News From The Frontier

If you thought we'd be celebrating Independence from Oil this 4th of July you must be huffing hydrogen. Instead responding to public anxiety over high gas prices and political opportunity seen in new polling figures Republican Presidential Candidate John McCain (followed shortly by our lame duck president) has come out in favor of offshore oil leasing and getting rid of a congressional ban on drilling off the continental U.S. that's been in effect for a generation.

The Blue Frontier Campaign is a Five-Year Old organization committed to building unity, providing tools and increasing awareness of the solution-oriented ocean and coastal protection movement. To this end we have organized national and regional conferences, produced books and brochures, sponsored "celebrations of the sea" and a trans-pacific rower, produce an online ocean-policy newsletter, do media and public speaking, outreach work and maintain a national online directory of "seaweed" (marine grassroots) groups and agencies on this website.

Blue Frontier Campaign is looking for a DC based Campaign Director. This should be someone with at least 4-5 years experience in non-profit fundraising, grassroots organizing and administration, with good writing and computer skills, someone who can work on their own but also inspire others and are themselves inspired by the sea. Please familiarize yourself with BFC if you are not already and then send a letter of interest, references and a resume to Helvarg@bluefront.org with your contact info.

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Oil-covered birds look even worse in real life than they do on TV. Not the dead ones so much, except when a gull has ripped open a floating grebe and is pulling at its toxic guts.

LEON E. PANETTA and retired Adm. James D. Watkins were on Capitol Hill last week lobbying for a treaty that, depending on how you look at it, is three to 25 years overdue for a Senate vote. As co-chairmen of the Joint Ocean Commission Initiative and former heads of two major blue-ribbon panels on the state of our seas, they recently gave the government a C-minus in ocean policy. One of the categories that helped drag that grade down was international leadership — in which the U.S. was given a D-minus because of its ongoing failure to ratify the U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea.

"I commend the Blue Frontier Campaign and its continuous efforts to strengthen ocean and coastal conservation. The Campaign's commitment to providing resources to grassroots organizations working to protect and restore our seas, and raising public awareness of the challenges facing these groups is greatly appreciated."

- Representative Nancy Pelosi

"Aw Shucks," - Blue Frontier Campaign

When it comes to the global ocean the best available science is projecting the worst imaginable scenarios. In 2003 Fisheries Scientists Ran Meyers and Boris Worm reported that 90 percent of the large predator fish like sharks and grouper had disappeared from the world's oceans since 1950. Actually they didn't disappear. We know where they went. Onto our dinner plates as a result of industrial overfishing. Now a new study with Boris Worm as lead author has appeared in the journal Science. This one, as widely reported, projects that after millennia of human dependence on wild fish as a source of protein and livelihood, commercial species of saltwater fish and shellfish could be wiped out on a global scale by 2048.