History
Todd Steiner, a herpetologist and then Director of the Save the Dolphin Project, an affiliate organization of the Earth Island Institute, launched STRP to help strengthen sea turtle protection policies at the local and international level. Steiner had traveled to Nicaragua to assist local communities in protecting their nesting populations of sea turtles. When he returned to the United States Steiner learned that the sea turtles that were protected in Nicaragua were being killed in Mexico to supply shells for the Japanese luxury apparel market. The sea turtle is a highly migratory species that crosses national boundaries as part of its natural life cycle.
STRP joined international efforts to end the trade in endangered sea turtles by organizing protests at the Mexican and Japanese consulates in the United States and generating thousands of letters and phone calls of protest. Mexico banned the killing of sea turtles and Japan ended its illegal trade in endangered sea turtle parts for luxury items.
Since 1989, STRP has attempted to address other threats facing sea turtles at nesting beaches and in the ocean where sea turtles spend most of their time. This has included protecting critical nesting habitat in Central America, seeking to establish a marine reserve for the Kemp's Ridley sea turtle in Texas, developing community-based projects to protect local sea turtle populations in the Western Pacific, preventing the capture of sea turtles by industrial fishing operations worldwide, and protecting critical foraging habitat for the near extinct Pacific leatherback turtle off the west coast of the United States.
In 1999 STRP broke off from its parent organization Earth Island Institute and was re-incorporated as the Turtle Island Restoration Network (TIRN). That same year STRP staff members marched with people dressed in sea turtle costumes at the World Trade Organization (WTO) meetings in Seattle to protest the conflict of trade rules with protecting endangered species. In September 2008 the movie titled Battle in Seattle was released that dramatizes the events surrounding the 1999 WTO protests.
Read more about this topic: Sea Turtle Restoration Project
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“The visual is sorely undervalued in modern scholarship. Art history has attained only a fraction of the conceptual sophistication of literary criticism.... Drunk with self-love, criticism has hugely overestimated the centrality of language to western culture. It has failed to see the electrifying sign language of images.”
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—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)