say the wildlife effects remain hard to grasp. The damage to people is most easily observable, best quantified and perhaps even most acute.
Regionally there’s been further damage to Louisiana marshes already assaulted by decades of channel-cutting, shipping, water direction, erosion and sinkage. For resident wildlife, undersea oil and dispersant endangers countless sea creatures — from plankton to whale sharks to dolphins and whales — including reefs and the eggs and larvae of corals, fishes, crabs and oysters.
Watch a talk by Carl Safina at TED.com
Of hemispheric importance are creatures that range widely but funnel through the Gulf to migrate or to breed. Two of the most important breeders are the world’s most endangered sea turtle — the Kemp’s Ridley — and the giant bluefin tuna, one of the most overfished of the world’s giant ocean fishes. Migrants include millions of shorebirds, ducks and geese; herons and egrets; gannets, loons, terns, skimmers and other seabirds; peregrine falcons, ospreys and Gulf-crossing songbirds that often land exhausted on beaches and marshes.
How many of these creatures, and what proportion of their populations, were damaged or spared, no one can say. Every oiled carcass found may suggest 10 to 100 undetected deaths. But it’s also true that at this point — with much of the oil yet to go somewhere — there remain numerous clean-looking pelicans, gleaming gulls, and immaculate egrets along Gulf shores and marshes.
People, though, have taken deep and immediate hits. Closures have meant an end to fishing, cessation of a way of life and of the way thousands of people understand who they are. Some may say the closures are artificial, that there are still plenty of fish, probably safe to eat. Others say the seafood safety is unreliable, and that, anyway, future consumer confidence is the most important thing to preserve. There’s truth to both sides.
The mere tainting of beaches has been enough to send beachgoers fleeing to other destinations, creating a real-estate implosion, hordes of refunded deposits, halted construction and thousands of service jobs lost.
Nationally, we’re all connected by the loss to the nation’s seafood supply and by taxpayer funded government expenses related to agencies such as the Coast Guard and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, as well as lost attention on other issues, and added unemployment costs that won’t be covered by BP.
No one knows whether the seafood and tourism and fisheries will be clean and healthy again next year or in a decade.
We should be willing to learn some lessons.
One is that this catastrophe wasn’t just an accident. It was the result of reckless corner-cutting by the oil company and scandalously compromised oversight by the government. As U.S. Rep. Henry Waxman, D-California, observed, “BP appears to have made multiple decisions for economic reasons that increased the danger of a catastrophic well failure.”
The compromised oversight included the Minerals Management Service failing to require a backup shutdown system required in much of the rest of the world, failing to require offshore drillers to file plans to deal with major oil spills and specifically allowing BP to drill without a detailed environmental analysis.
The George W. Bush administration gave top Interior Department jobs to former lobbyists of the fossil fuel industry. Now the inspector general finds that Interior had “a culture of substance abuse and promiscuity.”
Another lesson: Preparedness is near zero. The only two things responders could quickly muster were booms that can’t handle open water, and dispersants. But dispersants sink oil, defeating the idea behind booms, polluting much more water, making the oil more widely toxic to marine life and making it impossible to recover or clean up.
Absent preparedness, BP and other companies responding to the spill made stuff up as they went; during weeks of blundering, hare-brained schemes like using shredded tires and golf balls to “top kill” the well, and fabricating new slap-dab caps and domes that didn’t work. Meanwhile people sent their hair clippings to the Gulf. A comedy of horrors. That is not a response plan.
Obviously, reforms are needed. Rig regulations should now require that the best equipment and procedures are used. To eliminate guesswork and argument, these procedures must be specified and quantified. For instance, blowout preventers should have a specified number of valves for drilling in a particular range of depths, all spelled out as requirements. Further, there should be explicit checklists and decision trees.
If the driller detects a possible problem, the operation must be shut down; they must not retain the option of arguing about whether it’s probably OK to keep going. A culture of safety and best practices must replace the culture of risk.
We should never again be subjected to the comment, “We’ve never tried this at this depth.” It’s as if, after the house is on fire, they set about devising and then building a truck capable of spraying water.
With all the contracting companies servicing thousands of rigs, you’d think the oil giants would have, say, two or three pieces of equipment in a warehouse somewhere capable of stopping and controlling a blowout at one of their wells — and capturing the oil. This should be devised and required.
Because an oil company’s interests are not aligned with the public’s interests, the oil company must be liable, but not in charge. Allowing an oil company to run the response to a spill makes it possible for it to try to hide the amount of oil and the numbers of wildlife killed, to suppress scientific data and hamper journalists.
The federal government should nationalize major spills, avail itself of the best pooled talent in the oil industry, and send the offending company the people’s bill. Once it’s on our property, the offending oil company should not touch anything unless specifically directed to do so. As it is now, things are so insanely backward that at the end of June the Coast Guard made it a felony for boats to get within 70 feet of boom. We need to stop putting the murderer in charge of the crime scene.
Larger lessons lurk. The mortgage bubble, banking collapse, taxpayer-funded bailouts and this blowout all stem from a three-decade assault on government effectiveness, the consequent deregulation Mardi Gras, and the unleashing of corporate greed and corporate “personhood.” Corporate capture of government away from the public’s interests is the basic poison. Campaign finance reform and publicly funded elections would be the antidote.
Lastly and probably most important, to honor the scale of this catastrophe, we need to create a historic moment that begins to give us some energy options and creates a graceful phase-in of greater reliance on the clean, eternal energy that actually runs our planet.
There are many reasons to do this. Blowouts and dead workers and the awful environmental destruction wrought by coal mining and oil are some. Helping weaken petro-dictators and gaining U.S. energy independence is major. Helping stabilize world climate and the acidifying seas, and securing agriculture, are yet others.
Providing jobs, incentives for construction and investment opportunities are others still. The basic vision is to reduce oil subsidies, create a level playing field for clean renewable energies like wind, solar, tidal, geothermal, algae fuels, etc; construct a national smart grid capable of carrying power produced by any energy source whether dirty or renewable from where it’s abundant to where it’s needed.
Electric cars would be the grid’s storage battery. Other countries — China and some in northern Europe — are doing this. But I’d rather see American leadership regained. The nation that owns the future of energy will own the future. I want that nation of the future to be the United States of America.
The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of Carl Safina.
Find this article at:
http://www.cnn.com/2010/OPINION/07/28/safina.oil.lessons/index.html?iref=24hours
Text and photos by Carl Safina – click here to view photo gallery.
You’d think that, with an ongoing environmental disaster caused by a foreign corporation, the U.S. government would be OK with letting the public see what’s going on. Land of the free, right?
Well, not necessarily.
Among the latest and most enraging developments in the ongoing Gulf oil blowout catastrophe is that on June 30, the Coast Guard suddenly decided that something we’ve been doing for weeks—getting near booms deployed ostensibly to deter oil (because you really can’t avoid them)—is a felony.
A felony.
This, after weeks of people screaming for transparency and complaining about interference, the Administration promising transparency, and journalists (and myself) complaining of petty bullying on public roads and beaches by people now getting paid by BP. [For plenty of other reporting on the news strangle, do a Google search with the words: media access gulf oil]
A felony.
Here it is:
http://www.deepwaterhorizonresponse.com/go/doc/2931/726955/
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First of all, you can’t stay 66 feet [20 m] away from “boom” (it seems always referred to in the singular, like one mass of material) even if you never leave your car. They’re everywhere there’s saltwater from coastal Louisiana to Florida’s panhandle, alongside roads and under bridges. Second, no one interferes with them. Why would they; the booms aren’t doing much. They’re just floating there or lying where they’ve been pushed ashore by waves.
But here’s the thing: They can’t say, “We forbid the people of the United States from taking photos or talking to people.” But they know that the photos they don’t want you to see, the upsetting ones, tend to come from places where there is a lot of oil. And all those places have booms nearby. And they know that if you’re going to talk to anyone close to the situation, there’ll probably be booms nearby.
For people like me who are documenting some of what’s happening, cameras and notebooks have become hassle-magnets. And now—in accord with the interests of BP and contrary to the public interest—any official, any kid with an orange vest, any rent-a-cop who wants your camera and you gone, can not only yell and tell you you’re “not allowed,” they can threaten you with felony charges for being near boom. Boom has become proxy for censorship. They’ve lowered the boom.
So on the morning of the Fourth of July I found myself in Mobile, Alabama near the USS Alabama herself.
And there, because this is the Gulf region in the summer of 2010, I found myself in close proximity to—yes—boom.
It was only fitting. The battleship went boom, the cannons go boom. And now, more boom. Boom boom boom. (This one was holding a very light slick between the boom and the shore, a common misfunction.)
So, in the spirit of Independence Day, honoring the Revolution and all, I decided to be willful, thus commit a felony, and record it photographically. I report it here, patriotically and unrepentantly. Shame on BP, and shame on the Coast Guard. Shame, indeed, on us all, for letting our own government drift so deep into corporate territory, so far from allegiance to We, the people.
Private security guards working for a company paid by BP prevent a would-be beach-goer from entering public property clearly marked “Open.”
July 4th. Dauphin Island, Alabama.
Two-hundred-and-thirty-four years ago, The United States won its independence from, guess who: the British.
Not so fast. At the end of the road is a public park clearly marked “OPEN.” It’s noon when I approach what looks like a little temporary trailer-style guard station at the entrance.
A young guy with a clipboard straightens up and walks quickly to the threshold of the park entrance. The power play is immediate. He’s joined by an older guy, 60s, who takes over the interaction.
“ I assume this park is open,” I say, “since the sign says, ‘Open.’”
“No.”
“Then why does the sign say it’s open?”
“Because they haven’t taken it down.”
“Why would they take it down if it’s a public park?
“It’s closed.”
“Why is it closed?”
“Because there are operations going on here connected to the oil spill. It’s been taken over by the National Guard. The National Guard is operating down here.”
“And they’ve closed the public park, even though it says it’s open.”
“Yes. The city has closed it.”
“Does that seem right to you?”
“I have no comment on that, sir. All I know is it’s closed to the public.”
“And who do you work for?”
“I work for Response Force One security.”
“What is Response Force One?”
“A security company.”
“And you’re hired by who?”
“Response Force One.”
“Yes, but who are they hired by?”
“BP,” he says with a lift of his chin, as though those two letters are the big trump card of the whole Gulf region. A foreign corporation has hired American citizens to keep other Americans off of public property. These are not even real cops. They’re what we used to call rent-a-cops, private security guards, the kind appropriate for guarding private property like office buildings and department stores. The kind who have no real legal authority. Local police or sheriffs, as I understand it, can grant authority to private security guards, but I can’t check whether they’ve officially done so here, since, after all, it’s a holiday. But these guys are not guarding the park or public property. They’re guarding, well, I can’t really see; looks like more booms and porta-potties.
“So BP closed the public park?”
“No. The town closed it. The town has closed it. Because there are operations going on here.”
The parking lot behind him is pretty empty and the equipment is idle. It’s a holiday, after all. “I don’t really see any operations going on here,” I say.
“Sir,” he says, starting to lose his cool, “I’m tellin’ ya—it’s closed. OK?”
“OK, and I’m asking why.”
“Because there are operations going on. It’s a secure area.”
“So, it’s the Fourth of July, Independence Day, and we won a war of independence and now a British corporation has”—
“Sir,” he interrupts, now getting exasperated, “if you have any questions about the beach being closed I’m gonna suggest that you contact somebody from the Town of Dauphin Island.”
“OK. Who can I contact?”
“Anybody in the city. Contact the mayor.”
“Do you have their phone numbers?”
“They’re not working today. It’s a holiday.”
“But you don’t have their phone numbers, any contact information?”
“No I don’t.” Now he’s pretty fed up with me. Feeling’s mutual, I’d estimate. The eye contact between us is turning hostile. I ask if I can take his picture and, not surprisingly, he says “No.”
“But you’re on public property,” I point out again. I’m no lawyer, yet I assume he’d have a private right not to have his photo taken. But since he’s saying he’s acting in an official government capacity, I’m pretty sure the First Amendment would cover as free speech taking a photo of an “official.” At any rate, this is not a discussion on the fine points of the Constitution. We’re miles and miles from the fine points. This, after all, is The Oil.
“I said, NO!” he yells. I see hatred in his eyes and he’s starting to shake with rage. I guess he’s not accustomed to being challenged. Most cars just turn around. He doesn’t usually even have to talk to anyone. His mere presence is enough to repel people. Everyone can see it’s closed, never mind the sign. And obviously, I’ve come with an attitude about this. I hate it. I hate all of it. I feel myself pointlessly returning his glare of rage.
He reaches for his radio in a threatening way, as if to warn, “I’m going to call Daddy.” He’s got his finger on the key.
I should make him call some real police, in uniforms and a real cop car, hired by the citizens and paid with tax money. But I presume they’ll side with him and we might all get angry. I say ‘OK,’ turn, and leave.
But, acting on my own interpretation of the First Amendment, I’ve already got my photos, and my recording of our conversation.
Later, I did find a sheriff and asked how private security guards can keep people off public property, especially where the sign very clearly says a park is Open.
“I don’t know,” he said. “The park is closed; that’s true. In fact a lot of the island’s beach access is closed. But how they’re doing it, you’d have to ask the Town. Right now there’s a lot of screwy things on this island. I don’t understand it all myself.”
I guess you can’t explain something that doesn’t really make sense. Happy Independence Day.
Guest blog by Stephen Dishart, Executive Director, Blue Ocean Institute
To view Carl’s TEDx Oil Spill lecture click here.
Safina points to gross negligence as the cause of the spill
With a remarkable agenda of speakers, the hottest topic on the planet and a crowd of environmental experts and others eager for the latest word on the Gulf oil crisis, the TEDx Oil Spill event June 28th in Washington brought out the strongest message heard to date on the spill from Blue Ocean Institute’s Dr. Carl Safina.
“This is not just a Gulf issue,” said Safina, “we’re all engulfed. This will go down in the Guinness Book of ‘Unpreparedness,’” he told the audience at the sold-out daylong conference.
The TEDx Oil Spill program was delivered in four sessions covering Observation, Oil Science, Conservation and The Future of Energy. The event was independent from, but operated under a license by TED, a small nonprofit devoted to Ideas Worth Spreading. Each session featured leaders from the world of academia, business leaders, artists and leading NGOs.
Speaking from recent experience in the Gulf and based on his decades of writing and research, Dr. Safina was applauded by the crowd for his bold statement that he refuses to look at the spill as an “accident.” Instead, said Safina, “This is the result of gross negligence. The root causes of which are money and ideology.” Emphasizing some key themes of his recent writing, Safina, stated that the culture of deregulation has, in the case of the spill, “left the murderer in charge of the crime scene.”
Earlier in the day, Philippe Cousteau, a member of the legendary family and CEO of EarthEcho International, kicked off the program. Recalling his grandfather, Captain Jacques-Yves Cousteau, he opened the event emphasizing that the “oil crisis is not just what you can see, but also what you can’t see” under the ocean surface.
The theme of the hidden truth beneath the surface continued throughout many of the speakers’ remarks and presentations. The issue that the enormous underwater spread of the gushing oil has been hidden by toxic dispersants beneath the waves also led many audience members and other participants to ask for the truth from BP and the government.
Picking up that premise, marine toxicologist Dr. Susan Shaw, said, “The Ocean is the final sink of toxic chemicals. You can see the web of death.” Shaw, who is the founder and director of the Marine Environmental Research Institute explained how the combination of the Corexit, the dispersant BP is using, and oil are more toxic than either oil or the dispersant alone.
Noted oceanographer and explorer Dr. Sylvia Earle called on the nation to give back to the Gulf, itself. Recalling a recent dive in the oil slick in the Gulf and a visit to an unaffected area, Earle drew contrasts between the remarkable degradation and “signs of hope in a sea of despair.” But in that message of hope she also cautioned that each August is a major time of coral spawning in the Gulf and that the spill is “not good for corals and all life.”
Text and photos by Carl Safina – click here to view photo gallery.
After flying to the site of the blowout, I drove to Grand Isle, Louisiana. Everywhere across the extensive marshes, in any sweep of view, tools of the oil industry pierced the skyline.
Oil has hit heavily here.
And the residents are not happy.
Who can blame them?
Text and photos by Carl Safina – click here to view photo gallery.
On June 10, I returned to ground zero, the site of the ongoing oil blowout.
James Fox shot this video. I took still pictures.
The Delta in Louisiana is astonishing in many ways, not least that people live so aquatic an existence in a place so fraught with lethal weather.
It wasn’t hard to find oil. It was harder to find open water; I’m not sure we found any.
At ground zero the sea was full of oil, full of boats. The ship that flared flamed gas as it captured some fraction of the oil. The helicopters below us like dragonflies on a black-and-blue pond.
Even miles from the site of the erupting well, the sea seemed coated with oil. In massive streaks, some a mile long.
It was not a happy scene; it seemed apocalyptic, indeed.
Text and photos by Carl Safina – click here to view photo gallery.
During the second week of June, I got a boat to take me out Alabama’s Perdido Pass and into the open Gulf. We were interested in rumors of dead fish floating 15 miles from shore.
We saw some very light slicks close to shore. Schools of False Albacore (Little Tunny) chased prey through light oil. We saw many such schools over quite a few miles. We never saw dead fish. I did see many tiny fish swimming beneath the oil, and a few flyingfish that sailed in and out of the surface slick.
A few miles out, we started seeing slicks and little blobs of oil seemingly dissolving into the warm surface waters like brown pats of butter.
And soon, many more.
And bigger.
How to solve this? Hire some sport fishing boats that can’t fish because fishing is closed, and have them tow a boom between them. Yeah, that’ll do it.
And along shore, despite the boom-boom-booms, the oil gets in.
Text and photos by Carl Safina – click here to view photo gallery.
By the second week of June, oil began hitting the beaches of Alabama and the Florida Panhandle
At Dauphin Island, Alabama, beachgoers tried to enjoy the sun and water while workers “cleaned” the beach with shovels. Look at the incredible amount of plastic waste they’re generating. “Safetly rules” dictated that no more than ten pounds of sand could go into each bag, I guess because they didn’t want anyone hurting their back. (Too bad they didn’t have good enough safety rules on the rig itself.) Now what are they gonna do with all that oily sand and all those bags?
And by the way, even with all those people on a public beach, one of the foremen yelled at us because we had a camera. What are they thinking? Are they thinking?
A stroll in the sand, anyone?
A Great Blue Heron flew past the bags of oiled sand as a light slick nuzzled the shore.
Kids swam in a light slick.
No one I spoke to had seen the tiny sign warning swimmers.
Time for a brief chat with those pesky cameras.
Not all is lost; Laughing Gulls appeared un-oiled. I wonder where they were foraging.
Near Orange Beach, Alabama, a rising tide carried oil past booms through Perdido pass and into the back bays, where Bottlenose Dolphins still frolicked.
Recently, Blue Ocean Institute’s Dr. Carl Safina, appeared on the Emmy and Peabody Award-winning Comedy Central series, “The Colbert Report,” touted by The New York Times as “one of the best television shows of the year.”
After spending much of the past month in the Gulf of Mexico, Safina addressed the Colbert Nation about this catastrophic event, and the long-term social & ecological impact BP’s oil blow out will have. From our ocean to the dinner table, Safina asserts that, “it’s not the Gulf oil spill, it’s the U.S. oil spill. It’s our oil spill.”
| The Colbert Report | Mon – Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c | |||
| Carl Safina | ||||
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Blue Ocean Institute