I first met Arina Shurygina at the Keepers of the Salmon festival. It was amazing to see how much love she put into teaching about the salmon life cycle, its constitution, and peculiarities. It seemed that there was nothing more important to her than to teach each student how many fins a salmon has and the locations and names of each fin. Later, I learned that containers set throughout the town to collect plastic caps were another of Arina’s initiatives, but not the only one.

It was interesting to learn how it all began. Arina explains that, “One spring, at the outskirts of town, I realized that I was walking on a carpet of garbage. Snow cover was gone and garbage brought from nearby dumps had begun to surface. It was a very unpleasant feeling, but I wanted to fix it. I began to learn about different approaches to the problem that existed worldwide, and the possibilities available in the region. I discovered that in Kamchatka, and Russia in general, there is no general practice of sorting and recycling of household trash. I started to learn more about the issue and wrote articles to newspapers and journals. They were published but the situation still did not change.” (more…)

As the world watches the urgency of oil spill response operations in the Gulf of Mexico, Pacific Environment and SF Estuary Partnership hosted a local forum last week that brought this national tragedy a bit closer to home here in the Bay Area. The forum, “Oil Spills in San Francisco Bay: Preparing a Better Response,” for the first time brought together stakeholders of the Bay area community including natural resource managers, local and state agencies, environmental groups, fishing groups and the public to discuss the lessons learned from two recent oil spills in the Bay – the Cosco Busan in 2007 and the smaller Dubai Star spill in 2009 – and how to better prevent and respond in the future.

Oiled Bird

Among the speakers were Pacific Environment’s very own Jackie Dragon, Marine Sanctuaries Program Director; Mike Lynes, Conservation Director, Golden Gate Audubon Society; Scott Schaefer, Deputy Director for the Office of Spill Prevention and Response (OSPR); Zeke Grader, Executive Director for the Pacific Coast Federation of Fisherman’s Associations; and Captain Gugg and Lt. Cmdr. Gus Bannan of the U.S. Coast Guard. (more…)