WellBeing News has carried several articles describing specific fisheries' rise and fall. Perhaps the most notorious overfishing example of a once-abundant fishery is cod's collapse and prolonged, slow recovery in the northwest Atlantic. But there are many other examples of the impact of over-fishing. Fisheries...
Fifty years ago (Feb 10, 1973), Science News published a short article, “Setting sail into a plastic sea.” The story noted that scientists on an oceanographic voyage in the North Pacific “recorded 53 manmade objects in 8.2 hours of viewing” even though “they were 600...
In June 2020, WellBeing News included an article on sustainable fisheries that mentioned the 1990 collapse of the North Atlantic cod fishery off the coasts of the USA and Canada. A moratorium on catching cod was established in 1992 with the hope that the cod...
[caption id="attachment_11965" align="alignright" width="300"] Endangered Hawksbill Sea Turtle caught in a discarded net[/caption] The Challenge The plastics revolution launched in the 1950s has led to the cumulative production of 8,300 million tonnes (MT) of plastic products and vast quantities of plastic pollution (6,300 MT). According to a...
The Tristan da Cunha archipelago, a small group of volcanic islands in the middle of the South Atlantic, is characterized by the surrounding, largely undisturbed, temperate marine ecosystem. The largest island, Tristan, at 98 km2, has a population of approximately 260 permanent inhabitants and is...
After 15 months of looking at the four walls of our house and now fully vaccinated, we were eager to be anywhere but there. So, for our first foray, we travelled 2 hours to Slaughter Beach, a small Delaware community on the shores of the...
This video is worth watching simply to feast on the photographs and video images from around the world. The images are stunning, but they are freighted with warnings and eventually with an outline of specific goals that the video argues could help humans change the...
Last year, WBI ran a story about the South African documentary, My Octopus Teacher and recommended it to our readers. Many then watched the documentary (on Netflix) and sang its praises to their friends and contacts. This year, My Octopus Teacher, was nominated for numerous...
An earlier issue of WellBeing News explored the shifting historical baselines phenomenon. This phenomenon illustrates the tendency of ecologists to use recent wildlife population numbers as the baseline for their studies, even though the recent wildlife population may be much lower than the population 50...
The stars of the new Netflix documentary, My Octopus Teacher, are Craig Foster, a film maker, and a small boneless creature, Octopus vulgaris or the Common Octopus. For most humans, the only view of an octopus will be in an aquarium. However, Craig Foster visited...
