Name: Davison, aka "Ben Davison"
Web Site: http://www.undercurrent.org
Bio: Ben Davison founded Undercurrent in 1975 as a labor of love. He supported himself with his consulting and management company, which served clients ranging from the Cousteau Society and Greenpeace to the Sierra Club and Defemders of Wildlife. He holds a doctorate in public management from the University of Southern California.
Posts by Ben Davison
Greetings from Copenhagen
December 13th, 2009
Greetings from Copenhagen, December 11
We traveling divers love the island nations - Fiji, Papua New Guinea, Indonesia, the Solomons, the Maldives, and those in the Caribbean - and the island nations are speaking in a very loud voice in Copenhagen. Their argument, as I heard the ambassador from the Cape Verde Islands say today: “It was not us who put our waste in the atmosphere, but we are the ones who will suffer the most.”
Reef destruction may be upon us, with increased ocean acidification. As the sea gets warmer, more coral dies, taking the fishing industry with it. The warming atmosphere and the seas produce more severe hurricanes and cyclones, floods, mud slides . . . and of the course the biggest threat, an increasing sea level that already has people living in nations like Tuvalu moving their homes inland or migrating elsewhere.
As I listened to the island-nation advocates, I could hear their fear and anger. Those of us who live on beach fronts in America may experience some direct effect, and all of us can expect increased storms, but over then next decade or two the temperature increase for most of us may only mean a longer growing season for our roses and lower heating bills. But the poor nations are on the battle lines. And they haven’t got the money to fight the war. So they are doing everything they can in this enormous gathering to make sure everyone knows it.
In my dive travels to island nations, I see bleached coral but I’ve never thought much about the effect of global warming on the people I meet. I doubt that many divers do. We tend to get off a plane, go directly to the resort and liveaboard, maybe mingle with the staff, get in as many dives as we can then go home. But, unless we seriously curtail the amount of CO2 we - the US, the UK, and the rapidly industrializing world - spew into the air, in a generation or so these nations, the people and the reefs will be a shadow of what they are today. We might as well stay home and dive the local quarry.
I’m impressed with energy I see in the enormous Copenhagen Bella Center, where 20,000 attendees are acutely aware of the problem and see the solutions. Nonetheless there are plenty of reluctant governments. In the history of humanity, there has never been such an all-encompassing issue. At stake is whether mother earth will remain what we know, or whether our actions will change it irreversibly and disastrously. My guess is that if the US and the other industrial nations don’t act forcefully this time around, what we divers love about the island nations will disappear before our very eyes.
Ben Davison
Publisher, Undercurrent
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Copenhagen, COP 15 UN Climate Conference December 8
December 9th, 2009
I arrived in Copenhagen Tuesday afternoon, excited about engaging in the historic UN Climate Conference. While you know me as the editor of Undercurrent, I’m here in my new capacity to organize the International Court for the Environment Coalition in the U.S. Quite simply, a movement is underway to create such a court to hold nations and multinational coporations to account for environmental disasters. As it is, there is no accountability and no sanctions. The movement is modeled on the effort that created the International Criminal Court in the 90s.
A few steps after I emerged from my flight at 4 pm in the Copenhagen airport, I was greeted with a large sign stating:
Price of a dive vacation in 2050. 350ppm in CO2. Protect our oceans from acidification, which threatens corals reefs as well as fish and shellfish stock. Find out how you can make a difference www.oceana.org
I was amazed and delighted. How better to bring the message on reef destruction to divers than tying it directly to the target atmospheric target load of 350 ppm. If you want to know what global warming means to the reefs, acidification is one of many destructive causes.
That evening, I joined a gathering of the Danish United Nations Society. One of the staff members handed me a delicious Danish pastry and as she turned away her shoulder bumped my arm and I splashed drops of red wine on her yellow sweater. “Shit happens,” she said with a smile. A past president of the society told me “We’re all happy Obama is coming. We’re counting on him. We Europeans understand what’s happening to or planet, we live with it every day. But not enough Americans do. Are they listening yet?” he asked.
“Some,” I said, ‘but not many. We have a long ways to go.”
“But not much time,” he added. Americans don’t seem to understand that. They haven’t got enough of a history. They think one generation at a time. They must think about the future, not just about themselves and the present. We Europeans are counting on Obama to change that.”
Ben Davison
December 9, 2009
Fresh Fish? Think Twice Before Ordering
August 4th, 2009
Your responsibility to the marine life you love diving with
People are now eating manta rays. That right, those lovely creatures you spend thousands of dollars to dive with in the Revillagigedos Islands, Yap and the Maldives.
It’s all because shark populations are crashing. While the market for sharkfin soup continues to grow - - hell, you can buy it at Chinese restaurants in any city in America - - the shark fin population is crashing. So Asian chefs are looking for a substitute and the manta is it.
If you’ve ever seen a manta underwater, you know it’s an easy target to spear or snag with a hook attached to buoyant oil drums, against which the manta struggles until it wears itself out. Traditionally, they’ve been caught by subsistence fishermen throughout Asia, but now there is money in that meat. Frank Pope of the London Times reports that in the eastern Indonesian port of Lamakera, catches of manta have rocketed from a few hundred to about 1,500 a year.
Tim Clark, a marine biologist at the University of Hawaii, says manta rays are being used as shark fin soup filler, with the cartilage being mixed with low-grade shark fins in cheap versions of the soup. While the rays, distantly related to sharks, are ending up in Hong Kong’s restaurants, their gills are also being used in traditional Chinese medicines. “The big market is for the gill elements,” says Clark. “They are dried, ground to a powder and used in traditional Asian medicines.”
The manta’s branchial gill plates, which filter plankton from seawater, can fetch up to $325 on the street in China, because practitioners of traditional Chinese medicine claim they reduce toxins in the body by purifying the blood, Pope says.
Of course, news like this drives us divers crazy. It’s the equivalent of roasting panda bears. Yet this is just one marker in the horrible tale of the destruction of the seas, which many of us unwittingly play in to. If divers had never descended on Cayman or Bonaire or Cozumel in the Caribbean or similar islands in other parts of the world, development would be far less, populations would be smaller and the reefs populated.
But today, it’s a different picture. As we watch the sunset at the end of a day’s diving, how many of us delight in ordering the fresh local grouper? Or snapper? Or lobster? And then decry the declining population of critters on the reef before we’ve even digested our meal. Why do we fail to make the connection to our culinary habits? Sylvia Earle understands it. The renowned marine biologist doesn’t eat fish and implores others not to. She has solid reasons. Here’s what she told the graduating class of American University last year.
“When our numbers were small and the world was largely wilderness, we could sustain ourselves on the interest generated by a richly endowed planet. Hunting and gathering enabled a few million people to live more or less sustainably. [However], as biologist Ed Wilson has noted, humankind has had a way of eliminating the large, the slow and the tasty over the ages. On the way to developing effective agriculture, we managed to do in much of the wildlife that shared the planet with us. And although we should know better by now, we’re doing the same thing to the ocean. Not over thousands of years, but in decades. In the sea, we savagely reduced the large - - that is the whales, the dolphins, the seals, the manatees, the turtles. And with wondrous new technologies in just a few decades, we have managed to eliminate 90 percent of the sharks, the cod, the grouper, the halibut and other tasty creatures including the fast—the tunas, the swordfish, the marlin—and the small: the anchovies, the herring, the capelin, the menhaden. And more recently the slow-growing deep water species - - monkfish, Chilean sea bass, arctic cod, orange roughy.
That orange roughy swimming on your plate with lemon slices and butter may have been swimming two thousand feet deep in the ocean for more than a century . . . .Some of the deep, slow-growing coral destroyed in order to catch the orange roughy began life when the pyramids were being built in Egypt. Wild-caught fish are not exactly like corn or rice or cows and chickens. They are basically bush meat, wildlife, part of what makes our life possible by making our life-support system function.
We have entered [an era] where one species has so altered the nature of the planet, the fundamental systems that make the planet function are at risk. What can you do? Be mindful of where in the universe you are. On a little, mostly blue planet that is wonderfully resilient, but not infinitely so. Remember that half of the coral reefs have either been destroyed or are in a serious state of decline. But half are still in pretty good shape. In half a century, while we have consumed 90 percent of many
of the ocean’s big fish, they’re not all gone - - yet. There is still
a chance that they might recover if we give them a break. They
might not, if we don’t. . . .”
I think Dr. Earle’s graduation speech was more optimistic than she is privately. For every dollop of good news that trickles out, bad news overwhelms. As divers, we worry about inadvertently kicking a coral branch, about dive operators that feed fish Cheese Whiz, or about people tucking “dead shells” into their BC pockets. But it’s not enough. We must consider the impact of that tasty grouper dinner, knowing it may have come from the nearby marine park where subsistence fisherman are still allowed. We must think about the carbon spewed by dive boats carrying us to the reefs, and the airplanes to get us there in the first place. And we must think about how our high standard of living is forever altering our world. Maybe giving up a fresh fish dinner is something you’re not prepared to do. But you must do something, I must do something, we all must.
- - Ben Davison
PS: To get a list of what seafood may be sustainable, as well as what species are crashing and should be avoided, go to www.montereybayaquarium.org and click on “Seafood Watch.”
Insuring Against Swine Flu
May 17th, 2009
Dear Fellow Divers,
This is the first of our blogs and every few days or so, a number of diving writers with important opinions will have something to say: John Bantin, who spends a dozen or more weeks a year testing equipment for DIVER magazine; Bob Halstead, the retired owner of the Telita in PNG, who is never at a loss for words; Burt Jones and Maurine Shimlock, leading photographers and writers putting together a guide on Raja Ampat, Indonesia; Bret Gilliam, who has more insider knowledge about the industry than any combination of a dozen others; Doc Vikingo, who addresses an endless number of health and safety issues in Undercurrent, other magazines, and on the web….it’s a great list.
As for me, who started Undercurrent when I was a penniless but crusading diver, I’ll have a few things to say too. For example, as I write this, the swine flu scare is gaining ground and Cozumel, a diver’s favorite Caribbean haunt, is one of the areas where it has shown up. Bummer for anyone with plans to go there, double bummer for the good people of Cozumel, who are already teetering financially from the downturn in traveling divers.
About the only time I ever get travel insurance is if I have to hook up with a liveaboard. If my plane is delayed, I could miss the entire trip, so it’s worth having insurance. But I’d sure be thinking about it now if I were to head anywhere in the Caribbean because no one knows the boundaries of this disease. To get covered against these unpredictable sorts of things, travel insurance policies that might cover such events require that you take out a policy somewhere near the time you make your first payment. If you bought a flight to Cozumel in March and decide in May that you need to cancel, you either have to have that policy in hand or eat whatever amount you have prepaid.
If you have recently put some money toward your trip, your travel agent may still be able to help you. Or go to www.insuremytravel.com, where you might have some luck finding a policy to cover you. Good luck.
Ben Davison, founder and publisher, Undercurrent
