Tag: ocean
Nantucket Balloon Ban Is Up In The Air

Nantucket Balloon Ban Is Up In The Air

On the second night of the first Town Meeting of the year, residents of Nantucket, Massachusetts deliberated for over four hours on issues ranging from zoning laws to the allocation of park land for health care use. There was one point of discussion, however, that should have quietly blown over. By a count of 314-103, Nantucketers voted to prohibit the sale or use of any type of balloon that can be inflated with helium or any other “lighter-than-air gas.” But now the winds of change have brought this bit of local news to the broader media, who have only inflated the matter.

The island is on the front lines of a battle with detritus from balloons, which washes up on its shores and is slow to degrade. The Nantucket balloon ban, which covers Mylar, latex, and plastic balloons, is intended to protect the delicate marine ecosystem and picturesque beaches. (The name Nantucket designates both the island and the town.)

Local environmental advocate Sarah Otkay considers the island “as the final resting place” for the thousands of balloons that must be cleaned off the island’s many beaches. Balloons get carried by winds and tides from Cape Cod and Martha’s Vineyard functions and land on the island — that is, if they don’t get eaten up first by marine life mistaking the balloons for food.

Materials to inform the public and visitors to the island are in the works, and the Boston Globereports that anyone caught importing balloons to Nantucket will have to throw them away in plastic trash bags, dump them in the town landfill, and pay a $50 fine. Of course, residents will be prohibited from using the single-use plastic bags that, along with polystyrene foam, are already banned from the island.

The Nantucket Marine Mammal Conservation Program, which submitted an unsuccessful petition to ban helium balloons three years ago, helped to draft the balloon ban proposal.

As a popular vacation and party destination, Nantucket’s entertainment industry would surely suffer from such a ban. For some, such as Bobby “The Balloon Wizard” Lamb, the ban is an infringement that evokes the debate over gun rights. “Guns don’t kill people; it’s the people using the gun,” the Wizard said.

Yes, it is a stretch to compare murdering someone with a gun to a kid letting go of a helium balloon. If that were not a fallacy, what would come next? The Real Cape wonders if perhaps a balloon Brady Bill is in order: “Make little kids apply for a balloon permit seven days before their birthday parties. Make them get a BID card to be able to buy the balloon and a permit to carry…” and so on.

Though things may appear somewhat out of hand with the balloon ban, the state attorney general’s office still needs to approve the Town Meeting’s proposed bylaw before it can go into effect. For the moment at least, a balloon-free world for Nantucket is still in the wind.

Photo: Ruud Raats via Flickr

China’s ‘Great Wall of Sand’ In South China Sea

China’s ‘Great Wall of Sand’ In South China Sea

By David Tweed, Bloomberg News (TNS)

HONG KONG — The pace at which China is building islands in the South China Sea has been shown by satellite photos lending weight to claims by U.S. Pacific Fleet Commander Harry Harris that China is building a “great wall of sand.”

The photos, published by an initiative of the Washington- based Center for Strategic and International Studies, focus on China’s reclamation efforts in the Spratly Islands on Mischief Reef, a feature also claimed by Vietnam, the Philippines, and Taiwan.

Artificial islands could help China anchor its territorial claims and potentially develop bases in waters that host some of the world’s busiest shipping lanes. Disputes over the South China Sea, of which China claims about four-fifths under a so-called nine-dash line drawn on a 1940s map, have escalated as China expands the reach of its military.

Satellite photographs show construction efforts on Mischief Reef that appear to have begun only in recent months, according to the Asia Maritime Transparency Initiative. The group’s aim is to “promote transparency in the Indo-Pacific to dissuade assertive behavior and conflict,” according its website.

“China is creating a great wall of sand, with dredges and bulldozers,” Admiral Harris said in a speech in Canberra late last month. “China is building artificial land by pumping sand on live coral reefs — some of them submerged — and paving over them with concrete.”

Philippine fishermen first reported that China was building structures on Mischief Reef in 1995, when the reef was completely submerged at high tide, according to AMTI. The structures were upgraded to a single, permanent multistory building in 1998.

By 2013, the original structures had been transformed into a “forward naval station,” permitting the basing of one People’s Liberation Army Navy frigate at a time, according to the website. Philippine fisherman last year began to report patrols by the Chinese navy and coast guard.

A photograph taken in January shows a dredger widening the entrance to the reef, the website said. While images taken “just a few months prior” didn’t indicate dredging or construction, photos taken since show sand removed from one of the reef’s entrances being used to create a land formation.

Photos on March 16 show new structures, fortified seawalls, and dredgers, in a sign that construction is progressing.

In August last year, China rebuffed efforts by U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry to secure a freeze on any actions in the South China Sea that might provoke tensions. All claimants to the Spratlys except Brunei occupy islands or have built structures on reefs and shoals, according to IHS Jane’s.

China’s Foreign Minister Wang Yi said in March that his country has every right to carry out construction on its territory in the South China Sea and won’t accept criticism from others about its “legal and reasonable” work.

“China is carrying out necessary construction on its own islands, and that isn’t directed against and won’t affect anyone,” Wang said. “We are not comparable to some countries that like to build illegal houses on others’ territory.”

Photo: CSIS Asia Maritime Transparency Initiative and DigitalGlobe via TNS

Japan Plans To Resume Whaling Next Year

Japan Plans To Resume Whaling Next Year

By Carol J. Williams, Los Angeles Times (TNS)

Japan informed the International Whaling Commission on Tuesday that it intended to resume hunting whales for scientific research next year, a move that conservationists called a defiance of the International Court of Justice ruling that Japan’s whale kills are illegal.

Since the commission invoked a moratorium on commercial whaling in 1986, Japan had been claiming an exception to the ban that allows whaling for scientific purposes and had set quotas of 1,035 kills in each of the last few years.

The International Court of Justice ruled in March that Japan’s failure to publish results from its purported research demonstrated that its claim of science-related whaling was a cover for banned commercial hunting and ordered a halt.

In the revised program submitted to the commission on Tuesday, the Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry, and Fisheries cut its catch quota to 333 minke whales and said it would no longer hunt the more limited pods of fin and humpback whales.

Joji Morishita, Japan’s whaling commissioner, said research findings would be published in the future to comply with the terms of the moratorium exceptions.

“All these activities, as we have been arguing, are perfectly in line with international law, a scientific basis, as well as ICJ judgment language,” he told the whaling commission, asserting that Japan’s new program to start in late 2015 will be responsive to the court order.

The challenge to Japan’s whaling program was brought in 2010 by Australia. The international court, in the Netherlands, ruled that there was no scientific basis for Japan’s quotas, nor was there sufficient published findings of its research to justify the size of the projected annual catch.

Conservationists said nothing has changed with the plan submitted by Tokyo on Tuesday.

“Japan’s new whaling proposal for the southern ocean sanctuary is neither new nor improved,” said Kitty Block, vice president of Humane Society International. “Despite the ICJ decision condemning the nation’s so-called scientific program, Japan is still trying to explain the inexplicable and defend the indefensible. The hunt is for commercial purposes — not science.”

Although Japan set catch quotas of 935 minke whales and 50 each of fin and humpbacks, its annual captures have been significantly lower in recent years due to declining demand for whale meat and increasing intervention by protesters such as the Sea Shepherd group. In 2012, Japan caught 103 minke whales and last year its catch was 251, the Japan Times reported.

Japanese whalers were ordered to suspend operations after the court order, although they plan a nonlethal hunt in spring.

Tokyo doesn’t require approval by the International Whaling Commission to resume its lethal hunt, and it was unclear whether Australia would make any legal challenge. Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott, who was elected last year, has drawn fire for weakening his country’s environmental commitments with expanded mining and logging.

Photo via WikiCommons