Publish to Newswire
Add an EventEndangered Gulf Sea Turtles in Trouble Four Years After BP Oil Spill
New Orleans – Four years after the BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill, endangered Kemp's ridley sea turtle recovery has flatlined. Nesting dropped by 30 percent in 2010 and has not bounced back, according to nesting numbers in Mexico and Texas. See charts at end of release.
“On the four year anniversary of the BP disaster little has been done to protect the world’s most endangered sea turtle – the Kemp’s ridley – from slipping into extinction,” said Carole Allen, the Gulf of Mexico director for Turtle Island Restoration Network in Houston. “In fact, all federal funding is being cut to zero for Kemp's ridleys protection after decades of work on Mexico's beaches and in Texas right when they are most in need."
Sea turtle advocates attending the 34th Annual Symposium on Sea Turtle Biology and Conservation in New Orleans this week joined Louisiana conservation and community groups in marking the fourth anniversary of the BP oil spill, which is April 20. Sea turtle biologists attending the sea turtle symposium warned of long-term declines of Kemp's ridleys in the wake of the spill and cumulative threats including shrimp trawling, beach lighting, and water contamination.
No new protections or oil spill damage money has gone directly to protect the Gulf sea turtle species most impacted by the massive oil spill, the endangered Kemp's ridley, or their beach or marine habitat. Instead, the US Fish and Wildlife Service recently cut funding for the successful bi-national program that supported protection and monitoring of sea turtle beaches at the nesting beaches in Mexico and in Texas.
"Gulf sea turtles need our help now, not later," said Teri Shore, program director for Turtle Island. "We need to restore conservation efforts and add new protections for sea turtle nesting beaches and swimways throughout the Gulf of Mexico."
The recent Texas oil spill into Galveston Bay released an estimated 170,000 gallons of bunker fuel oil into Gulf waters, closing beaches from Galveston to as far south as Padre Island National Seashore. This spill is delivering another blow to the already endangered Kemp’s ridley sea turtle population that will soon begin to arrive and nest on Texas beaches to lay eggs.
"Here in Galveston we are scrambling to keep sea turtle patrols on the beach and watching for strandings due to the oil spill, shrimp trawl bycatch and sport fishing hooks," said Joanie Steinhaus, associate campaign director for Turtle Island.
Turtle Island Restoration Network is working to help sea turtles recover by advocating for a Gulf-of-Mexico-wide sea turtle stranding and nesting network, new sea turtle shrimping protections, protected sea turtle swimways and continued government funding to critical sea turtle programs.
Turtle Island Restoration Network works to mobilize people and communities around the world to protect marine wildlife, the oceans and the inland waterways that sustain them. SeaTurtles.Org
See charts online HERE
Presently in todays world the great need is to move away totally from all fossil fuels burning of oxygen, and end the destruction of the web-of-life that is going on and increasing every day with increased mountain top removal, fracking and Ocean drilling worldwide.
With 40% of the oxygen burned out to carbon dioxide that we cannot live on, we ought not to risk the remaining 60% oxygen as we cannot live without oxygen. Never has any societies throughout modern times risked the entire planets ecological organic balances of the planets web-of-life as had Bid Oil, and Big Nuclear Fission Atomic Power Plants.
The threat is real, not imaginary.
The Sea turtles are indeed threatened with oil pollution, but so is the entire life tree of the whole planet. People hold off calling this a real war against the planets livability, but in reality it is Nuremberg Trials level of conduct that the U.S. Judge Jackson, who chaired the trials says-- as he wrote into history and herstory ' that the planning and doing of aggressive war is the supreme crime on the planet earth'.
Here is his direct quote-- "War is essentially an evil thing....to initiate a war of aggression, therefore, is not only an International Crime; it is the Supreme International crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole." He further says that it is the Supreme International Crime whether Germany does it or the U.S.A. does it.
The first industrial revolution motivated by coal, gas, oil and atomic energy has driven the ecological organic, and inorganic balances of the web-of-life on the planet to such a threatened position, that its inner essence of character is exposed; as in truth of matter-in-motion to be a defacto War of Aggression against the livability of the entire planet.
This was described vividly by the OBU--One Big Union organized by the IWW-- Industrial Workers of the World, since its foundation in the U.S.A. in 1905. Also by the First International of Working Men, founded by Marx during the Nineteenth Century, as well as in the writings of the early socialists, and the safety committees of the early trade Unions at the inception of the Industrial Revolution in Europe.
Union Safety Committees in the coal industry, are and have described the companies unsafe conditions around all fossil fuel jobsites as being--- a huge early death and sickness to the workers for centuries.
The problem is the 'Bosses Media' does not sympathize with the working classes, but most only with the employing classes, who have been lying that their industries are always and ever the safest and cleanest progressive things in the world.
Present need to save the Sea Turtles and all the threatened species globally is to re-tool the entire industrial revolution to the non-pollution renewables such as wind, tidal, and solar power, which transforms to electricity and is more power than all the worlds fossil fuels.
That 'organic revolution' tends toward saving the oxygen, and electricity has a proven peaceful-co-existence with O2, that fossil fuels does not have.
That would allow the Oxygen to return to a positive valence and a safe livable atmosphere again. The present mode of Planet Earth is in 'Fail-Safe" mode. The Green Revolution can and does take carbon out of the atmosphere for cell building and replaces clean oxygen to the air.
That is how to end the most all ther threat to the species on the planet, as well as to the Sea Turtles in the Bay of Mexico.
Workers of the world unite!! End pollution aggressive wars, not endless wars for more and more pollution. You yet have a world to win!!
Donate
$255.00 donated
in the past month
Get Involved
If you'd like to help with maintaining or developing the website, contact us.
Publish
Publish your stories and upcoming events on Indybay.