August 31, 2020 By Kate Wheeling Hakai Magazine
In an ordinary year, Californians gather along the state’s beaches, parks, and waterways on the third Saturday of September to pick up trash before it can make its way into the Pacific. Every cigarette butt, bottle cap, and plastic bag in sight is collected and recorded, each a new point in a massive data set built over 35 years of coastal cleanups. Now, both the ecosystem and the data describing it are at risk.
July 30, 2020 By Annemarie Mannion Hakai Magazine
Sea turtles became an unexpected passion for Jones, who now often wears sea turtle T-shirts or Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle (TMNT) garb instead of his old Florida Gators shirts. (The TMNTs aren’t sea turtles, but Jones’s link to the superheroes is irresistible: the human vigilante who fought alongside them was also named Casey Jones.) He began searching for ways to help conserve the reptiles, which is how he learned about a pervasive and preventable risk to their well-being: light pollution. Artificial bright lights are a deadly hazard that can lead sea turtles astray. Jones had found his mission.
July 23, 2020 By Laura Parker National Geographic
The amount of plastic trash that flows into the oceans every year is expected to nearly triple by 2040 to 29 million metric tons. That single, incomprehensibly large statistic is at the center of a new two-year research project that both illuminates the failure of the worldwide campaign to curb plastic pollution and prescribes an ambitious plan for reducing much of that flow into the seas.
April 24, 2020 By Katherine J. Wu Smithsonian Magazine
Beaches in Florida and Thailand have tentatively reported increases in nests, due to decreased human presence. But the trend won’t necessarily persist.
March 5, 2020 By Somini Sengupta and Shola Lawal The New York Times
Shinnecock Indians are using nature-based solutions to calm the waves and restore the beaches that protect their lands.