Last summer, while visiting family in Charlevoix, Michigan, I found myself with a crew of relatives at a stylish seafood restaurant on the lake. I was craving fresh seafood, so I pulled out my handy Seafood Watch Card (www.seafoodwatch.org) from the Monterey Bay Aquarium and prepared to order.

"What’s that? What are you doing?" asked a nervous looking anonymous parent figure.

"People outside of California don’t know about such things. You will embarrass our poor waiter."

Instead of backing down, I tried to educate. I told Anonymous Parent Figure that Seafood Watch Cards are the greatest things since sliced tofu when it comes to choosing sustainable seafood. The guides are pocket sized and fit in your wallet. They have three columns: The green column offers "best choices", listing fish that are abundant, well managed and caught or farmed in environmentally friendly ways. The yellow column offers "good alternatives", fish that may or may not be well farmed or caught. The red column states "avoid" and lists fish that are currently farmed or caught in ways that are harmful to marine life and the marine environment. Fish with a red asterisk are of concern due to mercury. Fish with a blue asterisk are certified as sustainable to the Marine Stewardship Council standard (www.msc.org).

I told her that with salmon, you should aim for Alaska wild-caught because wild Pacific salmon are among the most intensely managed species in the world. Salmon fisheries in California, Oregon and Washington are also well managed. Farmed Salmon, however, can escape from their ocean pens and threaten the wild salmon by competing for food and spawning grounds, and spreading parasites and diseases.

"Hmmmmm," said Anonymous Parent Figure.

The waiter approached. I asked if the salmon in the evening’s special was farmed or wild- caught. He stared at me, puzzled, and somewhat embarrassed.

Score one for Annoynomous Parent Figure.

However, he was sweet, open and willing to listen. I told him a bit about the different fishing methods and how some were environmentally friendly and some were not. I explained that dredging is a rake-like method that damages habitat and results in significant bycatch (caught, but unwanted marine life). Hook and lining is the old fashioned rod and line method and is mostly environmentally friendly. Purse seining is a popular method for catching tuna. This is where a boat releases a wall of netting that encircles a school of fish, herding them into the center. This method is one that often catches dolphin in the process. Public outcry has forced innovations in the method, but dolphin populations have yet to recover, and not all tuna is "dolphin safe". I also told him about salmon.

The waiter listened intently, nodding then shaking his head. He promised to tell his boss that we were concerned. He promised to ask the chef about the salmon and be more informed next time.

Score one for me.

Being informed about seafood, as a waiter, chef, restaurant owner or consumer is vital to the future of our waters. Fish populations in our oceans, lakes and rivers are diminishing, due in part to non-sustainable fishing. More than 75% of the world's fisheries are either fully fished or over-fished. With certain fishing practices, habitats suffer immense damage, as well. Consumers drive this industry, and therefore MUST make good decisions.

The Seafood Watch program helps make these decisions easier. The cards can be printed off the aquarium website and are varied for different regions. Other tools are available, such as cards you can leave at restaurants to thank them or cards you can leave that request that they become more informed. One hundred partner groups help to distribute the Seafood Watch cards, as well as educate the public about their choices. The Oakland Zoo is proudly one of them.

Recently, Anonymous Parent Figure visited me in Oakland and we found ourselves out to dinner again. As the waitress waited for us to peruse the menu, Anonymous Parent Figure took a deep breath and asked, "Is this salmon wild-caught or farmed?"

"Gee, I don’t know."

"Hmmm. Well, you should."

Score one for fish.

And if Mom can do it, can’t we all?

Amy Gotliffe is Conservation Cooordinator at The Oakland Zoo.

Ladybug Ladybug Fly Away Home! Each year Ladybugs fly in by the millions to winter in the East Bay's Redwood Regional Park. We meet naturalist Linda Yemoto who explains this phenomenon. But how these beetles know where to go is still one of nature’s mysteries.

Green Burials and California’s High Speed Rail (episode #104), which contains this story as a short segment, airs tonight on QUEST at 7:30pm on KQED 9, and KQED HD, Comcast 709. (full schedule)

You may also view the entire Ladybug Pajama Party story online.

Chris Bauer is a Segment Producer for television on QUEST, and is the producer for this story.

A little-known state agency is drawing up a plan to radically reshape California's transportation system by constructing a 700-mile long high-speed rail system that would send sleek bullet trains whizzing at speeds of up to 220 mph from San Francisco to Los Angeles within a decade. The $37 billion idea is to stay ahead of airport and freeway gridlock as California's population grows by 500,000 people a year. But will voters in 2008 approve the funding? And how do you make a train go faster than a Ferrari?

Green Burials and California’s High Speed Rail (episode #104) airs tonight on QUEST at 7:30pm on KQED 9, and KQED HD, Comcast 709. (full schedule)

You may also view the entire California's High Speed Rail” story online.

Chris Bauer is a Segment Producer for television on QUEST, and is the producer for this story.

Concerned about toxic embalming fluid, caskets made of rainforest hardwood, and bodies encased in vaults that never decompose, a small but growing number of undertakers is driving a new movement: green burials. We visit cemeteries in Marin and Sebastopol offering green burials, in which bodies are laid to rest in a simple pine casket or a shroud, graves are marked with natural or very simple grave markers, and families often locate their loved ones through a GPS computer chip.

Green Burials and California's High Speed Rail (episode #104) airs tonight on QUEST at 7:30pm on KQED 9, and KQED HD, Comcast 709. (full schedule)

You may also view the entire Green Burials story online.

Additional images are available for viewing and comment at the Green Burial - KQED QUEST flickr photo set.

Gabriela Quirós is a Segment Producer for KQED-TV, and is the producer for this story.

Whenever I talk about my astronomy research, I realize that for most people, the fascination begins with star-gazing. I can't say that I know much about the constellations (I do recognize the Big Dipper and Orion, and that’s about it) but it is a constant reminder of how little most people know what they are missing with the naked eye.

To really understand where our small planet fits in, it’s helpful to look at the hierarchy of systems that are found in the universe. I think of this hierarchy in terms of size, running from small to enormous collections of objects. On the small end are solar systems, where a series of planets orbits around a central star. Galaxies like the Milky Way define the mid-range. Galaxy clusters, which are collections of thousands of galaxies, are the largest in this hierarchy.

The solar system everyone recognizes is our own, with nine… I mean eight… planets orbiting around the Sun. When I was in elementary school, they taught us “My Very Eager Mother Just Served Us Nine Pickles” as a reminder of the planets in our solar system. With the recent demotion of Pluto, I guess it's now "My Very Eager Mother Just Served Us Nachos".

Well, it turns out that we are not alone, or at least our solar system is not alone. There are now over 200 known solar systems in the Milky Way. These solar systems are very hard to find, since the planets that make the system do not emit light or "shine." Typically, these solar systems are identified through very careful observations of the central star. A central star, analogous to the Sun, displays a subtle wiggle or change in brightness with the passing of large planets in its system. These planets are known as extrasolar planets.

One person in the Bay Area community who is making serious headway in this research is Geoff Marcy at UC-Berkeley as part of the California and Carnegie Planet Search. Their team has discovered more than 100 extrasolar planets around nearby stars. No one really knows how many of these planets are out there. For all we know, every sun-sized star has its own solar system. It’s just going to take some time to find them all.

Getting back to the hierarchy, these solar systems are just a small component of our own galaxy, the Milky Way. The Milky Way is just one of many hundreds of millions of known galaxies, many of which lie in even larger systems called galaxy clusters. I'll come back to these topics in later posts as I build the backbone essential to understanding the principles of current cosmology and astrophysics research happening in the Bay Area. In the meanwhile, please tell your friends and family that Pluto really never was a planet. I swear.

Kyle S. Dawson is engaged in post-doctorate studies of distant supernovae and
development of a proposed space-based telescope at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

I've had all seven sacraments of the Catholic Church. I almost died when I was a baby and had the Last Rites before its name was changed to the Sacrament of the Sick. I was baptized, made my first confession when I was in second grade and during the rest of elementary school at St. Camillus in Silver Spring, Maryland, had my first communion and was confirmed. I was ordained when I was 29, left the priesthood when I was 39, and got married when I was 45. So I've had all seven.

Anne Dillard, one of my favorite writers, wrote about people who've been told that they miss the forest for the trees. According to her, when you've seen all the trees you've seen the forest. I think she's right. I have a bachelor's degree in metallurgical engineering and materials science, a masters degree in bioengineering, and a master of divinity degree. I used to think that I just had a hard time making up my mind. Now I think I just want to see all the trees. And I want to see everything together–call it the forest.

I'm a writer now. When I began working as the managing editor of Home Energy magazine, which covers energy efficient, healthy, affordable, and green home building and renovation, I did so because I had just left the priesthood, had no money, and needed to put a roof over my head and food on the table. Now I do it because a home is the place where it all comes together. Home is where we sleep, eat, rest, and relate to one another in the most intense ways–fighting, loving, working together, ignoring one another. Home is the planet writ small. Like people and plants, homes breathe; the air that homes breathe is the air that circles the planet. It's all there, the whole forest.

So it bothers me when scientists and religious people fight over who has the answers. Our planet has problems and it will take all of us to solve them. Scientists and religious people of integrity look for the truth of what connects us only in different ways. Religion makes use of stories and rituals to connect us to one another in the present, past, and future. We're all going to die. We all suffer and we all rejoice. Science looks for that which binds the universe together and uses concepts and formulas to describe it. Either there is a Theory of Everything, or a lot of little Theories that like a mosaic, together make up the whole forest.

I believe that scientists and theologians of integrity get glimpses of the whole from time to time, and that’s what keeps them going. In the Catholic Church, heresy is defined as a partial truth that is promoted in a way that obscures the whole. Both religious people and scientists err when they promote a partial truth as the whole thing. It makes me angry when people claim a corner on the truth. You can’t put truth in a corner. It’s too big. We only get hints and guesses. But those hints and guesses are what will save the planet in the end.

Jim Gunshinan is Managing Editor of Home Energy Magazine. He holds an M.S. in Bioengineering from Pennsylvania State University, State College, Pennsylvania, and a Master of Divinity (MDiv) degree from University of Notre Dame.

Silicon Valley investors are betting that clean power is the Valley's next boom. With solar and other alternative energy industries evolving into big business, how are the faces of the environmental movement changing?

You may listen the “Investing in Clean Tech” Radio report online.

Amy Standen is a Reporter for QUEST and Radio News at KQED-FM.

Recently there's been much in the news about the quagga mussel, a native of the Ukraine that, with its cousin the zebra mussel, has wreaked havoc in the Great Lakes and has now been found in Lake Havasu. Experts fear the mussels could find their way into the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta– part of what is already the most invaded estuary on earth.

Invasive species arrive in the Delta and Bay through a variety of means: riding in ocean liner ballast water, hitchhiking on hulls of recreational boats, dumped from home aquariums. The sudden addition of a new variable can throw the whole ecological equation out of whack.

For example, the Asian clam, first spotted in the Bay in 1980s, has proved such an efficient filter feeder than it has contributed to crashing levels of plankton, the microscopic plants and animals that form the base of the food web. This in turn has had serious consequences for the native fish that feed on the plankton.

The best defense is preventing new invasives from becoming established. This past summer, The Bay Institute worked with scientists from UC Davis and the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center on a project to eradicate an invasive Japanese mud snail, Batillaria attramentaria, from Loch Lomond Marina in San Rafael (a project we hope to continue this year). Project lead Heidi Weiskel, a UC Davis graduate student, tells me it is the first attempt on record to eradicate a soft sediment invertebrate.

The snail is a threat because it competes with the native California horn snail and because it carries a parasite that can infect native fish. If its population were to grow too large, the snail could disrupt the mudflat ecosystem by creating a hard pavement of dead shells that can prevent shorebirds and others from foraging. So far, the snail's appearance in the Bay has been limited to Loch Lomond Marina, giving hope that it may be eradicated before it spreads to the rest of the Bay.

The eradication process was low-tech and Bay-friendly, with no chemicals involved (apart from the coffee fueling the volunteers). Community members– including families, students, Cub Scouts, and others– simply donned boots or old sneakers, went out, and methodically plucked the snails from the mudflats.

I found eradicating invasive mud snails a surprisingly meditative way to spend a Saturday. The snails' conical shells are only about an inch and well camouflaged in their muddy and pebbly surroundings. At first you can't imagine how you are going to find them. And yet, after a little time spent staring intently at the mud, that distinctive shell shape comes somehow into focus. Foreground distinguishes itself from background, and all at once you see the little guys everywhere. Then begins the process of removing them, snail by snail.

Controlling invasive species may seem like holding back the tide. Still, in the course of just five eradication days spread over three months, volunteers removed 69,000 snails, estimated to be half the population in the project area. Further, by following protocols established by the researchers, volunteers were contributing to our scientific understanding of effective eradications, even as they were helping the Bay.

All that, and the calmness of mind that comes of a morning spent meditating over mud.

Ann Dickinson is Communications Manager for The Bay Institute (www.bay.org), a nonprofit research, education, and advocacy organization dedicated to protecting and restoring San Francisco Bay and its watershed, “from the Sierra to the sea.”

I remember the first time I saw the "Sniff" paintings at the Albany Bulb. They were on sheets of plywood. Each was painted with surrealistic scenes such as drunken wolves driving hot rods and debauchery in the land of the dead. Each was signed by the mysterious art collective "Sniff." At least 15 of them formed an outdoor gallery along the north shoreline this strange dump just north of Golden Gate Fields.

Each piece could have hung on the walls of a museum. They would never make it there though. The sun and rain were taking their toll. It was like watching a Buddhist sand mandala being slowly swept away. Each moment with them was to be relished, but they were only a small part of the incredible collection to be found in this ephemeral art gallery.

Outsider art was scattered all around the man-made peninsula. Rebar snakes sprung from the heads of concrete medusa. Strange copper plates were cast with hieroglyphic scenes, and riveted to chunks of cement. Iconic graffiti of cubist knights, and mayan calendar figures dotted the landscape. Elsewhere twisted, rusting, red metal had been transformed into a guardian angel, its feathered wings poised for flight or to give a demonic attacker a bad case of tetanus.

Elsewhere, an obsessive compulsive had lugged way too many bags of concrete all the way out to the Bulb's tip. They had mixed the concrete, created a bunker shaped like a heart, and painted the walls gold. Then they had inscribed transcendental poetry upon it. When one climbed the stairs to the roof, they could look down on the diamond and the club made out of gravel on sand. But there was no spade.

Elsewhere on the island, a stalwart, wooden dragon stood guard on the side of a hill while giants made of orange Styrofoam battled the sun's rays. The City of Albany has been working on plans to erase this artistic wilderness, and turn it into a more traditional park, or something, anything else but "that eyesore". After all, the place is a rag-tag palace for vagrants. The police have been called in several times to clear out the homeless encampments, but they just keep coming back.

Normally society could care less about whether the homeless stay or go. They wouldn't even mind if the dogs that fetch balls on the beach have to be kept on a leash. But they do care about the amazing art, and that's why there has been such a controversy for so many years.

True the place is a dump. But it's the coolest dump ever… and it's wild. Heaven knows we could always use more wild things in our mundane lives.

How long will the Bulb be around? Who knows… All I know is that I'll be sad when it goes away. <sniff>

Donovan Rittenbach is the Web Manager for the California Academy of Sciences. He has a Master’s Degree in Multimedia, and 12 years of web & multimedia industry experience.

Take stroll through San Francisco's Conservatory of Flowers with Executive Director Dr. John Peterson and learn about the building's Victorian history and rare collection of exotic Dracula orchids.

Condors vs. Lead Bullets and Genetic Testing (episode #103), which includes this short story, airs tonight on QUEST at 7:30pm on KQED 9, and KQED HD, Comcast 709. (full schedule)

You may also view the entire San Francisco Conservatory of Flowers" story online.

Chris Bauer is a Segment Producer for television on QUEST, and is the producer for this story.