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Breaking Waves: Ocean News
06/14/2025 - 01:00
A slew of global leaders met in the south of France to discuss the future of the oceans. There was ‘momentum’ and ‘enthusiasm’, but there were critical voices too
The sea, the great unifier, is man’s only hope … and we are all in the same boat.” So said Jacques Cousteau, the French explorer, oceanographer and pioneering film-maker, who notably pivoted from merely sharing his underwater world to sounding the alarm over its destruction.
Half a century later, David Attenborough, a year shy of his 100th birthday, followed Cousteau’s trajectory. In the naturalist’s acclaimed new film, Ocean, which highlights the destructive fishing practice of bottom trawling, he says he has come to the realisation that the “most important place on Earth is not on land but at sea”.
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06/13/2025 - 16:46
Kimberley Terrell’s research into health and job disparities had triggered a backlash from state and Tulane leaders
This story is co-published with Floodlight
Environmental advocates are questioning the actions of a private university in Louisiana after the resignation of a scientist who researches the health and job disparities in a heavily industrialized part of the state known as Cancer Alley.
Kimberly Terrell served as a director of community engagement and a staff scientist with Tulane University’s Environmental Law Clinic before resigning and accused university leaders of trying to censor the work she is doing to spotlight the harms to local communities plagued by industrial pollution.
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06/13/2025 - 13:26
Among other concerns, the US military parade will produce as much pollution as created to heat 300 homes for a year
Donald Trump’s military parade this weekend will bring thousands of troops out to march, while dozens of tanks and armored personnel carriers roll down the streets and fighter jets hum overhead.
The event has prompted concern about rising autocracy in the US. It will also produce more than 2m kilograms of planet-heating pollution – equivalent to the amount created by producing of 67m plastic bags or by the energy used to power about 300 homes in one year, according to a review by the progressive thinktank Institute for Policy Studies and the Guardian.
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06/13/2025 - 10:11
Groups say president ‘grievously wrong’ after withdrawing from Biden-led deal to protect fish in Pacific north-west
Donald Trump has pulled the US federal government from a historic agreement to recover the salmon population in the Pacific north-west, calling the plan “radical environmentalism”.
A presidential memorandum issued by Trump on Thursday removes the US from a deal brokered by Joe Biden with Washington, Oregon and four Native American tribes to work to restore salmon populations and develop clean energy for tribes.
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06/13/2025 - 10:00
Environment minister Murray Watt is returning from oceans conference where he pledged to curb the scourge of plastics and ratify a treaty to protect the high seas
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The federal environment minister, Murray Watt, is returning from a UN oceans conference where he pledged to curb the scourge of plastics and make good on Australia’s promise to ratify a treaty to protect the high seas.
The five-day meeting in Nice, France finished on Friday, and conservationists celebrated some key steps towards protecting wildlife in international waters.
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06/13/2025 - 10:00
Environment minister Murray Watt is restarting the process after the government shelved earlier proposed reforms
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A select group of environment and industry leaders will be brought together in a fresh attempt to build consensus on a long-awaited rewrite of federal nature laws, Guardian Australia can reveal.
The environment minister, Murray Watt, will soon detail the next phase of consultation as he presses ahead with an ambition to enact sweeping changes to the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act (EPBC) in the next 18 months.
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06/13/2025 - 06:27
Welfare of sows confined to farrowing crates was compromised and they displayed signs of extreme stress, experts say
The use of restrictive pens to temporarily house pregnant pigs in the UK severely compromises their welfare, can traumatise them and should be banned, experts have said.
Analysis by Animal Equality UK of footage collected from a farm in Devon showed that three pregnant sows in farrowing crates spent more than 90% of their time lying down, with one not standing up at all for a day. On average, between them they bit the bars (a sign of extreme stress) more than once an hour.
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06/13/2025 - 05:00
The Natural Sounds and Night Skies Division strives to provide ‘full sensory experience’ in country’s national parks
The Trump administration appears poised to cut the US Natural Sounds and Night Skies Division (NSNSD), a little-known office that works to rein in noise and light pollution in national parks, a task that is seen as a vital environmental endeavor.
Advocates say the division’s work is quiet but important – many plants and animals rely on the darkness, and light pollution is contributing to firefly and other insect die-offs. The office led efforts to reduce light pollution at the Grand Canyon and snowmobile noise that drowned out sounds emanating from the Old Faithful geyser, among other initiatives.
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06/13/2025 - 04:00
The documentary shows the damage that fishing does to our planet. So why does the industry still hold governments to ransom?
I have been saying this a lot recently: “At last!” At last, a mainstream film bluntly revealing the plunder of our seas. At last, a proposed ban on bottom trawling in so-called “marine protected areas” (MPAs). At last, some solid research on seabed carbon and the vast releases caused by the trawlers ploughing it up. But still I feel that almost everyone is missing the point.
David Attenborough’s Ocean film, made for National Geographic, is the one I’ve been waiting for all my working life. An epoch ago, when I worked in the BBC’s Natural History Unit in the mid-1980s, some of us lobbied repeatedly for films like this, without success. Since then, even programmes that purport to discuss marine destruction have carefully avoided the principal cause: the fishing industry. The BBC’s Blue Planet II and Blue Planet Live series exemplified the organisation’s perennial failure of courage.
George Monbiot is a Guardian columnist
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