Articles by Andrew Sharpless

When auto-delete just isn’t enough

In this day and age, there's little you can't do online. Book a flight? Click. File your taxes? Click. Chat with Aunt Sally on the other side of the world? Click. Contact your representative? Not so fast.

Congress wants to add "logic puzzles" to its already difficult web forms in an effort to reduce the number of emails it gets from those troublesome voters. Apparently, sending an email like this one through an advocacy group doesn't qualify you as a constituent with a legitimate concern. You need to answer questions like "what's 5 minus 1?" to get your Congressman (most likely, your Congressman's staffer) to read your email.

Advocacy groups are not letting this slide. Oceana has joined with at least 30 other groups in a letter to Congress today stating among other things that this technology "raise[s] dangerous questions about the infringement of constituents' First Amendment rights." It's not yet clear whether we'll be sending this letter via snail mail.

Hawaii Islands Win Unprecedented Protection

In the last five years, I can count on one hand the number of times environmental groups have come together to praise a new policy by President Bush -- and that one hand was probably making a fist. So for the ocean conservation community to be celebrating the president's announcement today, you know this is a VERY big deal.

George W. Bush is designating the world's largest fully protected marine reserve -- 84 million acres to be exact. A biologically rich string of islands known as the Northwestern Hawaii Islands (NWHI) will now enjoy complete federal protection from commercial fishing activities as a new National Monument. This is fantastic news for the seals, turtles, albatrosses, sharks, corals, and other marine life that call these waters home, and a strange, welcome, happy, confusing moment for conservationists everywhere. Congratulations to our colleagues who worked so hard to make this happen, including the Pew Charitable Trusts, The Ocean Conservancy, Marine Conservation Biology Institute, Environmental Defense, and especially all the groups in Hawaii. Read all about it.

Possible Whaling Majority at the IWC

The International Whaling Commission will gather this Friday in St. Kitts for its annual meeting. For 20 years now, Japan and other pro-whaling nations have done everything in their power to convince the IWC to reverse the whaling moratorium it set back in the '80s.

What remains a mystery is why Japan is so obsessed with the resumption of whaling. Recent polls suggest that fewer than half of Japanese people have ever tried whale meat, and just 1% eat it regularly. Over 2,000 supermarkets have stopped selling it in the last few years, due to lack of demand.

Manatee classification downgraded

Last week, the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission downgraded the listing of manatees as "endangered" to "threatened." Don't get me wrong: it's great that their numbers have increased. Scientists have counted 3,116 manatees in Florida waters -- up from 1,267 in 1991. But they also say the state's manatee population is predicted to decrease 50 percent in the next five years because of habitat loss, boat collisions, and red tide blooms.

So, just so we're all clear, the manatee is no longer on the brink of extinction -- but is expected to be on the brink again in 2011? At first I thought I was the only one who believed the manatee should be considered endangered until such time as scientists think it's likely that the population has recovered and can remain healthy. But then I saw that 17 environmental groups have already filed a petition with the state seeking to have the entire protection classification system revamped.