| Dear
EarthTalk: How can I find out which seafood
to avoid if I am concerned about lessening my impact on
the environment and avoiding consuming unhealthy pollutants?
-- Pat Kelly, Seattle, WA
| |
The
commercial fishing industry has essentially stripped
the ocean of its once teeming fish populations. Pollution
from industrial, agricultural and other everyday activities
has also taken a serious toll on the health of the
fish that remain.
© Getty Images |
Several
decades ago a fish-centric diet was considered to be not
only healthy but also environmentally friendly. But today
those of us who eat a lot of fish may not be doing ourselves
or the environment any favor. The two major concerns are
overfishing and pollution.
Demand for low-calorie, protein-rich fish has grown tremendously
alongside increases in world population. At the same time,
the technologies employed for catching seafood have improved
to the point that the commercial fishing industry has essentially
stripped the ocean of its once teeming fish populations.
One recent analysis concluded that only 10 percent of the
large predatory fish that once roamed the world’s
oceans are left, due to overzealous sport and commercial
fishing. Another study concluded that three-quarters of
the world’s fisheries are either fully fished or overfished.
Pollution from industrial, agricultural and other everyday
activities like electricity generation and automobile driving
has also taken a serious toll on the health of the remaining
fish species. Scientists routinely find unsafe levels of
mercury, PCBs, dioxins, pesticides and other harsh toxins
in the fat, internal organs and even muscle tissue of many
different kinds of fish. These contaminants are then passed
on up the food chain to our dinner plates.
According
to Seafood Watch, a project of the Monterey Bay Aquarium
that works to educate the public about the seafood crisis,
consumers can make a difference by getting educated so as
to make smart choices about what seafood to avoid. Consumers
can download and print out free Seafood Watch pocket guides
to the “best choices” across six different regions
of the U.S.—after all, what’s abundant and sustainably
harvested in your area may not be the same for someone across
the country.
Another
convenient way to get the low-down on the fish you may be
contemplating buying at the grocer or a restaurant is to
text “30644” with the message “FISH,”
followed by the name of the specific fish in question. In
a few seconds, an automated response will come back from
the non-profit Blue Ocean Network’s FishPhone service
with information on the status of the fish in question—and
alternatives, should Blue Ocean consider the fish an undesirable
choice.
The
basic skinny on fish consumption is that if you like it,
you should eat it, but responsibly—that means in moderation
and armed with the proper knowledge of which types of fish
to buy and which to avoid.
For
those looking to cut down on or eliminate seafood from their
diets but still gain the health benefits of eating fish,
plenty of alternatives exist. As most vegetarians know,
beans, tofu and many nuts can be significant alternative
sources of protein. And walnuts, flaxseed and hemp oil/seeds
are all rich in the Omega-3 fatty acids common in many fish
and thought to help ward off heart disease, cancer, macular
degeneration (age-related blindness), arthritis and inflammatory
disorders.
CONTACTS:
Seafood
Watch; FishPhone
Dear
EarthTalk: What makes those so-called “new
urbanism” housing developments popping up around the
U.S. more environmentally friendly than regular old suburban
neighborhoods?
-- Rusty Spinoza, Galveston, TX
| |
Front
porches, especially those located close to the street,
are an essential ingredient in new urbanism communities
because they promote neighborhood interaction and
enable porch sitters and passersby to communicate
without raising their voices.
© amandab3, Flkr |
The husband-and-wife
team of town planners Andrés Duany and Elizabeth
Plater-Zyberk are typically credited as the founders of
new urbanism, a style of community design that embraces
mixed use (commercial and residential) development in pedestrian-friendly
and green space-rich neighborhoods—much like the old
neighborhoods many baby-boomers remember before suburban
sprawl made us all slaves to our cars.
Duany and Plater-Zyberk
formulated their new urbanism principles while living in
one of the Victorian neighborhoods of New Haven, Connecticut
while they attended graduate school in architecture at Yale.
Their neighborhood included corner shops, front porches
and a variety of attractive and well-designed housing and
commercial structures—planting the seed of an idea
that has now swept the U.S. and beyond.
The prototypical
new urbanist community is Florida’s Seaside, which
Duany and Plater-Zyberk began designing in 1979 for the
80-acre coastal parcel’s developer, Robert S. Davis.
Their plan took the best elements of a handful of graceful
southern cities like Key West, Charleston and Savannah to
create a community based on the tried-and-true concept of
walkable, self-contained neighborhoods. Besides 300 homes,
Seaside contains a school, a town hall, an open-air market,
a tennis club, a tented amphitheater and a post office—everything
anyone could ever need in a town, and all within a five
minute walk.
According to
the non-profit Smart Communities Network, Seaside works
as a community because of its design: “Mandatory porches
are set close enough to walkways to enable porch sitters
and passersby to communicate without raising their voices….
The streets are all interconnected; creating a network that
eliminates ‘collector’ routes and reduces congestion.
Walkways crisscross the development to encourage walking
and biking, while narrow streets serve to reduce traffic
speed.” Building fronts are a uniform distance from
the curb and all streets are tree-lined to further the community’s
“sense of place.”
Other examples
of new urbanist communities include: Stapleton on the outskirts
of Denver, Colorado; Seabrook on the southern coast of Washington
State; Melrose Arch in Johannesburg, South Africa; Alta
de Lisboa near Lisbon, Portugal; and Jakriborg in southern
Sweden. Meanwhile, the idea has caught on in New Orleans,
where developers are styling new communities in the wake
of Hurricane Katrina based in part on the principles of
new urbanism.
According to
the website NewUrbanism.org, being green is central to the
concept of new urbanism, where houses tend to be compact
and on small lots. And many developers are incorporating
green building design and alternative energy generation
into their plans for these communities. Furthermore, proponents
say that building densely settled, walkable communities
instead of road-intensive suburban developments cuts down
on the need to drive, thus further reducing the carbon footprint.
CONTACTS:
Seaside;
Smart
Communities Network; NewUrbanism.org
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