Hear the one about the healthy ocean?
USA Today, Monday April 21, 2003, page 6D in the LIFE

Conservationists are using stand-up comedy to attract public attention to declining ocean ecosystems. A Web-based project laden with laugh lines launched today at www.shiftingbaselines.org. It focuses on raising the lowered expectations the public has developed about what constitutes a healthy ocean. ''Every ecosystem I studied is unrecognizably different from when I started,'' says project director Jeremy Jackson of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, a co-sponsor along with the Ocean Conservancy and the Surfrider Foundation. The consortium asked Tom Arnold, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Bill Maher, Peter Mehlman (co-creator of Seinfeld) and Mindy Sterling (Austin Powers) to select five spiels on the shifting-baselines theme from more than 40 stand-up comedians to lure readers to read up on the environment. One routine on the Web site features Guy Stevenson's quip: ''In 2003, the federal government changed its definition of pristine to 'lands untouched by civilization with the exception of oil rigs, drilling equipment, pipelines, refineries, workers, housing -- and the drugs, prostitution and gambling that follows said housing.' ''