I got an alert in my email box today from Food and Water Watch saying that Obama may be electing Republican Senator Judd Gregg to the office and postion of Secretary of Commerce. However, according to Food and Water Watch, Mr. Gregg is an advocate of offshore AQUACULTURE. Yet another "hm need to look this up" term. So this is what my friend wikipedia said:
"is the farming of freshwater and saltwater organisms including molluscs, crustaceans and aquatic plants. Unlike fishing, aquaculture, also known as aquafarming, implies the cultivation of aquatic populations under controlled conditions."
Photo of an operation in Chile:
The TAKE ACTION initiative said:
"Senator Gregg has been a
strong supporter of offshore aquaculture - the mass production of fish
in huge floating cages in ocean waters. He consistently expresses support for an experimental facility in New Hampshire and pushes for federal funding for ocean fish farming projects. Tell Obama to reconsider Senator Gregg's candidacy.
The Bush administration was pushing ocean fish farming its entire time in office!"
So WHY do people support it?
1. Economic Viability
2. Job Creation
3. Give fisherman the option for deep water fishing which has been highly regulated
4. Sustainable way to get our fish
Why does Food and Water watch NOT support Mr. Gregg?
1. Threatens Fishing and recreational activities
2. Threatens the marine environment
3. Threatens communities living by the ocean
In an exerpt from thier executive summary:
"The
National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, an agency of the U.S.
Department of Commerce, is promoting open ocean aquaculture as a way to
reduce the country’s $9.2 billion seafood trade deficit and ease
pressures on decimated wild marine fish populations. The government has
spent more than $25 million supporting four experimental fish farms, as
well as research into this technology, which involves growing tens of
thousands of fish in cages anchored to the seafloor between three and
200 miles off the U.S. coast. The government wants to open public
waters for the potential construction of thousands of these cages.
Despite this substantial financial and political support, open ocean
aquaculture has not been shown to be environmentally sustainable,
financially viable, or technically possible on a commercial scale. Each
of the four taxpayer-supported experimental operations––in Hawaii, New
Hampshire, and Puerto Rico––continues to be plagued by problems. Cages
and other equipment have broken, fish have died on a large scale, and
sharks have threatened workers. At one aquaculture facility, each pound
of fish sold costs about $3,000 in U.S. taxpayer money to produce."
The
most ambitious environmental project of the new year is being built right here
in San Francisco! David de Rothschild is assembling a boat from water bottles
and other recycled materials. David is a huge environmentalist, heir to a
banking fortune, founder of Adventure Ecology and, according to “earthfirst,” the
number one green hottie (my colleague Lauren agrees). He’s been all over the
world on his quest to bring attention to environmental devastation.
His
plan is to set out sail in March from the SF bay and make his way across the
Pacific Ocean to Australia. He will make several stops to document
the environmental impact of nuclear waste, garbage, and global warming. The first
leg of his journey, and the most interesting part to me, will be through the
Great Pacific Garbage Patch. This patch is located right above Hawaii, it's the size of Texas and contains
millions of tones of garbage. The currents pick up trash thrown into water and
carry it to this area where it has been accumulating and growing for a while. The
decomposing materials are dangerous for marine life and many animals like
turtles swallow this garbage and choke.
I’m
glad David agrees that bottled water is a waste of resources and super damaging
to the environment. How many Texas sized garbage patches will it take before we
start making real changes?
David Zetland studies water markets and keeps a blog
(aguanomics.com) to discuss current water policies, events, key players, and
myths. I had a chance to interview David and ask him some tough questions about
water.
Since the beginning of DROP, we have been interacting with fellow
nonprofits and activists who feel very passionately about this issue and fervently
advocate that water is a basic human right and should be available to
everybody. The different factions - corporations, municipal water managers, consumers, activists, etc. - all have varying views about how water should be distributed, priced, and conserved.
It was time to hear what an economist thinks about water privatization, shortages, access, human rights, etc. David was able to address all these issues through graphs and some of them actually made sense. For human rights, David argues that everybody should get some water for free and have to pay a ridiculous amount if they want more. Everyone would have enough water for basic human needs but watering the lawn, filling up the swimming pool and keeping a 24hour slip and slide would cost you big bucks! Check out the full interview with David and let us know where you stand.
On Dec 2nd,
Food and Water Watch organized a public forum to discuss the Corporate Water
Footprinting conference taking place in San Francisco. Huge corporations like
Nestles, Coca Cola, Fiji Water, etc. are getting together right now to discuss
“how they can reduce their company’s water use and build a sustainable water
strategy.”
The only problem is that these companies sell water for a
profit- not only depleting bodies of water and compromising human rights, but
also producing massive amount of CO2 and plastics waste. I agree that they came
together to maybe reduce their internal use of water and thereby decrease costs,
but there is no way that these corporations actually care about their impact on
the environment or communities from which they extract water for bottling and
selling.
The following day, Food and Water Watch held a public
protest and media conference outside of the Hyatt Regency in downtown San
Francisco to directly address these big fish. Here are two videos from the
event.
A crowd of people stood in front of the Hyatt Regency bellowing out powerful chants.
Water! The basic necessity of life. Something not one of us can
survive without. This is one resource which we all have taken for
granted for centuries now. Come on have a look at the map of the world
it doesn’t seem like there is any scarcity of it right? But then stop
and think, none of us can survive on that saline resource. The fresh
water that we humans need to survive is the water that is become
scarce day by day.
This is a global crisis which is building on the low. The reason we
don’t realize that we are falling short of it, is because we have
enough running water throughout the day in our taps and then of course
we have the “best tasting” water that is bottled up by huge corporate
companies and sold to us at high costs. We as humans don’t realize the
value of something until we lose it, but till the time we realize the
value of this life force we might not exist.
It is time to come together and make the human race realize that we
need to conserve water for our existence and not privatize it to make
profits. This is not a commodity to make money with, because all that
money will be of no use if we are dead.
This summit is a step towards building a movement that will create
realization and stop the waste of the most important resource on the
face of this earth. So lets start working.
