Protests from the tiny and good-tempered to the large and tragic this week, starting with the small and apparently ineffectual.

Ineffective Canadian protest

On Wednesday Royal Dutch Shell claimed that the oilsands mine that it operates at Muskeg River in northern Vancouver, Canada, was still running at full speed, despite the second day of environmental protest by Greenpeace activists who had arrived at the mine on Tuesday and prevented the operation of a super-sized dumper truck and a hydraulic mining shovel.  The protest is intended to show that the utilisation of Canada’s oilsands desposits is a contributor to worsening climate change.

Fatal Peruvian protest

In Peru, the government has acted on the financially troubled and environmentally challenged Doe Run Peru smelter. Their response to the closure of the site has been to give the operators a 30-month extension on their previous environmental clean-up deadline.  Production was halted in June, when banks cut off finance to the operating company: U.S.-based Renco Group. Now Renco says that it expects to obtain new loans and restart production now that 30 months have been added to the October deadline. If the plant reopens, around 20,000 jobs could be saved, but La Oroya will remain one of the most polluted towns on the planet for some time to come as spokesman has said Renco requires three years to undertake the clean-up. In unrest at the plant this week, one policeman died and at least three others were injured as protesters demanded the government reopen the smelter.

Polite Scottish Highlands protest

In the Scottish Highlands, a village of 270 persons has managed to obtain a 283 signature petition against proposed quarrying at Muir of Ord. Ord is famous for its distillery which produces whisky and several local businesses have lodged protests on environmental grounds. The entire 140-member Conon Fishings Syndicate has demanded safeguards for salmon fishing, and the Glen Orrin fish farm fears it could be at risk from flooding and reduced water quality. A local fruit farm has said the quarrying will have a detrimental effect on its business and adversely impact local wildlife. These protestors say this adverse effect on local business would counteract potential economic gains from the quarry which will extract sand and gravel from a 22-acre site over a 15 year licence period. Local wildlife like otters, ospreys and red kites may also be affected as their habitats are damaged, especially round local rivers.

Highlands photograph author’s own

The UK is undergoing a small crisis of parenting at present. The reason is that there has been an outbreak of E.coli, in one of its most virulent forms: 0157, which causes kidney damage in a small proportion of people contracting it, and the outbreaks have been linked to two city farms visited by children with their parents or as part of school groups.

City Zoos linked to disease outbreak

Forty-nine cases of E.coli have been linked to Godstone Farm in Surrey which has been closed, and its fellow site Horton Park Children’s Farm in Epsom, Surrey has closed voluntarily.  Other sites have closed in Nottingham and Devon. In Exmouth, Devon, a petting farm has closed after three children became ill, although there hasn’t been a direct link from their illness to a visit to the site.

However, in responding to the concerns, there appears to be a division of opinion in the governmental ranks. Professor Hugh Pennington who was chair of the Pennington Group enquiry into the Scottish Escherichia coli outbreak of 1996 and Chairman of the Public Inquiry into the 2005 Outbreak of E.coli O157 in South Wales, says parents should not allow under-fives to touch animals on farms. But the Department of Health (DoH) is maintaining that its current advice still stands: contact with animals is okay if good hand hygiene is undertaken.

Youngsters most at risk of harm

The concern is partly that very young children haven’t learned good hand hygiene and so are not good at washing their hands, and also that they are more prone to complications from E.coli than adults.  But there is a counter-argument being made by some health professionals that a child’s immune system is only built if it is given enough exposure to the wider world and depriving children of this kind of contact actually harms their ability to battle a range of viruses and infections.

One solution could be to provide better systems of hygiene, such as nail brushes that would allow people to ensure that they removed every lurking trace of the bacterium from their hands.  It is impossible to remove E.coli risk entirely from animals or their environment, even though most strains of the disease are very short lived outside the gut which is their natural habitat. So parents must decide whether to give their children the chance to get to meet animals, to improve their knowledge and development and to boost their immune systems through contact with the wider environment, or to reduce the risk of exposure to E.coli by avoiding such experiences as city zoos and agricultural or wild animals, altogether.

City Farm photograph author’s own

Recently the Food and Agriculture organisation (FAO) of the UN reported that millions more people may find themselves facing long term hunger and even starvation, in east Africa.

Climate change affects Africa

El Nino is blamed for changing rainfall patterns, and that, combined with inadequate harvests and increasing conflict has led to a drop in cereal production already affecting Uganda, Ethiopia, Kenya and Somalia. This could lead to an increase in the number of people relying on food aid.

Already more than 20 million people are receiving food assistance in the Horn of Africa region and their numbers are only likely to increase further towards the end of the year as El Nino drives heavy rains across the region, leading to mudslides on tree-denuded hillsides and the destruction of crops close to harvest time. The same rains often destroy roads and other infrastructure required to bring food aid and medicine into the region and can kill livestock or cause epidemic diseases in animals or human populations, all of which add to the complexity of managing food security in a region where conflict is endemic and border raids and ‘tribal’ disagreements are a standard response to poverty.

Horn of Africa countries badly hit

The worst hit country at present is Somalia, where the FAO claims that around half the population already need some form of aid; either food or medical supplies or both. Ethiopia is also expected to tip into reliance on emergency aid, as the second harvest of the year has failed and that means that food aid reliance could rise from 1.3 million to over six million people.

Kenya and Uganda are both expecting poor harvests, and Uganda has an even more disastrous prognosis as the ongoing unrest between government forces and rebels has forced people off their land or led them to stay barricaded in their compounds, resulting in less cultivation and a probably halving of the harvest of staple food crops. The current violence has left more than a million people in Uganda struggling with food security and the number is expected to rise steadily throughout the next twelve months, according to FAO experts.

Somali roadside wreckage courtesy of Carl Montgomery at Flickr under a creative commons licence

Thursday this week seems to have been a key day for environmental protest.

Chinese pollution protest

In Fujian Province, eastern China, villagers blockaded a road to protest against high levels of lead in the blood of their children. Local residents are convinced that the children’s excessive lead levels are the result of pollution from the  Huaqiang Battery Factory. Authorities have ordered China’s environmental protection bureau to increase oversight of the plant. The protest comes in the wake of several similar protests against industrial plants that have succeeded in getting polluting factories closed down.

Manure message

And in the UK, journalist and television presenter Jeremy Clarkson found his own bit of global warming, on his doorstep! Seven members of group Climate Rush visited his home and left steaming piles of horse manure on his drive, along with a message reading ‘This is what you’re landing us in’. The protestors, all women, chose Clarkson because he has a sceptical attitude to climate change. Clarkson is the presenter of Top Gear, a car programme, and has recently driven to the Arctic. In the past he has made inflammatory remarks about the effects of climate change, describing walkers who demand access to land as ‘urban communists’ and cyclists as ‘Lycra Nazis’.

New Zealand animal foods protest

And finally on the same day, 17 September, a New Zealand protest against palm kernel imports ended inconclusively.  The company, Fonterra, is a dairy supplies specialist and also a cooperative with over 11,000 dairy farming members in New Zealand.  Greenpeace claims there is both local and international concern about the nature of the palm oil industry globally and protestors chained themselves to the cranes of the ship delivering the imports.  Feed imports for livestock are an increasing contentious issue – Greenpeace says that corn and grain farmers in New Zealand have supported their action because their own products have been outpriced by cheap imported livestock foods and that endangered species are being further threatened by land clearance fuelled by the palm oil export industry. 14 protesters, charged with unlawful boarding of a ship, will be appearing in court next week.
New Zealand sheep courtesy of PhillipC at Flickr under a creative commons licence

Recent forest fires resulted in a quarter of the Angeles National Forest being burned to a crisp. More than 160,000 acres of wood and chaparral were destroyed.  Impassioned editorials are calling for the restoration of the forest’s beauty spots and trails, but what is the political cost of restoring the environment at a pace faster than nature’s, or of failing to do so?

Natural regenaration causes its own problems

The chaparral will reappear within a couple of seasons,  and the trees will begin to regenerate although for some species, seed germination won’t be possible until years of rain-water leaching remove the carbonised layer of ash and debris from the soil surface. While pines are willing to push through anything, oak is less rugged, and seedling trees don’t tolerate soil acidity as nearly as well, tending to fail before the end of their first year if they can’t get their roots down into rich humus.

Without tree cover, there is more damage on the way. If there are strong winter rains, then landslides will sluice fallen branches and trees down the steep slopes, pushing over remaining plants and creating debris jams in the watercourses with two results: denuded hillsides and flooded lower lands. Jams mean that water can’t run cleanly or well and that means that fish like trout, which rely on clear, fast running streams, die.

Recreation versus regenaration

But The Angeles is not just an area of forest – it’s a massive escape route for the people who live near it. From Patrick Swayze, who owned the five acre Rancho Bizarro at the foot of the forest, through to the poorest Angeleno who hitches to the Angeles to backpack the forest trails, the National Forest is both a green lung and a vast playground.

Not all visitors are enthralled by the beauty of the landscape: biker gangs frequently cut new trails through the woodland, and are hunted in turn by rangers, while gangs growing marijuana find or create clearings in which they can establish their crops. One of the strangest illegal activities in The Angeles is the searching out of hidden Native American sites, often to be found in caves hidden in the hills, and the looting of sacred items left there by previous generations of shamans and artists.

Another area of conflict that will appear very rapidly is that when a quarter of a habitat disappears, many animals need to relocate. They will move into other areas of the forest, but because human habitation now presses right up to the edges of the forest, they will also move into backyards and gardens, and while the odd rabbit or raccoon might not present too much of a problem, the migration of rattlesnakes will present many families with nightmares and mule deer stripping suburban yards of all their carefully nurtured plants will be very unpopular. And that’s without the mountain lions and bears …

Managing habitats requires funding and people

So funding the restoration of the habitat has to be a priority, for several reasons – the tourism factor, the need to ensure Los Angeles has enough greenery to act as a pollution soak, and the simple fact that failing to remedy the effects of fire will lead to greater problems later as invasive species, both plant and animal, take over the scorched spaces.

The great problem is that the earliest re-growth is the ecosystem that requires most management. Chaparral is a mixture of hardy small trees and shrubs such as scrub oak and ceanothus, Manzanita and bush rue, many of which will, in seven to twelve years, have become largely old, dead wood. This wood acts as a tinder to forest fires. And managing chaparral is a labour-intensive business – it has to be stripped out by hand or grazed by goats or mountain sheep, and the Forest has been understaffed by rangers, let alone foresters, for years.

However, there’s no obvious political will as yet to establish a large-scale reinvestment programme for the Forest and until some substantial replanning of the Forestry resources occurs, it will continue to be a fire risk.

National Forest courtesy of Rennet Stowe at Flickr under a creative commons licence

The leader of one of Australia’s most influential unions has said that green jobs is a ‘dopey term’. Tony Maher went on to suggest that many of the environmental campaigns run in his country are ‘judgemental nonsense’ and that industries like coal and steel will have more impact on both prosperity and the creation of a low carbon future than people realised. As an example, he claimed that carbon capture and storage schemes would require vast amounts of steel and that this steel should be produced in Australia by Australian workers.

Union fights for blue-collar jobs, not green-tinged ones

Maher is President of the Construction, Forestry, Mining and Energy Union, a constellation of workers that might look odd in many other parts of the world where ‘green’ industries like Forestry have separated themselves from extractive industries by putting logging in with extraction and keeping woodland husbandry and tree surgery in with farming.  For over ten years, Tony Maher has spoken on behalf of the union, which states in its publicity material that it is the principal union for both brown and black coal mining. Brown coal is relatively recent in origin and falls between peat, which is still largely vegetable in structure, and bituminous coal. It is often known as lignite.

Many people feel that brown coal should not be extracted because it should be kept as a reserve for the distance future when it may have developed further and become more like bituminous coal or black coal, which is more consolidated, deep black in colour and burns more readily with greater fuel efficiency.

Union leader says more coal, not less, will be burned in 2050

It’s not surprising that a union leader representing coal minders should object to ‘green jobs’ but Maher went much further than simply protesting against the removal of blue-collar industries, he added that he thought that by mid 2050 the planet would be using twice as much coal as at present and that the recent protest at Hazelwood power station was ‘just silly’.

Hazelwood Protestors Get Direct

‘Switch Off Hazelwood’ the campaigning group that organised the protests claims a successful weekend’s protesting, with more than 300 people turning up over 12 and 13 September, to use such direct action tactics as the Bikezilla (a number of bicycles welded together to form a giant bike, which was impounded by police), the Ministry of Energy, Resources and Silly Walks, the wombat warriors and forming a giant windmill with their bodies.  The police say 18 people were arrested, the action group says it was 22 individuals who were arrested and then released on bail.

While protestors said that removing Hazelwood could be the first step to creating an employment-rich, renewable energy manufacturing region, Maher’s comments suggest that the opposition to renewable energy is entrenched in the old blue-collar industrial regions as a threat to well paid jobs, as well as being perceived as a threat to lifestyle. Maher added that Australia produced some of the best-quality coking coal in the world, which was used to make premium quality steel and that it was ‘silly’ to raise objections to industries that created a large amount of Australia’s exports.

Switch off Hazelwood: Starring the Wombat Warriors courtesy of Sean Bedlam at youtube

The International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture (ITPGRFA) may not sound snappy, but its long-term aim is easily expressed: to act as a vegetable ark.  Part of the treaty requires the developed world to fund the preservation of diverse species of food crop around the world.

The funding is provided by richer nations, which have often become variety poor, and given to other nations, which are often poorer but have a wide range of plants which could act as an ‘agricultural insurance’ by maintaining biodiversity in essential crops.

The crops being preserved in this way include potatoes in Peru, corn and beans in Cuba and oranges in Egypt. The varieties need to be preserved to ensure that the planet has a range of foods that are more likely to be able to adapt to challenges ranging from climate change to pollution, from salination to the loss of pollinators like insects to the ability to resist diseases and predators.

Up to 90% of vegetable variety has been lost

Four basic food staples: rice, wheat, corn and potatoes make up more than half the total foodstuffs eaten on the planet, and in this group of staple foods, less than 150 varieties are grown commercially. Wheat has just five major varieties now grown globally on a commercial scale, of the more than 700 recorded varieties, many of which have been lost and others of which are only grown by hobby farmers or in remote districts where the ‘big five’ will not thrive. China alone has lost nearly 90% of the wheat varieties that were grown across the country sixty years ago and India grows only 10% of the rice varieties that appeared in its fields a hundred years ago.

This is not just a loss of diversity – a limited range of varieties means that those grown are more liable to damage by pests or disease. It also leaves many countries open to price hikes in the recently globalised commodity markets, meaning that many people simply cannot afford to buy the staple foods that used to grow in the fields around their houses.

ITPGRFA set up the Svalbard seed-bank last year, and now that a repository for 1.1 million plant varieties exists, it is focusing on the very many crops that can’t have their variety maintained in a seed bank, such as tuberous crops like potatoes.

International treaties depend on funding and have no national accountability

For a long time this part of the ITPGRFA programme looked as if it would never get off the ground because for five years the parties who were funding the seed conservation initiative couldn’t agree how to finance the on-site part of the project nor on contracts that guarantee any commercial use of the diverse species will bring financial benefit to the nations that have been conserving them. And perhaps the best news of all, for those already involved in ITPGRFA, is that the USA may be willing to join the scheme after expressing no interest in it under the previous administration.

Corn varieties courtesy of alecim at flickr under a creative commons licence

Judge Juan Nunez has recused himself in the case which focuses around claims that Chevron has been environmentally irresponsible in Ecuador’s Amazonian rainforest. He is the fifth judge to leave the case. While he refuses to discuss the reasons he has disqualified himself from giving judgment in the case, there has been a flurry of claim and counterclaim around Chevron’s release of video in which he appears to say to members of the ruling Alianza Pais party that he will decide against Chevron, although judgment is not due to be given until October.

Chevron further alleges Nunez was to be given a $15 million ‘commission’ by the party, for deciding against the oil company. Judge Nunez says the video was manipulated – Chevron say it was not and that they will bring a counter-case against him for corruption.

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September isn’t usually the silly season, but this week’s protests are all weird, wonderful, whacky or … missing!

No protest for polluted Peruvian town

On 31 August the union supporting workers at the currently suspended Doe Run smelter in Peru said they would not be protesting after all. They had planned  roadblocks and other protests the following day, to force the national government to fund the reopening of the struggling plant, but so few people turned up to a planning meeting that they are re-thinking their strategy.

Doe Run Peru’s smelter at La Oroya was closed in June when banks cut off credit and the government is refusing to extend the time-frame for a environmental cleanup, which could allow new loans to be negotiated. The plant must meet a 1 October deadline to clean up local conditions and establish better implement environmental controls but it says it lacks the money to fulfil its environmental contract and wants an extension of the deadline to mid 2010.

Around 3,000 employees and a further 16,000 indirect jobs are linked to the plant, which is why local union leaders want action on reopening the plant, even though the town of La Oroya is considered one of the most polluted on the planet.

Naked protest for PR company

On 1 September the London offices of Edelman’s were invaded by six naked environmentalists. The campaigners were protesting the PR firms involvement with Eon who are planning to rebuild the coal-fired power plant at Kingsnorth with two replacement ‘cleaner coal’ plants.

The protestors, some male and naked, some female and wearing knickers, superglued their wrists together in the lobby of the firm, while other protestors scale the roof of the building. The were removed by police carrying blankets.

Rocky protest in Australia

Latvala of Finland took a 2.2-second lead in the 4 September stage of Rally Australia in New South Wales but the first day’s racing was marked by protests.

Environmental activists had already forced the cancellation of two of the 15 stages when state police found boulders on the road at one rally stage. Later that day, the first car to take that stage was pelted with rocks. The driver, Hirvonen, was unharmed but the stage was stopped as there were concerns for the safety of the drivers and spectators.

Two groups, ‘No Rally’ and Peacebus, had already staged a campaign, trying to get the World Rally stage in Australia stopped because they claimed it would damage environment and frighten wildlife in the remote areas in which it is being held, a local government officer also tried to get a court injunction to prevent the rally but failed.

Rally car courtesy of Repco Rally Australia

Angola has been riven by conflict and it’s more than three decades since the government subsided sugar cane production, but now a 30,000 hectare area of land is to be planted with sugar cane in a dual attempt to establish a biofuel industry and to rebuild the poor agricultural sector which suffered after years of conflict.

Oil rich but food poor

Angola’s economy has been largely dependent on oil and diamonds since the civil war ended in 2002. Now the government aims to recreate some farming sectors. The country used to produce sugar, but for many years the entire sugar consumption of Angola has been imported. Now, in an attempt to decentralise industry away from Luanda, to boost farming and to create new jobs, the sugar cane project is taking shape.

It’s hoped the plantation will produce 280,000 tonnes of sugar from its own processing plant, and that the waste will be used, along with the ethanol harvested from the cane residue, to produce around 217 megawatts a year of electricity.

Foreign investment fears

While this is a multi-layered project, the tendency of African nations to invest in non-food crop is worrying the FAO which says that private and foreign ownership of large tracts of African land could destabilise local communities who will be deprived of access to water, food and other natural resources. The company managing the project, Biocom, is a three way partnership between Brazil’s Odebrecht, Angola’s Damer, and Sonangol, the Angolan state oil company. African governments need support to build the agricultural infrastructure that will allow them to become food secure, but partnership processes like this one are often viewed with suspicion by local people who fear that they will lose their land, or that the crops will be grown or processed in ways that have been outlawed in the developed world.

Sugar cane courtesy of Cristobal Alvarado Minic at Flickr under a creative commons license

Condors are native to California, and their numbers there are dropping, but San Diego Zoo is sponsoring a condor reintroduction programme based in Colombia. Seventy birds have been released in the Colombian highlands in the past two decades, most of them from San Diego’s breeding project, although twenty zoos in the US have been involved in the scheme.

The reintroduction programme has doubled the condor population in the Colombian Andes, although at one point before the project began, it looked as if extinction was certain, with less than twenty birds living in the area and most of them failing to rear young.

Reintroduction requires re-education

One reason for the death rate was that local people often killed the birds, either because they thought condors were prey seekers who killed livestock or to take feathers and bones for folk medicine. Another reason was that young birds, which like all condors, survive on carrion, found it more difficult to locate dead animals once they left the nest and didn’t have an adult to guide them to food sources. Finally, because condors mate for life, when one bird dies, the other doesn’t often find a new partner once the population starts to decline.

However, the new programme focuses on education as much as reintroduction. Local villagers are appointed as ‘condor keepers’ and given uniforms and receivers that pick up signals from the radio transmitters that the released birds carry. This helps them to track the birds, as well as allowing them to act as ambassadors to the local community, pointing out that the birds bring tourist money, as well as serving as environmental rubbish clearers by consuming carcases that could spread disease to livestock. The condor keepers also teach young people about the cultural and folk significance of the condor which appears on the Colombian flag. Although one released bird has been killed by a hunter, another was found near a town, disoriented and hungry, and the locals knew who to call to get the bird taken back to its territory where food can be provided if necessary.

Big birds make big dollars arrive

Captive breeding, raising, transporting and outfitting a condor with the radio costs thousands of dollars. But the local economy recoups a lot of this cost because the park in which many of the released birds live now receives around a hundred tourists a month: all of them looking for condors. San Diego Zoo says  ‘… we do it because we can, as stewards of the planet, and … to take care of the ecosystem and the wildlife within it.’

While the Zoo may focus on ecosystems, the rural Colombian communities which co-exist with the birds see something very different – the interrelationship between large mammals and developed nations which has become an increasing driver of tourism – simply put, when most people in the developed world can’t see large mammals in their towns, they include animal watching in their holidays, and that takes them to remote, often underdeveloped regions, where those creatures still exist. Infrastructure arrives swiftly: better roads, radio masts and refrigeration, to support the tourists. It’s still an open question as to whether tourist development proves sustainable, but as far as many in the Andes are concerned, the condors, and the money they bring, are here to stay.

Condor courtesy of Benedict Adam at Flickr under a creative commons license

Wangari Maathai

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.

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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.

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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 more of this story »

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

Chinese protestors have partial success

One of last week’s protests appears to have borne results. The chemical plant in central Hunan that was the focus of protests by local residents has been closed ‘forever’ according to Chinese media. Production at the plant was halted in March but now the plant will not re-open. The Xianghe Chemical Factory was cited in a number of incidents in the region, and after the deaths of two villagers, who were discovered to have high cadmium levels during autopsy, around 500 of 3,000 residents were found to have high cadmium levels during urine tests. As well as the permanent closure of the plant, it seems that its directors have been detained by police and the head of the local Environment Protection Bureau has been dismissed. There is no information yet on free healthcare for those affected by the cadmium, but thirty local residents were hospitalised as a result of the urine testing programme.

Israeli citizens protest against air pollution

On 4 August Greenpeace protestors disrupted the running of a coal-powered electric plant in Ashkelon, Israel in protest at the proposed construction of two further coal-powered electricity production plants. They chained themselves to the plant’s entrance gate and sixteen activists were arrested some of them already inside the plant’s grounds. The protest is high profile within Israel with several well-known Israeli entertainers having taken part in a Greenpeace-sponsored short film that claims that the new plants will increase air pollution in the area, as well as reducing Israel’s chances of meeting its international commitment to reduce greenhouse gases.

Australian activists protest for Pacific islanders

On Thursday, four environmental activists spent the night chained to the coal loader of the BHP Billiton Mitsubishi Alliance’s Hay Point Export Coal Terminal in Queensland, Australia. Six Greenpeace protestors had already been arrested on Wednesday after chaining themselves to lower areas of the loader, but the four remained near the top of the fifty metre tall loader all night. Police had discussed removing the protestors but decided for safety reasons not to attempt a forced removal. The four finally came down voluntarily on Friday evening and gave themselves up to the police.

The protest is both about the failure of the Australian government to take tough enough action on climate change, and in support of Pacific Island groups who have asked for substantial emission cuts from Australia and New Zealand to help protect their land from rising sea levels.

Greenpeace activists courtesy of Greenpeace Media