The Hawaiian culture places great emphasis on the word “Aloha,” which means love, peace, compassion, and charity. Hawaiians greet and bid farewell to their guests with Aloha. Unfortunately, there was no Aloha at this year’s APEC Summit (Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation) in Honolulu, Hawaii. Sadly, a local Hawaiian youth was killed on the first day of the summit after scuffling with a U.S. federal agent who was hired as a security guard for the multi-day event. This caused bewilderment and a wave of protests from locals.
Honolulu, normally a peaceful vacation town, was not very friendly during the week of the summit and seemed to escalate into chaos. Roads were closed for world leaders and their entourages, causing massive traffic jams. According to witnesses, just the Chinese delegation alone, arrived with 1,000 members and that was only one of the 21 delegations in attendance. Thousands of armed soldiers and federal agents patrolled the perimeter of the tourist part of Honolulu-Waikiki, where the summit took place. Displaying weapons to cause fear in peaceful people is, unfortunately, a common practice in many countries. The meeting was held on Hawaii, far from the US mainland, where large-scale protests were unlikely. Yet, authorities and the APEC planning committee apparently decided to take special measures in light of recent Occupy Movement Protests in most large US cities. To give you a sense of how much security was there, the US government spent $44 million to prepare for the summit, including $18 million for police and $10 million for “contingency expenses” such as 700 thousand units of non-lethal weapons, including 25 thousand pepper sprays, and even 3 thousand tasers, all purchased by American taxpayers.
I think I am one of the luckiest people out there to be doing the work I am very passionate about, being able to travel, meeting some of the most wonderful people around the globe and being able to connect those people in order to make positive change.
I recently traveled to Nome, Alaska for the Beringia Days Conference organized by the Shared Beringian Heritage Program of National Park Service (NPS). The conference was first held in 1997 and since then it alternated between both sides of the Bering Strait. This year it was Alaska’s turn to host the conference. Nome welcomed more than 130 people. Among them were native people of Alaska and Chukotka, Russian and American scholars, researchers, environmentalists, and representatives of government and non-governmental organizations.
The goal of the conference was to bring together various stakeholders for discussions around issues affecting communities both in Chukotka and Alaska. Some of the major topics covered during the conference were international cooperation, creation of the Shared Beringia Heritage Trans-boundary Protected Area, preservation of culture and language, youth programs, environmental issues including resource extraction, increased shipping, and pollution. Special attention was paid to marine mammal research and impacts of climate change on subsistence resources of indigenous peoples.
Nearly 300 years ago, one of the first researchers of the Kamchatka Peninsula, George Stelleronce wrote:
“Kamchatka lives almost solely on fish. If you hit the water with a spear you rarely miss a fish. Fishing nets or seines are useless in Kamchatka for that reason. It’s impossible to drag them ashore, they tear because ofthe abundance of fish.”
Many years ago, it seemed that the salmon would last forever. However, today we know that all natural resources are limited, and Kamchatka’s salmon need protection. So what is the current state of Kamchatka salmon? The Kamchatka Branch of the Pacific Institute of Geography has published extensively on the topic. (more…)
A western gray whale named Flex has been receiving media attention worldwide for being the first of his kind to be tagged and tracked. He is a 13 year old western gray whale that was tagged on October 4th, 2010 by Russian and American scientists off of Sakhalin Island in eastern Russia.
His precedence is not the only thing gaining him fame though; his unpredictable path in the last four months has also been gaining him attention. Scientists and researchers are baffled by his movements, but then again, they humbly admit they did not really know where western gray whales should be going in the first place. (more…)
While Sunday 10/10/10 was celebrated all over the world by activists as “Global Warming Work Party” and now known as the “Biggest Day of Climate Action”, I was fortunate enough to participate in Pacific Environment’s Vessel Watch trip to the Gulf of the Farallones National Marine Sanctuary to collect and record data on whales (humpbacks, blue whales, etc) and help raise awareness about the impacts of shipping traffic on our magnificent marine life that frequent this sanctuary.
Vessel Watch Trip Leaving San Francisco Bay
On board the 65’ Catamaran “KittyKat” were experienced naturalists plus my colleague Jackie Dragon, the director of our Marine Sanctuaries Program; fellow colleagues and researchers; and several members of the public who for the first time were going to see and hear these amazing creatures in the wild. The trip took us 27 miles beyond the Golden Gate to the Farallon Islands, a group of six small islands and giant rocks near the edge of the continental shelf. The sanctuary supports an abundance of life, including many threatened or endangered species – including the humpback whale, blue whale, great white shark and even killer whales. The naturalist informed us that just two weeks ago they saw pods of the endangered northern right whale dolphins, an extremely rare sighting. There are three typical seasons where researchers come out to collect data and they are – birds, whales and sharks. Right now is great white shark season and the Farallons are heavily frequented by shark cage divers.
I shot the following videos at Lake Azabache and in Bistrinsky Nature Park in central Kamchatka during a mid-July trip with my colleague Igor Goldfarb.
Here you can see a spawning stream filled with sockeye salmon as they complete the final leg of their journey to the spawning grounds. When I took this video, these fish had already traveled from the ocean, up two rivers, across a lake, and up several miles of this stream. The white fish have already spawned, and are beginning to die. The media portrays post-spawn salmon mortality as a romantic sacrifice, but the truth is far more gruesome: after completing their “duty,” the salmon literally begin to fall apart. The upshot is that the nutrients the salmon bring to Kamchatka’s rivers feed entire villages, an enormous population of bears, and even fertilizes the surrounding forest. (more…)
When was the last time you wanted a noisy leaf blower or a honking car alarm to stop blaring? Imagine thousands of similar sounds intruding into your daily life from breakfast through dinner time, and all through the night. This is what it’s like to be a whale in today’s noisy oceans. It’s called noise pollution. You and I may not notice it up here on land, but it is really bad for you if you are one of the animals that live in the vicinity of all the noise produced by humans on a daily basis in our oceans. The blue, grey, and humpback whales that swim and feed in the krill-rich waters of the Gulf of the Farallones National Marine Sanctuary are subject to dramatically increased background noise because of all the shipping traffic that drives through those waters on the way to the busy Port of Oakland, the 4th busiest port in the nation.
Now picture being at a concert and trying to hear something important that the person right next you is saying. Unless you have a hearing super power you would barely hear what the other person is saying. That is what the whales have to endure all the time. The noise that the ships make – mostly from their propellers – is at the same level, or frequency, that whales use to communicate with each other. In their darkened ocean world they can’t rely on sight, like humans can. Whales depend on sound to communicate through vast amounts of water, to find food, to mate, to survive, and protect themselves from predators.
Scientists recently discovered that some whales are changing their vocalizations – essentially screaming – so that they can be heard over the racket all the boats are making. But doing this is likely straining the whales and at some point they won’t be able to call loud enough to be heard in our industrialized ocean, leaving them silenced and alone.
If ships slowed down, though, they wouldn’t be spreading as much noise pollution, and they would save innocent whales that die each year after being struck and killed by fast-moving vessels.
Maersk, the world’s largest shipping line, is doing it! If they can slow their speed to 12 knots (about 14mph) – instead of the much noisier and dangerous 20 – 24 knots – then so should the rest of the shipping companies.
Try to picture having no way to communicate, protect yourself, or even be able to eat because of some body else who wants to be able to move faster to a destination. For whales’ sake, and cleaner air and less climate change, ships should give whales a brake!
Back in July, Igor and I went to visit a partner who conducts anti-poaching patrols in the Nalichego Nature Park, not far from Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky. We had to take a boat to his home within the park and, after a day-long tour, rode back to the truck to head home. As we turned a corner we saw the following image:
Right there, in the middle of a federal park on waters where any fishing equipment beyond a spinning rod is banned, we caught two men stringing a net across the mouth of a key spawning river.
I realized just how complacent poachers can be on Kamchatka, but it also revealed how a little support in the right places can significantly ameliorate the problem. Our partner in this park will likely catch several similarly complacent poachers this season. And if we can find more committed partners like him to conduct similar work, we can show poachers that their illegal work will not be tolerated by the locals who care the most about healthy salmon populations.
Olkhon is the third-largest lake-bound island in the world, and the largest in Lake Baikal with an area of 730 square kilometers (280 sq mi). On the evening of July 2nd, I arrived in Khuzhir, the administrative center of the Olkhon Island. I planned to spend the weekend finalizing a grant proposal and meeting with local activists.
I went for a run along the lake when I arrived. The last time I visited the island was in 1998, with a crew of filmmakers who I accompanied as an interpreter and a local chaperone. At the time, the island did not have electricity. In fact, the few people that did live there lived off diesel generators which supplied enough electricity for basic lighting, cooking, and an hour or two of TV in the evening. Back then, there were only a few foreigners who used to stride along the streets of Khuzhir, attracting a lot of attention from local kids. There were one or two grocery stores and a couple of tourist guest houses. One of the most famous guest houses was run by the island’s local interpreter, Nikita Bencharov, who had extra wooden cabins and some sites for tents in his backyard. (more…)
This week, just days after BP finally capped the hemorrhaging well in the Gulf, President Obama issued an Executive Order delivering a first-ever National Ocean Policy (NOP). Instead of 20 different agencies administering more than 140 unique laws, often with conflicting purposes, in a piecemeal fashion, we will now have a guiding vision for all federal agencies with a mandate for protection and restoration of our coasts, oceans, islands and Great Lakes.
While the new policy can’t prevent a blow-out like the Deepwater Horizon it can prepare us much better to address such accidents, before they occur. The NOP is the result of a yearlong public process that considered input from many stakeholders including commercial fisherman, conservationists, scientists, the recreational community, business owners and thousands of citizens. In San Francisco, over 500 people packed the hearing to weigh in on the question of how to best manage our shared ocean resources.
ts from locals.
Olkhon is the third-largest 