The best/worst of crazy, this week at EcoSalon.

Vivienne Westwood, oh-so-reserved lady of A-list fashion, is on a mission – and that mission is getting us to buy less clothes. Yep.

Fancy tucking to dinner underwater, or in pitch darkness? Check out our roundup of 10 of the strangest restaurants in the world (as if food isn’t complicated enough on its own).

It’s been another good year for sexism, as this bumper crop of dumb-as-a-stick comments about women demonstrates.

Google Street View is now taking in views of the Great Barrier Reef (while it still can).

Finally, the really crazy news this week is…we’re up for sale. And that means we need your help. Want us to remain your favorite voice of slightly-less-madness in a sea of madness? Spread the word!

The post The Friday 5: The World’s Gone Freaking Mad Edition appeared first on EcoSalon.

Panorama views of the sea floor FTW!

This, believe it or not, is an image from Google Street View.

What happened here? Appallingly bad driving? In fact it’s the result of a partnership between Street View and the Catlin Seaview Survey  – you can see the current collection here.

What’s the point of this? It’s designed to do two things – promote Google Maps, which is under pressure from its rivals (although not the beleaguered Apple Maps on iOS 6), and to promote the health of 71% of our planet. This month the Catlin Seaview Survey kicked off with two expeditions to sites along the 2,300km-long Great Barrier Reef & Coral Sea, taking images with specially designed 360-degree-view cameras to be stitched together into gorgeous Street View panoramas.

But there’s a serious side to the fun. These images are also designed to act as a snapshot record of the state of these reefs, so scientists can track changes in reef health. Those changes shouldn’t be long in coming, if studies from Brazil and the Caribbean are any indicators. Last chance to see? We sincerely hope not.

Image: jurvetson

The post Google Street View Goes Diving – And Here’s Why We Should Care appeared first on EcoSalon.

Since we didn’t have a Friday 5 last week, here’s a 2-week bumper edition!

Thanks to the advent of the DVD & Blu-ray, the world is littered with slithery piles of obsolete CDs. What to do? Artist Sean Avery takes, them, smashes them up – and makes them come alive.

Staying with animals, our relationship with marine critters is clearly broken – and here’s an exhibit that hammers it home.

Off on a classic American road trip? Here are 50 ways to break it.

It’s no great secret that some Republicans have a twisted view of the world when it comes to women’s rights – so how about an art movement that celebrates That Word That Nobody Should Say In Public?

Were you at our EcoSalon NYC Fashion Week launch party (which garnered a mention from CBS News)? If not, consider us broken up about it.

How do the two presidential candidates weigh up on the topic of energy? The devil is in the details.

Cinnamon makes bad coffee bearable and good coffee mindblowingly good. But as Aylin Erman shows, a closer look at this super-spice reveals a sweeping world of uses. (But really, the coffee thing? Do that first).

In the wake of New York Fashion Week, Amy DuFault stops to think about the troubling issue around the recent Pakistan garment factory fire, the biggest industrial accident in the country’s history.

Home improvement: here are some awesome women who truly know how to Do It Themselves.

And finally, if you’re used to budget hostel experiences in Europe where you try to avoid looking too closely at your surroundings… here are 7 accommodation options beautiful (and bizarre) enough to reward the most ardent scrutiny.

The post The Friday 10: The Broken / Fine-Detailed Edition appeared first on EcoSalon.

Here’s a story for everyone who has ever suspected there was something in the water in Portland (in other words, everyone).

It seems America’s love of caffeine is such that it’s starting to leak into the rest of the food cycle. A Portland State University graduate has been sampling ocean water at a number of locations on the Oregon coastline and has been finding traces of caffeine, tallying not with population density but with the movement of stormwater. In short: when the rain lashes down, we’re spiking the oceans with our favorite legal psychoactive drug. 

Cause for concern? Compared with the list of other environment-related things to worry about, this may be trifling – and since we’re deeply fascinated by the potential health benefits of caffeine in moderation, we’d be hypocrites to start banging our drums here. Or would we? Because until now we’ve been talking about the effect of caffeine on humans. While everyone currently has no idea how low doses of caffeine will affect marine life, we do know that it severely messes with spiders.

In 1995, NASA researchers dosed up common household spiders with a variety of drugs and left them to weave their webs. The ones “speeding” on benzadrine completed the job in record time but left enormous holes everywhere. The ones under the influence of marijuana did half the job and lost interest. And the one spinning on caffeine? Take a look (above right). It appears the spider was such a jittery mess that it lost the ability to plan ahead. Fascinating and disturbing – but at least it makes great tableware.

To repeat: nobody knows how caffeine will affect marine wildlife. However, tests suggest that the effects of caffeine are most pronounced in birds and mammals, less so in lower vertebrates and still less so in fish and amphibians. If we are indeed dosing up our offshore neighbors in miniscule amounts, let’s hope they’re designed to shrug it off.

Images: GOOD and Matt McGee.

The post This Is Your Ocean On Drugs? appeared first on EcoSalon.

Prod someone’s memory about Disney’s Finding Nemo, and you’ll find a fond thought or two for the chilled-out, backstroke-swimming dude called Crush the Sea Turtle. Just as Nemo turned clown-fish into ocean celebrities (with worrying consequences), sea turtles are now established as the languid, eccentric grandfathers of the sea, all thanks to those clever folk at Pixar.

But here’s the grim reality. All sea turtles are either threatened or endangered. Not cool.

The good news is there’s a Cousteau on the case – Fabien, grandson of world-famous ecologist and ocean pioneer Jacques (who would have been 100 this year). He’s working with biologist Dr. Wallace J. Nichols to fill the oceans with sea turtles – a billion of them. Sound absurd? Not when you consider that adult turtles each lay clutches of up to 250 eggs in just an hour-long sitting.

If you aspire to be one of the lucky ones hiding behind the shoreline of one of the special beaches of the world where turtles lay their young (e.g. Key Biscayne, Florida), the Billion Baby Turtle Project will work to protect the experience and the creatures behind it – and it all starts in El Salvador. From there, a worldwide network of government bodies, volunteers, non-profits and former egg collectors will work to shore up (as it were) the nesting grounds of turtles for generations to come.

Images: nosha, Marcio Cabral de Moura

The post Dude, the Beaches Are Turning Turtle appeared first on EcoSalon.

In the future, rising sea levels are going to drive people out of their low-lying communities and up to higher ground. But you might not know it’s going on right now.

As Luanne reported recently, the government of the Maldives is facing the prospect of inundation with admirable foresight by moving to a carbon zero economy by the end of the next decade and adding a splash of green to its luxury status.

The country is also going to use future profits to fund a wholesale relocation of the population to another part of the world before the island chain disappears under the waves by 2100.

Ninety years to prepare – sounds like luxury indeed if you’re from the Carteret Islands.

For the last 20 years, the inhabitants of this South Pacific atoll have been struggling to keep out rising tides, planting mangroves and erecting sea defences, but now the population of 2,600 are in full evacuation m0de, funded by the Papua New Guinea government.

Like the Maldives, the Carteret islands are low – just 170cm above sea-level at their highest point – and every high tide swamps the islanders’ efforts at subsistence agriculture and raises the salinity of the soil even further. It’s untenable, so they’re off.

Dan Box of The Ecologist has been watching the Carteretians rebuild their homes at Tinputz on the coast of Bougainville, and is currently preparing to visit the Carteret islands to see for himself how they’re faring.

Experts aren’t certain that the islands are being wiped out by global warming. This is a volcanic island chain, so sea floor movement is to be expected. But if independently rising sea levels aren’t primarily to blame, it could be the degradation of the coral that forms the backbone of the islands. When this dies, islands lose their natural defences against the sea – and coral is fragile enough to be killed by something as seemingly innocuous as sun screen, let alone the severely destabilizing effects of warmer seas.

However, as George Monbiot notes at The Guardian, these aren’t the world’s first “climate change refugees” – and they’re certainly not going to be the last.

For example, a rise of 20cm (well within the 88cm upper boundary estimated by the IPCC report in 2001) will make three quarters of a million people homeless in Nigeria alone.

We’re already coming up with innovative new ways to build flood-resistant homes, but until these become a widespread reality, we’re faced with the modern-day version of the King Canute story – and the best we can do is get out of the way.

Image: Addu Atoll, Maldives – nattu

The post Evictions Underway: Nature Gives Notice appeared first on EcoSalon.

For everyone’s good, we need to leave the oceans well alone for a while.

That’s the recommendation of over 100 scientific papers assessed by the Professor of Marine Conservation at the University of York, England. All these papers suggest that the demonstrably successful marine protected area (MPA) scheme should be dramatically expanded until it covers at least 20% of the world’s oceans – and maybe even up to one-third of them.

Why? Because many fish stocks are in deep crisis – not just depleted but at such dangerously low levels that their ability to reproduce is threatened, making their recovery more a question of If rather than When.

In the waters around Europe, conditions are dire – some 88% of all European fishing stocks are being overfished, and the European Union can shoulder a lot of the blame with its largely ineffective Common Fisheries Policy, doing little in practice to limit the efficiency of oversized fishing boat fleets and supporting muddleheaded subsidizing designed to help hard-hit fishermen make profits by chasing after what little is left under the waves.

The answer seems to be to ban fishing outright in the hardest-hit areas. This worked stunningly well around the UK’s Lundy Island – but that was small-scale. A worldwide, large-scale fishing ban is likely to light the touchpaper for the marine food industry and prove immensely unpopular for everyone whose traditional livelihood has just been outlawed to them. If managed badly, it’s going to ruin lives.

But what other answer is there? Either fish populations are allowed to recover – or they’re hunted until they never will again.

Image: treehouse1977

The post Ban Fishing, Say Conservationists – or Fish Are Sunk appeared first on EcoSalon.