You've probably never seen Atlantic menhaden on a restaurant menu, and maybe you've never even heard of this little fish. But Atlantic menhaden, which have been called the "most important fish in the sea," need your help. read more..

Bi-partisan legislation proposed by Senators Whitehouse (D-RI) and Snowe (R-ME) to establish a National Endowment for the Oceans received a shot in the arm recently, when the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works approved a proposal set forth earlier this year to fund the Endowment. Senator Whitehouse, a member of the Committee, called the approval a major step forward in getting the Endowment launched and said that its funds would help protect Rhode Island’s oceans and support the fishing, research and tourism jobs which are central to Rhode Island’s economy. The Committee voted to approve the RESTORE the Gulf Coast States Act of 2011, which would set up the Gulf Coast Restoration Trust Fund, financed by the billions of dollars in Clean Water Act penalties expected to be paid read more…

It had been more than a month since Tropical Storm Irene when I returned to kayak my favorite whitewater rivers in Vermont: the Middlebury and the New Haven. The massive flows from Irene moved some small rocks around, but in most places the overall character of the these rustic rivers remained the same, even after the storm. Sadly that is not true about sections of the rivers near roads where in the name of "repair" bulldozers literally flattened the rivers, excavating giant boulders, dredging gravel, and leaving the once vibrant river an unrecognizable shell. Rapids that used to be complex, multi-tiered stretches, supporting important habitat had transformed into homogeneous flat spots. read more..

The Congress creates our federal laws. The Administrative branch creates regulations. The National Ocean Policy has yet to change either. Of course, you wouldn’t have learned this if you had sat through the House of Representatives’ Natural Resources Committee oversight hearing on the National Ocean Policy this morning. The rhetoric from Chairman Doc Hastings (R-WA) and the Republican members – who tried really hard to follow the current GOP playbook by depicting any effort by the Obama Administration as a “job-killing regulation” – claimed that the National Ocean Policy is “…ocean zoning (which) could place huge sections of the ocean off limits to activities not ‘zoned’ as government-approved.” The argument was less than convincing. Massachusetts’ Representative Ed Markey (D-Malden) knows what many of us have learned from the value of the Massachusetts read more…

Starting tomorrow, those concerned about Lake Champlain and interested in helping outline how to deal with nutrient pollution threatening its future will have a chance to make their opinions heard. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, with the help of Vermont’s Department of Environmental Conservation, is in the process of re-writing the Lake Champlain Phosphorous Total Maximum Daily Load. This effort must be successful if we are to reduce phosphorous pollution to our great lake and keep one of Vermont’s most important resources swimmable, fishable and drinkable. As you may know, the TMDL is an important technical document which acts as a phosphorous pollution budget so Vermonters can plan for reducing how much phosphorous we ask Lake Champlain to handle. We currently add much more phosphorous – well over twice as read more…

This morning at the State House in Boston, the U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation will hold a field hearing on the first year of implementation of Amendment 16 to the Northeast Multispecies (Groundfish) Fishery Management Plan. In a statement issued today, Peter Shelley, CLF Senior Counsel, said the following. read more..

Catch up with the latest news from TalkingFish.org, a blog brought to you by CLF and other organizations and individuals who want to see a sustainable fishing industry in New England and abundant fish populations for generations to come. TalkingFish.org aims to increase people’s understanding of the scientific, financial and social aspects at work in New England’s fisheries. Here’s what went on this week: September 26: “Care about river herring? Then pay attention this week!” – This week was a big week for river herring at the New England Fishery Management Council meeting. TalkingFish.org tells you what was on the agenda and how you can make your voice heard to support options help save river herring. Next week we’ll have some recaps of the Council meeting, so be sure to read more…

  The very severe damage in Vermont caused by Tropical Storm Irene led to an impressive and encouraging recovery effort both by state government and residents, many of whom volunteered to help their neighbors salvage and rebuild. Unfortunately, however, the storm – the second flood of historic proportions in the state this year – also seems to have washed away much of what we have learned about the dangers of digging gravel from streams and rivers. In recent weeks there have been dozens of excavators and bulldozers in rivers across the state digging gravel, channelizing streams and armoring banks with stone, not only at great ecological cost, but – particularly in the many cases in which a true emergency did not exist – greatly increasing the risk of future flood read more…

Back in 2004 a group of researchers and analysts at Princeton led by Robert Socolow published the “wedge analysis” that captured the problem of greenhouse gas emissions reductions in a pithy way that presented solutions in a manner that a lot of folks found very appealing – they presented their own scenarios but did it in a way that was flexible and allowed readers to dial technologies up and down to reflect their own beliefs and preferences. Socolow has revisited that work and done some meditating on why in the intervening seven years we have not only failed to start to solve the problem but in fact have been making the hole we are in deeper. Andrew Revkin (in his continuing capacity as a New York Times blogger, even though read more…

New England’s old coal-burning power plants don’t just pollute the air. With their obsolete cooling technology, they also create havoc in the water bodies on which they reside. To control heat from the coal-combustion process, these coal plants draw millions of gallons of water daily into their antiquated cooling systems, killing the aquatic life that gets sucked in with it, and then discharge the super-heated, chemical-laden  water back into the fragile rivers and bays, where it creates untenable living conditions that destroy native fish and other species. Under decades of pressure from CLF and other organizations, EPA has tightened its regulations around water intake and discharge at the region’s coal plants. At the GenOn Kendall Power Plant in Cambridge, MA, as a result of a lawsuit brought by CLF and read more…