How will global warming affect plants?
By Judy Lowe | 07.02.09
In areas of the world where temperatures are documented to be growing warmer, plants are showing the effects. Some of these effects are good – increased microbial action in the soil making plants more productive. Some are bad – plants moving to cooler locations.
And other effects tend to be neutral (or maybe it’s who’s doing the perceiving).
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Community-based fishery management and Somali pirates
By Moises Velasquez-Manoff | 07.01.09
A question: What do Somali pirates have to do with community-based fishery management?
Before I answer that, the news:
Last week, the New England Fishery Management Council approved 19 fishermen-run, community-based sectors – a fishing cooperative-based catch share system, explains Julie Wormser of the Environmental Defense Fund – that will take effect in May 2010.
In my last post, I talked about the importance of sustainable fishery management. Basically, catch shares give fishermen a kind of ownership share in the fish stock – a percentage of a year’s harvest. If the fish do well, they get more fish. If not, they get fewer. That theoretically is an incentive for stewardship.
What about community-based management? Communities living next to and using a resource will best manage it, the thinking goes. They have the most to lose from bad management, and the most to gain from good management.
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Mixing socialist and capitalist approaches to fishery management
By Moises Velasquez-Manoff | 06.30.09
Last week, the New England Fishery Management Council approved 19 community-based sectors to be run by fishermen. In New England, 12 of the 19 ground fish stocks – bottom-dwelling fish such as cod and haddock – are overfished. Sectors are supposed to help end the overfishing.
Sectors are a kind of catch-share system. That means fishermen get a percentage of the year’s total allowable catch (TAC). If scientists set the TAC at 100 tons, say, and you own 10 percent, you can catch 10 tons that year. But in sectors, that allotment – the 10 percent – goes to a group rather than an individual. The group then breaks it up among members.
The National Marine Fisheries Service has yet to approve the sectors, and the proposed sectors, which would go live in 2010, are voluntary. (The Magnuson-Stevens Act says overfishing must end by 2010.) Beginning in 2012, boats that choose to remain outside the sectors will also operate under total allowable catch, to keep things fair.
Here’s what’s so interesting about the sector idea: It mixes socialist and capitalist approaches to fishery management. The fishermen now “own” a share of the sea, a solidly corporate proposition. That theoretically is an incentive for stewardship. If fishermen can tread lightly and fish in ways that continue to grow the stock, that 10 percent allocation will be worth more fish next year. Greed, or at least self-interest, becomes the impetus for conservation.
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Greening the Sears Tower
By Eoin O'Carroll | 06.29.09
Chicago’s Sears Tower – which, from 1974 to 1998, stood as the world’s tallest building – is getting a green makeover.
Wind turbines, a solar water heater, and the world’s highest green roof are just a few of the proposed improvements that the building’s owners and architects announced Wednesday for the 110-story, 1,450-foot skyscraper .
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What temperature is the Earth supposed to be?
By Eoin O'Carroll | 06.26.09
If we don’t get our act together and slash greenhouse gas emissions, the UN climate change panel tells us, average global temperatures could rise by as much as 10 degrees F. by the end of the century.
But would that really be so bad? Sure, much of the South would be unbearable during the summer months (as would many of those tropical countries), but think of all that beautiful real estate in Alaska that we’d open up! And many of us here in Boston would willingly trade a dozen or more 100-degree F. days each year to wear shorts and flip-flops through October. Less snow shoveling, more Frisbee tossing. What’s not to like?
