Green Options

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The top 10 headlines in international environmental news for the week of March 24 - 30.

1. World — Earth Hour 2008

As the clock struck eight in the evening, people across each time zone turned off their lights on March 29. It’s activism en mass and it’s called Earth Hour. The purpose: to inspire people to take action on climate change and to demonstrate that massive and immediate action is possible.

Earth Hour began as a city-wide voluntary blackout in Sydney, Australia, in 2007. This year, they’ve moved the date ahead two days and invited the world to join in. Even Google’s joined in. People from roughly 35 countries participated in this global event, which has become a yearly call to action. Read more: EcoWorldy, CNN.

2. Asia — Japanese Man Crosses Pacific with Wave-Powered Boat

A Japanese man named Kenichi Horie is attempting to be environmentally friendly by boating across the Pacific without sails and without fossil fuels.

How does he do it? With a wave-powered boat. Wave power has been discussed quite a bit recently, with a lot of applications including traditional grid energy generation. However, Kenichi is taking things to the next level by powering his ocean going vehicle with the very thing it bobs atop. Read more: Gas 2.0.

As it rages on five years later, perhaps one should spare a moment to reflect on the environmental effects of the war in Iraq.

How much has the war contributed to global warming? We can now debate the war on the scales of environmental justice and evidence is emerging that the damage on the environment and the global warming effects that this war has caused calls for all of us to pause and think.

The one thing that struck me about the story of Joseph Carey Merrick a.k.a. The Elephant Man was that he could never smile. However, he could weep a lot, so documented Sir Frederick Treves, the English surgeon who rescued him after years of performing in carnival freak shows. His great deformity, now postulated as the rare Proteus syndrome (named for the shape-shifting god Proteus) which affects tissue other than nerves, was allegedly caused by the trampling feet of a rogue elephant, many decades before some wildlife conservationists ever thought of culling.

In his brief autobiographical note just before he died, he wrote: “The deformity which I am now exhibiting was caused by my mother being frightened by an Elephant; my mother was going along the street when a procession of Animals were passing by, there was a terrible crush of people to see them, and unfortunately she was pushed under the Elephant’s feet, which frightened her very much; this occurring during a time of pregnancy was the cause of my deformity”. But that was all allegory.

The Culling Debate is back! Fast track to the 21st Century and focus on the wildlife fields of southern Africa. Do you support South Africa’s decision to cull its elephant population? Do you believe the elephant’s trampling is that bad for the local ecology? This is where animal conservationists (or ain’t they?) differ.

If I were to lay my hands on $48.6 million, I would probably go bonkers trying to figure out what to do with it. But I am no Sir Paul McCartney, neither can I guess what Heather Mills does for a living. However, now that I know this figure separates the two on their divorce, I also know what $48.6 million can do for drought in Africa.

It is ironic if not a coincidence that on the same pay day in a London courtroom, the European Union was also announcing a grant of a similar sum to fight drought in Africa. The European Union package of Euro 30 million (US$47 million) will help African countries in the northeast of the continent fight the effects of drought.

Drought fighting initiatives in countries like Ethiopia, Eritrea, Djibouti, Somalia, Kenya and even Sudan, always face funding shortfalls, affecting emergency relief for millions facing acute food shortages in the drought-hit Horn of Africa, in turn threatening to exacerbate already dire conditions. The effects of drought on people’s lives are devastating and not always visible to the rest of the world.

I live in a part of the world where the rich-poor extremes can be as depressing as they are embarrassing. Water, in its scarcity, coupled with inexistent or poor sanitation does not help things and being a woman can sometimes be even more burdensome. Given, this affects the basic necessities of a woman like personal hygiene.

Pubertal girls in rural communities miss going to school for a few days each month during their menstrual circle because they use inferior materials like old rags and newspapers for their menstrual flow and many feminine organizations have come to the help of these hapless girls by providing free sanitary pads.

But the provision of disposable supplies can create unforeseen burden on some communities where solid waste disposal consists of burning the garbage. Since many disposable feminine hygiene products contain plastic, incineration potentially creates an environmental and health hazard, according to Deanna Duke, the founder of Goods4Girls.

And the LORD God took the man, and put him into the garden of Eden to dress it and to keep it. - Genesis 2:15

Jim Lackey is not amused that the media - new media bloggers included - keep churning out misleading headlines on what the good old Archbishop Gianfranco Girotti actually said about sinning environmentally.

If you’re wondering who the hell the Lackey fellow is, Jim Lackey is the general news editor of the Catholic News Service and he says there is nothing new about environmental blighting as a sin. He says editors are just having fun and are committing another sin in the process - adulteration of the original ingredient! But the CNS website itself has “NEW SINS” as the sub headline to the big story. Perhaps he means it’s an old sin with a new definition?

A Tragic Case Study
We have seen how local ecology plays an important role in conflicts in Africa, which are mostly camouflaged as political, religious or ethnic. Let us spare a brief moment and look at the Democratic Republic of Congo as a case study outline for ecology as a source of wealth and as a precursor of death for innocent millions of people.

A synopsis of the history of the DRC, as Congo Kinshasa is commonly known, tells us that the plunder of its natural resources begun well in the 19th century when King Leopold II’s Belgium, its former colonial master, demarcated it for its own enrichment with the infamous “Scramble for Africa” - a period in late 19th Century world affairs when Africa’s interior was feverishly carved up by European imperialist expansion.

No Peace Amid Wanton Destruction
Since then, DRC, formerly Zaire under the notorious Mobutu Sese Seko, has not known peace. But the wanton plunder and destruction of its ecology, plentiful of minerals and forest cover, continues. And millions of people have and continue paying the heavy cost of it all - through rape and death under the watchful eye of the world hiding beneath the blue flag of the United Nations. Talk of ecological wealth turned into a curse.

There is no recent conflict in Africa that has elicited so much debate around the world and in the United States, in particular, as Darfur. Not even the post election political skirmishes in Kenya drew so much attention. Kenya, once the darling of the continent, the erstwhile adversaries are today sharing a cup of tea as well as power, something unthinkable only two months ago.

In a 2007 newspaper article, UN secretary general, Ban Ki-moon, said: “Almost invariably, we discuss Darfur in a convenient military and political shorthand - an ethnic conflict pitting Arab militias against black rebels and farmers. Look to its roots, though, and you discover a more complex dynamic. Amid the diverse social and political causes, the Darfur conflict began as an ecological crisis, arising at least in part from climate change.”

What does this mean? The Darfur conflict inflicts even more damage on Sudan’s environmental degradation with nearly two million internally displaced people putting pressure on the fragile environment as they clear land and source ground water to survive.

I want to be more than frank: for the many times I have found myself on the countryside (my other home as an African), I have always known that it was time to lower my personal sanitation-compatibility level from maybe 6 out of 10, to just 1, if such a scale exists.

Don’t even ask me if the term sanitation-compatibility exists because I really do not know! For I am yet to see a single flush toilet in the whole of my district! But there is nothing to shout about the fact that sub-Saharan Africa is the world leader in open-field or bush defecation, if you may. Why sub-Saharan Africa?

My grandmother could never have made this connection in a million lifetimes. But she would have cursed me for suggesting that the menacing elephants that occasionally come to our dusty village somewhere in remote Africa to pillage on our crops and the geckos that roam the village paths could have a connection with her lying on her death bed and needing the knife of a surgeon for her perennial ulcers.

But two separate scientific studies and discoveries in very different settings in Africa and the US can easily make the connection, if you may.

Connecting the Elephant and the Gecko
The pounding feet of the 15,000 pound African Bush Elephant make protective crevices in the savanna grasslands that help the geckos hide from their predators and the hot, penetrating African sun, according to Robert Pringle, an ecologist and conservation biologist at Stanford University in California, who conducted his research at the Mpala Research Center in Kenya. Significant numbers of geckos have been reported in the aftermath of an elephant’s feeding - the vertebrates often finding breeding space and security in fallen tree limbs and stripped barks. This makes the Elephant a change agent of habitat creation at the patch scale for small species that seem insignificant.

Connecting You and the Gecko
The gecko is a small to average sized lizard belonging to the family Gekkonidae that come in 1,196 different species and which are found in warm climates throughout the world.

Many species have specialized toe pads that enable them to climb smooth vertical surfaces and even cross indoor ceilings with ease. Some species like the house lizard are entirely harmless and feed on irritant house insects, which is good. But that is not all.

Cities and their even larger, fast-growing siblings — megacities (more than 10 million people) and hypercities (more than 20 million people) — aren’t just products of human civilization that dramatically affect their surrounding ecosystems. They’ve emerged as unique ecosystems in their own [...]