Rachel Weidinger's blog

Rachel Weidinger's picture

Oil Spill Turtle Photos + Ocean Plastic and Sea Skater Eggs + Pancakes: Sea Signals for Week of May 7, 2012

Submitted by Rachel Weidinger
on May 14, 2012 - 12:35pm

Oil Spill Turtle Photos
The story about Greenpeace releasing photos of oil-covered turtles from the BP Disaster, appeared first in the Washington Post on May 6th, but gained real social traction with a May 7th Mother Jones story. Boing Boing, and the Huffington Post coverage, along with additional stories and tweets, kept the story alive.

Number of online mentions (including blogs, social media, and forums) between May 7th and May 9th, 2012.

Amplification Action
At Upwell, we reached out to organizations and bloggers that have a vested interest in turtles and oil spill restoration, and who had recently posted about Gulf oil spill restoration efforts. Healthygulf.org posted about the story, and shared it with its network.

We also used Storify to document how the story spread across social media and to see who the key infuencers were on blogs and Twitter. As of this writing, the Storify had received 260 views on Storified and a handful of retweets.

Learnings
    •    Bloggers in smaller outlets were relatively easy to reach and interested in the big story
    •    Storify is an effective tool for sharing the life of a story, but it’s challenging to measure its impact, aside from views on the actual Storify.
    •    Bitly links cannot be used to share links to stories on Storify, but they can be embedded into the text between story blocks.
    •    If you use the automated tweeting function to notify Twitter users that they have been mentioned in the story, a Storify URL will be generated that you can’t track.  To measure impact, it’s better to tweet folks manually, and to use your own bitly link.

Ocean Plastic and Sea Skater Eggs
On May 8th, at 4:01 PM PT, Scripps Oceanography News released news of a Scripps study by Miriam Goldstein about how plastic trash is altering the ocean habitat of a marine insect, the Sea Skater (Halobates sericeus).  By the following morning, May 9, the story was covered by major news outlets and was shared by many ocean-focused

Rachel Weidinger's picture

Storify: Greenpeace FOIA release of photos BP Disaster

Submitted by Rachel Weidinger
on May 11, 2012 - 11:23am

A story about Greenpeace releasing photos of oil-covered turtles from the BP Disaster, appeared first in the Washington Post on May 6th, but gained real social traction with a May 7th Mother Jones story. Boing Boing, and the Huffington Post coverage, along with additional stories and tweets, kept the story alive.

We also used Storify to document how the story spread across social media and to see who the key infuencers were on blogs and Twitter. As of this writing, the Storify had received 265 views on Storified and a handful of retweets.

 

The Life of a Story: Greenpeace Obtains New Photos from the BP Disaster (with images, tweets) · upwell_us

Rachel Weidinger's picture

Are Humans and Reef Sharks Mutually Exclusive?

Submitted by Rachel Weidinger
on May 10, 2012 - 3:21pm

Over at Deep Sea News, a blog post last Monday asks whether humans and reef sharks are mutually exclusive.  The post summarizes a new paper in Conservation Biology, which “studied populations of reef sharks in the Pacific and attempted to reconstruct what the “starting” populations would have been before human activities began to affect them and before anyone thought to monitor reef shark populations.” The graph below demonstrates “the relationship between the density of sharks … and the number of humans living within 200km of the sampling site” and shows (with the exception of one outlier, highlighted by DSN), that “the relationship is heavily, heavily skewed.”

Photo Caption: This is a graph with a mysterious outlier

 

Notes DSN: “If this proves true then it may not be that humans are doing anything to the sharks per se, just not looking after the reef generally, and that is being reflected at the top trophic level.  However you slice it, their results are more grist to the mill that we need to be doing a better job with the conservation of both reefs and sharks, because sometimes those two things are inextricably intertwined.”

Rachel Weidinger's picture

Keep an Eye On: Battle over the Arctic

Submitted by Rachel Weidinger
on May 9, 2012 - 9:37am

Legal battles are brewing in the Arctic over Shell’s plans to conduct exploratory oil drilling in the Beaufort Sea, beginning next month, and environmental groups’ desire to stop them.

On Monday, Shell sued 13 environmental groups, “seeking a Federal Court order declaring it legally authorized to proceed with Arctic Ocean drilling this summer, despite the groups' complaints.” The move comes after Greenpeace activists confronted the Nordica, an icebreaker that is en route to the western Arctic to function as a support vessel for Shell’s drilling fleet, four times in four days in the North Atlantic:

20 Greenpeace Nordic activists boarded the Nordica in Helsinki, Finland. When the first team of activists was arrested, 22 more activists arrived onsite in two inflatable boats and three canoes. Two days later, six Greenpeace Nordic activists boarded the same vessel off the coast of Sweden and until Swedish authorities were called to the scene. Two days later, six Greenpeace Nordic activists boarded the same vessel off the coast of Sweden until Swedish authorities were called to the scene.  After 10 hours the activists were removed by a SWAT team and taken into custody. They were arrested under preliminary charges of aggravated trespass and arbitrary conduct.

Previous Greenpeace actions against other vessels in the fleet before their departure for the Arctic prompted Shell to seek – and receive – a protective order preventing Greenpeace from interfering with those vessels once they are on site. The new legal measure does not, however, address direct actions, but seeks to “prevent 12 other environmental groups from launching ‘last-minute legal challenges’ to its drilling.”

Why This Matters: The Arctic is emerging as the newest, and arguably most significant, environmental front line, especially as it relates to marine issues.

Pages