Conservation Organizations Join Legal Effort to Protect Endangered Blue Whale

SAN FRANCISCO— Friends of the Earth, Pacific Environment, and the Center for Biological Diversity, national and international conservation organizations with a combined membership of more than 120,000 people, today joined a notice of intent to sue the National Marine Fisheries Service (submitted by the Environmental Defense Center in August) for the agency's failure to implement the 1998 Blue Whale Recovery Plan. Among other actions, the recovery plan mandates that the Fisheries Service identify and implement methods to eliminate or reduce blue whale mortalities from ship strikes. The agency has failed to take this required action for more than a decade, despite the ship-strike deaths of at least five blue whales in Southern California in 2007, and two additional ship-strike mortalities along the California coast in October 2009. Tags: carbon offsetting, carbon offsets, Carbon Credits, carbon footprint, carbon neutral, buy carbon credits