Red, Green, and Blue

Wangari Maathai, founder of the Green Belt movement and winner of the 2004 Nobel Peace Prize, criticised many forestry projects this week.

She was giving the keynote address at the second World Agroforestry Conference in Nairobi and her concern was that imported tree species often became invasive and when they did so, two things happened. Either the trees took over the ecosystem and then, when they were felled, left nothing behind, or they damaged elements of the environment that were essential to local people and wildlife. She used the example of eucalypts, which are often planted in African agroforestry programmes and said, ‘they [the trees] are over promoted for commercial reasons. These trees are good for beauty but consume a lot of water when they are planted along rivers, wetlands and water shed areas.’ Maathai fears that such plantings cause havoc in Kenya’s complex biodiversity. Read the rest of this entry »

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce wants to force the Environmental Protection Agency to hold a “trial” on climate change. Characterizing it as the “Scopes monkey trial of the 21st century,” the trial would come complete with witnesses, cross-examination, and a judge to “rule” on whether human activity is contributing to dangerous climate change.

Opponents to the idea assert the idea all but abandons the scientific method, upon which modern civilization depends, in favor of what Brenda Ekwurzel, a climate scientist for the Union of Concerned Scientists says is reminiscent of “the Salem witch trials, based on myth.”

Read the rest of this entry »

Americans of a certain age grew up with a very common stock political caricature as part of our culture: he (invariably a man) was a Southern Gentleman with a quick wit and syrupy drawl, never without his vested suit and pocket watch, and—at least in popular satire—always with one hand cradling a well-chomped cigar and the other out for a bribe. To some extent, he was epitomized by Boss Hog. But, that was then.

Today, one political caricature resonates in American pop culture like no other, and he is the Simpsons’ Mayor Quimby. Rarely if ever has an animated character drawn so many of traits, mannerisms and context from one living person so directly. Mayor Quimby is Senator Edward Kennedy, making the late Liberal Lion from Massachusetts the most well-known and widely-recognized political figure in generations.

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This week’s Camp for Climate Action is actually a training event, taking place within sight of the City of London and preparing activists for the UN Climate Conference in Copenhagen.

The camp aims to provide volunteers with information on four aspects of Climate Change:

1) education
2) direct action
3) sustainable living
4) building a movement to effectively tackle climate change.

Tar Sands damage Canada via British involvement

It’s that second point that has brought five representatives of the Cree First Nations to the camp – they are highlighting the involvement of British corporations in the tar sand extraction taking place in Canada. A spokesman from Fort Chipewyan said that ‘British companies such as BP and Royal Bank of Scotland … are driving this project, which is having such devastating effects on our environment and communities.’

The Cree representatives say that the tar sand mining destroys ancient forestry, contaminates water systems with toxins and disrupts wildlife, which then threatens the aborigine lifestyle of the First Nations. The spokesman said it was ‘… the biggest environmental crime on the planet’ and that it was able to continue because very few people in Britain realised it was happening. BP and Shell oil companies are both involved in extracting oil from the tar sands of Alberta – the oil is removed by using water under intense pressure, a process which uses up natural resources, requires high levels of energy and produces higher CO2 emissions. Royal Bank of Scotland is now part-owned by the British government following its financial difficulties and is being targeted by the Cree representatives because it has been a major funder of tar sand extraction schemes.

Climate Camp Mystery Location

The exact site of the camp is not yet known although campers are already arriving in the Greater London Area – the village will ‘spring up’ overnight on Wednesday and open on Thursday: the organisers fear the police may try to prevent the camp being built if they have advance warning of its location.

Alberta courtesy of fotographix.ca at Flickr under a creative commons licence

We’ve all got used to the idea of a supply chain for products and the ‘reporting’ of that supply chain so that consumers can make decisions based on the ethicality or origin of a product or recognise its pedigree as a fair-trade, recycled, animal-friendly, organic, packaging free or whatever-else-is-the-current-preoccupation kind of purchase.

But there are supply chains we know almost nothing about, even when their ‘end product’ is a subject of hot and angry debate.

Read the rest of this entry »

Subsistence farmers in Bolivia have been given help to change their technology – moving away from pipe and sprinkle irrigation systems to an aeons-old technique of hand-built raised clay platforms that are surrounded by canals.

The platforms, called camellones, can be up to eight feet above the level of the fields they support, have two purposes: they protect seeds and crops from being washed away by floods and the water stored in the canals can be used when the river system is low, to irrigate the crops.

The camellone construction system is pre-Columbian dating back to around 1000BC to AD1400, which shows that communities, then, as now, faced the problem of flooding succeeded by drought. And this may have been one of the causes of collapse for those ancient cultures, because when workers were diverted from building and maintaining agricultural systems to joining armies, there may have been famines. In modern day Bolivia, serious floods in the past three years have caused more than £119 million of damage to agricultural systems. It’s hoped that with climate change driving more river flooding and more drought, reverting to old technology could help communities cope with water levels rising even as rains reduce.

Around 400 families have been supported by local and international charities to create camellones in five areas to grow corn, cassava and rice.  The first results look good, as the Amazonian floods have now receded, and where the nutrients in the soil would normally be washed back into the river, the platforms have remained above the floods and conserved the rich vegetative topsoil that can grow better crops than the sandy subsoil.

The downside of ancient systems

If you’re thinking it all sounds too good to be true, you could very well be right. This kind of preliminary report on an agricultural or technological ‘throw-back’ is often followed by a bleak silence. The reasons for this are often more political than environmental and include:

1) The cost of investment in building and maintaining such systems, which is subsided by charities for three or five years and then the charity funding moves on and nobody is motivated to carry on the work
2) The transfer of local power from hierarchical systems (which are often based on government or international aid and support) to individuals who may be low ranking, illiterate and unable to drive forward change outside their own behaviour
3) The failure to recognise that while subsistence farmers claim to want to be self-sufficient, such projects tend to recruit the young, healthy and confident: all it takes is illness in the family, a child to win a scholarship or a vehicle or house to need substantial repairs and that family is likely to move away from growing crops to eat back into growing cash crops that generate income to meet their needs.
4) Calls on local labour – if a road or resort is built nearby, all the available labour may be pulled from agriculture to work on the cash-generating project.

What such projects need is a longer term investment, along with social support to ensure that the community recognises that the new systems can deliver everything that cash crops or illegal forestry did.

Bolivan market courtesy of PJFurlong06 at Flickr under a Creative Commons Licence

Pirates may be figures of romance, like Captain Jack Sparrow, or historical fact, like the Viking raiders, but what they haven’t been, until the last few years, is a statistical risk. And that’s surprising, because piracy has always been with us.  However, in the past five years, the ‘menace’ of piracy has begun to have serious impacts on international waters, and the worst peril is the inadvertent one.

Two pirate attacks a week in 2008

Around 120 reported pirate attacks were recorded in 2008, with fifty of them including hostage taking as part of the attack. Large numbers of crew have been kidnapped, exactly how many is unknown, although six crew people on registered vessels have been killed in the past twelve months.  Part of the issue is that many of the ships that are attacked by pirates are not registered: they are artisanal fishing vessels or close-to-shore craft like barges and dredgers, coal transporters and other large but slow craft that may not be registered with marine organisations, and so there is no knowing how many are attacked and/or how they deal with those attacks. It’s certainly the case that some fishing captains pay off one pirate captain to protect them from others, turning the pirate vessel into a kind of marine sheepdog.

The Somali coast is notorious for attacks, including those on cruise ships that have caused some lines to reroute cruises to avoid the Gulf of Aden.  But the most recent apparent attack has been on a Russian cargo vessel that travelled through the British Channel, apparently with the pirates on board and in charge, before being located by Russian forces near the Cape Verde islands.  And the ship appears to have been attacked twice, once in the Baltic and the second time off the Portuguese coast.

Pirates have GPS and AK47s, not cutlasses and rum

The range of piracy is vast, from simple boarding at night and opportunistic theft, a scenario in which the vessel may not even be aware it’s been attacked until morning, when fixtures and fittings are missing, through to strike attacks with many small high-speed boats being launched from a mother ship that coordinates the activity through radio communication, using GPS tracking to pinpoint targets. These small boats have been armed with rocket-propelled grenades, and assault rifles. There have also been times when pirates have disguised themselves as naval patrol boats in order to board unsuspecting larger vessels.

This more sophisticated form of piracy appears to be well-developed, with the pirates targeting high value cargos that can be easily unloaded from the hijacked vessel.  The fear is that one day, their intelligence system will break down and instead of targeting a container ship or small oil tanker, they will end up in possession of a chemical carrier or a ship carrying spent nuclear materials.

Environmental risks escalate the longer a ship is held to ransom

Ransoms are a large part of the piracy equation – so far, the highest publicly acknowledged ransom has been the one paid for the Saudi Arabian oil tanker, Sirius Sta, which carried around £50 million of crude oil and was ransomed for around £15 million. For these ship ransoms to work, the vessel has to be under the control of the pirates for a considerable period of time, often meaning that pirates with little or no knowledge of navigation are piloting huge vessels through complex waters – the risk of an environmental disaster in these conditions is very high, which is one reason that crews are advised to comply with pirate demands and to sail the vessel to their orders. The highest level of risk is that pirates will take a vessel they cannot manage, will refuse crew cooperation and will run a highly toxic or dangerous cargo into heavily used waters where it will crash or founder.

There isn’t much international cooperation on this issue: some regional initiatives, such as the one launched by Indonesia, Malayasia and Singapore has been successful in removing many pirate crews from the Malacca Straits, but the pirates simply relocate to another area. The EU task force working in the Indian Ocean seems to be having little effect and while many nations have ships in that area to protect their interests, including the USA and Russia, there is no coordination of effort. Possibly there won’t be, until a massive oil or chemical spill forces a united political response to the actions of pirates.

Old map of Cape Verde courtesy of Norman B Leventhal map centre at the BPL at Flickr under a creative commons licence

This week’s protestors all have similar objectives – they want better local land use, and more consideration for the needs and behaviours of many different forms of land user.

Utahns want their recreational space back

Around 3,000 Utahns marched on their state Capitol last weekend, to protest federal control of their open spaces. Their complaint is that forests and other lands are increasing being closed or having only restricted access and their protest is staged both against the federal government and environmental protestors who ask for areas of land to be turned into reserves.  The protest attracted a wide range of people from farmers and hunters through to walkers and those who enjoy off-road riding: many protestors rode motorcycles, four-wheelers or other forms of all-terrain vehicle.  The local Representative Mike Noel, said, ‘If you want to see what it’s like to live in a socialist regime, go to southern Utah.’

French beach users want less green slime

In Brittany, France, environmental groups have launched a range of protests from petitions, to placards, to demand for new legislation to remove algae from local beaches. The problem is not just unsightliness or odour – the concentration of the algae caused a horse to die, and its rider to collapse, after they both fell victim to fumes given off by the rotting material.  An autopsy confirmed that the fumes killed the horse, and the rider’s owner has started legal action against ‘person unknown’ – but the assumption is that if the case gets to court, it will be local farmers who will be the subject of the action.  A local environmental activist says that intensive farming practises cause chemicals from animal feed to enter local water supplies and that these chemicals cause the toxic gases in the rotting algae. Local authorities say they have made efforts to reduce the quantity of farm effluent that is released into the sea. Some towns have spent a lot of municipal money on algae reduction schemes because they fear it puts off tourists. However, scientists say it isn’t a systemic problem and there is no widespread danger to beach users.

Puget Sound won’t have another pier

In Puget Sound, a dock isn’t being built. The water reserve on Maury Island has been a battleground for years – Glacier Northwest wanted to build a pier which would support pipelines carrying fine sand out onto the water to load barges. Local protestors were ready to chain themselves to the construction cranes or form a barrage of kayaks to block access to the pier, but a federal judge made it unnecessary – ruling that such projects needed stricter environmental review. It wasn’t enough, ruled Judge Martinez, to consider the individual impact of a building or development, the cumulative effect of all built and planned building had to be factored into the equation. He went on to say, ‘No single project or human activity has caused depletion of the salmon runs or the near-extinction of the … orca, or the general degradation of the marine environment of Puget Sound. Yet every project has the potential to incrementally increase the burden upon the species and the Sound.’ Local residents, who’ve been fighting the development, were jubilant, but Glacier Northwest feel the judgement is unsound because it means they must remove the sand with trucks which means more environmental impact on roads and use of fossil fuels.

Puget Sound courtesy of Brian Teutsch at Flickr under a creative commons licence

Drought is something we think of as being substantial and dramatic – months in which rain doesn’t fall, monsoons that never happen. But the truth about drought is that it is much more insidious – when average rainfall drops, crops fail even though rain happens and can appear plentiful.

Monsoon failure threatens farmers

In India, right now, the monsoon is failing to deliver. Yes, there has been rain most days between June and now, but the actual rainfall has been only a quarter of the usual vast deluge. Around 80% of India’s agricultural land is close to drought conditions, and the monsoon rains will end in September. The fear is twofold: that the rains won’t arrive, and that they will, telescoping immense rainfalls into the last few weeks of monsoon and causing flash floods and subsidence. This year’s rainfalls, so far, are the weakest since 2002, and 2002 was the worst year for Indian agriculture for more than fifty years. Food security is fragile in a country with a young population, greedy for consumer goods, and unwilling to spend hours on cultivating subsistence crops. Read the rest of this entry »

The first food security assessment ever carried out by a UK government has been published, and it says that the country needs to change the way food is produced and the way it is processed, to maintain a healthy and affordable food ‘base’ in the future.

Food security story has changed

While Winston Churchill’s government did undertake food security surveys during World War II, these encompassed food production across the ‘Commonwealth and dominions’ so this new food security assessment is a snapshot of what the UK has been doing well and badly since the early 1950s.

The Department of Environment Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA) says that the UK has a strong food system, which is typified by diverse food supplies and a strong distribution network, but will be challenged when it comes to maintaining sustainability in this food supply. The challenge of a growing and aging population is complicated by the need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and adapt to climate change, both of which will require changes to the location of crops and the kind of food grown.  Water is a key issue and the depletion of fish stocks around British territorial waters is a concern.

Food and health

Another key concern is the relationship between food and health and the report says that ‘diet-related illness’ costs the UK ‘billions’ of pounds a year.

The report also contains draft indicators for the sustainability of the food system – once agreed, these indicators will be used to measure future food security issues and are hoped to serve as an early warning system. They will include recognising hikes in oil prices that affect the cost of food production severely.

A final substantial challenge is ensuring that current food production methods doesn’t damage or limit the natural resources on which future food production may depend.

The UK strategy for future food security will be published later in 2009, building on this report and on a consultation process that follows the report’s launch.

Food shop courtesy of Nick Saltmarsh at Flickr under a creative commons licence