I hear a lot about how to be better — in terms of a number of factors, but largely sustainability — about my eating habits.  Buy organic.  Buy local.  Eat less meat.  Buy wild fish — caught sustainably — instead of farmed. But here’s one I hadn’t heard before — buy frozen.

Some recent research (NYT article— may require login; Environmental Science & Technology paper – requires subscription; Ecotrust press release — freely accessible) indicates that, in terms of salmon, buying fish that is flash-frozen at sea prior to shipment (instead of shipped fresh to markets or restaurants) makes a bigger environmental impact than any other factor.

The reason: Most salmon consumers live far from where the fish was caught or farmed, and the majority of salmon fillets they buy are fresh and shipped by air, which is the world’s most carbon-intensive form of travel. Flying fillets from Alaska, British Columbia, Norway, Scotland or Chile so that 24 hours later they can be served “fresh” in New York adds an enormous climate burden, one that swamps the potential benefits of organic farming or sustainable fishing.

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One of the first things I wanted to investigate when I was thinking about this blog was the effectiveness of petitions — particularly online petitions.  They just seem so useless to me.  And yet, a number of major non-profit organizations who generally seem to know what they’re doing sometimes ask me to sign online petitions.  Maybe there was something to them, after all.

I emailed a few non-profits to ask about the effectiveness of petitions as well as other forms of activism.  The answers that I got (which I’ll discuss more in future posts) did not address petitions specifically, and most of them said something along the lines of, “It’s hard to measure these things.”  I decided to do some of my own research — by which, for the moment, I mean “I used Google so you don’t have to.”

» Continue reading “Petitions: effective?”