Collaborative consumption is all the rage these days, but for every internet-enabled sharing economy start up, there are hundreds of other forms of sharing that simply involve neighbors doing what they have always done—pooling resources to ensure their mutual well-being.
From a group of neighbors who removed their fences and started a garden, through a household that turned a parking strip into a garden growing free produce for their neighbors, to sharing gardens that offer free food to all who need it, Peak Moment TV has been a great source of inspiration for people who believe that much of the solution to our current crisis may in fact be found in our past. By sharing what we have, we build social equity which in turn comes back to benefit all of us.
EJF makes a direct link between the need for environmental security and the defence of basic human rights.
EJF is a registered charity established in 2000 to empower people who suffer most from environmental abuses to find peaceful ways of preventing them.
EJF provides film and advocacy training to individuals and grassroots organisations in the global south, enabling them to document, expose and create long term solutions to environmental abuses.
EJF campaigns internationally to raise awareness of the issues our grassroots partners are working to solve locally.
Today EJF has a team of campaigners and film-makers based in London, and works internationally with partners in Brazil, Vietnam, Mali, Sierra Leone, Uzbekistan, Mauritius and Indonesia.
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Scripps Institution of Oceanography / University of California, San Diego
A 100-fold upsurge in human-produced plastic garbage in the ocean is altering habitats in the marine environment, according to a new study led by a graduate student researcher at Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego.
In 2009 an ambitious group of graduate students led the Scripps Environmental Accumulation of Plastic Expedition (SEAPLEX) to the North Pacific Ocean Subtropical Gyre aboard the Scripps research vessel New Horizon. During the voyage the researchers, who concentrated their studies a thousand miles west of California, documented an alarming amount of human-generated trash, mostly broken down bits of plastic the size of a fingernail floating across thousands of miles of open ocean.
LEFT: Examples of a not-yet-hatched sea skater (Halobates sericeus) egg (top), about the size of a grain of rice, and a hatched egg (bottom). Photo credit: Miriam Goldstein, Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego. RIGHT: SEAPLEX researchers collected an alarming amount of small bits of broken down plastic floating across thousands of miles of open ocean. Photo credit: Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego
At the time the researchers didn’t have a clear idea of how such trash might be impacting the ocean environment, but a new study published in the May 9 online issue of the journal Biology Letters reveals that plastic debris in the area popularly known as the “Great Pacific Garbage Patch” has increased by 100 times over in the past 40 years, leading to changes in the natural habitat of animals such as the marine insect Halobates sericeus. These “sea skaters” or “water striders”-relatives of pond water skaters-inhabit water surfaces and lay their eggs on flotsam (floating objects). Naturally existing surfaces for their eggs include, for example: seashells, seabird feathers, tar lumps and pumice. In the new study researchers found that sea skaters have exploited the influx of plastic garbage as new surfaces for their eggs. This has led to a rise in the insect’s egg densities in the North Pacific Subtropical Gyre.
Such an increase, documented for the first time in a marine invertebrate (animal without a backbone) in the open ocean, may have consequences for animals across the marine food web, such as crabs that prey on sea skaters and their eggs.
Miriam Goldstein of Scripps Oceanography. Photo credit: Chang Shu.
“This paper shows a dramatic increase in plastic over a relatively short time period and the effect it’s having on a common North Pacific Gyre invertebrate,” said Scripps graduate student Miriam Goldstein, lead author of the study and chief scientist of SEAPLEX, a UC Ship Funds-supported voyage. “We’re seeing changes in this marine insect that can be directly attributed to the plastic.”
The new study follows a report published last year by Scripps researchers in the journal Marine Ecology Progress Series showing that nine percent of the fish collected during SEAPLEX contained plastic waste in their stomachs. That study estimated that fish in the intermediate ocean depths of the North Pacific Ocean ingest plastic at a rate of roughly 12,000 to 24,000 tons per year.
The Goldstein et al. study compared changes in small plastic abundance between 1972-1987 and 1999-2010 by using historical samples from the Scripps Pelagic Invertebrate Collection and data from SEAPLEX, a NOAA Ship Okeanos Explorer cruise in 2010, information from the Algalita Marine Research Foundation as well as various published papers.
In April, researchers with the Instituto Oceanográfico in Brazil published a report that eggs of Halobates micans, another species of sea skater, were found on many plastic bits in the South Atlantic off Brazil.
“Plastic only became widespread in late ’40s and early ’50s, but now everyone uses it and over a 40-year range we’ve seen a dramatic increase in ocean plastic,” said Goldstein. “Historically we have not been very good at stopping plastic from getting into the ocean so hopefully in the future we can do better.”
Coauthors of the study include Marci Rosenberg, a student at UCLA, and Scripps Research Biologist Emeritus Lanna Cheng.
Funding for SEAPLEX was provided by the University of California Ship Funds, an innovative program that allows a new generation of scientists to gain valuable scientific training at sea, Project Kaisei/Ocean Voyages Institute, the Association for Women in Science-San Diego and the National Science Foundation’s (NSF) Integrative Graduate Education and Research Traineeship program. The NOAA Okeanos Explorer Program (2010 Always Exploring expedition) and National Marine Fisheries Service provided support for the 2010 samples. Other study support was provided by Jim and Kris McMillan, Jeffrey and Marcy Krinsk, Lyn and Norman Lear, Ellis Wyer and an anonymous donor. Other support was provided by the California Current Ecosystem (CCE) program, part of NSF’s Long-Term Ecological Research (LTER) program.
