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Posted: 03-10-2013 00:10 Post subject:

This covers it though:

The 18 species of freshwater eel are catadromous, which means that they live in freshwater as adults, but breed in saltwater. When sexually mature and ready to breed, freshwater eels stop feeding entirely; this journey is powered entirely by the stored fat reserves in their bodies. They swim downstream until they reach the sea. No obstacle seems insurmountable; eels trapped in lakes and ponds, or those that find their way blocked by dams or other barriers, will even travel overland at night, wriggling along until they find an unobstructed route to the sea.

http://lazy-lizard-tales.blogspot.co.uk/2009/03/freshwater-eels-anguillidae.html

Posted: 03-10-2013 07:35 Post subject:

Green NGOs cannot take big business cash and save planet
Naomi Klein is right to be concerned at the relationship between green groups and corporations, writes Genevieve LeBaron for The Conversation

When she wrote recently that “big green groups” are doing more harm than good when it comes to saving the planet, Naomi Klein was right to be concerned.

In recent years the environmental agenda has become heavily corporatised. Unimaginable a few decades back, partnerships between environmental NGOs and big-brand companies have become common. The Environmental Defense Fund led the way in 1990, partnering with McDonald’s to introduce more sustainable packaging. Today, the WWF receives funding from and works with Coca-Cola to “save” polar bears, and acts as “conservation partner” to IKEA.

Conservation International has partnerships with Starbucks and Walmart. The Nature Conservatory has partnered with Boeing, British Petroleum, Shell, Monsanto, and Walmart, among many others. Even Greenpeace, one of the more traditionally anti-corporate NGOs, is now cooperating with Unilever and Coca-Cola to promote “Greenfreeze” refrigeration technology (though unlike others, Greenpeace does not accept corporate funding).

Ties between environmental NGOs and the world’s largest oil and gas companies have also deepened. To name just a few examples, Time magazine reported in 2012 that “between 2007 and 2010 the Sierra Club, a US grassroots conservation network founded in the 19th century, accepted over US$25m in donations from the gas industry". The majority of these funds came from Chesapeake Energy, one of the world’s biggest gas drillers.

The Nature Conservancy has accepted millions of dollars from British Petroleum (BP) and is currently working with BP to “ensure their oil exploration efforts in the West are done sustainably”. And Antony Burgmans, a non-executive board member of BP, sits on the board of WWF International. While not completely new, such links between environmental NGOs and the biggest retail and energy corporations in the world are now commonplace, and growing in number.

As Peter Dauvergne and I argue in our forthcoming book Protest Inc., corporate-NGO partnerships do not represent a simple business takeover of activism. But they do demonstrate a significant shift in the strategy and ethos of many NGOs. They reflect the acceptance of corporations as allies rather than adversaries, and of the market as an efficient and acceptable tool through which to pursue environmental objectives. As many of the big environmental NGOs morph into global business-style institutions, they have come to value win-win moderate calls for “concrete and measurable progress” and impact over more radical disruptive demands to transform the system.

A consequence of environmental NGOs opting to co-operate with corporations has been that more effort has gone into market-friendly and consumer-driven activism – eco-certification and eco-labeling, for example, which helps legitimise rather than challenge business as usual.

For instance, the WWF/Coca-Cola campaign to “save” polar bears has driven sales of over one billion cans of Coke adorned with a white polar bear. The Sierra Club’s partnership with Clorox rents out the club’s century-old logo to help market a line of “green” cleaning products, in exchange for a percentage of sales. One can only imagine that John Muir, the Sierra Club’s first president and staunch advocate of ecological preservation, would hardly be impressed at the extent of his group’s compromises.

Efforts such as these may improve the ecological footprint of individual products and bring revenue to cash-strapped environmental organisations – but they are not fundamentally helping the planet, in fact they reinforce unsustainable patterns of production and consumption worldwide.

The great danger of corporatisation is that while environmental NGOs tinker at the edges with efforts to improve recycling and packaging (such as Greenpeace’s campaign to remove the illegal Indonesian paper fibre in Mattel’s Barbie boxes), overall consumption is rising exponentially. So too is the power and profit of the oil and retail corporations whose unsustainable business models drive climate change.

Grassroots environmental movements and groups continue to resist and challenge corporatisation. But this does not mean they are unaffected by it. Our research has found that at as global leaders praise corporate-NGO partnerships, politicians, police forces and court rooms in nations such as the UK, US and Canada treat street-level activists — particularly those involved in direct action — increasingly harshly. When credible alternatives are smeared by association, such actions only enhance the power that corporations have to weaken environmental activism.

• This article was first published by The Conversation

http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2013/oct/01/green-ngos-big-business-naomi-klein

Posted: 03-10-2013 07:55 Post subject:

Health of oceans 'declining fast'
By Roger Harrabin, Environment analyst

The health of the world’s oceans is deteriorating even faster than had previously been thought, a report says.
A review from the International Programme on the State of the Ocean (IPSO), warns that the oceans are facing multiple threats.
They are being heated by climate change, turned slowly less alkaline by absorbing CO2, and suffering from overfishing and pollution.

The report warns that dead zones formed by fertiliser run-off are a problem.
It says conditions are ripe for the sort of mass extinction event that has afflicted the oceans in the past.
It says: “We have been taking the ocean for granted. It has been shielding us from the worst effects of accelerating climate change by absorbing excess CO2 from the atmosphere.
“Whilst terrestrial temperature increases may be experiencing a pause, the ocean continues to warm regardless. For the most part, however, the public and policymakers are failing to recognise - or choosing to ignore - the severity of the situation.”

It says the cocktail of threats facing the ocean is more powerful than the individual problems themselves.
Coral reefs, for instance, are suffering from the higher temperatures and the effects of acidification whilst also being weakened by bad fishing practices, pollution, siltation and toxic algal blooms.

IPSO, funded by charitable foundations, is publishing a set of five papers based on workshops in 2011 and 2012 in partnership with the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN’s) World Commission on Protected Areas.

The reports call for world governments to halt CO2 increase at 450ppm. Any higher, they say, will cause massive acidification later in the century as the CO2 is absorbed into the sea.

It urges much more focused fisheries management, and a priority list for tackling the key groups of chemicals that cause most harm.

It wants the governments to negotiate a new agreement for the sustainable fishing in the high oceans to be policed by a new global high seas enforcement agency.

The IUCN’s Prof Dan Laffoley said: "What these latest reports make absolutely clear is that deferring action will increase costs in the future and lead to even greater, perhaps irreversible, losses.
"The UN climate report confirmed that the ocean is bearing the brunt of human-induced changes to our planet. These findings give us more cause for alarm – but also a roadmap for action. We must use it."

The co-coordinator, Prof Alex Rogers from Oxford University has been asked to advise the UN's own oceans assessment but he told BBC News he had led the IPSO initiative because: "It’s important to have something which is completely independent in any way from state influence and to say things which experts in the field felt was really needed to be said."
He said concern had grown over the past year thanks to papers signalling that past extinctions had involved warming seas, acidification and low oxygen levels. All are on the rise today.

He agreed there was debate on whether fisheries are recovering by better management following examples in the US and Europe, but said it seemed clear that globally they were not.

He also admitted a debate about whether overall climate change would increase the amount of fish produced in the sea. Melting sea ice would increase fisheries near the poles whilst stratification of warmer waters in the tropics would reduce mixing of nutrients and lead to lower production, he said.
He said dead zones globally appeared to be increasing although this may reflect increased reporting.

"On ocean acidification, we are seeing effects that no-one predicted like the inability of fish to detect their environments properly. It’s clear that it will affect many species. We really do have to get a grip on what’s going on in the oceans," he said.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-24369244

Posted: 03-10-2013 08:13 Post subject:

Posted: 03-10-2013 10:43 Post subject:

Did someone mention Soylent Green?