New Friends and Old: FisherPoets 2018
America’s fishermen are known across the country for their long and proud history of strong community ties. Nowhere is that tradition more striking than at the annual Fisherpoets gathering: a weekend of fishing-related m...
New Friends and Old: FisherPoets 2018
On a clear, cool Saturday morning in February, Allison Schutes, Associate Director of Ocean Conservancy’s Trash Free Seas® program, and I were up before sunrise, preparing for a beach cleanup Ocean Conservancy co-hosted...
Racing to Protect Our Ocean
The ripples of President Trump’s decision to fire Secretary of State Rex Tillerson will undoubtedly impact U.S. policy initiatives around the globe. But there’s at least one place where continuity should prevail: the Arc...
A Changing State Department: Why Collaboration is Still Vital in the Arctic
It’s not every day (or even every year) that marine debris experts from all around the world are together in one place. So when the 6th International Marine Debris Conference was scheduled to make landfall March 12-16, 2...
The Heart of a Global Movement: International Coastal Cleanup Coordinators
A Bloomberg editorial described it as a “minor miracle” and Quartz magazine called it a “stunning victory” for global conservation in its 2017 retrospective. In December, 10 countries reached an agreement to prevent the...
Central Arctic Ocean: Next Steps on the Arctic’s Newest International Agreement
During winter in the high-latitude Arctic Ocean, sea ice reflects much of the sun’s energy until seasonal melting promotes a spectacular plankton bloom along floe edges and even beneath the ice. The annual explosion of A...
People of the Ice Bridge
This past Wednesday, I took part in the first full meeting of the Aleutian Islands Waterways Safety Committee in Anchorage, Alaska. Here are five things you should know about this new group: The Committee is brand new. I...
5 Things About the Aleutian Islands Waterways Safety Committee
After 3 hours of zigzag patterns without a single whale shark sighting, we being to think we may come up emptyhanded during our last day on the water in St. Helena. We have been here to undertake the first whole-island s...
St. Helena 2018: Shark! Fins on! Splash!
Devastating 3,000 Gallon Spill of Heavy Fuel Oil Near Kodiak March 21, 2018 update: Although the nearest U.S. Coast Guard base is less than 50 miles away, due to bad weather, it took contracted Alaska Chadux responders f...
Alaska Oil Spill Blues
Most people interact with the oceans through the coasts. Beaches, from the white sands of the Florida Keys to rocky stretches of California coastline, are the windows to the expanse of the rest of the sea. In its 6th ins...