Bowermaster’s Adventures — Crossing the Atlantic with “Atlantic”

by Jon Bowermaster on

The Atlantic Ocean, 480 miles southwest of Lisbon – The seas have laid down to a meter in the past 24 hours and (for the moment) the sun is filtering through a gathering cloud layer. We have just sailed south of the Madeira Islands, destination (slowly) Puerto Rico. It should take another ten days or so.

Of all the places I’ve traveled this is my favorite place to be: In the blue heart of an ocean, surrounded by nothing but sea and horizon, eyes locked on that place where blue meets blue. It could be the center of the Pacific or Indian, the Arctic or Southern, any ocean will do. Today, it’s the Atlantic.

Thinking on my feet as I ran through the airport I grabbed a copy of Simon Winchester’s new book called simply … “Atlantic.” (Its subtitle elaborates: “Great Sea Battles, Heroic Discoveries, Titanic Storms and a Vast Ocean of a Million Stories.”)

When I first heard of the project – the biography of an ocean? – it sounded quixotic. Now that I’ve paged through it, surrounded on all sides by the very same ocean Winchester describes, I’d use the word “unique.”

It’s a challenging task to try and wrestle such a vast, constantly changing place into even 500 pages. There’s geography to consider, all that human exploration and exploitation, the development of trade and slave routes, dozens of wars and the commerce that inevitably followed, by sea and air. Thankfully towards the end of the book Winchester manages to devote about a tenth of his research to man’s impact on the Atlantic, starting with the raping of the cod fisheries off New Zealand right up to the way ocean acidification is today altering its equatorial reefs.”The oceans are under inadvertent attack, and as never before,” he writes. “Insofar as the Atlantic Ocean is the most used, traversed and plundered of all oceans, so it is the body of water that is currently most threatened.”

He admits the Pacific has been heavily hit by similar abuses, but is convinced the Atlantic is in “greater trouble,” in part because it is so much smaller than the Pacific, was the first to be explored, crossed by man and is by far the busiest. “It has become evidently the least pristine and most begrimed,” he concludes.

Winchester puts big responsibility for much of that grime on the trailings of jet planes and smokestacks of ships. One hundred million air passenger crisscross the Atlantic each year leaving behind jet trails of kerosene, a heavy contributor to the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. One stat is most telling: A fully loaded, 300 passenger Boeing 777 flying from London to New York spews 70 tons of carbon dioxide into the sky or about 2,000 pounds per person.

Ships leave behind a similar trail. Winchester quotes a 2007 report by BP and a German physics institute which says that the funnels of the world’s entire fleet of 70,000 fuel-burning cargo and passenger ships pour more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere than is currently produced by all of the nations of Africa combined. Half of that commerce takes place along the coastlines of the Atlantic.

One downside to the carbon dioxide created by ships –sulfur-laden soot and other particles created by the fossil-fuel burning exhaust — is that it creates its own low-level clouds that linger in the atmosphere for weeks and months. They are so dense they can be seen from space, from which they are called simply “ship tracks.”

(The biggest container ship afloat? The Danish Emma Maersk, which weighs 170,000 tons and carries 15,000 containers.)

Cleaner fuels will help slow the pollution, as might giant sails (computer-controlled, already in the experimental stages). Yet for now, Winchester concludes, “the degradation of the air above our ocean … is just one more of the egregious examples of modern man’s weary disregard for a sea he once revered.”

I put the book down on that note, agreeing with most of his conclusions, actually wishing there’d been more specifics about future options for transport of both cargo and man across the seas. But it is a heavy task to biography an ocean; not everything can be included.

Standing on the rail of my ship, ignoring for the moment the contribution it too is making to the ship tracks, looking out at the horizon line – where from this vantage, everything still looks quite pristine — I wonder to myself even as we gain more and more knowledge about the ways man impacts the ocean, do we really think there will come a day when we stop taking it for granted.

Flickr image via Patrick McConahay

Consumers spending again, travel included … but what’s next?

by Tom Johansmeyer on

We know that people around the world are traveling again. U.S. travel exports are up, and the airlines are having a solid year (relative to 2009, at least). Meanwhile, two years after the financial crisis erupted only a few miles from where I sit now, people are spending money again. Consumer credit is once again the culprit, as Black Friday deals touted financing with long periods of interest-free money use.

Favorable deals are enticing consumers who don’t really have the money to spend, but they’re lured in by offers that are “too good to be true.” As Newsweek reports, “Old habits die hard.”

Consumer debt by household is down, and savings habits are on the rise, but the increase in spending from a consumer base so recently battered does make me wonder what comes next. Is borrowed money going to fuel growth in retail, consumer product and travel sectors, as it did through 2007? Is this a house of cards that’s waiting to collapse (yet again) when easy money dries up and the consumers find themselves as squeezed as they did in 2009?

Leave a comment below to let us know your thoughts!

[Thanks, @jasoncoletta, photo by TheTruthAbout via Flickr]

Bowermaster’s Adventures: Five reasons we should not believe the BP mess is “cleaned up”

by Jon Bowermaster on

Three months ago, on August 2, the White House – citing an in-house National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration study – announced that 74 percent of the oil released into the Gulf of Mexico by the BP mess was gone, had either been cleaned up or simply disappeared.

Few seriously believed the report at the time, including many NOAA scientists; even fewer think it’s true today.

It was six months ago that the Deepwater Horizon sank below the surface and impacts of the disaster are still being felt daily along the Gulf Coast and across the U.S.

While 90 percent of the federal fisheries are open, processors are finding little demand for what much of the nation’s populace still believes are damaged goods. While much of the oil appears to be gone from the surface, there is more and more evidence that there is a significant amount on or near the ocean floor. Oil remains buried on sand beaches and marshes and bays are receiving new oil daily, still impacting migratory birds and marine life. That $20 billion compensation fund BP set up has so far only doled out $1.5 billion; many are still awaiting a first check, many more still struggling with an unknown future. The moratorium against deepwater drilling has been lifted, with some new rules and guidelines in place, but there are no guarantees against a repeat performance by one of the 4,000 wells still drilling in the Gulf.

Five reasons we should not believe the BP mess is “cleaned up”:

1. Photos taken this month in Barataria Bay, 40 miles south of New Orleans, which is fed directly from Gulf waters, show the edges of the marshes are as heavily soaked with oil today as they were mid-July. According to Plaquemine Parish coastal restoration manager P.J. Hahn, “we are averaging about 30,000 gallons of recovered oil a week from the marsh, mainly around Bay Jimmy. We’re also picking up about 8,700 bags of tar balls a week along the beaches, mainly in Pass Chaland and barrier islands. It is definitely not over!!”

%Gallery-107702%2. In Pensacola, environmentalist Gregg Hall has been collecting video of the impacts of the BP mess on the white sand beaches of Florida since the first week of June. With 600 hours of video and photo documentation, he asserts that BP … and the government … are not allowing a true clean-up of the beaches there, by not allowing its clean-up workers to dig more than six inches into the sand “or they will be fired, and now they’ve taken their shovels away as well.” By not putting their heads – or their hands — in the sand, by allowing the oil that has washed ashore to stay buried, at least until the next storm uncovers it, the clean-up of Florida’s beaches is something of a mirage. A collection of Hall’s videos can be seen on YouTube.

3. Similar concerns are being raised in Louisiana, where Governor Bobby Jindal initiated late-in-the-game rebuilding of offshore berms – at the cost of nearly $400 million – ostensibly to help keep the oil from reaching shore. The construction didn’t work – too little, way too late – but still continues even though, as the Times reports today, many in government and scientists contend it is “pointless.” Blocking the oil that remains is with dirt and san berms is futile … unless you happen to be one of the contractors hired to do the digging and building, many of who turn out to be big campaign supporters of Jindal. Opponents say the digging and building is actually harming wildlife and squandering money that should be used for real and necessary coastal restoration. My friend Ivor van Heerden has been scouring the coast since the spill began and tells me, “They’ve now buried oil by as much as seven feet and will not allow us to clean it up. With this winter’s erosion this buried oil will be released” and ultimately wash onto shore.

4. There is ongoing concern about what happened to all that oily waste collected along the beaches. BP contracted with Waste Management to properly dispose of the thousands of tons of plastic bags filled with oil-soaked sponges, etc, which were supposed to be treated as hazardous waste and put only in landfills prepared to receive such. Mike Stiers writes to suggest that the waste has continually been dumped in non-hazardous waste landfills and questions whether the company that is supposed to authorize the disposal – TestAmerica – is the best outfit to be overseeing that side of the clean-up since it is a BP partner.

5. If you’d like to hear what it’s like living on the Gulf these days from those who actually live there, the Natural Resources Defense Council has hooked up with StoryCorps to “record, share and preserve the stories and experiences of those living through the BP oil disaster.” Listening to these very recent stories from fishermen, tourist guides, filmmakers and average folks on what it is like today to be living tomorrow’s headlines is the most eye-opening reporting of all.

Kimpton hotels rank top among gay, lesbian community

by Melanie Nayer on

The LGBT community has honored Kimpton hotels as the most friendly hotel, according to a new survey. Of the more than 4,700 people surveyed by Community Marketing, 13% chose Kimpton as the hotel that does the best job of promoting itself to the gay and lesbian travel market. Starwood’s W chain came in second with 11%, trailed by Hilton, Hyatt and Marriott, according to USA Today. Kimpton and Starwood tied in 2009. In 2008, Starwood took top honors.

“Of all the hotel brands, (Kimpton is ) the most active in LGBT community,” Paisley told USA Today. “They have a website, they sponsor tons of events and they advertise in gay and lesbian media. W is very active and well respected, but they did fall behind.”

Headquartered in San Francisco, Kimpton has consistently been involved in fundraising and community awareness events for the gay and lesbian community. The hotel group also co-sponsors an event at one their hotels during San Francisco Pride, and spends quality advertising dollars in LGBT publications.

[via LezGetReal]