Don't ask me why fish and chips taste so good when you're in England. But Pamelia and I still talk about the newspaper-wrapped batch we got at a takeout stand near Weymouth several years ago. Now there's a campaign to raise London to a new level of environmental responsibility by turning the British capital into the world's first Sustainable Fish City. The organizers of the 2012 London Olympics got the initiative rolling by vowing to serve only sustainable fish (types that are not severely depleted in number or caught using methods destructive to other species) during the Games. The idea has caught on, as you can read further in these two stories: http://www.sustainweb.org/news/london_challenged_to_be_sustainable_fish_city/
http://www.aolnews.com/2011/01/16/will-london-serve-only-sustainable-fish-with-its-chips/
One of the planet's biggest environmental issues is how to sustainably catch or farm enough fish to feed a fast-expanding human population. Aquaculture is rapidly growing (half the world's seafood is now farm-raised) and entrepreneurs are experimenting with new approaches. One is inland fish farms, which have begun raising salt-water seafood species in tanks containing water that is only one-fifth as salty as the ocean; the water is recirculated and filtered to remove the waste products that taint some farm-raised fish. A huge advantage of these inland farms (in comparison to caged aquafarms that are set up in bays and oceans) is that they prevent non-wild fish from escaping and breeding with wild stocks, potentially weaking those stocks or spreading diseases.
Today's Birthday:
American zoologist Dian Fosse, who did extraordinary research on mountain gorillas in Rwanda before being murdered there in 1985 (possibly by poachers, though the case was never solved), would have been 79 years old today. She showed the world that gorillas are not the vicious killers they'd always been portrayed as, and helped save the mountain gorillas from extinction (they are still endangered). Her 1983 book "Gorillas in the Mist" was later made into a movie starring Sigourney Weaver, who is now the honorary chairwoman of the Dian Fosse Gorilla Fund.
Dian Fosse