New Mexico's dairy farms must clean up their act. (USDA)

New Mexico dairies forced to clean up their cow pies
New Mexico recently passed some of the most progressive water regulations for dairy farm operations in the West, reports High Country News. Large dairy operations create huge waste problems—each cow produces about 145 pounds of solid and liquid waste per day—so when Texas transplant Jerry Nivens found out in 2007 that a large dairy was planning to set up shop near his town, he and a band of allies teamed up against the powerful dairy lobby, and won. Four years later, after countless hours of grassroots organizing, New Mexico citizens have done what others in Idaho, Washington and California—all big dairy states—haven’t yet been able to: stop dairy farms from polluting their groundwater with nitrates, antibiotics and deadly bacteria like E.coli and salmonella. The new rules may inspire citizens in other states to follow suit by taking matters into their own hands when Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations of any kind—whether they house chickens, cows or pigs—poison their community.

Oceans get fleeced by clothes with microplastic
Polyester yoga pants may seem harmless with all of their comfy-ness and warmth, but every time you wash them you may be polluting the ocean, reports Grist. According to a new study by Environmental Science and Technology, approximately 2,000 polyester fibers are released for each piece of polyester clothing thrown the wash. And since the home appliance industry doesn’t filter out these tiny fibers, they end up in the world’s oceans where they can potentially harm marine life. Though most of the attention to date has been on plastic giants like the garbage patches found in the Atlantic, Pacific and elsewhere, these tiny microplastics worry scientists because they can be eaten by bottom feeders like clams and mussels, eventually making their way up the food chain, to us.

Sea turtles like Karsten often mistakenly swallow fishhooks, which can result in entanglement, choking and even death. (Jessica Knoblauch)

It’s not every day that a wild animal gets a lucky break, but a few months back that’s exactly what happened to Karsten, a peaceful loggerhead sea turtle that was released off of Sombrero Beach in the Florida Keys after months of rehabilitation.

Karsten was found back in May with a fishhook in his jaw and another in his esophagus. His painful plight is unfortunately all too common for countless numbers of sea turtles who mistake baited fishhooks for harmless food and then drown because they are unable to surface for air. Though turtles have charted the seven seas for more than 100 million years, over the past few decades these ancient and resilient creatures have seen their numbers plunge due to destructive human activities. Florida, for example, has seen its nesting loggerhead population plummet by more than 40 percent in the last decade, in part because of longline fishing.

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.

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.