Racing to win - Racing to change

Submitted by Dan Robinson on April 9, 2007 - 10:16am

Today's number 6 most active search on Yahoo is "Leatherback Turtles". This article tells the story of the latest in an increasingly familiar environmental story. We (citizens of the world) are living on an earth with 90% fewer Leatherbacks than existed 20 years ago.

Last week I spent a day with CivicActions people, Jenn Sramek, Jacob Singh and Zoey Kroll and the (TOPP) team. TOPP is an ambitious international pilot program to greatly expand our understanding of the ocean through the animals that live there. One of the species that TOPP tracks is Leatherback Turtles.

TOPP has been tagging Leatherbacks for some time now and in conjunction with other similiar organizations around the world and Yahoo they are taking the story of these animals global. Here at CivicActions we're contributing by working with them on The Great Turtle Race. The GTR will allow millions of people on the net to track the daily progress of 11 of these turtles as they travel from Costa Rica to the Galapagos Islands. This years migration is being documented as the Great Turtle Race as a way of reaching out and educating us as citizens about the huge pressures on these incredible animals.

TOPP tracks a host of other species as well. In the coming months we'll be working with them on re-imagining and re-designing their website to make these stories and information more available to the general public. Spending time on this project has reminded me that while we can't afford to let the "big ticket items" like Global Warming and Iraq to fade from view - we have other work we must do as well.

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MSNB ran a story on Tuesday
Submitted by Gregory Heller on April 10, 2007 - 11:50pm.

MSNB ran a story on Tuesday about the Great Turtle Race. The racew will kick of in just a few days and excitement certainly is building!

In other aquatic news the NYT Week in Review ran a story about aquariums.
The more popular and entertaining aquariums become, the more supporters insist that they educate and inspire conservation. And the more critics worry that aquariums are actually acting as enticing, crystal-clear substitutes for dying oceans.
and

Critics argue that aquariums have the opposite effect: as exhibits grow more technologically sophisticated, they implicitly suggest that oceans are disposable. “What they say is, the natural habitat doesn’t matter,” said Randy Malamud, an English professor at Georgia State University and the author of “Reading Zoos” (New York University Press, 1998). “That the awe and mystery of the animal’s life — which is so much dependent on the animal’s living where it lives — that that’s all irrelevant and can be dispensed with for our convenient consumption.”
This is one of the things that is so interesting about the Great Turtle Race, and other projects that TOPP is working on: they bring humans into the world of these ocean dwelling creatures through the data they collect, and hopefully they will inspire both awe and commitment to conservation of the worlds oceans.