Posts Tagged ‘ocean’

Shocking Visualization of Fish Left in the Sea

Friday, June 24th, 2011

Holy cow! (Carp? Cod? Crab?)

There are lots of good reasons to care about the environment and support the groups that fight to protect it. But one really good reason is that if we don’t do something, we’re going to run out of tuna melts and fish sticks.

This article in the Guardian talks about why we as a civilization are failing to do enough about problems like overfishing. Each new generation simply isn’t conscious of what things were like in the generation before them. Kind of like how your parents remember when kids used to play outside, but you’ll remember staying inside playing video games. And when you get old and cranky about how the kids these days never take off their holobands at the dinner table, you’ll wish for the days when people sat down in the living room to play Nintendo – not for the days when children played stickball in the streets.

Anyway, David McLandless (our data viz hero from Information is Beautiful) made a scary map of the devastation that tasty sea life has seen over the past hundred years. Definitely worth checking out if you still need a reason to care about the environment.

Cousteau & Co. Dive To Draw Attention To Waterways

Monday, June 14th, 2010
Fabien Cousteau, grandson of the famous Jacques, hopes to improve New York waterways with his nonprofit and a public school partnership.

  • Plant a Fish, Mr. Cousteau’s new nonprofit, focuses on ocean restoration around the world. Its first project:  The Hudson River.
  • Cousteau is working with students from the Urban Assembly New York Harbor School, a public city high school in Bushwick, Brooklyn, to plant thousands of oysters near Bay Ridge on Monday, June 14th.
  • The Harbor School offers its students scuba diving lessons and constructs its curriculum around New York’s waterways. The school will relocate to Governors Island this fall.

Facts & Figures

  • On Monday, June 14th, Mr. Cousteau and The Harbor School expect to plant 130,000 oysters.
  • Future Plant a Fish projects include planting one million corals in the Maldives and Florida Keys and one billion sea turtles in the mangroves of El Salvador.
  • The estimated cost per program ranges from $15,000 to $65,000

Best Quote
“We need to see our natural world as a bank account where we have to live on the interest rather than eating away at the capital.  Plant a Fish is one of the ways that we can start restoring that capital.”  – Fabien Cousteau, Founder, Plant A Fish