Symphony of Destruction

"Clean coal" is a dirty, dirty, dirty lie! Coal will never be clean no matter how much "carbon sequestration" they insist on achieving. Watch the short film above and also watch The Amazing Disappearing Mountains - these are artistic and entertaining renditions of coal's heavily polluting lifespan from mountain mining to smokestack. Coal produces millions of tons of toxins other than carbon. Learn the truth at thedirtylie.com

I'm inspired by coal's dirty lies from my fieldwork in Chile regarding the Los Robles coal plant that threatens to pollute a rural agricultural region of coastal Chile.

I Love Sharks

Whilst surfing this weekend, I pondered life and death. This sudden introversion was forced upon me by the environmental reality of the surf spots I love to frequent here in California: they're purportedly infested with Great White Sharks.



On Friday, a friend was sitting on the beach and saw a seal splash about 50 feet offshore. The seal swam frantically ashore. It beached itself in front of my friend, with a huge bloody gash in its rear. It had been bitten by a shark and escaped. I went surfing with another friend a few hours later at this exact point on the beach - we didn't learn of the shark attack until later, after we surfed. And they say this is the low-season for shark sitings...

Sharks are at grave risk of extinction from finning, bycatch fishing, and pollution - read and learn more here at New Scientist Magazine. Sharks are now on earth for over 400 million years, making them much older than dinosaurs.

Sharks are the ultimate survivors and adaptors. Will they survive humans? Learn more at Shark Alliance. Read my recent blog post about diving with the Great Whites of the Farallon Islands.

Above Great White Shark photo from newscientist.com

Tweet Yee Haw

In general I'm not a huge fan of new social media on the web - it seems the ship has already set sail, and the newest stuff is just a lame-if-well-funded marketing ploy to capture members and advertising dollars. All that facebook nonsense about photo ownership, user information and face recognition software kinda sucks.

However, short bursts of well-thought-out text is pretty cool - haiku Zen style - so I decided to take this twitter thing a step farther and attempt to rhyme twitter posts:

Read my rhyming twitter posts and then weep:

* twitter.com/savethewaves *

Irish Greens

I'm usually not a big fan of tow surfing in less-than-giant surf, but this film "Powers of Three" about three very focused big-wave surfers in Ireland is amazing - and the waves surfed are incredible. This is the trailer:



You can watch the full 34-minute film Powers of Three here: http://www.relentlessenergy.com/films/view/powers-of-three

Mermaids Cry Tears of Styrofoam

We went to the beach at Mavericks on Saturday to clean it of ocean-borne trash. The "trash du jour" was what we call mermaid tears, which are tiny bits of plastic and styrofoam that were once discarded and are now slowly broken down into small pieces by wind, sun and movement. The much-publicized Pacific Trash Vortex is mostly made up of this kind of floating waste, and the garbage we find on the beaches is brought in by high tide from the ocean. All of the bits of trash in the above photo was found at the high tide line on the beach, mixed in with seaweed and other organic matter.

Much of this trash ends up in the stomachs of fish and birds who think it's food. Not a healthy situation by any means. When you buy and soon after throw away your plastic and styrofoam, please remember: THERE IS NO "AWAY" when you "throw away" this stuff. It's high time to replace plastic and styrofoam with biodegradable packaging.

The Impact of Environmentalists on the Environment

Yesterday over beers, this question came up: "What is the impact of environmentalists on the environment?" We concluded that the destructive environmental impact of all our important universe-saving environmentalism is a lot more than anyone - except for redneck hunters and conservative talk show hosts - is willing to admit.

Then we drank more beer and promptly forgot the question.

Chile Forestry Pipeline Update

My friend and colleague Rodrigo de la O Guerrero, the Maule Itata Coastkeeper in Chile, has just published an excellent field report on the waste pipeline recently built by the Nueva Aldea Forestry Complex near Cobquecura. You can read his article in Spanish here:

http://maulecoastkeeper.blogspot.com/2009/06/ducto-celco-nueva-aldea-problemas-de.html

Through work with Save The Waves and Proplaya in Chile during 2006 - 2009 I monitored the construction of this pipeline with documentary filmmaking, water testing, community activism and education. All Points South and Pulp, Poo and Perfection are the films you can watch to educate yourself about this matter and take action - see the links list to the right here.


Top photo by Will Henry and above photo by Rodrigo Ferrer.

Oceans and Obama

President Obama came out with some very quotable quotes and strong words last week regarding the ocean environment and its increasingly fragile health. Some of my colleagues immediately and publicly bent over backwards with excitement that Obama mentioned oceans and our need to protect them. I remain skeptical as to what, exactly, is going to be done by his administration for ocean health.Wired.com magazine has an interesting article about this latest Obama media coup. I quote the first 3 paragraphs below, and you can read the entire article here.

"President Barack Obama has said all the right things about safeguarding the oceans. While campaigning, he promised to improve their management and research. Last Friday, he gave an Ocean Policy Task Force 90 days to develop a comprehensive oceans policy.

"Of course, it was just four-and-a-half years ago that the bipartisan Commission on Ocean Policy presented its sweeping recommendations to President Bush, who responded by creating a Cabinet-level Committee on Ocean Policy. The committee is now defunct.

"Whether Obama’s promises will amount to more than another round of bureaucratic chair shuffling remains to be seen. If so, it will be tragic. For years scientists have warned the oceans are in crisis, teetering on the edge of breakdown. Overfishing has all but eliminated many once-common species, disrupting aquatic ecosystems and unleashing plagues of jellyfish..."

Read the rest of this article here at Wired.com

Devils Teeth - living with the Great White Shark

The Devil's Teeth is a short film about Ron Elliot, the only urchin diver to frequent the Great White Shark-infested waters of the Farallon Islands. A fascinating subject and a beautiful film, follow the link below to watch the 9-minute short film in which Ron talks about his numerous encounters with sharks and his diving trade. Ron is a true hero and a survivor, residing in a world completely alien to our tech, noise, and city-saturated civilization:
http://link.brightcove.com/services/player/bcpid10791390001?bctid=1556133929

"You're just part of the background... they're passing by you, but that's not why they came by..." - Ron Elliot

Love Thy Ocean!

Abalone On The Rocks

I went abalone diving up north this weekend. Surfed the south swell, too. I'm shocked at how slim the abalone population is these days (this was my first ab dive in 15 years) - the spot we dove was picked nearly clean, and I saw lots of abs that were too small (less than 7"). Based on what I saw this weekend, I fully support aggressive marine protection of coastal waters to bring back their habitat! These tasty little critters need some private space to grow back, because diving and eating abalone is a great thing.

Missed Concepts of Pacific Garbage Patch

For World Oceans Day I wrote an article about the much-hyped "great Pacific garbage patch." It's about my adventures sailing through the area three years ago. Then a Korean news agency contacted me asking for a tour of this "giant plastic island." It brought my attention to a lot of well-meaning misunderstandings in medialand about what the garbage patch is. It is NOT a giant solid island of garbage the size of Texas. It IS a huge area of ocean where one can see floating junk ranging from bottles to miniscule pieces of plastic. It's a pollution problem and it's large, but it is not a giant floating island and you can't see it in satellite photos because of its distributed nature and lack of solidity. The media has latched on to this image of an island because it's dramatic and reads well, but it's really just a large area of ocean that has lots of small plastics floating in it.

This is NOT the Pacific garbage patch nor does it look like this:


This is a more realistic representation of what the "garbage patch" looks like - a water sample of 1 mile of trawling the patch:

Imagine thousands of square miles of tiny floating bits of trash. It's a major risk to sea life because they see this small stuff and think it's plankton and other tasty bites, and they eat it. It fills them up and they die of starvation. Sometimes when you're sailing through the Great Pacific Garbage Patch you can barely see it unless you really look for it. Of course there are larger trash objects floating among this, such as nets, buoys, bags, shoes, etc. But in no way is it a massive solid raft of plastic out there.
Thanks to algalita.org - Algalita Marine Research Foundation - for their great research and promotion of this subject.

The Cove Will Rock You

Remember, you read about it first at this blog in February! The Cove movie - about dolphin capture and slaughter in Japan and the adventures of hardcore activist filmmakers from Oceanic Protection Society to expose it - is coming in early August to a theater near you. It is guaranteed to rock your world. Go see it - find where and how at The Cove website - www.thecovemovie.com and then help spread the word:



What struck me most about this film is how intelligent and self-aware dolphins are. Dolphins in captivity for marine parks, swim-with-dolphin programs, and other captive dolphin programs is a tragedy and is akin to slavery. See the film and you will understand why. FILM AS ACTIVISM!

Small Is Great

Small organizations are amazing. The larger they are, the less efficient use of energy spent on all things. Less responsive. Less flexible. More wasteful. Although both large and small organizations are fraught with ego maniacs, but that's another blog post... Headlines the world over these days are all about downsizing, the cutting of budgets, and unfortunately the publicly funded bailout of this and that massive corporation. I say, let them get smaller!

Case in point: the Los Robles coal plant slated for construction on a remote beach in Chile has been delayed and its financiers have lost millions of dollars due to the global economic meltdown. Financing is not available for the massive boilers used to process steam and burn coal for electricity. They were just too big and asking for too much.

It seems macro-economic meltdowns on a global scale are actually GREAT for the environment! Less consumption, less fossil fuels used, less plastic crap being manufactured and bought and discarded, less pollution entering our bloodstreams and lungs. More health for our kids - childhood asthma is a major concern in cities due to industrial activity. There may be less jobs, too, due to the economic crisis, but that's only temporary: it's time to harness and create green manufacturing jobs.

So bring on the downsizing, bring on the shrinking of budgets and organizations! Small is great. It may just save us from ourselves.

Note of full disclosure: I am employed by a very small organization. Save The Waves Coalition.



Photos this post by Will Henry.

One Eighty South

Look for Chris Malloy's upcoming film 180 South, It will be epic. Woodshed Films finally goes enviro active on us. Thanks Yvon! I wrote some content for the film, let's hope it made the final cut!

180south.com
This film promotes the No Dams campaign in Chile as well: ¡SIN REPRESAS!

Our Film Screens Today - ¡hoy!

Our new award-winning short film Keeping Coast screens today in San Francisco! If you're tired of reading about news about my films, the good news is this may be the last time I post about Keeping Coast on my blog... or maybe not, because we will also be having a local release party sometime soon for the movie. So come on down to the Victoria Theatre - 7 PM - today - World Oceans Day Film Festival - yeee haaa!
Photo: On location with Teton Gravity Research at the Nueva Aldea Forestry Complex in southern Chile.
In case you live under a rock or just haven't read my blog before, find out more about Keeping Coast at: www.keepingcoast.blogspot.com


Above photo: Chilean Surf Dog (this used to be me).

¡Mañana!

Tomorrow is Wednesday and our new short film Keeping Coast is screening for the first time in San Francisco at the World Oceans Day Film Festival. Come on over, I'll be holding a Q & A bull session after the film. Lob me some softballs from the audience, or come with your hardest questions and make me sweat.

* KEEPING COAST * 7 PM * VICTORIA THEATRE * SAN FRANCISCO



It's screening with other short films: Surfing Favela, Papa Tortuga, End of the Line, and Silent Snow.

Watch the film trailer and read the synopsis here.

"We're Sailing Through a Quiet Sea of Plastic"

I wrote this post yesterday for the UK's Guardian Weekly, an awesome progressive journal of reports from around the world about everything newsworthy. Read it at this link or it's pasted below.

Monday June 8th 2009 - The Guardian Weekly:
www.guardianweekly.co.uk
Three years ago, environmental activist Josh Berry was on a sailing trip from California to Hawaii when he encountered the Pacific Trash Vortex – a huge patch of ocean-borne garbage thought to be twice the size of Texas. On UN World Oceans Day, he describes the sight of man-made garbage floating for miles on end and why he devotes his time to ocean conservation.

"2006. Day 14 at sea: this marks two weeks of nothing but blue waters, gusting winds, beautifully spooky white and grey albatrosses drifting across wave tops for hours on end. The horizon is always unbroken – nothing but ocean and sky – and we haven't seen another sign of human life for over a week. The last thing we saw was a supertanker near the California coast."

I'm on a tiny sailboat with two friends and we're sailing from San Francisco to the Hawaiian Islands, delivering a boat to its new owner. Then we start seeing it: plastic floating everywhere. Tiny, colourful, subtle, coin-sized chunks of plastic floating on the ocean surface all around the boat. For days on end the plastic does not stop. We're sailing through a quiet sea of plastic to Hawaii.

Today is World Oceans Day, an event celebrated all over the world by ocean conservation organisations to raise awareness and respect for the oceans. Kind of like how the card companies created Father's Day to sell more greeting cards, we've created this day to sell ocean conservation. This is the first time it is being recognised by the United Nations, which declares on its website: “The oceans are essential to food security and the health and survival of all life, power our climate and are a critical part of the biosphere.”
Our oceans are extremely fragile and in grave danger from industrial pollution, overfishing, runoff from megacities, floating plastic garbage and more. In many ways the ocean is our garbage dump, and it's evident in things like the Pacific Trash Vortex, a concentration of marine litter that's accumulated over the years from the convergence of currents and winds in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. Located between two huge population and industrial centers – Asia and North America – this huge patch of ocean-borne garbage has been accumulating for years from currents and winds, depositing it mostly from land-based sources of plastic litter.
I've thought of myself as a surfer, fisherman, sailor, and a lover of the ocean ever since I could eat sand at the age of one. In 2006 I sailed to Hawaii with some friends to deliver a boat to its new owner – it was the voyage of a lifetime. One feels an intimate and overwhelming connection to the earth out there. There are no distractions of people, cement, or technology to help you forget what you are – just a tiny organism in a vast system of life. We sailed out under the Golden Gate Bridge and into the Pacific Ocean, delivering our fate to the whims of the world's mightiest ocean.

It's humbling and inspiring to spend weeks at sea under power of wind and sail and I was having a great time thousands of miles from shore, when I began to notice the plastic. At first it's indistinct and you don't really notice it because your eye isn't looking for it: tiny chunks of plastic floating everywhere. As if you were surrounded by millions of ants. But after a few days I began to take notice, and larger pieces of plastic junk – parts of lawn chairs, a wheel broken off from a long-lost toy, the cap to a tube of toothpaste, a broken hairbrush – all of it floating in the ocean, thousands of miles from human civilisation.

Researchers say that 80% of this garbage comes from sources on land. It simply gets carelessly discarded and ends up in the ocean, where waves and wind and sun break it into small pieces and ocean currents carry it out into this giant garbage patch.

I work in California and South America as a surfer activist protecting the surf and the coastal environment from pollution and development and these are interesting times indeed: industrial and consumer demands create ever-increasing loads of waste, pressuring ocean waters. There are more and more people living on the coast worldwide and, whlie the beach is a great place to live, and coastal real estate is more coveted than ever before, erosion and rising sea levels are becoming a reality.
Our civilisation is basically based on the one-time use of throw away plastics: instead of hunting and gathering, we now shop. And every time we shop, we accumulate plastic: a toothbrush; a vat of butter; a bag of chips; a candy bar wrapper; it's all made of plastic. All I can do is get the word out through my films, activist work, writing and campaigning to create this web of protection to conserve what surfers all over the world love: a pristine coast that supports the full web of life that the ocean gives us.

Happy World Oceans Day To You

I prefer to celebrate every day as Oceans Day. But it's a great reason to celebrate, nonetheless. And a great reason to get the word out that 71% of the world is in serious danger. Overfishing. Acidification. Rising sea levels. Coral bleaching and die-off. Industrial pollution. Plastics. Coastal armoring. Sedimentation from damming, forestry, overdevelopment.

We've done a great job at taxing the hell out of our oceans. Change your life, change our consumptive throw-away society, and we will save the oceans and our own lives. Ocean is life. Love Thy Ocean.

Today our film Keeping Coast is screening at the Montara Lighthouse. On Wednesday Keeping Coast is playing at the World Oceans Day Film Festival at the Victoria Theater in San Francisco.

As a filmmaker, I struggle with how massive amounts of energy and waste are used to make so many mediocre films. Here's a new idea for truly "green" films: recycle old, stock footage that's not copyrighted! If you can make Sex Galaxy from old footage, you can make anything - it's all in the editing:

We Win Best Short Film for Keeping Coast

I just found out that Keeping Coast won best short film at the Cottonwood Creek Environmental Film Festival, showing this Saturday in Encinitas, CA. This is the US PREMIERE of Keeping Coast. More dates to follow in SF Bay Area (June 8-10 at World Oceans Day Film Festival), East Coast TBA, Spain (San Sebastián Surfilm Festibal, June 14) and more to follow!

US PREMIERE OF KEEPING COAST:

WHEN: This Saturday, June 6, 4:30pm
WHERE: La Paloma Theatre, Encinitas, California
WHO: I will be there for a Q&A after screening and to receive award. San Diego Surfrider (the most butt-kicking Surfrider chapter) will also be present to show a sunset surf movie by Thomas Campbell.
WHY: film as activism. And fun.

Oceans Day Is Everyday - World Oceans Day is Next Week

June 8, 2009: the first-ever UN-recognized World Oceans Day. Whatever, because every day is ocean day for my friends and I: buying less plastic since 1990. Driving less since 2001. Environmental activism to protect the ocean since 2003. But we all need a reason to celebrate, and a reason to encourage others to Love Thy Ocean. So next Monday come on out to any number of events being promoted all over the world to celebrate World Oceans Day.

Our newest short film, Keeping Coast, about Chile coal and our Coastkeeper program, is showing at the World Oceans Day Film Festival on Monday, June 8 at the Montara Lighthouse and Wednesday, June 10 in San Francisco. This is the first official screening of the film in California! Trailer:



Learn more about the film Keeping Coast and how you can see it by clicking here.

We Are Complicated Bacteria Here to Eat the Sandwich

For many years I've wondered and investigated and asked why we are here, and why we - humans - are destroying the earth with sprawl and oil and cars and concrete and insatiable appetites for everything. Here is what Joe Rogan the comedian, MMA host, and social commentator, has to say from his limo about us and the planet:



"I think we are here to eat the sandwich." - Well spoken, Joe.