Veronika Wild

At an unamed bay, somewhere south of Hobart, Tas I went fishing on Thursday. I know I should have been finishing my paperwork, but did you know that nearly all Tasmanians are Vitamin D deficient?   Every sunny day in winter ought to be a public holiday. Besides, my friend had been begging me for ages to take her fishing. Not sure why. I know as much about fishing as I do about quantum physics, but I did have a small fishing rod lying around and I did like the idea of catching something fresh from the sea, rather than down in the supermarket. We found ourselves a spot along the lower Derwent where it opens out to the sea. The good thing about fishing here is that you don’t need a licence, though you still need to be aware of catch numbers and sizes. There's a board with that information at the wharf. It was a superb day. Neat fishing boats were tied up at the wharf, gulls wheeled around and occasionally people with dogs wandered by to buy from a fisherman at the...

The Pacific as seen from the air en route to Vanuatu I doesn’t take much reading to discover that oceans are in trouble all over the world. Just trying to write a bit of a summary about the main issues seems to be taking forever, so I am going to do it in three parts. The first part will be about some of the threats to the marine environment itself, the second will be about some of the effects on marine life and the last one will be about things we could do. At the end of each post there will be some petitions related to topics raised. Links to source material  and or further reading, will mostly be shown in orange The Closing of the Commons There was a time when everyone believed that the earth was flat and that if you ventured too far out to sea, you would fall off the edge. Then, as ocean -going technology improved and the Magellans of the world ventured ever farther from shore, most people eventually came to understand that the world was round and much larger than previ...