Speaking on the crisis in the oceans and Gulf of Maine, Portland, Mar. 7

I'll be speaking about the crisis in the world's oceans and in the Gulf of Maine on March 7th at the Portland Public Library here in Maine. The talk was originally to have taken place in early February, but was postponed by a winter storm.

[Update, 3/7/18: Alas, this event has again been postponed by a winter storm. The new date is April 4, same time and place.]

The event -- which kicks off at 6pm in the Rines Auditorium in the main library on Monument Square -- is the 2018 Sustainability Series Keynote. It's free and open to the public.

As a foreign correspondent, I long focused on oceans policy and global environmental reporting, and my first book, Ocean's End: Travels Through Endangered Seas, took me to Antarctica, the tiny atoll states of Central Pacific, the coral reefs of Belize, the depleted cod banks of Newfoundland and the troubled waters of the Gulf of Mexico and the Black Sea. My second book, The Lobster Coast, told the story of coastal Maine and its ecosystem, and "Mayday," a 2015 series I wrote for the Portland Press Herald, was a finalist for the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Reporting.

I'll be speaking about the nature of the multi-faceted marine crisis, what it means for humans, and what might be done about it. Hope you can make it.

Arctic news hounds rejoice!

Ever since traveling to Antarctica while writing Ocean's End, I've been something of a polar news addict. After all, the poles are where climate change effects are most obvious and alarming, and the international governance of both regions is very much in flux, what with all the cruise ships getting themselves in trouble in the Antarctic and oil prospectors crawling around Greenland. Following polar developments is very much keeping ones hand on the planetary pulse.

But tracking polar news is extraordinarily difficult. Nobody really lives in Antarctica and the Arctic region is divided among several countries with different languages, agendas, and internal awareness of their Far North. Even the Inuit have a hard time keeping in touch with one another.

Fortunately, my colleagues Kieran Cooke and John Bennett are putting together a free weekly news digest called Arctic Monitor, which allows for one stop shopping on the latest developments in the High North. No plans for an Antarctic edition, but you can still learn a fair bit about the Southern Continent by following the news feed at the Antarctica and Southern Ocean Coalition and the official newspaper of the US Antarctic Program, the Antarctic Sun. (The latter, oddly enough, was once edited at McMurdo Station by Portland, Maine's own Jeff Inglis.)

Two other Arctic resources to check out: the Arctic Focus news service (which loads very slowly from New England at least) and Canada's Aboriginal People's Television Network, which has more regular coverage of far northern issues than most. (For example, this piece on ongoing polar "land" grab.)

Photo (c) 1998-2010 Colin Woodard. All rights reserved.

Antarctica's penguins, 12 years later

Flying back from Prague, I had a chance to catch up on my reading and ran across this New Yorker piece on the retreat of Adelie penguins on the Antarctic Peninsula and the work of penguin expert Bill Fraser.

In 1998, I visited many of the same locations on the Antarctic Peninsula while researching my first book, Ocean's End: Travels Through Endangered Seas, and interviewed Fraser about how climate change was turning the regional ecosystem upside down. Penguins were being attacked by fleas (whose eggs were now surviving the winter) while snow was overwhelming the Adelie's breeding sites. On the islands around the United States' Palmer Station, the penguins were in retreat, as was the 10,000 year old glacier behind the station.

What's astonishing is just how quickly things have gone from bad to worse, as the New Yorker piece makes clear. The pace of change -- be it penguins, glaciers, or floating ice shelves -- has exceeded the wildest dreams of the glaciologists, ecologists, and climate experts I spoke with in 1998-99. Indeed, the same is true for many of the other issues I raised in Ocean's End, including the pace of sea level rise threatening small island states like the Marshall Islands, the decline of coral reefs in Belize and other countries and, most dramatically, the hurricane threat to New Orleans.

On the bright side, the Black Sea is showing clear signs of recovery and the U.S. appears to have finally turned the corner on fisheries management. Unfortunately, neither will be much help to the penguins.

Obituary: San Francisco Chronicle Foreign Service

My editors at The San Francisco Chronicle tell me that my piece in today's paper will be the last to be produced by the Chronicle Foreign Service, the latest casualty in the battle to keep the venerable daily afloat.

The Chronicle Foreign Service -- or CFS -- was a network of freelancers which provided Bay Area readers original, on-the-ground reporting from around the world. In continuous operation since 1985, CFS gave many young journalists a start in the business, teaching them the ropes of foreign news reporting.

Many CFS-ers have gone on to do great things, including Colombia correspondent Karl Penhaul (now at CNN), London correspondent Kimberly Dozier (CBS News, injured in Iraq in 2006), Middle East writer Borzou Daragahi (a 2005 Pulitzer Prize finalist), Peter S. Goodman (now national economics writer at the New York Times) and Andrew E Kramer (now the Times' Moscow bureau chief.) Jill Carroll filed two CFS pieces from Iraq before her famous kidnapping, and Billy Nessen was held for 40 days by the Indonesian government while reporting from Aceh.

My own CFS career took me to Antarctica, Georgia, Belize, and the Marshall Islands, (while researching Ocean's End, a book on the global marine crisis), Iceland (on Keiko the whale, glaciers, genetics), Greenland (climate change), Canada (tidal power, fisheries, gas drilling) Micronesia (WW2 ships, kava crisis) Croatia (killer seaweed), Denmark (wind power, sustainability), the Netherlands (sea rise defenses), Bosnia (post-conflict), Romania (ethnic conflict, state secrets, interview with the president), Mexico (post-9/11 effects), and Panama (canal zone handover).

Nine years ago, things appeared to be look up for the Chronicle. It had a new owner -- the Hearst Corporation -- which promised to make it a "world class newspaper." But while the paper won several prizes, it has continued to operate in the red. This winter, Hearst threatened to close it entirely if it could not win major concessions from the unions. Since then 150 jobs have been cut, and on Friday management announced there would be more to come.

CFS stopped taking new stories late this winter, just after I filed my piece from Iceland which, fortunately, had the shelf life to survive a long wait for a spot in an ever-shrinking news hole.

I know I'll miss working with CFS editor Jack Epstein, and I suspect many readers will miss the coverage he and his predecessors oversaw.

Antarctica: my story on the Explorer sinking investigation

For those following polar cruise ship tourism, my piece on the investigation into the sinking of the cruise ship MS Explorer is now up at The Christian Science Monitor. There's audio as well.

The Canadian-owned ship sank in Antarctica's Bransfield Strait in November, 2007. As I reported at the time, the initial explanations didn't add up.

Antarctica: Sinking of the MS Explorer update

In late 2007, I reported on the sinking of the cruise ship M/S Explorer off the coast of Antarctica for The Christian Science Monitor, with a follow up on how the facts as they had been presented did not add up. Since then we've been waiting for the government of Liberia -- where the Canadian-owned vessel was flagged -- to release the results of their investigation.

Sunday the London Independent reported on the leaked contents of that report, which apparently suggest that the Explorer's captain was responsible for plowing into what one passenger called a "wall of ice." The leak comes at an uncomfortable time for the Antarctic cruise ship industry, as it comes in the midst of a major annual meeting of the parties to the Antarctica Treaty, who are considering tighter restrictions on cruise ships there.

I saw the M/S Explorer in Greenland a few months before her final voyage. The vessel I was on at the time -- while covering the Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople's efforts to draw attention to climate change -- also suffered a serious accident in Antarctica later that season.

I visited the Antarctic for six weeks in 1998 while writing my first book, Ocean's End: Travels Through Endangered Seas, and happened to pass through the straits in which the Explorer went down. As you'd expect, it's a cold and forbidding, not the sort of place you'd want to face in an open lifeboat.

Photograph (c) 2008 Colin S Woodard.