New Cook Islands Shark Sanctuary proposed

Activists in the Cook Islands in the South Pacific are proposing a huge new shark sanctuary in the face of fishing pressures and the continued massive drop in shark numbers over the last decade worldwide. The Pacific Islands Conservation Initiative, or PICI, is working with local fishery authorities to craft the Cook Islands Shark Sanctuary to extend over the Cook Islands Exclusive Economic Zone, which covers almost 2 million square kilometers of ocean.

“It’s pretty exciting to see this idea start to unfold and to see the community get behind it, and to actually feel like we might accomplish something of measurable impact,” says Jessica Cramp, program manager at PICI, interviewed by phone from the Cook Islands.

PICI is a small operation, started by Steve Lyon, who owns Pacific Divers, a dive shop in Rorotonga. He is also president of the Tourism Industry Council there. Cramp is the only other volunteer so far, and has been involved for seven months.

Of the 18 known species of sharks in the Cook Islands, Cramp says, 15 appear on a “red list” put out by the International Union for Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources, or the IUCN. That list is a widely recognized measure of species’ vulnerability to extinction, scaled from “least concern” to “extinct.” Five of the shark species in the Cook Islands are listed as being “vulnerable” or “endangered.”

The cause, of course, is soup. Sharks all over the world are finned in ever-greater numbers to feed a massive market for shark fins in Asia. A 2000 study by Shelley Clarke and other researchers estimated, after a program to genetically ID fins for years, that the fins of 38 million sharks were traded through the main Hong Kong fin market every year. It was noted that that estimate could range as low as 26 million or as high as 73 million.

Not only do large-scale fishing operations long-line specifically for sharks, but sharks are a very common by-catch in other fisheries, such as tuna, and the valuable fins are often used to pay the crew on those boats. The crew, then, have plenty of incentive to kill as many sharks as possible and not to return them to the water alive.

Until recently, the Cook Islands saw relatively little of this, and their biodiversity is quite good. However, the island nation recently signed an agreement with Chinese fishing interests that will soon begin to work in its waters, and this has PICI and others rushing to try to make the shark sanctuary a reality.

The nations of Palau, the Maldives, Tokelau, the Bahamas, Honduras and the Marshall Islands have already set aside shark refuges.

“Research studies have shown that the population of sharks have declined,” Cramp said. “Their biological characteristics make them unable to keep up with the fishing practices that are happening right now. They’re late to mature, slow growers and have very few pups -- they usually have about 6 to 10 pups, sometimes every two years.”

PICI has met with the prime minister and hopes to help write the sanctuary law with the Ministry of Marine Resources, and then to also put forward a separate Shark Act, to give the ministry two different laws that can be used to prosecute illegal shark fishing. Several shark-fishing regulations are already common on commercial boats, but the laws are easily skirted. Cramp says that, because of abuses, many organizations now are pushing for a zero-take, no-fin policy that bans the practice altogether.


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Top photo: Gray reef shark in the waters off the Cook Islands. Credit: Graham McDonald.

Bottom photo: Steve Lyon and Jessica Cramp of PICI. Credit: PICI.

Inupiat whaling, drilling at stake in recent Alaskan mayor’s race

Independent photojournalists Will Rose and Kajsa Sjölander were on Alaska’s North Slope in November to document traditional whaling by the native Inupiat people and found themselves at the height of a highly charged mayoral election season, with whaling and a gargantuan new Shell oil drilling project at stake.

Check out a fascinating photo gallery of images from their trip, exclusive to the Los Angeles Times.

The two were on hand as Charlotte Brower became the first female mayor for Alaska’s North Borough, a regional municipality that covers the north part of the state, a vast terrain with only eight small communities comprising about 10,000 mostly Inupiat Eskimos. The North Borough mayoralty, including the town of Barrow, has significant influence regarding federal decisions about offshore oil drilling and other resource uses affecting the area.

Royal Dutch Shell has already received some permits to begin drilling in the Chukchi Sea in 2012 but has been dogged by resistance such as a 2007 lawsuit by outgoing mayor Edward Itta that challenged the environmental effects of drilling and any potential spill –- all very real in the wake of the large Exxon Valdez spill in Alaska in 1989 and BP’s Deepwater Horizon spill in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010.

Drilling in Arctic waters is subject to many technical hurdles, but receding ice packs resulting from global warming have made drilling more enticing.

Though Brower is expected to continue to have relatively friendly relations with Shell, ConocoPhillips and other oil companies who are looking to drill off the coast, there were marked differences between her and the second-place finisher, former five-term mayor George Ahmaogak Sr. Notably, Brower made a point of declaring that she was anti-drilling and the borough needs someone to “stand up to the oil companies.” Her husband works with the Alaska Eskimo Whaling Commission. Ahmaogak, who says he too is against drilling but wants to make sure the community continues to receive millions of dollars in oil revenue, was a former Alaska community affairs manager for Shell. In the North Borough, however, lines of allegiance are quite hard to draw; Ahmaogak’s wife is a former head of the whaling commission. Subsequently, the race was tight, with Brower winning 1,022 votes to Ahmaogak’s 960.

Rose, who is English, and Sjölander, who is Swedish, have spent the last three years documenting the effects of climate change on the polar regions. They call their project 70°, because most of their work has turned out to be along the 70th parallel -– cutting through parts of the Arctic Ocean, Canada, Russia, Greenland, the United States and north Scandinavia.

“The trip to Alaska seemed a logical progression, as Shell have received the preliminary permits to drill in the Beaufort and Chukchi seas in 2012,” wrote Rose and Sjölander in an email to The Times from their home outside Gothenberg, Sweden. “At the same time, the Inupiat hunters are noticing changes in climate, sea ice and increasing numbers of polar bears are coming to shore around Kaktovik.

“Every autumn, polar bears come to Kaktovik in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to feed on the remains of bowhead whales from the traditional Inupiat harvest, but in recent years they have come in much larger numbers. Scientists are using DNA from hair snares to determine which bears show up in Kaktovik, and for how long. This information can help wildlife managers minimize human-bear conflicts, and understand how the animals are faring as climate change reduces the amount of time they can spend on the sea ice hunting their preferred prey, seals.”

The Inupiat hunt bowhead whales and are allowed 80 strikes on the whales during the fall hunt. A strike is an attack on a whale, though an animal sometimes escapes. In 2010 the community took 46 whales, which they split among themselves for food according to traditional distribution formulas.

Environmental concerns and protection of the traditional whaling culture are definitely top of mind in the region. The two journalists found that the small town of Point Hope was particularly active in fighting offshore drilling plans.

“The tribal government of Point Hope, backed by a group of 12 environmental organizations and Earth Justice, have challenged the validity of the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement’s conditional approval of Shell’s exploration plan. The decision has now been delayed in the courts again till December. The petition states that the BOEMRE decision violates the Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act and the National Environmental Policy Act. Former president of the Point Hope tribal government, Caroline Cannon, has fought the offshore plans for over five years,” write Rose and Sjölander.
 
The pair penned a story about their travels in the region and the politics around the election, which may be part of their upcoming 70° website. In that story, Point Hope city Mayor Steve Oomittuk told them, “The animals make us who we are; they’re our clothing, our shelter, our food, our spirituality, a way of life that has been passed down from generation to generation for thousands of years. Without the animals, we aren’t who we are, we are not the people of Point Hope.”

Rose said he felt that an embezzlement charge swung the election. “I think that Ahmoagak’s wife, Maggie, being charged with embezzling $475,000 from the Alaska Eskimo Whaling Commission played a part,” he wrote. “She served as the group’s executive director for 17 years until 2007. When she got fired after the financial irregularities were uncovered, George was working for Shell at the same time. The Alaska Eskimo Whaling Commission is supposed to protect the interests of the subsistence whaling community.”

The amount of money at stake is enormous. A Shell-commissioned study by consulting company Northern Economics and the University of Alaska Anchorage estimates that new drilling plans could generate $176 billion in federal, state and local tax revenue over a 45-year period from 2012 to 2057. Of that, $3.7 billion would go to the North Slope Borough.

Both Rose and Sjölander hope their futures includes a lot more snowy photos: “Our original idea was to circumnavigate the 70th parallel in 1 – 2 years, by skiing, sled or whatever means necessary. That sadly remains a dream, but we do our best by saving up and hoping to get commissions that allow us to continue with our project.”

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Photo: The Brower family of Barrow, Alaska, welcome community elders for a feast in their home after taking a bowhead whale during the fall subsistence hunt. Recent North Slope Borough elections reflected concerns over new proposed offshore oil drilling that could threaten sea life. Credit: Will Rose and Kajsa Sjolander

Brown cloud might be intensifying storms over Indian Ocean

A longstanding brown cloud of pollution over the Indian Ocean is causing cyclones to intensify in that region, according to a new study published this month in the journal Nature and involving researchers from multiple institutions, including the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, or NOAA.

After the apparent recent increase in the number and intensity of hurricanes in the Atlantic Ocean and Gulf of Mexico, including the devastation of Hurricane Katrina in 2005, climate watchers everywhere have speculated whether these storms were made stronger by industrial or man-made emissions. This is reportedly the first study to indicate that human activity may, in fact, affect large storms.

Amato Evan, lead author on the study and a professor of environmental sciences at the University of Virginia, notes: “The thing that stands out to me, as someone who works in climate and tropical cyclones, is that human activity, things people do, can actually change these massive atmospheric phenomena. To me, this is kind of the first study that can unambiguously tie human activity to something as enormous and powerful as a tropical cyclone.”

The Atmospheric Brown Cloud, previously known as the Asian Brown Cloud, has been observed for decades and began forming prior to World War II. From space, it resembles a dense brown smog and hangs over the northern Indian subcontinent, the northern Bay of Bengal, and the northern Arabian Sea. One of the contributors to the paper, Veerabhadran Ramanathan of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, has done some of the most important work on identifying the sources of this pollution, which is made up of particles like black carbon and sulfates and is a product of industrial development but also things as common as wood cookfires from an increasing population.

Cyclones naturally form over the warm waters of the Arabian Sea, but are often limited by wind shear -– the cacophony of short-distance winds moving at different speeds and different directions in the atmosphere. Wind shear can be thought of as turbulence and prevents the cyclones from organizing into powerful storms.

As the brown cloud shades the ocean (called “atmospheric dimming”), however, it affects surface temperatures, which lessen the effects of wind shear. As wind shear effects drop, the storm intensifies. The scientists looked at wind, temperature and satellite data from 1979 to present and correlated the increased pollution to increased storm wind speeds. According to a NOAA press release, five storms in the northern Indian Ocean since 1998 have had winds over 120 mph –- including category 5 Cyclone Gonu in 2007  — and have killed more than 3,500 people and caused over $6.5 billion in damage.

James Kossin, a climatologist at NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center in Ashville, N.C., and co-author on the study, cautions that it’s early to say smog causes bad storms. “It’s a hypothesis. It’s difficult to say with much certainty, and I think our main hurdle there is just a small sample of storms to look at. The results are very suggestive.”

“It gets into a tricky business when you want to start saying, ‘Here is the cost of that pollution associated with the tropical cyclones.’ That’s probably stretching it a bit far,” adds Evan. “But certainly it’s true in the Atlantic Ocean and it’s true anywhere: a bigger, stronger storm generally causes more damage.”

For Evan, the study has a significant upside: the pollutants that may be intensifying these cyclones are short-term, unlike greenhouse gases. They float into the lower or middle atmosphere and would clear out very quickly if emissions are cut.

“If emissions are reduced, we expect that this kind of trend would reverse on time scales of a few months,” Evans says. “It’s not like greenhouse gases, where we think we’re already in trouble. With these kinds of aerosols, if you just stopped all the emissions right now, the atmosphere would become much cleaner in a matter of weeks. And then the whole climate system, the ocean and the atmosphere, would essentially lose memory of those aerosols. It’s pretty dramatic.”

In an interesting side note, emails related to this study were among those listed in a recent FOIA request by the conservative American Traditions Institute as it investigates climate change science published by the former University of Virginia climate scientist Michael Mann. The ATI has close ties to energy interests that have opposed climate legislation, and the so-called "Climategate" matter has been the subject of previous posts on this blog.

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Photo: A NOAA satellite image showing Hurricane Katrina near the Louisiana-Mississippi border. Credit: EPA/NOAA

Peter Brown back onboard with Sea Shepherd

This post has been corrected. See note at bottom for details.

Peter Brown, the activist and filmmaker who recently released a warts-and-all portrait of the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society in his documentary film, "Confessions of an Eco-Terrorist," is rejoining the crew for its annual Antarctic anti-whaling campaign after a two-year hiatus.

"I'm really looking forward to it. Paul's been really great this year, helping with ['Confessions']," Brown said, referring to Sea Shepherd captain Paul Watson. "And we've been getting a lot closer. I'm looking forward to sailing with him."

The return is something of a surprise after Brown's acrimonious departure during Sea Shepherd's 2008-2009 winter campaign to stop Japanese whalers in the Antarctic. Those campaigns are the subject of the hit Animal Planet TV show, "Whale Wars," and in Seasons 1 and 2, Brown was made out to be something of a villain -– clashing with crew and camera people, and the subject of much side-interview sniping on the show. He left after a rope on a zodiac boat nearly cut his thumb off.

During two years off, Brown put together "Confessions," compiled from nearly 30 years of footage with the organization. It threatened to raise some hackles with the Sea Shepherd organization as it revealed how campaigns are improvised on the fly, including one incident in which Brown openly admitted he started a riot that resulted in Sea Shepherd officer Lisa DiStefano being dunked after indigenous Makah tribespeople pelted the two of them with rocks. Watson, however, has supported the film, saying his only beef is its name -– he doesn't like the comparison to terrorists -- and showed up for a premiere in Bermuda.

"I don't do this stuff for TV," Brown said. "I'm trying to stop whaling. Paul asked me to come back and I accepted."

Brown is set to rejoin the Sea Shepherd crew Dec. 6 in the harbor city of Fremantle, near Perth in Western Australia, to prepare for this winter’s anti-whaling campaign. He will be first mate on the Sea Shepherd vessel Steve Irwin -– named after the Australian star of the nature program "Crocodile Hunter."

Brown is a veteran Sea Shepherd campaigner, having joined the group in 1981. He is also a veteran of TV, having produced and directed the proto-reality show "Real People" beginning in the 1970s. He was also an original producer for "Entertainment Tonight." 

A fifth season of "Whale Wars" has yet to be announced or confirmed, but Brown says it doesn't matter to him if the show's crew comes along.

"I think it's the end of the line for the Japanese whalers this year," he said during a talk outside a Santa Monica coffeehouse. "They really should have given it up last year. They went home early, they didn't get their quota."

"But instead of realizing that maybe whaling should be done forever, they go back and they have an earthquake, they have a tsunami, they have a nuclear accident. And yet, they're going to subsidize a whaling fleet to tune of $200 million to go down there again, plus $27 million more in extra security. And why? They don't want to surrender to Sea Shepherd. It's not that they need whales to feed people."

Brown said his next film project will be a "Roger & Me"-type documentary project in which he visits whaling nations and confronts them directly on their home turf. But, in the meantime, he's bringing that high-energy confrontation back to the boat.

"Paul knew the trouble 'Whale Wars' caused me, so it'll be much better this time. I won't be dancing around, worried about hurting people's feelings. It's on!" he laughed. "Hang on for the ride, you're on the Peter Brown show!"

[For the Record, 2 p.m. Nov. 23, 2011: An earlier version of this post stated incorrectly that Brown would be captain on the Steve Irwin. He will be first mate.]

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Photo: Peter Brown is set to captain the vessel Steve Irwin when the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society returns to Antarctic waters in December to fight the Japanese whaling fleet. Credit: Kelsey Stevens

Playa Vista plan gets court approval

This post has been corrected. See note at bottom for details.

A state appellate court has upheld the city of Los Angeles' approval of Playa Vista's second and final phase.

Wetlands activists had challenged a revised environmental impact report for the Village, as Phase 2 of the big project south of Marina del Rey is known.

Wednesday's decision comes after a long trail of litigation, revision and further appeals.

The Los Angeles City Council initially approved the environmental analysis for the Village in April 2004. Challengers sued, alleging that the report was flawed. In January 2006, a Los Angeles County Superior Court judge upheld the city's approval.

The activists appealed, and a three-judge panel in the 2nd District Court of Appeal agreed that three aspects of the environmental impact report should be revised.

The City Council approved the revised EIR in 2010. Activists once again challenged that approval in Los Angeles County Superior Court. The trial court upheld the council's approval in January 2011, and the challengers appealed again.

The three-judge panel that affirmed the trial court's ruling on Wednesday was the same panel that ordered the EIR revisions. The wetlands activists have 40 days to petition the California Supreme Court for review.

Rex Frankel, president of the Ballona Ecosystem Education Project, one of the Playa Vista challengers, said his organization planned "soon" to petition the state high court. He contended that there "is a good likelihood the Supreme Court will take our case."

Playa Capital Co-President Patti Sinclair said the company would vigorously oppose his filing. She added that the high court seldom takes rulings that are "unpublished," as this one is. She said the company expected to begin construction on the Village early next year.

The Village is intended to be the link between the Phase 1 residential community and the commercial campus that is home to Facebook, USC and a division of Fox Sports, among other employers. The Village will include retail stores and restaurants as well as parks, office space and multi-family residences.

[For the Record, 6 p.m. Nov. 10, 2011: An earlier version of this post incorrectly reported that Patti Sinclair was president of Playa Capital.]

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Photo: Playa Vista's first phase can be seen behind the Ballona Fresh Water Marsh. Environmentalists eager to preserve wetlands have sought to limit development. Credit: Anne Cusack / Los Angeles Times

Obama proposal would open Arctic and Gulf of Mexico to oil drilling

Arctic waters would be open to new oil and gas development under an Obama administration proposal that keeps the Pacific and Atlantic coasts off limits to new drilling.

The Interior Department’s plan steers a middle course, going too far in the view of environmental groups and not far enough in the eyes of House Republicans.

The proposal, which outlines offshore oil and gas leasing from 2012 to 2017, omits areas on the West and East coasts that the Bush administration planned to open to drilling. But it also calls for three lease sales off the coast of Alaska in environmentally fragile areas that have become a much contested frontier of energy production.

“This five-year program will make available for development more than three-quarters of undiscovered oil and gas resources estimated on the [Outer Continental Shelf], including frontier areas such as the Arctic, where we must proceed cautiously, safely and based on the best science available,” Interior Secretary Ken Salazar said.

Environmentalists condemned the Arctic leasing, warning there is no proven way to clean up oil spills in the remote far north, a place of ice floes, towering waves and winter darkness. “The risk to the fragile Arctic area and Alaska communities is clear,” said Athan Manuel of the Sierra Club. “Spill prevention, containment and response systems are not equipped to work in challenging Arctic conditions.”

GOP House Natural Resources Committee Chairman Doc Hastings, on the other hand, complained the proposal “places some of the most promising energy resources in the world off-limits.”

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Photo: A family of polar bears on the Beaufort Sea, where Shell plans to drill for oil and gas. Credit: U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service

Gulf of Mexico fish-tracking system goes full steam ahead

Responding to deepening concerns about seafood mislabeling and the safety of fish caught in the Gulf of Mexico, a trade association of Gulf fishermen is tagging and credentialing each of the fish its members pull from the water. It is also routinely sampling catch for dispersants, heavy metals and other oil-based contaminants to allay customer concern over the safety of fish caught in the vicinity of the 2010 Deepwater Horizon explosion, which spilled 4.9 million barrels of crude oil into the Gulf. 

The new Gulf Wild system follows a six-month pilot program, during which 100,000 American red snapper and Gulf-caught grouper fish were tagged with identification numbers after being hauled aboard fishing boats. Upon reaching shore, the numbers were electronically recorded and uploaded to an online database with information about the fish's species, the harvesting vessel that caught it and the approximate harvest location. The Gulf Wild program went into full production this week with 100 high-volume commercial fishermen within the five-state Gulf region.

Bubba Cochrane, of Galveston, Texas, is one of the fisherman participating in the program. "We take each fish off the hook individually, so we tag them when we gut the fish and then they go down below for the ride home," said Cochrane, who typically catches 10,000 pounds of red snapper per four-day trip.

Cochrane then manually enters the tag numbers on data sheets, where he also writes the time, date and GPS location where he caught the fish. The data sheets are logged in lots of 100 fish, and are then given to the fish buyer, who enters it into the Gulf Wild database so the individual number on each fish can be tracked.

A recent investigation by the Boston Globe reported that fish was mislabeled 48% of the time.  Consumer Reports also reported recently that red snapper is labeled correctly just 45% of the time.

The Gulf Wild system is being rolled out just as the U.S. Food and Drug Administration announced plans to ramp up its new DNA fish-testing program. Early next year, FDA regulators will take DNA samples from fish as presented for import and from domestic warehouse and distribution centers, processing the data at six field labs in a program to determine how the FDA can best focus its efforts to reduce seafood fraud.

"Mislabeling seafood is illegal, and in recent years we’ve ramped up our focus on that," said FDA spokesman Doug Karas, adding that the FDA's main priority is seafood safety. He said seafood mislabeling presents a safety concern to people who may have allergies to certain types of fish and mistakenly eat something labeled as something else.

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Photo: Red snapper, mackerel and rainbow trout on sale at a fish stand. Credit: Mark Boster / Los Angeles Times

Coastal Commission staff urges rejection of park plan

Citing concerns about endangered bird habitat and wetlands, California Coastal Commission staff members have recommended rejecting Newport Beach's plans for Sunset Ridge Park.

The fate of the 20-acre public sports park rests in the hands of the 12 commissioners when they meet Wednesday in Oceanside.

Compared to other parts of town, the city's west side has fewer soccer fields and baseball diamonds, which are both proposed at Sunset Ridge, but this facility, which would have sweeping views of the coastline, has been stalled in legal and administrative wrangling.

The commission's central issue is the park's access road, proposed to be just west of West Coast Highway and Superior Avenue. While the road would avoid sensitive habitat, it follows the path of a larger arterial road planned for the adjacent Banning Ranch property.

Commission staff members sought an agreement preventing future expansion of the road onto sensitive California gnatcatcher habitat, but the ranch owners declined, and now the city's plans hang in the balance.

Both the city and Banning Ranch developers argue that the commission should focus on the application at hand, according to the Daily Pilot.

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Debate over renewing sewage outfall on Orange County coast

A permit that regulates the daily discharge of millions of gallons of treated wastewater into the ocean from an outfall off of Aliso Beach in South Laguna Beach has expired and is up for renewal.

The South Laguna Civic Assn. opposes the renewal of the National Pollution Discharge Elimination System permit. The South Orange County Wastewater Authority, of which Laguna is a member, supports the renewal.

A draft of the new permit will be distributed for public comment and hearings will be conducted by the state Regional Water Quality Control Board, probably in March or April.

"This is a serious issue," said association Vice President Michael Beanan. "We don't want it swept under a rug."

Protection zone established for endangered black abalones

Federal wildlife officials on Wednesday issued a final ruling designating about 140 square miles of critical habitat for endangered black abalone along the California coast.

The hard-shelled, edible marine snails were once abundant in rocky intertidal areas from the state's northernmost waters down to the tip of Baja California, but their numbers plummeted in the 1980s, mostly due to a bacterial disease called withering syndrome.

The decline may have been worsened by warming coastal waters, power plant discharges, overfishing and poaching, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Fisheries Service.

Black abalone was listed as an endangered species in 2009, which requires the government to set aside as much critical habitat as possible to aid their recovery.

In the areas, which stretch from Del Mar Landing Ecological Reserve in Sonoma County south to the Palos Verdes Peninsula and Catalina Island, projects that go before federal agencies or receive federal funding will be reviewed to make sure they do not threaten black abalone habitat.

The rule will take effect next month.

Excluded from the designation was an area of rocky habitat from Corona del Mar State Beach to Dana Point.

That was because "the economic benefits of exclusion outweigh the benefits of inclusion, and the exclusion will not result in the extinction of the species," according to a NOAA news release.

Black abalone are one of seven abalone species that live in California waters, typically wedged between rocks near the shore.

Their commercial harvest dates back to the 1800s and peaked in the 1970s. The fishery was closed in 1993 after landings plunged by 95%.

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Photo: Black abalone cluster together in a rocky, intertidal crag on San Nicolas Island. Credit: David Witting / NOAA Restoration Center.

Graphic: Black abalone critical habitat. Credit: NOAA