You want the good news first, or the bad news? Ok, bad news first.

It's been a tough week for the oceans. First, a report by the World Conservation Congress found that we could lose half of the planet's coral reefs in the next 40 years unless we take immediate action. Like what? Well, setting up a network of marine reserves and getting serious about curbing global warming, for starters.

Then, word began trickling out of China that no one has seen a species of endangered river dolphin called the baiji in months, and it is now feared to have gone extinct in the wild. The baiji have been battling for survival, but with so many of them drowning in fishing nets, killed by ship strikes, or succumbing to toxic contamination, things have not been looking good for them for a while. The construction of the enormous Three Gorges Dam on the Baiji's Yangtze River may have been the final nail in the coffin. Let's hope it's not too late

And today the heads of the USA's eight regional fisheries management councils will stand before Congress to tell our elected officials that there is no need to make any significant changes to the way we manage our marine resources. 'Sure, overfishing may have wiped out 90% of the ocean's large fish, and sure, we do sometimes allow overfishing to occur even on fish stocks we know are severely depleted, but... really, it's ok - we've got it covered. Trust us.' Uh, why, again?

With all this doom and gloom, we could probably all use a little inspiration to give us a glimpse of what can happen when people refuse to let things run their course, and somehow find the courage to stand up and fight. Two great new books came out this year, both written by average people that saw things going to hell and decided they were going to do something about it.

Dick Russell's Striper Wars tells the story of the fight to save the striped bass, America's most popular sportfish. After a long and often divisive campaign, Russell and his colleagues were able to get a coastwide moratorium on fishing for striped bass. The fish's recovery is one of the country's greatest environmental success stories. Incredibly, as Russell points out, this recovery is now jeopardized by Omega Protein's factory fishing operations for menhaden, the stripers' main food source. But that's another story...

Diane Wilson has written a stunningly powerful book about her battle to stop an enormous chemical plant from poisoning La Vaca Bay on the Texas Gulf Coast. An Unreasonable Woman: A true story of shrimpers, politicos, polluters and the fight for Seadrift, Texas is the kind of book that will make you think differently about your life and what you can achieve with it. Don't take my word for it, though, check out this review by Molly Ivins.

If you do pick up one of these books, let me know what you think!

John H

Earlier this year, Greenpeace tried to inject a little reality - and some humor - into a meeting of U.S. fisheries managers. Our "waiters" distributed a menu of what's missing to managers from NOAA Fisheries, the three multi-state fisheries commissions, and the eight regional fisheries councils. In the midst of a lot or self-congratulatory back-slapping, we used the menus to remind fisheries regulators that all is not well in the oceans.

Now, researchers at the University of New Hampshire have joined with scientists from Denmark and the U.K. to use menus to look at how fish stocks have changed over the past several hundred years. As reported in Nature, The History of Marine Animal Populations project "is drawing on sources such as monastery records of fishing hauls, taxes paid by fishermen to landowners, and even the discarded
papers of an Australian trawler company, retrieved from a rubbish dump.

The restaurant study looks at data from some 10,000 archived restaurant
menus in traditional US seafood towns such as Boston, San Francisco and
Providence in Rhode Island. After adjusting for inflation, the rises in
price of delicacies such as oysters reflect their growing scarcity as
fishermen strive to keep up with demand."

The HMAP project should be invaluable in countering the problem of shifting baselines, the idea that we tend to use far too limited of a timeline to judge how much things have changed. Instead of comparing cod, menhaden, or other important fish stocks to what they were ten or twenty years ago, we can get a much clearer picture of the costs of overfishing by looking back to the early days of fishing.

In the late 1800s, Andres Dumas said that if there were any more cod, one could walk across the Atlantic on their backs. I wonder what Monsieur Dumas would say today?

...or, for that matter, whether our fisheries managers would listen?

John H