|  Posted on September 14th,2006 Posted on September 9th,2006 
The Conservation Fund has created a nice calculator to help you understand your contributions to greenhouse gas emissions. It then lets you offset your footprint by preserving forested land as a carbon sequestration tactic. I highlight this for two reasons. First,and most important,this is a serious issue that profoundly effects our boating environments in specific and the world in general. We all need to care about it and work for solutions. Second,maybe less important in the grand scheme but another valuable incentive,this will be a nice way of helping ensure quality lumber in the years ahead. As forests are recreated and sustainably managed,many of the areas that once supported wooden boat construction but were over-harvested should come back. The current focus seems to be on the American South and Southeast,but the model should work for other regions with other important resources. Please take the time to go see how you can help. Posted on September 9th,2006 
From our friends at Paddling.net comes this interesting tidbit:under the auspices of Wilderness Classroom Organization (WCO),two kayakers,Dave Freeman and Amy Voytilla,are circumnavigating Lake Superior in order to draw attention to its myriad assets and challenges. Paddling.net will apparently be running stories from the trip;the first one,with an overview,came out in their recent newsletter. As I have noted in the past,Lake Superior (“the big lake they call gitche gumee,”in Gordon Lightfoot’s immortal words) is stunning. Being the largest body of fresh water on the planet and being butted against many industrial areas makes for challenges,as its siblings to the South can no doubt attest. Good luck to Amy and Dave on this voyage,and may it inspire others to care so much for this great boating ground. Posted on September 9th,2006 One nice thing you can do with a small boat is find nice dive and snorkeling spots. A small boat makes that much more area accessible in a sustainable way. I raise this because in looking through past e-mails today I came across an old blog post from a contact who was at Oceana. He was highlighting the EarthDive project,a consortium project to aggregate dive reports in the interest of making more information available for science and conservation. The core of it is a Global Dive Log –basically when you join and enter your dive records,the data is captured with other members,and the information stored such that it can be queried. Very cool use of technology. Posted on July 17th,2006 My wife and I saw An Inconvenient Truth,Al Gore’s movie on climate change,last night. You must go see this movie. Whatever you think of Al Gore,put it aside and just look at the evidence –it is too compelling to ignore and cuts through a lot of the garbage. Bottom line:this issue is the real deal and we all need to be worried about it. Check out the trailer if you need a preview,but it know that it doesn’t really prepare you. The movie is way more entertaining than may be described. As lovers of small,naturally-powered boats,especially wooden ones,I think we can give ourselves a small pat on the back (provided we use sustainable forestry products). By dropping a paddle or oar or flying before the wind,we are getting our rush in a decidedly carbon-friendly way. So add that the list of reasons to feel good on your next outing. Heck,a well-placed fouling substance in the tank of a Cigarette at the launching ramp,and you have yourself a carbon-negative trip! I’m kidding of course –that is way too nice a treatment for a Cigarette. ;^) Back to the “whatever you think of Al Gore”comment at the beginning:prepare to be impressed. His intellect was never in doubt (or oughtn’t have been),but he lets his passion and humor out more than we have seen him do in public before. He is striking in his command of the subject and confidence as a leader. Damn shame he couldn’t pull that out in 2000… By the way,for anyone who remembered my prior post on climate change,the film makes reference to Greenland being a lynch-pin in the sea-level rise problem (all that land-based ice). The movie’s blog notes that Greenland is starting to go. Might be time for those of us near-seal level to begin scouting paddling routes in the nearest upland forest… Posted on July 11th,2006 Also worth a look is this story on NPR’s Morning Edition,from July 6th. It talks about a program run by The Nature Conservancy that buys out fishing licenses and then leases them back with provisions that ban destructive trawling. I like the idea –it isn’t a substitute for marine protected areas like we recently got (yeah!) in the Northeastern Hawaiian Islands and Northern Pacific,but it is a good step to limit fishing while letting captains stay in the game. Definitely an important model to have in the marine conservation playbook. Posted on July 11th,2006 I read with interest Angus Phillips’piece in Sunday’s Washington Post about the masses of sediment that deluge the Chesapeake during rain storm like we’ve had here recently. He writes: Is the Chesapeake turning into a dead mud hole? Every year it seems to get worse,and it’s not just my imagination. “It’s becoming way too common,”said Bill Dennison of the University of Maryland’s Center for Environmental Studies,when asked about the frequency and duration of mud blooms. He spent most of last week monitoring the mess in the bay…The conclusion? It’s bad. “We got about half of what we got in Hurricane Agnes,”said Dennison,referencing the horrendous deluge that buried the bay in mud 34 years ago,wiping out great swaths of shellfish and submerged grasses that never recovered…“The peak daily flow during Agnes was 1.1 million cubic feet of water per second over Conowingo Dam”where Pennsylvania’s Susquehanna River enters the bay,he said. “Last week we had 450,000 cfs for peak daily flow there…”But Dennison worries that with population expansion,land development and the continued filling-up of reservoirs with mud,water roaring down the Susquehanna and other rivers is significantly thicker with crud today than it was a generation ago.
It doesn’t take a lot of time on the water around the Bay to see how this plays out. Even the central Bay,near Annapolis,is murky –and that is after a clear spell. I know it is hard to make a living in farming these days,but I also understand it doesn’t take much of a buffer of vegetation and / or wetland to hold back much of the run-off –we need to more aggressively figure out how to help landowners take this step. I also think we need to do what Germany does with run-off. Basically,you have to pay for whatever water comes off your property. This is fair to me –managing storm water is a cost of owning a piece of property;not charging for it is actually an undesirable subsidy. You’d see a lot more intelligently managed parking lots and subdivisions if we could put this policy through,and our boating areas would be much the better for it. Posted on June 1st,2006 Posted on March 24th,2006 All right –continuation of my rant here –I promise not to make this a regularity if others promise not to keep threatening the coasts as I know them. The issues aside,there is a fascinating new data tool available on line courtesy of the Department of Geosciences at the University of Arizona. It lets you browse expected effects of sea level rises that appear to be in progress. I’ve seen this analysis before,and it is pretty intuitive,but just in case you hadn’t contemplated this recently… Those of us in the northeast have a lot to look forward to if we can keep our seams caulked for a few hundred years. Maryland will have a nice solution to Chesapeake Bay Bridge traffic –of course the fact that Rehoboth and Ocean City will be down a couple fathoms probably will have already put a crimp in DC vacation plans. There will be a lot fo DelMarVa chicken farms with stunning waterfront acreage –give your descendants a gift a buy one of those decapitated places now!
 New York area boaters area in for a real treat –“Paddle Newark”and “Sail Secaucus”don’t do much for you right now,but if you have the patience,they’ll be a whole Meadowlands Bay out there. That’s if you aren’t slaloming through lower Manhattan. This just in,delays at LaGuardia and JFK… 
And finally,we find that basically the entire SE coast is screwed. Don’t like S. Florida? No problem. Overdevelopment in Metro Fort Meyers? Woosh. And,of course,the poor folks in S. Louisiana will be able to cross Hurricane damage off their list of worries. Hipwaders will be the new fashion among the trendy in Baton Rouge. Of course that’s carbon central down there,so a little self reflection may be in order… 
Posted on March 23rd,2006 So I really didn’t start this blog to do a lot of political ranting,but the fact is that there are threats on many fronts to the boating environment as we know it (to say nothing of the availability of quality boatbuilding lumber). There seems to have been a flood of news in the last few days: Of all the factors that drive a major storm such as humidity,wind shear or broad air circulation patterns only the steady increase in sea surface temperatures over the last 35 years can account for the rising strength of tempests in six oceans around the world,including the North Atlantic,Pacific and Indian oceans,scientists at the Georgia Institute of Technology reported… Their research revealed that the increase in the most severe storms category 4 and 5 hurricanes have doubled since 1990 was directly linked to the rising temperatures of tropical oceans,which warmed globally by 1 degree Fahrenheit during the same period. Warm water vapor rising from the sea helps energize massive storms. [See the LA Times article]
“It’s a white desert out there,”Berkelmans told Reuters in early March after returning from a dive to survey bleaching —signs of a mass death of corals caused by a sudden rise in ocean temperatures —around the Keppel Islands… Australia has just experienced its warmest year on record and abnormally high sea temperatures during summer have caused massive coral bleaching in the Keppels. Sea temperatures touched 29 degrees Celsius (84 Fahrenheit),the upper limit for coral. [See the Yahoo! News article]
These are a few of the issues –I could add overfishing,mercury pollution,mindless “taming”of rivers,and on. Sorry if it bothers folks to hear it,but we are just doing a lousy job of taking care of the resources that make for fulfilling boating experiences (in which I include related activities like diving,fishing,swimming,etc.). Please think about what you can do to help. If you feel so moved,I have added links to advocacy campaigns I think are worth supporting. Please consider learning more about these issues and joining these and other campaigns. | |
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