In his recent announcement about reorganizing government, President Obama gave an example right out of my book Blue Frontier. "As it turns out, the Interior Department is in charge of salmon in fresh water, but the Commerce Department handles them in saltwater. Apparently, this all had something to do...

I'm old enough to remember where I was the day Kennedy was shot and now where I was ten years ago on 9/11. Below is a brief excerpt from my memoir Saved by the Sea - A Love Story with Fish.
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"Nice weather," Wayne, the ship's...

Tuesday July 19 marked the first anniversary of President Obama signing an Executive Order establishing the first ever National Ocean Policy for the United States to protect our public seas and the jobs and communities that depend on their health. So where are we one year out?

A recent...

What do a high school student from LA, a scientist who studies the DNA of whales, the president of a Central American Nation, a former Coast Guard Commandant and a Washington Post reporter have in common? They're among the winners of this year's top ocean honors.

The fourth annual...

We have to stop dumping radioactive water, oil and dead terrorists in our ocean and treat it with more respect which is why I'm headed to Washington D.C. later this month. OK, let me explain.

The end of Osama bin Laden hopefully marks the beginning of the...

The National Ocean Policy Coalition has one aim -- to undermine America's National Ocean Policy. Why am I not surprised?

In 1994 I wrote a book called, The War Against the Greens, about how industries created anti-environmental front groups and nurtured a 'Wise Use' movement that, along with traditional rallies...

It may be too soon to know if the expanding global access to electronic media both new and old, from video cell-phones and Facebook to Al-Jazera and CNN, is making the world more intimate or more alienated (remember "Compassion Fatigue"). What is clear is it's collapsing the lines...

Former Wall Street Journal editor Frank Allen once pointed out that environmental stories don't break, they ooze.

The thing about breaking news like Egypt's people power revolution is its immediacy.

Wars, revolutions and natural disasters provide vivid portraits of humanity at the extreme, bringing out the best...

Upton Sinclair once said, "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it."

The new chair of the House Natural Resources Committee, Representative Doc Hastings (R. WA), doesn't understand President Obama's new ocean policy. In the 2010 elections his largest...

• New U.S. Ocean Policy: President Obama issued an executive order in July to implement conservation-based management of our public seas -- based on marine spatial planning, or what former Coast Guard Commandant Thad Allen calls, "urban planning into the water column." It would try to coordinate everyone (government...

It's 30 years ago today, December 2, that the Salvadoran National Guard murdered Ita Ford and three other U.S. church women. I did the last interview with Ita a short time before her death.

To those of us covering the war in El Salvador at the time,...

While the recent elections were seen as a setback for national environmental advocates, for the small city of Richmond in San Francisco's East Bay, it marked a tidal shift in a seven-year battle to protect Point Molate, the last large undeveloped headland on the bay from a mega-casino. Here, at...

While the recent elections were seen as a setback for environmental advocates nationally, for the small city of Richmond in San Francisco's East Bay it marked a tidal shift in a seven-year battle to protect Point Molate, the last large undeveloped headland on the bay from a mega-casino. Here at...

So a guy goes into his neighborhood bar and in a dark booth in the back spots Senator Mary Landreiu of Louisiana with President Obama and some secret service agents. "Mr. President, Senator, what are you doing here?" he asks.

"The President's agreed to reopen deep water drilling in the...

The government's own BP oil spill commission issued a recent report stating that the Obama administration underestimated the size of the BP oil eruption and then overestimated how much of it had gone away after the well was finally capped 220 million gallons later. On July 19, just after...

Five years ago the U.S. Coast Guard were the first responders after Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans and the Gulf Coast, saving over 33,500 lives when other parts of government seemed immobilized. They were dubbed 'the New Orleans Saints.'

Still, their role as the lead federal agency...

With Labor Day and the end of a too hot summer approaching the question everyone, or at least some people between New York and Delaware, are asking is, What does it take to be a real Jersey Girl? MTV's runaway hit show Jersey Shore, which has redefined reality TV (as...

Imagine if the New York police had been running the BP disaster response in the Gulf of Mexico for the past four months while still expected to keep the streets of the Big Apple safe. With 41,000 active duty personnel the U.S. Coast Guard is only slightly larger than the...

They've finally cemented up BP's runaway well (from above with a second relief well plug still to seal it from below). Unfortunately this comes after 220 million gallons of oil slimed the Gulf of Mexico. So what's the effect of a spill 20 times the size of the Exxon Valdez?...

If the new cap on the BP wellhead continues to hold we may be moving from containment to consequences. Still, it's hard to measure the long term impacts of the Deepwater Horizon Disaster on the Gulf of Mexico. By my second trip to the region last week there were over...