By Chris Cusack and Melissa Mahoney
It doesn’t take too much scrolling these days to see that our oceans — and our entire natural world — are in peril. Overfishing, habitat destruction, plastic pollution and warming temperatures are BIG challenges. And yet, they all have something in common: they can all be improved by sustainable, responsible use of emerging technologies. Read More
Americans import over 85% of all the seafood we consume — and half of that is from foreign aquaculture. That means when it comes to the majority of farmed fish we eat, we’re exporting our environmental footprint while missing out on the opportunity to create greater resilience and jobs for our coastal communities here in the U.S. Also lost is the opportunity to lead the way in developing best practices for sustainable production of healthy seafood that meets the most stringent environmental and health standards. This is most true in building a sustainable marine aquaculture industry.
In all the years I’ve been studying the ocean, whales have provided some of my fondest memories. I remember those humpbacks singing to each other off Maui; the baby gray whale I saw rolling around in the surf near Bodega Bay; and the blue whales that left me awestruck during trips to the Channel Islands.
Lately, I’ve been studying natural ocean processes that remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, searching for ways to restore or accelerate them so that we can safely slow down the rate of global warming. Whales might be part of the solution.
By Melissa Mahoney and Shems Jud
With fisheries providing livelihoods, income and nutrition for hundreds of millions of people around the world, finding ways to preserve them is always essential. Yet in many countries, fisheries management hasn’t caught up with the digital world we live in today. Electronic fisheries monitoring and other applications of cutting-edge technology could revolutionize this industry — and it’s an exciting new frontier. Read More
“I learned about sustainability that if you catch too many fish, you’ll catch them faster than they can reproduce … and there won’t be any more fish.”
A simple concept, but one that took decades to integrate into U.S. law — and one that Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) works to establish as an underlying fisheries management principle across the globe. And it’s a concept that we hoped to reinforce with an event we held in Jackson, Mississippi focused on connecting local youth to their seafood.
For Sadarius, a gregarious 11-year-old at Blackburn Middle School in Jackson, the idea made sense almost immediately. It was one of the core messages intended to impress upon students at Everyone’s Gulf, a collaborative project among Share the Gulf supporters EDF, Chef Nick Wallace, Mississippi Commercial Fisheries United, Gulf Wild™, Mississippi Hospitality and Restaurant Association, Silver Dollar Charters and of course, Blackburn Middle School. Read More
It was never going to be enough for Chef Nick Wallace to only cook food, even as deeply as the passion to cook has driven his life and career. The Chopped chef is on a mission that includes shaping the way children, especially children of color, relate to and think about food.
Creativity Kitchen, Chef Wallace’s brainchild, was launched to integrate real, nutritious, local food into urban school cafeterias in the South and the appreciation for its importance into the minds and hearts of the children eating it. “We work with kids who may eat their only meal of the day at school. By prompting them to think about where that food comes from, what it does for their body and how its production impacts the land, we try to instill a sense of agency that they will take into adulthood—a sense that they can choose what to put in their bodies with an understanding of the impacts of that choice,” Chef Wallace explains. Read More