Welcome to FERN’s Friday Feed (#FFF), where we share the stories from this week that made us stop and think.
The California Sunday Magazine
In the summer of 2018, Betsy, a thousand-pound black-haired Scottish Highland cross, escaped from a junior rodeo event in Alaska. Her owner, Frank Koloski, has been looking for her for more than a year. So, it seems, has the rest of Alaska. “In the months following Betsy’s disappearance, as the story of her escape continued to spread, her reputation rose to folk-heroine levels,” writes Clio Chang. “She has a Facebook group, where hundreds consistently follow up on her whereabouts.”
As ocean stocks dwindle, nations still subsidize overfishing
National Geographic
“In an exhaustive survey of 152 countries, scientists at the University of British Columbia found that ocean-faring nations spent $22 billion on … subsidies” that encourage overfishing in 2018, writes Todd Woody. “That’s a 6 percent rise since 2009 … Fuel subsidies alone accounted for 22 percent of all fishing subsidies last year. China, which operates the world’s largest overseas fishing fleet, has increased harmful subsidies by 105 percent over the past decade, according to the study published in Marine Policy.”
The Trump administration’s attack on public lands
Yale Environment 360
A long effort by Republicans to open federal lands to development and extractive industries “may seem to have subsided,” writes Jim Robbins. “But it has simply gone underground. There is a stealth battle to whittle away at federal authority over public lands that is very much in motion, as the Trump administration aggressively advances an agenda to remake U.S. policies toward those lands.”
The world’s fisheries are connected in a single network
The Conversation
New research has found that the world’s coastal marine fisheries are tightly connected to one another, as fish larvae travel across national borders. “This suggests that country-by-country fishery management may be fundamentally insufficient,” write Nandini Ramesh, James Rising, and Kimberly Oremus. “If a fish species that provides food to one country should decline, the amount of fish spawn, or eggs and larvae, riding the ocean currents from there to other countries would also decline dramatically, resulting in further loss of fish elsewhere.”
Can innovation, and cooperation, save New Mexico’s pecan farmers?
The Washington Post (multimedia)
In the latest episode of its series on climate change called “Gone in a Generation,” the Post tells the stories of New Mexican pecan farmers in “[a] rich Rio Grande farming valley” who face “drier fields, rising heat, and a cross-state ‘water war.’”