Quick guide to sustainable seafood

A friend asked me about sustainable seafood and I promised some information

Here is the quick guide I promised

The link to the seafood guide is

http://www.sustainableseafood.org.au/Sustainable-Seafood-Guide-Australia.asp?active_page_id=695

and it is downloadable from the app store

There is also the ACF Sustainable Seafood campaign information http://www.acfonline.org.au/be-informed/oceans-rivers/sustainable-australian-seafood. There is a cool and neat interactive map. 

Greenpeace Australia is also in on the action with http://www.greenpeace.org/australia/en/what-we-do/oceans/Take-action/The-Seafood-Redlist/

And there is an excellent pdf for download there

A couple of general comments follow. With fish it is more sustainable if they are farmed in tanks on landed than in pens at sea. The drawbacks of pen raising are they are fed fish humans can eat, they are pumped full of antibiotics as the concentration of fish makes them susceptible to disease, they poop the antibiotics out into the environment and they poop. There is a very high concentration of fish poop beneath the pens which destroys the the environment beneath the pens. And some of the non-native fish escape into native waters. That said I understand Tassie pens are better than some. 

As a rule smaller fish are better to eat than bigger - that is better 'for the environment'. The better fisheries are certified by the Marine Stewardship Council. 

Generally wild caught fish are better for the person eating them than farmed as wild caught fish have a more diverse diet and are not pumped full of antibiotics. 

So there is an app, an interactive map and pdf. Good coverage.

FSC certification of the loggin of old growth in Karelia

"You can't say that FSC can protect all forests. If we (claimed) to protect every tree, no company would (register) with FSC. It is not realistic. It is always a compromise." That's what Andrei Ptichnikov, general manager of FSC in Russia said to Swedish journalist which was then on-quoted by the Guardian on May 29 this year. That FSC is willing to certifiying the logging of old growth forests - that's old growth forests- raises redwood-sized questions about the quality of FSC certification and how compromised that quality may be.

Dirtying the water

I am interested rivers and sediments and what is happening to our urban rivers and what happens when the water runs out into bay. There is not much doubt that we as urban residents are putting a bunch of stuff into the storm water which then goes out into the rivers and bay. In the little lane in the inner city that runs past my office where I am writing this is an example of what happens in microcosm. It is a tiny bluestone lane. And there is sediment that washes out into the drain in the middle on a day to day basis - year in year out - but it is small. What is making a difference is construction. Three sites are in various stages of development. One small house that backs onto the land is nearing completion, now they have timbered over what was once a garden to create and 'outdoor room'. The waste the washed into the land was mainly sand  - and some sawdust, food wrappings. There was a surprising amount of sand from such a small development. Further up they have knocked the back of a commercial building and brought in a bobcat to shovel out a lot of mud. And now the lane is coated in mud. And that will all wash into the river and ultimately into the bay. So to me it seems on a scale that is happening all over this city, construction is the issue. As we shorten the life cycle of our domestic buildings - the throw-away society driven by fashion - we create sediment to make our rivers and creeks and bays dirty. We clog them with sediment and make it tough for life to thrive in turbid waters.

Pretending to be an outsider is the fashion of conservative politics

It is curious how conservatives are positioning themselves as outsiders. As Katherine Murphy notes in today's Age: "This is the fashion of conservative politics." Nick Minchin does it. Even the Heartland Institute does it; yet they are supported by the blue rinse set of US corporates. The majority of the US legislature doubt anthropogenic climate change.  Yet the world has been turned on its head and it is the majority of scientists who support the view that anthropogenic climate change is happening that are the 'insiders' and representing "the establishment'. It is hard not to be sarcastic about this position of "I am just a poor little rich guy." Deniers compare themselves to Galileo, missing the point that they are the political establishment who are rejecting science, as the church rejected Galileo's science.

Here is a quote from Darwin that intrigues me (and many others):

I have, also, reason to believe that humble-bees are indispensable to the fertilisation of the heartsease (Viola tricolor), for other bees do not visit this flower. From experiments which I have lately tried, I have found that the visits of bees are necessary for the fertilisation of some kinds of clover; but humble-bees alone visit the red clover (Trifolium pratense), as other bees cannot reach the nectar. Hence I have very little doubt, that if the whole genus of humble-bees became extinct or very rare in England, the heartsease and red clover would become very rare, or wholly disappear. The number of humble-bees in any district depends in a great degree on the number of field-mice, which destroy their combs and nests; and Mr. H. Newman, who has long attended to the habits of humble-bees, believes that "more than two-thirds of them are thus destroyed all over England." Now the number of mice is largely dependent, as every one knows, on the number of cats; and Mr. Newman says, "Near villages and small towns I have found the nests of humble-bees more numerous than elsewhere, which I attribute to the number of cats that destroy the mice." Hence it is quite credible that the presence of a feline animal in large numbers in a district might determine, through the intervention first of mice and then of bees, the frequency of certain flowers in that district!

From the Origin, second edition, pp. 73-74:

 And I was listening to Off Track and that again reminded me of it. It was one of those delight full snap moments when life puts one card on top of another and there is lovely fit. The program is "Native Like a Fox" and it is well worth a listen. It poses the challenging question of when does the introduced pest become native and when does the native become a pest, and it relates it to the links in the food chain. Nice. Here's the link.

I have an affection for weeds, gritty little survivors who set up life anywhere. Discriminated against but tough. The heroic underdogs. I like finding life in the most unexpected places and that is often a weed. After all our magnificent eucalypts were once weeds living on the edge of a Gondwanan forest. (It took me time to digest that when I first read it. But this affection can be pushed too far and Emma Marris does that in her Rambunctious Garden. Let’s re-evaluate them but it is bizarre to elevate them to the top of the ecological pyramid of good guys.

While reading Rambunctious Garden: Saving Nature in the Post-Wild World by Emma Marris, a little over 50% through (by this point there is lots of questions, lots of sledging but no answers, which I am looking forward to).

Marris's Rambunctious Garden too rambunctious?

I am annoyed by Emma Marris’s Rambunctious Garden, but maybe in a good way. It has certainly given me a new interest in invasive weeds, and a readiness to think differently. But and there is a big but, she seems to be simply saying bad stuff happens. Species ranges grow and shrink and species do go extinct – the world is really just one big garden for people to do as they like in it. And if we lose a whole bunch of interesting endemic species with short-lived, quick growing, rapidly seeding species who put little effort into their offspring. 

It is the economist’s view of ecology – a licence for greed and carelessness. Yes change happens but the rate of change in the past 200 years and especially the last 50 years is unprecedented. Ecosystems that have existed for 100s of years, 1000s of years (and that’s a lot of time in a world that marks itself as some 2000 years old), 100,000 of years, even millions of years, ecosystems that have co-evolved over many lifetimes are being destroyed in less than one. Yet she takes time out of the equation. Her position as an ecologist seems perverse. Yes climate change is changing the paradigm and we need to do some rethinking about what we consider "nature" and "wilderness'. Let's not throw the baby out with the bathwater. 

Is it important that the number of species on some islands are increasing though that is as the expense of the biodiversity of the world? Is that not obvious? Yes it is good to challenge prevailing wisdom, but what is she offering in its place? She seems to be picking around the margins, finding the exceptions, not the principles. The quality of the writing is disappointing for such a bold thesis. She is using language frequently to deliberately stretching the argument. She has eradicated time and the rate of change from her argument. Wow. Yes things have always changed chronologically and spatially but it is the rate of change that is a concern, a rate of change generated by the expansion of technology.

Maybe I have yet to read far enough. I am only 48% into the book (according the bar at the bottom of my kindle screen.) I look forward to writing again when I have finished the book.             

Davis has Oz wrong

In response to Marris citing it, I am now reading Mark A Davis “Researching Invasive Species 50 Years After Elton”. Davis is saying specifically in the case of Australia that: In Australia, non-native species have been reported to have contributed to the extinctions of some native mammals (see Finlayson 1961; Kinnear et al. 1998). However, the fact that declines in native species typically began decades before the introductions of species such as cats and foxes (often reputed to be the causes of extinctions), and the fact that species introductions are usually associated with other types of anthropogenic change that are believed to have contribute to the declines (for example land use change), it is difficult to ascribe extinctions of Australian mammals exclusively to no-native species (Abbott 2002; McKenzie et al. 2007.

Well that doesn’t accord with my understanding. Cats arrived with the First Fleet – the first settlement of Australia, as did cattle, which also soon ran wild. So I am not sure how “declines in native species typically began decades before the introductions” could work. In Australia’s case the introduction of species came early and non-native species spread quickly. We have seen waves of extinction in mammals since the arrival of Europeans – the latest of which is going on in the north at the moment with the disappearance of the bilby and other like sized animals.

A lot hangs on the word exclusively. Define it narrowly and  anything can be justified. Little if anything has a singular cause. The smaller mammals were not just killed by cats but had their habitats destroyed as farmers cleared bush litter, and the ground hardened by the hooves of introduced cattle. (Are cattle a land-use change or an invasive species?)

The MIS ponzis - who loves a monoculture?

I am just back from the Green Triangle, from canoeing the Glenelg, four days actually, and driving via Warrnambool and then back by Byaduk and Penshurst you cannot miss the plantations, rolling like dark water over the hills and valleys mainly pine, some gum (blue gum). The soil up this way is poor for farming but fine for pine. I am guessing the pines like the acidity of limestone soils.

            Much of the planting was the result of the failed managed investments schemes Great Southern and Timbercorp. A managed investment scheme (MIS) allows investors to pool their investment and pay a manager to manage on their behalf. As I understand it investors were encouraged to take the maintenance costs out as an upfront tax deduction and that was the attraction of a managed investment scheme. Timber has the advantage as do a number of agricultural products where there are high maintenance expenses over a long period of time, in tax terms that generated a good deduction that was brought forward to the time of the investment. It seems an artefact to me, just too clever: short term thinking harnessed to a long term product. There was something of the ponzi to the way the schemes managed the funds they attracted, buying production to keep the price up. And then the tax department I have been told disallowed bringing so much of the expenses to the time of the investment and ruled that the expenses had to be deducted closer to the time they were incurred. Owww. That’s a convenient explanation but not accurate. There was tax doubt but governments and the ATO worked to reassure investors. Maybe it would have been better if they hadn’t.

            In the meantime a lot of land had been bought and a lot of trees had been planted, and not just in the south-west of Victoria but as far away as the Tiwi island, which was controversial.

            The idea of the plantations is to grow trees fast and to industrialize the farming of timber. Plantations are monocultures – one tree species spread over a landscape like a disease. The industrialization of forestry means that many forestry values, say those espoused by Aldo Leopold are destroyed. It is all about the money and systems to reduce costs. It is about shortening the forester’s traditional long vision to something as short as a tree’s life can be squeezed into. It is about industrializing forestry, which is about simplifying everything to cut costs – and also to push costs especially unknown costs into the future on to other people and future generations. A forest is not a monoculture but a living diverse ecosystem, a series of habitats, a structured mosaic of ecotopes. These plantations are sucking up water and dropping the water table. One local told me that the level of the Blue Lake at Mt Gambier had a dropped a metre. The local ecology is locked up for a long time.

            The land is only productive for two rotations of timber so some 60 to 100 years, and after that the land is depleted of nutrients and clotted with roots. Will it be useable? What are we leaving future generations? Plenty of what economists like to call “externalities”, as if these are not part of their dream of a perfect economic system.

            The MIS are a touchstone for how economics and government treats the environment, seeking short-term profit blindly. 

Hope yet for James Price Point

Economics is looking like it will stop the James Price Point hub where environmental protest have yet to succeed. $30 billion is looking like a lot in the current environment and the strong inflationary pressures in WA are pushing the likely cost up. Woodside has asked the WA government to extend the commitment deadline from mid 2012 into 2013. That increases the chances that the project just will not go ahead. Woodside's joint-venture partners - BHP, Shell, BP and Chevron - prefer the cheaper alternative of processing the gas at the existing facility at Karratha, and Goldman Sachs said that option "increases in attractiveness as time goes on". Who wants to take a big risk in today's economic climate? Woodside may just have been saved from itself by the doggedness of environmental and indigenous groups. Oh, sweet irony. Woodside chief executive Peter Coleman has tempered several of the ambitious plans of his American predecesso,Don Voelte, since ascending to the chair in May this year. The Wilderness Society says this setback is a "testament to misguided egos" of the ambitious. How does Martin Ferguson feel about that? Maybe a few people should be reading Jon Ronson's The Psychopath Test.

Links:
SMH
West Australian
Oz

CSG concerns - handy summary

Here's a handy summary about the concerns with coal seam gas extraction. The fundamental is that as the industry is new there is not much known about the medium to long-term effects of lowering the pressure of coal seams but pumping out the gas (and the water with it). Specific concerns are:

• Just how impermeable are the layers of clay separating the coal seams from the aquifers?

• Are coal seams and aquifers always separated? (And, how do you know when you start drilling?)

• Will fracking lead to coal seams connecting to aquifers?

• Will the wells leak? Will the casing seal the wells adequately (think Deepwater Horizon)? Will the wells be plugged properly (think Rum Jungle? What is the industry's record of cleaning up after itself?)

Queensland Gas Company says the majority of view of hydrologists is that over time water will always flow from high pressure to low pressure areas regardless of permeability Now here's the kicker QGC says it won't be a problem in our lifetimes. So what they are saying is lets take the profits now and lets shift the problems to the future. A case of not paying for what economists call externalities. In the ninenteenth century factories used to pump toxic waste into rivers and let those who live downstream take the consequences. Now we the downstream is the future, our children and their children and so down to the nth generation.

The concerns from farmers is the damage that CSG does to their land, to the surface of the land. The web of roads and other facilities that go with CSG extraction. It is different from other sorts of mining. And there is the problem of what happens to everything that comes out of the ground apart from the methane that is pumped away - salty toxic water.

Abuse of language

Language is used and abused to pursue particular interests. An appreciation that was reinforced for me recently when I read of plans to use 'waste' to make resin pellets to fire power plants in South Australia. The 'waste' is the pulp that will no longer go to the Tantanoola Pulp Mill (Tantanoola is being closed because it is too 'small' in a global context. Small is beautiful is not something that industry embraces.) Woodchipping started with a plan to utilize the 'waste' from logging, now forests are clearfelled and only a small proportion of the timber is actually cut into timber, most is chipped and pulped. Woodchipping spearheaded the industrializaton of logging based on 'waste', and resin pellet will continue this trend, all in the name of being green, all in the name of utilizing 'waste'. Words just slide around.

The other recent notable abuse that I came across was the statements made by Queensland State Mining Minister Stirling Hinchcliffe that fracking is a 'very small' part of coal seam gas extraction. He's right. Here's what he actually said: "The scientific advice I have is that fracking is at the moment a very small part of what's required as part of oil and gas operations here in Queensland." The scientific is a nice touch. Fracking does not have much to do with science; it is a mining operation. Using 'scientific' lends support, though. But the key is what Stirling has not said. It is what he left out. Fracking is a small part 'at the moment'. It's about 5% but that's for now; in the future fracking proportions will grow. The industry is being coy about it, and reading between the lines about 30% of mines will eventually be fracked. And my guess is that it will be much higher. It is early days in CSG extraction so not much fracking is required to extact the gas. A point the minister conveniently did not mention.

In praise of walking - Annie Proulx

I am reading — and very much enjoying Annie Proulx's Bird Cloud. I came across this quote this morning that resonated: "Walking induces a trancelike stat that allows the mind freedom and ease and encourages exploration of odd possibilities and improbable connections." The "odd possibilities" and the "improbable connections" in particular; that is one reason I love walking that I had yet to let surface in my mind until Annie Proulx fished it up.

The Cobberas - a wilderness area?

I am back from 4 days walking in the Cobberas, in north-east Victoria, on the other side of the Great Divide. It snowed and it was exquisitely beautiful, but I was saddened by the impact that Europeans had had on the Australian landscape. The Cobberas is designated as a Wilderness Area but driving in to the Cowombat Flat Track the presence of feral dogs was obvious as farmers had shot them and left there corpses hanging from trees. On the first night I heard the mewling of a feral cat in the dark hours of the morning. The first night on Cowombat Flat we heard the eerie and beautiful yowling of a feral dog. Everywhere was evidence of feral horses: horse shit, brumby pads, and wetlands and streams turned to quagmires. And occasionally we had a sighting of the horses themselves - beautiful. Most obviously was the damage done by the fire of 2003. Without Aboriginal mosaic burning we have intense whirlwinds of fires that leave the debris of a holocaust, and a simplified ecosystem. The Cobberas burnt in 2003. Now, since the 2009 fires, almost all of the Victorian Alps are covered by dead trees. No where can I stand on a mountain and see a sweep of green unburnt forest to the horizon. That is lost to me and to coming generations. The countryside has the look of the stubble on an unshaven face.

So what is now a wilderness area?

I took the book Bird Cloud by Annie Proulx with me and read with sadness of the same situation in North American pine forests destroyed by the "triple catastrophes of prolonged drought, warming climate and an unprecedented invasion of mountain pine beetle" She goes on to say "I am deeply sorry for all who never … looked out from a fire tower across miles of green mountain wilderness." The pleasure in that awe has been lost there, as it has been here in Australia.

the other tragedy of the commons

The law locks up both man and woman

Who steals the goose from off the common

But lets the greater felon loose

Who steals the common from the goose. (Anon).

plus for carbon offsets where the offset is located in a developing country

A more benign way of looking at carbon offsets is they give first world countries a self-interested reason to invest in the the ecology of developing countries.

offsets are indulgences

What hurts my head about offsets is not that they are a get-out-of-jail-for-free card (let's just keep on consuming but ease our conscience), but that you need to know that what you are spending your money on would not have been done otherwise - that methane would not have been used to generate electricity from that waste dump, or that tree would not have been planted, without my expenditure on the offset. That is really hard to assess. We are talking about a counterfactual future, what would have happened if hadn't contributed that money, and who can really answer that.

The carbon we release in driving to the beach is actual but the carbon we save is more notional. If you are subsidizing a company that gives out free energy efficient light globes - how much does that actually save is an actuarial exercise in estimation. One is happening now but the savings are projected to happen in the future.

But what if you are paying somebody not to do something in the future, like not cut down that tree. Now that's really notional. Farmers may be asking for credits for trees that they could have cut down but don't actually have any plans to.

To the cynical offsets could be seen to just be subsidizing normal activities that would have occurred in the normal course of events - and therefore increasing profits.

Offets are also used to excuse the unsustainable growth in industries say like travel that emit a lot of carbon.

There also the issue of discount rates for carbon savings which I'll deal with in another blog.

It is less what you buy and more how you look after it that matters

It is not so much what clothes you buy as how you wash them that makes the green difference. The biggest impact of clothing on the environment is how they are washed: cold water, biodegradable washing powder and line drying are low energy/good for the environment. Hot wash and spin drying sucks up a bucketload of energy. So says Keith Colishaw a textiles expert from RMIT, quoted by Choice.

Garnaut sheds light

The smoke around Australia's carbon tax is clearing with the release of the latest update of the Garnaut report. While we still have a Labor government this report carries weight and it is being considered at a multiparty climate policy committee meeting today. Garnaut backed Labor's carbon price which is effectively a tax and it starts next year, at a price of between $20 and $30 tonnes on Garnaut's recommendation (compare EU $20.50, NZ 19.50 and forecasted for the mighty state of California:$12.95-15.95; with the global offset price being $16.95). Then we will graduate to a emissions trading scheme with a market-set carbon price.

Professor Garnaut did not think much of Tony Abbott's "Direct Action" style of approach. Abbott's plan is to select particular emission reduction projects and pay for them out of the government's coffers. Too arbitrary to win the heart of an economist. Garnaut has built in plenty of compensation for polluting export industries like aluminium and steel. They would get 90% back initially then down to 60% later. Initially that's a quarter of the revenue raised.

More on Reflex - the "ethical" paper

The more I peel back the layers the more layers that are revealed below. The Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) is, as mentioned in an earlier post, investigating the certification of Australian Paper the makers of Reflex. Adam Trumble, FSC's Business Manager, does not want to say too much as he doesn't want to prejudice any claims for or against the cerification but to let the process take its course. I have appended below what Adam and the FSC is prepared to say.

One item that intrigued me in this discussion was that the FSC doesn't do its own certification. That's done through an associated entity Accreditation Services International (ASI), and that associated entity does not actually do the certification either but contracts that out. Byzantinely beauracratic. There's a wrinkle in this exposed layer in that the certification for Australian Paper was done by Smart Wood, which is part of the not-for-profit Rainforest Alliance, and further that the Wilderness Society is a member of the FSC, and sits on its board. It's not a simple story.

FROM FSC Australia

The following points represent FSC Australia's position.

• The Forest Stewardship Council sets standards for responsible forest management.
• Organisations may seek certification under FSC forest management standards (forest management certification) or under FSC Chain of Custody Standards (for companies operating in the wood and paper supply chain).
• FSC does not undertake certifications itself, but through an associated entity (Accreditation Services International (ASI)) authorises certification bodies to conduct assessments and audits against FSC standards.
• In July 2006, Smart Wood (an accredited certification body and a unit of the US-based Rainforest Alliance) granted a Chain of Custody certificate (SW-COC-001966) to Australian Paper for production of specified paper products.
• In 2009 FSC clarified requirements for sourcing non-FSC certified ‘controlled wood’ that can be mixed with FSC certified material in a ‘Mix’ label product (Australian Paper supplements its FSC certified wood sourced from nearby plantations with non-FSC certified ‘controlled wood’ sourced from Victorian state forests).
• FSC Australia has concerns that the Smart Wood audit of Australian Paper in 2009 did not comply with FSC controlled wood requirements.
• FSC Australia has raised these concerns with ASI in 2010, which is investigating.
• Smartwood has since conducted a further regular audit of Australian Paper.
• Pending an outcome of the Smartwood audit and ASI investigation, Australian Paper's Chain of Custody certificate remains valid.
• FSC Australia does not have the ability to directly influence audit processes and therefore awaits the outcome of both the FSC International review and the Smartwood audit.