Happy Nirvana

A map turtle ready for release into the wild. Photo via U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Maybe it’s the shell. Turtles are tough when it comes to oil spills. While most birds covered in crude don’t survive, turtles seem to be doing pretty good following the Enbridge oil spill in July near Marshall, Michigan…. Read [...]

Photo via EarthEcho International Philippe Cousteau, the renowned oceans advocate, has been doing some of the best reporting on the Gulf out there (some of it has been published here on TreeHugger). I caught up to him at the 2010 Clinton Global Initiative, where he’d just launched a student-citizen journalism program called STREAM — which [...]

Photo via NOLA The recent discovery of trace amounts of oil in blue crab larvae has left experts forecasting dire news for the Gulf ecosystem. It’s evidence that the oil from the spill loosed from the Deepwater Horizon explosion has already begun working its way up the food chain — where it could be fatal [...]

Photo via CenCOOS As BP moves to permanently seal the blown-out well that unleashed 5 million barrels of oil into the Gulf of Mexico, the focus is turning to the toll of the disaster. It should be said that the true and total toll will not be known for some time, until scientists have had [...]

Photo via MSNBC It irks me that I have to write a headline like that, but with so much of the media’s BP spill coverage painting pictures of a harmonious, oil-free Gulf, I can’t underscore enough the fact that this thing is far, far, far from over. Thankfully, CNN ran a report that got this [...]

Photo via avlxyz @ Flickr Since the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in April, everyone from chef Tom Colicchio to President Barack Obama has come out to promise that Gulf Coast seafood is as safe and delicious as it ever was — and to remind the rest of us that boycotting it won’t help the regional [...]

The newly-described Halieutichthys intermedius batfish. Image credit: Ho, Chakrabarty & Sparks Though the Gulf of Mexico is one of the most intensely studied marine environments on the planet, there is still room for discovery. Scientists have managed to discover and describe three new species of fish—all of which live in areas partially or completely covered [...]

Well, it is depressing… Image: NASA, public domain. The 12th Victim of the Deepwater Horizon? If the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico never happened, William Allen “Rookie” Kruse might still be alive. At least that’s what his family thinks, and they’d like him to be considered the 12th victim of the explosion [...]

Image credit: Philippe Cousteau My sister Alexandra’s flight was delayed last night so she didn’t get in until after midnight. We were all sorry she couldn’t join us for dinner and a toast to my grandfather for what would have been his 100 birthday. Despite the late night we got moving around 8:30 for the [...]