30 July 2010          About Us             Contact Us

Search the DSCC site :

2009

ICES symposium, 27-30 Apr, Azores, Portugal

 


Dr Elliott A. Norse

"We can always resume trawling but we can not put back 1,000 year-old ecosystems."

Dr. Elliott A. Norse is President of Marine Conservation Biology Institute (MCBI) in Redmond, Washington USA, President of the Society for Conservation Biology's Marine Section and a Pew Fellow in Marine Conservation.

After earning his B.S. with honors in biology, geology and music from Brooklyn College, he studied the ecology of blue crabs in the Caribbean for his Ph.D. at the University of Southern California and his Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of Iowa. To catch more blue crabs for his dissertation research, he went out on trawlers off Mexico and Colombia in the early 1970s, thus witnessing firsthand the extraordinary amount of bycatch from trawling operations.
More information
More Information
• Dr. Norse spoke as part of the scientists' tour on 19 April at a lunch time briefing at the European Parliament, Brussels.
Contact: Mirella von Lindenfels
Tel: +44 20 88825041

• Watch the following videos:
A one time opportunity
The destructiveness of high seas bottom trawling

• MCBI's website.

• Scientists' Statement on Protecting the World's Deep-Sea Coral and Sponge Ecosystems.

• Deep sea coral photos and video


In 1978 he began working on ocean policy at the US Environmental Protection Agency, then the President's Council on Environmental Quality (where he defined biological diversity as the goal of conservation), the Ecological Society of America, The Wilderness Society and The Ocean Conservancy, before founding MCBI in 1996.

His 130+ publications include Conserving Biological Diversity in Our National Forests (1986), Ancient Forests of the Pacific Northwest (1990), Global Marine Biological Diversity: A Strategy for Building Conservation into Decision Making (1993), the seminal paper on "Disturbance of the seabed by mobile fishing gear: A comparison with forest clearcutting" in Conservation Biology (1998), and Marine Conservation Biology: The Science of Maintaining the Sea's Biodiversity (2005, in press).


• • • • • • • • •