Jennifer Marohasy

MICHAEL Crichton wrote the Oscar-winning science fiction adventure Jurassic Park. But screen writing was not his first career, he studied medicine at Harvard, and later in life became very concerned about environmentalism and science, and the difficulty of sorting fact from fiction. In a lecture to the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco in September 2003 [...]

BIASED media coverage of natural resource use issues should be fertile ground for the ABC’s Media Watch, but despite efforts to draw their attention to this have displayed little or no inclination to cover it in the past. Then again, as some of the worst examples of biased coverage of environmental issues have emanated from [...]

Rather than rejuvenating the scallop bed, closure just let scallops die of old age.  More here

I visited the State Library of South Australia today looking for information on species of fish caught by the Ngarrindjeri in the Lower Lakes at the time of European settlement. It is evident from the writing of the Reverend George Taplin (who ran the mission on the Narrung Peninsula) that there were Murray Cod in the Lakes [...]

Voltage coursing through electrical barriers designed to keep invasive Asian carp out of the Great Lakes may need to be raised to keep out juvenile fish, U.S. officials said on Friday.   Read more here.

Yesterday, Wakool farmer John Lolicato told me about recent fish kills in the southern Riverina.   Click here to listen to our conversation: WS450079    The fish kills were caused by black water with tens of thousands of Murray Cod dying over the last four years.   The enormous (1.4 metre long) Murray Cod being held up by two farmers is just one of [...]

I stayed in a house by the Murray River just upstream from Barham in the Central Murray Valley in November 2007.  Every morning I drank a large glass of water from the kitchen tap; water that had been pumped straight from the river.   The water tasted fine, and I didn’t get sick.    In the afternoon, [...]

THERE is now a website where, at least theoretically, anyone can download near-real time data on ocean temperatures, salinity and currents for the Australian marine environment.    The Australian government contributed $52 million to the development of the Integrated Marine Observing System (IMOS) developed by the University of Tasmania with support from CSIRO Marine and Atmospheric [...]

UNLUCKY fishermen are all alike: We don’t know how to see.  Read more here.

A VERY large American philanthropic organisation based in Philadelphia, PEW, has a few projects on at the moment.  In Washington DC it’s renovating and refurbishing a building in what it describes as “the heart of the nation’s capital”.  According to its website seven floors will be for its staff and three floors for other NGOs (non-government, non-business [...]