Rights and Environment

On Human Rights Day 2012, we explore the idea of environmental rights and environmental justice. Human Rights Watch Executive Director Ken Roth explains how environmental abuse has led to human rights violations in Darfur, Nigeria, Indonesia and Angola in the Joan B. Kroc Institute for Peace & Justice Distinguished Lecture Series at the University of San Diego. The talk explores whether or not we have a right to a clean environment and a right to environmental protection.

“The human rights movement and the environmental movement are and should be political allies.
They are conceptual allies, they are political allies,
and they need each other.”
– Kenneth Roth

For a more general video about the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, first adopted by the United Nations General Assembly in 1948, see below:

Management

Coral Reefs in Gulf of Carpentaria

Submerged coral reefs were mapped in the Gulf of Carpentaria by Geoscience Australia using a multibeam sonar seabed mapping system and underwater video.

Science

Bioluminescence

Walking along the beach at night or sailing on a darkened sea, you will often see sparkling lights in the water. This is bioluminescence—the emission of visible light by an organism as a result of a natural chemical reaction. A remarkable diversity of marine animals and microbes are able to produce their own light, and in most of the volume of the ocean, bioluminescence is the primary source of light. Luminescence is nearly absent in freshwater, with the exception of some insect larvae, a freshwater limpet, and unsubstantiated reports from deep in Lake Baikal. On land, fireflies are the most conspicuous examples, but other luminous taxa include other beetles, insects like flies and springtails, fungi, centipedes and millipedes, a snail, and earthworms. This discrepancy between marine and terrestrial luminescence is not fully understood, but several properties of the ocean are especially favorable for the evolution of luminescence: (a) comparatively stable environmental conditions prevail, with a long uninterrupted evolutionary history; (b) the ocean is optically clear in comparison with rivers and lakes; (c) large portions of the habitat receive no more than dim light, or exist in continuous darkness; and (d) interactions occur between a huge diversity of taxa, including predator, parasite, and prey.

via Haddock, Moline and Case (2010), Bioluminescence in the Sea – Annual Review of Marine Science, 2(1):443.

References and Further Information

Haddock S.H.D., Moline M.A., and Case J.F (2010) Bioluminescence in the Sea, Annual Review of Marine Science, 2(1):443
The Bioluminescence Web Page
The Nature of Animal Light by E. Newton Harvey (available for download at Project Gutenberg).

Management

Mapping the deep project

This short video explains the Mapping the Deep project at Plymouth University. Mapping the Deep is also part of the UK’s Marine Environmental Mapping Programme (MAREMAP), which aims to achieve common, national objectives in seafloor and shallow geological mapping addressing themes such as habitat mapping, Quaternary science, coastal and shelf sediment dynamics and the assessment of human impacts and geohazards in the marine environment.

Science

Interview with British Researcher Chris Yesson

The second in our series of interviews, Dr. Chris Yesson, Institute of Zoology, Zoological Society of London speaks about habitat suitability modelling of cold water corals and his team’s work as part of the CoralFISH FP7 project. He discusses his work the to identify suitable habitats for octocorals and stony corals from the North Atlantic and globally. Interview carried out at the Zoology and Marine Biology Museum, National University of Ireland, Galway. For more information please see the Institute of Zoology, Zoological Society of London website.

Acknowledgements

Special thanks go to Dr. Chris Yesson for permission for inclusion of this interview in this blog.

Science

Interview with Icelandic Ecologist Julian Burgos

Benthic ecologist Julian Burgos, Marine Research Institute, Iceland, gives us a rare perspective about cold water corals living in Icelandic deep waters and his team’s work as part of the CoralFISH FP7 project. CoralFISH is assessing the interaction between cold water corals, fish and fisheries, in order to develop monitoring and predictive modelling tools for ecosystem based management in the deep waters of Europe and beyond. More information about the findings of the study can be found on the CoralFISH website.