David Doubilet on assignment. (Jennifer Hayes)

This is the sixth in a series of Q and As on Earthjustice’s oceans work, which works to prevent habitat loss and overfishing, as well as to reduce the impacts of climate change on the ocean. David Doubilet, an acclaimed underwater photographer for National Geographic, talks about his experiences as an underwater photographer and provides tips for budding underwater photographers. View a slideshow of Doubilet's underwater photographs and learn more about Earthjustice's oceans work at earthjustice.org/oceans. 

Jessica Knoblauch: In your biography, you mention that you try to redefine photographic boundaries each time you enter the water. What did you mean by that?

David Doubilet: Here's a good example of a photographic boundary. For years, as long as I worked for National Geographic, I would or somebody else would propose a story on nudibranchs. These are basically sea-going snails without a shell that develop the most incredible colors in the world as a matter of survival. They feed on very toxic things and then advertise the fact that they are toxic by incorporating this toxicity into their flesh, changing their color.
 
There are so many ways that these creatures are able to survive, but they're snails. And if you want to do a story on these things, you have to first understand what they look like and you have to have some kind of intimacy to them. In other words, you have to be eye to eye with them. Because they live on the ocean bottom, most photographers photograph them looking down on them. It's a little like taking pictures of children and photographing only the tops of their heads.

So I thought for a long while and said, "Let's build a tiny studio underwater and treat these creatures like fashion models because the colors they create are more robust and incredibly vibrant than any piece of fashion I've ever seen, and that includes Haight-Ashbury in 1968." So I built a tiny, 10-inch square studio with a curved back wall made out of Plexiglas mounted on a tri-pod. We took it underwater, we took it to the nudibranchs, and with the help of a nudibranch expert we moved the nudibranchs off the sea floor and into the studio momentarily and photographed them in a studio setting.
 
So there are a lot of stories that we always try to add one more step, one more piece of vision, one more piece of technology. Where technology meets dreams, you make photographs.

David Doubilet, on assignment. (Jennifer Hayes)

This is the fifth in a series of Q and As on Earthjustice’s oceans work, which works to prevent habitat loss and overfishing, as well as reduce the impacts of climate change on the ocean. David Doubilet, an acclaimed underwater photographer for National Geographic, has spent decades photographing underwater images and has seen firsthand how ocean stressors have negatively impacted the aquatic environment he loves. Check out earthjustice.org/oceans to learn more about our oceans work. 

Jessica Knoblauch: What made you first want to document the underwater world?
 
David Doubilet: I began to go underwater not very far away from where I live now in a small lake in the Adirondack Mountains. I was at summer camp. I was a terrible camper. I hated the horse; I hated the mountains; I didn't like to hike. And the counselor said, "Why don't you try this mask and go underwater? Put your head underwater and look under the dock." I put on a French blue rubber mask, I put my head underwater, and everything that I knew about in life completely changed. Here was an entire world completely different than the world we live in. It was mind-altering, even for an eight year old, and I knew this was the direction that I wanted to go in.
 
There's a certain amount of hypnotic quality to being underwater. You're in a world that's weightless. You're in a world of blues and greens. And what you see underwater is most of the life on the planet. You have to think of this planet as a water planet, not as a land planet. So Earthjustice may have to change its name in some ways to OceanJustice to really cover our planet as best as possible. It really is the heart and soul of what life is. In this very, very empty, very, very dark universe, here's this one tiny orb that glows blue. And the color of life as we know it is blue.

Earthjustice attorney Andrea Treece (Brian Treece)

This is the fourth in a series of Q and As on Earthjustice’s oceans work, which works to prevent habitat loss and overfishing, as well as reduce the impacts of climate change on the ocean. Earthjustice attorney Andrea Treece is part of a core oceans litigation team whose work helps protect forage fish species like herring, anchovies and sardines, which serve as the building blocks of the ocean food web.

Jessica Knoblauch: You focus specifically on west coast ocean issues at Earthjustice. Are there issues in ocean management that are unique to the Pacific?
 
Andrea Treece: The west coast faces a lot of issues that are prevalent across the nation. That actually is a great advantage because we can as an organization get a bigger picture of what’s going on in ocean resource management. We can apply the law in a way that will hopefully set a beneficial precedent for management in the rest of the nation.
 
JK: Earthjustice has litigated heavily against industrial fishing in the Alaska pollock fishery. Why?
 
AT: It’s really one of the first cases that highlighted the ecosystem effects of fishing and how important it is to consider not just how much fish we’re consuming, but whether we’re leaving enough in the ecosystem for everything else to keep on sustaining themselves, including seals and sea lions and a lot of other key predators in the ocean. So it was a great case to try and bring that issue to the forefront and change the way that major fishery was managed.
 

Roger Fleming, with Gompers and Scout, on the Maine coast. (Amy Mills)

Jessica Knoblauch: What first interested you in oceans issues?

Roger Fleming: The ocean was always something that interested me. It was mysterious. It was far away. I’m from the Midwest, so I never even saw the ocean until I was a senior in high school. But I always read about it and I always dreamed of working on ocean-related issues, so I focused on environmental law in law school and took all of the ocean-related law classes that I could. Our planet is a blue planet and yet the oceans receive relatively little attention from an environmental perspective. It’s been a lifelong interest of mine, but it’s also an area where I think there’s a significant need for attorneys to work on the issues and a significant need for conservation.
 
JK: Are there ocean-management issues unique to the east coast?
 
RF: The east coast presents some unique circumstances in that it contains our nation’s oldest fishery. The European settlers came to New England and arguably settled here because of the fisheries’ resources available around the Gulf of Maine. Given that we have had organized commercial fisheries here for literally hundreds of years it brings with it a lot of unique challenges. There’s just that history and that culture engrained in the fabric of New England. There’s even a wooden sculpture of a codfish that hangs over the statehouse in Massachusetts. But that history can make change very difficult. New England is often referred to as the poster child for bad fisheries management, and I think that in part is because the history.
 

This is the second in a series of Q and As on Earthjustice’s oceans work, which works to prevent habitat loss and overfishing as well as reduce the impacts of climate change on the ocean. In early 2000, Patti Goldman, Earthjustice’s VP of Litigation, spearheaded efforts to protect the Puget Sound’s threatened orca whale population. Learn more at earthjustice.org/oceans. 

Jessica Knoblauch: Earthjustice has been working to protect a unique population of orcas in Washington State’s Puget Sound for almost a decade. Why?
 
Patti Goldman: Well, the orca whales in this region are hugely important to the people. They are so much part of the fabric here. There are three pods and each year when they come back to the Haro Straits in July, they do a ritual where they line up by pods and welcome each other. It’s just so magical. And there are no other orcas that really concentrate here in the same way, so they are unique and really special to this region.
 
The problem is that these orcas are further south than a lot of other orcas, so they are more accessible to where people are. In the 1960s and 1970s, about a third of the population was targeted for live capture by Sea World. Live capture ended when one of our clients, former Secretary of State Ralph Munro, was out on a boat with his wife and they found themselves in the middle of a live capture operation where they could hear the babies squealing as their mothers were captured. That was a very pivotal moment because he was then a member of the state legislature and was the lead proponent of banning live capture in Washington waters.

The CIA has a secret about climate change. Photo courtesy of AJC1.

CIA shouldn’t be keeping secrets about climate change
A new report by a U.S. government agency known as the Defense Science Board says that the CIA needs to stop being so secret about its climate change research, reports the UK Guardian. Though climate denialism in government seems to be all the rage these days, the CIA has seen the invisible ink on the wall -- that climate change is happening -- and has decided to start preparing for it. Enter the CIA’s Climate Center, established in 2009 to gather intelligence on climate change and its potential national security implications. Unfortunately, in typical CIA fashion, the agency has so far refused to disclose its valuable data to the public or even other government agencies, which could go a long way in preparing the nation for the inevitable destabilization that will occur in around the world as sea levels rise and fresh water resources dry up.

Fake “farmers” abound at local farmers’ markets
The next time you visit your local farmers’ market you may want to keep an eye out for unscrupulous vendors masquerading as local farmers, reports E: The Environmental Magazine. As the popularity of farmers’ has surged, so have the number of markets, from less than 2,0000 in 1994 to more than 7,000 in 2011. Though greater access to farmers’ markets is a good thing, the increased access has also left the door wide open to non-local, corporate vendors looking to cash in on the typically higher priced goods. In response to these fakers, some markets have begun adopting strict regulations to ensure that their farmers are the real deal. Before paying $2 for a local, organic Red Delicious apple, shoppers should look into the screening practices of their own farmers’ markets to find out whether they’re getting the real deal.

Steve Roady speaks about Earthjustice's oceans litigation.

Intro: This is the first in a series of Q and As on Earthjustice’s oceans work, which works to prevent habitat loss and overfishing, as well as reduce the impacts of climate change on the ocean. Earthjustice’s Oceans Program Director Steve Roady has been litigating cases that help protect our oceans for more than a decade. Check out earthjustice.org/oceans for more information.

Jessica Knoblauch: What first drew you to oceans management work?
 
Steve Roady: I was first exposed to the oceans while growing up on Florida’s Gulf coast. I spent a lot of time on the beaches as a child and was always fascinated by the shrimpers. But I really first became aware of the key problems in the environment in middle school where we were all forced to read Rachel Carson’s classic book, Silent Spring. The idea that birds were dying because of DDT was just amazing to me and it really got me thinking about environmental issues.
 
JK: How does Earthjustice use the law to protect oceans?
 
SR: Earthjustice is one of the leading groups to begin looking at oceans’ problems through the lens of potential federal litigation. Basically, we work with three or four of your standard environmental laws. There’s the Magnuson-Stevens Act, the main federal fisheries act, which directs the federal government to prevent overfishing and to minimize bycatch, to protect habitat and to rebuild overfished fish populations. There’s also the National Environmental Policy Act, which mandates the federal government to carefully study the environmental effects of their actions before they take them. And we also invoke the Endangered Species Act to protect species like sea turtles, which are protected under the ESA but often killed as so-called bycatch in trawl fisheries around the country.
 
We invoke all of these statutes in an effort to try to curb the unrestrained fishing practices going on in federal fisheries and do our best to make sure the federal government is complying with the basic thrust of the laws that protect the ocean resource. Since we started the Ocean Law Project back in 1998, we’ve had a number of significant wins in the courts that set some significant precedents with respect to how the federal government manages ocean resources in a sustainable way. And typically we’ll have a case that we’ll bring on behalf of other groups, so if a case is won the precedent goes to everybody’s benefit.

Photo courtesy of Elvert Barnes

Energy companies dodge taxes while getting rich off subsidies 
Most people try to pay as little in taxes as possible, but energy companies like Exxon Mobil and PG&E have taken tax dodging to the extreme by actually making money off taxpayers while paying zero dollars in taxes, reports ThinkProgress. According to an analysis by the Citizens for Tax Justice and the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, 32 companies in the fossil-fuel industry “transformed a tax responsibility of $17.3 billion…into tax benefits of $6.5 billion” between 2008 and 2010 through such financial wizardry as tax breaks, government-funded subsidies and “questionable tax dodging.” ' As the report’s authors note, “It seems rather odd, not to mention highly wasteful, that the industries with the largest subsidies (driven in part by their large share of total profits) are ones that would seem to need them least.” It’s rather odd, indeed, especially when average Americans are paying record prices at the gas pump.   

Coca-Cola drinks to successfully blocking Grand Canyon bottle ban
The nation’s top parks official recently blocked a plastic water bottle ban in the Grand Canyon after meeting with Coca-Cola, a major park foundation donor, reports the New York Times. Plastic bottles make up approximately one-third of the park’s total waste stream and are reportedly the “single biggest source of trash” found in the Grand Canyon. The plastic water bottle ban was scheduled to go into effect in 2012, but was shelved after Coca-Cola officials met with members of the National Park Foundation and expressed their “concerns” about the ban, such as the issue of limiting “personal choice.” Of course, both parties deny that Coca-Cola’s million dollar donations have anything to do with the park’s about-face on the issue. But even though the park won’t be going through with the ban, park officials have already installed about $300,000 worth of water filling stations so hikers and wildlife watchers can still make it their personal choice to not trash the canyon by bringing their own reusable bottles.
 

The Occupy protests center around issues of corporate greed and government ineptitude.

It’s not every day that you see a “stop police brutality” sign coupled with signs about protecting the environment, but that was the scene I came upon last week while attending an Occupy Oakland.

If you’ve been paying any attention to the Occupy Wall Street movement that now spans100 U.S. cities, you know that many Americans are tired of corporate greed and government ineptitude. Though there’s no central voice for this people-powered movement, one recurring theme is the backlash against unregulated big businesses. Wall Street bankers are obvious targets, but the public’s aggravation extends further to corporate entities that put profit above people and the environment.

Photo courtesy of quinn.anya

Republican dust up over phantom environmental regulation
Conservative Republicans are so intent on eliminating “unnecessary” environmental regulations that they recently set their sights on eliminating a rule that doesn’t even exist, reports the Washington Post. The so-called “dust rule” regulates farm dust, which is mixed with things like dirt and dried cornstalk bits and is technically considered pollution by the U.S. EPA. The agency does limit how much of this particle pollution can be in the air, but just two states—Arizona and California—require farmers to take some dust control measures. Though EPA administrator Lisa Jackson has said that she’s unlikely bring on stricter dust rules, regulation-wary Republicans aren’t taking any chances and have already proposed three new bills to prevent a rule that does not (and probably will never) exist. Unfortunately, the zealousness with which Republicans have attacked this rule is just the latest in a spate of attempts to cut the EPA off at its knees for trying to regulate environmental health hazards like coal ash, power plant pollution, and mountaintop removal mining.
 
Exxon punts financial responsibility on Valdez spill
While the oil continues to linger on the shore of Alaska’s Prince William Sound—twenty some years since the Exxon Valdez oil spill—the company who caused this mess is quietly trying to get out of paying to clean it up, reports Mother Jones. To date, Exxon has paid about $900 million over 10 years for cleanup costs, but when the government asked for an additional $92 million in 2006 to address existing problems, Exxon said no way, arguing that it is only responsible for “restoration projects” and not costs associated with cleanup. Of course, none of this matters to the people affected by the spill, who are too busy trying to move on with their lives to argue over semantics.