In Tamilnadu, the temple tanks were once the heart of water management, and ensured riparian rights and sustainable use. But community care has long since vanished, and with it, so has the water. Lalitha Sridhar reports.
DAJA award 2005, People and Development Category
September 2004 - "In traditional societies water was sacred and, concurrently, rivers were deified. This has many implications for the protection and management of water supplies," says Dr. R Nagaswamy, former Director-General of the Archaeological Survey of India and author of books on epicgraphy. "For example, Rajendra Chola I, one of the greatest emperors of South India, marched on a conquering quest right upto present day Bangladesh, which was then known as Vangaaladesham. This is a historically documented fact. From this triumphant journey, he brought back the waters of the sacred Ganges and constructed the incredible temple at Gangaikondachozhapuram (The Chola land where the Ganges Was brought by conquest).
Now, obviously, he could only sanctify the temple tank with the waters he had carried. Yes, it was notional - but it was also absolute. It was a matter of faith. This tank, then named Chola Ganga and now referred to as Ponneri, is immense. It traverses virtually the entire land South of the temple, covering vast areas of cultivable land. It had stone duct inlets and outlets covered on all sides, plastered by lime mortar, of such superb standards that not a drop of water could enter from outside. Today we speak about pure and safe water but the delivery system already existed in 1020 AD. During the British rule, a road was constructed across the Chola Ganga, the ducts were allowed to be encroached and littered in disuse. Where waters once lapped as far as the eye could see, all that remains is parched earth and a few dried up shrubs. The duct system still exists - we excavated it when I was with the Archaeological Survey of India - its potential is immense but what we lack is the will to set matters right.”
Dr.Nagaswamy is underlining the importance of temple tanks, sacred structures that served a very practical purpose - that of maintaining ground water tables and replenishing community water supplies. In ancient days, temple tanks were constructed to the east of every village, and multipurpose tanks to the west. Today, many are abused or in a state of disuse, their potential and original purpose all but forgotten.
Says Dr. R Sakthivadivel, Professor at the International Water Management Institute, "There are a lot of funds earmarked for creating infrastructure - borewells, tubes, pipes, taps - but there is still no water. Besides temple tanks, Tamilnadu has close to 39,000 ooranis, common ponds. Today, in most cases ooranis are the only ones that have water in them when it rains. They are also deteriorating, if not defunct already, but restoration, like elsewhere, is not happening. Originally tanks were common property. Then the ryotwadi system transferred ownership. So multipurpose tanks became irrigation tanks.
Temple tanks are more for ground water replenishment. Water has to remain trapped for a little while. But nowadays, it simply becomes run off instantaneously. Also, the parched land sucks everything in. Even for percolation, water must stay for some time. Thanjavur always had plenty of water and the land is made of flat, alluvial soil. So common tanks were not built here in a major way. That makes the temple tanks all the more important. The Thanjavur delta arguably has the largest number of temple tanks anywhere in the country. They have not been studied properly. If one sees the urban example of Chennai and other cities like Trichy, and towns like Kumbakonam, unchecked development has taken over tanks. Efforts at revival must be decentralised. Their management has to be scientific with a focus on storing, augmenting and utilizing water.”
Srikumar is an engineering contractor who has taken up the renovation of the temple at his native village of Thirumarugal in the Thiruvarur taluk of the Thanjavur delta. The tank here is being desilted, inlets and steps repaired, and the structure provided with a boundary wall. It is presently dry.
He says, “The Hindu Religious and Charitable Endowments Department has no funds for renovation. Even if a major proposal is undertaken, they are able to give only 25% of the money required. Where is the money for renovation? For as long as I am here, I don’t let the work stop. I underwrite expenses with my personal funds. I have put in a lot of my own money. Due to the Cauvery crisis and the failed rains, agricultural labourers are living in poverty. Money is coming only from those who have migrated, many abroad. This is the first generation that has left its roots behind. They still feel commitment to their native land. But in another generation or two, this affinity may be diluted. What happens then? It is good that we will not be around to see that happen.”
He adds, "Not that there isn't life in the villages. But with migration, not too many people are left. In the days of the old, all activities were dedicated to the temple. These are extraordinary temples, marvels of architecture and design. People still throng to the temples, particularly those sanctified as paadalpatta sthalam (shrines where famous saint-poets sang or gave up their life) or divyadeshams (divine lands based on mythological legends). Whenever I go to the city, I use every contact I have to raise funds. I don't hesitate to become a beggar, for this is something that has to be done."
In a controversial move some years back, the state government took over the management of temples which had hundial (cash box) collections, across the state. Matters have only deteriorated since then, as the maintenance of the temples and their highly vulnerable tanks has been badly affected.
But, says L.K.S. Murthy, a farmer in the Myladuthurai district, "Both hereditary trustees and the HR&CE officials have their faults. Earlier it was the temple trusts that were swindling money, and now it is the official hierarchy. But the HR&CE infrastructure keeps the antiquities and jewellery safe. Earlier, without any systemic checks, misappropriation could happen and nobody would notice. This included signing off temple property, an act that often had direct impact on access to the temple tanks. Temple wealth has been acquired over centuries, often through royal patronage of the earlier eras. A bronze icon that can fetch several lakhs of rupees in the overseas black markets for Indian antiquities, actually has a value that is beyond monetary haggling. It is a matter of faith. It is a question of a common, inherited heritage. This is true for the sacred temple tanks as well.”
But, says Shekhar Raghavan, Ashoka Fellow and honorary director of Rain Centre in Madras, "Encroachments have come in all the routes by which water travelled to the tanks. Concretization and congestion have added to the troubles. Buildings and hutments obstruct the way. Instead of flowing naturally to the tank, water gets trapped and cannot travel. Encroachments are a major impediment but difficult to tackle because of political sensitivities."
At other temples, including the famous Thamarai Kulam at the Meenakshi Amman Temple at Madurai and the Veeraraghava Perumal Temple at Thiruvallur in the district by the same name, the tanks have been concretized, becoming similar in function to containers or swimming pools! Local community initiatives are also absolutely essential to keep the momentum going.
Explains Srikumar, "Paucity of water is the main reason why temple tanks are going dry. There is no recharge. All around the temples, for residential usage and for agricultural crops, groundwater is being pumped at alarming rates. At Nachaiarkovil, borewells have been dug to maintain water to the temple tank. Now people turn to borewells when they need water, not to the Cauvery. The quantum of rain has gone down badly."
Encroachments have been the bane of the temple tanks. They have cut off the water supply to the tanks. The great majority of the inlets are blocked - either by construction of human dwellings or with debris and litter. Earlier, temple tanks would be linked to other structures to ensure only pure water overflowed to them - for example, the Selambanayikulam tank would fill up, the debris or silting in the water would settle and only pure water would overflow into the Thirukannavur temple tank. Now, forget pure or turgid (water), there is simply no water.
Says Dr. Nagaswamy, "The village layout had to adhere to specific instructions while locating the irrigation tank. The Vaastu Shastra practiced today is just so much commercial humbug. Traditionally, it was a powerful tool in town planning. Every village would have a tank to its west, on raised land, so that the harvested water would flow naturally to the fields. Riparian rights were clearly laid out - no one upstream could block the flow of water. The first share, in fact, belonged to the farmer furthest downstream and access to water progressed therefrom, moving upward in the reverse order. Today rivers are dammed and we talk about water wars."
He continues, "Narmada, Sindhu, Cauvery ... when we say a prayer and invoke the water for rituals, the water in that vessel is not merely water from the well in the backyard but, in effect, the waters of all the sacred Indian rivers. You cannot divide its divinity. Traditional society demanded that water could not be polluted. Every village had an Assembly for the control of the water tank; this Assembly oversaw the judicious distribution of water, to keep the bund walls strong, to undertake periodical desilting and de-weeding. The tanks were part of the temple. So they were pious. Money for their upkeep was raised by seeking donations for the temple - a charitable and spiritual exercise. Again sacred. Some gave in cash or kind, sometimes land in perpetuity to further the temple's requirements. It was all interconnected - dharma, temples, tanks, cultivation, mankind. Water was life.
Today, it is a subject of dispute, the victim of adharma. Governments fight over rights and control of rivers. The community has lost its control over its traditional sources of water. The degeneration of temple tanks began during the colonial rule. Encroachment, littering, neglect of ducts which closed and led to stagnation, mosquitoes and diseases, pollution and abuse of the once sacred waters destroyed a finely balanced system. This system had worked over centuries, that required a community to care for its assets, the most precious of which was water.”
Lalitha Sridhar
September 2004
Lalitha Sridhar is a freelance journalist.
Wednesday, 20 June 2007
Monday, 18 June 2007
Is it over for the lake? The Outflows of Coatepeque
by Tomás Guevara, La Prensa Gràfica, Daily Newspaper, From April 25th (first publication) through May 16th 2004, El Salvadorian.
The Reuters - IUCN Media Award 2004, Winner, North America, Oceania and the English-speaking Caribbean.
Coatepeque Lake, which is shared among the municipalities of Santa Ana, El Congo and Izalco, is undergoing an alarming reduction in water levels, as has not been seen in the past 40 years. Starting today, Revista Dominical is beginning a series of publications with the aim of understanding the reasons behind this phenomenon, that has placed on alert the local inhabitants of the basin and the State institutions in charge of supervising this water resource.
The cliff that once served David Ramirez as a seat from which to throw the line and hook one or another mojarra fish from Coatepeque Lake, is now far away from the shore. It would seem as if he were telling an old man’s tale, when in reality he is only referring to five years back, when the lake was two metres deeper. This was considered for many years its normal depth, as much in the dry season that tended to bring low tides, as when it recovered its higher levels during the rainy season.
Measurements taken of the lake in the 1980s indicate that it was 114 metres deep, with a breadth of 24.8 square kilometres. These figures have changed, in light of the bare supporting poles of the docks of the 560 houses constructed along the edges of the shoreline.
On the wooden planks supporting the piers, there remain the stains of the chemicals in the water of at least the last three years.
At first, the 2001 earthquakes were blamed for this phenomenon, since it was at that point that the recession of the lake began to reach alarming levels, some two metres less; although folk wisdom holds that the levels began to descend in the 1970s.
The Ministry of Agriculture and Livestock was the last state institution to carry out a hydrological study of Coatepeque Lake in which the amount of water used and that received from rainfall were balanced. The study dates to 1973.
Before speaking, one must take measure
For now, it is difficult to ascertain the amount of rainfall that the lake and its basin have received in the last few years, because the meteorological station in charge of registering this data was dismantled in the 1980s.
And this is the first issue that needs to be addressed by the Hydrological Division of the National Service of Territorial Studies (SNET), in order to give estimates of what could be happening.
This is where local knowledge predominates in the sharp voice of Germán Molina. “No, man, the thing is that we are finishing off the lake, so much water is pumped into the fields, and more pipes that draw water to the cantons,” says the employee who arrived 35 years ago to work in a field alongside the lake.
Its measurements indicate that at the beginning of the 1970s, the water reached certain walls that now stand at some 20 metres from the actual shoreline. However, he emphasises that the greatest level reductions have occurred during the last three years.
Hope in the cycle
The concern over the outflows of water is placated by emerging testimonials from elderly locals, that tell of the years when the water level was very much below where it currently stands.
The information provided by the Coatepeque Lake water study carried out by the Ministry of Agriculture and Livestock indicates that the period of greatest growth of the water reserve was during the first years of the 1960s.
The rise was so steep that many houses were flooded over, and some property owners had to hire boats to remove building materials and pillars from their ranches submerged in the water.
There began an era of new constructions at a “sure” distance, in case the water levels continued to rise. These same houses have now had to expand their gardens in search of the lakeshore.
Considering the threat that the water would continue to rise until flowing over the edges of the lake, which is at some 1,700 metres above sea level, there was thought of constructing a drainage pipe that would empty waters into the Zapotitán Valley.
As planned, the construction of the tunnel started to the southeast side of the basin, but an impenetrable rock mass prevented passage, after a second attempt a few metres away from the first site. The remains of this project were finally covered up some nine years ago by the current owner of the lot.
Doña Élida Cartagena, who comes down from the summit of the basin to use the lake water, comments that the rise of the waters in the 1960s left the old street that ran alongside the lake underwater, from where there now begin to emerge the tops of the posts of the its old electrical wires.
These facts provide hope to the technicians of the National Service for Territorial Studies (SNET), who are in charge of studying what is happening with the lake. “This information that we have up until the 1970s indicates that the lake has periodic cycles of growth and descent in its water levels,” says Ana Deysi López, Director of the National Hydrological Service.
However, it will require measuring a new balance to establish the current situation. The formula is simple: we will need to measure the amount of rainfall into the lake, and subtract from that the amount of outgoing water by way of evaporation, by way of feeding into other water bodies, such as the Sucio River, and the amount that the local population of the area uses.
However, the rainfall of the winter of 2003 in the basin – that covers all of the mountains around this crater of volcanic origin (see side note) – will only reach the underground water table of the lake in some 10 years, affirms geologist Carlos Pullinger of SNET.
According to specialists, there are three factors that have to be taken into account in order to understand the considerable reduction of water in Coatepeque.
In the first place, we cannot disregard the fact that the 2001 earthquakes could have opened up underground cracks in the lake. However, it is nearly impossible to test this hypothesis, considering the scarcity of technical resources available.
Secondly, the water levels of the Sucio River have not been measured, being the only natural outflow of the lake.
A third factor is making a priori calculations on the amount of water entering the water table. And finally, taking inventory of how many barrels of water are extracted daily for domestic and agricultural use.
For example, among the 560 houses that surround the lake, the technicians of the Coatepeque Foundation calculate that some 25 barrels daily are used to water gardens, only half of which return to the underground water table, another part of which evaporates, and the rest is absorbed by the plants.
To this, we must add the amount of water that is released from six hydraulic plants pumping water towards receiving tanks on the foothills of the volcanic complex of Santa Ana.
Damp Numbers
It was the afternoon of Thursday, 15th of April. We went aboard a boat on Coatepeque Lake to see in situ the cause for alarm of the inhabitants of the area and the environmental authorities who undertake to study the balance between the states of this impressive water resource.
Once within the lake, tossed about by the breeze and waves, we followed along the breadth of the lake in search of cracks that the neighbours indicate are responsible for the descending water levels.
The first indicator that lit up the yellow alert light was the precariously dry state of the wooden docks, as well as their rafters that are now reaching their highest points of exposure.
Many did not know that near the island of El Cerro, also known as Teopán, was the small hill of San Juan, that is now a settling point for visitors coming to install their baited fishing lines.
The boat entered all the way until reaching the small streams formed by the natural waterways and others formed by resident owners in order to remain close to the water. From here, several outgoing pipelines could be seen gathering water for pools and cisterns.
Watch those Tanks
But the neighbours point out the six pumps that supply six farms and some 20 villages in the surrounding cantons, as well as two perforated wells within the basin that drain water out to 10 houses and as far away as the district of El Congo.
The person in charge of the Pozo del Guineo project, Juan Pablo Martínez, says that the 420 gallons of water per minute generated by the pump, at a rate of 10 hours per day, by conversion, add up to six thousand barrels daily.
The water rises to the capturing tank, and then by gravity tosses out the vital liquid – without sanitary processing – to the cantons of El Guineo, San José, el Rodeo, Siete Príncipes, and beyond, to the municipality of El Congo. In summary, Juan Pablo says that they rationally supply some 1,500 plumbing systems, with an average of three families per faucet.
Then the eye turns to the managers of the communal project of La Vuelta de Oro, with a well that pumps close to one thousand barrels daily to the canton of Los Arados, from which an average of some thirteen thousand inhabitants receive their water supply, according to Don Marco Coto, the person in charge of the pump.
The remaining pumps (see the informational graphics) drain water to farms and cooperatives of the reform sector outside of the basin. The use that people give to this water is always for domestic purposes.
In the face of alarm, the time comes to look for responsibilities. David Ramirez, of the Coatepeque Foundation, is in charge of taking a census of the houses and the number of barrels used by each one for irrigation during the summer season. He has already established some calculations and offers figures that can only be alarming. Out of a total of 560 residences, each one spends an average of 25 barrels per day, that comes to a total of fourteen thousand barrels daily, of which only half will return to the lake.
Suggestions have already begun to emerge to assuage the problem. Don Diego Chirino, ex-president of the community of El Estoraque, who also drains water from the lake, suggests that farms could just water three times per week and the vegetation would not dry up. “The majority leave the sprinklers running all day long,” he says.
As these damp numbers begin to jump out at us, we need to calculate the amount of water coming in during winter, and that which is still hidden in the basin under the blue waters of the Coatepeque.
Photograph:
The dock and viewpoint of Lake Coatepeque’s only hotel has been left on dry land. In the 1970s, the water used to come up to the restaurant’s open terraces, which now stand over thirty metres above the water. Some houses have had to extend their gardens and construct new docks.
The Cave of the Explosion
SUMMARY:
The volcano of Coatepeque, that is the older brother of its same generation sibling, the Santa Ana, and father to the rest of the volcanoes that make up this eruptive complex, underwent a fierce period of metallurgic activity that concluded with a great explosion, leaving an enormous hole of more than 20 kilometres radius and some two (kilometres) deep, beginning a long process of capturing of rainwater and underground water that eventually transformed itself into a lake.
NOTE:
From the top of the Santa Ana Volcano, at 2,381 metres above sea level, the restless blue mirror of the Coatepeque resembles a creation of the gods, made to meditate upon themselves. As blue as the sky that clothes it, Coatepeque Lake shows off its waves from some two kilometres of depth and some twenty wide, if one were to cross it in a straight line from one end of the basin to the other.
From above, this impressive resource, product of the rich volcanic heritage of the territory of El Salvador, takes on one of the most capricious forms that the human imagination can muster. It is difficult to avoid getting the impression that one is standing before a gigantic pot that is half-full.
In effect, after a long and critical period of volcanic activity some 55,000 years ago, Coatepeque had a mega-eruption that geologists call “Plinian,” to commemorate Latin American naturalist, Cecilio Segundo Plinio, who described the eruptions of the Vesuvio (Italy) in the year 79 A.D., when it buried Pompeii.
The Plinian eruption that took place in Coatepeque is characterized by the explosion of the volcano and the expulsion of its material over long distances, which caused great cataclysms and a radical transformation in the geography.
From this explosion, there remains a crater, which, with the passing of time over several thousand years, began to capture rainwater and underground water until it transformed itself into the major body of water that is today considerably losing its content levels.
The explanation offered by German geologists Helmut Meyer-Abich and Howel Willliams, in their work “The Volcanic History of Coatepeque Lake and its Surroundings,” written in 1954 under the auspices of the Tropical Scientific Research Institute (Instituto Tropical de Investigaciones Científicas) of the University of El Salvador, is the most important scientific reference available to understand this water resource of a volcanic nature.
Times of Tranquility
Even though Coatepeque Lake forms part of the Volcanic Complex of Santa Ana, that encompasses the volcanic ensemble of San Marcelino, Cerro Verde and Izalco (which can be observed in the satellite image illustrated on this page), danger of its eruption does not generate concern.
The vulcanologist, Carlos Pullinger studied this volcanic complex in order to obtain his Master’s Degree in Geology at the Technological University of Michigan in the United States of America.
Pullinger’s theory sustains that both the Coatepeque and the Santa Ana are two masses from the same period, and that both have undergone large eruptions that have affected the geography of the area.
However, Coatepeque as a volcano does not show signs of any further activity, considering that, according to the geologist’s theory, the displacement of the underground magma, some 18 kilometres deep, has run in a southwesterly direction, in the direction of Izalco and beneath the Santa Ana.
In this sense, it is difficult to separate the Coatepeque study from the rest of the volcanoes that comprise the complex. Nevertheless, the site awakens a certain fascination for the rawness with which it demonstrates evidence of its fierce past.
Helmut Meyer-Abich and Howel Williams studied the rock deposits located along the bottom of the lake in order to analyse the age and nature of the material, as well as the differences among its sides, as clear indicators in distinguishing the lava rock of the Coatepeque and that of its siblings.
These specialists also traced maps along the breadth of the floors towards the interior of the crater. In its area to the south, there is a valley covered with fresh earth, that has to some extent altered the underground activity.
Although from the top, the impressive mirror of water appears to be a caprice of the ego of the gods, from the surface of the blue waters, its colossal eruptive past is evident: a pot of water half-full that once reached its higher moments in the decade of the 70s, when it surpassed 115 metres in depth and generated concern over its rising levels, and that now sets off the green light for its descent.
Illustrative box:
PALLIATIVES FOR CLEANSING
The polluted waters of Coatepeque Lake were among one of the first problematic symptoms that put on alert the farmowners located in the basin. By the end of the 1990s, people could see the problems coming.
A study carried out in 1997 indicated that close to one thousand persons came to wash their clothes and domestic utensils directly in the lake. Pollution both from dirt and from chemical agents was evident.
In 1996, the Coatepeque Foundation proposed a project for the construction of public washing facilities away from the lake.
To date, 12 modules have been constructed, that are used by an average of 900 persons.
The project was financed by a private enterprise, that established of the structure.
However, users must pay a fee to cover electrical energy costs incurred by the water pumps and persons administering the facilities, and communities have established the fee at $0.80 per wash.
Those users who refuse to use the washing facilities represent a minimal group of people, says David Ramírez, technician of the Coatepeque Foundation. Rebellion against using the facilities tends to be worse among those who arrive from outside the basin.
The Foundation surged from the need to protect this water resource, and it is now proposing new strategies on the use of the lake, especially in the face of the alarming rate of descent in its water levels.
Coatepeque, the Polluted Surface
( Second submission)
by Tomás Guevara
Coatepeque Lake is the water supply source for some 20,000 persons who live within and beyond the surrounding basin. In addition to an alarming descent in the water level of this body, from which 21,000 barrels of water are extracted daily, there are pollution problems with this natural resource.
As the water trickles on the shores of Punta Arena beach in Coatepeque, the trash floats by and coming onto the land, spoils this enchanting natural scenery. A detergent wrapper competes with an empty bag of candies to reach the shore, but a plastic soda bottle is the first to touch land, pushed forward by the currents.
Together with the lake, and just a few metres from this scene, Doña Reyna Ramírez, who comes down to the shore every so often from the canton of Santa Rosa, washes her family’s weekly laundry. Close by are some ten women chatting while using rocks as washing utensils to rinse away the dirty foam from their washing.
Silently, a spot of soap disperses over to the edge of the lake, to the whim of the water’s movement – and the women continue their “normal” activity while their children bathe in the lake.
Reyna allows herself a break from the chores and comes out of the water to comment that the drought in the canton of Santa Rosa doesn’t leave them with any other option than to come and do their washing at the edge of the lake.
Pangs of Conscience
The water that the washerwomen’s families drink is the same water in which they do their washing. Reyna knows this. “We are aware that polluting the lake is a wrong that we commit against ourselves, but what else can we do if we have no water at home?” she says.
The 12 washer modules ordered for construction by the Coatepeque Foundation are not within everyone’s reach. These potential users all agree that to pay one dollar to wash one basketful of clothing is too high a price for their family budget.
But this is the way that the cards are dealt. David Ramírez, Technician of the Foundation in the area, comments that this measure has at least reduced the amount of washerwomen along the shores of the lake by about 80 per cent over the last four years.
To the personnel in charge of Sanitation in the Health Unit of the lake, there is no other option but to urge the population to boil the water before drinking it. However, timber has become scarce, since most of the basin has been deforested.
With this somber panorama, the survival of Coatepeque Lake as a rational alternative for human consumption has become critical. The high density of the population and the lack of a management plan for this water resource begin to present a problem.
The Head of Research on Water Resource Pollution of the National Service for Territorial Studies (SNET), Zulma Mena, says that a comprehensive study on the pollution problems of Coatepeque could shed light towards finding urgent solutions and alleviating the problems.
Everything that Goes Down
But Coatepeque’s pollution is not only due to detergents and trash left by the people along the shores. A study carried out by U.S. Geologist Molly C. McCutcheon of the University of Ohio in the United States of America in 1998, entitled “Volcanic and Anthropogenic Pollution in Coatepeque Lake” brought samples of the lake water under the laboratory lens of the Department of Science and Geology of the North American institution.
The results take off in various directions, pointing to several sources of pollution. Some abnormal elements found in the water – sulfur, boron and acids – are not noxious to human health in the quantities detected, and they come from the very volcanic nature of the basin.
However, other components point directly to the pollution caused by human beings. Among these, McCutcheon found hydrocarbon residues (gasoline) and motor oil. These wastes proceed from some 500 boats that go out periodically from the docks of the houses along the lake.
Another source of pollution described in detail by the North American was the presence of fertiliser and pesticide residues. These in their majority proceed from the local maize and grain farms and the country houses forming part of the basin, but also from the fertiliser used in home gardens.
From these samples, detergents and solid wastes also floating in the water did not escape their attention. If the presence of these toxins has not yet caused a state of alarm for Coatepeque, the geologist left open the speculation that these quantities found could sky rocket if regulations are not placed on the human exploitation of this water resource.
Luck has been kinder to Coatepeque than to its fellow lake, Ilopango, from which some four years ago, several tons of hospital waste was extracted, that had proceeded from the metropolitan area of San Salvador.
Water that One Shouldn’t Drink...
Even though the water from Coatepeque supplies some 30 thousand people within and around the basin, there is no laboratory proof that certifies the quality of the water as suitable for human consumption.
The Coordinator of the Protection Committee for Water Resources of the National Administration of Aqueducts and Sewage Systems (ANDA), Rubén Alemán, assures us that the institution maintains control over the quality of well water that supplies the network.
In Coatepeque, however, their presence is nil, since there is an abundance of community projects on water supply financed by non-governmental organisations. Only in certain cases, some samples are analysed by petition of the community.
No one has certified the water quality in Coatepeque recently. Meanwhile, Reyna Ramírez and her fellow washerwomen won’t deny the fact that the water they drink is somewhat salty, but that nonetheless, necessity requires them to quench their thirst.
(Illustrative box)
AQUATIC BROOMS
By Latin American standards, on the subject of lakes, Coatepeque is considered to be one of the cleanest. However, this encouraging category is only an advantage by comparison to other water bodies on the continent.
Between 1996 and 1999, the School of Ocean Diving carried out annual clean-ups of the lake and the surprises hidden in its depths. Javier Mena, instructor at the diving school, recalls that during the first clean up, in a period of two days and with the participation of 300 divers, they brought up three tons of garbage.
At that time, they extracted tires, batteries, plastic bags, cans and even objects of personal use. Throughout the following years, they extracted less garbage. In 1999, only 200 pounds were brought up.
At that point, they abandoned the clean-up effort at Coatepeque and focused their interest on Ilopango, that was getting to a critical state.
Clear Accounts for Coatepeque
( Third submission)
by Tomás Guevara
To establish a hydrological balance of Coatepeque Lake, that has undergone a descent of more than two metres in the last three years, is the first measure to be taken before proposing mitigations to its potential run-offs and to the use of this natural resource.
When the Mayas directed their gaze to the gray skies, their spirits contemplated the Giver of Rain, Chac, who enriched the flows of the rivers and the lakes with his humid presence.
Now that Coatepeque Lake is in a state of crisis, that prayer which was once offered up by the Mayas from this impressive lake of a volcanic nature, may still take effect.
The estimates of losses in the level of the water body are frightening, considering that in three years, the water level has gone down by approximately two metres. And during the last two winters, the recuperation of some 50 centimetres of average rainfall for the season evaporated within the first months of the dry season. That is to say, that with the arrival of the rain season, the level has not risen to even half of what it had risen to at the end of the previous winter season.
These estimates made a priori by the inhabitants of the basin are indeed a testimony to the fact as such, but there is still a need to conduct tests using scientific methods.
And this is the aim of Hydrological Management Division of the National Service for Territorial Studies (SNET), that hopes to take in the greatest amount of information possible in order to establish a hydrological balance of the waters of the lake in three month’s time.
Adding and Subtracting
Celina Mena, Technician with Hydrological Management, comments that the method used to establish this balance is not complicated.
The main point is to measure the quantity of rainwater received in the basin during a minimum period of the last ten years in order to establish an average cycle. On the basis of this amount, water evaporation is subtracted, as well as water used by plants and that which goes out by way of underground fissures and by way of extraction for domestic use.
In the last balance conducted in 1973 by the Hydrological Service of the Ministry of Agriculture and Livestock, it was estimated that underground drainage of the lake is located at the head of El Chorrerón, El Tinteral and La Joya, wells that feed into the Sucio River at a volume of 721 litres per second.
To conduct the balance that SNET has in view, these measurements must be brought up to date, as Celina Mena foresees, because there may have been alterations after the earthquakes with the settlement of the fault lines.
However, while this puzzle is solved, the indicators point in several directions. In the first of this series of articles, water extraction was estimated at 22 thousand barrels daily, according to the numbers provided by the Coatepeque Foundation and facts offered by the heads of water pumping projects for the communities located outside the basin.
Climate Change
Others attribute the reduction in water levels to climate change and the amount of rainfall, which has gone down considerably during the past decade.
According to a detailed register of the amount of rainfall in the basin between 1976 and 2003, Don Antonio Cabrales maintains that the lower level is due to a natural phenomenon.
His data proceeds from a udometer (an instrument used to measure the amount of rainfall) that is installed at the ranch El Porvenir, located within the Coatepeque basin.
His estimates detail that between 1997 and 2003, the basin has only received an average rainfall of 1,536 millimetres annually; a figure considerably less that that of 1,800, that is considered to be the normal average in the territory of El Salvador, according to Tomás Rivas Pacheco, coordinator of the Centre for Climate Prediction of SNET.
With the rain season at the doorstep, the meteorology management team hopes that the rains will reach a higher average this year, with some variations in the microclimates of the eastern and coastal areas of the country.
In response to this reality, Don Antonio Cabrales, who served as an employee of the Ministry of Agriculture and Livestock between 1989 and 1994 during the mandate of Alfredo Cristiani, ensures us that we need to reflect seriously on this natural resource without setting aside the water needs of the area’s population.
Mother Nature Pays
The concerns of the inhabitants of Coatepeque, and those surrounding another three water resources in the country undergoing the same situation, has reached the attention of the National Development Foundation (FUNDE), which has already established a multidisciplinary team that searches for the reasons behind the problems and seeks to propose short-term concrete solutions.
Diego Salcedo, Environmental Economist and Consultant to the Foundation, assures us that the project that is already underway not only plans to identify the reasons for the reduction in water resources, but also tries to gain the commitment of users to protect the resource from pollution and ensure that this remains so for the future.
The objective of this plan is that the communities that are supplied with the resources take on the payments and costs of environmental services. This is a modality that interests the World Bank when considering offering loans.
However, in the executive part of the plan, the country’s political structures must also be called upon to work on the issues. For the FUNDE team, water is not only a conflictive issue in Coatepeque, but by virtue of the very needs of the population as a whole.
They are sure that once having the final result of their study, anticipated by next July, some of the differences in needs among those affected will be highlighted, for example, whether it is more important to have water for irrigation or for human consumption.
Julio Quiñónez, Hydrologist and also a member of the consultative team of the Foundation, affirms that with the water balance study created, elements of the problem will be identified; however, the facts produced by this will also have to be taken as a reference for seeking solutions to the water problem on a national scale.
While the discussions follow their course and proposals towards solutions begin to emerge, Coatepeque Lake continues in its descent, waiting on Chac, whom the Mayas once implored to bring them rain.
A Lifesaver for Coatepeque
( Last submission)
by Tomás Guevara
Before the rain arrives to mitigate the crisis of the lake that is shrinking, the storm of proposals begins to fall, but achieving consensus among all the users in the Coatepeque basin could unravel a true tempest.
Completely still, as rarely occurs but few days ever, the waters of Coatepeque allow one to see peacefully, from deep within, the houses, docks, gardens and even its own basin, denuded of trees, reflected in the mirror of its surface.
This is a day in which the stillness of the water seems to indicate that the anticipated rains will be late in coming. By surprise, only a couple of hours go by before the waves begin to rise before the imminent presence of a gray cloud that appears as if having emerged from the Santa Ana volcano, before pouring in by streams into the lake.
This cycle of rains is the first hope of recuperation for Coatepeque Lake, which in the last three years has experienced a dramatic descent in its water levels, having lost some two metres in this short span of time.
The phenomenon has awakened concern, as much for the inhabitants, as among the state institutions in charge of environment and water.
Inputs for a Plan
The causes of the water level’s descent continue on a course for proof, sought out by those in charge of responding to the avalanche of questions generated by this phenomenon.
One thing is certain to Celina Mena, Technician of Hydrological Management of the National Service for Territorial Studies (SNET), who, by way of previous studies on Coatepeque and updated information, seeks responses to the complex crisis surrounding the lake.
Her unit’s contribution will be to offer a complete diagnostic study so that from this, guidelines may be established that may help to structure a management plan for the entire basin.
SNET’s motives are not gratuitous. Coatepeque as a body of water having a parameter of 35 kilometres and a maximum depth of 115 metres, is without any doubt the most significant water reserve in the western region of the country.
Not only does the Lake provide water to some 20,000 persons who live within and around the basin, the aquiferous body of Coatepeque nourishes the humid agricultural valley of Zapotitán and other water sources near the volcanic complex of Santa Ana.
According to Don Rafael Aguilar, who took up a water supply project some ten years ago for a community close to the Los Pinos Cooperative, the margins for action to protect the resource are limited.
The shortage of resources makes it impossible to establish a project to save the lake.
However, he does what is within his reach. Thanks to him, there is no garbage on his stretch of beach where the pipeline passes through to extract water for some 40 homes. Moreover, he has planted trees along the shore that are full of life.
His criticism is strong of those who, before constructing, hew down as many trees as may be obstructing their view of the lake. “They could build large houses without having to bring down all of the trees,” he says.
But deforestation is only one of the factors indicated among the problems, although perhaps its reversal is the most viable palliative to consider that could serve to reverse the reduction in the water level of the lake.
Helpful Facts
Before entering into the guidelines of a management plan for the lake, Federico Castellanos, who carried out a water study for the Coatepeque basin in 1999 under contract with the Coatepeque Foundation, refers to the conclusions proposed in his study to reverse the problem of the low water levels.
Castellanos identified the factors contributing to water loss of the lake. At that time, the majority of its volume was lost by condensation and by way of the natural outflows that fed into the Sucio River, for which he recommended a periodic control.
Another critical point signaled by the specialist was the deforestation of the basin, which needed to be urgently recovered in order to improve the infiltration of rainwater into this major body of water.
Castellanos’ study showed that human consumption, which surpassed one million cubic metres during one year, was merely the smallest source of water loss for the lake.
Already by that time, however, the change in water reserve levels during the rain season was generating numbers in the red.
During each cycle, it lost an average of 5 million cubic metres of water, that is, 4.46% of the total stored.
Voices of Commitment
In 1998, an environmental law was adopted, but the majority of institutions turn a blind eye when it comes to putting it into effect, as a matter of cultural practice, according to the opinion of the Director of National Heritage of the Ministry of Environment and National Resources, Ernesto López.
In the face of this reality, his office takes charge to contribute to proposals to move ahead. And Coatepeque is in its sights, ever since a joint effort with the National Development Foundation (FUNDE), that anticipates generating inputs to establish an action plan for the basin.
The modality is that the users of the basin should pay for the services received from nature. But this proposal is yet to be sold over to the hundreds of families who have their homes along the shores of the lake.
Crossroads
These projects on “payment for environmental services” enjoy the endorsement of the World Bank as a condition to release funds.
Enrique Merlos of FUNDE sees the realistic dimension of the situation in the Coatepeque basin. To him, it is not simply a question of placing prohibitions on farmers who continue to cut down trees to make agricultural use of the land, but rather, proposing alternative, environmentally friendly livelihoods.
And in the Coatepeque basin, given the issues, the owners of homes on the lakeshore could contribute to encouraging those who live on the outskirts to stop their harmful practices and work on reforestation projects throughout the zone.
Don Jesús Méndez is one of the community leaders of Potrerillos de la Laguna, located at the peak of the basin. Water stopped reaching his house when the water pump that supplied the 127 families of his village broke down, and the collective funds amongst the neighbours were not enough to have it replaced.
The suggestion offered during a forum organised by FUNDE a couple of weeks ago, at the office of the Coatepeque Labour Centre, was that reforestation needs to be well-planned.
To him, the solution lies in sowing fruit trees, “...because people practice burning to clear land to sow maize, but if what they would burn bears nourishment, they will be incapable of setting it on fire, and they will protect it,” he says.
The solutions jump out everywhere, and those who already have their feet in a solution ask that they be looked to as an example. Isabel Morales, of the Salvadoran Association for Environmental Conservation (ASACMA), who executes a project to protect the Las Lajas Forest, considered to be the area of greatest water absorption for the basin, says that her entire community is involved in the work of protecting the 400 hectares.
The payment made by the neighbours to protect the resource is not monetary, plus they also receive something vital. Within the forest, there are water sources which, were it not for the forest, would have disappeared.
While the rains fall on the Coatepeque basin, the rise and fall of numbers are small. Before going any further, we must see what consolation the rain season may bring and what will be the human will of everyone together to throw a lifesaver to Coatepeque.
Teopán, the Green Jewel
In the Coatepeque basin, only the island of Teopán relies on a management and urban development plan.
It looks as though is a big green hat floating along the southern side of Coatepeque Lake. In reality, they are 145 square blocks that comprise the island of Teopán, which in the Nahuat language means “Home of the Gods.”
The vegetation is exuberant and the fauna is so well recovered, that the garrobos (an iguana-like reptile), armadillos and squirrels allow themselves to be seen from just a short distance away.
But the island, that was condemned to depredation some 40 years ago, has recovered thanks to the intervention of the visionary plan of Don Antonio Cabrales, landowner of this portion of land over the last four decades.
When I came from the United States, I found the island and thought of it as heritage that we must leave for future generations,” he said.
The advice of Don Francisco De Sola, his father, pushed him to seek out professional help to propose a future for this natural resource.
Don Francisco put him in touch with a prestigious international company in charge of developing management plans for this type of natural sanctuary, and this proposal still remains in force today for the owners of plots on the island.
Conservation First
In 1970, a group of specialists from the “Sea Pines Company” arrived inTeopán from the island of “Hilton Head” in South Carolina.
The consultancy group designed a development plan that contained strict measures for the protection of flora and fauna on the island, and an urbanisation plan in balance with the environment.
The consultancy firm, recalls Cabrales, recommended that the housing in the areas resembling the brim of the hat and the top of the hat should conserve their primary forests.
No sooner said than done, of the 40 houses constructed on the island, the owners have committed themselves to respecting the norms mandated by the construction company.
Among the environmental requirements complied to by the owners is to use only those trees that are necessary to construct housing, which should be situated at a minimum of 50 metres from the edge of the lakeshore.
Another modality is that the houses should have no walls, except for natural barriers. And wastewater should be deposited as far away as possible from the edge of the lake.
There are no regulations on the exploitation of the land, and less so for the use of the lake water. The director of Natural Heritage of the Ministry of Environment, Ernesto López, says that the environmental law approved in 1998 likewise states that any construction should remain at a minimum of 50 metres’ distance from any water resource.
However, in practice, the mandate leaves much to be desired. To him, beginning to comply with a law is an important step in resource protection. For now, the island of Teopán is the only sanctuary within the basin that shines like a green jewel.
FIGURE 1
An Analysis on the Behaviour of Water Systems in El Salvador carried out between the years 2001 and 2002 by the National Service of Territorial Studies (SNET) indicates that surface water has diminished by 30 per cent, comparing current data registered on caudals with that registered in the decade of the 1970s.
In order to reverse this process, that can be most seriously observed in the Coatepeque basin, hydrologist Federico Castellanos recommended in 1999 the installation of at least two meteorological stations in the area to measure temperature, solar radiation, atmospheric pressure, wind direction and velocity, and evaporation. Besides this, he recommended the installation of a hydrometric station to conduct evaluations with precision on the variations in the lake’s levels.
He also recommended the urgent reforestation of the basin’s hillsides to support the replenishment of this water body, towards which the community of users should play an important role and should be informed regarding the balanced use of this natural resource, that is showing clear signs of endangerment.
FIGURE 2
The only regulation on “Water quality, drainage control and areas under protection” was approved under Executive Bill No. 50, dated 16 October 1987.
Article 5 of said regulation calls for the protection and enjoyment of water resources in the country, which should be protected by a State entity created for such ends. However, to date, no such institution exists to take charge of enforcement and of protecting subterranean and surface-level bodies of water.
The Reuters - IUCN Media Award 2004, Winner, North America, Oceania and the English-speaking Caribbean.
Coatepeque Lake, which is shared among the municipalities of Santa Ana, El Congo and Izalco, is undergoing an alarming reduction in water levels, as has not been seen in the past 40 years. Starting today, Revista Dominical is beginning a series of publications with the aim of understanding the reasons behind this phenomenon, that has placed on alert the local inhabitants of the basin and the State institutions in charge of supervising this water resource.
The cliff that once served David Ramirez as a seat from which to throw the line and hook one or another mojarra fish from Coatepeque Lake, is now far away from the shore. It would seem as if he were telling an old man’s tale, when in reality he is only referring to five years back, when the lake was two metres deeper. This was considered for many years its normal depth, as much in the dry season that tended to bring low tides, as when it recovered its higher levels during the rainy season.
Measurements taken of the lake in the 1980s indicate that it was 114 metres deep, with a breadth of 24.8 square kilometres. These figures have changed, in light of the bare supporting poles of the docks of the 560 houses constructed along the edges of the shoreline.
On the wooden planks supporting the piers, there remain the stains of the chemicals in the water of at least the last three years.
At first, the 2001 earthquakes were blamed for this phenomenon, since it was at that point that the recession of the lake began to reach alarming levels, some two metres less; although folk wisdom holds that the levels began to descend in the 1970s.
The Ministry of Agriculture and Livestock was the last state institution to carry out a hydrological study of Coatepeque Lake in which the amount of water used and that received from rainfall were balanced. The study dates to 1973.
Before speaking, one must take measure
For now, it is difficult to ascertain the amount of rainfall that the lake and its basin have received in the last few years, because the meteorological station in charge of registering this data was dismantled in the 1980s.
And this is the first issue that needs to be addressed by the Hydrological Division of the National Service of Territorial Studies (SNET), in order to give estimates of what could be happening.
This is where local knowledge predominates in the sharp voice of Germán Molina. “No, man, the thing is that we are finishing off the lake, so much water is pumped into the fields, and more pipes that draw water to the cantons,” says the employee who arrived 35 years ago to work in a field alongside the lake.
Its measurements indicate that at the beginning of the 1970s, the water reached certain walls that now stand at some 20 metres from the actual shoreline. However, he emphasises that the greatest level reductions have occurred during the last three years.
Hope in the cycle
The concern over the outflows of water is placated by emerging testimonials from elderly locals, that tell of the years when the water level was very much below where it currently stands.
The information provided by the Coatepeque Lake water study carried out by the Ministry of Agriculture and Livestock indicates that the period of greatest growth of the water reserve was during the first years of the 1960s.
The rise was so steep that many houses were flooded over, and some property owners had to hire boats to remove building materials and pillars from their ranches submerged in the water.
There began an era of new constructions at a “sure” distance, in case the water levels continued to rise. These same houses have now had to expand their gardens in search of the lakeshore.
Considering the threat that the water would continue to rise until flowing over the edges of the lake, which is at some 1,700 metres above sea level, there was thought of constructing a drainage pipe that would empty waters into the Zapotitán Valley.
As planned, the construction of the tunnel started to the southeast side of the basin, but an impenetrable rock mass prevented passage, after a second attempt a few metres away from the first site. The remains of this project were finally covered up some nine years ago by the current owner of the lot.
Doña Élida Cartagena, who comes down from the summit of the basin to use the lake water, comments that the rise of the waters in the 1960s left the old street that ran alongside the lake underwater, from where there now begin to emerge the tops of the posts of the its old electrical wires.
These facts provide hope to the technicians of the National Service for Territorial Studies (SNET), who are in charge of studying what is happening with the lake. “This information that we have up until the 1970s indicates that the lake has periodic cycles of growth and descent in its water levels,” says Ana Deysi López, Director of the National Hydrological Service.
However, it will require measuring a new balance to establish the current situation. The formula is simple: we will need to measure the amount of rainfall into the lake, and subtract from that the amount of outgoing water by way of evaporation, by way of feeding into other water bodies, such as the Sucio River, and the amount that the local population of the area uses.
However, the rainfall of the winter of 2003 in the basin – that covers all of the mountains around this crater of volcanic origin (see side note) – will only reach the underground water table of the lake in some 10 years, affirms geologist Carlos Pullinger of SNET.
According to specialists, there are three factors that have to be taken into account in order to understand the considerable reduction of water in Coatepeque.
In the first place, we cannot disregard the fact that the 2001 earthquakes could have opened up underground cracks in the lake. However, it is nearly impossible to test this hypothesis, considering the scarcity of technical resources available.
Secondly, the water levels of the Sucio River have not been measured, being the only natural outflow of the lake.
A third factor is making a priori calculations on the amount of water entering the water table. And finally, taking inventory of how many barrels of water are extracted daily for domestic and agricultural use.
For example, among the 560 houses that surround the lake, the technicians of the Coatepeque Foundation calculate that some 25 barrels daily are used to water gardens, only half of which return to the underground water table, another part of which evaporates, and the rest is absorbed by the plants.
To this, we must add the amount of water that is released from six hydraulic plants pumping water towards receiving tanks on the foothills of the volcanic complex of Santa Ana.
Damp Numbers
It was the afternoon of Thursday, 15th of April. We went aboard a boat on Coatepeque Lake to see in situ the cause for alarm of the inhabitants of the area and the environmental authorities who undertake to study the balance between the states of this impressive water resource.
Once within the lake, tossed about by the breeze and waves, we followed along the breadth of the lake in search of cracks that the neighbours indicate are responsible for the descending water levels.
The first indicator that lit up the yellow alert light was the precariously dry state of the wooden docks, as well as their rafters that are now reaching their highest points of exposure.
Many did not know that near the island of El Cerro, also known as Teopán, was the small hill of San Juan, that is now a settling point for visitors coming to install their baited fishing lines.
The boat entered all the way until reaching the small streams formed by the natural waterways and others formed by resident owners in order to remain close to the water. From here, several outgoing pipelines could be seen gathering water for pools and cisterns.
Watch those Tanks
But the neighbours point out the six pumps that supply six farms and some 20 villages in the surrounding cantons, as well as two perforated wells within the basin that drain water out to 10 houses and as far away as the district of El Congo.
The person in charge of the Pozo del Guineo project, Juan Pablo Martínez, says that the 420 gallons of water per minute generated by the pump, at a rate of 10 hours per day, by conversion, add up to six thousand barrels daily.
The water rises to the capturing tank, and then by gravity tosses out the vital liquid – without sanitary processing – to the cantons of El Guineo, San José, el Rodeo, Siete Príncipes, and beyond, to the municipality of El Congo. In summary, Juan Pablo says that they rationally supply some 1,500 plumbing systems, with an average of three families per faucet.
Then the eye turns to the managers of the communal project of La Vuelta de Oro, with a well that pumps close to one thousand barrels daily to the canton of Los Arados, from which an average of some thirteen thousand inhabitants receive their water supply, according to Don Marco Coto, the person in charge of the pump.
The remaining pumps (see the informational graphics) drain water to farms and cooperatives of the reform sector outside of the basin. The use that people give to this water is always for domestic purposes.
In the face of alarm, the time comes to look for responsibilities. David Ramirez, of the Coatepeque Foundation, is in charge of taking a census of the houses and the number of barrels used by each one for irrigation during the summer season. He has already established some calculations and offers figures that can only be alarming. Out of a total of 560 residences, each one spends an average of 25 barrels per day, that comes to a total of fourteen thousand barrels daily, of which only half will return to the lake.
Suggestions have already begun to emerge to assuage the problem. Don Diego Chirino, ex-president of the community of El Estoraque, who also drains water from the lake, suggests that farms could just water three times per week and the vegetation would not dry up. “The majority leave the sprinklers running all day long,” he says.
As these damp numbers begin to jump out at us, we need to calculate the amount of water coming in during winter, and that which is still hidden in the basin under the blue waters of the Coatepeque.
Photograph:
The dock and viewpoint of Lake Coatepeque’s only hotel has been left on dry land. In the 1970s, the water used to come up to the restaurant’s open terraces, which now stand over thirty metres above the water. Some houses have had to extend their gardens and construct new docks.
The Cave of the Explosion
SUMMARY:
The volcano of Coatepeque, that is the older brother of its same generation sibling, the Santa Ana, and father to the rest of the volcanoes that make up this eruptive complex, underwent a fierce period of metallurgic activity that concluded with a great explosion, leaving an enormous hole of more than 20 kilometres radius and some two (kilometres) deep, beginning a long process of capturing of rainwater and underground water that eventually transformed itself into a lake.
NOTE:
From the top of the Santa Ana Volcano, at 2,381 metres above sea level, the restless blue mirror of the Coatepeque resembles a creation of the gods, made to meditate upon themselves. As blue as the sky that clothes it, Coatepeque Lake shows off its waves from some two kilometres of depth and some twenty wide, if one were to cross it in a straight line from one end of the basin to the other.
From above, this impressive resource, product of the rich volcanic heritage of the territory of El Salvador, takes on one of the most capricious forms that the human imagination can muster. It is difficult to avoid getting the impression that one is standing before a gigantic pot that is half-full.
In effect, after a long and critical period of volcanic activity some 55,000 years ago, Coatepeque had a mega-eruption that geologists call “Plinian,” to commemorate Latin American naturalist, Cecilio Segundo Plinio, who described the eruptions of the Vesuvio (Italy) in the year 79 A.D., when it buried Pompeii.
The Plinian eruption that took place in Coatepeque is characterized by the explosion of the volcano and the expulsion of its material over long distances, which caused great cataclysms and a radical transformation in the geography.
From this explosion, there remains a crater, which, with the passing of time over several thousand years, began to capture rainwater and underground water until it transformed itself into the major body of water that is today considerably losing its content levels.
The explanation offered by German geologists Helmut Meyer-Abich and Howel Willliams, in their work “The Volcanic History of Coatepeque Lake and its Surroundings,” written in 1954 under the auspices of the Tropical Scientific Research Institute (Instituto Tropical de Investigaciones Científicas) of the University of El Salvador, is the most important scientific reference available to understand this water resource of a volcanic nature.
Times of Tranquility
Even though Coatepeque Lake forms part of the Volcanic Complex of Santa Ana, that encompasses the volcanic ensemble of San Marcelino, Cerro Verde and Izalco (which can be observed in the satellite image illustrated on this page), danger of its eruption does not generate concern.
The vulcanologist, Carlos Pullinger studied this volcanic complex in order to obtain his Master’s Degree in Geology at the Technological University of Michigan in the United States of America.
Pullinger’s theory sustains that both the Coatepeque and the Santa Ana are two masses from the same period, and that both have undergone large eruptions that have affected the geography of the area.
However, Coatepeque as a volcano does not show signs of any further activity, considering that, according to the geologist’s theory, the displacement of the underground magma, some 18 kilometres deep, has run in a southwesterly direction, in the direction of Izalco and beneath the Santa Ana.
In this sense, it is difficult to separate the Coatepeque study from the rest of the volcanoes that comprise the complex. Nevertheless, the site awakens a certain fascination for the rawness with which it demonstrates evidence of its fierce past.
Helmut Meyer-Abich and Howel Williams studied the rock deposits located along the bottom of the lake in order to analyse the age and nature of the material, as well as the differences among its sides, as clear indicators in distinguishing the lava rock of the Coatepeque and that of its siblings.
These specialists also traced maps along the breadth of the floors towards the interior of the crater. In its area to the south, there is a valley covered with fresh earth, that has to some extent altered the underground activity.
Although from the top, the impressive mirror of water appears to be a caprice of the ego of the gods, from the surface of the blue waters, its colossal eruptive past is evident: a pot of water half-full that once reached its higher moments in the decade of the 70s, when it surpassed 115 metres in depth and generated concern over its rising levels, and that now sets off the green light for its descent.
Illustrative box:
PALLIATIVES FOR CLEANSING
The polluted waters of Coatepeque Lake were among one of the first problematic symptoms that put on alert the farmowners located in the basin. By the end of the 1990s, people could see the problems coming.
A study carried out in 1997 indicated that close to one thousand persons came to wash their clothes and domestic utensils directly in the lake. Pollution both from dirt and from chemical agents was evident.
In 1996, the Coatepeque Foundation proposed a project for the construction of public washing facilities away from the lake.
To date, 12 modules have been constructed, that are used by an average of 900 persons.
The project was financed by a private enterprise, that established of the structure.
However, users must pay a fee to cover electrical energy costs incurred by the water pumps and persons administering the facilities, and communities have established the fee at $0.80 per wash.
Those users who refuse to use the washing facilities represent a minimal group of people, says David Ramírez, technician of the Coatepeque Foundation. Rebellion against using the facilities tends to be worse among those who arrive from outside the basin.
The Foundation surged from the need to protect this water resource, and it is now proposing new strategies on the use of the lake, especially in the face of the alarming rate of descent in its water levels.
Coatepeque, the Polluted Surface
( Second submission)
by Tomás Guevara
Coatepeque Lake is the water supply source for some 20,000 persons who live within and beyond the surrounding basin. In addition to an alarming descent in the water level of this body, from which 21,000 barrels of water are extracted daily, there are pollution problems with this natural resource.
As the water trickles on the shores of Punta Arena beach in Coatepeque, the trash floats by and coming onto the land, spoils this enchanting natural scenery. A detergent wrapper competes with an empty bag of candies to reach the shore, but a plastic soda bottle is the first to touch land, pushed forward by the currents.
Together with the lake, and just a few metres from this scene, Doña Reyna Ramírez, who comes down to the shore every so often from the canton of Santa Rosa, washes her family’s weekly laundry. Close by are some ten women chatting while using rocks as washing utensils to rinse away the dirty foam from their washing.
Silently, a spot of soap disperses over to the edge of the lake, to the whim of the water’s movement – and the women continue their “normal” activity while their children bathe in the lake.
Reyna allows herself a break from the chores and comes out of the water to comment that the drought in the canton of Santa Rosa doesn’t leave them with any other option than to come and do their washing at the edge of the lake.
Pangs of Conscience
The water that the washerwomen’s families drink is the same water in which they do their washing. Reyna knows this. “We are aware that polluting the lake is a wrong that we commit against ourselves, but what else can we do if we have no water at home?” she says.
The 12 washer modules ordered for construction by the Coatepeque Foundation are not within everyone’s reach. These potential users all agree that to pay one dollar to wash one basketful of clothing is too high a price for their family budget.
But this is the way that the cards are dealt. David Ramírez, Technician of the Foundation in the area, comments that this measure has at least reduced the amount of washerwomen along the shores of the lake by about 80 per cent over the last four years.
To the personnel in charge of Sanitation in the Health Unit of the lake, there is no other option but to urge the population to boil the water before drinking it. However, timber has become scarce, since most of the basin has been deforested.
With this somber panorama, the survival of Coatepeque Lake as a rational alternative for human consumption has become critical. The high density of the population and the lack of a management plan for this water resource begin to present a problem.
The Head of Research on Water Resource Pollution of the National Service for Territorial Studies (SNET), Zulma Mena, says that a comprehensive study on the pollution problems of Coatepeque could shed light towards finding urgent solutions and alleviating the problems.
Everything that Goes Down
But Coatepeque’s pollution is not only due to detergents and trash left by the people along the shores. A study carried out by U.S. Geologist Molly C. McCutcheon of the University of Ohio in the United States of America in 1998, entitled “Volcanic and Anthropogenic Pollution in Coatepeque Lake” brought samples of the lake water under the laboratory lens of the Department of Science and Geology of the North American institution.
The results take off in various directions, pointing to several sources of pollution. Some abnormal elements found in the water – sulfur, boron and acids – are not noxious to human health in the quantities detected, and they come from the very volcanic nature of the basin.
However, other components point directly to the pollution caused by human beings. Among these, McCutcheon found hydrocarbon residues (gasoline) and motor oil. These wastes proceed from some 500 boats that go out periodically from the docks of the houses along the lake.
Another source of pollution described in detail by the North American was the presence of fertiliser and pesticide residues. These in their majority proceed from the local maize and grain farms and the country houses forming part of the basin, but also from the fertiliser used in home gardens.
From these samples, detergents and solid wastes also floating in the water did not escape their attention. If the presence of these toxins has not yet caused a state of alarm for Coatepeque, the geologist left open the speculation that these quantities found could sky rocket if regulations are not placed on the human exploitation of this water resource.
Luck has been kinder to Coatepeque than to its fellow lake, Ilopango, from which some four years ago, several tons of hospital waste was extracted, that had proceeded from the metropolitan area of San Salvador.
Water that One Shouldn’t Drink...
Even though the water from Coatepeque supplies some 30 thousand people within and around the basin, there is no laboratory proof that certifies the quality of the water as suitable for human consumption.
The Coordinator of the Protection Committee for Water Resources of the National Administration of Aqueducts and Sewage Systems (ANDA), Rubén Alemán, assures us that the institution maintains control over the quality of well water that supplies the network.
In Coatepeque, however, their presence is nil, since there is an abundance of community projects on water supply financed by non-governmental organisations. Only in certain cases, some samples are analysed by petition of the community.
No one has certified the water quality in Coatepeque recently. Meanwhile, Reyna Ramírez and her fellow washerwomen won’t deny the fact that the water they drink is somewhat salty, but that nonetheless, necessity requires them to quench their thirst.
(Illustrative box)
AQUATIC BROOMS
By Latin American standards, on the subject of lakes, Coatepeque is considered to be one of the cleanest. However, this encouraging category is only an advantage by comparison to other water bodies on the continent.
Between 1996 and 1999, the School of Ocean Diving carried out annual clean-ups of the lake and the surprises hidden in its depths. Javier Mena, instructor at the diving school, recalls that during the first clean up, in a period of two days and with the participation of 300 divers, they brought up three tons of garbage.
At that time, they extracted tires, batteries, plastic bags, cans and even objects of personal use. Throughout the following years, they extracted less garbage. In 1999, only 200 pounds were brought up.
At that point, they abandoned the clean-up effort at Coatepeque and focused their interest on Ilopango, that was getting to a critical state.
Clear Accounts for Coatepeque
( Third submission)
by Tomás Guevara
To establish a hydrological balance of Coatepeque Lake, that has undergone a descent of more than two metres in the last three years, is the first measure to be taken before proposing mitigations to its potential run-offs and to the use of this natural resource.
When the Mayas directed their gaze to the gray skies, their spirits contemplated the Giver of Rain, Chac, who enriched the flows of the rivers and the lakes with his humid presence.
Now that Coatepeque Lake is in a state of crisis, that prayer which was once offered up by the Mayas from this impressive lake of a volcanic nature, may still take effect.
The estimates of losses in the level of the water body are frightening, considering that in three years, the water level has gone down by approximately two metres. And during the last two winters, the recuperation of some 50 centimetres of average rainfall for the season evaporated within the first months of the dry season. That is to say, that with the arrival of the rain season, the level has not risen to even half of what it had risen to at the end of the previous winter season.
These estimates made a priori by the inhabitants of the basin are indeed a testimony to the fact as such, but there is still a need to conduct tests using scientific methods.
And this is the aim of Hydrological Management Division of the National Service for Territorial Studies (SNET), that hopes to take in the greatest amount of information possible in order to establish a hydrological balance of the waters of the lake in three month’s time.
Adding and Subtracting
Celina Mena, Technician with Hydrological Management, comments that the method used to establish this balance is not complicated.
The main point is to measure the quantity of rainwater received in the basin during a minimum period of the last ten years in order to establish an average cycle. On the basis of this amount, water evaporation is subtracted, as well as water used by plants and that which goes out by way of underground fissures and by way of extraction for domestic use.
In the last balance conducted in 1973 by the Hydrological Service of the Ministry of Agriculture and Livestock, it was estimated that underground drainage of the lake is located at the head of El Chorrerón, El Tinteral and La Joya, wells that feed into the Sucio River at a volume of 721 litres per second.
To conduct the balance that SNET has in view, these measurements must be brought up to date, as Celina Mena foresees, because there may have been alterations after the earthquakes with the settlement of the fault lines.
However, while this puzzle is solved, the indicators point in several directions. In the first of this series of articles, water extraction was estimated at 22 thousand barrels daily, according to the numbers provided by the Coatepeque Foundation and facts offered by the heads of water pumping projects for the communities located outside the basin.
Climate Change
Others attribute the reduction in water levels to climate change and the amount of rainfall, which has gone down considerably during the past decade.
According to a detailed register of the amount of rainfall in the basin between 1976 and 2003, Don Antonio Cabrales maintains that the lower level is due to a natural phenomenon.
His data proceeds from a udometer (an instrument used to measure the amount of rainfall) that is installed at the ranch El Porvenir, located within the Coatepeque basin.
His estimates detail that between 1997 and 2003, the basin has only received an average rainfall of 1,536 millimetres annually; a figure considerably less that that of 1,800, that is considered to be the normal average in the territory of El Salvador, according to Tomás Rivas Pacheco, coordinator of the Centre for Climate Prediction of SNET.
With the rain season at the doorstep, the meteorology management team hopes that the rains will reach a higher average this year, with some variations in the microclimates of the eastern and coastal areas of the country.
In response to this reality, Don Antonio Cabrales, who served as an employee of the Ministry of Agriculture and Livestock between 1989 and 1994 during the mandate of Alfredo Cristiani, ensures us that we need to reflect seriously on this natural resource without setting aside the water needs of the area’s population.
Mother Nature Pays
The concerns of the inhabitants of Coatepeque, and those surrounding another three water resources in the country undergoing the same situation, has reached the attention of the National Development Foundation (FUNDE), which has already established a multidisciplinary team that searches for the reasons behind the problems and seeks to propose short-term concrete solutions.
Diego Salcedo, Environmental Economist and Consultant to the Foundation, assures us that the project that is already underway not only plans to identify the reasons for the reduction in water resources, but also tries to gain the commitment of users to protect the resource from pollution and ensure that this remains so for the future.
The objective of this plan is that the communities that are supplied with the resources take on the payments and costs of environmental services. This is a modality that interests the World Bank when considering offering loans.
However, in the executive part of the plan, the country’s political structures must also be called upon to work on the issues. For the FUNDE team, water is not only a conflictive issue in Coatepeque, but by virtue of the very needs of the population as a whole.
They are sure that once having the final result of their study, anticipated by next July, some of the differences in needs among those affected will be highlighted, for example, whether it is more important to have water for irrigation or for human consumption.
Julio Quiñónez, Hydrologist and also a member of the consultative team of the Foundation, affirms that with the water balance study created, elements of the problem will be identified; however, the facts produced by this will also have to be taken as a reference for seeking solutions to the water problem on a national scale.
While the discussions follow their course and proposals towards solutions begin to emerge, Coatepeque Lake continues in its descent, waiting on Chac, whom the Mayas once implored to bring them rain.
A Lifesaver for Coatepeque
( Last submission)
by Tomás Guevara
Before the rain arrives to mitigate the crisis of the lake that is shrinking, the storm of proposals begins to fall, but achieving consensus among all the users in the Coatepeque basin could unravel a true tempest.
Completely still, as rarely occurs but few days ever, the waters of Coatepeque allow one to see peacefully, from deep within, the houses, docks, gardens and even its own basin, denuded of trees, reflected in the mirror of its surface.
This is a day in which the stillness of the water seems to indicate that the anticipated rains will be late in coming. By surprise, only a couple of hours go by before the waves begin to rise before the imminent presence of a gray cloud that appears as if having emerged from the Santa Ana volcano, before pouring in by streams into the lake.
This cycle of rains is the first hope of recuperation for Coatepeque Lake, which in the last three years has experienced a dramatic descent in its water levels, having lost some two metres in this short span of time.
The phenomenon has awakened concern, as much for the inhabitants, as among the state institutions in charge of environment and water.
Inputs for a Plan
The causes of the water level’s descent continue on a course for proof, sought out by those in charge of responding to the avalanche of questions generated by this phenomenon.
One thing is certain to Celina Mena, Technician of Hydrological Management of the National Service for Territorial Studies (SNET), who, by way of previous studies on Coatepeque and updated information, seeks responses to the complex crisis surrounding the lake.
Her unit’s contribution will be to offer a complete diagnostic study so that from this, guidelines may be established that may help to structure a management plan for the entire basin.
SNET’s motives are not gratuitous. Coatepeque as a body of water having a parameter of 35 kilometres and a maximum depth of 115 metres, is without any doubt the most significant water reserve in the western region of the country.
Not only does the Lake provide water to some 20,000 persons who live within and around the basin, the aquiferous body of Coatepeque nourishes the humid agricultural valley of Zapotitán and other water sources near the volcanic complex of Santa Ana.
According to Don Rafael Aguilar, who took up a water supply project some ten years ago for a community close to the Los Pinos Cooperative, the margins for action to protect the resource are limited.
The shortage of resources makes it impossible to establish a project to save the lake.
However, he does what is within his reach. Thanks to him, there is no garbage on his stretch of beach where the pipeline passes through to extract water for some 40 homes. Moreover, he has planted trees along the shore that are full of life.
His criticism is strong of those who, before constructing, hew down as many trees as may be obstructing their view of the lake. “They could build large houses without having to bring down all of the trees,” he says.
But deforestation is only one of the factors indicated among the problems, although perhaps its reversal is the most viable palliative to consider that could serve to reverse the reduction in the water level of the lake.
Helpful Facts
Before entering into the guidelines of a management plan for the lake, Federico Castellanos, who carried out a water study for the Coatepeque basin in 1999 under contract with the Coatepeque Foundation, refers to the conclusions proposed in his study to reverse the problem of the low water levels.
Castellanos identified the factors contributing to water loss of the lake. At that time, the majority of its volume was lost by condensation and by way of the natural outflows that fed into the Sucio River, for which he recommended a periodic control.
Another critical point signaled by the specialist was the deforestation of the basin, which needed to be urgently recovered in order to improve the infiltration of rainwater into this major body of water.
Castellanos’ study showed that human consumption, which surpassed one million cubic metres during one year, was merely the smallest source of water loss for the lake.
Already by that time, however, the change in water reserve levels during the rain season was generating numbers in the red.
During each cycle, it lost an average of 5 million cubic metres of water, that is, 4.46% of the total stored.
Voices of Commitment
In 1998, an environmental law was adopted, but the majority of institutions turn a blind eye when it comes to putting it into effect, as a matter of cultural practice, according to the opinion of the Director of National Heritage of the Ministry of Environment and National Resources, Ernesto López.
In the face of this reality, his office takes charge to contribute to proposals to move ahead. And Coatepeque is in its sights, ever since a joint effort with the National Development Foundation (FUNDE), that anticipates generating inputs to establish an action plan for the basin.
The modality is that the users of the basin should pay for the services received from nature. But this proposal is yet to be sold over to the hundreds of families who have their homes along the shores of the lake.
Crossroads
These projects on “payment for environmental services” enjoy the endorsement of the World Bank as a condition to release funds.
Enrique Merlos of FUNDE sees the realistic dimension of the situation in the Coatepeque basin. To him, it is not simply a question of placing prohibitions on farmers who continue to cut down trees to make agricultural use of the land, but rather, proposing alternative, environmentally friendly livelihoods.
And in the Coatepeque basin, given the issues, the owners of homes on the lakeshore could contribute to encouraging those who live on the outskirts to stop their harmful practices and work on reforestation projects throughout the zone.
Don Jesús Méndez is one of the community leaders of Potrerillos de la Laguna, located at the peak of the basin. Water stopped reaching his house when the water pump that supplied the 127 families of his village broke down, and the collective funds amongst the neighbours were not enough to have it replaced.
The suggestion offered during a forum organised by FUNDE a couple of weeks ago, at the office of the Coatepeque Labour Centre, was that reforestation needs to be well-planned.
To him, the solution lies in sowing fruit trees, “...because people practice burning to clear land to sow maize, but if what they would burn bears nourishment, they will be incapable of setting it on fire, and they will protect it,” he says.
The solutions jump out everywhere, and those who already have their feet in a solution ask that they be looked to as an example. Isabel Morales, of the Salvadoran Association for Environmental Conservation (ASACMA), who executes a project to protect the Las Lajas Forest, considered to be the area of greatest water absorption for the basin, says that her entire community is involved in the work of protecting the 400 hectares.
The payment made by the neighbours to protect the resource is not monetary, plus they also receive something vital. Within the forest, there are water sources which, were it not for the forest, would have disappeared.
While the rains fall on the Coatepeque basin, the rise and fall of numbers are small. Before going any further, we must see what consolation the rain season may bring and what will be the human will of everyone together to throw a lifesaver to Coatepeque.
Teopán, the Green Jewel
In the Coatepeque basin, only the island of Teopán relies on a management and urban development plan.
It looks as though is a big green hat floating along the southern side of Coatepeque Lake. In reality, they are 145 square blocks that comprise the island of Teopán, which in the Nahuat language means “Home of the Gods.”
The vegetation is exuberant and the fauna is so well recovered, that the garrobos (an iguana-like reptile), armadillos and squirrels allow themselves to be seen from just a short distance away.
But the island, that was condemned to depredation some 40 years ago, has recovered thanks to the intervention of the visionary plan of Don Antonio Cabrales, landowner of this portion of land over the last four decades.
When I came from the United States, I found the island and thought of it as heritage that we must leave for future generations,” he said.
The advice of Don Francisco De Sola, his father, pushed him to seek out professional help to propose a future for this natural resource.
Don Francisco put him in touch with a prestigious international company in charge of developing management plans for this type of natural sanctuary, and this proposal still remains in force today for the owners of plots on the island.
Conservation First
In 1970, a group of specialists from the “Sea Pines Company” arrived inTeopán from the island of “Hilton Head” in South Carolina.
The consultancy group designed a development plan that contained strict measures for the protection of flora and fauna on the island, and an urbanisation plan in balance with the environment.
The consultancy firm, recalls Cabrales, recommended that the housing in the areas resembling the brim of the hat and the top of the hat should conserve their primary forests.
No sooner said than done, of the 40 houses constructed on the island, the owners have committed themselves to respecting the norms mandated by the construction company.
Among the environmental requirements complied to by the owners is to use only those trees that are necessary to construct housing, which should be situated at a minimum of 50 metres from the edge of the lakeshore.
Another modality is that the houses should have no walls, except for natural barriers. And wastewater should be deposited as far away as possible from the edge of the lake.
There are no regulations on the exploitation of the land, and less so for the use of the lake water. The director of Natural Heritage of the Ministry of Environment, Ernesto López, says that the environmental law approved in 1998 likewise states that any construction should remain at a minimum of 50 metres’ distance from any water resource.
However, in practice, the mandate leaves much to be desired. To him, beginning to comply with a law is an important step in resource protection. For now, the island of Teopán is the only sanctuary within the basin that shines like a green jewel.
FIGURE 1
An Analysis on the Behaviour of Water Systems in El Salvador carried out between the years 2001 and 2002 by the National Service of Territorial Studies (SNET) indicates that surface water has diminished by 30 per cent, comparing current data registered on caudals with that registered in the decade of the 1970s.
In order to reverse this process, that can be most seriously observed in the Coatepeque basin, hydrologist Federico Castellanos recommended in 1999 the installation of at least two meteorological stations in the area to measure temperature, solar radiation, atmospheric pressure, wind direction and velocity, and evaporation. Besides this, he recommended the installation of a hydrometric station to conduct evaluations with precision on the variations in the lake’s levels.
He also recommended the urgent reforestation of the basin’s hillsides to support the replenishment of this water body, towards which the community of users should play an important role and should be informed regarding the balanced use of this natural resource, that is showing clear signs of endangerment.
FIGURE 2
The only regulation on “Water quality, drainage control and areas under protection” was approved under Executive Bill No. 50, dated 16 October 1987.
Article 5 of said regulation calls for the protection and enjoyment of water resources in the country, which should be protected by a State entity created for such ends. However, to date, no such institution exists to take charge of enforcement and of protecting subterranean and surface-level bodies of water.
Congo Brazzaville: oil and gas flarings pollute the coasts
by Esther Pabou Mbaki, Jean Valère Ngoubangoyi, Press Agency Syfia International
, Internet Publication (www.syfia.info), 2 September 2003.
The Reuters - IUCN Media Award 2004, Winner, French-speaking Africa.
(Syfia Congo) Tar on the beaches, fish with the hydrocarbon taste, desiccated plants, populations suffering from respiratory diseases... In Congo Brazzaville, the intensive exploitation of oil at sea pollutes the coasts seriously. That about which seem little to worry the all-powerful oil companies and hardly more the government.
"Certain days water becomes very dirty, and the fishermen do not go at sea. Oil pollution prevents us from concluding our activities. We are obliged to go further to hope to return with a quantity of fish ", notes Habram Mossassi, fisherman to 30 km of Pointe-Noire, capital economic of Congo, on the Atlantic Coast. Along this coast more than 120 wells of oil working are indeed in activity and a score of flares burns day and night there. All the large oil companies are present in water congolaises to start with TotalFinaElf, the largest operator, but also Agip, Shell, Chevron... Congo Brazzaville is the third oil producer in Africa behind Nigeria and Angola. An intensive exploitation whose the environment feels. These last years, the sea waters and the atmosphere are constantly polluted by "the oils poured in the sea and the pollutant tons of gases released in the air coming from the sites where proceeds the offshore oil rig oil exploitation", specifies Martial Makondi, tallies with the anti-pollution cell, of the ministry for Hydrocarbons "In the town of Point-Black, one noted that there is often tar on the beach", adds it without however giving figures, for lack of reliable studies on the extent of the pollution of the coasts congolaises by hydrocarbons. Many Pontenegrins which liked to go on the wild Coast deserted the places. As Jocelyne Mambou which regrets it, the glance fixed on the smoke which leaves the offshore oil rigs: "Since the tankers discharge their oils with broad, my friends and me ceased bathing us". Since the Nineties, oil discharges are daily "the tar, of dirty oil... even go up very high in the lagoon of Conkouati which constitutes one of the surfaces protected from the country", testifies Marcel Tati, chief of the projects of the nature conservation in Conkouati, to 160 km of Pointe-Noire.
The heat of the flares desiccates the plants
In certain villages located close of the sites of exploitation like that of Djeno or Loango, to 20 km of the city, the hot air of the flares which burn natural gas desiccates the seedlings and the cultures: palm trees, sheets of manioc, and other vegetables... The impotent populations badly support the strong odors released by these gases "Several times, I spoke with the authorities about the area about Kouilou, but they do not react", is indignant Jean Jacques Goma Makaya, chief of the village of Laongo where it even became difficult to find fruit trees. Pontenegrins which prefers to buy their fish directly in the villages of fishermen note that they have a hydrocarbon after-taste. They show rare Ong which are occupied of environment not to denounce with enough strength these problems "We have very limited means. This is why our claims do not bear fruits. Especially that we are not decision makers ", explains Yves Mbama, one of the persons in charge for association the humane Cause. Difficult, indeed, to be made hear all-powerful oil companies. In July 2002, the bishops of central Africa rose against the degradation of the living conditions of the populations and invited the oil companies "to offer compensations to the touched populations". In Kouilou, these compensations result in the construction of roads, schools, dispensaries... and especially the distribution of bribes to the authorities of the area, comments on one living of Pointe-Noire. Unfortunately, regrets Calvin Ampieh, administrator of the Observatory congolais of the biodiversity and of the environment, "the principle of the pollutant-payer is a thing which does not apply as it is necessary on our premises. Impossible thus to impose a tax of pollution waters of sea and atmosphere against these companies ".
Raise respiratory affections
For the oil companies, the expansion of the activity does not harm the ecosystems. In a leaflet on Kitina, one of the new oil fields recently put in exploitation, Agip Congo Research, affirms that the exploitation "is entirely conceived in coherence with the criteria of environmental protection produced by Agip Recherches for the Republic of Congo and its coastal zone". As for the person in charge for the accountancy of TotalfinaElf, which speaks under anonymity, it estimates that "the populations are wrong to think that we have contempt for their health. Each year our company spends important money sums for health". However, tuberculosis and other respiratory affections are in full increase and constitute the principal reasons for consultation in the hospitals of the city. Nearly 300 million tons of natural gas would be flarings each year in the flares, which is interdict in the Western countries where this source of energy is recovered. In Congo, it is only in December 2002 that a first power station with gas was inaugurated to make up the energy deficit of Pointe-Noire. In July 2003, the Council of Ministers finally decided that Congo was to ratify the International Convention on the civil liability for the damage due to pollution by hydrocarbons. It is a first step...
, Internet Publication (www.syfia.info), 2 September 2003.
The Reuters - IUCN Media Award 2004, Winner, French-speaking Africa.
(Syfia Congo) Tar on the beaches, fish with the hydrocarbon taste, desiccated plants, populations suffering from respiratory diseases... In Congo Brazzaville, the intensive exploitation of oil at sea pollutes the coasts seriously. That about which seem little to worry the all-powerful oil companies and hardly more the government.
"Certain days water becomes very dirty, and the fishermen do not go at sea. Oil pollution prevents us from concluding our activities. We are obliged to go further to hope to return with a quantity of fish ", notes Habram Mossassi, fisherman to 30 km of Pointe-Noire, capital economic of Congo, on the Atlantic Coast. Along this coast more than 120 wells of oil working are indeed in activity and a score of flares burns day and night there. All the large oil companies are present in water congolaises to start with TotalFinaElf, the largest operator, but also Agip, Shell, Chevron... Congo Brazzaville is the third oil producer in Africa behind Nigeria and Angola. An intensive exploitation whose the environment feels. These last years, the sea waters and the atmosphere are constantly polluted by "the oils poured in the sea and the pollutant tons of gases released in the air coming from the sites where proceeds the offshore oil rig oil exploitation", specifies Martial Makondi, tallies with the anti-pollution cell, of the ministry for Hydrocarbons "In the town of Point-Black, one noted that there is often tar on the beach", adds it without however giving figures, for lack of reliable studies on the extent of the pollution of the coasts congolaises by hydrocarbons. Many Pontenegrins which liked to go on the wild Coast deserted the places. As Jocelyne Mambou which regrets it, the glance fixed on the smoke which leaves the offshore oil rigs: "Since the tankers discharge their oils with broad, my friends and me ceased bathing us". Since the Nineties, oil discharges are daily "the tar, of dirty oil... even go up very high in the lagoon of Conkouati which constitutes one of the surfaces protected from the country", testifies Marcel Tati, chief of the projects of the nature conservation in Conkouati, to 160 km of Pointe-Noire.
The heat of the flares desiccates the plants
In certain villages located close of the sites of exploitation like that of Djeno or Loango, to 20 km of the city, the hot air of the flares which burn natural gas desiccates the seedlings and the cultures: palm trees, sheets of manioc, and other vegetables... The impotent populations badly support the strong odors released by these gases "Several times, I spoke with the authorities about the area about Kouilou, but they do not react", is indignant Jean Jacques Goma Makaya, chief of the village of Laongo where it even became difficult to find fruit trees. Pontenegrins which prefers to buy their fish directly in the villages of fishermen note that they have a hydrocarbon after-taste. They show rare Ong which are occupied of environment not to denounce with enough strength these problems "We have very limited means. This is why our claims do not bear fruits. Especially that we are not decision makers ", explains Yves Mbama, one of the persons in charge for association the humane Cause. Difficult, indeed, to be made hear all-powerful oil companies. In July 2002, the bishops of central Africa rose against the degradation of the living conditions of the populations and invited the oil companies "to offer compensations to the touched populations". In Kouilou, these compensations result in the construction of roads, schools, dispensaries... and especially the distribution of bribes to the authorities of the area, comments on one living of Pointe-Noire. Unfortunately, regrets Calvin Ampieh, administrator of the Observatory congolais of the biodiversity and of the environment, "the principle of the pollutant-payer is a thing which does not apply as it is necessary on our premises. Impossible thus to impose a tax of pollution waters of sea and atmosphere against these companies ".
Raise respiratory affections
For the oil companies, the expansion of the activity does not harm the ecosystems. In a leaflet on Kitina, one of the new oil fields recently put in exploitation, Agip Congo Research, affirms that the exploitation "is entirely conceived in coherence with the criteria of environmental protection produced by Agip Recherches for the Republic of Congo and its coastal zone". As for the person in charge for the accountancy of TotalfinaElf, which speaks under anonymity, it estimates that "the populations are wrong to think that we have contempt for their health. Each year our company spends important money sums for health". However, tuberculosis and other respiratory affections are in full increase and constitute the principal reasons for consultation in the hospitals of the city. Nearly 300 million tons of natural gas would be flarings each year in the flares, which is interdict in the Western countries where this source of energy is recovered. In Congo, it is only in December 2002 that a first power station with gas was inaugurated to make up the energy deficit of Pointe-Noire. In July 2003, the Council of Ministers finally decided that Congo was to ratify the International Convention on the civil liability for the damage due to pollution by hydrocarbons. It is a first step...
Persuading all to hold nature dear
by Leon Marshall, Sunday Argus, Weekly Newspaper, South African, 17 August 2003
The Reuters - IUCN Media Award 2004, Winner, English-speaking Africa and the Middle East.
The fifth World Parks Congress will be held in Durban next month. Leon Marshall looks at how money, poaching, poverty and history hinder the true importance of conservation
Hosi Shilungwa Mhinga II is a regal figure with the quaintest of mannerisms. He likes holding hands with his guests, and so taken was the young reporter by the kindly way he answered her questions, she appeared poised to lean her head on his chest and hug him.
It was in similarly gentle tones that he explained in a speech to a media party why his Mhinga tribe had instituted a claim under South Africa's new land restitution law to a northern portion of the Kruger National Park.
Hosi, or chief, Mhinga was a lawyer in Johannesburg before he assumed the tribal position some years ago on his father's death.
It was an unlikely occasion he chose for making his point to the media party visiting his tribe's upmarket Wisani Lodge and Cultural Village, built with state funds as a community-development ecotourism project outside the Kruger Park.
The visit was part of the promotional campaign for the launch of the Great Limpopo Transfrontier Park, joining South Africa's Kruger with Mozambique's Limpopo and Zimbabwe's Gonarezhou parks.
It was a moment for celebrating the giant new park, not for undercutting it. But the chief insisted that was not his purpose.
He explained that the Mhinga had occupied the land in question since the 14th century, but after Kruger's declaration as a national park in the early 20th century they were systematically forced out.
At question time, a corpulent man from a lunch group that did not form part of the media contingent asked: "Why don't you do as we in Zimbabwe do and simply take what is yours?"
Hosi Mhinga smiled indulgently. "No," he said. "What we want is an acknowledgement that this is our land. We want a say in its management, a share in profits and traversing rights so we can visit our ancestral graves and erect memorials."
The episode happened some months ago, and the outcome of the application is still pending. But the issues it raised go to the heart of what the upcoming World Parks Congress in Durban, from September 8-18, will be about.
The congress is held under the auspices of the influential World Conservation Union. Staged once a decade, and bringing together top environmentalists and interested parties from around the globe, it has a key part in setting the agenda for the world's protected areas.
Past congresses have helped governments create more protected areas, and have helped get more resources directed into conservation. This will be the first time the congress is held in Africa, which is highly opportune. The struggle to protect nature is not this continent's alone.
Globally, nature is under pressure from a growing population wanting space and resources. The destruction of natural forests, for instance, is as frightful in South America and Asia as it is in Africa. So is the number of fauna species under threat, most alarmingly from the trade in bushmeat. And so, too, are the global effects of pollution, among others.
What makes it such a good time for Africa to be hosting the congress right now, though, is its own changing mood, as marked by the advent of the African Union, the energetic promotion by the likes of President Thabo Mbeki of the New Partnership for Africa's Development, and initiatives to stop its destructive conflicts.
Swathes of Africa's beautiful wildlife remain under threat from military marauders, from thoughtless commercial exploitation and from the destruction that goes with mass poverty. But as minds turn to ways of constructing a brighter future, so, surely, must its fabulous natural beauty enter the equation, as is indeed happening.
The continent boasts a remarkable two-million square kilometres of protected areas. And one of the most positive developments from the recent AU assembly in Maputo was the adoption of the revised African Convention on the Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources, aimed at upgrading conservation standards.
The fifth World Parks Congress, promises to focus the international conservation spotlight on the continent. The potential benefits are legion.
Already a global trust fund is being mooted for assisting its conservation efforts. Technical assistance, too, can be expected. But what will count most in the end is the way it contributes to Africa's own spirit of revival and conservation.
Southern Africa will indeed be offering a ready example to congress delegates of the role environmental protection can play in socio-economic reconstruction generally. The extension and consolidation of protected areas, even across national boundaries, since the end of apartheid and the region's pre- and post-colonial conflicts have been truly phenomenal. It is heavily attributable to tourism being earmarked as a prime growth and job-creating industry. But it springs as much from simple care.
The people in the public and private sectors driving it hardest are environmentalists whose prime concern is to see precious remaining parts of nature preserved, for its own sake and for the enjoyment of future generations. On the other hand, the sub-continent offers as good a case study of the relentless pressures there are on protected areas.
With time and resources for putting more of our dwindling natural environment under legal protection already tight, much money and effort still has to be spent on just keeping existing protected areas safe.
Poaching, raids on vegetation and other forms of illegal intrusion remain a widespread problem.
Greed and criminality have their part, but sometimes it springs from more complex situations, such as when park demarcations and management clash with the traditional rights and practices of local communities. At the other end of the scale, conservationists have to be perpetually vigilant against developments in the name of ecotourism, for example, that could tip the delicate balance away from conservation and turn protected areas into nothing more than commercial undertakings. But worst of all remains the threat of mass poverty underpinned by ignorance about the purpose of parks. An estimated four million people, encompassing some of South Africa's poorest communities, live on the western side of the Kruger Park.
How safe could even the pride of SA's parks be if thoughts are entertained about its being the fancy of conservationists, or the playing field of the rich, or its proving that, to the privileged classes, animals and plants are more important than people?
Adding to the conundrum are the insensitivities of a previous political era that went into the creation of parks, and which have been rebounding as in the Mhinga case. Fortunately, with the wisdom of time and modern communication it has come to be realised, in SA as in many other parts of the world, just how important it is that protected areas exist in harmony with society. They cannot be safe unless surrounding communities get a practical sense of their benefits, in the same way that the global conservation drive cannot make headway unless broad society comes to appreciate and support protected areas better for their vital role as reservoirs of diversity, as the filters providing fresh air and water, and as places where people can reconnect with nature. It is what makes the fifth congress's theme of "benefits beyond boundaries" so entirely fitting.
There are now about 44 000 parks around the globe, together coming to about 10% of Earth's landmass.
They are the product of exhaustive battles going back deep into the 19th century, and are a tribute to the few whose foresight and commitment, in the face of much public indifference and often of political and commercial opposition and outright obstruction, produced this miracle.
It is an ongoing struggle, though. It is vital, for Earth's wellbeing and that of humankind, that vastly greater land areas be saved from destruction.
It is as vital that marine life becomes a similar priority for legal protection, for though the oceans constitute about two-thirds of Earth's surface, not even 1% are designated protected areas.
Such are the challenges that will be confronting the World Parks Congress in its efforts to chart the way ahead for protected areas.
Following last year's World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg, which highlighted the deterioration of the natural environment, it presents a good opportunity for taking stock and for setting a hopeful course for the future.
In a sense it can be as remarkable as the first congress held in Seattle in 1962 where, at a time when East and West were threatening each other with nuclear obliteration, environmentalists chose to talk about the global significance of protected areas.
That congress set the tone for its 1972 successor in the US's Yellowstone Park, where the emphasis was on establishing global standards for administering protected areas. The 1982 congress in Bali, Indonesia, underscored the need for broader understanding of the value of parks. The 1992 congress in Caracas, Venezuela, took the theme further by emphasising the importance of fitting in protected areas with local, regional and international planning. The Durban congress will undoubtedly come up with sound practical proposals regarding the declaration, financing and administration of protected areas. But its hallmark will come from the principles it sets for strengthening the relationship between parks and society. It means finding ways of making them meaningful for surrounding communities to cherish and protect. It also means finding ways of mustering more people behind the cause of conservation by convincing them of the true importance of protected areas for our wellbeing. The ideal is a global partnership of those who hold nature dear.
The Reuters - IUCN Media Award 2004, Winner, English-speaking Africa and the Middle East.
The fifth World Parks Congress will be held in Durban next month. Leon Marshall looks at how money, poaching, poverty and history hinder the true importance of conservation
Hosi Shilungwa Mhinga II is a regal figure with the quaintest of mannerisms. He likes holding hands with his guests, and so taken was the young reporter by the kindly way he answered her questions, she appeared poised to lean her head on his chest and hug him.
It was in similarly gentle tones that he explained in a speech to a media party why his Mhinga tribe had instituted a claim under South Africa's new land restitution law to a northern portion of the Kruger National Park.
Hosi, or chief, Mhinga was a lawyer in Johannesburg before he assumed the tribal position some years ago on his father's death.
It was an unlikely occasion he chose for making his point to the media party visiting his tribe's upmarket Wisani Lodge and Cultural Village, built with state funds as a community-development ecotourism project outside the Kruger Park.
The visit was part of the promotional campaign for the launch of the Great Limpopo Transfrontier Park, joining South Africa's Kruger with Mozambique's Limpopo and Zimbabwe's Gonarezhou parks.
It was a moment for celebrating the giant new park, not for undercutting it. But the chief insisted that was not his purpose.
He explained that the Mhinga had occupied the land in question since the 14th century, but after Kruger's declaration as a national park in the early 20th century they were systematically forced out.
At question time, a corpulent man from a lunch group that did not form part of the media contingent asked: "Why don't you do as we in Zimbabwe do and simply take what is yours?"
Hosi Mhinga smiled indulgently. "No," he said. "What we want is an acknowledgement that this is our land. We want a say in its management, a share in profits and traversing rights so we can visit our ancestral graves and erect memorials."
The episode happened some months ago, and the outcome of the application is still pending. But the issues it raised go to the heart of what the upcoming World Parks Congress in Durban, from September 8-18, will be about.
The congress is held under the auspices of the influential World Conservation Union. Staged once a decade, and bringing together top environmentalists and interested parties from around the globe, it has a key part in setting the agenda for the world's protected areas.
Past congresses have helped governments create more protected areas, and have helped get more resources directed into conservation. This will be the first time the congress is held in Africa, which is highly opportune. The struggle to protect nature is not this continent's alone.
Globally, nature is under pressure from a growing population wanting space and resources. The destruction of natural forests, for instance, is as frightful in South America and Asia as it is in Africa. So is the number of fauna species under threat, most alarmingly from the trade in bushmeat. And so, too, are the global effects of pollution, among others.
What makes it such a good time for Africa to be hosting the congress right now, though, is its own changing mood, as marked by the advent of the African Union, the energetic promotion by the likes of President Thabo Mbeki of the New Partnership for Africa's Development, and initiatives to stop its destructive conflicts.
Swathes of Africa's beautiful wildlife remain under threat from military marauders, from thoughtless commercial exploitation and from the destruction that goes with mass poverty. But as minds turn to ways of constructing a brighter future, so, surely, must its fabulous natural beauty enter the equation, as is indeed happening.
The continent boasts a remarkable two-million square kilometres of protected areas. And one of the most positive developments from the recent AU assembly in Maputo was the adoption of the revised African Convention on the Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources, aimed at upgrading conservation standards.
The fifth World Parks Congress, promises to focus the international conservation spotlight on the continent. The potential benefits are legion.
Already a global trust fund is being mooted for assisting its conservation efforts. Technical assistance, too, can be expected. But what will count most in the end is the way it contributes to Africa's own spirit of revival and conservation.
Southern Africa will indeed be offering a ready example to congress delegates of the role environmental protection can play in socio-economic reconstruction generally. The extension and consolidation of protected areas, even across national boundaries, since the end of apartheid and the region's pre- and post-colonial conflicts have been truly phenomenal. It is heavily attributable to tourism being earmarked as a prime growth and job-creating industry. But it springs as much from simple care.
The people in the public and private sectors driving it hardest are environmentalists whose prime concern is to see precious remaining parts of nature preserved, for its own sake and for the enjoyment of future generations. On the other hand, the sub-continent offers as good a case study of the relentless pressures there are on protected areas.
With time and resources for putting more of our dwindling natural environment under legal protection already tight, much money and effort still has to be spent on just keeping existing protected areas safe.
Poaching, raids on vegetation and other forms of illegal intrusion remain a widespread problem.
Greed and criminality have their part, but sometimes it springs from more complex situations, such as when park demarcations and management clash with the traditional rights and practices of local communities. At the other end of the scale, conservationists have to be perpetually vigilant against developments in the name of ecotourism, for example, that could tip the delicate balance away from conservation and turn protected areas into nothing more than commercial undertakings. But worst of all remains the threat of mass poverty underpinned by ignorance about the purpose of parks. An estimated four million people, encompassing some of South Africa's poorest communities, live on the western side of the Kruger Park.
How safe could even the pride of SA's parks be if thoughts are entertained about its being the fancy of conservationists, or the playing field of the rich, or its proving that, to the privileged classes, animals and plants are more important than people?
Adding to the conundrum are the insensitivities of a previous political era that went into the creation of parks, and which have been rebounding as in the Mhinga case. Fortunately, with the wisdom of time and modern communication it has come to be realised, in SA as in many other parts of the world, just how important it is that protected areas exist in harmony with society. They cannot be safe unless surrounding communities get a practical sense of their benefits, in the same way that the global conservation drive cannot make headway unless broad society comes to appreciate and support protected areas better for their vital role as reservoirs of diversity, as the filters providing fresh air and water, and as places where people can reconnect with nature. It is what makes the fifth congress's theme of "benefits beyond boundaries" so entirely fitting.
There are now about 44 000 parks around the globe, together coming to about 10% of Earth's landmass.
They are the product of exhaustive battles going back deep into the 19th century, and are a tribute to the few whose foresight and commitment, in the face of much public indifference and often of political and commercial opposition and outright obstruction, produced this miracle.
It is an ongoing struggle, though. It is vital, for Earth's wellbeing and that of humankind, that vastly greater land areas be saved from destruction.
It is as vital that marine life becomes a similar priority for legal protection, for though the oceans constitute about two-thirds of Earth's surface, not even 1% are designated protected areas.
Such are the challenges that will be confronting the World Parks Congress in its efforts to chart the way ahead for protected areas.
Following last year's World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg, which highlighted the deterioration of the natural environment, it presents a good opportunity for taking stock and for setting a hopeful course for the future.
In a sense it can be as remarkable as the first congress held in Seattle in 1962 where, at a time when East and West were threatening each other with nuclear obliteration, environmentalists chose to talk about the global significance of protected areas.
That congress set the tone for its 1972 successor in the US's Yellowstone Park, where the emphasis was on establishing global standards for administering protected areas. The 1982 congress in Bali, Indonesia, underscored the need for broader understanding of the value of parks. The 1992 congress in Caracas, Venezuela, took the theme further by emphasising the importance of fitting in protected areas with local, regional and international planning. The Durban congress will undoubtedly come up with sound practical proposals regarding the declaration, financing and administration of protected areas. But its hallmark will come from the principles it sets for strengthening the relationship between parks and society. It means finding ways of making them meaningful for surrounding communities to cherish and protect. It also means finding ways of mustering more people behind the cause of conservation by convincing them of the true importance of protected areas for our wellbeing. The ideal is a global partnership of those who hold nature dear.
Breaking up is hard to do
by Duncan Graham-Rowe, Nature, Vol. 429, Weekly Science Journal, 24 June 2004
The Reuters - IUCN Media Award 2004, Winner, Europe.
Single-hulled ships are being rushed to the scrapyard in the wake of oil spills such as that of the Prestige. But will breaking them up cause environmental havoc too? Duncan Graham-Rowe finds out.
In November 2002, the Prestige oil tanker hit rough weather off the coast of Spain. The ship was badly damaged, the crew air-lifted to safety, and the vessel was led out to sea. Six days later it was torn in two, spewing 77,000 tonnes of oil into the sea. Kilometres of coastline were closed to the public as the thick black liquid spread over beaches and wildlife, prompting fears that the environmental disaster could be even worse than the one in Alaska caused by the Exxon Valdez 13 years earlier.
It’s not known exactly what caused the Prestige to crack.What is known is that it was 26 years old and was a single-hulled ship. Such vessels have only a single skin between their cargo and the sea, leaving a slight margin of safety against a spill in case of collision. At the time of the accident, more than 2,200 such ships, many of them old and rusting, had already been earmarked for the scrapyard.
Under regulations drawn up in April 2001 by the International Maritime Organization (IMO) and the European Union, all single-hulled tankers had to be retrofitted or replaced with ships containing two hulls by 2015 — some types as early as 2007. But in the wake of the Prestige accident, those deadlines were cut to 2010 and 2005, respectively.
But this victory for the environment will come at a cost. As the deadlines approach there is a concern that there are not enough ship-breaking yards to cope with the impending deluge of ships. Instead, most of the vessels will end up being scrapped on beaches in India, Bangladesh and China, by workers without access to the tools and equipment that make scrapping safe.
At the same time, some people — including both ship owners and environmentalists — argue that this rush to decommission old hulls won’t necessarily stop oil spills. A double hull comes with its own problems, says Tim Wilkins, environment manager with Intertanko, an association that represents independent tanker owners. These cost more to maintain because roughly twice the surface area needs to be kept free from corrosion, and gases can build up between hulls, creating the risk of explosion.
Ground rules
Perhaps more importantly, double hulls are designed to protect against low-velocity impacts, says Wilkins. Yet almost invariably oil spills are caused not by collisions but by running aground, such as happened to the Exxon Valdez and the Erika tanker — which ran aground off the coast of France in 1999. “If both these ships had been double-hulled this would not have prevented the accidents,” he says. No one is arguing that the old, singlehulled ships should simply be allowed to stay at sea. But the rush to decommission them will cause its own problems.“It’s a good thing to make tankers safer,”says Marietta Harjono, coordinator of Greenpeace’s ship-breaking campaign. “But we should be aware if we’re simply shifting the pollution.”
Oil isn’t the only potential pollutant onboard a tanker. Even an empty ship can pose a serious environmental threat. A typical tanker contains heavy metals such as lead, mercury, cadmium and zinc in the paint of its hull — much of it intended to kill barnacles and other life that may try to adhere to the ship’s belly.Other hazardous compounds used as antifouling agents include tributyltin, which is toxic to nerve cells and can accumulate in the blood, liver, kidney and brain. Polychlorinated organic compounds, which have been linked to cancer and liver damage, can be found in the insulation of old electrical cables. And asbestos litters old ships as a fire retardant.
In the West, says Harjono, tough regulations ensure the safe disposal of such hazardous materials. Ideally, ships are scrapped in regulated dry docks or controlled quayside facilities where any pollutants released by the dismantling process can be contained.
But in Asia, where 92% of all ship scrapping takes place, there are precious few of these yards. Three years ago, even before the Prestige sank, Philippe Poirier d’Ange d’Orsay, the now retired president of the Baltic and International Maritime Council (BIMCO) — a global shipping association — called upon China, where most of Asia’s dry docks are located, to increase its shipscrapping capacity to help meet the IMO deadlines. But not much seems to have been done.
On the scrapheap
The reality is that the vast majority of ships are going to be scrapped on beaches in India, China and Bangladesh, says Torben Strand, a senior manager at BIMCO. And it can be difficult to monitor activity there, even where legislation exists.
When ships are scrapped on beaches,their hazardous materials are often just burned in open pyres.Harmful fumes are then released directly into the environment — and into the people breathing the air. Useful materials such as asbestos are often removed without any protective equipment and left to dry on the beach before being resold.
In theory, there are some ship-scrapping facilities in Western countries that could handle some of the load, but there is a definite ‘not in my backyard’ attitude when it comes to ship breaking, says Harjono. Governments would far rather shuffle the problem to a place where the cost of breaking is cheaper and the pollution problems are farther away.
The US Congress recently appropriated $16 million for ship scrapping and now has several yards equipped for breaking. But after a bidding war, the government recently sent four of its ex-Navy ‘ghost ships’ across the Atlantic to the Able UK ship-breaking yard in Hartlepool. Their arrival was greeted by a mass of protests against what was called a cocktail of hazardous chemicals in the ships, and environmental groups claimed that Able UK did not have the right permits to deal with the ‘toxic waste’. Those ships are still sitting in dry-dock in Britain,waiting for permits to roll in. Another nine former US Navy ships scheduled to sail for Britain seem destined to be broken up elsewhere — along with nearly 200 others also waiting to be scrapped.
Waste transfer
Environmental groups argue that shipping such waste to another country breaches the Basel Convention on the export of hazardous waste and so should be prevented, forcing Western countries to clean up their own mess. “It doesn’t matter if you export a barrel of asbestos, or transport it as part of a ship’s cabin,” says Harjono. “The effect is the same.” But many ship companies argue that the Basel Convention applies only to the transport of waste and so does not extend to the ships themselves.
Some countries are beginning to take steps that indicate they are aware of their global responsibilities. A European consortium is planning to build a new scrapping facility in the Netherlands to try to cope with the influx of ships, for example. A new type of environmentally friendly ship-recycling yard called an EcoDock is being planned at Eemshaven. Touted as a ‘zero pollution’ facility, this €45-million (US$54-million) yard aims to use about one fifth of the workforce of a typical Chinese yard to scrap ships more safely and much faster than is currently possible.
Pioneered by a non-profit organization called the Stichting Tanker Ontmanteling Platform (STOP), the EcoDock should be able to use heavy cutting machinery to scrap a ship in just 23 days, says STOP chairman Doebren Mulder. In other yards the process usually takes 13 weeks and on the beaches it can take as long as eight months, he says.
If successful,STOP hopes to initiate up to 40 more yards based on this model, and has already begun negotiations with a number of governments to do so.Many of the governments in these talks are again in Asia, where ship scrapping is big business and the raw materials — such as scrap steel — are in high demand. Giving Asia a greater capacity to scrap ships safely should be good news. Nevertheless, the first EcoDock won’t be complete until July 2006, making it questionable how much of an impact these yards will have on the accelerated decommissioning process.
Across all the ship-breaking facilities available worldwide now, the industry can scrap about 28 million tonnes of steel a year, according to the London-based shipbrokers E. A. Gibson. Technically that is enough to scrap the 175 million tonnes of ships that need to be disposed of by 2010 — if all the vessels are scrapped at a constant rate. In reality, experts say, that is unlikely to happen.
Companies are reluctant to decommission their tankers ahead of the IMO deadlines because the ships are still earning their keep. So shipyards are currently running below capacity, looking for more ships to break, says Wilkins. As the deadlines approach the concern is that there will be a rush to scrap the remaining ships, overburdening the dry docks and forcing most ships onto the seemingly endless stretches ofAsian beaches willing to take in more business.
Dirty work
In Bangladesh alone, more than 100,000 migrant workers are thought to depend on this industry. These are often vulnerable people with few other work options, who work for little more than a US dollar a day in some of the most dangerous conditions imaginable. According to Paul Bailey of the United Nations’ International Labour Organization (ILO), ship scrapping is now considered one of the world’s most dangerous occupations.
Figures taken from industrialized countries indicate that the rate of accidents and disease in ship breaking is very high compared with other industries. “We can assume that they are as bad, but probably even much worse, in developing countries,” says Bailey. Labourers working on beaches receive little training and lack protective clothing or equipment, exposing them to hazardous materials and physical dangers including suffocation, falling debris, fire, explosions and electrocution.
In theory, there are provisions in place to help force this industry to a halt:beach scrapping is set to be phased out by 2012, according to guidelines set up in 2002 under the Basel Convention. But with the industry bringing in so much cash and raw material, it is not clear how this will be achieved.
In the meantime, some governments have tried to deal with the situation by making beach scrapping safer. India,for example, now refuses to allow ships to be scrapped on its shores unless they have been certified as gas-free — meaning that the vessel has been checked for any potentially explosive pockets of gas. This has led to a drop in the number of explosion-related accidents, but has also lost India a lot of business as ship owners have taken their vessels elsewhere.
The ILO and the IMO have also produced guidelines for recycling ships safely. The IMO, for example, has introduced a Green Passport, which involves keeping an inventory of hazardous materials throughout a ship’s life. Then, at least, ship breakers will know what they are dealing with when they come to tackle the vessel. The ILO guidelines advise on the use of protective equipment when dealing with hazardous materials. But these guidelines are voluntary and the passport applies only to new ships.
If the rules and regulations could be made universal across the handful of countries involved in ship scrapping, says Bailey, then they would be much easier to enforce.
“What we want is a level playing field,” he says. Alternatively,Western governments could introduce guidelines ensuring that ship owners can only sell their ships to scrapping companies that abide by ILO and IMO guidelines, says Bailey. One solution would be for ship owners to be made responsible for the conditions under which their ships are scrapped,he says.
In the absence of such action, some companies are taking matters into their own hands. The Dutch firm P&O Nedlloyd already has a policy of only allowing its ships to be scrapped in two dry-dock scrapping facilities in China, both of which abide by ILO guidelines. The company also precleans its ships before handing them over,removing any hazardous materials and providing protective equipment for workers. So far, 19 ships have been scrapped this way at an additional cost of no more than $100 per tonne, says Tom Peter Blankestijn, P&O Nedlloyd’s maritime-policy manager.But the company doesn’t have any oil tankers, so this only applies to smaller ships.
Clean and dry It is possible to scrap ships in an environmentally friendly way, as EcoDock and P&O Nedlloyd are showing, but it is not the cheapest option. “Some parts of the industry are very much in favour of changing the way ships are scrapped,” says Frank Stuer- Lauridsen, chief environmental project manager at Danish engineering consultancy firm COWI, which is investigating the impacts of accelerated ship decommissioning. But, he says, whether a large part of the industry is willing to invest the money to make it happen is another matter.
It is very easy to blame ship owners for taking advantage of cheap scrapping facilities, says Strand, but finding out which ones are clean and safe can be difficult. “We are trying to accommodate concerns about the environment,” he says, but the onus should not rest solely on ship owners. “If the ILO wants ship owners to sell to responsible yards then the ILO should supply a list of them,” says Strand. This is on the cards, says Bailey.
In the meantime, as the ships queue up to be torn to bits and the deadlines loom, it is worth remembering that the motivation for this rapid response is based largely on politics rather than scientific evidence or environmental concerns, says Stuer-Lauridsen. “It’s the high-profile sinking of ships that has driven this,”he says.
In the end, the change to double-hulled ships won’t be a panacea for the environment, says Harjono. The situation on the beaches where these boats are scrapped is already bad — and is now bound to get worse. The number of ships being ripped apart on the sand has increased by about 25% each year for the past three years, she claims. The people carrying out the work may depend on the industry and they may be doing the world a service, but they are paying for it dearly. “They are paying with their health, they are paying with their environment and they are paying with their lives.We think that is unacceptable,” she says.
The Reuters - IUCN Media Award 2004, Winner, Europe.
Single-hulled ships are being rushed to the scrapyard in the wake of oil spills such as that of the Prestige. But will breaking them up cause environmental havoc too? Duncan Graham-Rowe finds out.
In November 2002, the Prestige oil tanker hit rough weather off the coast of Spain. The ship was badly damaged, the crew air-lifted to safety, and the vessel was led out to sea. Six days later it was torn in two, spewing 77,000 tonnes of oil into the sea. Kilometres of coastline were closed to the public as the thick black liquid spread over beaches and wildlife, prompting fears that the environmental disaster could be even worse than the one in Alaska caused by the Exxon Valdez 13 years earlier.
It’s not known exactly what caused the Prestige to crack.What is known is that it was 26 years old and was a single-hulled ship. Such vessels have only a single skin between their cargo and the sea, leaving a slight margin of safety against a spill in case of collision. At the time of the accident, more than 2,200 such ships, many of them old and rusting, had already been earmarked for the scrapyard.
Under regulations drawn up in April 2001 by the International Maritime Organization (IMO) and the European Union, all single-hulled tankers had to be retrofitted or replaced with ships containing two hulls by 2015 — some types as early as 2007. But in the wake of the Prestige accident, those deadlines were cut to 2010 and 2005, respectively.
But this victory for the environment will come at a cost. As the deadlines approach there is a concern that there are not enough ship-breaking yards to cope with the impending deluge of ships. Instead, most of the vessels will end up being scrapped on beaches in India, Bangladesh and China, by workers without access to the tools and equipment that make scrapping safe.
At the same time, some people — including both ship owners and environmentalists — argue that this rush to decommission old hulls won’t necessarily stop oil spills. A double hull comes with its own problems, says Tim Wilkins, environment manager with Intertanko, an association that represents independent tanker owners. These cost more to maintain because roughly twice the surface area needs to be kept free from corrosion, and gases can build up between hulls, creating the risk of explosion.
Ground rules
Perhaps more importantly, double hulls are designed to protect against low-velocity impacts, says Wilkins. Yet almost invariably oil spills are caused not by collisions but by running aground, such as happened to the Exxon Valdez and the Erika tanker — which ran aground off the coast of France in 1999. “If both these ships had been double-hulled this would not have prevented the accidents,” he says. No one is arguing that the old, singlehulled ships should simply be allowed to stay at sea. But the rush to decommission them will cause its own problems.“It’s a good thing to make tankers safer,”says Marietta Harjono, coordinator of Greenpeace’s ship-breaking campaign. “But we should be aware if we’re simply shifting the pollution.”
Oil isn’t the only potential pollutant onboard a tanker. Even an empty ship can pose a serious environmental threat. A typical tanker contains heavy metals such as lead, mercury, cadmium and zinc in the paint of its hull — much of it intended to kill barnacles and other life that may try to adhere to the ship’s belly.Other hazardous compounds used as antifouling agents include tributyltin, which is toxic to nerve cells and can accumulate in the blood, liver, kidney and brain. Polychlorinated organic compounds, which have been linked to cancer and liver damage, can be found in the insulation of old electrical cables. And asbestos litters old ships as a fire retardant.
In the West, says Harjono, tough regulations ensure the safe disposal of such hazardous materials. Ideally, ships are scrapped in regulated dry docks or controlled quayside facilities where any pollutants released by the dismantling process can be contained.
But in Asia, where 92% of all ship scrapping takes place, there are precious few of these yards. Three years ago, even before the Prestige sank, Philippe Poirier d’Ange d’Orsay, the now retired president of the Baltic and International Maritime Council (BIMCO) — a global shipping association — called upon China, where most of Asia’s dry docks are located, to increase its shipscrapping capacity to help meet the IMO deadlines. But not much seems to have been done.
On the scrapheap
The reality is that the vast majority of ships are going to be scrapped on beaches in India, China and Bangladesh, says Torben Strand, a senior manager at BIMCO. And it can be difficult to monitor activity there, even where legislation exists.
When ships are scrapped on beaches,their hazardous materials are often just burned in open pyres.Harmful fumes are then released directly into the environment — and into the people breathing the air. Useful materials such as asbestos are often removed without any protective equipment and left to dry on the beach before being resold.
In theory, there are some ship-scrapping facilities in Western countries that could handle some of the load, but there is a definite ‘not in my backyard’ attitude when it comes to ship breaking, says Harjono. Governments would far rather shuffle the problem to a place where the cost of breaking is cheaper and the pollution problems are farther away.
The US Congress recently appropriated $16 million for ship scrapping and now has several yards equipped for breaking. But after a bidding war, the government recently sent four of its ex-Navy ‘ghost ships’ across the Atlantic to the Able UK ship-breaking yard in Hartlepool. Their arrival was greeted by a mass of protests against what was called a cocktail of hazardous chemicals in the ships, and environmental groups claimed that Able UK did not have the right permits to deal with the ‘toxic waste’. Those ships are still sitting in dry-dock in Britain,waiting for permits to roll in. Another nine former US Navy ships scheduled to sail for Britain seem destined to be broken up elsewhere — along with nearly 200 others also waiting to be scrapped.
Waste transfer
Environmental groups argue that shipping such waste to another country breaches the Basel Convention on the export of hazardous waste and so should be prevented, forcing Western countries to clean up their own mess. “It doesn’t matter if you export a barrel of asbestos, or transport it as part of a ship’s cabin,” says Harjono. “The effect is the same.” But many ship companies argue that the Basel Convention applies only to the transport of waste and so does not extend to the ships themselves.
Some countries are beginning to take steps that indicate they are aware of their global responsibilities. A European consortium is planning to build a new scrapping facility in the Netherlands to try to cope with the influx of ships, for example. A new type of environmentally friendly ship-recycling yard called an EcoDock is being planned at Eemshaven. Touted as a ‘zero pollution’ facility, this €45-million (US$54-million) yard aims to use about one fifth of the workforce of a typical Chinese yard to scrap ships more safely and much faster than is currently possible.
Pioneered by a non-profit organization called the Stichting Tanker Ontmanteling Platform (STOP), the EcoDock should be able to use heavy cutting machinery to scrap a ship in just 23 days, says STOP chairman Doebren Mulder. In other yards the process usually takes 13 weeks and on the beaches it can take as long as eight months, he says.
If successful,STOP hopes to initiate up to 40 more yards based on this model, and has already begun negotiations with a number of governments to do so.Many of the governments in these talks are again in Asia, where ship scrapping is big business and the raw materials — such as scrap steel — are in high demand. Giving Asia a greater capacity to scrap ships safely should be good news. Nevertheless, the first EcoDock won’t be complete until July 2006, making it questionable how much of an impact these yards will have on the accelerated decommissioning process.
Across all the ship-breaking facilities available worldwide now, the industry can scrap about 28 million tonnes of steel a year, according to the London-based shipbrokers E. A. Gibson. Technically that is enough to scrap the 175 million tonnes of ships that need to be disposed of by 2010 — if all the vessels are scrapped at a constant rate. In reality, experts say, that is unlikely to happen.
Companies are reluctant to decommission their tankers ahead of the IMO deadlines because the ships are still earning their keep. So shipyards are currently running below capacity, looking for more ships to break, says Wilkins. As the deadlines approach the concern is that there will be a rush to scrap the remaining ships, overburdening the dry docks and forcing most ships onto the seemingly endless stretches ofAsian beaches willing to take in more business.
Dirty work
In Bangladesh alone, more than 100,000 migrant workers are thought to depend on this industry. These are often vulnerable people with few other work options, who work for little more than a US dollar a day in some of the most dangerous conditions imaginable. According to Paul Bailey of the United Nations’ International Labour Organization (ILO), ship scrapping is now considered one of the world’s most dangerous occupations.
Figures taken from industrialized countries indicate that the rate of accidents and disease in ship breaking is very high compared with other industries. “We can assume that they are as bad, but probably even much worse, in developing countries,” says Bailey. Labourers working on beaches receive little training and lack protective clothing or equipment, exposing them to hazardous materials and physical dangers including suffocation, falling debris, fire, explosions and electrocution.
In theory, there are provisions in place to help force this industry to a halt:beach scrapping is set to be phased out by 2012, according to guidelines set up in 2002 under the Basel Convention. But with the industry bringing in so much cash and raw material, it is not clear how this will be achieved.
In the meantime, some governments have tried to deal with the situation by making beach scrapping safer. India,for example, now refuses to allow ships to be scrapped on its shores unless they have been certified as gas-free — meaning that the vessel has been checked for any potentially explosive pockets of gas. This has led to a drop in the number of explosion-related accidents, but has also lost India a lot of business as ship owners have taken their vessels elsewhere.
The ILO and the IMO have also produced guidelines for recycling ships safely. The IMO, for example, has introduced a Green Passport, which involves keeping an inventory of hazardous materials throughout a ship’s life. Then, at least, ship breakers will know what they are dealing with when they come to tackle the vessel. The ILO guidelines advise on the use of protective equipment when dealing with hazardous materials. But these guidelines are voluntary and the passport applies only to new ships.
If the rules and regulations could be made universal across the handful of countries involved in ship scrapping, says Bailey, then they would be much easier to enforce.
“What we want is a level playing field,” he says. Alternatively,Western governments could introduce guidelines ensuring that ship owners can only sell their ships to scrapping companies that abide by ILO and IMO guidelines, says Bailey. One solution would be for ship owners to be made responsible for the conditions under which their ships are scrapped,he says.
In the absence of such action, some companies are taking matters into their own hands. The Dutch firm P&O Nedlloyd already has a policy of only allowing its ships to be scrapped in two dry-dock scrapping facilities in China, both of which abide by ILO guidelines. The company also precleans its ships before handing them over,removing any hazardous materials and providing protective equipment for workers. So far, 19 ships have been scrapped this way at an additional cost of no more than $100 per tonne, says Tom Peter Blankestijn, P&O Nedlloyd’s maritime-policy manager.But the company doesn’t have any oil tankers, so this only applies to smaller ships.
Clean and dry It is possible to scrap ships in an environmentally friendly way, as EcoDock and P&O Nedlloyd are showing, but it is not the cheapest option. “Some parts of the industry are very much in favour of changing the way ships are scrapped,” says Frank Stuer- Lauridsen, chief environmental project manager at Danish engineering consultancy firm COWI, which is investigating the impacts of accelerated ship decommissioning. But, he says, whether a large part of the industry is willing to invest the money to make it happen is another matter.
It is very easy to blame ship owners for taking advantage of cheap scrapping facilities, says Strand, but finding out which ones are clean and safe can be difficult. “We are trying to accommodate concerns about the environment,” he says, but the onus should not rest solely on ship owners. “If the ILO wants ship owners to sell to responsible yards then the ILO should supply a list of them,” says Strand. This is on the cards, says Bailey.
In the meantime, as the ships queue up to be torn to bits and the deadlines loom, it is worth remembering that the motivation for this rapid response is based largely on politics rather than scientific evidence or environmental concerns, says Stuer-Lauridsen. “It’s the high-profile sinking of ships that has driven this,”he says.
In the end, the change to double-hulled ships won’t be a panacea for the environment, says Harjono. The situation on the beaches where these boats are scrapped is already bad — and is now bound to get worse. The number of ships being ripped apart on the sand has increased by about 25% each year for the past three years, she claims. The people carrying out the work may depend on the industry and they may be doing the world a service, but they are paying for it dearly. “They are paying with their health, they are paying with their environment and they are paying with their lives.We think that is unacceptable,” she says.
The Untold Story
by Massoud Ansari, Newsline, Pakistan
The Reuters - IUCN Media Award 2004, Winner, Asia
When an environmental catastrophe threatens a city, it is one scoop private news agencies vie to get their hands on. The oil spill along the Karachi coast is just one such story.
The Tasman Spirit - a Greek-registered, Maltese flag-flying oil tanker - carrying approximately 67,500 tonnes of Iranian crude oil for the PNSC (Pakistan National Shipping Corporation) from the Emirates, bound for the Pakistan State Oil refinery, drifted perilously close to the Karachi harbour, became grounded, and in the process developed cracks along its base. On the eve of August 13, a few hours short of the country's independence day, the tanker split in two and began to disgorge huge amounts of its cargo into the water.
Although the vessel had been grounded since July 27, and repeated requests were made to the Karachi Port Trust (KPT) to take remedial action, the authorities concerned reacted by employing standard operating procedure: putting in place a few token measures and responding to queries about the spill evasively. Law enforcement officials closed the 16-kilometre coastline to the public and around 1,000 police personnel, army jawans and para-military troops, equipped with masks, were deployed to block all the inlets and outlets for vehicular traffic that led to the beach. But by the time concerted action had been initiated to contain the spill and the consequent damages on the environment, it was a case of too little, too late.
If the thick oil slick surrounding the ship, or the odour emanating from it were not evidence enough of the gravity of the situation, the effects of the spill in just two incidents is an eye-opener.
After spending four hours at the Clifton beach in an attempt to examine the causes and effects of the incident, and extracting with major difficulty one-liners from tight-lipped officials involved in the salvage operation finally underway, the crew of a private television channel decided to head back to the studios. They had barely left the beach when the driver of their vehicle began to have violent convulsions and soon thereafter fainted. Rushed to the nearest hospital where he was admitted to the Intensive Care Unit, he remained unconscious and was listed as "critically ill" for 48 hours. The diagnosis: toxic fume inhalation.
Likewise, a photographer belonging to a local NGO, who braved the polluted Clifton shores to take pictures of the grounded vessel, developed severe chest pains and began to vomit. Also transported to a neighbourhood hospital and made to undergo an immediate ECG, he was informed that he too was suffering from exposure to toxic pollutants.
As the fumes from the oil began to envelope the surrounding areas and incidences of asthma, allergies, nausea and conjunctivitis became commonplace among residents of these areas, a sense of panic started to prevail. While many of those who live around the seafront have moved to other parts of the city, others who have no choice but to stay have been compelled to suffer the oppressive atmosphere, with the long-term effects of breathing in the noxious air not even having begun to be ascertained. The human toll aside, there is the fallout on the marine life - in fact, the area's entire eco-system.
It has been estimated that between 24,000 to 26,000 tonnes of oil that are now in the sea have entirely destroyed the area's marine life, and the environment may never recover. The sight of dead fish, lobsters and crabs floating in the oily sea water, is graphic visual evidence of the devastation, but it is just one element of the larger ramifications of the spill. So much for official claims that the leakage was "minor, intermittent and under control," or to hear a KPT official declaring on local television, "The situation is under control; everything will normalise within a week." And despite increasing information about the hazards of the situation, to find the minister of communication and the KPT chief discussing how effective, "the dispersal of 6,000 litres of chemical clearing gas being sprayed with the help of two air-crafts" will be on the crude oil that is currently polluting the waters of the Arabian sea.
What, it turns out, is the worst environmental disaster in Pakistan's history, began when the Tasman Spirit, scheduled to be anchored in the Karachi harbour channel on July 27, became grounded. According to normal procedure, the operations wing of the KPT meets with the general manager operations every day to decide about the berthing of cargo-carrying vessels arriving at the country's biggest port. The timing of the berthing changes daily because it is dependent on the tide, shoring being most conducive at high tide, which in turn depends on the allegories of the moon. Priority is given to deep-loaded vessels, as they have to be berthed at the highest tide of the day. These vessels also have to be shored at the furthermost berths and consequently have to enter the channel first. The bigger ships require tugs to push and manoeuvre them into their berths. The KPT has only four such tugs.
According to the KPT's records, four ships were lined up for berthing on July 27, and the time of high tide that day was recorded at 10.33 a.m. Insiders reveal that two of the four vessels - one carrying freight containers and another oil tanks - were safely brought to the berths assigned to them, but when it was the turn of the Tasman Spirit, Pakistan navy officials demanded that one of their submarines be allowed to berth at the spot assigned for the ship. According to reports, the KPT officials demurred, saying they could not oblige because if the ship was not shored according to schedule, it would miss the high tide, and other ships lined up for shoring would also not be able to be berthed in their assigned spots. However, the navy officials paid no heed, and proceeded to berth their submarine. As a result, the Tasman Spirit could not be docked.
Insiders disclose that if the Tasman Spirit ship had been berthed the following day at the proper time perhaps the disaster could have been averted. However, the harbour master only gave the ship the go-ahead at 1 p.m. when it was not high tide, and assigned a licensed KPT pilot to see to the berthing of the vessel.
Experts on the subject maintain that when the Tasman Spirit, which has about 12 tanks, each containing between 5,000 to 6,000 tonnes of oil, was finally allowed to enter the channel, it was about three hours too late since it had lost the high tide and was about 2.5 metres short of the required depth for berthing. As a result, the vessel became grounded while rounding the breakwater, halfway in the channel bend.
"The harbour master should not have allowed the ship to come in. As a technical expert on the subject, he should have known better. He is largely responsible for the damage," says an expert on the subject. He adds that it is the harbour master's responsibility to ensure that the navigable channels are safe for shipping at all times and to oversee and monitor all shipping movements in the port. "Had there been proper supervision by the operations department, this accident could have been averted," he contends.
Further investigations reveal that one human error was compounded by another. Capt. Abdul Karim Bondrey, who is a master mariner and has served as a pilot and harbour master, also attributes part of the blame to the pilot who brought the ship in. According to him, "When a pilot bringing in the ship misses the tide, he is supposed to seek advise from the harbour master about what course of action to follow. However, the pilot also has to exercise his own judgement about whether to steer a ship in." He adds that the key element is safety. Bondrey maintains that according to international rules, ultimately it is the pilot or captain of the ship who is considered responsible for any accident because he is in command.
Other eyewitness-accounts lend weight to Bondrey's argument. They reveal that when the vessel was entering the channel, it had not gained the sufficient speed or power required to round the bend or turn into the main channel, which is one of the reasons it became grounded. An insider disclosed that the pilot, Nasir Javed, who was one of the key players in the Tasman Spirit debacle, was reportedly involved in at least four other accidents last year, and it was incomprehensible to his colleagues why he had been allowed to continue with his duties given his track record.
Some technical experts meanwhile, point out that since the vessel split within the channel and not outside of it, this indicates that either the channel had not been properly dredged, or the pilot had been provided charts which were erroneous or outdated, which would lay the blame squarely on the hydrographer. "The spot where the vessel became grounded is part of the main channel which we now know has insufficient depth," says an expert. However, he adds that the soundings shown on the chart also appear to be erroneous. "If the soundings were correct," he maintains, "then it means the buoys in the channel were out of position - i.e. they had drifted outside the channel and this lapse had not been discovered."
The matter did not end there. What is shocking is the lack of foresight demonstrated by the concerned authorities. Experts on the subject maintain that anyone with even the slightest knowledge of shipping and ports could have anticipated that if decisive remedial action was not taken, the ship would split. However, KPT officials apparently deluded themselves into believing that the high tide on August 5 would rescue the stranded ship, enabling it to enter the channel. This optimistic evaluation of the situation was borne out by the fact that rather than attempt to set the ship afloat as soon as possible, all the KPT officials did was to despatch crews to the vessel to siphon off as much oil as they could from it to make it lighter so that it could be tugged to deeper waters. Says an expert, "the weather was quite favourable and the tide kept rising. There is no logical explanation for why the concerned officials did not even attempt to refloat the vessel." He also fulminates about how in such a situation standard operating procedure dictates that traffic at an affected port is closed so that all energies are concentrated on the salvage operation. However, there was a free-flow of incoming and outgoing traffic at the Karachi port, despite the enormity of what had occurred.
He cites the fact that the KPT has at least four strong tugboats, which could have pulled the ship out. Alternately he says, with the vessel so close to the shore, it would have been possible to take a flexible pipe out to it from the beach and pump the oil out. The pump operation the KPT finally embarked on to empty the stricken tanker fell, in his view, desperately short of what was required. Expectedly, the slow pace of the operation yielded poor results: only 20,000 tonnes of the 67,500 tonnes of oil the ship was carrying, were pumped out.
Eventually, even this effort had to be abandoned and the crew evacuated from the marooned ship when the cracks in its base widened, and the ship began to buckle. "With action being delayed, and once initiated moving at a snail's pace, the likelihood of the tanker breaking up due to high swells was inevitable," says Capt Karim Bondrey. And once the vessel's forward tanks were ruptured, the oil leakage began in earnest. "Now the vessel is well and truly grounded, with her draft having increased from 12 metres originally to more than 18 metres," he contends.
As the toxic fumes began to spread in the area, aircraft loaded with pollution-control equipment, including booms, were called for from the UK and a C-130 aircraft was brought in from Singapore with 10 tonnes of chemical dispersant. Another dispatch of 250 tonnes of dispersant was also en route to Pakistan. Thereafter, a C-130 craft began spraying dispersant on the affected area, oblivious to the fact it would cause further degradation to marine life. The KPT chairman claimed that the dispersant would help save the marine eco-system and overall environment along the coastal belt. An environmental expert who works for an international environmental agency, however, begs to differ. "As a matter of fact, the chemical spray is even more dangerous than the other pollutants which are coming from the industrial areas. It will adversely affect, if not kill, marine life because it contains deadly chemicals," he says, adding that instead of using chemical dispersants, the concerned authorities should have examined other options like oil-consuming bacteria, which is available in the European market (see following report).
Even as the KPT chairman, Ahmed Hayat claimed that "the worst is now over; there will be no more spillage, and the remaining oil will be unloaded in a 10-15-day operation once the ship's parts have settled in the seabed," news broke on August 22, that the two parts into which the grounded tanker had broken, had finally drifted apart, spilling huge quantities of oil into the sea. According to reports, the two parts of the vessel had remained tenuously linked together for a few days through pipes and metal sheets since after it split into two on August 13, but finally even this link severed due to the rough sea. Consquently, the front portion of the ship got lodged even deeper in the seabed, while its rear portion also began to descend sharply. The ship's oil storage tanks were badly shaken as its rear buckled from the impact of the tide. This resulted in major oil spillage which is ongoing and so far salvage measures are proving inadequate, with the authorities stumped as to how to deal with the situation. "It is now quite certain that the 20,000 tonnes of oil remaining on the ship will empty out into the sea, adding to the miseries of the people who have still not recovered from the effects of the earlier spill," says an observer.
Ironically, even once the news of the leakage broke and effects on both human and marine life became public knowledge, KPT officials continued to waffle about the exact situation. Only on August 21, over a week after the disaster had occurred, did the federal minister for communications, Ahmed Ali, announce officially for the first time that there had been leakage of anwhere from 15,000 to 20,000 tonnes of crude oil. "We are not in a position to declare the exact quantity of oil spillage in the sea as the oil, being lighter than water, floats, so one cannot assess how much oil is remaining and how much has been spilled," said the minister. Ironically, soon after the incident, local newspapers quoted the federal communications minister saying that it was none of their business and the shipping company would handle the situation. And, even as reports of casualties to marine life accompanied by photographs of dead fish littering the beach and floating on the water were being published by newspapers daily, he was heard declaring, on a local television programme, "the Karachi shore is so polluted that it is devoid of any marine life." He meant presumably that there was no danger to marine life since there was no marine life to begin with.
The non-professional attitude of the KPT administration and its under-reporting of the situation can be gauged from the fact that when a delegation from NIPA went to the port for a briefing by one of the organisation's general managers, he responded to a question about the long-term damages to the eco-system by overruling the concerns of environmentalists. "Marine life has the guts and strength to move to safer waters. The spill will not do any damage to these species," he reportedly told the NIPA delegation.
Interestingly, despite the increasing evidence that the disaster owed, at least in major part to KPT functionaries, and all the classification certificates of the Tasman Spirit and other relevant documentation are in order and the ship was declared fit to carry a cargo of 67,500 tonnes, only the 25-man crew of the ship, comprising five Greeks and 20 Philippinos, are being held in custody and are presently under interrogation. "They will have to stay in the country till the inquiry is complete," says the federal communications minister.
A top-level investigation team, headed by the acting principal officer of the mercantile marine department, has been constituted to probe into the matter, ascertain its causes and effects on the environment. According to reports, it will submit its findings directly to General Pervez Musharraf.
Inside sources reveal that President Musharraf has also asked the ministry of communications as well as the ministry of petroleum to examine all the possible causes for the catastrophic incident, while expressing his deep anguish over the delay in damage-control efforts.
Meanwhile, KPT chairman Ahmed Hayat, is claiming that they will charge the owners of the vessel for all the damage caused. Legal experts however, say the KPT will be hard put to make such a case. "There is a general rule that ships causing oil spills must bear all the costs connected with the spill, but it has to be conclusively proved that the spill was caused due to the fault of the crew, or that the vessel was overloaded beyond its capacity, or the vessel did not have the required certification to carry such cargo," says a lawyer.
Some local legal experts however, maintain that the KPT authorities might be successful in their bid to seek recourse from the ship's owners if they engage legal eagles of international repute and alongside enlist the aid of various international bodies. "They should try to collect both compensation and cleaning-up costs from various international funds that are available such as the InternationalOil Pollution Compensation Fund," says a legal expert. The International Oil Pollution Compensation Fund is contributed by the vessel owners' insurers in case of spillage and accident.
Whoever is ultimately found culpable for the vessel being grounded, the question is, why did the KPT authorities take over a week to even begin to attempt to refloat the stranded vessel? To compound their negligence, they tried to hush up the incident. Insiders disclose that all KPT officers and employees were, through an official letter, threatened with serious disciplinary action, if any one of them was found discussing the issue with outsiders. "Not only was a warning letter issued to the employees, but the activities of port intelligence officials were also increased manifold in the port area. They were told to keep a close watch on all the workers and to inform the administration if they detected anyone discussing the issue even within the port premises," says a KPT employee. Reportedly, two KPT employees have been sacked for attending a press conference held by the leader of the KPT Progressive Workers Union, Mr. Shibli, to throw light on and disclose the names of the officials whose negligence led to the Tasmin Spirit disaster.
Ironically, even as Pakistan's worst environmental nightmare was unfolding, the KPT management continued to focus on other activities. All the employees from the lower cadres until Grade-19 were asked to take 'efficiency tests,' during this period, and informed that if they did not make the grade they would be shown the door. Interestingly, the first efficiency test was conducted on August 16, just two days after the oil spillage began. "It is bizarre; the tests should have been postponed and the empoyees asked to concentrate on devising means to refloat the sinking vessel," says a KPT official.
KPT officials maintain that one of the main reasons for the organisation's mismanagement is the fact that its entire administration has been handed over to members of the armed forces over the last few years. The Karachi Port Trust consists of six divisions, each headed by a general manager. In the past, these positions were held by civilians who had many years of experience at the job and the corresponding expertise. Now alongside other appointments in the KPT of armed forces personnel, five of the organisation's six divisions are also headed by them.
Since these officials took over control of the KPT, they have made various structural changes in the organisation, and are now handling assorted technical assignments. For example, traditionally, the deputy conservator - usually an individual with years of hands-on experience at the job - supervises the process of fixing the timing of the berthing of vessels. However, now, after a reshuffle, it is the general manager (operations) who has been awarded this responsibility. Currently, this post is held by a member of the Pakistan navy, who is considered a rank outsider by KPT employees. Likewise, a professional aviator from the Pakistan navy has been appointed traffic manager of the KPT. This too is a highly technical position. "Assigning these technical jobs to a non-technical person is like asking a car driver to fly an aeroplane," says a senior KPT official.
As a result of the invasion by non-professionals in the KPT in the past few years, many senior KPT officials have availed of the 'golden handshake' scheme and moved on to private corporations.
None of which augurs well for Pakistan's beleaguered shipping industry, its citizens' well-being, or its marine life. Have any lessons been learnt? Judging by official response, none so far.
The Reuters - IUCN Media Award 2004, Winner, Asia
When an environmental catastrophe threatens a city, it is one scoop private news agencies vie to get their hands on. The oil spill along the Karachi coast is just one such story.
The Tasman Spirit - a Greek-registered, Maltese flag-flying oil tanker - carrying approximately 67,500 tonnes of Iranian crude oil for the PNSC (Pakistan National Shipping Corporation) from the Emirates, bound for the Pakistan State Oil refinery, drifted perilously close to the Karachi harbour, became grounded, and in the process developed cracks along its base. On the eve of August 13, a few hours short of the country's independence day, the tanker split in two and began to disgorge huge amounts of its cargo into the water.
Although the vessel had been grounded since July 27, and repeated requests were made to the Karachi Port Trust (KPT) to take remedial action, the authorities concerned reacted by employing standard operating procedure: putting in place a few token measures and responding to queries about the spill evasively. Law enforcement officials closed the 16-kilometre coastline to the public and around 1,000 police personnel, army jawans and para-military troops, equipped with masks, were deployed to block all the inlets and outlets for vehicular traffic that led to the beach. But by the time concerted action had been initiated to contain the spill and the consequent damages on the environment, it was a case of too little, too late.
If the thick oil slick surrounding the ship, or the odour emanating from it were not evidence enough of the gravity of the situation, the effects of the spill in just two incidents is an eye-opener.
After spending four hours at the Clifton beach in an attempt to examine the causes and effects of the incident, and extracting with major difficulty one-liners from tight-lipped officials involved in the salvage operation finally underway, the crew of a private television channel decided to head back to the studios. They had barely left the beach when the driver of their vehicle began to have violent convulsions and soon thereafter fainted. Rushed to the nearest hospital where he was admitted to the Intensive Care Unit, he remained unconscious and was listed as "critically ill" for 48 hours. The diagnosis: toxic fume inhalation.
Likewise, a photographer belonging to a local NGO, who braved the polluted Clifton shores to take pictures of the grounded vessel, developed severe chest pains and began to vomit. Also transported to a neighbourhood hospital and made to undergo an immediate ECG, he was informed that he too was suffering from exposure to toxic pollutants.
As the fumes from the oil began to envelope the surrounding areas and incidences of asthma, allergies, nausea and conjunctivitis became commonplace among residents of these areas, a sense of panic started to prevail. While many of those who live around the seafront have moved to other parts of the city, others who have no choice but to stay have been compelled to suffer the oppressive atmosphere, with the long-term effects of breathing in the noxious air not even having begun to be ascertained. The human toll aside, there is the fallout on the marine life - in fact, the area's entire eco-system.
It has been estimated that between 24,000 to 26,000 tonnes of oil that are now in the sea have entirely destroyed the area's marine life, and the environment may never recover. The sight of dead fish, lobsters and crabs floating in the oily sea water, is graphic visual evidence of the devastation, but it is just one element of the larger ramifications of the spill. So much for official claims that the leakage was "minor, intermittent and under control," or to hear a KPT official declaring on local television, "The situation is under control; everything will normalise within a week." And despite increasing information about the hazards of the situation, to find the minister of communication and the KPT chief discussing how effective, "the dispersal of 6,000 litres of chemical clearing gas being sprayed with the help of two air-crafts" will be on the crude oil that is currently polluting the waters of the Arabian sea.
What, it turns out, is the worst environmental disaster in Pakistan's history, began when the Tasman Spirit, scheduled to be anchored in the Karachi harbour channel on July 27, became grounded. According to normal procedure, the operations wing of the KPT meets with the general manager operations every day to decide about the berthing of cargo-carrying vessels arriving at the country's biggest port. The timing of the berthing changes daily because it is dependent on the tide, shoring being most conducive at high tide, which in turn depends on the allegories of the moon. Priority is given to deep-loaded vessels, as they have to be berthed at the highest tide of the day. These vessels also have to be shored at the furthermost berths and consequently have to enter the channel first. The bigger ships require tugs to push and manoeuvre them into their berths. The KPT has only four such tugs.
According to the KPT's records, four ships were lined up for berthing on July 27, and the time of high tide that day was recorded at 10.33 a.m. Insiders reveal that two of the four vessels - one carrying freight containers and another oil tanks - were safely brought to the berths assigned to them, but when it was the turn of the Tasman Spirit, Pakistan navy officials demanded that one of their submarines be allowed to berth at the spot assigned for the ship. According to reports, the KPT officials demurred, saying they could not oblige because if the ship was not shored according to schedule, it would miss the high tide, and other ships lined up for shoring would also not be able to be berthed in their assigned spots. However, the navy officials paid no heed, and proceeded to berth their submarine. As a result, the Tasman Spirit could not be docked.
Insiders disclose that if the Tasman Spirit ship had been berthed the following day at the proper time perhaps the disaster could have been averted. However, the harbour master only gave the ship the go-ahead at 1 p.m. when it was not high tide, and assigned a licensed KPT pilot to see to the berthing of the vessel.
Experts on the subject maintain that when the Tasman Spirit, which has about 12 tanks, each containing between 5,000 to 6,000 tonnes of oil, was finally allowed to enter the channel, it was about three hours too late since it had lost the high tide and was about 2.5 metres short of the required depth for berthing. As a result, the vessel became grounded while rounding the breakwater, halfway in the channel bend.
"The harbour master should not have allowed the ship to come in. As a technical expert on the subject, he should have known better. He is largely responsible for the damage," says an expert on the subject. He adds that it is the harbour master's responsibility to ensure that the navigable channels are safe for shipping at all times and to oversee and monitor all shipping movements in the port. "Had there been proper supervision by the operations department, this accident could have been averted," he contends.
Further investigations reveal that one human error was compounded by another. Capt. Abdul Karim Bondrey, who is a master mariner and has served as a pilot and harbour master, also attributes part of the blame to the pilot who brought the ship in. According to him, "When a pilot bringing in the ship misses the tide, he is supposed to seek advise from the harbour master about what course of action to follow. However, the pilot also has to exercise his own judgement about whether to steer a ship in." He adds that the key element is safety. Bondrey maintains that according to international rules, ultimately it is the pilot or captain of the ship who is considered responsible for any accident because he is in command.
Other eyewitness-accounts lend weight to Bondrey's argument. They reveal that when the vessel was entering the channel, it had not gained the sufficient speed or power required to round the bend or turn into the main channel, which is one of the reasons it became grounded. An insider disclosed that the pilot, Nasir Javed, who was one of the key players in the Tasman Spirit debacle, was reportedly involved in at least four other accidents last year, and it was incomprehensible to his colleagues why he had been allowed to continue with his duties given his track record.
Some technical experts meanwhile, point out that since the vessel split within the channel and not outside of it, this indicates that either the channel had not been properly dredged, or the pilot had been provided charts which were erroneous or outdated, which would lay the blame squarely on the hydrographer. "The spot where the vessel became grounded is part of the main channel which we now know has insufficient depth," says an expert. However, he adds that the soundings shown on the chart also appear to be erroneous. "If the soundings were correct," he maintains, "then it means the buoys in the channel were out of position - i.e. they had drifted outside the channel and this lapse had not been discovered."
The matter did not end there. What is shocking is the lack of foresight demonstrated by the concerned authorities. Experts on the subject maintain that anyone with even the slightest knowledge of shipping and ports could have anticipated that if decisive remedial action was not taken, the ship would split. However, KPT officials apparently deluded themselves into believing that the high tide on August 5 would rescue the stranded ship, enabling it to enter the channel. This optimistic evaluation of the situation was borne out by the fact that rather than attempt to set the ship afloat as soon as possible, all the KPT officials did was to despatch crews to the vessel to siphon off as much oil as they could from it to make it lighter so that it could be tugged to deeper waters. Says an expert, "the weather was quite favourable and the tide kept rising. There is no logical explanation for why the concerned officials did not even attempt to refloat the vessel." He also fulminates about how in such a situation standard operating procedure dictates that traffic at an affected port is closed so that all energies are concentrated on the salvage operation. However, there was a free-flow of incoming and outgoing traffic at the Karachi port, despite the enormity of what had occurred.
He cites the fact that the KPT has at least four strong tugboats, which could have pulled the ship out. Alternately he says, with the vessel so close to the shore, it would have been possible to take a flexible pipe out to it from the beach and pump the oil out. The pump operation the KPT finally embarked on to empty the stricken tanker fell, in his view, desperately short of what was required. Expectedly, the slow pace of the operation yielded poor results: only 20,000 tonnes of the 67,500 tonnes of oil the ship was carrying, were pumped out.
Eventually, even this effort had to be abandoned and the crew evacuated from the marooned ship when the cracks in its base widened, and the ship began to buckle. "With action being delayed, and once initiated moving at a snail's pace, the likelihood of the tanker breaking up due to high swells was inevitable," says Capt Karim Bondrey. And once the vessel's forward tanks were ruptured, the oil leakage began in earnest. "Now the vessel is well and truly grounded, with her draft having increased from 12 metres originally to more than 18 metres," he contends.
As the toxic fumes began to spread in the area, aircraft loaded with pollution-control equipment, including booms, were called for from the UK and a C-130 aircraft was brought in from Singapore with 10 tonnes of chemical dispersant. Another dispatch of 250 tonnes of dispersant was also en route to Pakistan. Thereafter, a C-130 craft began spraying dispersant on the affected area, oblivious to the fact it would cause further degradation to marine life. The KPT chairman claimed that the dispersant would help save the marine eco-system and overall environment along the coastal belt. An environmental expert who works for an international environmental agency, however, begs to differ. "As a matter of fact, the chemical spray is even more dangerous than the other pollutants which are coming from the industrial areas. It will adversely affect, if not kill, marine life because it contains deadly chemicals," he says, adding that instead of using chemical dispersants, the concerned authorities should have examined other options like oil-consuming bacteria, which is available in the European market (see following report).
Even as the KPT chairman, Ahmed Hayat claimed that "the worst is now over; there will be no more spillage, and the remaining oil will be unloaded in a 10-15-day operation once the ship's parts have settled in the seabed," news broke on August 22, that the two parts into which the grounded tanker had broken, had finally drifted apart, spilling huge quantities of oil into the sea. According to reports, the two parts of the vessel had remained tenuously linked together for a few days through pipes and metal sheets since after it split into two on August 13, but finally even this link severed due to the rough sea. Consquently, the front portion of the ship got lodged even deeper in the seabed, while its rear portion also began to descend sharply. The ship's oil storage tanks were badly shaken as its rear buckled from the impact of the tide. This resulted in major oil spillage which is ongoing and so far salvage measures are proving inadequate, with the authorities stumped as to how to deal with the situation. "It is now quite certain that the 20,000 tonnes of oil remaining on the ship will empty out into the sea, adding to the miseries of the people who have still not recovered from the effects of the earlier spill," says an observer.
Ironically, even once the news of the leakage broke and effects on both human and marine life became public knowledge, KPT officials continued to waffle about the exact situation. Only on August 21, over a week after the disaster had occurred, did the federal minister for communications, Ahmed Ali, announce officially for the first time that there had been leakage of anwhere from 15,000 to 20,000 tonnes of crude oil. "We are not in a position to declare the exact quantity of oil spillage in the sea as the oil, being lighter than water, floats, so one cannot assess how much oil is remaining and how much has been spilled," said the minister. Ironically, soon after the incident, local newspapers quoted the federal communications minister saying that it was none of their business and the shipping company would handle the situation. And, even as reports of casualties to marine life accompanied by photographs of dead fish littering the beach and floating on the water were being published by newspapers daily, he was heard declaring, on a local television programme, "the Karachi shore is so polluted that it is devoid of any marine life." He meant presumably that there was no danger to marine life since there was no marine life to begin with.
The non-professional attitude of the KPT administration and its under-reporting of the situation can be gauged from the fact that when a delegation from NIPA went to the port for a briefing by one of the organisation's general managers, he responded to a question about the long-term damages to the eco-system by overruling the concerns of environmentalists. "Marine life has the guts and strength to move to safer waters. The spill will not do any damage to these species," he reportedly told the NIPA delegation.
Interestingly, despite the increasing evidence that the disaster owed, at least in major part to KPT functionaries, and all the classification certificates of the Tasman Spirit and other relevant documentation are in order and the ship was declared fit to carry a cargo of 67,500 tonnes, only the 25-man crew of the ship, comprising five Greeks and 20 Philippinos, are being held in custody and are presently under interrogation. "They will have to stay in the country till the inquiry is complete," says the federal communications minister.
A top-level investigation team, headed by the acting principal officer of the mercantile marine department, has been constituted to probe into the matter, ascertain its causes and effects on the environment. According to reports, it will submit its findings directly to General Pervez Musharraf.
Inside sources reveal that President Musharraf has also asked the ministry of communications as well as the ministry of petroleum to examine all the possible causes for the catastrophic incident, while expressing his deep anguish over the delay in damage-control efforts.
Meanwhile, KPT chairman Ahmed Hayat, is claiming that they will charge the owners of the vessel for all the damage caused. Legal experts however, say the KPT will be hard put to make such a case. "There is a general rule that ships causing oil spills must bear all the costs connected with the spill, but it has to be conclusively proved that the spill was caused due to the fault of the crew, or that the vessel was overloaded beyond its capacity, or the vessel did not have the required certification to carry such cargo," says a lawyer.
Some local legal experts however, maintain that the KPT authorities might be successful in their bid to seek recourse from the ship's owners if they engage legal eagles of international repute and alongside enlist the aid of various international bodies. "They should try to collect both compensation and cleaning-up costs from various international funds that are available such as the InternationalOil Pollution Compensation Fund," says a legal expert. The International Oil Pollution Compensation Fund is contributed by the vessel owners' insurers in case of spillage and accident.
Whoever is ultimately found culpable for the vessel being grounded, the question is, why did the KPT authorities take over a week to even begin to attempt to refloat the stranded vessel? To compound their negligence, they tried to hush up the incident. Insiders disclose that all KPT officers and employees were, through an official letter, threatened with serious disciplinary action, if any one of them was found discussing the issue with outsiders. "Not only was a warning letter issued to the employees, but the activities of port intelligence officials were also increased manifold in the port area. They were told to keep a close watch on all the workers and to inform the administration if they detected anyone discussing the issue even within the port premises," says a KPT employee. Reportedly, two KPT employees have been sacked for attending a press conference held by the leader of the KPT Progressive Workers Union, Mr. Shibli, to throw light on and disclose the names of the officials whose negligence led to the Tasmin Spirit disaster.
Ironically, even as Pakistan's worst environmental nightmare was unfolding, the KPT management continued to focus on other activities. All the employees from the lower cadres until Grade-19 were asked to take 'efficiency tests,' during this period, and informed that if they did not make the grade they would be shown the door. Interestingly, the first efficiency test was conducted on August 16, just two days after the oil spillage began. "It is bizarre; the tests should have been postponed and the empoyees asked to concentrate on devising means to refloat the sinking vessel," says a KPT official.
KPT officials maintain that one of the main reasons for the organisation's mismanagement is the fact that its entire administration has been handed over to members of the armed forces over the last few years. The Karachi Port Trust consists of six divisions, each headed by a general manager. In the past, these positions were held by civilians who had many years of experience at the job and the corresponding expertise. Now alongside other appointments in the KPT of armed forces personnel, five of the organisation's six divisions are also headed by them.
Since these officials took over control of the KPT, they have made various structural changes in the organisation, and are now handling assorted technical assignments. For example, traditionally, the deputy conservator - usually an individual with years of hands-on experience at the job - supervises the process of fixing the timing of the berthing of vessels. However, now, after a reshuffle, it is the general manager (operations) who has been awarded this responsibility. Currently, this post is held by a member of the Pakistan navy, who is considered a rank outsider by KPT employees. Likewise, a professional aviator from the Pakistan navy has been appointed traffic manager of the KPT. This too is a highly technical position. "Assigning these technical jobs to a non-technical person is like asking a car driver to fly an aeroplane," says a senior KPT official.
As a result of the invasion by non-professionals in the KPT in the past few years, many senior KPT officials have availed of the 'golden handshake' scheme and moved on to private corporations.
None of which augurs well for Pakistan's beleaguered shipping industry, its citizens' well-being, or its marine life. Have any lessons been learnt? Judging by official response, none so far.
State of Denial
by Tom Knudson,
The Reuters - IUCN Media Award 2004, Global Winner
Intro
California's environmental legacy of conserving resources at home is on a collision course with its habit of consuming them in record quantities from abroad. And often the losers are impoverished citizens and communities - and spectacular ecosystems - in remote parts of the globe, where money speaks louder than the land.
From the Editor: Our choices make ripples around the world
How do decisions we make in California affect the environment in other parts of the world?
That simple question is the basis for this in-depth project.
And it is clear from months-long research, which took Bee staffers from the headwaters of the Amazon in Ecuador to the boreal forests in northern Canada to the seas off British Columbia, that the answer is just as simple. The impact of our public policy, business and individual decisions is profound.
The decision, for example, not to drill for oil off California's coastline has wide public support, for good reason. It allows California to preserve its wondrously scenic coastal beauty.
But the demand for gasoline continues to increase in the state - California drivers now use 38 million gallons a day. It has to come from somewhere. And so it does, increasingly from debt-ridden countries like Ecuador that have fewer environmental controls, leaving entire villages of indigenous people suffering severe consequences.
There are no simple solutions in a complex, industrialized nation like ours. Demands for goods and services will continue to grow. But are there ways as a nation, as a state, as a business or as individuals that we can lessen our global impacts?
To answer that question, it is fair to start with some introspection.
Newspapers are large consumers of newsprint, a wood product. Indeed, part of this project examines the impact of decisions to cut back on logging in California which, in turn, has had a profound impact on Canada's forests.
The Bee, for example, uses an average of 174 metric tons of newsprint a day, a significant percentage of which is made from recycled fiber. The Bee's parent company, the McClatchy Co., ranks second among California's largest newspaper companies in using partially recycled newsprint. According to the California Integrated Waste Management Board, 86 percent of the newsprint the company uses is at least 40 percent recycled fiber.
For this project, we tried to do better. We tried to find paper made partially with rice straw. In 1996, The Bee participated in an experiment to make newsprint using rice straw. The test went well, but the experiment didn't go any further because the cost to produce the paper was too high. There is no leftover rice-straw paper.
We also sought out a manufacturer of paper made with a hemp-like plant known as kenaf, but he said the newsprint project had been put on hold in the fall of 2000.
So the paper on which the newsprint version of this project appears was made last year by Blue Heron Paper Co. in Oregon City, Ore. The Blue Heron paper is 60 percent recycled, with the remainder coming from ground-up wood, mostly hemlock chips left over from lumber mills in the area. The paper, an upgraded stock, costs a little more and is brighter than our normal paper, the result of bleaching. Blue Heron uses hydrogen peroxide, described by the company as environmentally friendly.
Still, as we researched Blue Heron, we found that its environmental record isn't faultless. We found it occasionally uses whole logs to make newsprint. And the company has had brushes with environmental regulators for discharging hot wastewater into the Willamette River, negatively affecting the salmon run.
The difficulty we encountered in trying to reduce our environmental impact for this project points out that there are few easy alternatives to the way we do things, even in a global economy, and many of those alternatives may be prohibitively expensive.
To jump-start our creativity about seeking alternatives, an Oakland think tank, Redefining Progress, has come up with one way for each of us to measure our impact on the world - our own ecological footprint.
It can be calculated in acres on the organization's Web site at www.myfootprint.org. The national average is 24 acres; mine is 34 acres, the product of my wife and me living in a 2,000-square-foot home, driving two cars, rarely using public transportation except to travel often by air, and frequently eating meat. According to the think tank, we would need 7.8 planets if everyone in the world lived as I do. This project has me thinking and changing, bit by bit. We hope you, too, find it provocative.
-- Rick Rodriguez, Executive Editor
Prologue: Shifting the pain
World's resources feed California's growing appetite
By Tom Knudson - Bee Staff Writer
Half a hemisphere separates the headwaters of the Amazon River and the frostbitten northern latitudes of Canada.
But the two landscapes have one thing in common.
You can see it along a muddy rain-forest road in Ecuador, in the silver glint of a pipeline snaking through the grass. North of Edmonton, Alberta, a different sight catches your eye: an old-growth forest of spruce, pine and aspen shredded by a dusty maze of logging roads.
That oil pipeline and those logging roads are linked, via quiet rivers of commerce, to the largest concentration of consumers in North America, to a culture that proudly protects its own coastline and forests from exploitation while using more gasoline, wood and paper than any other state in America: California.
With 34 million people and the world's fifth-largest economy, California has long consumed more than it produces. But today, its passion for protecting natural resources at home while importing them in record quantities from afar is backfiring on the world's environment.
It is exporting the pain of producing natural resources - polluted water, pipeline accidents, piecemeal forests and human conflicts - to the far corners of the planet, to places out of sight and out of mind. California is the state of denial.
"There is a disconnect going on," said William Libby, a professor emeritus of forestry at the University of California, Berkeley, who lectures and consults on forest issues around the globe. "We consume like mad. And we preserve like mad."
Since the days of John Muir - the California naturalist whose writings and ramblings helped kindle the conservation movement just over a century ago - concern for the environment has been a cornerstone of California life.
And seldom has conservation touched California so deeply as during the past 10 years. Since 1992, environmental rules have eliminated or sharply reduced logging on 10 million acres of national forest land in the state - an area 13 times larger than Yosemite National Park. In the Mojave and Great Basin deserts, 3.5 million acres were declared wilderness in 1994 - an expanse half again the size of Yellowstone National Park.
And while that conservation legacy will enrich Californians - and California ecosystems - for generations to come, its reach also extends far beyond the Golden State.
Libby was one of the first to notice, while on sabbatical in New Zealand in 1992. As the volume of wood cut from California forests dropped due to regulations to protect spotted owls, the demand for logs in New Zealand soared - making loggers there happy.
"Prices were insane," Libby said. "The New Zealanders wanted me to get them a dead spotted owl so they could stuff it, put it in the lobby and genuflect to it."
He soon discovered logging was on the rise in other places, too, and has since published several articles that link preservation of California forests with species extinctions elsewhere.
"We Californians are really not very good conservationists - we're very good preservationists," he said. "Conservation means you use resources well and responsibly. Preservation means you are rich enough to set aside things you want and buy them from someone else."
A half-century ago, California was self-sufficient in wood. Today, the state imports 80 percent of what it uses. Follow some of that wood back to its source and you find yourself in the northern boreal forest, where Canada allows trees to be cut in ways not permitted in California.
On average, nine of every 10 acres logged in Canada are clear-cut - the contentious practice of leveling large patches of the forest. And more than two-thirds of Canadian logging takes place in stands that have never been nicked by a chain saw - virgin forests that in California would be regarded as sanctuaries.
"Many Americans believe Canada is this incredible wilderness, but it's not true," said Richard Thomas, an Edmonton consultant and author of a 1998 provincial study critical of logging practices in Alberta. "We are very much like a Third World country when it comes to our resources. We just let other countries have at it."
Six thousand miles south, a wave of development for another resource crucial to California - crude oil - is inflicting similarly serious wounds across Ecuador's Amazon. Rain forests that were home to kaleidoscopic displays of plant and animal life in the 1970s and '80s now are showcases of pollution and poverty.
Every day, an average of 235,000 barrels of oil is pumped from the region for export to world markets. The largest portion - 65,000 to 85,000 barrels a day - is shipped to refineries in Los Angeles and San Francisco.
The discovery of more reserves in the Amazon is setting off a new wave of controversy and threatening the cultural survival of semi-nomadic rain-forest tribes. Still, the country's new president, Lucio Gutiérrez, assured financiers in New York earlier this year that he supports more drilling because Ecuador is deeply in debt and needs foreign investment.
"The historical challenges for my government are very clear," Gutiérrez said at the time.
California's hunger for the planet's natural resources need not stir up trouble, if a system were in place to prevent it. You can find such a safeguard in the storm-tossed North Pacific, where Canadian fishermen, working under a federal plan that gives them an ownership stake in fish, are harvesting millions of pounds of rockfish every year for California without hurting the environment.
"Everybody is quite conscientious," said Jim Harris, a Canadian trawler. "We've got a fishery that is going to be here for the duration."
The clash of conservation and consumption in California may be large, but it is not unique in this country.
"We're the largest consuming nation basically of everything," said James Bowyer, a professor at the University of Minnesota who specializes in conservation policy and natural resource consumption.
"Yet we find every reason in the world why we shouldn't mine steel, why we shouldn't drill for oil," Bowyer said. "It's ironic because we are transferring the impacts to someplace else. And then we are telling ourselves what we are doing is good for the environment.
"And not only are we transferring those impacts, we are magnifying them by turning to nations that don't have the stringent environmental controls that we do."
No government agency maps the global impact of California consumers. But a small Oakland think tank, Redefining Progress, has assembled estimates of the mountain of resources, from wood to fossil fuel, fresh water to seafood, consumed by 146 nations - and some California counties - a yardstick it calls an "ecological footprint."
The United States, a world leader in the conservation of natural resources, has a larger footprint (24 acres per person) than all nations except the United Arab Emirates (with 25 acres). Do the math and you find America's 291 million people draw upon a 7 billion-acre chunk of the planet - an area roughly three times the size of the United States.
An assessment for Marin County - the pricey, conservation-minded San Francisco suburb - found citizens there eat, drink, spend and drive their way through even more of the planet's natural wealth: 27 acres per person a year - the largest ecological footprint ever calculated.
The group's footprints have attracted attention from scientists and policy-makers around the world. And although some people criticize the methods as imprecise, none denies the basic premise.
"The idea is right," said Libby, the forestry professor.
Last year, Libby found some Californians are not eager to hear about the global consequences of conservation and consumption.
At a conference on Sierra Nevada forest management, held in Nevada City, Libby asked the 250 people attending how many of them lived in houses made of wood.
Almost everyone did. Then he asked how many had houses built with alternatives such as used tires and straw bales. Only two or three people responded.
A few moments later, Libby recalled, he asked, "How many people are comfortable with species going extinct somewhere else because we're not going to cut any wood on the Tahoe National Forest?'"
At that point, Libby said, "Somebody in the audience shouted: 'We don't like your question.' "
Chapter One: Staining the Amazon
The tropics suffer to satisfy state's thirst for oil
By Tom Knudson - Bee Staff Writer
SUCUMBÍOS PROVINCE, ECUADOR
At midday, the fresh spill of crude oil sparkles like obsidian.
Creeping across the floor of the Amazon rain forest, it covers jade-colored plants and lime-green grasses in a thick petroleum paste. Imprisoned on its surface, insects struggle for freedom, then sink slowly into an oily tomb.
A few feet away, on a dirt road stained with oil, Luz Soto points to a festering sore on her arm. "It's from the pollution," said the 40-year-old mother of six.
Journey to the South American nation of Ecuador and you find pollution and misery on a scale that never would be tolerated in California, a state that guards its own majestic coastline from oil development and is home to some of the toughest environmental laws on Earth.
Follow that oil as it leaves Ecuador and you find that between 20 and 40 million barrels a year flow to California, which consumes more gasoline - 38 million gallons a day - than Florida and New York combined.
Yet the link between petroleum consumption in California and environmental damage and human suffering abroad is not well known, in part because such harm happens thousands of miles away, out of view of consumers, policy-makers and many environmental groups.
It also is masked by the generic nature of crude oil, which leaves no fingerprint at the pump, no clue to the landscapes where it is coaxed from beneath the earth, loaded onto tankers and shipped to the United States.
But there's no hiding what oil development is doing to Ecuador. Its signature includes not only pollution, disease, poverty, deforestation and diminishing wildlife but something darker: the decimation of indigenous rain forest cultures.
"The discovery of oil brings the promise of great riches," said Terry Lynn Karl, a senior fellow at Stanford University's Institute for International Studies who wrote "The Paradox of Plenty: Oil Booms and PetroStates."
"But the reality is it is very closely linked to environmental degradation, the spread of conflict and a wide range of economic problems."
In Ecuador, the hardest-hit area is a riot of vegetation and swift-moving streams east of the Andes: the Ecuadorean Amazon. Flanked by Colombia to the north and Peru to the south and east, Ecuador's Amazon is surprisingly rich in petroleum. It also is part of a forest ecosystem second in size only to the boreal forest, which circles the globe across Canada, Alaska, Russia and Scandinavia.
Unlike the austere boreal, South America's fabled tropical Amazon forest abounds in biological diversity. And few parts are as lively as Ecuador's portion, home to an estimated 8,000 to 12,000 species of plants - or up to 5 percent of all plant species on Earth - and an impressive complement of wildlife, from pink fresh.water dolphins to transparent "glass frogs" to the largest raptor on Earth, the harpy eagle.
But since 1972, when the first oil well was tapped, petroleum has siphoned off much of its glory. Tracts of forest that teemed with monkeys, macaws and semi-nomadic tribes now are tattered by roads, rigs and colonist settlements. Tea-colored streams that shimmered with silvery fish now float petroleum scum.
With the recent discovery of additional oil reserves in still-untouched parts of Ecuador's Amazon, many Ecuadoreans fear for the future.
"If the oil companies come in, they will be finishing off with us, and nature as well," said Sabino Gualinga, an indigenous healer who has lived all his 82 years in a remote Amazon village now targeted for oil development.
More than a dozen oil companies from around the world - including the United States and Canada - operate in Ecuador. The largest is Ecuador's own national petroleum company: Petroecuador.
Ivan Narvaez, Petroecuador's chief of environmental protection, said that although Ecuador is taking steps to clean up its petroleum-fouled rain forest, the scope of the problem is too much for the debt-strapped country to handle.
"We do as much as we can," he said, "but it is always too little."
Near refineries and oil fields in the Amazon, even the rain reeks of petroleum. "It smells similar to the exhaust from a car," said Serbio Escobar, who farms near the Colombian border. His wife, Margarita Campoverde de Escobar, added: "Sometimes, when we collect rainwater in pots, the water is black."
Wherever oil goes, trouble seems to follow.
Inside a pipeline that snakes westward up the eastern slope of the Andes, through green canyons tinseled with waterfalls and veiled in clouds, crude oil is pumped into the cross hairs of danger. Here, landslides attack it, rip it out of its steel cocoon and send it gushing in toxic black waves down mountain streams.
On the other side of the Andes, the mayhem continues.
"We sleep in terror here," said Lucia Castillo, whose brother was burned to death when a pipeline break sent waves of fire through the coastal community of Esmeraldas in 1998. As flames roared down oil-soaked streets, devouring cars and homes, frantic parents put their children in wooden canoes and pushed them into the Esmeraldas River.
Then they watched in horror as fire engulfed the river - and the children.
"They say petroleum is the excrement of the devil," said Byron Borja, a customs agent who lost two family members in the disaster. "In part that's right, because it's the cause of so many of the world's problems."
Ecuador's environmental rules not well enforced
California's complicity in Ecuador's pain is relatively new. Just a decade ago, all but 6 percent of the state's oil came from its own reserves - mostly in Kern County - and from Alaska. Last year, 31 percent came from other countries.
That's because existing oil fields in California and Alaska slowly are running out of crude. And proposals to drill for more in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, and off the California coast, so far have been sidelined by environmental opposition.
California's intake of foreign crude reached a record 196 million barrels in 2002. More than a third came from deserts in Saudi Arabia and Iraq - through the United Nations sanctioned "oil-for-food" program.
But the third largest source - at 14 percent - was tropical Ecuador, which contributed 27 million barrels. The recent war in Iraq is certain to increase demand for Ecuador's oil.
Yet the ground rules for oil drilling vary widely. In California, the oil industry must comply with environmental regulations that John Martini, head of the California Independent Petroleum Association, called "the most stringent in the U.S."
Oil companies face an array of environmental laws in Ecuador, too, under the jurisdiction of the Ministry of Energy and Mines, the Ministry of the Environment, and Petroecuador. But those laws are not well enforced, according to Judith Kimerling, associate law professor at the City University of New York and author of "Amazon Crude," a book about Ecuadorean oil development.
"Despite a growing trend toward increasingly detailed paper regulations, the government has still not implemented meaningful environmental regulation in the oil field," Kimerling said.
Larry Meriage, spokesman for Los Angeles-based Occidental Petroleum Corp., a major company in Ecuador, said Kimerling is "completely off-base."
In Ecuador, Meriage said, "We jump through hoops for developments which are really very carefully manicured and carved out." Oil companies are held to a higher standard of accountability in Ecuador than other businesses, he said.
The Golden State needs that oil because it is home to more vehicles - 27.7 million - than any other state. When industrial and other uses are considered, Texas consumes more petroleum overall. But California leads the nation in gasoline consumption, burning up 15 billion gallons a year. Its freeways are showcases of consumption. In California, one in eight motorists drives a gas-guzzling sport-utility vehicle.
"When I visit an oil-exporting country with the kind of degradation and poverty that you see in Ecuador, I can't help but think, 'Oh, my God - all of this to fuel someone's SUV,' " said Karl, the Stanford fellow.
Filling up his Toyota Tacoma recently at a Beacon station in suburban Roseville, Rob Beazizo - a registered nurse - wasn't thinking about Ecuador at all. But when told about the pollution, he was concerned.
"It kind of gives you pause," he said. "Americans are pretty oblivious to what happens outside the U.S. It's out of sight, out of mind."
Overshadowed by larger reserves in conflict-torn parts of the world, such as Venezuela and the Persian Gulf, Ecuador's 30-year history of petroleum development has drawn scant attention in the world's press.
In recent years, the situation in Ecuador has grown tense too, and the causes are complex:
• Since 1972, oil companies have extracted 3 billion barrels of oil from Ecuador. Yet little of that wealth is reinvested in the Amazon, in part because the nation is so deeply in debt. In many places, potable water, electricity and medical care simply do not exist.
"Petroleum has not brought a bonanza of benefits; it has not brought happiness. It has brought misfortune," said Carlos Castillo, a petroleum engineer and vice mayor of Esmeraldas, whose wife died in the fiery pipeline break.
• Studies point to a link between oil extraction and skin rashes, miscarriages, even cancer. "The level of petroleum in the rivers, on which local residents depend, is 200 to 300 times higher than the limits set for human consumption," said Miguel San Sebastian, an Ecuadorean physician and co-author of the most recent study of petroleum's impact on the health of Ecuador's people.
• Oil spills and other ecological calamities are routine. The 300-mile trans-Ecuadorean pipeline has suffered more than 60 major ruptures since 1972, spilling 614,000 barrels of oil - more than two Exxon Valdez tankers' worth. By contrast, the 800-mile trans-Alaskan pipeline, which came on line in 1977 and carries more than twice as much oil, has spilled just 85,000 barrels.
• As new parts of the Amazon are opened to oil development, the cultural survival of the continent's last indigenous hunter-gatherer cultures is in doubt.
"This is a repeat of what happened in the U.S. in the 19th century," said Karen Marrero, an Ecuadorean woman who is helping Quichua natives fight oil development around the village of Sarayacu.
"Just as you had a gold rush, there is a rush for oil here. But this one is coming with more velocity. There's no time for people to adapt to it."
Accessible only by small plane, canoe or foot, Sarayacu clings to the reddish-brown banks of a jungle river. One Sunday last year, nearly the entire village of 300 turned out to greet two strangers from a distant land: California.
One man carried a spear. A woman with raven hair and a painted face nursed a baby. Children scampered everywhere. A man in a monkey headdress strummed a guitar. Lunch was smoked monkey soup, served on a table piled high with fruit and meat, including the monkey's grinning skull.
"This is our life," said one young man, César Santi, pointing to the rain forest. "This is our Earth."
Ecuador's government, which owns all sub-surface mineral rights in the nation, has granted permission to an Argentine company to develop petroleum resources in the pristine area around Sarayacu. But first the company must secure Quichua approval. And the Quichua refuse.
"I worry for my daughters," said Sarayacu resident Ester Malaver, walking barefoot down a muddy jungle trail. "Here, everything is healthy and natural. If the petroleum company comes, the land will be poisoned.
"I will fight against the oil incursion until my last days; until I die."
In Ecuador, indigenous leaders say oil companies sometimes use unsavory practices to attempt to win community support.
"There are a lot of small bits of money placed here and there," said Randy Borman, territories and economic director for the Cofan people, an Amazon tribe hit hard by oil development. "They create a lot of false expectations."
The son of American missionaries, Borman has gone native. He is married to a Cofan and is the leader of Zabálo, a Cofan village in a remote part the Amazon. In 1998, The Field Museum in Chicago awarded Borman its Parker/Gentry award for his efforts to protect Cofan territory.
Borman recalled one incident he said took place when an oil exploration company showed up at the remote Cofan village of Bermejo in 1999.
"First of all, they brought in several series of gifts: a whole lot of rice, a couple of pigs and several cases of whiskey," he said. "Next they had a big party and they offered villagers helicopter flights. And then they said, 'Let's negotiate.'"
Such anger toward oil exploration is growing across Ecuador. A new $1.1 billion pipeline, now under construction and funded by companies from Canada, Spain, Argentina, Italy and the United States - including Occidental Petroleum - is behind much of it.
The Oleoducto de Crudos Pesados (OCP) pipeline, expected to double the flow of oil to foreign markets, follows the old trans-Ecuadorean pipeline as it rises out of the Amazon. But in the Andes, it strikes a more northerly course and slices through one of the last pristine cloud forests in South America.
Lost in a thick blanket of fog, the Mindo-Nambillo Reserve has been rocked by environmental protests. During one last year, activists shadowed by military and pipeline police climbed to a ridge about 90 miles northwest of Ecuador's capital, Quito.
Security forces halted the group and ordered the protesters downhill. Instead they charged uphill, through a thick green wall. The police followed.
Protesters and police gained the ridge, which looms over a landscape that is home to 400 species of birds and a thriving ecotourism industry. Downhill, the brown gash of a pipeline road was plainly visible. The roar of earth-moving equipment sounded like distant thunder.
One of the protesters - Juan Pablo Barragán - sat wearily on a log and shook his head.
"This kind of destruction would never be permitted in the United States," said Barragán, a Quito businessman. "The government would not allow it."
Later that night, Barragán and seven others were jostled from their sleep by police, marched down the mountain at gunpoint and jailed in Quito.
"That's how it is in Ecuador," Barragán said when contacted later. "If you stand up for a cause, you expect to be imprisoned."
Last July, Julia "Butterfly" Hill - the famous environmental activist who spent two years living in a giant California redwood tree - trekked to the same ridge for another protest. During a later protest in Quito, she too was arrested, then deported.
Ecuador's president at the time, Gustavo Noboa, showed no sympathy for Hill or her cause. After her arrest, he told the media: "The little gringos have been arrested, including the old cockatoo who climbs trees." In 2001, Noboa told The Economist magazine that cloud forest demonstrations were limited to "four bird-watchers and a couple of mayors."
Other clashes have been more severe. In February 2002, the Inter Press Service news agency reported that at least 300 people were wounded in conflicts with the Ecuadorean military during 10 days of violent demonstrations in the Amazon region over the new OCP pipeline, expected to be finished this year.
"Oil companies operate here without responsibility," said Natalia Arias, former president of Acción Ecológica, a Quito environmental group. "The people and environment of Ecuador have suffered greatly."
Occidental's spokesman, Meriage, said the pipeline won't hurt the cloud forest because "a tremendous amount of care and effort has been taken." That care, he added, substantially increased the project's cost.
Meriage blamed the uproar on "the radicalization" of environmental protest in Ecuador by U.S. and European groups.
"Not everybody who wraps themselves in the mantle of environmental protection can be accepted at face value," he said. "These groups in many cases are unaccountable to anyone. They can say whatever they want."
Government shares blame for pollution
The heart of Ecuador's oil country lies south of the Colombian border in the steamy jungles of Sucumbíos province. This is where Texaco first perforated the Amazon 36 years ago, launching an oil boom that continues today.
In the 1970s, the province was a daunting, largely untrammeled wilderness. Today, it is still daunting but for different reasons. Around the oil boomtown of Lago Agrio - a grimy muddle of shacks, brothels, bars and cheap motels 12 miles from the Colombia border - violence is epidemic.
The border is a no man's land, where Colombia guerrillas routinely cross into Ecuador for reconnaissance, rest and supplies. In the past year, more than 100 people have been killed in guerrilla-related violence in Lago Agrio, population 24,000, according to local authorities. In October 2000, 10 foreign oil workers - half of them Americans - were kidnapped by guerrillas in the surrounding jungle. One of the Americans was later murdered.
Roads are rutted and ruinous, morphing into sluices during downpours. The U.S. Embassy's advice to Americans who might want to visit the region is direct: don't.
Yet it's not the violence, poverty or bad roads that most capture your attention here. It's the pollution - and the stories about it.
Stop by a small convenience store in the town of Dureno and ask the manager, Jacinto Jumbo, her opinion of the oil industry.
"This is what happens," she says, pulling down her blouse to reveal a red welt on her left breast. "When you take a bath in the river, it creates boils on your skin, like this."
Not far away, a woman stands ankle-deep in a creek, stubbornly trying to scrub her clothes clean on a board. It's a washday gamble because pools of thin, purplish oil skim along the creek's surface.
"They are always spilling oil around here," says the woman, who identifies herself only as Marta. "We have to drink this water, too. Of course, it is bad. But what choice do we have? We live here."
A few hundred yards west, across a road and up a hill, lies the pollution's source: Campo Libertador - literally "Liberator Field" - a major Ecuadorean oil field.
Campo Libertador is a sprawl of wells, pipes and tanks operated by Petro.ecuador, the national oil company. But locals say there is nothing liberating about it.
"There are many sicknesses here," said Dora Solano, a 45-year-old Ecuadorean woman who lives in the area. "There is no control. The oil companies just throw their chemicals and garbage into the water."
Inside the oil field, a large, unlined pit shines black with waste oil floating on a toxic soup of drilling wastes and "production water" - liquid pumped out of the ground with petroleum that contains heavy metals such as arsenic, lead and mercury.
A Petroecuador subcontractor pointed to a tube piercing the side of one oil-filled pit.
"Look at that pipe," he said. "It takes the waste crude and chemicals and spills them into a swamp, and from there they go into the river.
"And that is why, when people go to the river to take a bath, they get a rash," said the man, who said giving his name would cost him his job. "In the river, sometimes you can see chemicals swirling, like smoke. Fish just don't exist around here anymore."
In Quito, Narvaez - Petroecuador's environmental chief - acknowledged his company is partly responsible for the pollution. But he blamed others, too, including his own government for failing to adequately invest in pollution control and cleanup.
Pacing back and forth, Narvaez grew exasperated. "The sickness of the people, the poverty of the people, the contamination of the rivers, the loss of biodiversity - this is all the product of 30 years of oil drilling," he said. "You can't solve that in just one year, not even two or three."
Another problem is Ecuador's $14 billion foreign debt. The sale of oil brings Ecuador more than $2 billion a year, but Narvaez said there's little left over for the environment because of the country's enormous debt payments, which account for more than a third of its $5.6 billion budget.
Narvaez also blamed Texaco, which made the first major discovery of oil in the region in 1967 and formed a business consortium with Petroecuador. When Texaco pulled out of Ecuador in 1990, Narvaez said, it left a "disaster."
For its part, Texaco - now ChevronTexaco - maintains it acted properly. "I'm not going to dispute that conditions in the region are difficult," said Chris Gidez, a spokesman for ChevronTexaco. "But it's hard to isolate one (factor) as a cause of some or all of the problems."
For instance, he cited the miles of oil service roads that pierce large parts of Ecuador's Amazon, opening it to colonization.
"You have to understand this is a region in which there had been a border dispute with Peru," Gidez said. "The government of Ecuador encouraged colonization in order to lay claim to the region and forced the consortium to build more roads than it needed."
Gidez also defended the unlined wastewater pits, saying that during the 1970s and '80s, the approach was a generally accepted practice in the region.
After Texaco left Ecuador, Gidez said it agreed to pay the government of Ecuador $40 million to clean up 250 sites identified in environmental audits.
Ask Borman, the Cofan director, about Texaco's payment and he says it "really didn't have much effect. We tried to get a piece of it for cleaning up a series of wells that contaminate rivers that go through the Cofan reserve. And the guy at Petroecuador said there is only 800 barrels of (toxic) production water per day going in from wells in that area. We were way low on the priority list."
Oil companies operate differently in foreign countries than in the United States, according to Roger Herrera, a retired exploration geologist for British Petroleum.
"What tends to happen is they use the cheapest technology they can get away with," he said. "In a way, it is sort of shameful."
But Herrera, who worked for 30 years in such places as Kuwait, Libya and Colombia, said it's not just oil companies that are at fault.
"Often, they are forced or coerced by foreign governments into using primitive pollution-control technologies," he said. "I know that sounds startling. And it doesn't take all the guilt from the companies. But it is a fact that they are discouraged from using more costly technologies because it would take a little bit off the bottom line of the host countries."
Since Texaco left, Ecuador has adopted more rigorous environmental laws. Even critics say some private firms are using modern pollution-control measures, such as injecting oil drilling waste and production water deep into the earth.
"Some things are changing," wrote Judith Kimerling, the law professor, in a recent article in the Columbia Journal of Environmental Law. But enforcement of environmental laws remains weak and is "hindered by the absence of political will (and) a lack of resources.
"The jury is still out on whether oil companies can extract oil and gas from a fragile rainforest environment without serious injury. The track record to date suggests they cannot."
Last year, Ecuador's then-minister of Energy and Mines, Pablo Teran, failed to respond to a written request for an interview presented in person at his Quito office. Nor did he respond to subsequent e-mails. Alfredo Bariga, a sub-secretary in the Ministry of the Environment, agreed to an interview but failed to show up for it.
Occidental's Meriage said like it or not, oil development is going to happen in the Amazon. "The question is: Do you want it done by somebody who does a responsible job or an irresponsible job?" he said. "Would you rather have Oxy do it or Petroecuador?"
Major oil spills - such as the Exxon Valdez accident that hemorrhaged 260,000 barrels of crude into the Prince William Sound in Alaska in 1989 - capture world attention. Lesser spills go unnoticed but inflict real pain as well.
With a wave of his hand, Benigno Martínez motions toward a jungle thicket. "You want to see the bones?" he said. "Follow me."
Martínez, 58, who farms near the Colombian border in Sucumbíos province, said that in recent years seven of his horses have died after drinking water fouled by oil waste. Tromping into the forest, he finds the spot where the carcass of his favorite horse - Condorito - rots slowly in the shade.
"Pobre Condorito," Martínez said, poking at the animal's rib cage with a machete. "First, his stomach bloated. Then he began throwing up. ... It took him a month to die.
"I am just a poor farmer. When I went to ask for compensation, they made jokes about me."
A stocky man with short salt-and-pepper hair, Martínez shuffles out to a clearing. His flannel shirt is stained with mud. A crucifix hangs around his neck. His home is 200 miles over the Andes from Ecuador's capital, Quito. But, he said, "Next Sunday, at Mass, we are going to talk about taking a walk to Quito to talk to the government about the pollution."
In Ecuador, less pollution would likely mean better health. Since the 1980s, studies have pointed to links between petroleum contamination and chronic diseases in humans there.
One report, by a team of Harvard physicians working with the Center for Economic and Social Rights - a New York-based human rights group - made these observations in 1994: "Residents of the (Amazon) are exposed to levels of oil-related contaminants significantly exceeding internationally recognized safety limits ... Such levels of exposure suggest increased risk of more serious health consequences."
ChevronTexaco's Gidez disputed those findings, saying the report is not scientifically valid. "It has never been held up for peer review, as any credible medical study would be," he said.
A more recent study, completed by two Ecuadorean doctors in May 2002, found that Amazon residents living near oil facilities were more likely to contract stomach, liver, skin and other cancers than people elsewhere in the country.
Ecuador's attorney general, José Ramón Jiménez-Carbo, spoke publicly about health concerns last year, vowing to back Ecuadorean plaintiffs in a U.S. lawsuit against Texaco seeking $120 million in damages and injuries. That suit, however, was dismissed in August by a federal appeals court in New York, which ruled the matter should be resolved in Ecuador.
Back in Ecuador's Amazon, it seems every neighborhood has its tale of ailments. In Sucumbíos province, Silvio Calderón's common-law wife, Luz Soto, sipped water from a spring in their jungle garden, downhill from an unlined toxic waste pit at a Petroecuador oil facility, Estación Guanta.
"When it rains, the pit fills up and the waste comes right through here," said Calderón, machete in hand, indicating the clearing where the couple grow rice, corn, yucca, beans and plantains - or try to. Like others in the area, they say pollution is withering their crops.
After drinking the water, Luz Soto "immediately fell ill with diarrhea and fever. Her skin turned yellow," Calderón said. "She almost died. She still feels very sick today."
At the one-room wooden shack where they raise five children, their son, Jorge, stood in the doorway, pale. He, too, is sick.
"He is 8 years old but looks like he is 4," Calderón said. "We took him to a hospital in Quito and lab tests showed he had lumps in his stomach. I'm sure it is contamination. ... We can't go on like this."
Animals suffer, too. In 2000, Johnny Alman, manager of the Amazon Jungle Resort Village in Sucumbíos pprovince, was guiding some scientists on a tour near the Cuyabeno Wildlife Reserve when they spotted a dark object flopping and shaking on the side of a road.
It was an agouti, a large jungle rodent, "so completely covered with oil it couldn't walk," Alman said. "He was making a howling noise.
"A little while later, we came across a smaller rodent, completely drenched with oil. Even its eyes were coated. It was almost dead.
"We were shocked," Alman said. "The idea was to see animals alive and running through the rain forest, not animals covered with oil."
Five years after inferno, town is still traumatized
In the port of Esmeraldas - where ocean tankers are loaded with oil bound for California - petroleum took a violent turn in 1998.
"That fire came roaring down the river like a dragon," said Zoila Valverde, a 45-year-old laundrywoman.
She is speaking of the night when two major pipelines broke during a landslide, sending oil and gas cascading down streets and into rivers.
Someone notified Petroecuador. But it was too late. Around 10 p.m., a spark from perhaps an automobile or a backyard barbecue - no one is sure what - set off an inferno. "I gathered up my children and we ran," Valverde said. "There was one little girl in the neighborhood who lost her way. We never saw her again."
At 3 a.m., Byron Borja - the Ecuadorean customs agent - rushed to the hospital to find his sister-in-law's two teenage daughters badly burned, but conscious. They pleaded for water. "It was horrible," Borja recalled. "The odor of burned flesh was everywhere."
Borja stepped away to speak to his sister-in-law, who was out of town, on the phone.
Frantic, she screamed into the phone: "Byron, tell me the truth! Tell me the truth!"
"I am going to tell you the truth," Borja replied. "Be prepared for the worst."
One of the daughters died a short while later. The other died a month later at a burn unit in a hospital in the United States.
They were among the 12 confirmed dead. Six more were never found.
When Valverde returned to her home, "It was in ashes," she said. "I took my children into my arms and started to cry.
"Then, it began to rain a black rain. It made dark oily spots in our clothes. Two weeks later, we all got rashes. Our hair was falling out."
Five years later, the town remains traumatized.
"We are afraid," said Maritza Quiñonez, who lives in a small cabin near where the pipeline broke. "I am worried that the next time it might finish the world."
The enormous black and red ocean tankers that gather in the Pacific at Petroecuador's export terminal near Esmeraldas hauled 86.5 million barrels of Amazon oil to world markets in 2000. The largest portion, 43 percent, was shipped to California, according to U.S. and Ecuadorean records.
Few oil benefits, though, seep back to the Amazon. Last year, the sale of crude oil brought Ecuador about $2 billion. Yet only 3 percent of Ecuador's national budget is routed to its jungle provinces, according to the Inter Press Service news agency, even though those provinces make up 50 percent of its land area. Some of Ecuador's poorest communities are in the shadow of the oil fields.
"Oil is the Midas myth," said Terry Lynn Karl, the former director of Stanford's Center for Latin American Studies. "It creates the expectation that you will be rich. But the end result is you have more poverty, more inequality and more conflict."
Karl said she sees the pattern around the world. Oil, she said, concentrates political and economic power, and "when power is so concentrated, it is extremely difficult for the benefits of petroleum to trickle down."
"Nada! Nada!" exclaims Margarita Campoverde de Escobar. "Nothing! Nothing! That's what petroleum brings to this area."
She lives with her husband in a one-room wood shack in an agricultural cooperative near Dureno, in SucumbÍos province. Her neighbor is an oil field and she once washed clothes for an oil company, but that work has disappeared. The couple earn $60 to $80 a month selling coffee and bananas - barely enough to support three children and a granddaughter.
They have no electricity, phone, running water or car. They are separated from the nearest pharmacy by a six-mile walk and a 20-mile bus ride - and their granddaughter is sick.
"Petroleum only puts money in the pockets of the rich," said Campoverde de Escobar. "The oil industry has forgotten us."
Chapter Two: Scarring the Boreal
Swaths of forest taken for lumber, paper
By Tom Knudson - Bee Staff Writer
Ten years after the historic battle to protect spotted owls and old-growth forests, California's woods are quiet, almost churchlike.
The chain saws and logging trucks that once shattered the symphony of birdsong and muted the music of mountain streams have disappeared from many places - stilled by environmental lawsuits, public opinion and increasingly strict regulations about timber harvesting.
Since 1990, 62 lumber mills in California have closed. The volume of timber cut from national forests has dropped 80 percent. At no time in state history have California forest ecosystems enjoyed such sweeping protection.
Yet there is a trapdoor to this turnabout, one that opens a passageway to more environmental trauma: The logging never really stopped; it just moved to Canada.
In throttling the harvest of wood from its own back yard, while continuing to devour forest products, California is not merely turning to America's largest trading partner, Canada, to fill the gap.
It is buying wood from a nation where up to 90 percent is harvested through clear-cutting - the controversial mowing down of entire stands of forest - and where two-thirds of the cutting occurs in old-growth stands. And it is buying wood from a country where logging is moving more deeply into one of the planet's most important ecosystems: the boreal forest.
Circling the globe like a jade and emerald crown, the boreal, named for Boreas, the Greek god of the north wind, is home to a mythic array of wildlife, including timber wolves, woodland caribou and - in Russia - Siberian tigers. It also plays a critical role in regulating the Earth's climate, helping protect it from global warming.
But in Canada's boreal zone, which sweeps across the country in a wide arc from Newfoundland to the Yukon, logging is proceeding so rapidly that some scientists fear the forest's vital ecological functions may be in danger. Already, some species of wildlife are in decline and native cultures, for whom the boreal is both pantry and medicine chest, are struggling to maintain their way of life.
"This is a classic example of not taking a holistic view," said Richard Thomas, an environmental consultant in Edmonton, Alberta.
"You do the cosmetic stuff at home," Thomas said. "You minimize your ecological footprint in your own back yard. And here in Canada, you get away with murder. It's out of sight and out of mind."
California's hunger for Canadian forest products is part of a larger national appetite. In 2001, a record 18.5 billion board feet of Canadian softwood lumber was imported to the United States - enough two-by-fours, plywood, doorjambs, siding and other products to build a city the size of San Diego.
Lots of Canadian paper was shipped south, too: 26.8 billion pounds, to be precise. That is roughly equal to the weight of every man, woman and child in America. Most arrived in two forms: newsprint (13.2 billion pounds) and printing and writing paper (9.4 billion pounds).
Track that wood and paper back to Canada and you are in for a jolt.
A sheet of Canadian siding from a Roseville Home Depot, for example, will lead you to Lesser Slave Lake in Alberta, where the forest is so shredded by cutting that only thin wisps of trees remain - old-growth confetti.
"The boreal is under attack," said Dave Donahue, a gray-bearded trapper who lives nearby with his wife and oldest son. "This is not progress. This is mass destruction."
Deeply religious, the 59-year-old Donahue moved to Alberta in 1972 after watching his native New Brunswick forests fall to logging.
Last spring, as outrage welled up inside him, Donahue wrote an essay titled "Americans Wake Up," hoping it might appear in the pages of an environmental newsletter in the United States. It never did.
"Americans are not even vaguely aware of what is happening here in Canada," he wrote. "Every tree that is of any value is cut by means of clear-cut logging and any tree that is of no use … is knocked down and left to rot. The lungs of Mother Earth are being RIPPED out. ... Wild animals are being destroyed at a fantastic rate."
Not long ago, some siding made from the boreal forest Donahue calls home was being nail-gunned to the roof of a new home in Highland Park, a Roseville subdivision. A sign out front read: "Building America's Neighborhoods - Sold."
"This is hard to believe," said carpenter Ruben Centeno when shown photos of the Alberta clear-cuts. "They should find some other way to make this stuff."
Pick up a newspaper at any Northern California convenience store and you find roots that reach deep into majestic stands of old-growth forest in northeast British Columbia. Trees in that Rocky Mountain region feed a mill owned by the world's largest newsprint maker - Abitibi Consolidated Ltd. - which sells paper to several U.S. dailies, including The Bee.
From its Mackenzie, British Columbia, mill, Abitibi harvests pine, spruce and balsam across a vast wilderness that not only is home to some of the continent's most impressive species of wildlife, including grizzly bears, but also is inhabited by the indigenous Kaska Dena people, many of whom still survive by hunting wild game.
Although conflicts between indigenous people and timber and paper companies are common in Canada, Abitibi and the Kaska Dena are working together to develop environmentally sensitive kinds of logging. Abitibi has even helped the Kaska Dena form their own logging company.
When asked why, Abitibi forester Wayne Lewis said, "They live here. We respect that. They should be a part of the process."
Dave Porter, chairman of the Kaska Dena council, praised the company's efforts but added: "There is still a long way to go."
A barrel-chested man with curly black hair, bushy beard and wire-rimmed glasses, Porter folded his arms as he spoke of desperate living conditions around the Kaska Dena community of Fort Ware.
"The road to the outside world is one of the worst excuses for a road anywhere," he said. "We're hooked up to diesel generators with a history of blackouts and shutdowns - in the winter.
"How many millions of dollars are taken out in profits and how much is put back into indigenous communities?" he said. "A pittance."
Speaking broadly, Porter said U.S. consumers "have an inherent responsibility to ask questions" about forest products from Canada.
"This is not just about the environment. It's about people. Aboriginal people and their cultures (in Canada) are as endangered as endangered species. And that should be known."
Fifteen hundred miles east, Steve Fobister - a former grand chief of the Ojibwa nation - kicks the dust in a gaping clear-cut in Ontario. Trees there also supply an Abitibi mill vital to U.S. newspapers, including the Minneapolis Star-Tribune - owned by The Bee's parent company, The McClatchy Co.
Staring at a moonscape of stumps and bare ground stretching for more than 10 square miles, Fobister said: "This is selfish. This is devastation."
Nearby, someone has spray-painted the word "PROPAGANDA" across a timber company sign about reforestation.
That someone, Fobister said, is him.
"You can't even hear a bird in a clear-cut. You can't even find an insect," he said. "Everything is dead."
But in Montreal, Abitibi spokesman Marc Osborne defended the company's logging. "We adhere to sustainability," he said.
Rich in forest resources, Canada has been cutting trees for years. But as demand for wood has jumped worldwide, the nation has stepped up its level of cutting: from 1.6 million acres in 1970 to 2.5 million acres in 2001.
In recent years, that increase has ignited a trade dispute with the United States, which now assesses a stiff 27 percent duty on Canadian lumber imports to this country. The environmental side of Canadian logging, which is largely overseen by its provinces, has drawn less attention.
A spokesman for the Ontario Ministry of Natural Resources, which leases provincial land to timber companies, said Canadian-style logging actually is healthy because it mimics the natural rejuvenating force of forest fire.
"A clear-cut is not the end of the forest," said ministry forest policy officer Joe Churcher. "It's the beginning."
Many in the industry say concerns about cutting are overblown.
"We're certainly not running out of trees," said Ed Greenberg, spokesman for the Alberta Forest Products Association, a trade group. "We're as concerned about the environment as anybody."
U.S. regulations meant opportunity in Canada
To environmentalists in the United States, the spotted owl in the 1990s became a symbol of the vanishing of old-growth forest and - through the U.S. Endangered Species Act - a legal tool to halt and slow timber cutting. To many Canadians, though, it was a business opportunity.
As the harvest of wood from federal forests in California, Oregon and Washington plunged 4.8 billion board feet during the 1990s, Canadian imports to the United States shot up 6.2 billion board feet.
"You can put a fence around a particular forest. But you can't put a fence around all the forests in the world," said Roger Sedjo, a senior fellow at Resources for the Future, a Washington, D.C., think tank.
At the same time, wood consumption in the United States catapulted to a record high: 68.3 billion board feet in 1999. Per capita wood consumption in the United States is 2.5 times higher than in other developed nations - and 3.4 times the world average. Americans also use more paper than anyone else in the world - about 718 pounds per person per year.
Wood consumption figures for states aren't available, but experts say California, partly because of its size and growth, devours the biggest share of lumber - an estimated 10 billion board feet a year. That is nearly 15 percent of the national total, the equivalent of 70 two-by-fours for every person in the state. About a fifth comes from Canada, up from 6 percent in the 1980s.
The numbers make some Canadians uneasy. "If we brought everybody in the world up to California's standard of living, we would need four or five Earths," said Thomas, the Alberta environmental consultant.
The international impact of the United States' forest conservation is hardly ever covered by the mainstream press, but it is starting to surface elsewhere.
"Reducing domestic production (of wood) with no corresponding change in consumption simply requires other parts of the globe to supply the resources," said a 2002 article in Harvard Forest, a Harvard University publication. "Consequently, well-intentioned environmental activism may generate unanticipated environmental degradation. ... A new effort is needed to expose this illusion of preservation."
Boreal forest losing its shroud of obscurity
Controversy is no stranger to Canada's forests. Until recently, however, outcry has focused on the rich rain forests of British Columbia, the nation's largest timber producer.
As more of those coastal forests are set aside for conservation, the battleground is moving inland, to the boreal forest.
The first thing you notice about the boreal is its size. Thirteen times larger than California, Canada's boreal is the world's largest contiguous wooded wilderness and part of the planet's largest ecosystem. Yet it is a landscape few know well.
Punished by long, cold winters, Canada's boreal can't compete with the dazzling diversity of species that endear environmentalists to the tropics. Its spindly stands of spruce, pine, larch and aspen are no match for the coastal redwoods that crane necks and inspire awe on the California coast.
Yet the boreal has its own magic. In the brief, frantic summers, its silvery panorama of lakes, ponds and puddles quivers with 40 percent of North America's nesting waterfowl. Its thick canopy is home to more than 1 billion nesting migratory warblers. Endangered whooping cranes raise their chicks there.
Much of the year, though, the boreal is barren and brooding - haunted by the howling of wolves and the restless rasping of wind across snow and ice.
Its greatest gift may be climatologic. Like all forests, the boreal helps the planet breathe, filtering out and storing more carbon - the primary spark for global warming - than any other forest on earth.
As threats to Canada's boreal grow, its obscurity is lifting. Last June, National Geographic devoted a story to the region. And environmentalists have launched a campaign to scale back logging and set aside large tracts of the boreal as wilderness, arguing the health of the planet is at stake.
"If you care about wild forests, if you care about migratory songbirds, waterfowl and combating climate change, then you need to care about Canada's boreal forest," said Stewart Elgie, executive director of the Canadian Boreal Trust, an Ottawa environmental group.
Canada's timber companies say such concerns are exaggerated and that the environmentalists - having succeeded in the rain forest - are merely revving up another money-making, alarmist campaign.
"You've got to justify your existence somewhere," said Rick Alguire, woodlands manager at Tolko Industries Ltd., which makes siding and sheathing in High Prairie, Alberta. "The boreal is the next big target. We are a target. Every mill in Canada is a target."
Target or not, some companies are moving away from large, industrial clear-cuts to a quiltlike "mosaic" of smaller cuts that more closely resemble the natural progression of fire.
"Are there impacts? Of, course there are. We've never denied that," said Kirk Andries, director of external affairs at Alberta-Pacific Forest Industries, Al-Pac, which harvests trees for pulp - ground wood fiber - the primary building block for paper products.
But, he said, Al-Pac - which is the largest timber company in Alberta and 70 percent owned by Mitsubishi - has invested in "a staggering amount of science" to make sure those impacts are kept to a minimum and the boreal remains healthy.
Elgie, the environmentalist, agreed Al-Pac is doing a good job. But, he added, "On the whole, most wood and paper coming from Canada's boreal is not being cut with adequate environmental protection."
Investigators feel a 'sense of urgency'
There is one thing environmentalists and loggers agree on: Opening the boreal to logging, oil and gas drilling, mining and other activities at the same time is not ideal.
Al-Pac is a good example. Under a long-term "forest management agreement" with Alberta's government, it is entitled to log trees across a nearly 15 million-acre swath of the boreal. Much of that land also is leased to oil and gas companies. One area may hold as much oil - in deposits called tar or oil sands - as Saudi Arabia, and is being feverishly tapped. (Most of Canada's oil and gas ends up in the United States too.)
"I'm comfortable with our own activities," said Al-Pac's Andries. "But when you start layering stuff - energy, agriculture, forestry - on the landscape, you wonder, 'Gee, maybe this needs a little more thought.'"
There also are concerns about accountability. Across the boreal, government environmental monitoring often is limited and sometimes left to industry. Even federal inventories showing that forests are growing faster than they are being logged rely in part on industry data.
Charles Caccia, who served as environment minister under Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau in the 1980s, said the reports cannot be trusted.
"There is no established manner to verify the data," said Caccia, now a member of Parliament. "In the absence of a reliable inventory, we do not know - and cannot claim - that we are on a sustainable path."
Starting in 1996, a Canadian Senate subcommittee spent 2 1/2 years examining boreal conflicts. It staged a dozen hearings and field trips and heard testimony from about 175 witnesses. Its report is a stark account of over-cutting and mismanagement.
"There is ample evidence to show that current forest management practices are destroying our legacy, that we are cutting too many trees over too large an area," the subcommittee reported.
And it added a warning: "There is a sense of urgency that, at least in some parts of the boreal forest, time is running out for saving some vital functions, such as wildlife habitat, watershed protection and carbon sinks."
One place the subcommittee stopped was Winnipeg, Manitoba, not far from a part of the boreal forest Randall Bird knows well: his "trap line" - 10 square miles near his native Ojibwa village of Hollow Water.
Bird, now in his 50s, has worked the area since he was a boy - laying out traps each fall, checking them by snowshoe and snowmobile, sleeping wrapped in fur blankets in remote cabins. Most years, he would harvest a pile of pelts - from beaver to lynx, weasel to wolf - now worth $10,000 to $15,000 Canadian ($6,500 to $9,750 U.S.).
Then, in the late 1990s, the Pine Falls Paper Co. began clear-cutting in the area.
Walking through a recent cut, Bird was quiet. A few patches of aspen remained, but large stands of black spruce and jack pine, from which newsprint is made, had been leveled. It looked like a bomb had exploded.
"Everything's gone," he said.
Bird inherited the trap line from his father, who inherited it from his father. He had long planned to pass it on to his sons. But now Bird says it won't be worth it.
"You won't get anything now. Fishers, martens - those animals like trees. They have no place to go now because it's all open," he said.
Last summer, Bird joined his fellow tribal elders inside a large tepee. They sat in a circle and smoked a sacred pipe as Garry Raven, a traditional healer, prayed for help.
The logging industry "has killed off our rabbits, our porcupine, our otter and lynx," Raven told the Creator. "Most of the forest roads are blocked off. There are big gates on them so you can't get in."
Pine Falls Paper has since been sold to another company, Tembec, which plans more logging on lands where Ojibwa trap and gather herbs. But Tembec official Bob Yatkowsky said the cutting can be done without hurting the land and that he is proceeding cautiously.
"You don't want to end up with standoffs and roadblocks," he said.
Others have less patience. Asked about Ojibwa concerns, John Bulmer - a former superintendent who leads mill tours - said, "That's all fine and dandy. But what are we going to live on in the meantime? We can't live on nuts and berries. We can't turn the clock back."
Winding his way through a maze of stairwells and industrial machinery, Bulmer vigorously defended Tembec logging. "It's a system that works," he said. "We plant trees. We cut trees. And we keep a lot of people employed."
Tembec's newsprint is not just made from trees. A lot of recycled newspaper is mixed in, too. Over the years, the amount of newspaper born again as newsprint has grown dramatically. But newspaper companies generally prefer to publish on newsprint with some virgin wood fiber because the paper is whiter and photographs reproduce better.
Environmentalists say that leaves plenty of room for damage. And while most U.S. newspapers, The Bee included, routinely write about forest conservation and editorialize on its behalf, seldom if ever do they examine the environmental price of newsprint.
"The amazing lack of coverage is no coincidence," said Todd Paglia, campaign coordinator at Forest Ethics, a San Francisco environmental group. "When their own bottom line is on the line, newspapers tend to shy away from coverage that would reveal their complicity."
Bruce Meissner, who manages The Bee's press room, said four of the company's five largest newsprint suppliers make paper with 40 percent or more recycled content. "At times, they go 60, 70, 80," he said.
Only one supplier makes newsprint 100 percent from virgin old-growth trees: Abitibi in Mackenzie, British Columbia, which supplies about 6 percent of the 55,000 to 65,000 metric tons The Bee consumes annually. The paper is actually made from chunks of wood left over from cutting logs into two-by-fours and other dimensional lumber.
But even with 100 percent old-growth fiber, the Mackenzie paper has problems. "It tends to tear easily," Meissner said. "If I had my druthers, I wouldn't use any."
Why, then, does The Bee use it? The company, Meissner said, prefers a mix of manufacturers to ensure a steady supply of newsprint and to get a good price.
The subject of newsprint was on the mind of U.S. Forest Service chief Dale Bosworth when he addressed the Newspaper Association of America, which represents the nation's newspaper publishers.
A transcript of Bosworth's October 2001 speech, released by the Forest Service, contains the following passage:
"Newsprint comes from wood and wood comes from forests. Just to produce the Washington Post takes the equivalent of three or four square miles of clear-cut forest per year. Multiply that by all the newspapers and magazines in the nation and you get some idea of the demands on our natural resources just to produce newsprint."
Tom Croteau, a senior vice president for the association, said Bosworth's statement was misleading.
"It suggests that all newspapers and magazines are printed on paper that has been manufactured from forests that were clear-cut," Croteau said. "And that's not true."
Building supplies for U.S. deprive beavers of theirs
North of Edmonton, near Lesser Slave Lake, trees are falling not for newsprint but for "oriented strand board."
Sold in 4-by-8-foot panels and used widely for roof sheathing and siding, oriented strand board, known as OSB, is a relatively recent boreal forest innovation. And industry officials say it's environmentally friendly, as well, because it is made from fast-growing aspen, not century-old pine and spruce.
Last summer, sheets of Canadian OSB were sailing out of the Stanford Ranch Home Depot in Roseville at a rate of about 2,500 per week. Stacked 15 feet high, each panel was stamped: Tolko, Made in Canada, High Prairie, AB.
The price: $5.99, about $4 cheaper than plywood.
"This was a special buy for us," said Home Depot lumber and building department manager Kathleen Johnson. "And we are passing the savings on to our customers."
Back in the boreal forest near High Prairie, trapper Dave Donahue said those savings are savaging nature.
Slowing his pickup, he pointed to a clear-cut where he said a logging crew working for Tolko had leveled a stand of aspen, from which OSB is made.
But it wasn't the clear-cut he was pointing at. It was an igloo-shaped mound of sticks near a bog.
"You see that beaver den?" Donahue said. "After they logged it, those beavers died out. Beavers need aspen to live."
Donahue said that in the winter, when a lot of logging takes place, heavy equipment sometimes crashes through snarls of debris where bears are hibernating and nursing their cubs. When that happens, the cubs freeze to death and the mother starves.
"It happens with all the denning animals," he said. "The logging companies know this is going on."
Tolko's Rick Alguire said he knows of no such thing.
First, he said that although Tolko logged the area in 1998, the cuts Donahue pointed out may not have been Tolko's - because other companies work there, too.
About beaver, Alguire said: "I can tell you honestly we do not encroach within their food supply. We just legally cannot do it."
About bears, he said that in two decades of logging he has seen bears disturbed only twice - once by oil and gas crews and once by Tolko. On both occasions he said the animals "crawled back into their dens, safe."
Logging for OSB is very forest-friendly, Alguire said. "There are areas coming back like a green carpet," he said. "It's beautiful. The moose populations are just booming."
A March 1998 report by Alberta's provincial government found something different: a landscape shredded by logging and also crisscrossed by 45,000 miles of oil and gas pipelines and 88,000 miles of access roads. Alberta's boreal is experiencing "a massive increase in industrial activity - timber, hydrocarbon and mineral extraction - unprecedented in scale," it said.
Consultant Richard Thomas, who wrote the report, said such fragmentation is happening across Canada - and beyond.
"These problems are international in scope," he said. "The boreal is much more important to the global community left standing than exploited, simply because of its carbon storage.
"Messing around with the boreal the way we are, it's eventually going to affect everybody on the planet."
Chapter Three: Harvesting the Sea
Quotas work to protect Canada's catch
By Tom Knudson - Bee Staff Writer
Once they turned to the sea for sustenance. Today, many fishermen on California's coast turn to wives and girlfriends instead.
"Steady job and benefits, that's the marrying kind," said Troy Vought, a commercial trawler in Eureka. "If you ask most fishermen, 'How are you still fishing?' they tell you, 'It's because my wife has a good job.'"
Six hundred miles up the coast, in a restaurant on Vancouver Island, Canadian trawler Brian Mose leans back and smiles.
Life is good. Unlike Vought, Mose faces no snarl of federal rules that threaten his career. His deckhands earn up to $150,000 Canadian ($104,000 U.S.) a year. And three-quarters of their catch is shipped south to the most voracious seafood market on the West Coast: California.
"I would never try to sell to 34 million people in Canada; it's logistically impossible," Mose said. "The beauty of it is Californians are all jammed into the I-5 corridor. California is just as sweet as it comes."
Ever since gold-seekers swarmed to California in the 19th century, the state has been known as a mother lode of economic opportunity.
But on its central and north coast, efforts to protect seven species of Pacific rockfish - commonly known as red snapper - with federal fishing limits and bans put into place beginning in the 1990s, are reversing that historic trend by exporting opportunity to Canada - and sowing joblessness and despair at home.
Like many commodities, Canada's rockfish don't leave a well-defined trail in the marketplace. Once sold to processing plants, they are shipped by truck and plane to seafood wholesalers who in turn deal them to restaurants and supermarkets from Vancouver to San Diego. No agency - U.S. or Canadian - logs the final destination.
But trawlers and processors in Canada say about 75 percent of British Columbia's commercial catch is snapped up by consumers in California.
And that has some British Columbia environmentalists worried.
A decade ago, hunger for North Atlantic cod - its fillets white and flaky like rockfish - helped propel one of the most dramatic episodes of overfishing ever off the coasts of Newfoundland and New England. Some fear the same kind of market forces could one day deplete British Columbia's rockfish.
"When California started scaling back, I said: 'Holy smokes! What kind of pressure is this going to put on our species?'" said Terry Glavin, marine conservation adviser and rockfish specialist for the Sierra Club of British Columbia.
So far, the answer has been: none at all.
Therein lies a contrarian tale suggesting California's passion for conserving resources at home while consuming them from elsewhere need not export environmental pain, as it has done in Ecuador's Amazon and Canada's boreal forest.
The key is having a system to prevent such damage.
In British Columbia, that system is a federal management plan that is turning commercial fishermen into conservationists by giving them an ownership stake in the fish of the sea.
With legal title to an average of 610,000 pounds of rockfish a year, trawlers no longer race to sea in a competitive dash for fish. They work at their own pace, dragging their nets when prices are good. Most fish less - and catch less - but earn more.
Like property owners, they now take a keen interest in the value of their asset, including its resale value. The more productive rockfish stocks are, the more valuable a trawler's ownership stake - or quota - in them becomes. Lately, some trawlers have retired from the fleet and sold their quota to other fishermen for about $1.90 a pound, becoming millionaires.
While not flawless, Canada's 6-year-old quota system has made trawling less wasteful.
When British Columbia trawlers happen to catch more than their quota, they are not forced to shovel the excess overboard dead, as U.S. fishermen must do. Instead, the Canadian system allows them to keep their catch - and profit from it, without hurting the environment.
Perhaps most importantly, Canada's system puts a federal "observer" on every boat, allowing its Department of Fisheries and Oceans to eliminate the guesswork that has long plagued fisheries management and to respond more quickly to changing ocean conditions. It is just such a failure to react to changing conditions that precipitated the rockfish crisis in California.
"The quota system has proven so successful you can't ignore it," said Bruce Turris, executive manager of the Canadian Groundfish Research and Conservation Society, which represents the trawl fleet.
"Clearly, there are public policy issues about the allocation of quasi-proprietary rights to a public resource. But there is no question quotas have their place in enhanced resource management."
U.S. fishery officials agree. "It's a system I would love to have," said Hans Radtke, chairman of the Portland-based Pacific Fishery Management Council, the federal entity that oversees commercial fishing on the West Coast.
Until October, though, the Pacific council, like regional councils around the country, was forbidden by Congress from developing quota systems, in part because of conflict about how to divvy up fish stocks.
With that ban now lifted, "We'll move ahead," Radtke said. "But it's going to be a long, drawn-out political process. And the industry has to get behind it. Otherwise, it won't work."
Many trawlers are enthusiastic. "I wish we had that system here," said Peter Leipzig, head of the Eureka-based Fishermen's Marketing Association, which represents the 273-boat West Coast trawl fleet.
Instead, the fleet has faced a maze of federal limits and closures so riddled with uncertainty it has forced fishermen and fish processors out of business and contributed to divorce, drug abuse and domestic violence, according to skippers and their wives.
"There is so much worry about money," said Mary Young, a Crescent City social worker married to a trawl captain. "I talk to the wives of crew members and half the time they're splitting up. You see a lot more problems in the family."
By their very nature, rockfish are not an easy species to know.
For starters, there aren't just a few kinds. There are dozens, an undersea galaxy of 70 to 80 species that school and swarm along the continental shelf from Baja California to Alaska.
Rockfish don't splash up rivers like salmon. They don't slash through the surface like tuna. They hunker down at crushing and sunless depths of 400 to 2,500 feet, where many details about their lives remain unfathomed by science.
They are ambassadors of the unusual.
With bulging eyes, bucket-like mouths and a forest of quills on their spines, rockfish seem to spring from a Dr. Seuss children's story:
There were purple rockfish, lemon rockfish
and other strange types;
Some had thin yellow lips, some wore
speckles and stripes!
Even their names are colorful. There are chilipeppers and chuckleheads, harlequins and honeycombs, widows and idiots, vermilions and chameleons, warthogs and watermelons.
But their comic front masks a complex nature. As scientists recently discovered, rockfish are like humans in some ways. They grow slowly, take years to mature and reproduce only occasionally. The rockfish on your plate may be older than you. Some live to be 70 or more. A few make it past 100.
With quotas, trawlers can ride market tides
Two days before Thanksgiving, 30 miles off the west coast of Vancouver Island, a large trawling net swollen with fish hangs from a hoist over the Miss Tatum's aft deck.
A crew member pulls a cord and a waterfall of rockfish cascades onto the boat. Most are widows and yellowtails, but there is a smattering of red-stripe, silver-gray and canary rockfish, even an occasional strawberry-red bocaccio.
With tails flapping and mouths and gills slowly opening and closing, the catch sloshes across the deck, forming snowdrifts of snapper. The crew wades in, shoveling the fish into a hold, amid a whirling cloud of gulls.
The Miss Tatum was at sea because its skipper, Clayton Odberg, saw a market opportunity in the millions of Californians he hoped would soon tire of Thanksgiving turkey and turn to fish. And he had enough quota to give it a try.
About 8 a.m., with his net 490 feet deep in the Pacific, Odberg's radio crackled with the voice of Dave Ernst, a local seafood processor in touch with fish wholesalers in San Francisco and Los Angeles. California buyers were hungry for snapper - but the market was not sizzling.
"Clayton, the price isn't as good as what we were hoping for."
"I know that," Odberg said. "I was going to stop at 60,000."
"It would be better if you stopped at 50, even better at 40."
Later, Odberg raised the net. It held close to 40,000 pounds of rockfish, enough to bring a good price - 75 cents a pound (52 cents U.S.) - but not too much to drive the market down.
For Odberg and the rest of Canada's trawlers, quotas have turned fishermen into entrepreneurs.
"We each have our pull of fish now," trawler captain Mose said. "That's all we have. We want to make the very most of them.
"Take canary rockfish. My quota is 50,000 pounds for the year. I can catch that in one tow, or two - or 10. I can bring it in at 40 cents a pound or 75 cents a pound."
The ability to ride rising market tides means many Canadian trawlers now make more while working less.
"I used to fish 12 months a year. Sometimes I would even leave on Boxing Day," just after Christmas, said skipper Norman Sigmund. "Now I fish four months and make more money."
The news is not all upbeat. Some skippers say the government gave too much quota to some boats and too little to others. "There was not a lot of fairness," said skipper Jim Harris. "Some guys wound up out of business who had been pioneers in the industry."
The approach also has made boats so costly - a no-frills trawler with "quota" has jumped in value from $400,000 to $3 million in Canadian currency - that some fear for the fleet's future. "Who's going to come into this business if they have to pay $5 million for an operation that will only generate a million a year?" Sigmund asked.
"How are we supposed to transfer this equity to the next generation? Larger entities will gobble up the quota because they can afford to."
Several Vancouver Island trawlers are now millionaires. Many drive new trucks and SUVs. One has a condo in Palm Beach, Fla. Another sold his quota for $5 million Canadian ($3.45 million U.S.). Some have reinvested heavily, buying more efficient boats, safer gear and technology to cut the catch of undesired fish.
But the biggest sea change may be in attitude.
"It has changed the tone of discussion," said Rick Stanley, a biologist with Canada's Department of Fisheries and Oceans. "Fishermen take a more long-term interest because they own a share of the farm."
When Mose first saw his quota, he cried.
"I thought I was finished," he said. "Why would I like something that was going to reduce the amount of my take?"
And today?
"My revenues are higher than they've ever been," Mose said.
"But what is most interesting to me is when I'm out trawling and I see a school of fish, I'm thinking, 'I know your parents. They did me well. Now do me well. Be productive.'"
West Coast fleet's cost in wasted fish is high
Like many improvements, Canada's quota system began with failure. Every three months, at the government's order, trawlers charged to sea, hoping to catch their "trip limit" before another boat got to it first. The competition was so fierce trawlers called it "Olympic" fishing.
"It created a boom-and-bust cycle," said Murray Chatwin, a buyer at Ocean Fisheries Ltd., a major Canadian processor. "It wasn't working for anybody. The boats weren't making money; we weren't making money."
When trawlers caught more than their limit, they threw the excess overboard, dead. With so many nets in the water, they also caught more than the entire fleet's three-month quota in just a few days. Unable to regulate the catch, Canada shut the fishery down in September 1995.
"It was binge fishing," Mose said. "Looking back, there was not one thing good about it. Production was high; quality was low. All you could predict was, 'Look out, here it comes.'
"I watched it evolve to the point where there just wasn't enough fish for the fleet anymore."
A similar cloud now hangs over the West Coast trawl fleet. From Seattle to San Diego, the Pacific Fishery Management Council also uses limits to harness trawlers. Here, though, the limits cap what trawlers can catch over a 60-day period, instead of on every trip.
But with some rockfish populations in decline, pressure from environmental groups on the rise and a 1996 federal law on the books requiring that "overfished" stocks be rebuilt, the fishery management council has steadily whittled those limits lower.
The result: a desperate, impoverished fleet and a whole lot of wasted fish.
"You are forced to catch what you can while you can because of the uncertainty of not being able to fish tomorrow," said Vought, the Eureka trawler.
Last year, while making a tow for lingcod near Eureka, Vought's crew caught something unexpected: 2,500 pounds of canary rockfish, a delicious, valuable species known to live to be at least 84 years old. Trouble is, Vought was already near his two-month limit for canaries.
To avoid a federal fine, the crew shoveled 2,000 pounds of canary rockfish back into the sea. Not one survived, because rockfish's air bladders burst in the rapid pressure change of their forced journey to the surface.
"In order to sell $800 worth of fish, we actually threw away $1,100 worth," Vought said. "In what world does that make sense?"
When Canadian trawler Sigmund found himself in a similar predicament not long ago, not one fish was wasted. He had hauled in 35,000 pounds of silver-gray rockfish, 20,000 of which was over his legal quota.
Sigmund called another trawler who had not yet caught his annual quota of silver-grays, and traded for 20,000 additional pounds of quota. "I turned my by-catch into catch," Sigmund said. "That's what the quota system is all about."
California trawlers say being forced to conserve rockfish by wasting them is crazy. Crescent City trawler Richard Young once walked onto the deck of his boat while his crew was heaving fish overboard. "They told me, 'This is nuts,'" Young said. He responded sarcastically: "No, it's not. It's conservation."
"There's no way you can feel good about it," Young said. "That fish is food. It could be feeding hungry people."
John DeVore, groundfish coordinator for the Pacific management council, said the 60-day limits were put into place for an economic reason: to keep a steady flow of fish coming to the dock. Seafood processors wanted a system in which they had a year-round business, he said.
But he acknowledged the biological cost in wasted fish is high. "It doesn't make sense from any perspective," DeVore said. "It's distasteful for everyone. It's one of those things we want to get away from."
Unable to gauge how many fish were being wasted, and faced with a continued decline in rockfish, the federal fisheries council last year took an unprecedented step. It declared a huge swath of the continental shelf, from Canada to Mexico, off-limits to trawling.
Since then, a deep economic gloom has settled over California's North Coast. The value of Young's trawler, the City of Eureka, has fallen from $400,000 to $150,000. "I'm not convinced we can sell it for anything," said his wife, Mary.
Like many fishing families, the Youngs, who are in their 50s, have always counted on the future sale of that boat to fund their retirement. "I try not to think about it, because right now the only retirement we have is my Social Security," Mary Young said.
"We sit here and struggle at night and say, 'What are we going to do?'" she said.
As catches have shriveled, so have paychecks. A decade ago, Richard Young paid crew members $35,000 to $40,000 a year. Now they make less than half that. Times are so lean that some deckhands have even stopped paying federal income taxes.
Statewide, roughly 200 people still earn a living as deckhands on trawl boats. Despite the downturn in rockfish, Young keeps his crew employed most of the year, in part by turning to other species, including crab and shrimp. During slow times, they repair gear.
Many have found other work. "One guy is a prison guard. Another is a truck driver," Young said. "Twenty years ago, people were begging us for jobs. Now it's hard to find a crewman."
In Eureka, Vought has his own way of dealing with that problem. He swings by the local unemployment office where, he said, he finds an unusual class of workers.
"We are literally pulling drug addicts off the street to take them fishing." But Vought said it's not as bad as it sounds. "A lot of times, they are cleaned up by the time you get them. There's no help. The perception is that fishing is over with."
It's more dangerous, too, because trawlers are under financial pressure and can't afford to maintain boats.
A recent U.S. Coast Guard report attributed accidents and loss of boats in Northern California partly to desperate financial straits. In Crescent City, at least two trawlers have sunk in the past decade due to fatigue and financial stress, local fishermen said.
"More boats get lost," Vought said. "You have more accidents."
Warmer water doomed generations of rockfish
The West Coast's rockfish disaster began in the 1970s when the federal government, after pushing foreign trawlers out of coastal waters by extending the 200-mile territorial limit, handed out boatloads of financial incentives to jump-start a domestic trawl fleet.
The fleet grew rapidly and the fishing was fantastic. Most people assumed rockfish were prolific breeders, like sole and halibut.
Rockfish productivity "was not an issue," said Peter Leipzig, head of the trawlers association and a former member of the Pacific fisheries council. "The national policy was full utilization of the resource."
The first hint that something was awry came in the late 1980s, when scientists noticed that most rockfish in trawl nets were adults. There was a drought of youngsters.
They now understand that in the mid-'70s, a period of generally cold water, rockfish thrived, giving birth to millions of squiggling larvae that survived to become healthy adults.
But in the 1980s, a time of warmer water, including one of the century's worst El Niño patterns, new generations of rockfish were born and then mysteriously perished.
The 1990s brought a surge of even warmer water - and more reproductive failure. But figuring that out took time. Meanwhile, the trawl fleet continued catching adult rockfish in the prime of their reproductive lives.
Veteran rockfish scientist Alec MacCall likens it to continually dipping into the principal in a savings account. Sooner or later, you deplete the account.
"It wasn't until the late '90s that we started realizing there was a serious problem," said MacCall, who works for the National Marine Fisheries Service. "By then, a lot of damage had been done."
The management council did not act swiftly enough to avert disaster, MacCall said, in part because of the usual pressure from politicians, fishermen and fish processors. But he also blames another group for the disaster: scientists, himself included.
"We blew it by not looking hard enough and soon enough at what was going on," he said.
There is plenty of blame to go around, according to Leipzig. "We all regret what happened," he said. "But we can't attack it because we were all part of it."
Today, seven species of rockfish have been hurt the most: bocaccio, canary, cowcod, dark-blotched, yelloweye, widow and Pacific Ocean perch. And because they have been fished to such low levels, and reproduce so sporadically, scientists say it will be years, decades, even more than a century before they recover.
Three species - dark-blotched, widow and Pacific Ocean perch - are expected to rebound the quickest: between 2011 and 2047.
Depending on ocean conditions and fishing practices, yelloweye and canary rockfish could take 24 to 73 years to bounce back. Biological recovery - a return to just 40 percent of their original abundance - could take 96 years for cowcod and more than a century for bocaccio.
Managing rockfish is a task that calls for detailed monitoring of fish populations, commercial catch, by-catch and ocean conditions.
Perhaps the best way to keep track of such matters is by placing a federal observer on every trawler. And that is just what the Canadian quota system does.
On board the Miss Tatum, that observer was Guy Boxall, a bushy-haired young man in a ragged flannel shirt who watched everything that came up and jotted it down: yellowtails (48 percent), widows (46 percent), a sprinkling of red-stripes, silver-grays and bocaccio - even two stray salmon.
At first, Canadian trawlers were skeptical. After all, the cost of the program - about $350 Canadian a day ($240 U.S.) - is paid by fishermen. And observers, who work for a private company, report everything they see to the government.
"There's a significant cost to this program," Mose said. "It's privacy, the thing we hold dearest."
Most now are sold on the concept, finding that they can easily afford it and that observer information serves as an early-warning system about the health of rockfish stocks. Government fishery managers like the program because it provides a precise accounting of the catch. U.S. fishery managers are envious.
Told about the Canadian program, John DeVore, the federal U.S. rockfish manager, said: "They've got 100 percent observer coverage? That's great. That's really ideal. Then you see everything. You could really manage by-catch a lot better doing that."
The Pacific council took a step in that direction in 2001, placing observers on 20 percent of trawl trips. "Clearly, if we had the resources, we would like to see 100 percent coverage," DeVore said.
Recently, observer data helped the Canadian fleet respond to a potential rockfish disaster. "We were watching silver-grays just get older - there were no young ones," Mose said. Last year, the fisheries and oceans department cut the silver-gray quota.
Leipzig said quick action often is difficult in the United States because the current system requires extensive public notice and involvement. A simple stock assessment to estimate rockfish abundance takes two years to work its way through the system. "By the time you use the information, it's out of date by at least two years," he said. "How does that advance conservation?"
Canada's system has its critics, too.
Terry Glavin, the Sierra Club adviser, said that even with observers, there is not enough information to guarantee the long-term health of rockfish stocks. "We don't know about interspecies relationships," he said. "We don't know anything about what influences the productivity of the various species."
He's also skeptical of the close relationship between the fishing industry and its government overseers. "Decisions are made ... in closed meetings by nameless mandarins and industry lobbyists who reckon that the less the rest of us know about this stuff, the better," Glavin wrote in a newspaper column published in Canada last year.
But what haunts him most is that an overfishing disaster like the one that decimated cod stocks on the east coast of Canada and in New England in the 1980s and early 1990s could happen to British Columbia.
The genesis of that catastrophe is eerily similar to what spawned California's rockfish crisis: a prolonged spell of intense fishing, seasoned by industry pressure and scientific uncertainty.
"My country destroyed the largest and oldest fishery in the history of the human experience: North Atlantic cod," Glavin said.
But Bruce Turris, the British Columbia trawl fleet representative, said past is not prologue. Federal groundfish managers "are much more cautious and conservative now," he said.
A snapshot of the British Columbia rockfish catch shows no wild upswings in rockfish landings - despite rapidly declining catches and cutbacks in California, Oregon and Washington. British Columbia rockfish landings have actually dipped 9 percent, from 53.8 million pounds in 1996 to 48.9 million pounds in 2001.
Many West Coast trawlers have argued for a quota system and other reforms, including a buy-back program to reduce the number of boats in the fleet - a measure recently approved by Congress.
"Quotas, if done properly, could be the salvation of this fishery," said Richard Young, the Crescent City trawler.
Unless that happens, they will have to continue to deal with the fallout of the current system.
For Young, that means spending time and money diversifying into crab and shrimp fishing.
For Troy Vought, it means getting out of trawling. Last year, he started Aquascape, a business building water gardens and ponds.
And it means changes in the marketplace.
To see one example, drop by Mr. Fish Seafood, a popular retail fish market on Highway 101 in Eureka.
A sign near the door says, "Save a Cow, Eat a Fish." Inside, there are colorful fish-shaped Christmas ornaments, T-shirts ($10 each) that say "Fish Happens!" and another sign: "Catch Your Limit Here."
One recent weekend, there was rockfish for sale too - labeled as snapper, for $5.99 a pound. Asked where it came from, owner Mark McCullough ducked into the back and fished out the smelly brown box in which it was shipped.
Stamped on one side were three words: Product of Canada.
The Reuters - IUCN Media Award 2004, Global Winner
Intro
California's environmental legacy of conserving resources at home is on a collision course with its habit of consuming them in record quantities from abroad. And often the losers are impoverished citizens and communities - and spectacular ecosystems - in remote parts of the globe, where money speaks louder than the land.
From the Editor: Our choices make ripples around the world
How do decisions we make in California affect the environment in other parts of the world?
That simple question is the basis for this in-depth project.
And it is clear from months-long research, which took Bee staffers from the headwaters of the Amazon in Ecuador to the boreal forests in northern Canada to the seas off British Columbia, that the answer is just as simple. The impact of our public policy, business and individual decisions is profound.
The decision, for example, not to drill for oil off California's coastline has wide public support, for good reason. It allows California to preserve its wondrously scenic coastal beauty.
But the demand for gasoline continues to increase in the state - California drivers now use 38 million gallons a day. It has to come from somewhere. And so it does, increasingly from debt-ridden countries like Ecuador that have fewer environmental controls, leaving entire villages of indigenous people suffering severe consequences.
There are no simple solutions in a complex, industrialized nation like ours. Demands for goods and services will continue to grow. But are there ways as a nation, as a state, as a business or as individuals that we can lessen our global impacts?
To answer that question, it is fair to start with some introspection.
Newspapers are large consumers of newsprint, a wood product. Indeed, part of this project examines the impact of decisions to cut back on logging in California which, in turn, has had a profound impact on Canada's forests.
The Bee, for example, uses an average of 174 metric tons of newsprint a day, a significant percentage of which is made from recycled fiber. The Bee's parent company, the McClatchy Co., ranks second among California's largest newspaper companies in using partially recycled newsprint. According to the California Integrated Waste Management Board, 86 percent of the newsprint the company uses is at least 40 percent recycled fiber.
For this project, we tried to do better. We tried to find paper made partially with rice straw. In 1996, The Bee participated in an experiment to make newsprint using rice straw. The test went well, but the experiment didn't go any further because the cost to produce the paper was too high. There is no leftover rice-straw paper.
We also sought out a manufacturer of paper made with a hemp-like plant known as kenaf, but he said the newsprint project had been put on hold in the fall of 2000.
So the paper on which the newsprint version of this project appears was made last year by Blue Heron Paper Co. in Oregon City, Ore. The Blue Heron paper is 60 percent recycled, with the remainder coming from ground-up wood, mostly hemlock chips left over from lumber mills in the area. The paper, an upgraded stock, costs a little more and is brighter than our normal paper, the result of bleaching. Blue Heron uses hydrogen peroxide, described by the company as environmentally friendly.
Still, as we researched Blue Heron, we found that its environmental record isn't faultless. We found it occasionally uses whole logs to make newsprint. And the company has had brushes with environmental regulators for discharging hot wastewater into the Willamette River, negatively affecting the salmon run.
The difficulty we encountered in trying to reduce our environmental impact for this project points out that there are few easy alternatives to the way we do things, even in a global economy, and many of those alternatives may be prohibitively expensive.
To jump-start our creativity about seeking alternatives, an Oakland think tank, Redefining Progress, has come up with one way for each of us to measure our impact on the world - our own ecological footprint.
It can be calculated in acres on the organization's Web site at www.myfootprint.org. The national average is 24 acres; mine is 34 acres, the product of my wife and me living in a 2,000-square-foot home, driving two cars, rarely using public transportation except to travel often by air, and frequently eating meat. According to the think tank, we would need 7.8 planets if everyone in the world lived as I do. This project has me thinking and changing, bit by bit. We hope you, too, find it provocative.
-- Rick Rodriguez, Executive Editor
Prologue: Shifting the pain
World's resources feed California's growing appetite
By Tom Knudson - Bee Staff Writer
Half a hemisphere separates the headwaters of the Amazon River and the frostbitten northern latitudes of Canada.
But the two landscapes have one thing in common.
You can see it along a muddy rain-forest road in Ecuador, in the silver glint of a pipeline snaking through the grass. North of Edmonton, Alberta, a different sight catches your eye: an old-growth forest of spruce, pine and aspen shredded by a dusty maze of logging roads.
That oil pipeline and those logging roads are linked, via quiet rivers of commerce, to the largest concentration of consumers in North America, to a culture that proudly protects its own coastline and forests from exploitation while using more gasoline, wood and paper than any other state in America: California.
With 34 million people and the world's fifth-largest economy, California has long consumed more than it produces. But today, its passion for protecting natural resources at home while importing them in record quantities from afar is backfiring on the world's environment.
It is exporting the pain of producing natural resources - polluted water, pipeline accidents, piecemeal forests and human conflicts - to the far corners of the planet, to places out of sight and out of mind. California is the state of denial.
"There is a disconnect going on," said William Libby, a professor emeritus of forestry at the University of California, Berkeley, who lectures and consults on forest issues around the globe. "We consume like mad. And we preserve like mad."
Since the days of John Muir - the California naturalist whose writings and ramblings helped kindle the conservation movement just over a century ago - concern for the environment has been a cornerstone of California life.
And seldom has conservation touched California so deeply as during the past 10 years. Since 1992, environmental rules have eliminated or sharply reduced logging on 10 million acres of national forest land in the state - an area 13 times larger than Yosemite National Park. In the Mojave and Great Basin deserts, 3.5 million acres were declared wilderness in 1994 - an expanse half again the size of Yellowstone National Park.
And while that conservation legacy will enrich Californians - and California ecosystems - for generations to come, its reach also extends far beyond the Golden State.
Libby was one of the first to notice, while on sabbatical in New Zealand in 1992. As the volume of wood cut from California forests dropped due to regulations to protect spotted owls, the demand for logs in New Zealand soared - making loggers there happy.
"Prices were insane," Libby said. "The New Zealanders wanted me to get them a dead spotted owl so they could stuff it, put it in the lobby and genuflect to it."
He soon discovered logging was on the rise in other places, too, and has since published several articles that link preservation of California forests with species extinctions elsewhere.
"We Californians are really not very good conservationists - we're very good preservationists," he said. "Conservation means you use resources well and responsibly. Preservation means you are rich enough to set aside things you want and buy them from someone else."
A half-century ago, California was self-sufficient in wood. Today, the state imports 80 percent of what it uses. Follow some of that wood back to its source and you find yourself in the northern boreal forest, where Canada allows trees to be cut in ways not permitted in California.
On average, nine of every 10 acres logged in Canada are clear-cut - the contentious practice of leveling large patches of the forest. And more than two-thirds of Canadian logging takes place in stands that have never been nicked by a chain saw - virgin forests that in California would be regarded as sanctuaries.
"Many Americans believe Canada is this incredible wilderness, but it's not true," said Richard Thomas, an Edmonton consultant and author of a 1998 provincial study critical of logging practices in Alberta. "We are very much like a Third World country when it comes to our resources. We just let other countries have at it."
Six thousand miles south, a wave of development for another resource crucial to California - crude oil - is inflicting similarly serious wounds across Ecuador's Amazon. Rain forests that were home to kaleidoscopic displays of plant and animal life in the 1970s and '80s now are showcases of pollution and poverty.
Every day, an average of 235,000 barrels of oil is pumped from the region for export to world markets. The largest portion - 65,000 to 85,000 barrels a day - is shipped to refineries in Los Angeles and San Francisco.
The discovery of more reserves in the Amazon is setting off a new wave of controversy and threatening the cultural survival of semi-nomadic rain-forest tribes. Still, the country's new president, Lucio Gutiérrez, assured financiers in New York earlier this year that he supports more drilling because Ecuador is deeply in debt and needs foreign investment.
"The historical challenges for my government are very clear," Gutiérrez said at the time.
California's hunger for the planet's natural resources need not stir up trouble, if a system were in place to prevent it. You can find such a safeguard in the storm-tossed North Pacific, where Canadian fishermen, working under a federal plan that gives them an ownership stake in fish, are harvesting millions of pounds of rockfish every year for California without hurting the environment.
"Everybody is quite conscientious," said Jim Harris, a Canadian trawler. "We've got a fishery that is going to be here for the duration."
The clash of conservation and consumption in California may be large, but it is not unique in this country.
"We're the largest consuming nation basically of everything," said James Bowyer, a professor at the University of Minnesota who specializes in conservation policy and natural resource consumption.
"Yet we find every reason in the world why we shouldn't mine steel, why we shouldn't drill for oil," Bowyer said. "It's ironic because we are transferring the impacts to someplace else. And then we are telling ourselves what we are doing is good for the environment.
"And not only are we transferring those impacts, we are magnifying them by turning to nations that don't have the stringent environmental controls that we do."
No government agency maps the global impact of California consumers. But a small Oakland think tank, Redefining Progress, has assembled estimates of the mountain of resources, from wood to fossil fuel, fresh water to seafood, consumed by 146 nations - and some California counties - a yardstick it calls an "ecological footprint."
The United States, a world leader in the conservation of natural resources, has a larger footprint (24 acres per person) than all nations except the United Arab Emirates (with 25 acres). Do the math and you find America's 291 million people draw upon a 7 billion-acre chunk of the planet - an area roughly three times the size of the United States.
An assessment for Marin County - the pricey, conservation-minded San Francisco suburb - found citizens there eat, drink, spend and drive their way through even more of the planet's natural wealth: 27 acres per person a year - the largest ecological footprint ever calculated.
The group's footprints have attracted attention from scientists and policy-makers around the world. And although some people criticize the methods as imprecise, none denies the basic premise.
"The idea is right," said Libby, the forestry professor.
Last year, Libby found some Californians are not eager to hear about the global consequences of conservation and consumption.
At a conference on Sierra Nevada forest management, held in Nevada City, Libby asked the 250 people attending how many of them lived in houses made of wood.
Almost everyone did. Then he asked how many had houses built with alternatives such as used tires and straw bales. Only two or three people responded.
A few moments later, Libby recalled, he asked, "How many people are comfortable with species going extinct somewhere else because we're not going to cut any wood on the Tahoe National Forest?'"
At that point, Libby said, "Somebody in the audience shouted: 'We don't like your question.' "
Chapter One: Staining the Amazon
The tropics suffer to satisfy state's thirst for oil
By Tom Knudson - Bee Staff Writer
SUCUMBÍOS PROVINCE, ECUADOR
At midday, the fresh spill of crude oil sparkles like obsidian.
Creeping across the floor of the Amazon rain forest, it covers jade-colored plants and lime-green grasses in a thick petroleum paste. Imprisoned on its surface, insects struggle for freedom, then sink slowly into an oily tomb.
A few feet away, on a dirt road stained with oil, Luz Soto points to a festering sore on her arm. "It's from the pollution," said the 40-year-old mother of six.
Journey to the South American nation of Ecuador and you find pollution and misery on a scale that never would be tolerated in California, a state that guards its own majestic coastline from oil development and is home to some of the toughest environmental laws on Earth.
Follow that oil as it leaves Ecuador and you find that between 20 and 40 million barrels a year flow to California, which consumes more gasoline - 38 million gallons a day - than Florida and New York combined.
Yet the link between petroleum consumption in California and environmental damage and human suffering abroad is not well known, in part because such harm happens thousands of miles away, out of view of consumers, policy-makers and many environmental groups.
It also is masked by the generic nature of crude oil, which leaves no fingerprint at the pump, no clue to the landscapes where it is coaxed from beneath the earth, loaded onto tankers and shipped to the United States.
But there's no hiding what oil development is doing to Ecuador. Its signature includes not only pollution, disease, poverty, deforestation and diminishing wildlife but something darker: the decimation of indigenous rain forest cultures.
"The discovery of oil brings the promise of great riches," said Terry Lynn Karl, a senior fellow at Stanford University's Institute for International Studies who wrote "The Paradox of Plenty: Oil Booms and PetroStates."
"But the reality is it is very closely linked to environmental degradation, the spread of conflict and a wide range of economic problems."
In Ecuador, the hardest-hit area is a riot of vegetation and swift-moving streams east of the Andes: the Ecuadorean Amazon. Flanked by Colombia to the north and Peru to the south and east, Ecuador's Amazon is surprisingly rich in petroleum. It also is part of a forest ecosystem second in size only to the boreal forest, which circles the globe across Canada, Alaska, Russia and Scandinavia.
Unlike the austere boreal, South America's fabled tropical Amazon forest abounds in biological diversity. And few parts are as lively as Ecuador's portion, home to an estimated 8,000 to 12,000 species of plants - or up to 5 percent of all plant species on Earth - and an impressive complement of wildlife, from pink fresh.water dolphins to transparent "glass frogs" to the largest raptor on Earth, the harpy eagle.
But since 1972, when the first oil well was tapped, petroleum has siphoned off much of its glory. Tracts of forest that teemed with monkeys, macaws and semi-nomadic tribes now are tattered by roads, rigs and colonist settlements. Tea-colored streams that shimmered with silvery fish now float petroleum scum.
With the recent discovery of additional oil reserves in still-untouched parts of Ecuador's Amazon, many Ecuadoreans fear for the future.
"If the oil companies come in, they will be finishing off with us, and nature as well," said Sabino Gualinga, an indigenous healer who has lived all his 82 years in a remote Amazon village now targeted for oil development.
More than a dozen oil companies from around the world - including the United States and Canada - operate in Ecuador. The largest is Ecuador's own national petroleum company: Petroecuador.
Ivan Narvaez, Petroecuador's chief of environmental protection, said that although Ecuador is taking steps to clean up its petroleum-fouled rain forest, the scope of the problem is too much for the debt-strapped country to handle.
"We do as much as we can," he said, "but it is always too little."
Near refineries and oil fields in the Amazon, even the rain reeks of petroleum. "It smells similar to the exhaust from a car," said Serbio Escobar, who farms near the Colombian border. His wife, Margarita Campoverde de Escobar, added: "Sometimes, when we collect rainwater in pots, the water is black."
Wherever oil goes, trouble seems to follow.
Inside a pipeline that snakes westward up the eastern slope of the Andes, through green canyons tinseled with waterfalls and veiled in clouds, crude oil is pumped into the cross hairs of danger. Here, landslides attack it, rip it out of its steel cocoon and send it gushing in toxic black waves down mountain streams.
On the other side of the Andes, the mayhem continues.
"We sleep in terror here," said Lucia Castillo, whose brother was burned to death when a pipeline break sent waves of fire through the coastal community of Esmeraldas in 1998. As flames roared down oil-soaked streets, devouring cars and homes, frantic parents put their children in wooden canoes and pushed them into the Esmeraldas River.
Then they watched in horror as fire engulfed the river - and the children.
"They say petroleum is the excrement of the devil," said Byron Borja, a customs agent who lost two family members in the disaster. "In part that's right, because it's the cause of so many of the world's problems."
Ecuador's environmental rules not well enforced
California's complicity in Ecuador's pain is relatively new. Just a decade ago, all but 6 percent of the state's oil came from its own reserves - mostly in Kern County - and from Alaska. Last year, 31 percent came from other countries.
That's because existing oil fields in California and Alaska slowly are running out of crude. And proposals to drill for more in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, and off the California coast, so far have been sidelined by environmental opposition.
California's intake of foreign crude reached a record 196 million barrels in 2002. More than a third came from deserts in Saudi Arabia and Iraq - through the United Nations sanctioned "oil-for-food" program.
But the third largest source - at 14 percent - was tropical Ecuador, which contributed 27 million barrels. The recent war in Iraq is certain to increase demand for Ecuador's oil.
Yet the ground rules for oil drilling vary widely. In California, the oil industry must comply with environmental regulations that John Martini, head of the California Independent Petroleum Association, called "the most stringent in the U.S."
Oil companies face an array of environmental laws in Ecuador, too, under the jurisdiction of the Ministry of Energy and Mines, the Ministry of the Environment, and Petroecuador. But those laws are not well enforced, according to Judith Kimerling, associate law professor at the City University of New York and author of "Amazon Crude," a book about Ecuadorean oil development.
"Despite a growing trend toward increasingly detailed paper regulations, the government has still not implemented meaningful environmental regulation in the oil field," Kimerling said.
Larry Meriage, spokesman for Los Angeles-based Occidental Petroleum Corp., a major company in Ecuador, said Kimerling is "completely off-base."
In Ecuador, Meriage said, "We jump through hoops for developments which are really very carefully manicured and carved out." Oil companies are held to a higher standard of accountability in Ecuador than other businesses, he said.
The Golden State needs that oil because it is home to more vehicles - 27.7 million - than any other state. When industrial and other uses are considered, Texas consumes more petroleum overall. But California leads the nation in gasoline consumption, burning up 15 billion gallons a year. Its freeways are showcases of consumption. In California, one in eight motorists drives a gas-guzzling sport-utility vehicle.
"When I visit an oil-exporting country with the kind of degradation and poverty that you see in Ecuador, I can't help but think, 'Oh, my God - all of this to fuel someone's SUV,' " said Karl, the Stanford fellow.
Filling up his Toyota Tacoma recently at a Beacon station in suburban Roseville, Rob Beazizo - a registered nurse - wasn't thinking about Ecuador at all. But when told about the pollution, he was concerned.
"It kind of gives you pause," he said. "Americans are pretty oblivious to what happens outside the U.S. It's out of sight, out of mind."
Overshadowed by larger reserves in conflict-torn parts of the world, such as Venezuela and the Persian Gulf, Ecuador's 30-year history of petroleum development has drawn scant attention in the world's press.
In recent years, the situation in Ecuador has grown tense too, and the causes are complex:
• Since 1972, oil companies have extracted 3 billion barrels of oil from Ecuador. Yet little of that wealth is reinvested in the Amazon, in part because the nation is so deeply in debt. In many places, potable water, electricity and medical care simply do not exist.
"Petroleum has not brought a bonanza of benefits; it has not brought happiness. It has brought misfortune," said Carlos Castillo, a petroleum engineer and vice mayor of Esmeraldas, whose wife died in the fiery pipeline break.
• Studies point to a link between oil extraction and skin rashes, miscarriages, even cancer. "The level of petroleum in the rivers, on which local residents depend, is 200 to 300 times higher than the limits set for human consumption," said Miguel San Sebastian, an Ecuadorean physician and co-author of the most recent study of petroleum's impact on the health of Ecuador's people.
• Oil spills and other ecological calamities are routine. The 300-mile trans-Ecuadorean pipeline has suffered more than 60 major ruptures since 1972, spilling 614,000 barrels of oil - more than two Exxon Valdez tankers' worth. By contrast, the 800-mile trans-Alaskan pipeline, which came on line in 1977 and carries more than twice as much oil, has spilled just 85,000 barrels.
• As new parts of the Amazon are opened to oil development, the cultural survival of the continent's last indigenous hunter-gatherer cultures is in doubt.
"This is a repeat of what happened in the U.S. in the 19th century," said Karen Marrero, an Ecuadorean woman who is helping Quichua natives fight oil development around the village of Sarayacu.
"Just as you had a gold rush, there is a rush for oil here. But this one is coming with more velocity. There's no time for people to adapt to it."
Accessible only by small plane, canoe or foot, Sarayacu clings to the reddish-brown banks of a jungle river. One Sunday last year, nearly the entire village of 300 turned out to greet two strangers from a distant land: California.
One man carried a spear. A woman with raven hair and a painted face nursed a baby. Children scampered everywhere. A man in a monkey headdress strummed a guitar. Lunch was smoked monkey soup, served on a table piled high with fruit and meat, including the monkey's grinning skull.
"This is our life," said one young man, César Santi, pointing to the rain forest. "This is our Earth."
Ecuador's government, which owns all sub-surface mineral rights in the nation, has granted permission to an Argentine company to develop petroleum resources in the pristine area around Sarayacu. But first the company must secure Quichua approval. And the Quichua refuse.
"I worry for my daughters," said Sarayacu resident Ester Malaver, walking barefoot down a muddy jungle trail. "Here, everything is healthy and natural. If the petroleum company comes, the land will be poisoned.
"I will fight against the oil incursion until my last days; until I die."
In Ecuador, indigenous leaders say oil companies sometimes use unsavory practices to attempt to win community support.
"There are a lot of small bits of money placed here and there," said Randy Borman, territories and economic director for the Cofan people, an Amazon tribe hit hard by oil development. "They create a lot of false expectations."
The son of American missionaries, Borman has gone native. He is married to a Cofan and is the leader of Zabálo, a Cofan village in a remote part the Amazon. In 1998, The Field Museum in Chicago awarded Borman its Parker/Gentry award for his efforts to protect Cofan territory.
Borman recalled one incident he said took place when an oil exploration company showed up at the remote Cofan village of Bermejo in 1999.
"First of all, they brought in several series of gifts: a whole lot of rice, a couple of pigs and several cases of whiskey," he said. "Next they had a big party and they offered villagers helicopter flights. And then they said, 'Let's negotiate.'"
Such anger toward oil exploration is growing across Ecuador. A new $1.1 billion pipeline, now under construction and funded by companies from Canada, Spain, Argentina, Italy and the United States - including Occidental Petroleum - is behind much of it.
The Oleoducto de Crudos Pesados (OCP) pipeline, expected to double the flow of oil to foreign markets, follows the old trans-Ecuadorean pipeline as it rises out of the Amazon. But in the Andes, it strikes a more northerly course and slices through one of the last pristine cloud forests in South America.
Lost in a thick blanket of fog, the Mindo-Nambillo Reserve has been rocked by environmental protests. During one last year, activists shadowed by military and pipeline police climbed to a ridge about 90 miles northwest of Ecuador's capital, Quito.
Security forces halted the group and ordered the protesters downhill. Instead they charged uphill, through a thick green wall. The police followed.
Protesters and police gained the ridge, which looms over a landscape that is home to 400 species of birds and a thriving ecotourism industry. Downhill, the brown gash of a pipeline road was plainly visible. The roar of earth-moving equipment sounded like distant thunder.
One of the protesters - Juan Pablo Barragán - sat wearily on a log and shook his head.
"This kind of destruction would never be permitted in the United States," said Barragán, a Quito businessman. "The government would not allow it."
Later that night, Barragán and seven others were jostled from their sleep by police, marched down the mountain at gunpoint and jailed in Quito.
"That's how it is in Ecuador," Barragán said when contacted later. "If you stand up for a cause, you expect to be imprisoned."
Last July, Julia "Butterfly" Hill - the famous environmental activist who spent two years living in a giant California redwood tree - trekked to the same ridge for another protest. During a later protest in Quito, she too was arrested, then deported.
Ecuador's president at the time, Gustavo Noboa, showed no sympathy for Hill or her cause. After her arrest, he told the media: "The little gringos have been arrested, including the old cockatoo who climbs trees." In 2001, Noboa told The Economist magazine that cloud forest demonstrations were limited to "four bird-watchers and a couple of mayors."
Other clashes have been more severe. In February 2002, the Inter Press Service news agency reported that at least 300 people were wounded in conflicts with the Ecuadorean military during 10 days of violent demonstrations in the Amazon region over the new OCP pipeline, expected to be finished this year.
"Oil companies operate here without responsibility," said Natalia Arias, former president of Acción Ecológica, a Quito environmental group. "The people and environment of Ecuador have suffered greatly."
Occidental's spokesman, Meriage, said the pipeline won't hurt the cloud forest because "a tremendous amount of care and effort has been taken." That care, he added, substantially increased the project's cost.
Meriage blamed the uproar on "the radicalization" of environmental protest in Ecuador by U.S. and European groups.
"Not everybody who wraps themselves in the mantle of environmental protection can be accepted at face value," he said. "These groups in many cases are unaccountable to anyone. They can say whatever they want."
Government shares blame for pollution
The heart of Ecuador's oil country lies south of the Colombian border in the steamy jungles of Sucumbíos province. This is where Texaco first perforated the Amazon 36 years ago, launching an oil boom that continues today.
In the 1970s, the province was a daunting, largely untrammeled wilderness. Today, it is still daunting but for different reasons. Around the oil boomtown of Lago Agrio - a grimy muddle of shacks, brothels, bars and cheap motels 12 miles from the Colombia border - violence is epidemic.
The border is a no man's land, where Colombia guerrillas routinely cross into Ecuador for reconnaissance, rest and supplies. In the past year, more than 100 people have been killed in guerrilla-related violence in Lago Agrio, population 24,000, according to local authorities. In October 2000, 10 foreign oil workers - half of them Americans - were kidnapped by guerrillas in the surrounding jungle. One of the Americans was later murdered.
Roads are rutted and ruinous, morphing into sluices during downpours. The U.S. Embassy's advice to Americans who might want to visit the region is direct: don't.
Yet it's not the violence, poverty or bad roads that most capture your attention here. It's the pollution - and the stories about it.
Stop by a small convenience store in the town of Dureno and ask the manager, Jacinto Jumbo, her opinion of the oil industry.
"This is what happens," she says, pulling down her blouse to reveal a red welt on her left breast. "When you take a bath in the river, it creates boils on your skin, like this."
Not far away, a woman stands ankle-deep in a creek, stubbornly trying to scrub her clothes clean on a board. It's a washday gamble because pools of thin, purplish oil skim along the creek's surface.
"They are always spilling oil around here," says the woman, who identifies herself only as Marta. "We have to drink this water, too. Of course, it is bad. But what choice do we have? We live here."
A few hundred yards west, across a road and up a hill, lies the pollution's source: Campo Libertador - literally "Liberator Field" - a major Ecuadorean oil field.
Campo Libertador is a sprawl of wells, pipes and tanks operated by Petro.ecuador, the national oil company. But locals say there is nothing liberating about it.
"There are many sicknesses here," said Dora Solano, a 45-year-old Ecuadorean woman who lives in the area. "There is no control. The oil companies just throw their chemicals and garbage into the water."
Inside the oil field, a large, unlined pit shines black with waste oil floating on a toxic soup of drilling wastes and "production water" - liquid pumped out of the ground with petroleum that contains heavy metals such as arsenic, lead and mercury.
A Petroecuador subcontractor pointed to a tube piercing the side of one oil-filled pit.
"Look at that pipe," he said. "It takes the waste crude and chemicals and spills them into a swamp, and from there they go into the river.
"And that is why, when people go to the river to take a bath, they get a rash," said the man, who said giving his name would cost him his job. "In the river, sometimes you can see chemicals swirling, like smoke. Fish just don't exist around here anymore."
In Quito, Narvaez - Petroecuador's environmental chief - acknowledged his company is partly responsible for the pollution. But he blamed others, too, including his own government for failing to adequately invest in pollution control and cleanup.
Pacing back and forth, Narvaez grew exasperated. "The sickness of the people, the poverty of the people, the contamination of the rivers, the loss of biodiversity - this is all the product of 30 years of oil drilling," he said. "You can't solve that in just one year, not even two or three."
Another problem is Ecuador's $14 billion foreign debt. The sale of oil brings Ecuador more than $2 billion a year, but Narvaez said there's little left over for the environment because of the country's enormous debt payments, which account for more than a third of its $5.6 billion budget.
Narvaez also blamed Texaco, which made the first major discovery of oil in the region in 1967 and formed a business consortium with Petroecuador. When Texaco pulled out of Ecuador in 1990, Narvaez said, it left a "disaster."
For its part, Texaco - now ChevronTexaco - maintains it acted properly. "I'm not going to dispute that conditions in the region are difficult," said Chris Gidez, a spokesman for ChevronTexaco. "But it's hard to isolate one (factor) as a cause of some or all of the problems."
For instance, he cited the miles of oil service roads that pierce large parts of Ecuador's Amazon, opening it to colonization.
"You have to understand this is a region in which there had been a border dispute with Peru," Gidez said. "The government of Ecuador encouraged colonization in order to lay claim to the region and forced the consortium to build more roads than it needed."
Gidez also defended the unlined wastewater pits, saying that during the 1970s and '80s, the approach was a generally accepted practice in the region.
After Texaco left Ecuador, Gidez said it agreed to pay the government of Ecuador $40 million to clean up 250 sites identified in environmental audits.
Ask Borman, the Cofan director, about Texaco's payment and he says it "really didn't have much effect. We tried to get a piece of it for cleaning up a series of wells that contaminate rivers that go through the Cofan reserve. And the guy at Petroecuador said there is only 800 barrels of (toxic) production water per day going in from wells in that area. We were way low on the priority list."
Oil companies operate differently in foreign countries than in the United States, according to Roger Herrera, a retired exploration geologist for British Petroleum.
"What tends to happen is they use the cheapest technology they can get away with," he said. "In a way, it is sort of shameful."
But Herrera, who worked for 30 years in such places as Kuwait, Libya and Colombia, said it's not just oil companies that are at fault.
"Often, they are forced or coerced by foreign governments into using primitive pollution-control technologies," he said. "I know that sounds startling. And it doesn't take all the guilt from the companies. But it is a fact that they are discouraged from using more costly technologies because it would take a little bit off the bottom line of the host countries."
Since Texaco left, Ecuador has adopted more rigorous environmental laws. Even critics say some private firms are using modern pollution-control measures, such as injecting oil drilling waste and production water deep into the earth.
"Some things are changing," wrote Judith Kimerling, the law professor, in a recent article in the Columbia Journal of Environmental Law. But enforcement of environmental laws remains weak and is "hindered by the absence of political will (and) a lack of resources.
"The jury is still out on whether oil companies can extract oil and gas from a fragile rainforest environment without serious injury. The track record to date suggests they cannot."
Last year, Ecuador's then-minister of Energy and Mines, Pablo Teran, failed to respond to a written request for an interview presented in person at his Quito office. Nor did he respond to subsequent e-mails. Alfredo Bariga, a sub-secretary in the Ministry of the Environment, agreed to an interview but failed to show up for it.
Occidental's Meriage said like it or not, oil development is going to happen in the Amazon. "The question is: Do you want it done by somebody who does a responsible job or an irresponsible job?" he said. "Would you rather have Oxy do it or Petroecuador?"
Major oil spills - such as the Exxon Valdez accident that hemorrhaged 260,000 barrels of crude into the Prince William Sound in Alaska in 1989 - capture world attention. Lesser spills go unnoticed but inflict real pain as well.
With a wave of his hand, Benigno Martínez motions toward a jungle thicket. "You want to see the bones?" he said. "Follow me."
Martínez, 58, who farms near the Colombian border in Sucumbíos province, said that in recent years seven of his horses have died after drinking water fouled by oil waste. Tromping into the forest, he finds the spot where the carcass of his favorite horse - Condorito - rots slowly in the shade.
"Pobre Condorito," Martínez said, poking at the animal's rib cage with a machete. "First, his stomach bloated. Then he began throwing up. ... It took him a month to die.
"I am just a poor farmer. When I went to ask for compensation, they made jokes about me."
A stocky man with short salt-and-pepper hair, Martínez shuffles out to a clearing. His flannel shirt is stained with mud. A crucifix hangs around his neck. His home is 200 miles over the Andes from Ecuador's capital, Quito. But, he said, "Next Sunday, at Mass, we are going to talk about taking a walk to Quito to talk to the government about the pollution."
In Ecuador, less pollution would likely mean better health. Since the 1980s, studies have pointed to links between petroleum contamination and chronic diseases in humans there.
One report, by a team of Harvard physicians working with the Center for Economic and Social Rights - a New York-based human rights group - made these observations in 1994: "Residents of the (Amazon) are exposed to levels of oil-related contaminants significantly exceeding internationally recognized safety limits ... Such levels of exposure suggest increased risk of more serious health consequences."
ChevronTexaco's Gidez disputed those findings, saying the report is not scientifically valid. "It has never been held up for peer review, as any credible medical study would be," he said.
A more recent study, completed by two Ecuadorean doctors in May 2002, found that Amazon residents living near oil facilities were more likely to contract stomach, liver, skin and other cancers than people elsewhere in the country.
Ecuador's attorney general, José Ramón Jiménez-Carbo, spoke publicly about health concerns last year, vowing to back Ecuadorean plaintiffs in a U.S. lawsuit against Texaco seeking $120 million in damages and injuries. That suit, however, was dismissed in August by a federal appeals court in New York, which ruled the matter should be resolved in Ecuador.
Back in Ecuador's Amazon, it seems every neighborhood has its tale of ailments. In Sucumbíos province, Silvio Calderón's common-law wife, Luz Soto, sipped water from a spring in their jungle garden, downhill from an unlined toxic waste pit at a Petroecuador oil facility, Estación Guanta.
"When it rains, the pit fills up and the waste comes right through here," said Calderón, machete in hand, indicating the clearing where the couple grow rice, corn, yucca, beans and plantains - or try to. Like others in the area, they say pollution is withering their crops.
After drinking the water, Luz Soto "immediately fell ill with diarrhea and fever. Her skin turned yellow," Calderón said. "She almost died. She still feels very sick today."
At the one-room wooden shack where they raise five children, their son, Jorge, stood in the doorway, pale. He, too, is sick.
"He is 8 years old but looks like he is 4," Calderón said. "We took him to a hospital in Quito and lab tests showed he had lumps in his stomach. I'm sure it is contamination. ... We can't go on like this."
Animals suffer, too. In 2000, Johnny Alman, manager of the Amazon Jungle Resort Village in Sucumbíos pprovince, was guiding some scientists on a tour near the Cuyabeno Wildlife Reserve when they spotted a dark object flopping and shaking on the side of a road.
It was an agouti, a large jungle rodent, "so completely covered with oil it couldn't walk," Alman said. "He was making a howling noise.
"A little while later, we came across a smaller rodent, completely drenched with oil. Even its eyes were coated. It was almost dead.
"We were shocked," Alman said. "The idea was to see animals alive and running through the rain forest, not animals covered with oil."
Five years after inferno, town is still traumatized
In the port of Esmeraldas - where ocean tankers are loaded with oil bound for California - petroleum took a violent turn in 1998.
"That fire came roaring down the river like a dragon," said Zoila Valverde, a 45-year-old laundrywoman.
She is speaking of the night when two major pipelines broke during a landslide, sending oil and gas cascading down streets and into rivers.
Someone notified Petroecuador. But it was too late. Around 10 p.m., a spark from perhaps an automobile or a backyard barbecue - no one is sure what - set off an inferno. "I gathered up my children and we ran," Valverde said. "There was one little girl in the neighborhood who lost her way. We never saw her again."
At 3 a.m., Byron Borja - the Ecuadorean customs agent - rushed to the hospital to find his sister-in-law's two teenage daughters badly burned, but conscious. They pleaded for water. "It was horrible," Borja recalled. "The odor of burned flesh was everywhere."
Borja stepped away to speak to his sister-in-law, who was out of town, on the phone.
Frantic, she screamed into the phone: "Byron, tell me the truth! Tell me the truth!"
"I am going to tell you the truth," Borja replied. "Be prepared for the worst."
One of the daughters died a short while later. The other died a month later at a burn unit in a hospital in the United States.
They were among the 12 confirmed dead. Six more were never found.
When Valverde returned to her home, "It was in ashes," she said. "I took my children into my arms and started to cry.
"Then, it began to rain a black rain. It made dark oily spots in our clothes. Two weeks later, we all got rashes. Our hair was falling out."
Five years later, the town remains traumatized.
"We are afraid," said Maritza Quiñonez, who lives in a small cabin near where the pipeline broke. "I am worried that the next time it might finish the world."
The enormous black and red ocean tankers that gather in the Pacific at Petroecuador's export terminal near Esmeraldas hauled 86.5 million barrels of Amazon oil to world markets in 2000. The largest portion, 43 percent, was shipped to California, according to U.S. and Ecuadorean records.
Few oil benefits, though, seep back to the Amazon. Last year, the sale of crude oil brought Ecuador about $2 billion. Yet only 3 percent of Ecuador's national budget is routed to its jungle provinces, according to the Inter Press Service news agency, even though those provinces make up 50 percent of its land area. Some of Ecuador's poorest communities are in the shadow of the oil fields.
"Oil is the Midas myth," said Terry Lynn Karl, the former director of Stanford's Center for Latin American Studies. "It creates the expectation that you will be rich. But the end result is you have more poverty, more inequality and more conflict."
Karl said she sees the pattern around the world. Oil, she said, concentrates political and economic power, and "when power is so concentrated, it is extremely difficult for the benefits of petroleum to trickle down."
"Nada! Nada!" exclaims Margarita Campoverde de Escobar. "Nothing! Nothing! That's what petroleum brings to this area."
She lives with her husband in a one-room wood shack in an agricultural cooperative near Dureno, in SucumbÍos province. Her neighbor is an oil field and she once washed clothes for an oil company, but that work has disappeared. The couple earn $60 to $80 a month selling coffee and bananas - barely enough to support three children and a granddaughter.
They have no electricity, phone, running water or car. They are separated from the nearest pharmacy by a six-mile walk and a 20-mile bus ride - and their granddaughter is sick.
"Petroleum only puts money in the pockets of the rich," said Campoverde de Escobar. "The oil industry has forgotten us."
Chapter Two: Scarring the Boreal
Swaths of forest taken for lumber, paper
By Tom Knudson - Bee Staff Writer
Ten years after the historic battle to protect spotted owls and old-growth forests, California's woods are quiet, almost churchlike.
The chain saws and logging trucks that once shattered the symphony of birdsong and muted the music of mountain streams have disappeared from many places - stilled by environmental lawsuits, public opinion and increasingly strict regulations about timber harvesting.
Since 1990, 62 lumber mills in California have closed. The volume of timber cut from national forests has dropped 80 percent. At no time in state history have California forest ecosystems enjoyed such sweeping protection.
Yet there is a trapdoor to this turnabout, one that opens a passageway to more environmental trauma: The logging never really stopped; it just moved to Canada.
In throttling the harvest of wood from its own back yard, while continuing to devour forest products, California is not merely turning to America's largest trading partner, Canada, to fill the gap.
It is buying wood from a nation where up to 90 percent is harvested through clear-cutting - the controversial mowing down of entire stands of forest - and where two-thirds of the cutting occurs in old-growth stands. And it is buying wood from a country where logging is moving more deeply into one of the planet's most important ecosystems: the boreal forest.
Circling the globe like a jade and emerald crown, the boreal, named for Boreas, the Greek god of the north wind, is home to a mythic array of wildlife, including timber wolves, woodland caribou and - in Russia - Siberian tigers. It also plays a critical role in regulating the Earth's climate, helping protect it from global warming.
But in Canada's boreal zone, which sweeps across the country in a wide arc from Newfoundland to the Yukon, logging is proceeding so rapidly that some scientists fear the forest's vital ecological functions may be in danger. Already, some species of wildlife are in decline and native cultures, for whom the boreal is both pantry and medicine chest, are struggling to maintain their way of life.
"This is a classic example of not taking a holistic view," said Richard Thomas, an environmental consultant in Edmonton, Alberta.
"You do the cosmetic stuff at home," Thomas said. "You minimize your ecological footprint in your own back yard. And here in Canada, you get away with murder. It's out of sight and out of mind."
California's hunger for Canadian forest products is part of a larger national appetite. In 2001, a record 18.5 billion board feet of Canadian softwood lumber was imported to the United States - enough two-by-fours, plywood, doorjambs, siding and other products to build a city the size of San Diego.
Lots of Canadian paper was shipped south, too: 26.8 billion pounds, to be precise. That is roughly equal to the weight of every man, woman and child in America. Most arrived in two forms: newsprint (13.2 billion pounds) and printing and writing paper (9.4 billion pounds).
Track that wood and paper back to Canada and you are in for a jolt.
A sheet of Canadian siding from a Roseville Home Depot, for example, will lead you to Lesser Slave Lake in Alberta, where the forest is so shredded by cutting that only thin wisps of trees remain - old-growth confetti.
"The boreal is under attack," said Dave Donahue, a gray-bearded trapper who lives nearby with his wife and oldest son. "This is not progress. This is mass destruction."
Deeply religious, the 59-year-old Donahue moved to Alberta in 1972 after watching his native New Brunswick forests fall to logging.
Last spring, as outrage welled up inside him, Donahue wrote an essay titled "Americans Wake Up," hoping it might appear in the pages of an environmental newsletter in the United States. It never did.
"Americans are not even vaguely aware of what is happening here in Canada," he wrote. "Every tree that is of any value is cut by means of clear-cut logging and any tree that is of no use … is knocked down and left to rot. The lungs of Mother Earth are being RIPPED out. ... Wild animals are being destroyed at a fantastic rate."
Not long ago, some siding made from the boreal forest Donahue calls home was being nail-gunned to the roof of a new home in Highland Park, a Roseville subdivision. A sign out front read: "Building America's Neighborhoods - Sold."
"This is hard to believe," said carpenter Ruben Centeno when shown photos of the Alberta clear-cuts. "They should find some other way to make this stuff."
Pick up a newspaper at any Northern California convenience store and you find roots that reach deep into majestic stands of old-growth forest in northeast British Columbia. Trees in that Rocky Mountain region feed a mill owned by the world's largest newsprint maker - Abitibi Consolidated Ltd. - which sells paper to several U.S. dailies, including The Bee.
From its Mackenzie, British Columbia, mill, Abitibi harvests pine, spruce and balsam across a vast wilderness that not only is home to some of the continent's most impressive species of wildlife, including grizzly bears, but also is inhabited by the indigenous Kaska Dena people, many of whom still survive by hunting wild game.
Although conflicts between indigenous people and timber and paper companies are common in Canada, Abitibi and the Kaska Dena are working together to develop environmentally sensitive kinds of logging. Abitibi has even helped the Kaska Dena form their own logging company.
When asked why, Abitibi forester Wayne Lewis said, "They live here. We respect that. They should be a part of the process."
Dave Porter, chairman of the Kaska Dena council, praised the company's efforts but added: "There is still a long way to go."
A barrel-chested man with curly black hair, bushy beard and wire-rimmed glasses, Porter folded his arms as he spoke of desperate living conditions around the Kaska Dena community of Fort Ware.
"The road to the outside world is one of the worst excuses for a road anywhere," he said. "We're hooked up to diesel generators with a history of blackouts and shutdowns - in the winter.
"How many millions of dollars are taken out in profits and how much is put back into indigenous communities?" he said. "A pittance."
Speaking broadly, Porter said U.S. consumers "have an inherent responsibility to ask questions" about forest products from Canada.
"This is not just about the environment. It's about people. Aboriginal people and their cultures (in Canada) are as endangered as endangered species. And that should be known."
Fifteen hundred miles east, Steve Fobister - a former grand chief of the Ojibwa nation - kicks the dust in a gaping clear-cut in Ontario. Trees there also supply an Abitibi mill vital to U.S. newspapers, including the Minneapolis Star-Tribune - owned by The Bee's parent company, The McClatchy Co.
Staring at a moonscape of stumps and bare ground stretching for more than 10 square miles, Fobister said: "This is selfish. This is devastation."
Nearby, someone has spray-painted the word "PROPAGANDA" across a timber company sign about reforestation.
That someone, Fobister said, is him.
"You can't even hear a bird in a clear-cut. You can't even find an insect," he said. "Everything is dead."
But in Montreal, Abitibi spokesman Marc Osborne defended the company's logging. "We adhere to sustainability," he said.
Rich in forest resources, Canada has been cutting trees for years. But as demand for wood has jumped worldwide, the nation has stepped up its level of cutting: from 1.6 million acres in 1970 to 2.5 million acres in 2001.
In recent years, that increase has ignited a trade dispute with the United States, which now assesses a stiff 27 percent duty on Canadian lumber imports to this country. The environmental side of Canadian logging, which is largely overseen by its provinces, has drawn less attention.
A spokesman for the Ontario Ministry of Natural Resources, which leases provincial land to timber companies, said Canadian-style logging actually is healthy because it mimics the natural rejuvenating force of forest fire.
"A clear-cut is not the end of the forest," said ministry forest policy officer Joe Churcher. "It's the beginning."
Many in the industry say concerns about cutting are overblown.
"We're certainly not running out of trees," said Ed Greenberg, spokesman for the Alberta Forest Products Association, a trade group. "We're as concerned about the environment as anybody."
U.S. regulations meant opportunity in Canada
To environmentalists in the United States, the spotted owl in the 1990s became a symbol of the vanishing of old-growth forest and - through the U.S. Endangered Species Act - a legal tool to halt and slow timber cutting. To many Canadians, though, it was a business opportunity.
As the harvest of wood from federal forests in California, Oregon and Washington plunged 4.8 billion board feet during the 1990s, Canadian imports to the United States shot up 6.2 billion board feet.
"You can put a fence around a particular forest. But you can't put a fence around all the forests in the world," said Roger Sedjo, a senior fellow at Resources for the Future, a Washington, D.C., think tank.
At the same time, wood consumption in the United States catapulted to a record high: 68.3 billion board feet in 1999. Per capita wood consumption in the United States is 2.5 times higher than in other developed nations - and 3.4 times the world average. Americans also use more paper than anyone else in the world - about 718 pounds per person per year.
Wood consumption figures for states aren't available, but experts say California, partly because of its size and growth, devours the biggest share of lumber - an estimated 10 billion board feet a year. That is nearly 15 percent of the national total, the equivalent of 70 two-by-fours for every person in the state. About a fifth comes from Canada, up from 6 percent in the 1980s.
The numbers make some Canadians uneasy. "If we brought everybody in the world up to California's standard of living, we would need four or five Earths," said Thomas, the Alberta environmental consultant.
The international impact of the United States' forest conservation is hardly ever covered by the mainstream press, but it is starting to surface elsewhere.
"Reducing domestic production (of wood) with no corresponding change in consumption simply requires other parts of the globe to supply the resources," said a 2002 article in Harvard Forest, a Harvard University publication. "Consequently, well-intentioned environmental activism may generate unanticipated environmental degradation. ... A new effort is needed to expose this illusion of preservation."
Boreal forest losing its shroud of obscurity
Controversy is no stranger to Canada's forests. Until recently, however, outcry has focused on the rich rain forests of British Columbia, the nation's largest timber producer.
As more of those coastal forests are set aside for conservation, the battleground is moving inland, to the boreal forest.
The first thing you notice about the boreal is its size. Thirteen times larger than California, Canada's boreal is the world's largest contiguous wooded wilderness and part of the planet's largest ecosystem. Yet it is a landscape few know well.
Punished by long, cold winters, Canada's boreal can't compete with the dazzling diversity of species that endear environmentalists to the tropics. Its spindly stands of spruce, pine, larch and aspen are no match for the coastal redwoods that crane necks and inspire awe on the California coast.
Yet the boreal has its own magic. In the brief, frantic summers, its silvery panorama of lakes, ponds and puddles quivers with 40 percent of North America's nesting waterfowl. Its thick canopy is home to more than 1 billion nesting migratory warblers. Endangered whooping cranes raise their chicks there.
Much of the year, though, the boreal is barren and brooding - haunted by the howling of wolves and the restless rasping of wind across snow and ice.
Its greatest gift may be climatologic. Like all forests, the boreal helps the planet breathe, filtering out and storing more carbon - the primary spark for global warming - than any other forest on earth.
As threats to Canada's boreal grow, its obscurity is lifting. Last June, National Geographic devoted a story to the region. And environmentalists have launched a campaign to scale back logging and set aside large tracts of the boreal as wilderness, arguing the health of the planet is at stake.
"If you care about wild forests, if you care about migratory songbirds, waterfowl and combating climate change, then you need to care about Canada's boreal forest," said Stewart Elgie, executive director of the Canadian Boreal Trust, an Ottawa environmental group.
Canada's timber companies say such concerns are exaggerated and that the environmentalists - having succeeded in the rain forest - are merely revving up another money-making, alarmist campaign.
"You've got to justify your existence somewhere," said Rick Alguire, woodlands manager at Tolko Industries Ltd., which makes siding and sheathing in High Prairie, Alberta. "The boreal is the next big target. We are a target. Every mill in Canada is a target."
Target or not, some companies are moving away from large, industrial clear-cuts to a quiltlike "mosaic" of smaller cuts that more closely resemble the natural progression of fire.
"Are there impacts? Of, course there are. We've never denied that," said Kirk Andries, director of external affairs at Alberta-Pacific Forest Industries, Al-Pac, which harvests trees for pulp - ground wood fiber - the primary building block for paper products.
But, he said, Al-Pac - which is the largest timber company in Alberta and 70 percent owned by Mitsubishi - has invested in "a staggering amount of science" to make sure those impacts are kept to a minimum and the boreal remains healthy.
Elgie, the environmentalist, agreed Al-Pac is doing a good job. But, he added, "On the whole, most wood and paper coming from Canada's boreal is not being cut with adequate environmental protection."
Investigators feel a 'sense of urgency'
There is one thing environmentalists and loggers agree on: Opening the boreal to logging, oil and gas drilling, mining and other activities at the same time is not ideal.
Al-Pac is a good example. Under a long-term "forest management agreement" with Alberta's government, it is entitled to log trees across a nearly 15 million-acre swath of the boreal. Much of that land also is leased to oil and gas companies. One area may hold as much oil - in deposits called tar or oil sands - as Saudi Arabia, and is being feverishly tapped. (Most of Canada's oil and gas ends up in the United States too.)
"I'm comfortable with our own activities," said Al-Pac's Andries. "But when you start layering stuff - energy, agriculture, forestry - on the landscape, you wonder, 'Gee, maybe this needs a little more thought.'"
There also are concerns about accountability. Across the boreal, government environmental monitoring often is limited and sometimes left to industry. Even federal inventories showing that forests are growing faster than they are being logged rely in part on industry data.
Charles Caccia, who served as environment minister under Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau in the 1980s, said the reports cannot be trusted.
"There is no established manner to verify the data," said Caccia, now a member of Parliament. "In the absence of a reliable inventory, we do not know - and cannot claim - that we are on a sustainable path."
Starting in 1996, a Canadian Senate subcommittee spent 2 1/2 years examining boreal conflicts. It staged a dozen hearings and field trips and heard testimony from about 175 witnesses. Its report is a stark account of over-cutting and mismanagement.
"There is ample evidence to show that current forest management practices are destroying our legacy, that we are cutting too many trees over too large an area," the subcommittee reported.
And it added a warning: "There is a sense of urgency that, at least in some parts of the boreal forest, time is running out for saving some vital functions, such as wildlife habitat, watershed protection and carbon sinks."
One place the subcommittee stopped was Winnipeg, Manitoba, not far from a part of the boreal forest Randall Bird knows well: his "trap line" - 10 square miles near his native Ojibwa village of Hollow Water.
Bird, now in his 50s, has worked the area since he was a boy - laying out traps each fall, checking them by snowshoe and snowmobile, sleeping wrapped in fur blankets in remote cabins. Most years, he would harvest a pile of pelts - from beaver to lynx, weasel to wolf - now worth $10,000 to $15,000 Canadian ($6,500 to $9,750 U.S.).
Then, in the late 1990s, the Pine Falls Paper Co. began clear-cutting in the area.
Walking through a recent cut, Bird was quiet. A few patches of aspen remained, but large stands of black spruce and jack pine, from which newsprint is made, had been leveled. It looked like a bomb had exploded.
"Everything's gone," he said.
Bird inherited the trap line from his father, who inherited it from his father. He had long planned to pass it on to his sons. But now Bird says it won't be worth it.
"You won't get anything now. Fishers, martens - those animals like trees. They have no place to go now because it's all open," he said.
Last summer, Bird joined his fellow tribal elders inside a large tepee. They sat in a circle and smoked a sacred pipe as Garry Raven, a traditional healer, prayed for help.
The logging industry "has killed off our rabbits, our porcupine, our otter and lynx," Raven told the Creator. "Most of the forest roads are blocked off. There are big gates on them so you can't get in."
Pine Falls Paper has since been sold to another company, Tembec, which plans more logging on lands where Ojibwa trap and gather herbs. But Tembec official Bob Yatkowsky said the cutting can be done without hurting the land and that he is proceeding cautiously.
"You don't want to end up with standoffs and roadblocks," he said.
Others have less patience. Asked about Ojibwa concerns, John Bulmer - a former superintendent who leads mill tours - said, "That's all fine and dandy. But what are we going to live on in the meantime? We can't live on nuts and berries. We can't turn the clock back."
Winding his way through a maze of stairwells and industrial machinery, Bulmer vigorously defended Tembec logging. "It's a system that works," he said. "We plant trees. We cut trees. And we keep a lot of people employed."
Tembec's newsprint is not just made from trees. A lot of recycled newspaper is mixed in, too. Over the years, the amount of newspaper born again as newsprint has grown dramatically. But newspaper companies generally prefer to publish on newsprint with some virgin wood fiber because the paper is whiter and photographs reproduce better.
Environmentalists say that leaves plenty of room for damage. And while most U.S. newspapers, The Bee included, routinely write about forest conservation and editorialize on its behalf, seldom if ever do they examine the environmental price of newsprint.
"The amazing lack of coverage is no coincidence," said Todd Paglia, campaign coordinator at Forest Ethics, a San Francisco environmental group. "When their own bottom line is on the line, newspapers tend to shy away from coverage that would reveal their complicity."
Bruce Meissner, who manages The Bee's press room, said four of the company's five largest newsprint suppliers make paper with 40 percent or more recycled content. "At times, they go 60, 70, 80," he said.
Only one supplier makes newsprint 100 percent from virgin old-growth trees: Abitibi in Mackenzie, British Columbia, which supplies about 6 percent of the 55,000 to 65,000 metric tons The Bee consumes annually. The paper is actually made from chunks of wood left over from cutting logs into two-by-fours and other dimensional lumber.
But even with 100 percent old-growth fiber, the Mackenzie paper has problems. "It tends to tear easily," Meissner said. "If I had my druthers, I wouldn't use any."
Why, then, does The Bee use it? The company, Meissner said, prefers a mix of manufacturers to ensure a steady supply of newsprint and to get a good price.
The subject of newsprint was on the mind of U.S. Forest Service chief Dale Bosworth when he addressed the Newspaper Association of America, which represents the nation's newspaper publishers.
A transcript of Bosworth's October 2001 speech, released by the Forest Service, contains the following passage:
"Newsprint comes from wood and wood comes from forests. Just to produce the Washington Post takes the equivalent of three or four square miles of clear-cut forest per year. Multiply that by all the newspapers and magazines in the nation and you get some idea of the demands on our natural resources just to produce newsprint."
Tom Croteau, a senior vice president for the association, said Bosworth's statement was misleading.
"It suggests that all newspapers and magazines are printed on paper that has been manufactured from forests that were clear-cut," Croteau said. "And that's not true."
Building supplies for U.S. deprive beavers of theirs
North of Edmonton, near Lesser Slave Lake, trees are falling not for newsprint but for "oriented strand board."
Sold in 4-by-8-foot panels and used widely for roof sheathing and siding, oriented strand board, known as OSB, is a relatively recent boreal forest innovation. And industry officials say it's environmentally friendly, as well, because it is made from fast-growing aspen, not century-old pine and spruce.
Last summer, sheets of Canadian OSB were sailing out of the Stanford Ranch Home Depot in Roseville at a rate of about 2,500 per week. Stacked 15 feet high, each panel was stamped: Tolko, Made in Canada, High Prairie, AB.
The price: $5.99, about $4 cheaper than plywood.
"This was a special buy for us," said Home Depot lumber and building department manager Kathleen Johnson. "And we are passing the savings on to our customers."
Back in the boreal forest near High Prairie, trapper Dave Donahue said those savings are savaging nature.
Slowing his pickup, he pointed to a clear-cut where he said a logging crew working for Tolko had leveled a stand of aspen, from which OSB is made.
But it wasn't the clear-cut he was pointing at. It was an igloo-shaped mound of sticks near a bog.
"You see that beaver den?" Donahue said. "After they logged it, those beavers died out. Beavers need aspen to live."
Donahue said that in the winter, when a lot of logging takes place, heavy equipment sometimes crashes through snarls of debris where bears are hibernating and nursing their cubs. When that happens, the cubs freeze to death and the mother starves.
"It happens with all the denning animals," he said. "The logging companies know this is going on."
Tolko's Rick Alguire said he knows of no such thing.
First, he said that although Tolko logged the area in 1998, the cuts Donahue pointed out may not have been Tolko's - because other companies work there, too.
About beaver, Alguire said: "I can tell you honestly we do not encroach within their food supply. We just legally cannot do it."
About bears, he said that in two decades of logging he has seen bears disturbed only twice - once by oil and gas crews and once by Tolko. On both occasions he said the animals "crawled back into their dens, safe."
Logging for OSB is very forest-friendly, Alguire said. "There are areas coming back like a green carpet," he said. "It's beautiful. The moose populations are just booming."
A March 1998 report by Alberta's provincial government found something different: a landscape shredded by logging and also crisscrossed by 45,000 miles of oil and gas pipelines and 88,000 miles of access roads. Alberta's boreal is experiencing "a massive increase in industrial activity - timber, hydrocarbon and mineral extraction - unprecedented in scale," it said.
Consultant Richard Thomas, who wrote the report, said such fragmentation is happening across Canada - and beyond.
"These problems are international in scope," he said. "The boreal is much more important to the global community left standing than exploited, simply because of its carbon storage.
"Messing around with the boreal the way we are, it's eventually going to affect everybody on the planet."
Chapter Three: Harvesting the Sea
Quotas work to protect Canada's catch
By Tom Knudson - Bee Staff Writer
Once they turned to the sea for sustenance. Today, many fishermen on California's coast turn to wives and girlfriends instead.
"Steady job and benefits, that's the marrying kind," said Troy Vought, a commercial trawler in Eureka. "If you ask most fishermen, 'How are you still fishing?' they tell you, 'It's because my wife has a good job.'"
Six hundred miles up the coast, in a restaurant on Vancouver Island, Canadian trawler Brian Mose leans back and smiles.
Life is good. Unlike Vought, Mose faces no snarl of federal rules that threaten his career. His deckhands earn up to $150,000 Canadian ($104,000 U.S.) a year. And three-quarters of their catch is shipped south to the most voracious seafood market on the West Coast: California.
"I would never try to sell to 34 million people in Canada; it's logistically impossible," Mose said. "The beauty of it is Californians are all jammed into the I-5 corridor. California is just as sweet as it comes."
Ever since gold-seekers swarmed to California in the 19th century, the state has been known as a mother lode of economic opportunity.
But on its central and north coast, efforts to protect seven species of Pacific rockfish - commonly known as red snapper - with federal fishing limits and bans put into place beginning in the 1990s, are reversing that historic trend by exporting opportunity to Canada - and sowing joblessness and despair at home.
Like many commodities, Canada's rockfish don't leave a well-defined trail in the marketplace. Once sold to processing plants, they are shipped by truck and plane to seafood wholesalers who in turn deal them to restaurants and supermarkets from Vancouver to San Diego. No agency - U.S. or Canadian - logs the final destination.
But trawlers and processors in Canada say about 75 percent of British Columbia's commercial catch is snapped up by consumers in California.
And that has some British Columbia environmentalists worried.
A decade ago, hunger for North Atlantic cod - its fillets white and flaky like rockfish - helped propel one of the most dramatic episodes of overfishing ever off the coasts of Newfoundland and New England. Some fear the same kind of market forces could one day deplete British Columbia's rockfish.
"When California started scaling back, I said: 'Holy smokes! What kind of pressure is this going to put on our species?'" said Terry Glavin, marine conservation adviser and rockfish specialist for the Sierra Club of British Columbia.
So far, the answer has been: none at all.
Therein lies a contrarian tale suggesting California's passion for conserving resources at home while consuming them from elsewhere need not export environmental pain, as it has done in Ecuador's Amazon and Canada's boreal forest.
The key is having a system to prevent such damage.
In British Columbia, that system is a federal management plan that is turning commercial fishermen into conservationists by giving them an ownership stake in the fish of the sea.
With legal title to an average of 610,000 pounds of rockfish a year, trawlers no longer race to sea in a competitive dash for fish. They work at their own pace, dragging their nets when prices are good. Most fish less - and catch less - but earn more.
Like property owners, they now take a keen interest in the value of their asset, including its resale value. The more productive rockfish stocks are, the more valuable a trawler's ownership stake - or quota - in them becomes. Lately, some trawlers have retired from the fleet and sold their quota to other fishermen for about $1.90 a pound, becoming millionaires.
While not flawless, Canada's 6-year-old quota system has made trawling less wasteful.
When British Columbia trawlers happen to catch more than their quota, they are not forced to shovel the excess overboard dead, as U.S. fishermen must do. Instead, the Canadian system allows them to keep their catch - and profit from it, without hurting the environment.
Perhaps most importantly, Canada's system puts a federal "observer" on every boat, allowing its Department of Fisheries and Oceans to eliminate the guesswork that has long plagued fisheries management and to respond more quickly to changing ocean conditions. It is just such a failure to react to changing conditions that precipitated the rockfish crisis in California.
"The quota system has proven so successful you can't ignore it," said Bruce Turris, executive manager of the Canadian Groundfish Research and Conservation Society, which represents the trawl fleet.
"Clearly, there are public policy issues about the allocation of quasi-proprietary rights to a public resource. But there is no question quotas have their place in enhanced resource management."
U.S. fishery officials agree. "It's a system I would love to have," said Hans Radtke, chairman of the Portland-based Pacific Fishery Management Council, the federal entity that oversees commercial fishing on the West Coast.
Until October, though, the Pacific council, like regional councils around the country, was forbidden by Congress from developing quota systems, in part because of conflict about how to divvy up fish stocks.
With that ban now lifted, "We'll move ahead," Radtke said. "But it's going to be a long, drawn-out political process. And the industry has to get behind it. Otherwise, it won't work."
Many trawlers are enthusiastic. "I wish we had that system here," said Peter Leipzig, head of the Eureka-based Fishermen's Marketing Association, which represents the 273-boat West Coast trawl fleet.
Instead, the fleet has faced a maze of federal limits and closures so riddled with uncertainty it has forced fishermen and fish processors out of business and contributed to divorce, drug abuse and domestic violence, according to skippers and their wives.
"There is so much worry about money," said Mary Young, a Crescent City social worker married to a trawl captain. "I talk to the wives of crew members and half the time they're splitting up. You see a lot more problems in the family."
By their very nature, rockfish are not an easy species to know.
For starters, there aren't just a few kinds. There are dozens, an undersea galaxy of 70 to 80 species that school and swarm along the continental shelf from Baja California to Alaska.
Rockfish don't splash up rivers like salmon. They don't slash through the surface like tuna. They hunker down at crushing and sunless depths of 400 to 2,500 feet, where many details about their lives remain unfathomed by science.
They are ambassadors of the unusual.
With bulging eyes, bucket-like mouths and a forest of quills on their spines, rockfish seem to spring from a Dr. Seuss children's story:
There were purple rockfish, lemon rockfish
and other strange types;
Some had thin yellow lips, some wore
speckles and stripes!
Even their names are colorful. There are chilipeppers and chuckleheads, harlequins and honeycombs, widows and idiots, vermilions and chameleons, warthogs and watermelons.
But their comic front masks a complex nature. As scientists recently discovered, rockfish are like humans in some ways. They grow slowly, take years to mature and reproduce only occasionally. The rockfish on your plate may be older than you. Some live to be 70 or more. A few make it past 100.
With quotas, trawlers can ride market tides
Two days before Thanksgiving, 30 miles off the west coast of Vancouver Island, a large trawling net swollen with fish hangs from a hoist over the Miss Tatum's aft deck.
A crew member pulls a cord and a waterfall of rockfish cascades onto the boat. Most are widows and yellowtails, but there is a smattering of red-stripe, silver-gray and canary rockfish, even an occasional strawberry-red bocaccio.
With tails flapping and mouths and gills slowly opening and closing, the catch sloshes across the deck, forming snowdrifts of snapper. The crew wades in, shoveling the fish into a hold, amid a whirling cloud of gulls.
The Miss Tatum was at sea because its skipper, Clayton Odberg, saw a market opportunity in the millions of Californians he hoped would soon tire of Thanksgiving turkey and turn to fish. And he had enough quota to give it a try.
About 8 a.m., with his net 490 feet deep in the Pacific, Odberg's radio crackled with the voice of Dave Ernst, a local seafood processor in touch with fish wholesalers in San Francisco and Los Angeles. California buyers were hungry for snapper - but the market was not sizzling.
"Clayton, the price isn't as good as what we were hoping for."
"I know that," Odberg said. "I was going to stop at 60,000."
"It would be better if you stopped at 50, even better at 40."
Later, Odberg raised the net. It held close to 40,000 pounds of rockfish, enough to bring a good price - 75 cents a pound (52 cents U.S.) - but not too much to drive the market down.
For Odberg and the rest of Canada's trawlers, quotas have turned fishermen into entrepreneurs.
"We each have our pull of fish now," trawler captain Mose said. "That's all we have. We want to make the very most of them.
"Take canary rockfish. My quota is 50,000 pounds for the year. I can catch that in one tow, or two - or 10. I can bring it in at 40 cents a pound or 75 cents a pound."
The ability to ride rising market tides means many Canadian trawlers now make more while working less.
"I used to fish 12 months a year. Sometimes I would even leave on Boxing Day," just after Christmas, said skipper Norman Sigmund. "Now I fish four months and make more money."
The news is not all upbeat. Some skippers say the government gave too much quota to some boats and too little to others. "There was not a lot of fairness," said skipper Jim Harris. "Some guys wound up out of business who had been pioneers in the industry."
The approach also has made boats so costly - a no-frills trawler with "quota" has jumped in value from $400,000 to $3 million in Canadian currency - that some fear for the fleet's future. "Who's going to come into this business if they have to pay $5 million for an operation that will only generate a million a year?" Sigmund asked.
"How are we supposed to transfer this equity to the next generation? Larger entities will gobble up the quota because they can afford to."
Several Vancouver Island trawlers are now millionaires. Many drive new trucks and SUVs. One has a condo in Palm Beach, Fla. Another sold his quota for $5 million Canadian ($3.45 million U.S.). Some have reinvested heavily, buying more efficient boats, safer gear and technology to cut the catch of undesired fish.
But the biggest sea change may be in attitude.
"It has changed the tone of discussion," said Rick Stanley, a biologist with Canada's Department of Fisheries and Oceans. "Fishermen take a more long-term interest because they own a share of the farm."
When Mose first saw his quota, he cried.
"I thought I was finished," he said. "Why would I like something that was going to reduce the amount of my take?"
And today?
"My revenues are higher than they've ever been," Mose said.
"But what is most interesting to me is when I'm out trawling and I see a school of fish, I'm thinking, 'I know your parents. They did me well. Now do me well. Be productive.'"
West Coast fleet's cost in wasted fish is high
Like many improvements, Canada's quota system began with failure. Every three months, at the government's order, trawlers charged to sea, hoping to catch their "trip limit" before another boat got to it first. The competition was so fierce trawlers called it "Olympic" fishing.
"It created a boom-and-bust cycle," said Murray Chatwin, a buyer at Ocean Fisheries Ltd., a major Canadian processor. "It wasn't working for anybody. The boats weren't making money; we weren't making money."
When trawlers caught more than their limit, they threw the excess overboard, dead. With so many nets in the water, they also caught more than the entire fleet's three-month quota in just a few days. Unable to regulate the catch, Canada shut the fishery down in September 1995.
"It was binge fishing," Mose said. "Looking back, there was not one thing good about it. Production was high; quality was low. All you could predict was, 'Look out, here it comes.'
"I watched it evolve to the point where there just wasn't enough fish for the fleet anymore."
A similar cloud now hangs over the West Coast trawl fleet. From Seattle to San Diego, the Pacific Fishery Management Council also uses limits to harness trawlers. Here, though, the limits cap what trawlers can catch over a 60-day period, instead of on every trip.
But with some rockfish populations in decline, pressure from environmental groups on the rise and a 1996 federal law on the books requiring that "overfished" stocks be rebuilt, the fishery management council has steadily whittled those limits lower.
The result: a desperate, impoverished fleet and a whole lot of wasted fish.
"You are forced to catch what you can while you can because of the uncertainty of not being able to fish tomorrow," said Vought, the Eureka trawler.
Last year, while making a tow for lingcod near Eureka, Vought's crew caught something unexpected: 2,500 pounds of canary rockfish, a delicious, valuable species known to live to be at least 84 years old. Trouble is, Vought was already near his two-month limit for canaries.
To avoid a federal fine, the crew shoveled 2,000 pounds of canary rockfish back into the sea. Not one survived, because rockfish's air bladders burst in the rapid pressure change of their forced journey to the surface.
"In order to sell $800 worth of fish, we actually threw away $1,100 worth," Vought said. "In what world does that make sense?"
When Canadian trawler Sigmund found himself in a similar predicament not long ago, not one fish was wasted. He had hauled in 35,000 pounds of silver-gray rockfish, 20,000 of which was over his legal quota.
Sigmund called another trawler who had not yet caught his annual quota of silver-grays, and traded for 20,000 additional pounds of quota. "I turned my by-catch into catch," Sigmund said. "That's what the quota system is all about."
California trawlers say being forced to conserve rockfish by wasting them is crazy. Crescent City trawler Richard Young once walked onto the deck of his boat while his crew was heaving fish overboard. "They told me, 'This is nuts,'" Young said. He responded sarcastically: "No, it's not. It's conservation."
"There's no way you can feel good about it," Young said. "That fish is food. It could be feeding hungry people."
John DeVore, groundfish coordinator for the Pacific management council, said the 60-day limits were put into place for an economic reason: to keep a steady flow of fish coming to the dock. Seafood processors wanted a system in which they had a year-round business, he said.
But he acknowledged the biological cost in wasted fish is high. "It doesn't make sense from any perspective," DeVore said. "It's distasteful for everyone. It's one of those things we want to get away from."
Unable to gauge how many fish were being wasted, and faced with a continued decline in rockfish, the federal fisheries council last year took an unprecedented step. It declared a huge swath of the continental shelf, from Canada to Mexico, off-limits to trawling.
Since then, a deep economic gloom has settled over California's North Coast. The value of Young's trawler, the City of Eureka, has fallen from $400,000 to $150,000. "I'm not convinced we can sell it for anything," said his wife, Mary.
Like many fishing families, the Youngs, who are in their 50s, have always counted on the future sale of that boat to fund their retirement. "I try not to think about it, because right now the only retirement we have is my Social Security," Mary Young said.
"We sit here and struggle at night and say, 'What are we going to do?'" she said.
As catches have shriveled, so have paychecks. A decade ago, Richard Young paid crew members $35,000 to $40,000 a year. Now they make less than half that. Times are so lean that some deckhands have even stopped paying federal income taxes.
Statewide, roughly 200 people still earn a living as deckhands on trawl boats. Despite the downturn in rockfish, Young keeps his crew employed most of the year, in part by turning to other species, including crab and shrimp. During slow times, they repair gear.
Many have found other work. "One guy is a prison guard. Another is a truck driver," Young said. "Twenty years ago, people were begging us for jobs. Now it's hard to find a crewman."
In Eureka, Vought has his own way of dealing with that problem. He swings by the local unemployment office where, he said, he finds an unusual class of workers.
"We are literally pulling drug addicts off the street to take them fishing." But Vought said it's not as bad as it sounds. "A lot of times, they are cleaned up by the time you get them. There's no help. The perception is that fishing is over with."
It's more dangerous, too, because trawlers are under financial pressure and can't afford to maintain boats.
A recent U.S. Coast Guard report attributed accidents and loss of boats in Northern California partly to desperate financial straits. In Crescent City, at least two trawlers have sunk in the past decade due to fatigue and financial stress, local fishermen said.
"More boats get lost," Vought said. "You have more accidents."
Warmer water doomed generations of rockfish
The West Coast's rockfish disaster began in the 1970s when the federal government, after pushing foreign trawlers out of coastal waters by extending the 200-mile territorial limit, handed out boatloads of financial incentives to jump-start a domestic trawl fleet.
The fleet grew rapidly and the fishing was fantastic. Most people assumed rockfish were prolific breeders, like sole and halibut.
Rockfish productivity "was not an issue," said Peter Leipzig, head of the trawlers association and a former member of the Pacific fisheries council. "The national policy was full utilization of the resource."
The first hint that something was awry came in the late 1980s, when scientists noticed that most rockfish in trawl nets were adults. There was a drought of youngsters.
They now understand that in the mid-'70s, a period of generally cold water, rockfish thrived, giving birth to millions of squiggling larvae that survived to become healthy adults.
But in the 1980s, a time of warmer water, including one of the century's worst El Niño patterns, new generations of rockfish were born and then mysteriously perished.
The 1990s brought a surge of even warmer water - and more reproductive failure. But figuring that out took time. Meanwhile, the trawl fleet continued catching adult rockfish in the prime of their reproductive lives.
Veteran rockfish scientist Alec MacCall likens it to continually dipping into the principal in a savings account. Sooner or later, you deplete the account.
"It wasn't until the late '90s that we started realizing there was a serious problem," said MacCall, who works for the National Marine Fisheries Service. "By then, a lot of damage had been done."
The management council did not act swiftly enough to avert disaster, MacCall said, in part because of the usual pressure from politicians, fishermen and fish processors. But he also blames another group for the disaster: scientists, himself included.
"We blew it by not looking hard enough and soon enough at what was going on," he said.
There is plenty of blame to go around, according to Leipzig. "We all regret what happened," he said. "But we can't attack it because we were all part of it."
Today, seven species of rockfish have been hurt the most: bocaccio, canary, cowcod, dark-blotched, yelloweye, widow and Pacific Ocean perch. And because they have been fished to such low levels, and reproduce so sporadically, scientists say it will be years, decades, even more than a century before they recover.
Three species - dark-blotched, widow and Pacific Ocean perch - are expected to rebound the quickest: between 2011 and 2047.
Depending on ocean conditions and fishing practices, yelloweye and canary rockfish could take 24 to 73 years to bounce back. Biological recovery - a return to just 40 percent of their original abundance - could take 96 years for cowcod and more than a century for bocaccio.
Managing rockfish is a task that calls for detailed monitoring of fish populations, commercial catch, by-catch and ocean conditions.
Perhaps the best way to keep track of such matters is by placing a federal observer on every trawler. And that is just what the Canadian quota system does.
On board the Miss Tatum, that observer was Guy Boxall, a bushy-haired young man in a ragged flannel shirt who watched everything that came up and jotted it down: yellowtails (48 percent), widows (46 percent), a sprinkling of red-stripes, silver-grays and bocaccio - even two stray salmon.
At first, Canadian trawlers were skeptical. After all, the cost of the program - about $350 Canadian a day ($240 U.S.) - is paid by fishermen. And observers, who work for a private company, report everything they see to the government.
"There's a significant cost to this program," Mose said. "It's privacy, the thing we hold dearest."
Most now are sold on the concept, finding that they can easily afford it and that observer information serves as an early-warning system about the health of rockfish stocks. Government fishery managers like the program because it provides a precise accounting of the catch. U.S. fishery managers are envious.
Told about the Canadian program, John DeVore, the federal U.S. rockfish manager, said: "They've got 100 percent observer coverage? That's great. That's really ideal. Then you see everything. You could really manage by-catch a lot better doing that."
The Pacific council took a step in that direction in 2001, placing observers on 20 percent of trawl trips. "Clearly, if we had the resources, we would like to see 100 percent coverage," DeVore said.
Recently, observer data helped the Canadian fleet respond to a potential rockfish disaster. "We were watching silver-grays just get older - there were no young ones," Mose said. Last year, the fisheries and oceans department cut the silver-gray quota.
Leipzig said quick action often is difficult in the United States because the current system requires extensive public notice and involvement. A simple stock assessment to estimate rockfish abundance takes two years to work its way through the system. "By the time you use the information, it's out of date by at least two years," he said. "How does that advance conservation?"
Canada's system has its critics, too.
Terry Glavin, the Sierra Club adviser, said that even with observers, there is not enough information to guarantee the long-term health of rockfish stocks. "We don't know about interspecies relationships," he said. "We don't know anything about what influences the productivity of the various species."
He's also skeptical of the close relationship between the fishing industry and its government overseers. "Decisions are made ... in closed meetings by nameless mandarins and industry lobbyists who reckon that the less the rest of us know about this stuff, the better," Glavin wrote in a newspaper column published in Canada last year.
But what haunts him most is that an overfishing disaster like the one that decimated cod stocks on the east coast of Canada and in New England in the 1980s and early 1990s could happen to British Columbia.
The genesis of that catastrophe is eerily similar to what spawned California's rockfish crisis: a prolonged spell of intense fishing, seasoned by industry pressure and scientific uncertainty.
"My country destroyed the largest and oldest fishery in the history of the human experience: North Atlantic cod," Glavin said.
But Bruce Turris, the British Columbia trawl fleet representative, said past is not prologue. Federal groundfish managers "are much more cautious and conservative now," he said.
A snapshot of the British Columbia rockfish catch shows no wild upswings in rockfish landings - despite rapidly declining catches and cutbacks in California, Oregon and Washington. British Columbia rockfish landings have actually dipped 9 percent, from 53.8 million pounds in 1996 to 48.9 million pounds in 2001.
Many West Coast trawlers have argued for a quota system and other reforms, including a buy-back program to reduce the number of boats in the fleet - a measure recently approved by Congress.
"Quotas, if done properly, could be the salvation of this fishery," said Richard Young, the Crescent City trawler.
Unless that happens, they will have to continue to deal with the fallout of the current system.
For Young, that means spending time and money diversifying into crab and shrimp fishing.
For Troy Vought, it means getting out of trawling. Last year, he started Aquascape, a business building water gardens and ponds.
And it means changes in the marketplace.
To see one example, drop by Mr. Fish Seafood, a popular retail fish market on Highway 101 in Eureka.
A sign near the door says, "Save a Cow, Eat a Fish." Inside, there are colorful fish-shaped Christmas ornaments, T-shirts ($10 each) that say "Fish Happens!" and another sign: "Catch Your Limit Here."
One recent weekend, there was rockfish for sale too - labeled as snapper, for $5.99 a pound. Asked where it came from, owner Mark McCullough ducked into the back and fished out the smelly brown box in which it was shipped.
Stamped on one side were three words: Product of Canada.
US vs. the World
By David Arnold, The Boston Globe.
The Reuters - IUCN Environmental Media Award 2002, Regional Winner: North America.
Warren Hoppie has been loading trash for 22 years and has learned to take the job one street at a time. So, when he turns a corner, he spares himself the burden of estimating the load ahead because "trash is trash and there will always be more around the next corner."
But, as he turned from Almardine to Milton Street in Dorchester on a recent sticky summer morning, Hoppie allowed himself to editorialize. "Heavy," he opined. The hydraulic breaks hissed, the truck growled to a stop, and Hoppie jumped down from behind the steering wheel to join Manuel Barboza, who already had his hands full with discarded lamp shades and a bag dripping something rancid sweet and dark brown.
For the next 15 minutes, the two men would be able to advance only 450 feet down the street as they hauled away 1.5 tons of debris from 18 addresses. Dorchester recycles and Massachusetts has a bottle bill, but the conservation measures appeared to have no effect on what was getting tossed out on Milton Street. In fact, Dorchester (population 86,000) weekly discards about six times more trash into landfills than the entire city of Oslo, Norway (population 500,000).
Put another way, the Oslo resident ultimately throws away less than a pound of household debris per week. The typical Dorchester resident throws away more than 28 pounds.
On the eve of the second world environmental summit scheduled to open next Monday in Johannesburg, an Indonesian official's quip unintentionally underscored the frustration much of the world feels about sharing the planet with Americans. It was late in the evening of May 27 in Bali. The last of four preparatory meetings attempting to find compromises that could be presented at the summit had stalled.
Once again, the United States was stifling initiatives, according to accounts in the local press. Finally, an exasperated Emil Salim, the Indonesian economist who was chairing the working session, turned to an associate, and thinking the microphone was off, asked: "What should we do about the United States?"
It popped the lid on United Nations decorum, where verbal swiping at one's brother is verboten. Within hours, dozens of delegates were wearing pins bearing Salim's question. By the end of the next day, the quote was emblazoned on hundreds of T-shirts that security guards started banning at the front door.
"The US had not been the only problem," said John Bonine, who attended the conference and is cofounder of the Oregon-based Environmental Law Alliance Worldwide. "But American opposition to any firm targets or deadlines frustrated a lot of people."
Next week's World Summit on Sustainable Development has been dubbed "Rio-Plus-10" because it marks the 10th anniversary of the landmark Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro. The Brazil summit put environmental issues on the global political agenda for the first time. The meeting Monday serves as a progress report on the world as an estimated 100 heads of state and 60,000 delegates convene for the largest United Nations gathering ever held.
The hitch, as many observers see it, is that there hasn't been much progress. In fact, the world appears to be dirtier, hotter, and more divided between rich and poor than ever, which is why some environmentalists have taken to calling the summit "Rio-Minus-10." This comes as no surprise when 190 nations are asked to think beyond self-interest, and politicians are forced to ponder the rewards of serving voters yet unborn.
Nevertheless, Salim struck a chord in Bali because the world's perception is that the United States relies on corporate initiatives to lead the way to sustainable development. Unfortunately, it has not been a good year for corporate ethics.
"It's shameful. The American business lobby is in charge of US environmental policy at just the time the world is looking for American leadership," said Oystein Dahle, a retired Norwegian business executive and chairman of the board for the Worldwatch Institute, an enviromental advocacy organization.
"The US is a superpower. But even superpowers need friends, and, for you, they're disappearing."
The American strategy going into Johannesburg calls for partnerships between governments, the private sector and nongovernment organizations to achieve sustainable development, according to a press release. "We can strive together for freer and more open societies, thriving economies, a healthy environment," said Undersecretary of State Paula Dobriansky in prepared remarks that offered no specific goals or timetables.
But partnerships won't do the job, said Nitin Desai, the summit secretary-general, in a telephone interview last week. "Partnerships are no substitute for government action or responsibililities. For partnerships to succeed, you need a public-policy framework."
In 1992 at Rio, all the participating countries committed to drafting a game plan that would bring consumption within levels that could be sustained indefinitely. They also pledged to start reducing carbon-dioxide emissions - the primary cause of human-induced global warming - to 1990 levels. At the time, the United States had 5 percent of the world's population but was consuming about 25 percent of the world's energy and 30 percent of its raw materials, according to UN statistics.
Since Rio, US consumption of energy has jumped 21 percent, material consumption is up 10 percent, and greenhouse gas emissions are up 13 percent. Those emissions are expected to exceed 1990 levels by more than 46 percent by 2020, according to testimony presented to the US Congress last month by John Dernbach, professor of law at Widener University in Chester, Pa., and editor of Stumbling Toward Sustainability, published four weeks ago.
Citing calculations by Harvard biologist Edward O. Wilson, Dernbach said that, for every person in the world to meet current US levels of consumption, four more planet Earths would be needed.
That is not to say that the United States deserves no credit, Dernbach stressed. The country has been instrumental in preventing lead poisoning, protecting fisheries, and incorporating environmental-impact reviews into World Bank projects, while some corporations and a few states have taken initiatives to promote sustainable development practices.
"The perception is, however, that except for the antiterror campaign, the United States is less engaged than ever with the rest of the world," Dernbach said in a telephone interview.
And, as another environmentalist pointed out, to appear disengaged can be a lonely, and perhaps dangerous, place to be for a country contributing the most to global warming. The sea level is now rising 1 centimeter a decade. The rate is expected to accelerate. "If you think they hate us now," he said, "wait'll they start going underwater."
Hoppie and Barboza worked with complete anticipation of the other's movements - and complete indifference to the impatient motorists backed up behind them, one of whom unsuccessfully tried to pass the truck via a sidewalk. Outside No. 84, the trash, in various stages of disrepair, included a toilet bowl with seat, a patio umbrella, a bed, a Hoover vacuum cleaner, a General Electric fan, and a 1971 framed mural in good condition titled "New England" by Maurice Meyer.
As the men progressed down Milton Street, the grumble from the hydraulic compactor grew increasingly strained as the truck filled. From No. 81: six bags of dirt from a landscaping job in progress; from No. 78: twin mufflers, two tail pipes, four sofa cushions, and a trampoline with one broken spring; from No. 67: a large, half-inch-thick piece of unbroken tabletop glass from a dining room set, four chairs, a broken weed eater, 40 empty bottles of Corona beer, and four unopened boxes of Prince spaghetti, tucked into a plastic snap-top food container that someone had purchased for $4.99 at Osco.
The greatest challenge facing the 10-day summit in Johannesburg may simply be that it follows Rio. The summit in Brazil occurred at a time when, as Hilary French, a director in WorldWatch put it, "the world felt it was finally getting its act together." For example, global cooperation and corporate leadership from companies such as DuPont had demonstrated that the release of chlorofluorocarbons, which are detrimental to the ozone layer, could be curtailed.
"Rio came along amidst a spirit of global awakening. Anything seemed possible," French said. But Rio may have ultimately raised the bar to unrealistic heights, particularily for the fuel-guzzling American economy and its defenders - who may be scrambling for some public relations magic next week.
"The perception that we are foot-dragging is accurate; the fact is, the perception is erroneous," said a senior State Department official who requested anonymity. He said the United States is leading a campaign to halve the number of people without clean drinking water in the next 13 years. He also said that the United States had just donated $500 million - the largest gift made - to the UN's Global Environment Facility, a fund that will immediately begin supporting UN environmental programs.
More challenging to the American environmental record are two significant documents from Rio that critics say are US embarrassments. Agenda 21 was a nonbinding blueprint for action to achieve sustainable development worldwide; the Convention on Climate Change called for the stabilization of greenhouse gas emissions. The United States signed both documents.
But a decade later, the United States has yet to even establish a game plan for how it hopes to achieve the sustainable-development goals as outlined in the Agenda. It is a rare American who has even heard of Agenda 21; yet, according to a recent poll in Sweden, almost 50 percent of voting-age Swedes know the basic tenets of the blueprint.
The Climate Change Convention set a voluntary goal for signatories to return greenhouse gas emissions to 1990 levels by the year 2000. But, by 1995, the scientific evidence for global warming was growing ever stronger, so the signatories agreed to go a step further. In 1997, they signed a legally binding protocol, established after a meeting in Kyoto, Japan. The US agreed not only to reduce emissions to 1990 levels, but drop them 7 percent lower by 2012. Last year, however, President Bush repudiated the protocol on the basis it would severely damage the US and world economy, and that the science was inconclusive.
Enough other countries have ratified the protocol that it will likely go into effect despite the nonparticipation of the world's largest offender. It does not help the American cause that President Bush is one of the only leaders of a developed country who has not committed to attending the Johannesburg Summit, according to Donald Brown, author of "Heat," and the environmental liaison between the Pennsylvania government and universities in the state.
"We are failing the world on a catastophic moral level," Brown said. "Our excuse is our economy. But the source of American power doesn't come from our McDonald's. It comes from doing the right thing."
At 9:30 a.m., after just three hours on the job, Hoppie and Barboza had almost filled one truck with 15 tons of household rubbish. And so they took a short break, popped the tops of sodas they had purchased at Ada's Tropical Market on Norfolk Street, and took a curbside seat to talk a little trash.
"Didn't used to be like this in the old days," Hoppie said. "Somehow it's gotten heavier; much heavier." He doesn't mind the volume; on a busy day, the pair hoist almost 30 tons of trash between them. He does mind the needles that occasionally protrude from plastic bags. "Hey, if it's on the sidewalk, we're required to take it." Twice this day they would remove piles of trash left in front of vacant lots.
Hoppie and Barboza work for Waste Management Inc., a Houston-based company and one of three private contractors hired by the city to pick up after its residents.
By 9:45, the trash collectors were back on the job, picking their way down Wells Avenue when they stumbled onto a phenomenon they seldom see. As they started clearing a dozen piles of neatly bundled construction waste into their truck outside 154 Wells Ave., the owner, Joao Jose Cardoso, came out to help. Both collectors had the same amused expression that suggested: "Huh?"
"I come from Cape Verde," Cardoso would explain later. "We don't throw things away much there. All this trash here makes me feel guilty."
The Reuters - IUCN Environmental Media Award 2002, Regional Winner: North America.
Warren Hoppie has been loading trash for 22 years and has learned to take the job one street at a time. So, when he turns a corner, he spares himself the burden of estimating the load ahead because "trash is trash and there will always be more around the next corner."
But, as he turned from Almardine to Milton Street in Dorchester on a recent sticky summer morning, Hoppie allowed himself to editorialize. "Heavy," he opined. The hydraulic breaks hissed, the truck growled to a stop, and Hoppie jumped down from behind the steering wheel to join Manuel Barboza, who already had his hands full with discarded lamp shades and a bag dripping something rancid sweet and dark brown.
For the next 15 minutes, the two men would be able to advance only 450 feet down the street as they hauled away 1.5 tons of debris from 18 addresses. Dorchester recycles and Massachusetts has a bottle bill, but the conservation measures appeared to have no effect on what was getting tossed out on Milton Street. In fact, Dorchester (population 86,000) weekly discards about six times more trash into landfills than the entire city of Oslo, Norway (population 500,000).
Put another way, the Oslo resident ultimately throws away less than a pound of household debris per week. The typical Dorchester resident throws away more than 28 pounds.
On the eve of the second world environmental summit scheduled to open next Monday in Johannesburg, an Indonesian official's quip unintentionally underscored the frustration much of the world feels about sharing the planet with Americans. It was late in the evening of May 27 in Bali. The last of four preparatory meetings attempting to find compromises that could be presented at the summit had stalled.
Once again, the United States was stifling initiatives, according to accounts in the local press. Finally, an exasperated Emil Salim, the Indonesian economist who was chairing the working session, turned to an associate, and thinking the microphone was off, asked: "What should we do about the United States?"
It popped the lid on United Nations decorum, where verbal swiping at one's brother is verboten. Within hours, dozens of delegates were wearing pins bearing Salim's question. By the end of the next day, the quote was emblazoned on hundreds of T-shirts that security guards started banning at the front door.
"The US had not been the only problem," said John Bonine, who attended the conference and is cofounder of the Oregon-based Environmental Law Alliance Worldwide. "But American opposition to any firm targets or deadlines frustrated a lot of people."
Next week's World Summit on Sustainable Development has been dubbed "Rio-Plus-10" because it marks the 10th anniversary of the landmark Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro. The Brazil summit put environmental issues on the global political agenda for the first time. The meeting Monday serves as a progress report on the world as an estimated 100 heads of state and 60,000 delegates convene for the largest United Nations gathering ever held.
The hitch, as many observers see it, is that there hasn't been much progress. In fact, the world appears to be dirtier, hotter, and more divided between rich and poor than ever, which is why some environmentalists have taken to calling the summit "Rio-Minus-10." This comes as no surprise when 190 nations are asked to think beyond self-interest, and politicians are forced to ponder the rewards of serving voters yet unborn.
Nevertheless, Salim struck a chord in Bali because the world's perception is that the United States relies on corporate initiatives to lead the way to sustainable development. Unfortunately, it has not been a good year for corporate ethics.
"It's shameful. The American business lobby is in charge of US environmental policy at just the time the world is looking for American leadership," said Oystein Dahle, a retired Norwegian business executive and chairman of the board for the Worldwatch Institute, an enviromental advocacy organization.
"The US is a superpower. But even superpowers need friends, and, for you, they're disappearing."
The American strategy going into Johannesburg calls for partnerships between governments, the private sector and nongovernment organizations to achieve sustainable development, according to a press release. "We can strive together for freer and more open societies, thriving economies, a healthy environment," said Undersecretary of State Paula Dobriansky in prepared remarks that offered no specific goals or timetables.
But partnerships won't do the job, said Nitin Desai, the summit secretary-general, in a telephone interview last week. "Partnerships are no substitute for government action or responsibililities. For partnerships to succeed, you need a public-policy framework."
In 1992 at Rio, all the participating countries committed to drafting a game plan that would bring consumption within levels that could be sustained indefinitely. They also pledged to start reducing carbon-dioxide emissions - the primary cause of human-induced global warming - to 1990 levels. At the time, the United States had 5 percent of the world's population but was consuming about 25 percent of the world's energy and 30 percent of its raw materials, according to UN statistics.
Since Rio, US consumption of energy has jumped 21 percent, material consumption is up 10 percent, and greenhouse gas emissions are up 13 percent. Those emissions are expected to exceed 1990 levels by more than 46 percent by 2020, according to testimony presented to the US Congress last month by John Dernbach, professor of law at Widener University in Chester, Pa., and editor of Stumbling Toward Sustainability, published four weeks ago.
Citing calculations by Harvard biologist Edward O. Wilson, Dernbach said that, for every person in the world to meet current US levels of consumption, four more planet Earths would be needed.
That is not to say that the United States deserves no credit, Dernbach stressed. The country has been instrumental in preventing lead poisoning, protecting fisheries, and incorporating environmental-impact reviews into World Bank projects, while some corporations and a few states have taken initiatives to promote sustainable development practices.
"The perception is, however, that except for the antiterror campaign, the United States is less engaged than ever with the rest of the world," Dernbach said in a telephone interview.
And, as another environmentalist pointed out, to appear disengaged can be a lonely, and perhaps dangerous, place to be for a country contributing the most to global warming. The sea level is now rising 1 centimeter a decade. The rate is expected to accelerate. "If you think they hate us now," he said, "wait'll they start going underwater."
Hoppie and Barboza worked with complete anticipation of the other's movements - and complete indifference to the impatient motorists backed up behind them, one of whom unsuccessfully tried to pass the truck via a sidewalk. Outside No. 84, the trash, in various stages of disrepair, included a toilet bowl with seat, a patio umbrella, a bed, a Hoover vacuum cleaner, a General Electric fan, and a 1971 framed mural in good condition titled "New England" by Maurice Meyer.
As the men progressed down Milton Street, the grumble from the hydraulic compactor grew increasingly strained as the truck filled. From No. 81: six bags of dirt from a landscaping job in progress; from No. 78: twin mufflers, two tail pipes, four sofa cushions, and a trampoline with one broken spring; from No. 67: a large, half-inch-thick piece of unbroken tabletop glass from a dining room set, four chairs, a broken weed eater, 40 empty bottles of Corona beer, and four unopened boxes of Prince spaghetti, tucked into a plastic snap-top food container that someone had purchased for $4.99 at Osco.
The greatest challenge facing the 10-day summit in Johannesburg may simply be that it follows Rio. The summit in Brazil occurred at a time when, as Hilary French, a director in WorldWatch put it, "the world felt it was finally getting its act together." For example, global cooperation and corporate leadership from companies such as DuPont had demonstrated that the release of chlorofluorocarbons, which are detrimental to the ozone layer, could be curtailed.
"Rio came along amidst a spirit of global awakening. Anything seemed possible," French said. But Rio may have ultimately raised the bar to unrealistic heights, particularily for the fuel-guzzling American economy and its defenders - who may be scrambling for some public relations magic next week.
"The perception that we are foot-dragging is accurate; the fact is, the perception is erroneous," said a senior State Department official who requested anonymity. He said the United States is leading a campaign to halve the number of people without clean drinking water in the next 13 years. He also said that the United States had just donated $500 million - the largest gift made - to the UN's Global Environment Facility, a fund that will immediately begin supporting UN environmental programs.
More challenging to the American environmental record are two significant documents from Rio that critics say are US embarrassments. Agenda 21 was a nonbinding blueprint for action to achieve sustainable development worldwide; the Convention on Climate Change called for the stabilization of greenhouse gas emissions. The United States signed both documents.
But a decade later, the United States has yet to even establish a game plan for how it hopes to achieve the sustainable-development goals as outlined in the Agenda. It is a rare American who has even heard of Agenda 21; yet, according to a recent poll in Sweden, almost 50 percent of voting-age Swedes know the basic tenets of the blueprint.
The Climate Change Convention set a voluntary goal for signatories to return greenhouse gas emissions to 1990 levels by the year 2000. But, by 1995, the scientific evidence for global warming was growing ever stronger, so the signatories agreed to go a step further. In 1997, they signed a legally binding protocol, established after a meeting in Kyoto, Japan. The US agreed not only to reduce emissions to 1990 levels, but drop them 7 percent lower by 2012. Last year, however, President Bush repudiated the protocol on the basis it would severely damage the US and world economy, and that the science was inconclusive.
Enough other countries have ratified the protocol that it will likely go into effect despite the nonparticipation of the world's largest offender. It does not help the American cause that President Bush is one of the only leaders of a developed country who has not committed to attending the Johannesburg Summit, according to Donald Brown, author of "Heat," and the environmental liaison between the Pennsylvania government and universities in the state.
"We are failing the world on a catastophic moral level," Brown said. "Our excuse is our economy. But the source of American power doesn't come from our McDonald's. It comes from doing the right thing."
At 9:30 a.m., after just three hours on the job, Hoppie and Barboza had almost filled one truck with 15 tons of household rubbish. And so they took a short break, popped the tops of sodas they had purchased at Ada's Tropical Market on Norfolk Street, and took a curbside seat to talk a little trash.
"Didn't used to be like this in the old days," Hoppie said. "Somehow it's gotten heavier; much heavier." He doesn't mind the volume; on a busy day, the pair hoist almost 30 tons of trash between them. He does mind the needles that occasionally protrude from plastic bags. "Hey, if it's on the sidewalk, we're required to take it." Twice this day they would remove piles of trash left in front of vacant lots.
Hoppie and Barboza work for Waste Management Inc., a Houston-based company and one of three private contractors hired by the city to pick up after its residents.
By 9:45, the trash collectors were back on the job, picking their way down Wells Avenue when they stumbled onto a phenomenon they seldom see. As they started clearing a dozen piles of neatly bundled construction waste into their truck outside 154 Wells Ave., the owner, Joao Jose Cardoso, came out to help. Both collectors had the same amused expression that suggested: "Huh?"
"I come from Cape Verde," Cardoso would explain later. "We don't throw things away much there. All this trash here makes me feel guilty."
What a difference can Rio+10 make
By Ms Regina Scharf, Galileu magazine
The Reuters - IUCN Environmental Media Award 2002, Regional Winner: Latin America
Four specialists make their forecasts of the world's environment destiny after the meeting that starts next August 26, in Johannesburg, South Africa
Stopping Extinction
Most Brazilian genetic patrimony may be saved, even if the rhythm of the Amazon destruction grew all along the last decade. Even if 11,000 species of plants and animals endure high risk of disappearing from the planet. Paulo Nogueira-Neto, president of Fundação Florestal, in São Paulo, strongly believes in that. He says: 'if we face Johannesburg with excessive confidence, we will be naïf. But if we don't have at least some optimism, no progress can be expected'.
This is not John Doe's opinion. Among the most respected Brazilian environmentalists, Nogueira-Neto was the first national secretary of Environment, for a 12-year-period, till 1986. He is also one of the fathers of the sustainable development concept, based in the triple bottom line of economical viability, social justice and environmental correctness. In the eighties, he worked for the notorious Brundtland Commission, created by the United Nations to define planetary strategies on the long term.
But it is his present work, at the University of São Paulo, on small populations genetics, that gives him such hope in the survival capacity of species. 'Take the hamsters as an example', says the professor. 'All of them descend from a unique pregnant female, captured in the Syrian desert.' The North American bison has a similar story. Its populations grew from 23 specimens that survived in the Rocky Mountains. Today they are thousands'.
According to Nogueira-Neto, the same human intervention that helped hamsters and bisons to grow and multiply is essential to ecosystems conservation. ' We must plant the riversides - to help connecting isolated forest fragments - improve conservation units control and remove taxes imposed on those who strive to maintain the forest. We must show that, in many cases, knocking the native vegetation down is simply not worth from an economic point of view.'
Such initiatives had good results in Rio Grande do Sul state. A recent inventory of the local forests made by local government and the Federal University of Santa Maria realized that the forests' extension almost tripled since 1983. This study associates regeneration to the fact that some areas difficult to cultivate were despised, thanks to tougher laws and a bigger awareness of the landowners.
To help degraded areas recover their former magnificence, the researcher suggested that Brazilian government should propose, in Johannesburg, the establishment of a worldwide network to protect those areas. ' While the untouched woods offer a steady carbon balance, the secondary forests can grow up and remove that gas from the atmosphere and so reduce global heating ', he explains. Only in the Amazon, there are 165,000 square kilometres of deforested and abandoned areas - a surface comparable to Acre state.
Saving the forest fragments
Another beneficial form of human intervention, emphasizes Paulo Nogueira-Neto, is the creation of conservation units. In Brazil, the officially protected area more than doubled in the last decade. The global growth maintained a similar rhythm. According to the World Commission of Protected Areas, they rose from 7,35 million to 13,2 million squared kilometres since 1990, scattered between 30,000 parks and reserves. It is true that many of these units were not effectively created, basically due to the huge amounts of money needed to control those areas and remove local populations. The increasing use of the environmental compensations system - a tax retained on major engineering works, around 0.5% of their total value, used to compensate their negative impacts and thus transferred to the closest conservation units - has helped to protect these areas. The new thermal power plants from Rio Grande do Sul are a good example, says the professor. The taxes paid by the entrepreneurs allowed the dispossession of National Park of São Joaquim's 30,000 hectares - the only region in Brazil where it snows - so that it could truly exist.
Nogueira-Neto also bets that an attitude change might guarantee success, in addition to official instruments, such as the Convention of the Biological Diversity, which imposes to each country the protection of its species, through the conservation of their habitats. Launched in the Earth Summit, in 1992, it entered into force less than two years later, thanks to the support of 183 nations. Brazil was the first one to sign it after the National Congress approval in February 1994. The document never obtained American support. Nogueira-Neto says what really matters is people's evolution. 'The Earth Summit generated in the population the desire to preserve its natural wealth ', says. 'Therefore, they will not only survive - but even prosper.'
The Carbon War
The Kyoto Protocol will succeed and the Earth heating rhythm will freeze. This will happen even if the US insist in keeping out of this game - despite their responsibility for one fourth of all the world carbon emissions, which form a gas layer in the atmosphere that doesn't allow heat to escape. This is the forecast made by Fabio Feldmann, executive secretary of the Brazilian Forum on Climate Changes. ' If Russia and Poland sign the Protocol - and I think this will happen soon - the document will enter into force even without the USA ', says Feldmann, that also coordinates Brazilian preparation for Rio+10. If this to happen, environmentalists will obtain an important victory, in Johannesburg, in one of the fiercest wars in modern diplomacy.
The Kyoto Protocol was launched in 1997, once there was evidence that practically no industrialized country had fulfilled the commitments established by the Convention on Climate Change: to control their emissions of carbon dioxide, ozone and nitrogen oxides, amongst others. These gases are produced mainly by modern activities -vehicles, industries and even cattle, which eliminates methane while ruminating. But, to enter into force, 55 countries must ratify the Protocol, including those responsible for, at the very least, 55% of the global emissions. And, till now, the USA refuses to sign it. There are, by now, very clear evidences that the world climate is changing. The 90's were the hottest years since temperature monitoring started, in 19th century. The 2,500 scientists work for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) have calculated that the temperature will still grow some 3 ºC more this century.
Some consequences of the heating are already visible. Munich Re, a German reinsurance company that systematically reviews indemnities paid for catastrophes associated with the climate, as tornados and sea-quakes, realized that, in the 90's, those phenomena caused expenses around US$ 608 billion worldwide - three fold the indemnities paid in the 80's. Moreover, the oceans' level rose from 10 to 20 centimetres since 1900. And tropical diseases linked to temperature, as malaria and yellow fever, have been occurring in regions where they were not registered previously.
Clean development
According to Feldmann, Americans have given hints that, during Rio+10, they intend to challenge principles established in Rio-92, as of the principle of common but differentiated responsibility: those who have polluted for a longer period have to make an extra effort. And the USA accepted this principle, says Feldmann, in 1992, when they signed the Convention on Climate Change, along with 164 other countries. Now, the American diplomats are demanding, for instance, that poor countries with significant economies, such as Brazil, China or India, also assume concrete goals of reduction. Since the beginning of the 90's, the United States broadened their carbon emissions in 18%, reaching 1.57 billion tons per year. 'President George W. Bush faces this question only from a domestic point of view', says Feldmann. ' If this standard is reproduced by the rest of the world, there is no possibility of global agreement.'
Not that the protocol, the way it is, might save the planet. ' Even if it defines these very clear goals, they are insufficient ', evaluates Feldmann. In 1990, the IPCC calculated that it would be necessary to cut 60% of the pollutant emissions to revert global heating. However, the Kyoto Protocol orders industrialized countries to cut an average of 5.2% of their emissions, comparing to 1990 levels, all along next ten years. These goals will become, certainly, tougher during the next decade, he says. ' When the climate changes starts to be more evident, public opinion's pressure will be enormous '. Brazil, like other developing countries, must make efforts so that its emissions stop growing up and must also produce an inventory of its emissions, which government intends to publish, with considerable delay, still before the Johannesburg meeting. This document will show that we are among the ten countries that emit more carbon, due to the Amazon deforestation. The Clean Development Mechanism (CDM), one of the main instruments of the Kyoto Protocol, allows companies and rich countries which were unable to reduce their emissions to the established goals sponsor forestry projects or the adoption of cleaner energies in developing countries. In exchange, the sponsor receives credits that can be traded as stock options. 'The CDM is a very creative instrument that allows migration of financial resources from the North to the South, in a way that might be beneficial to all ', says Feldmann. An instrument that, in the best scenario, could flood the Third World with US$ 30 billion in the next years.
Total Failure
Main complaints that will be herd in Johanesburg will certainly refer to the lack of financing for environmental projects. This is the forecast of Hélcio Marcelo de Souza, expert in Public Policies from the Institute of Socio-Economic Studies (Inesc), an NGO specialized in monitoring how governments manage their budgets. Many global financial mechanisms for sustainable development proposed during the Earth Summit never took off or remain far insufficient, according to Souza. ' Only 0.9% of all the resources spent by the Environment Ministry last year were offered by international sources ', he calculates. The reasons that explain this failure are several. Part of the responsibility lies on developed countries, which reduced their donations despite the promises made in Rio, when they agreed to be more generous. In 1992, the so-called Official Development Aid (ODA)- that is, the donations rich countries offer the poor countries - was around US$ 69 billion, which represents, in average, 0.33% of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of donor countries. During ECO-92, they committed to raise this aid to 0.7% of their GDPs. Since then, they acted in the opposite way, reducing even more this share. In 2000, ODA fell to US$ 53 billion, or 0.22% of the rich countries GDP. The US, for instance, sets aside only 0.10% of its wealth for its poorer cousins.
During the Earth Summit, the developed countries also promised to load the Global Environment Facility (GEF) - a fund conceived to finance projects in poor countries that might have a global positive impact. This money is managed by the World Bank and offered to initiatives that aim to reduce climate change, ocean pollution, the ozone layer depletion and the loss of forests and biodiversity. In its first decade, GEF distributed US$ 4,2 billion. It is not much, considering that the adoption of sustainable development by poor countries might cost US$ 600 billion per year, as it was estimated during the Earth Summit - including US$ 125 billion that should have been donated by developed countries. Thus, GEF's help was 30 times smaller than the amount effectively needed.
No counterpart
There are other explanations for the lack of money for the environmental agenda. According to Souza, the World Bank, a traditionally huge dispenser of financial resources to environment projects, decided to offer only technical help and advisory services, instead of money. Besides, since 1999, when official expenses had to shrink, the Brazilian government stopped offering its counterpart. Without this contribution, the foreign investments started to vanish, say the expert.
Along the last decade, no environmental project received more external aid in the country than the Pilot Program for the Protection of Tropical Forests in Brazil (PPG-7), considered the greater in its sort in the world. It has been just incorporated to federal policies in a permanent basis. Launched in Rio-92, it took off only by 1995, with a US$ 280 million budget. A significant part of these resources was sent to parks and other conservation units in the Amazon and to forest resources management projects. However, according to Hélcio de Souza, the increase of external donations is not enough to guarantee an effective environmental preservation. In his opinion, when the government decides to focus its economy in foreign commercial interests, it prevents sustainable development's expansion. 'The decision of stimulating soy beans exports - and thus expand the plantations in the Amazon - is a good example of this', says the Inesc's expert.
In his evaluation, one of the hottest debates in the Johannesburg summit will be, precisely, on international trade and the foreign debt of developing countries. According to him, the sum of both internal and external debts interests paid in the last four-year-mandate of president Cardoso reach R$ 400 billion - the equivalent of a whole year of public budget. 'In consequence, he says, very little money remains in the country to promote projects that are fundamental in the environmental domain'.
The Planet Which Lost its Track
The day public administrators consider environment factors before making decisions is still far away, both in Brazil and abroad, despite all recommendations made by the Agenda 21. That is the evaluation of Pedro Jacobi, president of the Graduate Program of Environmental Sciences of the University of São Paulo, who worked in the making of the Brazilian Agenda 21.
This subject will be one of the main themes discussed in Johannesburg, since the conference is supposed to evaluate if Agenda 21 - probably the main international commitment born in the Earth Summit - was effectively adopted. This document is a sort of conduct code that each city, state or country should produce, to serve as a guide in public administration in order to promote sustainable development. According to the United Nations, over 6,000 cities are concluding their Agendas 21, and at least 80 countries keep sustainable development councils in charge of producing the national version of this document.
The process itself started to take off consistently in the last four years. In 1997, only 1,800 cities were involved in this effort. Brazil just concluded its own document, whose production listened to 40,000 people, who presented 6,000 proposals in several public audiences. The result was a volume with hundreds of pages, presented to president Cardoso last June. The local and state documents are also burning new. From Petrolina, in the Northeast region, to Campo Grande, right in the middle of Brazil, at least three-dozen initiatives are under discussion.
Agenda 21 discusses from the population growth and social inequalities to de environment impacts of transportation, electric generation, agriculture and industrialization. ' There is a crazy amount of information taken into consideration ', explains Jacobi. ' It is so ambitious that it risks to fail'. He compares this document to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights - but in a longer and more complex version. 'Agenda 21 has a symbolic importance. But it must include environmental education and society mobilization. Otherwise, it will be only a bureaucratic device ', says.
Less than 1 dollar per day
Jacobi pays his tribute to documents produced by the city of Rio and the Ribeira Valley region, in the south of São Paulo state. On the other hand, he considers the Agenda 21 produced in the city of São Paulo quite frustrating, because it was not sufficiently discussed with citizens. 'Anyway, it is even more important to have consistent sustainable development programs, such as those adopted by Amapá state or the city of Ribeirão Pires, in the Greater São Paulo area, whose territory is 100% inside a protected area', he evaluates. In those cases, having a formal Agenda 21 turned out to be of lesser importance.
Jacobi notes, though, that these efforts are exceptions; public administrations normally don't incorporate the environmental vision. 'The economic aspects always prevail and environment continues to be seen as a minor and futile question', he says. That is why governments frequently opt to react after damage already happened - cleaning rivers or the soil - instead of investing in impact reduction.
Worldwide indicators prove that the management of the planet continues so problematic as much as by the time of Rio-92. Then, the 1% richest Brazilians had 13% of the overall national income. This did not change. In a global level, poverty also persists. Today, 1,2 billion of people live with less than one dollar per day. It is practically the same amount registered one decade ago. In this period, 800 million babies were born to the planet.
The good news is that they will have a better scholarity and life expectancy than their parents. In the beginning of the 90's, life expectancy of an average Brazilian was of 65,75 years. Today, according to the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE), we live, in average, 68,8 years. Moreover, in the same period, the number of children that die in their first years in the country fell from 44 to 34 in thousand new-borns.
According to Jacobi, hope lays in a solid Agenda 21 solids and in a stronger participation of civil society. 'We have never had so many NGOs networks putting pressure on the public policies and articulating the resistance against inadequate government actions', he says. The professor mentions networks that advocate in favour of the Amazon, the Atlantic Rainforest and the savannas or against big hydropower plants. Most of them not even existed one decade ago. To Jacobi, little by little, that is how the world administrators' attitude will finally change.
The Path that Led to the Conference
The Earth Summit, as Eco-92 is also known, was the biggest meeting of heads of State and government in History. From the Cuban Fidel Castro and George Bush, father of the current American president, who refused to sign the Convention of Biological Diversity, alleging that he could not allow 'environmental extremism to harm the United States'. ' Beyond the 108 presidents and prime ministers, the Earth Summit joined more than 20,000 members of civil society, in a parallel event. Environmentalists, religious and minorities leaderships and social activists promoted their own debates and produced several unofficial documents. Their motto: 'think globally, act locally '. At least 9,000 journalists from all around the planet witnessed two weeks of discussions and the birth of three documents that became the main environmental references in the following years: the conventions of Biological Diversity and Climate Change and Agenda 21.
Y2K as a goal
Despite its importance, the Earth Summit was not the true beginning of the international effort to guarantee the planet's future. The first big conference organized by the United Nations to discuss conflicts between environment and development occurred 20 years earlier, in Stockholm. One of the main products of that meeting was the creation of the United Nations Commission on Environment and Development, led by Gro Harlem Brundtland, then prime minister of Norway and presently director-general of the World Heath Organization. The commission published, in 1987, the report Our Common Future, that it considered environmental strategies in the long run to 'reach a sustainable development by the year 2000 and further'.
Johannesburg shall restart some discussions that were launched in Stockholm and search forms to implement the conventions born in Rio. ' We have to establish concrete goals and define financial sources so that the meeting doesn't convert into Rio-less-20 ', says Fabio Feldmann, who coordinates the federal government efforts towards the conference. In his opinion, the meeting shouldn't be excessively focused in African problems and poverty, as it seems to be the tendency. This was an effective risk, reduced when Latin American launched an initiative that represents the subcontinent view, according to Feldmann. ' Latin America's example inspired East Europe and Asia, that also presented their own documents, changing the focus of this discussion.'
A part from catching up themes from the previous conferences, Rio+10 must introduce some new discussions. One of them is global governance - the capacity of integrating global subjects into national and local policies. 'It is hard for parliaments to understand climate change or biodiversity loss, for instance ', Feldmann says. In his opinion, another important subject in the conference will be multilateralism - that is, the distribution of the global power, which is very concentrated in the United States nowadays. ' If the Rio+10 summit fails, this might be the end of the great international conferences cycle, making clear the United Nations difficulties to act ', he says. 'The very role of the UN will be a matter for debate.'
The Reuters - IUCN Environmental Media Award 2002, Regional Winner: Latin America
Four specialists make their forecasts of the world's environment destiny after the meeting that starts next August 26, in Johannesburg, South Africa
Stopping Extinction
Most Brazilian genetic patrimony may be saved, even if the rhythm of the Amazon destruction grew all along the last decade. Even if 11,000 species of plants and animals endure high risk of disappearing from the planet. Paulo Nogueira-Neto, president of Fundação Florestal, in São Paulo, strongly believes in that. He says: 'if we face Johannesburg with excessive confidence, we will be naïf. But if we don't have at least some optimism, no progress can be expected'.
This is not John Doe's opinion. Among the most respected Brazilian environmentalists, Nogueira-Neto was the first national secretary of Environment, for a 12-year-period, till 1986. He is also one of the fathers of the sustainable development concept, based in the triple bottom line of economical viability, social justice and environmental correctness. In the eighties, he worked for the notorious Brundtland Commission, created by the United Nations to define planetary strategies on the long term.
But it is his present work, at the University of São Paulo, on small populations genetics, that gives him such hope in the survival capacity of species. 'Take the hamsters as an example', says the professor. 'All of them descend from a unique pregnant female, captured in the Syrian desert.' The North American bison has a similar story. Its populations grew from 23 specimens that survived in the Rocky Mountains. Today they are thousands'.
According to Nogueira-Neto, the same human intervention that helped hamsters and bisons to grow and multiply is essential to ecosystems conservation. ' We must plant the riversides - to help connecting isolated forest fragments - improve conservation units control and remove taxes imposed on those who strive to maintain the forest. We must show that, in many cases, knocking the native vegetation down is simply not worth from an economic point of view.'
Such initiatives had good results in Rio Grande do Sul state. A recent inventory of the local forests made by local government and the Federal University of Santa Maria realized that the forests' extension almost tripled since 1983. This study associates regeneration to the fact that some areas difficult to cultivate were despised, thanks to tougher laws and a bigger awareness of the landowners.
To help degraded areas recover their former magnificence, the researcher suggested that Brazilian government should propose, in Johannesburg, the establishment of a worldwide network to protect those areas. ' While the untouched woods offer a steady carbon balance, the secondary forests can grow up and remove that gas from the atmosphere and so reduce global heating ', he explains. Only in the Amazon, there are 165,000 square kilometres of deforested and abandoned areas - a surface comparable to Acre state.
Saving the forest fragments
Another beneficial form of human intervention, emphasizes Paulo Nogueira-Neto, is the creation of conservation units. In Brazil, the officially protected area more than doubled in the last decade. The global growth maintained a similar rhythm. According to the World Commission of Protected Areas, they rose from 7,35 million to 13,2 million squared kilometres since 1990, scattered between 30,000 parks and reserves. It is true that many of these units were not effectively created, basically due to the huge amounts of money needed to control those areas and remove local populations. The increasing use of the environmental compensations system - a tax retained on major engineering works, around 0.5% of their total value, used to compensate their negative impacts and thus transferred to the closest conservation units - has helped to protect these areas. The new thermal power plants from Rio Grande do Sul are a good example, says the professor. The taxes paid by the entrepreneurs allowed the dispossession of National Park of São Joaquim's 30,000 hectares - the only region in Brazil where it snows - so that it could truly exist.
Nogueira-Neto also bets that an attitude change might guarantee success, in addition to official instruments, such as the Convention of the Biological Diversity, which imposes to each country the protection of its species, through the conservation of their habitats. Launched in the Earth Summit, in 1992, it entered into force less than two years later, thanks to the support of 183 nations. Brazil was the first one to sign it after the National Congress approval in February 1994. The document never obtained American support. Nogueira-Neto says what really matters is people's evolution. 'The Earth Summit generated in the population the desire to preserve its natural wealth ', says. 'Therefore, they will not only survive - but even prosper.'
The Carbon War
The Kyoto Protocol will succeed and the Earth heating rhythm will freeze. This will happen even if the US insist in keeping out of this game - despite their responsibility for one fourth of all the world carbon emissions, which form a gas layer in the atmosphere that doesn't allow heat to escape. This is the forecast made by Fabio Feldmann, executive secretary of the Brazilian Forum on Climate Changes. ' If Russia and Poland sign the Protocol - and I think this will happen soon - the document will enter into force even without the USA ', says Feldmann, that also coordinates Brazilian preparation for Rio+10. If this to happen, environmentalists will obtain an important victory, in Johannesburg, in one of the fiercest wars in modern diplomacy.
The Kyoto Protocol was launched in 1997, once there was evidence that practically no industrialized country had fulfilled the commitments established by the Convention on Climate Change: to control their emissions of carbon dioxide, ozone and nitrogen oxides, amongst others. These gases are produced mainly by modern activities -vehicles, industries and even cattle, which eliminates methane while ruminating. But, to enter into force, 55 countries must ratify the Protocol, including those responsible for, at the very least, 55% of the global emissions. And, till now, the USA refuses to sign it. There are, by now, very clear evidences that the world climate is changing. The 90's were the hottest years since temperature monitoring started, in 19th century. The 2,500 scientists work for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) have calculated that the temperature will still grow some 3 ºC more this century.
Some consequences of the heating are already visible. Munich Re, a German reinsurance company that systematically reviews indemnities paid for catastrophes associated with the climate, as tornados and sea-quakes, realized that, in the 90's, those phenomena caused expenses around US$ 608 billion worldwide - three fold the indemnities paid in the 80's. Moreover, the oceans' level rose from 10 to 20 centimetres since 1900. And tropical diseases linked to temperature, as malaria and yellow fever, have been occurring in regions where they were not registered previously.
Clean development
According to Feldmann, Americans have given hints that, during Rio+10, they intend to challenge principles established in Rio-92, as of the principle of common but differentiated responsibility: those who have polluted for a longer period have to make an extra effort. And the USA accepted this principle, says Feldmann, in 1992, when they signed the Convention on Climate Change, along with 164 other countries. Now, the American diplomats are demanding, for instance, that poor countries with significant economies, such as Brazil, China or India, also assume concrete goals of reduction. Since the beginning of the 90's, the United States broadened their carbon emissions in 18%, reaching 1.57 billion tons per year. 'President George W. Bush faces this question only from a domestic point of view', says Feldmann. ' If this standard is reproduced by the rest of the world, there is no possibility of global agreement.'
Not that the protocol, the way it is, might save the planet. ' Even if it defines these very clear goals, they are insufficient ', evaluates Feldmann. In 1990, the IPCC calculated that it would be necessary to cut 60% of the pollutant emissions to revert global heating. However, the Kyoto Protocol orders industrialized countries to cut an average of 5.2% of their emissions, comparing to 1990 levels, all along next ten years. These goals will become, certainly, tougher during the next decade, he says. ' When the climate changes starts to be more evident, public opinion's pressure will be enormous '. Brazil, like other developing countries, must make efforts so that its emissions stop growing up and must also produce an inventory of its emissions, which government intends to publish, with considerable delay, still before the Johannesburg meeting. This document will show that we are among the ten countries that emit more carbon, due to the Amazon deforestation. The Clean Development Mechanism (CDM), one of the main instruments of the Kyoto Protocol, allows companies and rich countries which were unable to reduce their emissions to the established goals sponsor forestry projects or the adoption of cleaner energies in developing countries. In exchange, the sponsor receives credits that can be traded as stock options. 'The CDM is a very creative instrument that allows migration of financial resources from the North to the South, in a way that might be beneficial to all ', says Feldmann. An instrument that, in the best scenario, could flood the Third World with US$ 30 billion in the next years.
Total Failure
Main complaints that will be herd in Johanesburg will certainly refer to the lack of financing for environmental projects. This is the forecast of Hélcio Marcelo de Souza, expert in Public Policies from the Institute of Socio-Economic Studies (Inesc), an NGO specialized in monitoring how governments manage their budgets. Many global financial mechanisms for sustainable development proposed during the Earth Summit never took off or remain far insufficient, according to Souza. ' Only 0.9% of all the resources spent by the Environment Ministry last year were offered by international sources ', he calculates. The reasons that explain this failure are several. Part of the responsibility lies on developed countries, which reduced their donations despite the promises made in Rio, when they agreed to be more generous. In 1992, the so-called Official Development Aid (ODA)- that is, the donations rich countries offer the poor countries - was around US$ 69 billion, which represents, in average, 0.33% of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of donor countries. During ECO-92, they committed to raise this aid to 0.7% of their GDPs. Since then, they acted in the opposite way, reducing even more this share. In 2000, ODA fell to US$ 53 billion, or 0.22% of the rich countries GDP. The US, for instance, sets aside only 0.10% of its wealth for its poorer cousins.
During the Earth Summit, the developed countries also promised to load the Global Environment Facility (GEF) - a fund conceived to finance projects in poor countries that might have a global positive impact. This money is managed by the World Bank and offered to initiatives that aim to reduce climate change, ocean pollution, the ozone layer depletion and the loss of forests and biodiversity. In its first decade, GEF distributed US$ 4,2 billion. It is not much, considering that the adoption of sustainable development by poor countries might cost US$ 600 billion per year, as it was estimated during the Earth Summit - including US$ 125 billion that should have been donated by developed countries. Thus, GEF's help was 30 times smaller than the amount effectively needed.
No counterpart
There are other explanations for the lack of money for the environmental agenda. According to Souza, the World Bank, a traditionally huge dispenser of financial resources to environment projects, decided to offer only technical help and advisory services, instead of money. Besides, since 1999, when official expenses had to shrink, the Brazilian government stopped offering its counterpart. Without this contribution, the foreign investments started to vanish, say the expert.
Along the last decade, no environmental project received more external aid in the country than the Pilot Program for the Protection of Tropical Forests in Brazil (PPG-7), considered the greater in its sort in the world. It has been just incorporated to federal policies in a permanent basis. Launched in Rio-92, it took off only by 1995, with a US$ 280 million budget. A significant part of these resources was sent to parks and other conservation units in the Amazon and to forest resources management projects. However, according to Hélcio de Souza, the increase of external donations is not enough to guarantee an effective environmental preservation. In his opinion, when the government decides to focus its economy in foreign commercial interests, it prevents sustainable development's expansion. 'The decision of stimulating soy beans exports - and thus expand the plantations in the Amazon - is a good example of this', says the Inesc's expert.
In his evaluation, one of the hottest debates in the Johannesburg summit will be, precisely, on international trade and the foreign debt of developing countries. According to him, the sum of both internal and external debts interests paid in the last four-year-mandate of president Cardoso reach R$ 400 billion - the equivalent of a whole year of public budget. 'In consequence, he says, very little money remains in the country to promote projects that are fundamental in the environmental domain'.
The Planet Which Lost its Track
The day public administrators consider environment factors before making decisions is still far away, both in Brazil and abroad, despite all recommendations made by the Agenda 21. That is the evaluation of Pedro Jacobi, president of the Graduate Program of Environmental Sciences of the University of São Paulo, who worked in the making of the Brazilian Agenda 21.
This subject will be one of the main themes discussed in Johannesburg, since the conference is supposed to evaluate if Agenda 21 - probably the main international commitment born in the Earth Summit - was effectively adopted. This document is a sort of conduct code that each city, state or country should produce, to serve as a guide in public administration in order to promote sustainable development. According to the United Nations, over 6,000 cities are concluding their Agendas 21, and at least 80 countries keep sustainable development councils in charge of producing the national version of this document.
The process itself started to take off consistently in the last four years. In 1997, only 1,800 cities were involved in this effort. Brazil just concluded its own document, whose production listened to 40,000 people, who presented 6,000 proposals in several public audiences. The result was a volume with hundreds of pages, presented to president Cardoso last June. The local and state documents are also burning new. From Petrolina, in the Northeast region, to Campo Grande, right in the middle of Brazil, at least three-dozen initiatives are under discussion.
Agenda 21 discusses from the population growth and social inequalities to de environment impacts of transportation, electric generation, agriculture and industrialization. ' There is a crazy amount of information taken into consideration ', explains Jacobi. ' It is so ambitious that it risks to fail'. He compares this document to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights - but in a longer and more complex version. 'Agenda 21 has a symbolic importance. But it must include environmental education and society mobilization. Otherwise, it will be only a bureaucratic device ', says.
Less than 1 dollar per day
Jacobi pays his tribute to documents produced by the city of Rio and the Ribeira Valley region, in the south of São Paulo state. On the other hand, he considers the Agenda 21 produced in the city of São Paulo quite frustrating, because it was not sufficiently discussed with citizens. 'Anyway, it is even more important to have consistent sustainable development programs, such as those adopted by Amapá state or the city of Ribeirão Pires, in the Greater São Paulo area, whose territory is 100% inside a protected area', he evaluates. In those cases, having a formal Agenda 21 turned out to be of lesser importance.
Jacobi notes, though, that these efforts are exceptions; public administrations normally don't incorporate the environmental vision. 'The economic aspects always prevail and environment continues to be seen as a minor and futile question', he says. That is why governments frequently opt to react after damage already happened - cleaning rivers or the soil - instead of investing in impact reduction.
Worldwide indicators prove that the management of the planet continues so problematic as much as by the time of Rio-92. Then, the 1% richest Brazilians had 13% of the overall national income. This did not change. In a global level, poverty also persists. Today, 1,2 billion of people live with less than one dollar per day. It is practically the same amount registered one decade ago. In this period, 800 million babies were born to the planet.
The good news is that they will have a better scholarity and life expectancy than their parents. In the beginning of the 90's, life expectancy of an average Brazilian was of 65,75 years. Today, according to the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE), we live, in average, 68,8 years. Moreover, in the same period, the number of children that die in their first years in the country fell from 44 to 34 in thousand new-borns.
According to Jacobi, hope lays in a solid Agenda 21 solids and in a stronger participation of civil society. 'We have never had so many NGOs networks putting pressure on the public policies and articulating the resistance against inadequate government actions', he says. The professor mentions networks that advocate in favour of the Amazon, the Atlantic Rainforest and the savannas or against big hydropower plants. Most of them not even existed one decade ago. To Jacobi, little by little, that is how the world administrators' attitude will finally change.
The Path that Led to the Conference
The Earth Summit, as Eco-92 is also known, was the biggest meeting of heads of State and government in History. From the Cuban Fidel Castro and George Bush, father of the current American president, who refused to sign the Convention of Biological Diversity, alleging that he could not allow 'environmental extremism to harm the United States'. ' Beyond the 108 presidents and prime ministers, the Earth Summit joined more than 20,000 members of civil society, in a parallel event. Environmentalists, religious and minorities leaderships and social activists promoted their own debates and produced several unofficial documents. Their motto: 'think globally, act locally '. At least 9,000 journalists from all around the planet witnessed two weeks of discussions and the birth of three documents that became the main environmental references in the following years: the conventions of Biological Diversity and Climate Change and Agenda 21.
Y2K as a goal
Despite its importance, the Earth Summit was not the true beginning of the international effort to guarantee the planet's future. The first big conference organized by the United Nations to discuss conflicts between environment and development occurred 20 years earlier, in Stockholm. One of the main products of that meeting was the creation of the United Nations Commission on Environment and Development, led by Gro Harlem Brundtland, then prime minister of Norway and presently director-general of the World Heath Organization. The commission published, in 1987, the report Our Common Future, that it considered environmental strategies in the long run to 'reach a sustainable development by the year 2000 and further'.
Johannesburg shall restart some discussions that were launched in Stockholm and search forms to implement the conventions born in Rio. ' We have to establish concrete goals and define financial sources so that the meeting doesn't convert into Rio-less-20 ', says Fabio Feldmann, who coordinates the federal government efforts towards the conference. In his opinion, the meeting shouldn't be excessively focused in African problems and poverty, as it seems to be the tendency. This was an effective risk, reduced when Latin American launched an initiative that represents the subcontinent view, according to Feldmann. ' Latin America's example inspired East Europe and Asia, that also presented their own documents, changing the focus of this discussion.'
A part from catching up themes from the previous conferences, Rio+10 must introduce some new discussions. One of them is global governance - the capacity of integrating global subjects into national and local policies. 'It is hard for parliaments to understand climate change or biodiversity loss, for instance ', Feldmann says. In his opinion, another important subject in the conference will be multilateralism - that is, the distribution of the global power, which is very concentrated in the United States nowadays. ' If the Rio+10 summit fails, this might be the end of the great international conferences cycle, making clear the United Nations difficulties to act ', he says. 'The very role of the UN will be a matter for debate.'
Johannesburg: An end to brutal development or a beginning to sustainable poverty?
Development or food security: Africa caught between a rock and a hard place
By Mr Sena Alouka, Online magazine Coordination.sud.org
The Reuters - IUCN Environmental Media Award 2002, Regional Winner: French-speaking Africa.
'I can only stay rich if poor countries stay poor'
René Dumont
When looking forward to see what the year 2000 might be like, Emmanuel Berthelot wrote: 'Everyone will be tending livestock'. That fairly firm belief he voiced shows how technological changes were supposed to bring us food security. Today, we are all well aware that more than a billion of our fellow men, the poor, may not yet have had anything to eat today. Their only mistake is to have been born in a world prey to men who are not just driven by selfish ambition but who show no gratitude to the earth which feeds them. Men who woke up to a planet giving more and more cause for concern and who realised that their own interests were at risk. Men who were forced to invent nebulous machinery to ensure that they could keep on doing what they do best: raking in more and more money. And, because they were afraid of being labelled dictators or usurpers, they (the super decision-makers) evinced, sorry, convinced representatives of under-developing countries to attend their deliberations.
In Côte d'Ivoire they have a saying: 'what business does a thief have at a policeman's funeral?' For better or for worse, worried that they might miss an opportunity to have their voices heard, they went along with their own personal agendas, even though they might not necessarily have understood what it was all about. You can imagine the result.
When it was all over, the scales fell from their eyes: they realised it was all a sham! Everything was signed, sealed and delivered well in advance. They were just guests at the wedding of a demon and a princess, business and development. It was a foregone conclusion: everyone could tell which of the ill-matched spouses would win the tug o' war.
That's what happened at the Johannesburg summit!
A world of contradictions
Oh, I almost forgot Johannesburg, the city whose streets are paved with gold, the most reforested city in the world. It was no accident that Johannesburg was chosen to host the summit: the idea was to show that when individuals pool their forces they can beat anything. By the way, did they manage to beat apartheid? Far from it! Let's have a look!
Take just a few steps outside the airport to see that apartheid was only abolished on paper. What a show: social injustice and democracy rubbing shoulders together, the teeming throng and the prim and proper working together, exclusion and patriotism living together, preening with pride. Watching black and white soldiers together on duty was a rare sight that few were invited to watch. Even when blacks and whites are chosen to go on duty, they've hardly arrived when our coloured brethren stand apart. They never work together. And you talk about sustainable development! Apparently the new leaders are practising a whites-out policy, but no one seems to notice!
It's hardly surprising: the world is full of striking contradictions! The Johannesburg summit showed how utopian the woolly idea of sustainable development really is. Reducing or increasing the number of poor people, that was where the summit failed. And why was that? Too many contradictions, not enough realism!
Think about it: how can you expect to talk about poverty without inviting along the experts, the poor themselves? At the Global Forum, the in-place for civil society (what civil society?) everything was set up to ensure that once again those most concerned would miss out on development. That was where 'the peoples' were supposed to get together. Unfortunately, though, it was obvious that many 'peoples' were unable to attend because of the registration fees, 700 Rand (about 70 euros).
By way of example, a group of village people from Lesotho travelled miles only to have the door slammed in their faces, to their great disappointment. Of course, there are plenty of opportunities to talk about poverty, except that the poor never get to tell their side of it. There are hundreds of opportunities to talk about enterprise responsibility and about the threat to food security. And when you're tired after a long debate, the only refreshments available are Coca-Cola and fast food 'made in Canada'. Instead of just for once eating traditional non genetically-modified dishes or drinking organic fruit juice produced by local farmers, people stick to Coca-Cola and other processed foods for economic reasons, despite their undesirable effects. A group of well-prepared fishermen brought along their own food for their own consumption, but they weren't allowed to take it into the building, for 'health reasons'. That was so obviously done to protect the fast-food companies who had hired space at the exhibition.
An hour's drive away at, Sandton, the venue of the official discussions, there were plenty of contradictions on show. When you look at the closed sessions (democracy...), the papers being distributed everywhere (recycling...) or the triple entry badges (participation...), you wonder exactly what lies behind all the preaching. Even the notorious major groups (youth, women, indigenous peoples, local authorities, NGOs, farmers, enterprise...) who were supposed to have a positive influence on the debate with their joint positions had no effect in the end. Every minute yet another declaration was cooked up by small groups run by different centres of interest. Everyone who was anyone was on display in Johannesburg!
The most striking feature was the split in the youth 'caucus'. First of all, at the International Youth Summit held a few days before the official summit, the so-called 'leaders of tomorrow' came away empty handed, unable to agree on a common statement. At one point it became clear that interest groups were also fighting for the helm of the ship of youth. Here's a good one: a young man from Zimbabwe wanted 'land to be redistributed on the basis of national laws', while young Europeans wanted it done 'on the basis of human rights'. That would have protected their big white brothers in Zimbabwe. What a mess it all was: disorderly behaviour, lack of respect, people getting drunk... you can easily imagine the rest.
Even more alarming was the final Youth declaration which really put the cat among the pigeons as the session came to a close. Just as a girl was putting the finishing touches to the declaration she'd received a mandate to draft (since the regional drafting strategy had fallen through), another declaration was submitted to the Global Forum on behalf of other young people, mainly from the South, who also threatened to stage a rival press conference if their declaration was not read out in plenary. And that's how tomorrow's artists think they're going to take over from those they accuse of presenting a disunited front. Just like the Pharisees (the teachers of the law) at the time of Jesus who said, 'Do what we say, not what we do'.
Obviously, these differing viewpoints show how mature and determined our young people are. Nevertheless, it's important for us to take a step back and take a critical look at ourselves, to realise that our fine ideas for saving the world are strewn with contradictions. That should bring us back down to earth. And, more importantly, teach us something for the future. As Gandhi said, we have to start by 'Being the change we want to see'.
But what did we really get out of the Johannesburg summit? We can start to find an answer if we look at the double-talk from the Heads of State. As usual, there is a clear discrepancy between the high-flown rhetoric and the language of the official documents (final declaration and programme of action). Almost all the speeches called for clear objectives and a precise time frame, but there is no mention of anything like that in the documents that all the countries signed up to. Don't they even realise? The President admitted as much in his statement - 'We can't say we didn't know'- some people thought that was a contradiction.
Further, how come Australia, which waited for Earth Day to announce that it wouldn't sign the Kyoto Protocol, was chosen to chair consultations on the climate? How come Canada, the very country which opposed the ban on trade in toxic wastes under the Basel Convention and which thwarted negotiations on the Stockholm Convention on persistent organic pollutants, was chosen to umpire consultations on chemicals? And when you think that Italian President Silvio Berlusconi made a whole speech without even mentioning the word 'environment' you really doubt the good faith and the ability of human beings to manage human affairs.
Was Johannesburg a success? 'Yes, for our friends in the North', according to Clayton, a young indigenous person from the United States. As for the southern countries, particularly Africa, references such as 'the cradle of mankind' and the many promises made should be enough to make us understand that 'life is a job that you have to do standing up', as Emile Chartier put it. Well, back to the drawing board.
Whose fault was it, anyway? Everyone's pointing the finger of blame at the United States...
It is true that the world's biggest polluters have responsibilities and debts to the rest of the world. Of course, it's naughty of them not to ratify the Kyoto Protocol.
But in fact the rich countries are not the only cause of the problem. Many developing countries also opposed the definition of clear objectives and time frames, for fear of reprisals in case of failure. And indeed, the United States and the G 77 had similar views on most of the items under discussion at the summit. You don't have to look too far: the major OPEC countries hold the reins of power in the G 77. And all good deeds conceal unavowed interests. Does Germany support renewable energy out of the goodness of its heart, or because of the vast export potential of its renewal resources industry? Otherwise, how could you explain the fact that their coal subsidies are the highest in the world? If Europe hadn't threatened to stop importing African countries' products in case of GMO contamination would African countries have opposed GMOs? Finally, if Europe really supported reductions in farm subsidies, why did it threaten to pull out of the negotiations when the G77 had managed to get them to the contact group table, and why did it refuse to revise the common agricultural policy (CAP)? Good question!
I wonder whether the hundreds of statements (like the common positions of the Johannesburg collective) really achieved their objective. Never mind! Johannesburg may have been a disappointment, but it wasn't all in vain. We now understand better that negotiations will never progress as long as they threaten the sustainability of the interests of the countries in the North. Development is fine, but we'll have to see about sustainable…
What I believe
We need to rethink the world, go back to the drawing board with our strategies. Europe must stop aping the United States, and Africa must produce its own development pattern. (I doubt whether NEPAD is a trial run. But I remain open to persuasion)
Man must refocus his priorities on the well-being of the community. Think globally but act locally. As Gandhi said, 'Nobody should underestimate the force of individuals to change the world (for world, read environment)'. We must forget the alarming statistics (for example, that Europe and the United States spend 1.7 billion Euros a year on their cats and dogs whereas all the newborn babies in developing countries only have 1.3 billion per year to survive) and think of the fact that part of the salary paid to Kofi Annan (and other human rights defenders) would be enough to educate thousands of Ghanaian children: and why not? It would be enough if compensation funds were not gobbled up by those who hold the keys to the safe, or if the poor farmer received his usual amount of money regardless of world coffee prices. However ephemeral, the solution to our problems is within our grasp. So let's try to improve the quality of life for a few populations while we still have the means to act. No more motions, no more declarations: we have to do something. We are hungry!
By Mr Sena Alouka, Online magazine Coordination.sud.org
The Reuters - IUCN Environmental Media Award 2002, Regional Winner: French-speaking Africa.
'I can only stay rich if poor countries stay poor'
René Dumont
When looking forward to see what the year 2000 might be like, Emmanuel Berthelot wrote: 'Everyone will be tending livestock'. That fairly firm belief he voiced shows how technological changes were supposed to bring us food security. Today, we are all well aware that more than a billion of our fellow men, the poor, may not yet have had anything to eat today. Their only mistake is to have been born in a world prey to men who are not just driven by selfish ambition but who show no gratitude to the earth which feeds them. Men who woke up to a planet giving more and more cause for concern and who realised that their own interests were at risk. Men who were forced to invent nebulous machinery to ensure that they could keep on doing what they do best: raking in more and more money. And, because they were afraid of being labelled dictators or usurpers, they (the super decision-makers) evinced, sorry, convinced representatives of under-developing countries to attend their deliberations.
In Côte d'Ivoire they have a saying: 'what business does a thief have at a policeman's funeral?' For better or for worse, worried that they might miss an opportunity to have their voices heard, they went along with their own personal agendas, even though they might not necessarily have understood what it was all about. You can imagine the result.
When it was all over, the scales fell from their eyes: they realised it was all a sham! Everything was signed, sealed and delivered well in advance. They were just guests at the wedding of a demon and a princess, business and development. It was a foregone conclusion: everyone could tell which of the ill-matched spouses would win the tug o' war.
That's what happened at the Johannesburg summit!
A world of contradictions
Oh, I almost forgot Johannesburg, the city whose streets are paved with gold, the most reforested city in the world. It was no accident that Johannesburg was chosen to host the summit: the idea was to show that when individuals pool their forces they can beat anything. By the way, did they manage to beat apartheid? Far from it! Let's have a look!
Take just a few steps outside the airport to see that apartheid was only abolished on paper. What a show: social injustice and democracy rubbing shoulders together, the teeming throng and the prim and proper working together, exclusion and patriotism living together, preening with pride. Watching black and white soldiers together on duty was a rare sight that few were invited to watch. Even when blacks and whites are chosen to go on duty, they've hardly arrived when our coloured brethren stand apart. They never work together. And you talk about sustainable development! Apparently the new leaders are practising a whites-out policy, but no one seems to notice!
It's hardly surprising: the world is full of striking contradictions! The Johannesburg summit showed how utopian the woolly idea of sustainable development really is. Reducing or increasing the number of poor people, that was where the summit failed. And why was that? Too many contradictions, not enough realism!
Think about it: how can you expect to talk about poverty without inviting along the experts, the poor themselves? At the Global Forum, the in-place for civil society (what civil society?) everything was set up to ensure that once again those most concerned would miss out on development. That was where 'the peoples' were supposed to get together. Unfortunately, though, it was obvious that many 'peoples' were unable to attend because of the registration fees, 700 Rand (about 70 euros).
By way of example, a group of village people from Lesotho travelled miles only to have the door slammed in their faces, to their great disappointment. Of course, there are plenty of opportunities to talk about poverty, except that the poor never get to tell their side of it. There are hundreds of opportunities to talk about enterprise responsibility and about the threat to food security. And when you're tired after a long debate, the only refreshments available are Coca-Cola and fast food 'made in Canada'. Instead of just for once eating traditional non genetically-modified dishes or drinking organic fruit juice produced by local farmers, people stick to Coca-Cola and other processed foods for economic reasons, despite their undesirable effects. A group of well-prepared fishermen brought along their own food for their own consumption, but they weren't allowed to take it into the building, for 'health reasons'. That was so obviously done to protect the fast-food companies who had hired space at the exhibition.
An hour's drive away at, Sandton, the venue of the official discussions, there were plenty of contradictions on show. When you look at the closed sessions (democracy...), the papers being distributed everywhere (recycling...) or the triple entry badges (participation...), you wonder exactly what lies behind all the preaching. Even the notorious major groups (youth, women, indigenous peoples, local authorities, NGOs, farmers, enterprise...) who were supposed to have a positive influence on the debate with their joint positions had no effect in the end. Every minute yet another declaration was cooked up by small groups run by different centres of interest. Everyone who was anyone was on display in Johannesburg!
The most striking feature was the split in the youth 'caucus'. First of all, at the International Youth Summit held a few days before the official summit, the so-called 'leaders of tomorrow' came away empty handed, unable to agree on a common statement. At one point it became clear that interest groups were also fighting for the helm of the ship of youth. Here's a good one: a young man from Zimbabwe wanted 'land to be redistributed on the basis of national laws', while young Europeans wanted it done 'on the basis of human rights'. That would have protected their big white brothers in Zimbabwe. What a mess it all was: disorderly behaviour, lack of respect, people getting drunk... you can easily imagine the rest.
Even more alarming was the final Youth declaration which really put the cat among the pigeons as the session came to a close. Just as a girl was putting the finishing touches to the declaration she'd received a mandate to draft (since the regional drafting strategy had fallen through), another declaration was submitted to the Global Forum on behalf of other young people, mainly from the South, who also threatened to stage a rival press conference if their declaration was not read out in plenary. And that's how tomorrow's artists think they're going to take over from those they accuse of presenting a disunited front. Just like the Pharisees (the teachers of the law) at the time of Jesus who said, 'Do what we say, not what we do'.
Obviously, these differing viewpoints show how mature and determined our young people are. Nevertheless, it's important for us to take a step back and take a critical look at ourselves, to realise that our fine ideas for saving the world are strewn with contradictions. That should bring us back down to earth. And, more importantly, teach us something for the future. As Gandhi said, we have to start by 'Being the change we want to see'.
But what did we really get out of the Johannesburg summit? We can start to find an answer if we look at the double-talk from the Heads of State. As usual, there is a clear discrepancy between the high-flown rhetoric and the language of the official documents (final declaration and programme of action). Almost all the speeches called for clear objectives and a precise time frame, but there is no mention of anything like that in the documents that all the countries signed up to. Don't they even realise? The President admitted as much in his statement - 'We can't say we didn't know'- some people thought that was a contradiction.
Further, how come Australia, which waited for Earth Day to announce that it wouldn't sign the Kyoto Protocol, was chosen to chair consultations on the climate? How come Canada, the very country which opposed the ban on trade in toxic wastes under the Basel Convention and which thwarted negotiations on the Stockholm Convention on persistent organic pollutants, was chosen to umpire consultations on chemicals? And when you think that Italian President Silvio Berlusconi made a whole speech without even mentioning the word 'environment' you really doubt the good faith and the ability of human beings to manage human affairs.
Was Johannesburg a success? 'Yes, for our friends in the North', according to Clayton, a young indigenous person from the United States. As for the southern countries, particularly Africa, references such as 'the cradle of mankind' and the many promises made should be enough to make us understand that 'life is a job that you have to do standing up', as Emile Chartier put it. Well, back to the drawing board.
Whose fault was it, anyway? Everyone's pointing the finger of blame at the United States...
It is true that the world's biggest polluters have responsibilities and debts to the rest of the world. Of course, it's naughty of them not to ratify the Kyoto Protocol.
But in fact the rich countries are not the only cause of the problem. Many developing countries also opposed the definition of clear objectives and time frames, for fear of reprisals in case of failure. And indeed, the United States and the G 77 had similar views on most of the items under discussion at the summit. You don't have to look too far: the major OPEC countries hold the reins of power in the G 77. And all good deeds conceal unavowed interests. Does Germany support renewable energy out of the goodness of its heart, or because of the vast export potential of its renewal resources industry? Otherwise, how could you explain the fact that their coal subsidies are the highest in the world? If Europe hadn't threatened to stop importing African countries' products in case of GMO contamination would African countries have opposed GMOs? Finally, if Europe really supported reductions in farm subsidies, why did it threaten to pull out of the negotiations when the G77 had managed to get them to the contact group table, and why did it refuse to revise the common agricultural policy (CAP)? Good question!
I wonder whether the hundreds of statements (like the common positions of the Johannesburg collective) really achieved their objective. Never mind! Johannesburg may have been a disappointment, but it wasn't all in vain. We now understand better that negotiations will never progress as long as they threaten the sustainability of the interests of the countries in the North. Development is fine, but we'll have to see about sustainable…
What I believe
We need to rethink the world, go back to the drawing board with our strategies. Europe must stop aping the United States, and Africa must produce its own development pattern. (I doubt whether NEPAD is a trial run. But I remain open to persuasion)
Man must refocus his priorities on the well-being of the community. Think globally but act locally. As Gandhi said, 'Nobody should underestimate the force of individuals to change the world (for world, read environment)'. We must forget the alarming statistics (for example, that Europe and the United States spend 1.7 billion Euros a year on their cats and dogs whereas all the newborn babies in developing countries only have 1.3 billion per year to survive) and think of the fact that part of the salary paid to Kofi Annan (and other human rights defenders) would be enough to educate thousands of Ghanaian children: and why not? It would be enough if compensation funds were not gobbled up by those who hold the keys to the safe, or if the poor farmer received his usual amount of money regardless of world coffee prices. However ephemeral, the solution to our problems is within our grasp. So let's try to improve the quality of life for a few populations while we still have the means to act. No more motions, no more declarations: we have to do something. We are hungry!
People, Planet and Prosperity
By Ms Julienne du Toit, Sawubona Magazine.
The Reuters - IUCN Environmental Media Award 2002, Regional Winner: English-speaking Africa.
The World Summit on Sustainable Development promises to be the kind of Earth-changing event best understood in hindsight. Julienne du Toit spotlights a few issues.
There are few things as confusing as a UN convention. Even if you are allowed into a session, and manage to figure out the how the simultaneous translation headphone thingies work, it is like bearing witness to a highly elaborate ritual carried out in an arcane language that only vaguely resembles your own.
For many, the only hope lies in the Earth Negotiations Bulletin, made up by a bunch of eager beavers from the Canadian-based International Institute of Sustainable Development who, god help them, devote their lives to unraveling the inscrutable utterings of UN delegates on the subjects of environment and development.
Otherworldly as the process may seem, the new global deal that 65 000 people are to negotiate in the edgy city of Johannesburg is breathtaking in its sheer audacity. Between 26 August and 4 September, people will be coming together from all over the world, in good faith and bad, to take measure of all the global issues - social, environmental and economic - that most of us agree are wrongly managed, and attempt to set them right. You simply have to respect and applaud that ambition. These inscrutable delegates, anonymous activists and world leaders are attempting something historic, something noble, something that could change our world for the better.
There are enough depressing facts on environment and global development to terminally sadden you, and the broader issues being faced are monumentally more complex than can be given justice here, but they boil down to this: Are we humans wise enough to change so that there can be some for all forever? Or are we willing to carry on this way of life, which the scientists assure us will deliver a future within 30 years that looks uncannily like Mad Max?
So this is an interesting gathering, and Africa, strengthened by the new African Union, will be making the most of its home-ground advantage.
For once, the developing countries are bringing the fight to the industrialised nations. That's not surprising, since the poor have the least to lose and the most to gain from this battle. It's the rich countries in North America and Europe who stand to lose the most. Considering that any meaningful deal means cutting deep into the sensitive fat of the industrial nations, it's a miracle that 73% of the deal has been pretty much agreed upon during the four preparatory meetings in New York and Bali.
A big part of the world's problem is that 20% of its population is stick thin, dying of starvation, AIDS and preventable diseases, living on the most resource-poor and polluted parts of the planet with no way up. The 20% at the other end of the scale is eating up 80% of the world's resources, commanding most of its money, and dying of obesity, cancer, heart disease, diabetes and strokes. The people in between, around four billion, are living an almost sustainable life. These are the people that use bicycles and public transport a lot, live mostly on grains and vegetables and use modest amounts of energy.
They're not the problem. It's the two billion on either end that are making the world an increasingly unstable and dangerous place. The poor have nothing left to lose, always a dangerous position, and the rich have everything.
Everyone agrees that poverty alleviation should be high on the agenda, that care for resources and care for people cannot be separated. But for the industrial nations, this begs the big question: does it also mean wealth alleviation?
Do the rich (and that probably means you) have to give up their way of life? Perhaps not entirely. UNEP and the Worldwatch Institute say much can be improved with a tenfold reduction in consumption, and much of this is could be done by recycling, not necessarily a lowering of living standards, so it's just concerted action that's needed.
The big sticking points in the run-up to WSSD have been with the money. No surprise there. Money also points to where human priorities are.
Recently a whole host of organisations, World Health Organisation, the UN Development Programme, the World Bank and Oxfam, calculated the total cost of implementing the Millennium Development Goals (which aim to halve the world's poverty by 2015). The lowest quote came in at $50 billion and the highest at $100 billion a year.
If the developed nations of the world had kept their promise made ten years ago to give 0,7% of their GDPs towards Official Development Assistance, we would have that amount and change every year. But most fell far short, and instead, the UNDP reports that the world spends $780 billion on war and military forces every year. That's $65 billion a month, or $2 billion a day spent on ensuring there is no sustainable development, since stability and security are prerequisites.
The way the world is run may also be faulty. The Worldwatch Institute has warned that the world's current economic model is, used by developing as well as industrialised nations, is too materials-intensive, driven by fossil-fuel, based on mass consumption and mass disposal, and oriented primarily towards economic growth - with insufficient regard for meeting people's needs. In other words, it is unsustainable, and yet vast tracts of money are going towards propping it up.
Greenpeace estimates that governments currently subsidise fossil fuels to the tune of $250 to $350 billion a year, money that could more constructively go towards promoting renewable sources of energy. The EU subsidised fishing industry has practically wiped out the North Sea stocks.
And of course, there is the $360 billion spent annually on by industrialised countries in subsidising their rich farmers, a sum recently inflated even further by President George W. Bush. The Financial Times recently reported that a European cow receives twice as much in subsidies as a Third World farmer makes in a year.
Nobody would be saying too much about this massive waste of money, which facilitates all sorts of pesticide overuse and inappropriate land-use, except that it's also costing the developing world $100 billion a year in lost revenue - overseas markets are effectively closed to its agricultural produce.
Yet Oxfam points out that if Africa, south Asia and South America were to each increase their share of world exports by 1%, the resulting gains could lift 128 million people out of grinding poverty.
It is this sticky Gordian knot of money and self-interest that WSSD could spend most of its time trying to undo. The rest of the world's problems, including water and sanitation, energy, health, agriculture and food security, education and biodiversity, achieved a high degree of agreement at Bali.
But when it came to committing money, or wiping out perverse subsidies, or agreeing to technology transfers that would enable the developing world to leapfrog the hideously polluting industrial age, no one would sign. And yet it could be so much fun to use all our new knowledge and great new technology to put the planet together again.
Of course, all this vastly oversimplifies the formidable issues to be discussed at the World Summit, which nevertheless offers great hope for a human and planetary turning point. As National Geographic writer Rick Gore once put it:
"For the first time since life on Earth began four billion years ago, a living organism can begin to understand what is happening to this planet. We can see that the health of the species is interconnected, that if we let too many disappear, we will go too. For the first time, a living organism can consciously do something to halt a mass extinction. Perhaps most important, for the first time a living creature can gaze out across the species of the Earth and say: This is beautiful. I care. I will not let it go."
---------------------------
Boxes: THE EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
THE AGENDA
WSSD delegates will focus on issues relating to environment and human development, which pretty much covers everything on the planet, and will in some way be relevant to every living person.
The agenda of the developing world will broadly focus on poverty eradication, good global governance, economic development, fair trade and fair access to resources.
Europe is more focused on "green" issues, including genetically modified organisms, nuclear power and renewable energy sources.
America, if it remains true to form, will spend 10 days backpedalling.
IS THERE ANY GOOD NEWS?
Not enough has changed for the better since the last Earth Summit ten years ago in Rio de Janeiro. Quite the reverse, in fact.
But interestingly, in the past ten years the Internet and cell phones have arrived, and the world is talking to itself far more. This global interconnectedness stretches even to Africa, where cell phone users now number a startling 30 million in 2001, and climbing fast. The more we see ourselves as one, the better our decisions will be, surely.
Thanks to a concerted global effort in the past 15 years, UNEP scientists are predicting that the ozone hole will be back to pre-1980 levels by 2050.
Most of the world's nations have bought into Agenda 21, the framework that spells out in fine detail how to achieve sustainable development at all levels, from community, through national and regional, to global.
There are now at least 24 000 non-governmental organisations operating across international borders, four times as many as in 1992. They are providing some measure of representation for humans involved in almost every kind of activity, cause and issue on Earth.
And technological improvements have meant that there is less pollution associated with increased production. Already, 10% of Europe's energy sources are renewable.
WHAT IS SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT?
The Brundtland Report from the World Commission on Environment and Development in 1987 delivered this elegant definition: "Development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs."
The tricky part will be measuring that definition against every human activity and seeing them holistically. Ecosystems and natural resources sprawl across borders, as do all forms of development. Need we mention globalisation?
WHY THE BIG RUSH?
Humans have become a destructive force of nature. In June 2002, the National Academy of Sciences in Washington became the latest major Earth-watching organisation to warn that the consumption of forests, energy and land by humans now exceeds the rate at which earth can replenish itself. Right now, it takes the Earth 1,2 years to regenerate what people remove every year.
In other words, we are heading for a big time overdraft, with no clear way of paying it back, and at the moment, the poor are footing most of the bill. If Planet Earth were a company, shareholders and auditors would be clamouring for an overhaul of management.
SOME REASONS FOR CHANGE
" The assets of the three richest people in the world match the combined national economies of the poorest 48 countries.
" Only five times in the Earth's history has there been anything like today's mass extinction of species. The last wave of extinction, 65 million years ago, obliterated the dinosaurs.
" One fifth of the world's people live on a dollar or less a day, even as the world's wealthy suffer from symptoms of excess, like obesity.
" The 1990s were the hottest decade since measurements began in the nineteenth century. Sea levels have risen nearly 20 centimetres in the past 100 years.
" Unless fossil fuel use slows dramatically, the Earth's average temperature could rise by 6 degrees Celsius within the next 100 years.
" Most materials in industrial nations are used only once before being discarded.
" Nearly 3 600 children die every day from preventable diarrhoea, mostly caused by contaminated water. That's the equivalent of six jumbo jet planes full of children crashing daily.
" The world's economic system depends massively on the overconsumptive habits of Americans, two thirds of whom now face heightened risks of cancer because of exposure to toxins.
" At least 70% of all fisheries are depleted or fully exploited.
" Because of overexploitation of groundwater, aquifers have been overpumped to the point where the sustained production of 10% of the global grain supply is at risk.
(Source: Wordwatch Institute's State of the World 2002, UNEP, UNDP, EPA
The Reuters - IUCN Environmental Media Award 2002, Regional Winner: English-speaking Africa.
The World Summit on Sustainable Development promises to be the kind of Earth-changing event best understood in hindsight. Julienne du Toit spotlights a few issues.
There are few things as confusing as a UN convention. Even if you are allowed into a session, and manage to figure out the how the simultaneous translation headphone thingies work, it is like bearing witness to a highly elaborate ritual carried out in an arcane language that only vaguely resembles your own.
For many, the only hope lies in the Earth Negotiations Bulletin, made up by a bunch of eager beavers from the Canadian-based International Institute of Sustainable Development who, god help them, devote their lives to unraveling the inscrutable utterings of UN delegates on the subjects of environment and development.
Otherworldly as the process may seem, the new global deal that 65 000 people are to negotiate in the edgy city of Johannesburg is breathtaking in its sheer audacity. Between 26 August and 4 September, people will be coming together from all over the world, in good faith and bad, to take measure of all the global issues - social, environmental and economic - that most of us agree are wrongly managed, and attempt to set them right. You simply have to respect and applaud that ambition. These inscrutable delegates, anonymous activists and world leaders are attempting something historic, something noble, something that could change our world for the better.
There are enough depressing facts on environment and global development to terminally sadden you, and the broader issues being faced are monumentally more complex than can be given justice here, but they boil down to this: Are we humans wise enough to change so that there can be some for all forever? Or are we willing to carry on this way of life, which the scientists assure us will deliver a future within 30 years that looks uncannily like Mad Max?
So this is an interesting gathering, and Africa, strengthened by the new African Union, will be making the most of its home-ground advantage.
For once, the developing countries are bringing the fight to the industrialised nations. That's not surprising, since the poor have the least to lose and the most to gain from this battle. It's the rich countries in North America and Europe who stand to lose the most. Considering that any meaningful deal means cutting deep into the sensitive fat of the industrial nations, it's a miracle that 73% of the deal has been pretty much agreed upon during the four preparatory meetings in New York and Bali.
A big part of the world's problem is that 20% of its population is stick thin, dying of starvation, AIDS and preventable diseases, living on the most resource-poor and polluted parts of the planet with no way up. The 20% at the other end of the scale is eating up 80% of the world's resources, commanding most of its money, and dying of obesity, cancer, heart disease, diabetes and strokes. The people in between, around four billion, are living an almost sustainable life. These are the people that use bicycles and public transport a lot, live mostly on grains and vegetables and use modest amounts of energy.
They're not the problem. It's the two billion on either end that are making the world an increasingly unstable and dangerous place. The poor have nothing left to lose, always a dangerous position, and the rich have everything.
Everyone agrees that poverty alleviation should be high on the agenda, that care for resources and care for people cannot be separated. But for the industrial nations, this begs the big question: does it also mean wealth alleviation?
Do the rich (and that probably means you) have to give up their way of life? Perhaps not entirely. UNEP and the Worldwatch Institute say much can be improved with a tenfold reduction in consumption, and much of this is could be done by recycling, not necessarily a lowering of living standards, so it's just concerted action that's needed.
The big sticking points in the run-up to WSSD have been with the money. No surprise there. Money also points to where human priorities are.
Recently a whole host of organisations, World Health Organisation, the UN Development Programme, the World Bank and Oxfam, calculated the total cost of implementing the Millennium Development Goals (which aim to halve the world's poverty by 2015). The lowest quote came in at $50 billion and the highest at $100 billion a year.
If the developed nations of the world had kept their promise made ten years ago to give 0,7% of their GDPs towards Official Development Assistance, we would have that amount and change every year. But most fell far short, and instead, the UNDP reports that the world spends $780 billion on war and military forces every year. That's $65 billion a month, or $2 billion a day spent on ensuring there is no sustainable development, since stability and security are prerequisites.
The way the world is run may also be faulty. The Worldwatch Institute has warned that the world's current economic model is, used by developing as well as industrialised nations, is too materials-intensive, driven by fossil-fuel, based on mass consumption and mass disposal, and oriented primarily towards economic growth - with insufficient regard for meeting people's needs. In other words, it is unsustainable, and yet vast tracts of money are going towards propping it up.
Greenpeace estimates that governments currently subsidise fossil fuels to the tune of $250 to $350 billion a year, money that could more constructively go towards promoting renewable sources of energy. The EU subsidised fishing industry has practically wiped out the North Sea stocks.
And of course, there is the $360 billion spent annually on by industrialised countries in subsidising their rich farmers, a sum recently inflated even further by President George W. Bush. The Financial Times recently reported that a European cow receives twice as much in subsidies as a Third World farmer makes in a year.
Nobody would be saying too much about this massive waste of money, which facilitates all sorts of pesticide overuse and inappropriate land-use, except that it's also costing the developing world $100 billion a year in lost revenue - overseas markets are effectively closed to its agricultural produce.
Yet Oxfam points out that if Africa, south Asia and South America were to each increase their share of world exports by 1%, the resulting gains could lift 128 million people out of grinding poverty.
It is this sticky Gordian knot of money and self-interest that WSSD could spend most of its time trying to undo. The rest of the world's problems, including water and sanitation, energy, health, agriculture and food security, education and biodiversity, achieved a high degree of agreement at Bali.
But when it came to committing money, or wiping out perverse subsidies, or agreeing to technology transfers that would enable the developing world to leapfrog the hideously polluting industrial age, no one would sign. And yet it could be so much fun to use all our new knowledge and great new technology to put the planet together again.
Of course, all this vastly oversimplifies the formidable issues to be discussed at the World Summit, which nevertheless offers great hope for a human and planetary turning point. As National Geographic writer Rick Gore once put it:
"For the first time since life on Earth began four billion years ago, a living organism can begin to understand what is happening to this planet. We can see that the health of the species is interconnected, that if we let too many disappear, we will go too. For the first time, a living organism can consciously do something to halt a mass extinction. Perhaps most important, for the first time a living creature can gaze out across the species of the Earth and say: This is beautiful. I care. I will not let it go."
---------------------------
Boxes: THE EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
THE AGENDA
WSSD delegates will focus on issues relating to environment and human development, which pretty much covers everything on the planet, and will in some way be relevant to every living person.
The agenda of the developing world will broadly focus on poverty eradication, good global governance, economic development, fair trade and fair access to resources.
Europe is more focused on "green" issues, including genetically modified organisms, nuclear power and renewable energy sources.
America, if it remains true to form, will spend 10 days backpedalling.
IS THERE ANY GOOD NEWS?
Not enough has changed for the better since the last Earth Summit ten years ago in Rio de Janeiro. Quite the reverse, in fact.
But interestingly, in the past ten years the Internet and cell phones have arrived, and the world is talking to itself far more. This global interconnectedness stretches even to Africa, where cell phone users now number a startling 30 million in 2001, and climbing fast. The more we see ourselves as one, the better our decisions will be, surely.
Thanks to a concerted global effort in the past 15 years, UNEP scientists are predicting that the ozone hole will be back to pre-1980 levels by 2050.
Most of the world's nations have bought into Agenda 21, the framework that spells out in fine detail how to achieve sustainable development at all levels, from community, through national and regional, to global.
There are now at least 24 000 non-governmental organisations operating across international borders, four times as many as in 1992. They are providing some measure of representation for humans involved in almost every kind of activity, cause and issue on Earth.
And technological improvements have meant that there is less pollution associated with increased production. Already, 10% of Europe's energy sources are renewable.
WHAT IS SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT?
The Brundtland Report from the World Commission on Environment and Development in 1987 delivered this elegant definition: "Development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs."
The tricky part will be measuring that definition against every human activity and seeing them holistically. Ecosystems and natural resources sprawl across borders, as do all forms of development. Need we mention globalisation?
WHY THE BIG RUSH?
Humans have become a destructive force of nature. In June 2002, the National Academy of Sciences in Washington became the latest major Earth-watching organisation to warn that the consumption of forests, energy and land by humans now exceeds the rate at which earth can replenish itself. Right now, it takes the Earth 1,2 years to regenerate what people remove every year.
In other words, we are heading for a big time overdraft, with no clear way of paying it back, and at the moment, the poor are footing most of the bill. If Planet Earth were a company, shareholders and auditors would be clamouring for an overhaul of management.
SOME REASONS FOR CHANGE
" The assets of the three richest people in the world match the combined national economies of the poorest 48 countries.
" Only five times in the Earth's history has there been anything like today's mass extinction of species. The last wave of extinction, 65 million years ago, obliterated the dinosaurs.
" One fifth of the world's people live on a dollar or less a day, even as the world's wealthy suffer from symptoms of excess, like obesity.
" The 1990s were the hottest decade since measurements began in the nineteenth century. Sea levels have risen nearly 20 centimetres in the past 100 years.
" Unless fossil fuel use slows dramatically, the Earth's average temperature could rise by 6 degrees Celsius within the next 100 years.
" Most materials in industrial nations are used only once before being discarded.
" Nearly 3 600 children die every day from preventable diarrhoea, mostly caused by contaminated water. That's the equivalent of six jumbo jet planes full of children crashing daily.
" The world's economic system depends massively on the overconsumptive habits of Americans, two thirds of whom now face heightened risks of cancer because of exposure to toxins.
" At least 70% of all fisheries are depleted or fully exploited.
" Because of overexploitation of groundwater, aquifers have been overpumped to the point where the sustained production of 10% of the global grain supply is at risk.
(Source: Wordwatch Institute's State of the World 2002, UNEP, UNDP, EPA
Planting rice is never fun, modern life threatens Ifugao rice terraces
By Imelda Visaya Abano, The Philippine Post Magazine
The Reuters - IUCN Environmental Media Award 2002, Regional Winner: Asia.
February 2002
Time may be finally catching up with Ifugao's rice terraces. Built several centuries ago, this tourist attraction often referred to as the eighth wonder of the world, is rapidly deteriorating.
Environmental degradation and neglect, largely brought about by modern life and the changing values of Ifugao's younger generation, have robbed this natural wonder of its exotic magic.
Already, sections of the terraces, designated a world heritage site by United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO), have worn away, with jagged earth now showing where green rice stalks once swayed.
Without regular maintenance, the mud-walled terraces, one of the world's few surviving ancient wonders, begin crumbling, setting off a chain reaction of erosion and hardship for other farmers.
"When there would be no more rice terraces it will seem the face of our ancestors is erased. Now you can see they are already deteriorating," Ifugao governor Teddy Baguilat Jr. said.
Baguilat, at his most pessimistic, believes they could be gone within 15 years.
"While everyone agrees that the cultural and tourism treasure should be protected, itâs unclear who should or will pay the price? Progress should not come at the expense of losing our lush forests," he lamented.
Earlier, the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) and the International Council of Monuments and Sites (Icomos), said in their report that the alarming and steady deterioration of the rice terraces will lose their claim to World Heritage status should it not be maintained within the next 10 years.
They observed that unregulated development currently taking place in the terraces areas "threatens to erode the heritage landscape".
Instead of tilling the ricefields and maintaining the stone and mud walls by hand for meager returns, young Ifugaos now prefer tourism-related jobs such as weaving handicrafts, woodcarving, and guiding tourists to tending the rice terraces, said Baguilat.
Baguilat added that only about a tenth of Ifugao's farmers, most of them too old to lift the rocks that form the terracesâ supporting walls, have remained dedicated to preserving the structure.
"The young Ifugaos have lost their links with the terraces, even disliking the idea of tilling the mountainsides. Well the reason is obvious. Aside from the tedious and manual labor required, terrace farming is no longer profitable and practical," he added.
Economic pressures due to limited opportunities in the province are forcing many Ifugaos to migrate to other provinces, abandoning rice terraces farming in favor of more lucrative livelihood opportunities.
Rice farming is labor intensive, and it reaps relatively low financial returns. "When you can get a high-paying, white-collar job working in the city, who wants to push a plow in the mud all day?" Baguilat asked.
Leti Pangay-on, a 34-year-old native of barangay Bangaan in Banaue, said she helps her neighbors farm their plot. Her husband left the province to seek work elsewhere.
"You can't grow enough food to live on for a whole year. That's why many people are leaving to work in other places," she said.
The European Union funded Central Cordillera Agricultural Programme (Cecap) said neglect is partly to blame for the increasing number of landslides that destroy parts of the terraces. But equally insidious, is the creeping destruction of the mountainsâ forest tops.
The fragile mossy forest of stunted oaks and other trees, which stores water and feeds the complex system of irrigation channels, is being increasingly chopped down as farmers seek areas to grow vegetables.
"Once ecosystem is lost, it's gone forever. Already there is not enough water because of the destruction of the watershed," a Cecap researcher warned.
The Cecap said there is a need to strengthen the muyong indigenous forest system, a program of the provincial government of Ifugao to restore the terraces.
A muyong is an area of at least a half-hectare, where trees, animals, food and water can be found co-existing with one another. It is a man-made forest created on the highest part of the mountain to water the terraces found below.
A muyong is a clan-owned forest handed down from one generation to next through the eldest son to support the rice fields owned by the clan.
"We now have to redouble our efforts in restoring the grandeur of our terraces and saving it from further degradation. Funds should be devoted for the rehabilitation and extension of communal irrigation systems, livelihood projects for farmer beneficiaries, agricultural research and application of appropriate and environment-friendly technologies," Baguilat added.
Aiming to arrest the deterioration of the world famous Banaue Rice Terraces and other terraces in the province Ifugao Congressman Solomon Chungalao filed the proposed House Bill 4002 seeking the creation of the Ifugao Terraces Authority.
Chungalao explained that there is an urgent need to create a permanent body with sufficient staffing and funding to address and undertake measures to restore and preserve the Ifugao rice terraces and to promote socio-economic development in Ifugao so it not to lose a world heritage site.
He explained that the Ifugao Terraces Authority aims to immediately address the tourism-related concerns of the terraces in coordination with the concerned government agencies like the Department of Tourism, Department of Environment and Natural Resources, Department of Agriculture and National Commission on Culture and Arts.
Dr. Jesus Peralta, an expert on restoration and rehabilitation of landmark sites, said that "If there is any landmark that best demonstrates ingenuity and engineering and agricultural skills of our people, this is the Ifugao Rice Terraces."
Peralta said the private sector will undertake the rehabilitation and restoration efforts with the government participation limited to planning and technical support.
The restoration of the terraces will be complemented by other projects designed to enhance the restored terraces, he said.
These complementary projects include the establishment of typical mountain villages whose activity will revolve around rice production and culture in the uplands, the marketing of rice and rice wine produced from farming the terraces, and the putting up of museums in several towns in Ifugao.
"The enhancement of traditional beliefs and practices is a must to ensure that a core of skilled upland farmers are always available to tend the terraces," he added.
Ifugaos themselves agree that one sure way of preserving the terraces is to encourage their children to value their rich heritage.
"You have to educate the young Ifugaos to convince them about their unique cultural heritage. The Ifugao culture is currently undergoing dramatic social change brought about by the influence of several factors," Baguilat said.
He said that in order for the ancient rice terraces to endure as a living landscape in the face of the present-day challenges to its integrity and survival, it is necessary that the traditional lifestyle of the Ifugao continues.
Just last year, the Ifugao School of Living Traditions was established to teach chanting, myth narrating, folk singing, rice wine-making, dancing and presiding over rituals of the community, among other skills.
"The ancestral knowledge and ingenuity of the Ifugaos should be revived. Maybe establishing schools like this will help endure the indigenous culture of the Ifugaos especially the younger ones," Baguilat said.
To totally keep the blight of modernization away, an Ifugao elder from Bangaan village, even suggested that roads leading to the terraces should be closed.
He said that the opening of the Solano-Banaue road some 30 years ago has eased the inflow of commercially grown rice from the lowlands. This he says, had discouraged the young people of Ifugao from planting rice in the terraces to meet their own food needs.
"If you really want to save the rice terraces, close all the roads to compel the boys and girls to plant in the terraces. This is the only way for them to survive," the elder argues. "After all, our ancestors were able to build and maintain these terraces thruogh the centuries even without the roads."
The Reuters - IUCN Environmental Media Award 2002, Regional Winner: Asia.
February 2002
Time may be finally catching up with Ifugao's rice terraces. Built several centuries ago, this tourist attraction often referred to as the eighth wonder of the world, is rapidly deteriorating.
Environmental degradation and neglect, largely brought about by modern life and the changing values of Ifugao's younger generation, have robbed this natural wonder of its exotic magic.
Already, sections of the terraces, designated a world heritage site by United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO), have worn away, with jagged earth now showing where green rice stalks once swayed.
Without regular maintenance, the mud-walled terraces, one of the world's few surviving ancient wonders, begin crumbling, setting off a chain reaction of erosion and hardship for other farmers.
"When there would be no more rice terraces it will seem the face of our ancestors is erased. Now you can see they are already deteriorating," Ifugao governor Teddy Baguilat Jr. said.
Baguilat, at his most pessimistic, believes they could be gone within 15 years.
"While everyone agrees that the cultural and tourism treasure should be protected, itâs unclear who should or will pay the price? Progress should not come at the expense of losing our lush forests," he lamented.
Earlier, the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) and the International Council of Monuments and Sites (Icomos), said in their report that the alarming and steady deterioration of the rice terraces will lose their claim to World Heritage status should it not be maintained within the next 10 years.
They observed that unregulated development currently taking place in the terraces areas "threatens to erode the heritage landscape".
Instead of tilling the ricefields and maintaining the stone and mud walls by hand for meager returns, young Ifugaos now prefer tourism-related jobs such as weaving handicrafts, woodcarving, and guiding tourists to tending the rice terraces, said Baguilat.
Baguilat added that only about a tenth of Ifugao's farmers, most of them too old to lift the rocks that form the terracesâ supporting walls, have remained dedicated to preserving the structure.
"The young Ifugaos have lost their links with the terraces, even disliking the idea of tilling the mountainsides. Well the reason is obvious. Aside from the tedious and manual labor required, terrace farming is no longer profitable and practical," he added.
Economic pressures due to limited opportunities in the province are forcing many Ifugaos to migrate to other provinces, abandoning rice terraces farming in favor of more lucrative livelihood opportunities.
Rice farming is labor intensive, and it reaps relatively low financial returns. "When you can get a high-paying, white-collar job working in the city, who wants to push a plow in the mud all day?" Baguilat asked.
Leti Pangay-on, a 34-year-old native of barangay Bangaan in Banaue, said she helps her neighbors farm their plot. Her husband left the province to seek work elsewhere.
"You can't grow enough food to live on for a whole year. That's why many people are leaving to work in other places," she said.
The European Union funded Central Cordillera Agricultural Programme (Cecap) said neglect is partly to blame for the increasing number of landslides that destroy parts of the terraces. But equally insidious, is the creeping destruction of the mountainsâ forest tops.
The fragile mossy forest of stunted oaks and other trees, which stores water and feeds the complex system of irrigation channels, is being increasingly chopped down as farmers seek areas to grow vegetables.
"Once ecosystem is lost, it's gone forever. Already there is not enough water because of the destruction of the watershed," a Cecap researcher warned.
The Cecap said there is a need to strengthen the muyong indigenous forest system, a program of the provincial government of Ifugao to restore the terraces.
A muyong is an area of at least a half-hectare, where trees, animals, food and water can be found co-existing with one another. It is a man-made forest created on the highest part of the mountain to water the terraces found below.
A muyong is a clan-owned forest handed down from one generation to next through the eldest son to support the rice fields owned by the clan.
"We now have to redouble our efforts in restoring the grandeur of our terraces and saving it from further degradation. Funds should be devoted for the rehabilitation and extension of communal irrigation systems, livelihood projects for farmer beneficiaries, agricultural research and application of appropriate and environment-friendly technologies," Baguilat added.
Aiming to arrest the deterioration of the world famous Banaue Rice Terraces and other terraces in the province Ifugao Congressman Solomon Chungalao filed the proposed House Bill 4002 seeking the creation of the Ifugao Terraces Authority.
Chungalao explained that there is an urgent need to create a permanent body with sufficient staffing and funding to address and undertake measures to restore and preserve the Ifugao rice terraces and to promote socio-economic development in Ifugao so it not to lose a world heritage site.
He explained that the Ifugao Terraces Authority aims to immediately address the tourism-related concerns of the terraces in coordination with the concerned government agencies like the Department of Tourism, Department of Environment and Natural Resources, Department of Agriculture and National Commission on Culture and Arts.
Dr. Jesus Peralta, an expert on restoration and rehabilitation of landmark sites, said that "If there is any landmark that best demonstrates ingenuity and engineering and agricultural skills of our people, this is the Ifugao Rice Terraces."
Peralta said the private sector will undertake the rehabilitation and restoration efforts with the government participation limited to planning and technical support.
The restoration of the terraces will be complemented by other projects designed to enhance the restored terraces, he said.
These complementary projects include the establishment of typical mountain villages whose activity will revolve around rice production and culture in the uplands, the marketing of rice and rice wine produced from farming the terraces, and the putting up of museums in several towns in Ifugao.
"The enhancement of traditional beliefs and practices is a must to ensure that a core of skilled upland farmers are always available to tend the terraces," he added.
Ifugaos themselves agree that one sure way of preserving the terraces is to encourage their children to value their rich heritage.
"You have to educate the young Ifugaos to convince them about their unique cultural heritage. The Ifugao culture is currently undergoing dramatic social change brought about by the influence of several factors," Baguilat said.
He said that in order for the ancient rice terraces to endure as a living landscape in the face of the present-day challenges to its integrity and survival, it is necessary that the traditional lifestyle of the Ifugao continues.
Just last year, the Ifugao School of Living Traditions was established to teach chanting, myth narrating, folk singing, rice wine-making, dancing and presiding over rituals of the community, among other skills.
"The ancestral knowledge and ingenuity of the Ifugaos should be revived. Maybe establishing schools like this will help endure the indigenous culture of the Ifugaos especially the younger ones," Baguilat said.
To totally keep the blight of modernization away, an Ifugao elder from Bangaan village, even suggested that roads leading to the terraces should be closed.
He said that the opening of the Solano-Banaue road some 30 years ago has eased the inflow of commercially grown rice from the lowlands. This he says, had discouraged the young people of Ifugao from planting rice in the terraces to meet their own food needs.
"If you really want to save the rice terraces, close all the roads to compel the boys and girls to plant in the terraces. This is the only way for them to survive," the elder argues. "After all, our ancestors were able to build and maintain these terraces thruogh the centuries even without the roads."
Worlds apart
James Meek, The Guardian, The Reuters - IUCN Environmental Media Award 2002, Regional Winner: Europe.
James Meek travels from Addis Ababa to Zug - the A to Z of inequality
Hussein Sormolo left the village where he was born for the big city in 1978. Or sometime then - exact dates have little value when the present makes such harsh demands. He left his eight hungry brothers and seven hungry sisters behind, as the land that the family farmed was being forcibly collectivised by a new regime.
Hussein was 16. He travelled the 100 miles north to the city in the back of a truck, arriving with the clothes he stood up in and the price of a little food in his pocket. A kinsman from the same village took him in until he found a job in a bakery. He slept in the bakery for 18 months before he got the lease on the home he has shared with his family ever since.
Paul Rust, too, left his village when he was a teenager - he was 17 - and ended up in a bakery. The two men are similar in other ways. Both are friendly, hospitable and generous, and love their families. Both work hard. Both like to watch the news. Both are active worshippers, without being religious dogmatists.
Yet their lives are different. Hussein lives with his wife, sons and daughters in a leaky shack of corrugated asbestos and steel in the Nefas Silk district of Addis Ababa, the capital of Ethiopia. Paul lives with his wife in a six-roomed house (not counting the ground-floor flat where his son Martin lives with his girlfriend) overlooking the lustrous green waters and steep wooded slopes of Lake Aegeri in the canton of Zug, Switzerland.
The alphabet of inequality from Addis to Zug, from the poorest country in the world to the richest, divides two ordinary families, chosen at random, in a way that is more than miles and more, even, than money. The income difference is huge, of course. The average income in Ethiopia is $110 per person per year. Hussein supports his wife and three younger children on wages of about $280 a year - about $56 per person.
The average income per head in Zug is about $50,000; from their bakery, Paul and his wife, Hedi, draw about $68,000 between them each year. The Rusts are not rich by Swiss standards.
It is the rainy season in Addis. Fat raindrops drum against, and often through, the rusting grooves of the corrugated roofs of the houses in Nefas Silk. Nights can be chill and dank. From Debre Zeit road, the busy main north-south street lined with small businesses including the bakery where Hussein works, it's a 10-minute walk to the alley where he lives. The market-friendly, post-socialist Ethiopian regime is driving a four-lane motorway through the district. It's likely to make Hussein's journey to work a little longer, but it has provided one unexpected boon. Local kids stole gravel from the building site and hawked it round; Hussein and his neighbours clubbed together and bought some to cover the muddy alleyway, hardly a metre wide, that separates their main rooms from their kitchens.
Inside the Hussein shack, a single bare light bulb always burns. There is little natural light: there are no glass windows, and the openings punched in the asbestos walls are covered to keep out draughts. What daylight there is leaks in past the ill-fitting wooden door, usually left open. Hussein pays his neighbour 18 birr (£1.30) a month, almost a 10th of his 200 birr salary, to sublet his electricity supply for the bulb in the shack and a second bulb in the kitchen. The family has no other electrical appliances, apart from a battery-operated radio. Neither Hussein, his wife Rukia, nor his eldest daughter, Fate, 17, who is lucky enough to be at school, have ever used a computer, taken a photograph or made a phone call.
The corrugated walls are covered with pages from newspapers and the friable remnants of ancient floral wallpaper. A sheet hanging from the ceiling partitions a third of the available space for Hussein and Rukia's double bed and a few storage chests and baskets. Closer to the door, there is a mattress, some pillows and boxes around the walls and a hopper for flour. Old rush matting and pieces of sacking cover the floor. Here the family eats; Hussein, a Muslim, prays; and, at night, they sleep, the parents in the bed and the two daughters, Fate and Fethia, 10, and their son Fuad, three, on mattresses on the floor.
Except for feast days, the family eats the same dish every meal - a grey, spongy, limp bread called injira, spread out like a cloth, and a spicy vegetable stew. Meat, fish, cheese and eggs are luxuries. They only buy fruit when one of the children is sick. If Hussein takes bread from work, he has to pay for it.
Hussein and Rukia have a pair of shoes each. They buy new ones every two years. They have no savings. "It's not possible to save," said Hussein. "The children will fall ill, a relative will die, and the money would be spent." The family doesn't take holidays. If Hussein is off work sick, he doesn't get paid.
Just under a quarter of the family income goes on charcoal for cooking and on cans of water. In a country where only a quarter of people in the countryside have access to safe drinking water, Hussein's family is lucky. There is a standpipe around the corner with reasonably clean water. That's about where their luck ends. With their neighbours, they used to have a toilet for 26 people. Now they have no toilet at all.
The old regime, the socialistic Derg, nationalised a nearby house with a toilet and let the alley use it. When the Derg was toppled, the owner reclaimed his house and the toilet. The locals have appealed to the local administration, the ward-level kebele , but since the chairman of the administration owns the house, they've had short shrift. So it's the bucket, the street or river.
The Rust house, not counting the flat, has three toilets, one each in the bathroom and two shower rooms of the four-storey building on the slopes of the village of Oberaegeri. Paul Rust took out a mortgage to have it built in the 1980s. On the balconies under its broad, dark, solid eaves are cascades of red flowers. The well-used furnishings inside are not ostentatious, but the building is roomy and comfortable. From the top, there is a loft, four bedrooms, two living rooms, a kitchen, an office, a small wine cellar, a work room, garage parking for three cars (Paul, Hedi and Martin Rust have one each) with room for another five on the forecourt. The house has its own lift.
Paul and Hedi are going on holiday for a fortnight in Austria this month, and usually take a week at Easter. Each has a mobile phone. The office has computers and internet access. They have a TV, a video and a dishwasher. They eat what they want, although their tastes are plain - meat and several veg, salad, sometimes a little wine, and the source of the family prosperity, bread and cake.
One Sunday afternoon we sat on the Rust's balcony as children and in-laws came and went. Our hosts offered millefeuilles and Swiss rolls. We were sitting in a quarter of the balcony space in the house. It was about the same size as Hussein and Rukia's home.
I asked the Rusts about family photographs. Hussein and Rukia have no photographs of themselves, their forebears, or their past lives, except the mugshots on their ID cards. They have no birth certificates: they live utterly in the now. Hussein and Rukia don't even know how old they are. Hussein thinks he's 37 but it's clear from his account of his past that he's older.
Not only do the Rusts have pictures of their children and themselves at every stage of their lives, and a mass of documents charting their course from birth to the present, but they have pictures of their distant ancestors. Paul went into the house and came back with a wedding photograph of his grandfather's grandfather and his grandmother's grandmother taken, he said, in 1860, when photography was new. It's a powerful physical token of the personal and national continuity, the unbroken centuries of peace and absence of destruction and famine, which the Rusts and Switzerland have enjoyed and Hussein's family and Ethiopia have not.
The Swiss stopped invading their neighbours almost 500 years ago. Their neighbours haven't invaded them since the Napoleonic era. The last time anything approaching famine struck the country was in the 18th century. The last civil war was a brief affair in 1847 which ended in forgiveness and mutual compromise. From the Thirty Years war through the first and second world wars to the Gulf war of 1991 the Swiss declined to shed blood or risk property in military causes, and that lack of interruption to life and work has to be one of the reasons for their exceptional prosperity now.
Switzerland is a rich country landlocked by other rich countries. Ethiopia is a poor country landlocked by other poor countries. Unlike other African nations, Ethiopia was not a European colony, but its people have endured regular European military incursions, proxy superpower duels and local wars that have exacerbated the ravages of famine and disease.
Famines in the 1970s, 80s and 90s killed 1.3 million people. A revolution in 1974 replaced a conservative, remote, land-owning emperor and aristocracy with the socialist Derg ; both regimes failed to cope with famine. Through the 70s and 80s, the country was embroiled in ideological and ethnic civil war. The pragmatic post- Derg government which came to power in 1991 put the economy on a sounder footing, but failed to prevent a foolish, expensive war with neighbouring Eritrea. HIV/Aids has infected 3 million Ethiopians, and kills 300,000 a year.
The fractured history of illness, disappointment and lack of opportunity which have marred the lives of the extended Hussein family rings like a theme song for their country's troubles, as the seeming tranquillity and success of the Rust dynasty sets the key for theirs.
Hussein never learned to read or write properly. He married his first wife, Zeinu, after he got the lease on the shack, and they had two sons, Homid and Kemol, then Fate. Hussein had high hopes of the sons: that they would get the education he never had, get a trade, or emigrate, and subsidise the rest of the family. But Zeinu had a mental breakdown; evil spirits, Hussein says, though it sounds more like depression. They separated. More desperate to escape the cramped shack than they were to study longer, the two young men got jobs - Kemol in a paint factory, Homid as a paratrooper. Both earn more than Hussein but their father is disappointed, particularly about Homid, who did well at school. "I told my son to quit the army but he refused. He said we were poor, so it was a better job for him," said Hussein. "In Africa, a soldier is spoiled material."
Rukia was adopted by a childless older sister when she was two and moved from the countryside to Addis. She was forced to school against her will, and she learned to read and write, but not much more, to her regret now. The sister, Rewda, also suffered what the family calls mental illness, but it sounds as if she became an alcoholic after her husband took a second wife. Rewda returned to the village, in the hope of a cure from a sacred spring, but the water didn't work, she never came back, and Rukia went looking for a husband. She found Hussein.
They pay a high proportion of their income now to ensure the two daughters go to school. Even the state schools charge fees, but there aren't enough places, so Fate has to go private, at 17 birr a month. "We send our children to school from our money, reducing what we have for food, so that they will not become like us, uneducated and poor," said Rukia.
The Rust family uses the stability of the past to build its future. After school, Paul became an apprentice baker, while his future wife became an apprentice saleswoman. When Paul passed his master baker's exams and decided to set up his own bakery, he had the past generation's property as collateral, the unspoken presumption of peace and a stable system of laws and taxes. The same personal and financial security is now being passed on: Paul and Hedi set their son, Martin, up as a confectioner in Zug, and their daughter, Andrea, married another master baker, Silvan Hotz. Eventually, the Hotz and Rust baking businesses may merge.
One grey Thursday morning, as Hussein was about to head off to work, I quoted to him from the Economic Commission for Africa's latest cheery report on the outlook for Ethiopia, which begins: "Ethiopia's recent economic performance has been quite encouraging. During 1992-2001 real GDP growth averaged 6% a year."
Hussein hadn't heard the expression "GDP" before. He said only God knew whether people would become rich or not. "Meteorologists say rain will come in the south and not in the north and so forth, but it doesn't mean people will or will not be hungry. What is said by the economists is not reflected on every individual.
"We're seeing huge road construction for the first time. I can also see huge construction of buildings in the city. But poor people like us haven't experienced any growth."
Hussein knows little about Switzerland. "I heard about Switzerland on the radio but I don't know. I heard it was a rich country, they help poor countries," he said. Fate said: "I heard the name, but... it's near Europe."
Paul thought he could find Ethiopia on the map. Switzerland is not as aloof from the world as it was, he points out: they joined the boycott of apartheid South Africa. He said his brother helped build a dairy in Nepal 20 years ago. His church had adopted a village in Romania, giving them money for a new church and a school.
The talk turned to immigration. "The really poor people, they can't come to Switzerland, they need money to get here," said Andrea.
Paul said: "We have 20% foreigners in Switzerland. If they work, it's OK." [Half of the "foreigners" were in fact born in Switzerland.] "When they live on our money, it's not OK," said Ursi, Paul and Hedi's youngest daughter.
On aid, however, Switzerland is exemplary. It gives 0.08% of its GDP in aid to Africa, more than Britain. It shows the world the material benefits of not making war, and of democracy in depth, where communities really do run the government, and not the other way round. Yet for the Swiss government to be generous, and for the people to be exemplary, is not enough for countries such as Ethiopia. The disproportion in wellbeing between the two countries and families, raises two difficult questions. Is it possible for the rich world to help the poor find a peaceful way to community-based democracy, in a single generation, when it took the rich world many generations of violence and poverty to get even part of the way there? And can the communities of Switzerland, Britain and the rest, in their hearts, ever extend their sense of responsibility and caring beyond their folk-boundaries to the whole world?
"We work, and have our life, we have our own problems," said Andrea. "So we don't think very often of other people's problems. It's a little bit selfish."
James Meek travels from Addis Ababa to Zug - the A to Z of inequality
Hussein Sormolo left the village where he was born for the big city in 1978. Or sometime then - exact dates have little value when the present makes such harsh demands. He left his eight hungry brothers and seven hungry sisters behind, as the land that the family farmed was being forcibly collectivised by a new regime.
Hussein was 16. He travelled the 100 miles north to the city in the back of a truck, arriving with the clothes he stood up in and the price of a little food in his pocket. A kinsman from the same village took him in until he found a job in a bakery. He slept in the bakery for 18 months before he got the lease on the home he has shared with his family ever since.
Paul Rust, too, left his village when he was a teenager - he was 17 - and ended up in a bakery. The two men are similar in other ways. Both are friendly, hospitable and generous, and love their families. Both work hard. Both like to watch the news. Both are active worshippers, without being religious dogmatists.
Yet their lives are different. Hussein lives with his wife, sons and daughters in a leaky shack of corrugated asbestos and steel in the Nefas Silk district of Addis Ababa, the capital of Ethiopia. Paul lives with his wife in a six-roomed house (not counting the ground-floor flat where his son Martin lives with his girlfriend) overlooking the lustrous green waters and steep wooded slopes of Lake Aegeri in the canton of Zug, Switzerland.
The alphabet of inequality from Addis to Zug, from the poorest country in the world to the richest, divides two ordinary families, chosen at random, in a way that is more than miles and more, even, than money. The income difference is huge, of course. The average income in Ethiopia is $110 per person per year. Hussein supports his wife and three younger children on wages of about $280 a year - about $56 per person.
The average income per head in Zug is about $50,000; from their bakery, Paul and his wife, Hedi, draw about $68,000 between them each year. The Rusts are not rich by Swiss standards.
It is the rainy season in Addis. Fat raindrops drum against, and often through, the rusting grooves of the corrugated roofs of the houses in Nefas Silk. Nights can be chill and dank. From Debre Zeit road, the busy main north-south street lined with small businesses including the bakery where Hussein works, it's a 10-minute walk to the alley where he lives. The market-friendly, post-socialist Ethiopian regime is driving a four-lane motorway through the district. It's likely to make Hussein's journey to work a little longer, but it has provided one unexpected boon. Local kids stole gravel from the building site and hawked it round; Hussein and his neighbours clubbed together and bought some to cover the muddy alleyway, hardly a metre wide, that separates their main rooms from their kitchens.
Inside the Hussein shack, a single bare light bulb always burns. There is little natural light: there are no glass windows, and the openings punched in the asbestos walls are covered to keep out draughts. What daylight there is leaks in past the ill-fitting wooden door, usually left open. Hussein pays his neighbour 18 birr (£1.30) a month, almost a 10th of his 200 birr salary, to sublet his electricity supply for the bulb in the shack and a second bulb in the kitchen. The family has no other electrical appliances, apart from a battery-operated radio. Neither Hussein, his wife Rukia, nor his eldest daughter, Fate, 17, who is lucky enough to be at school, have ever used a computer, taken a photograph or made a phone call.
The corrugated walls are covered with pages from newspapers and the friable remnants of ancient floral wallpaper. A sheet hanging from the ceiling partitions a third of the available space for Hussein and Rukia's double bed and a few storage chests and baskets. Closer to the door, there is a mattress, some pillows and boxes around the walls and a hopper for flour. Old rush matting and pieces of sacking cover the floor. Here the family eats; Hussein, a Muslim, prays; and, at night, they sleep, the parents in the bed and the two daughters, Fate and Fethia, 10, and their son Fuad, three, on mattresses on the floor.
Except for feast days, the family eats the same dish every meal - a grey, spongy, limp bread called injira, spread out like a cloth, and a spicy vegetable stew. Meat, fish, cheese and eggs are luxuries. They only buy fruit when one of the children is sick. If Hussein takes bread from work, he has to pay for it.
Hussein and Rukia have a pair of shoes each. They buy new ones every two years. They have no savings. "It's not possible to save," said Hussein. "The children will fall ill, a relative will die, and the money would be spent." The family doesn't take holidays. If Hussein is off work sick, he doesn't get paid.
Just under a quarter of the family income goes on charcoal for cooking and on cans of water. In a country where only a quarter of people in the countryside have access to safe drinking water, Hussein's family is lucky. There is a standpipe around the corner with reasonably clean water. That's about where their luck ends. With their neighbours, they used to have a toilet for 26 people. Now they have no toilet at all.
The old regime, the socialistic Derg, nationalised a nearby house with a toilet and let the alley use it. When the Derg was toppled, the owner reclaimed his house and the toilet. The locals have appealed to the local administration, the ward-level kebele , but since the chairman of the administration owns the house, they've had short shrift. So it's the bucket, the street or river.
The Rust house, not counting the flat, has three toilets, one each in the bathroom and two shower rooms of the four-storey building on the slopes of the village of Oberaegeri. Paul Rust took out a mortgage to have it built in the 1980s. On the balconies under its broad, dark, solid eaves are cascades of red flowers. The well-used furnishings inside are not ostentatious, but the building is roomy and comfortable. From the top, there is a loft, four bedrooms, two living rooms, a kitchen, an office, a small wine cellar, a work room, garage parking for three cars (Paul, Hedi and Martin Rust have one each) with room for another five on the forecourt. The house has its own lift.
Paul and Hedi are going on holiday for a fortnight in Austria this month, and usually take a week at Easter. Each has a mobile phone. The office has computers and internet access. They have a TV, a video and a dishwasher. They eat what they want, although their tastes are plain - meat and several veg, salad, sometimes a little wine, and the source of the family prosperity, bread and cake.
One Sunday afternoon we sat on the Rust's balcony as children and in-laws came and went. Our hosts offered millefeuilles and Swiss rolls. We were sitting in a quarter of the balcony space in the house. It was about the same size as Hussein and Rukia's home.
I asked the Rusts about family photographs. Hussein and Rukia have no photographs of themselves, their forebears, or their past lives, except the mugshots on their ID cards. They have no birth certificates: they live utterly in the now. Hussein and Rukia don't even know how old they are. Hussein thinks he's 37 but it's clear from his account of his past that he's older.
Not only do the Rusts have pictures of their children and themselves at every stage of their lives, and a mass of documents charting their course from birth to the present, but they have pictures of their distant ancestors. Paul went into the house and came back with a wedding photograph of his grandfather's grandfather and his grandmother's grandmother taken, he said, in 1860, when photography was new. It's a powerful physical token of the personal and national continuity, the unbroken centuries of peace and absence of destruction and famine, which the Rusts and Switzerland have enjoyed and Hussein's family and Ethiopia have not.
The Swiss stopped invading their neighbours almost 500 years ago. Their neighbours haven't invaded them since the Napoleonic era. The last time anything approaching famine struck the country was in the 18th century. The last civil war was a brief affair in 1847 which ended in forgiveness and mutual compromise. From the Thirty Years war through the first and second world wars to the Gulf war of 1991 the Swiss declined to shed blood or risk property in military causes, and that lack of interruption to life and work has to be one of the reasons for their exceptional prosperity now.
Switzerland is a rich country landlocked by other rich countries. Ethiopia is a poor country landlocked by other poor countries. Unlike other African nations, Ethiopia was not a European colony, but its people have endured regular European military incursions, proxy superpower duels and local wars that have exacerbated the ravages of famine and disease.
Famines in the 1970s, 80s and 90s killed 1.3 million people. A revolution in 1974 replaced a conservative, remote, land-owning emperor and aristocracy with the socialist Derg ; both regimes failed to cope with famine. Through the 70s and 80s, the country was embroiled in ideological and ethnic civil war. The pragmatic post- Derg government which came to power in 1991 put the economy on a sounder footing, but failed to prevent a foolish, expensive war with neighbouring Eritrea. HIV/Aids has infected 3 million Ethiopians, and kills 300,000 a year.
The fractured history of illness, disappointment and lack of opportunity which have marred the lives of the extended Hussein family rings like a theme song for their country's troubles, as the seeming tranquillity and success of the Rust dynasty sets the key for theirs.
Hussein never learned to read or write properly. He married his first wife, Zeinu, after he got the lease on the shack, and they had two sons, Homid and Kemol, then Fate. Hussein had high hopes of the sons: that they would get the education he never had, get a trade, or emigrate, and subsidise the rest of the family. But Zeinu had a mental breakdown; evil spirits, Hussein says, though it sounds more like depression. They separated. More desperate to escape the cramped shack than they were to study longer, the two young men got jobs - Kemol in a paint factory, Homid as a paratrooper. Both earn more than Hussein but their father is disappointed, particularly about Homid, who did well at school. "I told my son to quit the army but he refused. He said we were poor, so it was a better job for him," said Hussein. "In Africa, a soldier is spoiled material."
Rukia was adopted by a childless older sister when she was two and moved from the countryside to Addis. She was forced to school against her will, and she learned to read and write, but not much more, to her regret now. The sister, Rewda, also suffered what the family calls mental illness, but it sounds as if she became an alcoholic after her husband took a second wife. Rewda returned to the village, in the hope of a cure from a sacred spring, but the water didn't work, she never came back, and Rukia went looking for a husband. She found Hussein.
They pay a high proportion of their income now to ensure the two daughters go to school. Even the state schools charge fees, but there aren't enough places, so Fate has to go private, at 17 birr a month. "We send our children to school from our money, reducing what we have for food, so that they will not become like us, uneducated and poor," said Rukia.
The Rust family uses the stability of the past to build its future. After school, Paul became an apprentice baker, while his future wife became an apprentice saleswoman. When Paul passed his master baker's exams and decided to set up his own bakery, he had the past generation's property as collateral, the unspoken presumption of peace and a stable system of laws and taxes. The same personal and financial security is now being passed on: Paul and Hedi set their son, Martin, up as a confectioner in Zug, and their daughter, Andrea, married another master baker, Silvan Hotz. Eventually, the Hotz and Rust baking businesses may merge.
One grey Thursday morning, as Hussein was about to head off to work, I quoted to him from the Economic Commission for Africa's latest cheery report on the outlook for Ethiopia, which begins: "Ethiopia's recent economic performance has been quite encouraging. During 1992-2001 real GDP growth averaged 6% a year."
Hussein hadn't heard the expression "GDP" before. He said only God knew whether people would become rich or not. "Meteorologists say rain will come in the south and not in the north and so forth, but it doesn't mean people will or will not be hungry. What is said by the economists is not reflected on every individual.
"We're seeing huge road construction for the first time. I can also see huge construction of buildings in the city. But poor people like us haven't experienced any growth."
Hussein knows little about Switzerland. "I heard about Switzerland on the radio but I don't know. I heard it was a rich country, they help poor countries," he said. Fate said: "I heard the name, but... it's near Europe."
Paul thought he could find Ethiopia on the map. Switzerland is not as aloof from the world as it was, he points out: they joined the boycott of apartheid South Africa. He said his brother helped build a dairy in Nepal 20 years ago. His church had adopted a village in Romania, giving them money for a new church and a school.
The talk turned to immigration. "The really poor people, they can't come to Switzerland, they need money to get here," said Andrea.
Paul said: "We have 20% foreigners in Switzerland. If they work, it's OK." [Half of the "foreigners" were in fact born in Switzerland.] "When they live on our money, it's not OK," said Ursi, Paul and Hedi's youngest daughter.
On aid, however, Switzerland is exemplary. It gives 0.08% of its GDP in aid to Africa, more than Britain. It shows the world the material benefits of not making war, and of democracy in depth, where communities really do run the government, and not the other way round. Yet for the Swiss government to be generous, and for the people to be exemplary, is not enough for countries such as Ethiopia. The disproportion in wellbeing between the two countries and families, raises two difficult questions. Is it possible for the rich world to help the poor find a peaceful way to community-based democracy, in a single generation, when it took the rich world many generations of violence and poverty to get even part of the way there? And can the communities of Switzerland, Britain and the rest, in their hearts, ever extend their sense of responsibility and caring beyond their folk-boundaries to the whole world?
"We work, and have our life, we have our own problems," said Andrea. "So we don't think very often of other people's problems. It's a little bit selfish."
The Treasures of the Sierra Madre
A scientific expedition to a remote and mountainous corner of Luzon in the Philippines is a race against time to discover and protect endangered species
By Peter Fredenburg, for Morning Calm, Korean Air Inflight Magazine.
The Reuters - IUCN Environmental Media Awards 2001, Winner - Asia
We struggle out of the ravine and emerge from the trees to find a scrub-covered plateau marooned in a swirling white cloud — an island in the sky. After five days of trekking through rain-soaked forest, up and down over countless ridges, we’ve finally reached Mossy Base Camp, our destination in the heart of the Sierra Madre Mountains. The area is one of the last remnants of primordial wilderness in the Philippines, uninhabited and virtually unexplored.
"I guess it’s like the good old days, when 19th-century naturalists roamed the world making scientific discoveries," observes Merlijn van Weerd, the Dutch scientist leading our expedition, whose purpose is a biodiversity survey in this little-studied environment. "Nowadays, discovering new species — a biologist’s dream — is rare in the world. But it’s still a reality here."
As we pitch our tents, the cloud lifts to reveal the view to the west. Forest-cloaked peaks and ridges fall away to frame a broad valley, a familiar bend in the Cagayan River, and the town of Cabagan, where many in our party of 25 conservationists and porters last slept in a bed. Thirty kilometers away as the crow flies, it looks surprisingly close. Several residents take turns with the binoculars, trying to spot their homes, as they would from an airliner.
The cloud closes in again, and we return to our tasks. The interlude has highlighted the immediacy of the biodiversity survey. However much it recalls an earlier age, it furthers the modern goals of environmental protection and sustainable development. And however global these objectives may be, for most of us settling into Mossy Base this evening, they start in our backyard.
The survey is a step toward establishing the Northern Sierra Madre Natural Park, which promises to be the pearl of the Philippines’ fledgling park system. The Sierra Madre, which flank the east coast of northern Luzon, are so spectacularly remote that not a single road crosses the range to link the narrow coastal strip with the Cagayan Valley. The boundaries of the park enclose 287,861 hectares of mostly mountainous land and 71,625 hectares of coastal waters. Nearly three quarters the size of Grand Canyon National Park in the United States, it is the largest protected area in the Philippines and the most important in terms of biodiversity, containing a dozen major terrestrial and marine habitat types, from coral reefs to upper montane, or mossy, forest. About a quarter of the Philippines’ severely depleted reserves of undisturbed forest lie within the park.
It is also home to some 1,300 Agtas, tribal Negrito people who traditionally live by fishing, hunting and gathering but are increasingly taking up kaingin, or slash-and-burn, agriculture. Today, these aboriginal inhabitants comprise only a fraction of the estimated 30,000 people who live within the park, most of whom arrived in the 1960s and 70s to work in now-closed logging concessions and farm newly cleared land.
This influx complicates the challenge of protecting the pristine reaches of the park and rehabilitating its degraded areas. In consultation with local residents, the Department of Environment and Natural Resources is formulating a management plan, with technical support from PLAN International and the Nordic Foundation for Development and Ecology, and financial backing from the World Bank and Dutch government.
The plan entails biodiversity surveys to catalog the park’s natural treasures. One such is our fauna survey in the mossy forest — sometimes called cloud forest or, more evocatively, elfin forest — that crouches on the ridges, summits and plateaus leading up to the highest mountain in the park, the otherwise unnamed Peak 1844 (its height in meters).
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The map of the area is both alluring and sobering. It shows rivers, contour lines and peak elevations derived from aerial photography, but no roads, trails or place names. Not a soul lives within a couple dozen kilometers of the Peak 1844 in any direction, and local Agtas confirm that not even they ever go there. In May 1999, a party of park naturalists became the first people ever to reach the summit.
The way up from the valley begins along an old logging track, a day’s walk bringing you to its end at Kamosi. This camp name, like the others along the trail ahead, were coined by porters only in the past couple of years: Kamosi for the semi-wild "sweet potatoes" they planted there, Biklat for the "python" they found, Batalag for the "sleeping platform" they built over the stream.
Up to Kamosi, you walk through residual forest, the track crowded by sharp-edged talahib grass. Here you suddenly enter primary forest, a dark cathedral roofed by the leafy, layered canopy overhead but fairly open on the ground. In this starkly different habitat, the mosquitoes that thrive in degraded areas give way to leeches. "The question is, which do you prefer?" smiles van Weerd. It’s a good question. Unnerving as the leeches are, at least they don’t fly or carry disease.
The newly cut trail is marked by ribbons tied to trees and the treacherous, stake-like stumps of saplings diagonally sliced by the machetes of the trail cutters. The plan for the trail — the line drawn on the map — followed a long ridge leading to 1844, but the need to camp near water means it rises and falls with exhausting regularity.
On the stiff climb from Biklat, you pull yourself up, tugging on vines and grasping the now-familiar trees and saplings of the lower montane forest. You’re in for a surprise when you reach the 1,500-meter-high ridge top. Suddenly you’re in a topsy-turvy world, a tangle of dwarfed wood so completely clothed in green moss it’s like St Patrick’s Day on hallucinogens. Sometimes the ground itself vanishes, and you clamber from tree to tree, perhaps swinging from an exposed root to make footfall on a branch. Let your foot slip to the "surface" of dead leaves, and a hole opens up to swallow your entire leg. At this point, you may imagine you hear a burst of gleeful giggles — elfin forest, indeed!
Drop from the ridge top, and you reenter the lower montane forest as suddenly as you left it. In the next couple of days, you enter and leave mossy forest several times, before finally arriving at the broad, rain- and windswept plateau of Mossy Base Camp.
"Mossy forest is a habitat of its own," explains van Weerd. "The canopy has only one layer, at a height of only five to 10 meters. There’s much more light coming through, and it’s wet, which is why there’s so much moss."
"I’ve never seen mossy forest this big," adds Lilian Spijkerman, a Dutch soil scientist, who is surprised to find it dipping into sheltered ravines, as it does on the plateau. "In Jamaica, we found mossy forest growing on rock with one meter of organic matter on top, then live vegetation. There was no soil profile. But there is soil development here, so it would be a very nice site to study."
Not just now, though. After resting for a day at Mossy Base, Spijkerman and three companions continue to Peak 1844, making her the first woman to reach the top, and the guide Kennedy Baula the first man to return to it. Several porters go back the way we came, leaving our food for the next week and a half. The rest of us — van Weerd, wildlife associates Dominic Rodriguez, Bernard Tarun and Jessie Guerrero, and the remaining porters, or "community counterparts" — begin setting out mist nets.
"We’re still doing base-line surveys to see what is present, where, and how much of it," explains van Weerd. "With such a large area and so many species, we focus first on birds because they’re relatively easy to see and hear, and they serve as good indicators of habitat quality. And we focus on species that are threatened or endemic to the Philippines, or even only to the Sierra Madre."
Van Weerd, 29, studied at the universities of Groningen and Leiden, where in 1996 he earned a master of science degree in tropical ecology and environmental issues in developing countries.
"More new species are discovered in the Philippines than anywhere else, with three or four new animal species found each year," he continues, explaining that islands lend themselves to the evolution of isolated, endemic species. "And you have high mountains with different vegetation types — mossy forest in the Sierra Madre, pine forests in the Cordillera Central. These are specific habitat types. You can regard mountains as islands."
In addition to wet mossy forest, the plateau has patches of dry mossy, also called heather or bonsai forest. This is gnarled scrub about a meter high, which is readily dried by the sun. Why these patches occur remains a mystery. We camp in one because it’s easy to clear and — as a bonus — too dry for leeches.
The team sets the nets fairly close to camp, as they must be checked every few hours. One of the first birds caught is a woodcock, a fairly large, mottled-brown wader with a long, narrow beak. Van Weerd is pleased.
"In 1992, Danish ornithologists experienced with waders were surveying near here," he says. "They saw a woodcock flying at dusk, but they didn’t recognize its call. They thought it might be a new species, like the rare subspecies of woodcock that live on small islands or mountaintops in the Pacific. If it’s an Eurasian woodcock, it’s here very late. They migrate early, going north to breed on the tundra. We’ll have to measure everything, because woodcocks are very difficult to distinguish."
The bird closely fits the description of the Eurasian woodcock — but so does another specimen, recently collected elsewhere in the islands, that could be a new species of Philippine woodcock. Van Weerd’s measurements, along with photos, a video recording and a feather that can be used for DNA analysis, may help settle the question.
Altogether, we capture 55 birds in the eight days that the nets are up. They represent 14 species, five of which are threatened to some degree. Six are endemic to the Philippines or Luzon. In addition to the woodcock, which is the first specimen netted in the Sierra Madre, six species have never before been described in the mossy forest of the Sierra Madre, and three of these have never been recorded anywhere at so high an altitude.
We also catch nine bats, including a vulnerable Luzon pygmy fruit bat. A hand-captured frog matches no description in the guide to Philippine amphibians. Van Weerd wonders if it may be a new species but must consult with a specialist. Otherwise, we see the tracks of the Philippine warty pig, deer and macaque, but the harsh mossy forest habitat appears to harbor few mammals. Combined with inaccessibility, the lack of game is what has shielded it from destructive human incursions.
Other habitats in the Northern Sierra Madre Natural Park are richer in wildlife and therefore more threatened. Two dolphin and three whale species have been spotted in park waters, and three of the world’s seven species of sea turtle nest on its shores. The park boasts the Philippines’ largest colony of flying foxes, a variety of fruit bat. There are also two species of crocodile: the huge estuarine crocodile common to many parts of the world, and the smaller, freshwater-dwelling Philippine crocodile.
"When we found a Philippine crocodile last year, we were surprised, because it had never before been documented in the Sierra Madre," recalls van Weerd. "It had simply been overlooked. We launched surveys and learned that local people knew where they lived."
In 1993, only 100 Philippine crocodiles were thought to live in the wild, their chances for survival reckoned to be zero. There is, however, a captive breeding program on the island of Palawan. "The Sierra Madre seem to be the only place that’s viable for eventually reintroducing them in the wild," says van Weerd.
Finally, what about the rare Philippine eagle, the national poster child of environmental protection? This magnificent raptor is the second-largest bird of prey in the world, with a wingspan of more than two meters. A three- or four-year-old adolescent was recently retrieved from captivity on the outskirts the park, renewing hope that the species still breeds in the Sierra Madre. Calculating territory size against remaining suitable habitat, the range could theoretically support 50 breeding pairs, or 150 birds including chicks.
"I doubt there are that many," van Weerd asserts. "Other than the captive eagle, I know of just one reported sighting on the valley side of the park in recent decades. On the sea side, only a few people have reported seeing one. But it’s a difficult bird to observe, because it doesn’t soar. It flies through the canopy."
Still, van Weerd keeps his eyes open and hopes.
"Once, I thought I saw one from a plane," he confesses. "And once on 1844. But — whoosh! — it was gone."
By Peter Fredenburg, for Morning Calm, Korean Air Inflight Magazine.
The Reuters - IUCN Environmental Media Awards 2001, Winner - Asia
We struggle out of the ravine and emerge from the trees to find a scrub-covered plateau marooned in a swirling white cloud — an island in the sky. After five days of trekking through rain-soaked forest, up and down over countless ridges, we’ve finally reached Mossy Base Camp, our destination in the heart of the Sierra Madre Mountains. The area is one of the last remnants of primordial wilderness in the Philippines, uninhabited and virtually unexplored.
"I guess it’s like the good old days, when 19th-century naturalists roamed the world making scientific discoveries," observes Merlijn van Weerd, the Dutch scientist leading our expedition, whose purpose is a biodiversity survey in this little-studied environment. "Nowadays, discovering new species — a biologist’s dream — is rare in the world. But it’s still a reality here."
As we pitch our tents, the cloud lifts to reveal the view to the west. Forest-cloaked peaks and ridges fall away to frame a broad valley, a familiar bend in the Cagayan River, and the town of Cabagan, where many in our party of 25 conservationists and porters last slept in a bed. Thirty kilometers away as the crow flies, it looks surprisingly close. Several residents take turns with the binoculars, trying to spot their homes, as they would from an airliner.
The cloud closes in again, and we return to our tasks. The interlude has highlighted the immediacy of the biodiversity survey. However much it recalls an earlier age, it furthers the modern goals of environmental protection and sustainable development. And however global these objectives may be, for most of us settling into Mossy Base this evening, they start in our backyard.
The survey is a step toward establishing the Northern Sierra Madre Natural Park, which promises to be the pearl of the Philippines’ fledgling park system. The Sierra Madre, which flank the east coast of northern Luzon, are so spectacularly remote that not a single road crosses the range to link the narrow coastal strip with the Cagayan Valley. The boundaries of the park enclose 287,861 hectares of mostly mountainous land and 71,625 hectares of coastal waters. Nearly three quarters the size of Grand Canyon National Park in the United States, it is the largest protected area in the Philippines and the most important in terms of biodiversity, containing a dozen major terrestrial and marine habitat types, from coral reefs to upper montane, or mossy, forest. About a quarter of the Philippines’ severely depleted reserves of undisturbed forest lie within the park.
It is also home to some 1,300 Agtas, tribal Negrito people who traditionally live by fishing, hunting and gathering but are increasingly taking up kaingin, or slash-and-burn, agriculture. Today, these aboriginal inhabitants comprise only a fraction of the estimated 30,000 people who live within the park, most of whom arrived in the 1960s and 70s to work in now-closed logging concessions and farm newly cleared land.
This influx complicates the challenge of protecting the pristine reaches of the park and rehabilitating its degraded areas. In consultation with local residents, the Department of Environment and Natural Resources is formulating a management plan, with technical support from PLAN International and the Nordic Foundation for Development and Ecology, and financial backing from the World Bank and Dutch government.
The plan entails biodiversity surveys to catalog the park’s natural treasures. One such is our fauna survey in the mossy forest — sometimes called cloud forest or, more evocatively, elfin forest — that crouches on the ridges, summits and plateaus leading up to the highest mountain in the park, the otherwise unnamed Peak 1844 (its height in meters).
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The map of the area is both alluring and sobering. It shows rivers, contour lines and peak elevations derived from aerial photography, but no roads, trails or place names. Not a soul lives within a couple dozen kilometers of the Peak 1844 in any direction, and local Agtas confirm that not even they ever go there. In May 1999, a party of park naturalists became the first people ever to reach the summit.
The way up from the valley begins along an old logging track, a day’s walk bringing you to its end at Kamosi. This camp name, like the others along the trail ahead, were coined by porters only in the past couple of years: Kamosi for the semi-wild "sweet potatoes" they planted there, Biklat for the "python" they found, Batalag for the "sleeping platform" they built over the stream.
Up to Kamosi, you walk through residual forest, the track crowded by sharp-edged talahib grass. Here you suddenly enter primary forest, a dark cathedral roofed by the leafy, layered canopy overhead but fairly open on the ground. In this starkly different habitat, the mosquitoes that thrive in degraded areas give way to leeches. "The question is, which do you prefer?" smiles van Weerd. It’s a good question. Unnerving as the leeches are, at least they don’t fly or carry disease.
The newly cut trail is marked by ribbons tied to trees and the treacherous, stake-like stumps of saplings diagonally sliced by the machetes of the trail cutters. The plan for the trail — the line drawn on the map — followed a long ridge leading to 1844, but the need to camp near water means it rises and falls with exhausting regularity.
On the stiff climb from Biklat, you pull yourself up, tugging on vines and grasping the now-familiar trees and saplings of the lower montane forest. You’re in for a surprise when you reach the 1,500-meter-high ridge top. Suddenly you’re in a topsy-turvy world, a tangle of dwarfed wood so completely clothed in green moss it’s like St Patrick’s Day on hallucinogens. Sometimes the ground itself vanishes, and you clamber from tree to tree, perhaps swinging from an exposed root to make footfall on a branch. Let your foot slip to the "surface" of dead leaves, and a hole opens up to swallow your entire leg. At this point, you may imagine you hear a burst of gleeful giggles — elfin forest, indeed!
Drop from the ridge top, and you reenter the lower montane forest as suddenly as you left it. In the next couple of days, you enter and leave mossy forest several times, before finally arriving at the broad, rain- and windswept plateau of Mossy Base Camp.
"Mossy forest is a habitat of its own," explains van Weerd. "The canopy has only one layer, at a height of only five to 10 meters. There’s much more light coming through, and it’s wet, which is why there’s so much moss."
"I’ve never seen mossy forest this big," adds Lilian Spijkerman, a Dutch soil scientist, who is surprised to find it dipping into sheltered ravines, as it does on the plateau. "In Jamaica, we found mossy forest growing on rock with one meter of organic matter on top, then live vegetation. There was no soil profile. But there is soil development here, so it would be a very nice site to study."
Not just now, though. After resting for a day at Mossy Base, Spijkerman and three companions continue to Peak 1844, making her the first woman to reach the top, and the guide Kennedy Baula the first man to return to it. Several porters go back the way we came, leaving our food for the next week and a half. The rest of us — van Weerd, wildlife associates Dominic Rodriguez, Bernard Tarun and Jessie Guerrero, and the remaining porters, or "community counterparts" — begin setting out mist nets.
"We’re still doing base-line surveys to see what is present, where, and how much of it," explains van Weerd. "With such a large area and so many species, we focus first on birds because they’re relatively easy to see and hear, and they serve as good indicators of habitat quality. And we focus on species that are threatened or endemic to the Philippines, or even only to the Sierra Madre."
Van Weerd, 29, studied at the universities of Groningen and Leiden, where in 1996 he earned a master of science degree in tropical ecology and environmental issues in developing countries.
"More new species are discovered in the Philippines than anywhere else, with three or four new animal species found each year," he continues, explaining that islands lend themselves to the evolution of isolated, endemic species. "And you have high mountains with different vegetation types — mossy forest in the Sierra Madre, pine forests in the Cordillera Central. These are specific habitat types. You can regard mountains as islands."
In addition to wet mossy forest, the plateau has patches of dry mossy, also called heather or bonsai forest. This is gnarled scrub about a meter high, which is readily dried by the sun. Why these patches occur remains a mystery. We camp in one because it’s easy to clear and — as a bonus — too dry for leeches.
The team sets the nets fairly close to camp, as they must be checked every few hours. One of the first birds caught is a woodcock, a fairly large, mottled-brown wader with a long, narrow beak. Van Weerd is pleased.
"In 1992, Danish ornithologists experienced with waders were surveying near here," he says. "They saw a woodcock flying at dusk, but they didn’t recognize its call. They thought it might be a new species, like the rare subspecies of woodcock that live on small islands or mountaintops in the Pacific. If it’s an Eurasian woodcock, it’s here very late. They migrate early, going north to breed on the tundra. We’ll have to measure everything, because woodcocks are very difficult to distinguish."
The bird closely fits the description of the Eurasian woodcock — but so does another specimen, recently collected elsewhere in the islands, that could be a new species of Philippine woodcock. Van Weerd’s measurements, along with photos, a video recording and a feather that can be used for DNA analysis, may help settle the question.
Altogether, we capture 55 birds in the eight days that the nets are up. They represent 14 species, five of which are threatened to some degree. Six are endemic to the Philippines or Luzon. In addition to the woodcock, which is the first specimen netted in the Sierra Madre, six species have never before been described in the mossy forest of the Sierra Madre, and three of these have never been recorded anywhere at so high an altitude.
We also catch nine bats, including a vulnerable Luzon pygmy fruit bat. A hand-captured frog matches no description in the guide to Philippine amphibians. Van Weerd wonders if it may be a new species but must consult with a specialist. Otherwise, we see the tracks of the Philippine warty pig, deer and macaque, but the harsh mossy forest habitat appears to harbor few mammals. Combined with inaccessibility, the lack of game is what has shielded it from destructive human incursions.
Other habitats in the Northern Sierra Madre Natural Park are richer in wildlife and therefore more threatened. Two dolphin and three whale species have been spotted in park waters, and three of the world’s seven species of sea turtle nest on its shores. The park boasts the Philippines’ largest colony of flying foxes, a variety of fruit bat. There are also two species of crocodile: the huge estuarine crocodile common to many parts of the world, and the smaller, freshwater-dwelling Philippine crocodile.
"When we found a Philippine crocodile last year, we were surprised, because it had never before been documented in the Sierra Madre," recalls van Weerd. "It had simply been overlooked. We launched surveys and learned that local people knew where they lived."
In 1993, only 100 Philippine crocodiles were thought to live in the wild, their chances for survival reckoned to be zero. There is, however, a captive breeding program on the island of Palawan. "The Sierra Madre seem to be the only place that’s viable for eventually reintroducing them in the wild," says van Weerd.
Finally, what about the rare Philippine eagle, the national poster child of environmental protection? This magnificent raptor is the second-largest bird of prey in the world, with a wingspan of more than two meters. A three- or four-year-old adolescent was recently retrieved from captivity on the outskirts the park, renewing hope that the species still breeds in the Sierra Madre. Calculating territory size against remaining suitable habitat, the range could theoretically support 50 breeding pairs, or 150 birds including chicks.
"I doubt there are that many," van Weerd asserts. "Other than the captive eagle, I know of just one reported sighting on the valley side of the park in recent decades. On the sea side, only a few people have reported seeing one. But it’s a difficult bird to observe, because it doesn’t soar. It flies through the canopy."
Still, van Weerd keeps his eyes open and hopes.
"Once, I thought I saw one from a plane," he confesses. "And once on 1844. But — whoosh! — it was gone."
The Caviar Game Rules
An incredible thing has happened: under the pressure of international environmental organizations, seeking to halt rampant sturgeon poaching in the Caspian Sea, Russia stopped its caviar export.
By Konstantin Volkov, The Reuters - IUCN Environmental Media Awards 2001, Winner - Europe.
Caviar, a unique product, which used to bring gold to the Tsar’s treasury, and dollars to the Soviet budget, will no longer be officially exported from Russia. Moscow has to put up with a one year ‘voluntary’ embargo on sturgeon catch. But most likely it won’t help the Caspian sturgeon. Russian caviar will continue to be smuggled to the West via Turkey and Iran, as hitherto.
Khrushev, Sturgeon’s Enemy
In 1958, under Nikita Khrushev’s rule, the Volgograd hydroelectric power plant (HPP) was constructed, preventing the Caspian sturgeon from migrating to its spawning grounds up the stream. As a result, Volga lost 100% of Beluga’s natural spawning grounds, 80% of Russian sturgeon’s spawning grounds, and 40% of Stellate sturgeon spawning grounds. In attempt to counter the catastrophic drop in sturgeon populations, all commercial catch, deadly for young fish stocks, was banned in 1962. Approximately at the same time the first fish farms for artificial breeding of sturgeon species started to be built. All these measures helped to increase the Caspian sturgeon stocks. The 1977 hit the records, when the catch was as high as 27 700 tons as against 461,1 tons in 2000. The annual catches remained stable until the early 80s, when they went down again: the reason was that the sturgeons born before the construction of Volgograd HPP were caught out, while existing fish farms were unable to compensate for the loss. The drop in the Caspian sturgeon population took a dramatic pace in the late 90s: the paralysis of the power led to outrageous poaching. Experts estimate the volumes of poaching to exceed the levels of legal harvesting by eleven times. The situation in the Azov Sea region is even worse: poachers cast up to 40 thousand fishnets every year, harvesting 50 times more sturgeons than fishermen with official licenses.
On top of that, sturgeon has been overtaken by another disaster. The females’ share has been shrinking in Sturgeon populations. The normal sex ratio in a population should be equal, whereas the actual ratio is approximately 12 female to 88 male sturgeon species. All this due to the fact that sturgeons are caught primarily for caviar, the value of which is far and away higher than that of sturgeon meat. A few male species are therefore left for fish soup, while the rest of the male catch is released. Furthermore, the fish processing farms would only buy the catch in the 1:1 proportion, and there’s no reasoning with them. Half of females, that’s it! According to experts, the status of sturgeon species generally, as well as in specific basins may be described as catastrophic. In the Caspian Sea, the main sturgeon basin, the catches over the two last decades dropped by 17 to 20 times, in the Azov basin the decrease is 36 times compared to 1936 and 17 times compared to 1952. The catch in Siberian sturgeon in the Ob River has dropped disastrously as well. Over 60 years, from 1935 to 1994, it dropped by 122 times, and over 9 years from 1985 to 1994, by 7 times.
The UN and the Fish
On 3 March, 1973 the UN Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES) was signed in Washington. CITES is the main mechanism that controls and regulates trade in rare and endangered species of wild animals and plants worldwide. The Convention has a number of Appendices, which list all those endangered species. At the moment, 152 states, including Russia, have signed the Convention.
Last June the Convention Secretariat warned the four Caspian states (Russia, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan), that it would seek to apply an embargo on caviar expert unless these four states enforce their sturgeon stock protection measures. The warning apparently took effect, since at the Paris meeting the countries assented to one-year embargo on sturgeon catch. Now that’s how it looks like in practice. The countries are authorized to sell the spring spawning stock caviar until the 2001 quotas set by CITES will have been exhausted.
CITES embargo warnings shouldn’t be taken as idle threats. Obviously, we are used to weak enforcement of western market regulations in Russia. But the force of CITES is in its ability to regulate the western market itself. Any inspection there that has doubts about the authenticity of the product license has the right to put a fine on the retailer and confiscate the goods. Yet, another problem arises: how to identify the origin of the sturgeon?
That’s what Dr. Ruben, leading ichthyologist, has told ITOGI Magazine: "Let’s assume that according to the papers the caviar originates from the Persian sturgeon. To prove it, one should make a lab analysis. Each of the sturgeon species has a unique sequence of nucleotides that form the DNA. But the US lab analysis uses a pat of B cytochrome gene, whereas it is proved that the B cytochrome of the Russian, the Siberian and the Persian sturgeon is identical. So from the scientific point of view, such analysis cannot be validated, especially in the absence of samples collection."
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Still in spite of the failures of lab analysis, western retailers are cautious about buying caviar on the side. As the story goes, once Russian tourists brought a few cans of caviar each to the US, with no certificates, of course, expecting to get a bargain. To their surprise, no one wanted to buy a single can of caviar from them. Finally, one retailer yielded: "The hell with you, I’ll take five of those at 5 bucks each! And that’s for personal consumption." This is on CITES enforcement in the West.
However, as for CITES’s imperative request to enforce anti-poaching measures, most experts consider it impossible to fulfill. "CITES urges us to develop anti-poaching measures, says George Ruben, which we’ have already elaborated plenty, but what’s the good of it? They are all left on paper. Fish police should chase poachers, confiscate fishing equipment, impose penalties. However, given the rampant corruption, the police are inoperative. The rivers are netted in broad daylight, and the fish police just bypass those areas.
The Volga Delta and Dagestan are known as distressed regions, with high unemployment. That’s why everyone depends on fishing. Stellate Sturgeon suffers from the economic collapse. In Dagestan, sturgeon business is a throwback of the feudalism. All catch goes to "the master". A few fishermen have boats on their own and sell their catch themselves; others work for "the master" for food.
Sea trawling is another common way of sturgeon commerce in Dagestan. Usually trawlers are owned by high-ranking officials. A trawler owned, for instance, by a "Dagryba" fishery company, puts out to sea absolutely legally, with a license for some smaller fish. Evidently, nobody cares to trawl this fish, what’s trawled is sturgeon. Frontier guards are either fled or bribed. While coastal fishing is somewhat of an amateur activity, trawling is already a serious business. They say, once a similar trawler discharged about two KamAz trucks of sturgeons. A fish police boat wished to inspect the cargo. Suddenly, a local water police boat appeared out of nowhere. Rifles from both sides, the game ended in a draw. The trucks smoothly drove away…
As a result the illegal catch volumes exceed those reported to the state by far. It is also noteworthy, that according to the Russian Fisheries Committee, the legal catch quotas for caviar are not taken up completely. Thus, the 1999 export quota was 162 tons, whereas the official catch was reported as 42 tons. The question of how much was caught illegally may be considered rhetorical: who counted it? According to the CITES, the yearly illegal catch is about 1100 tons, equivalent to US$100 million.
The Caviar Route
The reasonable question is where do these zillions of illegal caviar go? Experts say about 10 per cent of the total illegal catch goes abroad. At the CITES meeting in Paris, the representatives of Russia, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan argued that the ban on legal export would not stop caviar smuggling in the region. By saying this, they hinted at Iran, immune from CITES sanctions. "A substantial share of Azerbaijani caviar is being smuggled via Iran at the moment," gives his opinion Vyacheslav Mironov, Director General of the ‘Russian Caviar’ Trading Company. "Nobody assessed Iran’s sturgeon resources. The existing Persian sturgeon is known to spawn in Volga and Ural rivers. Iran has only one spawning river, up in the mountains. How come this only spawning river may produce 82 tons of caviar, just as much as the remaining Caspian States altogether? Unfortunately, to prove that, a large-scale tagging program should had been carried out years ago, but this had not been done," adds George Ruben.
It is worth mentioning though, that the major caterer of illicit caviar to the world market is Turkey, not Iran. Turkey is the destination of the illicit caviar floods from all CIS Caspian States. That’s where the caviar is packaged and given the ‘made in Turkey’ label, and then re-exported to other countries. Given the fact that Turkish sturgeon resources are not enough to swear by. Still, until 1997 Turkey had been declaring the annual catch quotas of 120 tons, which is 30% higher than Russia’s bid. It went so far that the CITES session in Harare, Zimbabwe put forward a proposal to embargo caviar re-export and reserve the right of the trade in caviar to the sturgeon-producing countries exclusively.
Yet the caviar has first to reach Turkey somehow. One of the major routes is Black Sea Ports, first of all Novorossiysk. When a ship is about to set off for Turkey, Russian and Ukrainian salesmen are approached by some people who insist to buy caviar from them. Aggressively enough not to dare to refuse. And the salesmen are eager to take it, knowing that on the Turkish embarcadero, other people, who would buy the caviar from them at a higher price, would meet them.
The Turks make an effort to legalize the imported caviar. To do that, Turkish middlemen buy out the lists of Russian and Ukrainian salespeople from small hotels, and sign over legal import of five cans of caviar by each of the salesmen appearing in those lists. No import tax is therefore paid. Caviar import via land border is cleared likewise. Salesmen are just about enough for every transaction. Only 10% of the illegal caviar goes abroad, the rest (90%) is consumed domestically.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Everyone knows where the illegal caviar concentrates, in what cities; how it is being shipped to Moscow, by what routes, in what warehouses it is being stored. The starting points are Volga Delta and Dagestan. If the caviar originates from Makhachkala, it is shipped up north, to a town called Artesian. Then it may go two ways: one along the Volga River, by trucks, via Nizhny Novgorod; the other directly to Voronezh city. Voronezh cold storages are Russia’s main terminals. Moreover, everyone knows how much one should slip at each of the block posts, it is also of general knowledge that the containers in the refrigerators only have a thin layer of vegetables concealing caviar underneath, and that’s how the customs are cleared. Then the caviar is expedited to Moscow region, as a rule. All markets fall within a certain sphere of influence. Mytishi market, for instance, is where Ukrainians trade in Azov Sea caviar, whereas Cheremushki market specializes in Caspian Sea caviar. Practically all Moscow cold storages are involved in illicit caviar trade. They sub-lease their premises to some shady companies storing unidentified goods. Some time ago, the Moscow Fish and Water Inspection initiated an investigation, which did not succeed. As for the State Fisheries Committee, it could apparently be one of the beneficiaries. Some private sources testify that even legal fish brigades sell to the State no more than 20–25% of their catch," says Alexey Vaisman, coordinator of TRAFFIC (Trade Records Analysis of Flora and Fauna in Commerce) – Russia, an organization that monitors illegal trade in wildlife.
Strangle the trade?
The aforesaid suggests a dark forecast. "Banning the legal export will not help to bring to an end illegal business," grieves George Ruben. "The total catch will decrease by 10%, but 90% will remain. That’s why the export embargo is pointless."
TRAFFIC ecologists suggest a different approach. "Trade, that’s what should be strangled. Once there’s no demand from salesmen, the poaching problem is resolved," advocates Alexey Vaisman. "TRAFFIC opposes to the embargo idea. If Russia is shut off from the caviar export, the country will lose money necessary for subsidizing fish processing farms, whereas poaching will persist. TRAFFIC suggests to keep caviar export as is, but to embargo domestic trade. We realize this measure will not be popular, but Russia’s market is entirely illegal from fancy boutiques to fish markets." TRAFFIC proposes to ban street market trade in sturgeon species.
"Russian police are unable to process any papers, due to their venality and clumsiness. Here’s a simple decision for simple people: no trade, that’s it. It doesn’t matter whether the caviar is legal or not. One of the examples where such scheme works is weapons: you cannot trade in weapons on the street, right? Same thing with caviar: a complete embargo on domestic trade," says Alexey Vaisman. Alas, it is not that clear how to implement such a ‘simple’ decision. Caviar is nonetheless neither drugs nor weapons. The Penal Code does not stipulate caviar trade. Formally, in Moscow (and the capital is the largest consumer of the product) caviar trade in city markets is prohibited, according to a city regulation. However, the caviar does not seem to disappear from Moscow street markets. The reason is that violating the caviar trade regulation would only entail administrative penalty, i.e. a fine.
AquaUNcultural Russia
In fact, there’s another way to improve the situation. At the present time, seven fish restocking farms operate in the Volga Delta. Almost all Beluga sturgeons, about 60% of Russian sturgeon, and 40% of Stellate sturgeon are being re-stocked artificially. Besides, there’s an option called "aquaculture", a farm where sturgeons are bred exclusively for sale, thus easing the pressure on natural population. Vendible sturgeons should weight about 1.5 to 2 kg. Sturgeons put on the necessary weight before too long and hence the expenses are quite moderate. In 2000, the "aquacultures" produced around fifteen hundred tons of fish, whereas the overall catch in Russia, including Siberia, did not exceed eight hundred tons. This year, the State Fisheries Committee is planning to produce in ‘aquacultures’ up to two thousand tons of fish. On the other hand, artificially bred fish does not produce caviar. To get the caviar, a female should be grown for 12-15 years, and the costs are forced up. And yet, the State Fisheries Committee considers the options of artificial breeding for caviar.
As a side note, artificial caviar breeding has been tested long ago in France, and French caviar is now competing with Russian caviar. In 1970s, France accepted as a gift from the Soviet Union some Lena River sturgeons. The French created a fish farm with caviar producing females. The caviar is fertilized, then incubated, and that’s how the young fish is born. The young fish is leased to small fish farms for growth. France has about 50 tons of fish meat every year as a result. Two years ago France was producing one ton of caviar as well, and the plan for the next few years is to increase the artificially produced caviar volumes up to five tons.
Unfortunately, "aquacultures" are far from being a popular business in Russia. The investments are high, and the payoff is expected no earlier than after 5 to 10 years. Not profitable. "I’ve talked to some businessmen suggesting to create an ‘aquaculture’ using the outlets of a power plant," says George Ruben. "No, the answer was, we want a net profit ratio of 40 per cent and up, with no long-term investments."
So, it looks like while the grass grows, the horse starves. Kenneth Stancell, CITES Committee chair assures that the limiting measures regarding caviar exports from CIS adopted in Paris are right and will be efficient for addressing alarmingly plummeting sturgeon stocks in the Caspian basin. Russia, unwilling to fall out with international organisations, signed a compromise agreement on export ban. The result, however, may prove to be counter-productive.
By Konstantin Volkov, The Reuters - IUCN Environmental Media Awards 2001, Winner - Europe.
Caviar, a unique product, which used to bring gold to the Tsar’s treasury, and dollars to the Soviet budget, will no longer be officially exported from Russia. Moscow has to put up with a one year ‘voluntary’ embargo on sturgeon catch. But most likely it won’t help the Caspian sturgeon. Russian caviar will continue to be smuggled to the West via Turkey and Iran, as hitherto.
Khrushev, Sturgeon’s Enemy
In 1958, under Nikita Khrushev’s rule, the Volgograd hydroelectric power plant (HPP) was constructed, preventing the Caspian sturgeon from migrating to its spawning grounds up the stream. As a result, Volga lost 100% of Beluga’s natural spawning grounds, 80% of Russian sturgeon’s spawning grounds, and 40% of Stellate sturgeon spawning grounds. In attempt to counter the catastrophic drop in sturgeon populations, all commercial catch, deadly for young fish stocks, was banned in 1962. Approximately at the same time the first fish farms for artificial breeding of sturgeon species started to be built. All these measures helped to increase the Caspian sturgeon stocks. The 1977 hit the records, when the catch was as high as 27 700 tons as against 461,1 tons in 2000. The annual catches remained stable until the early 80s, when they went down again: the reason was that the sturgeons born before the construction of Volgograd HPP were caught out, while existing fish farms were unable to compensate for the loss. The drop in the Caspian sturgeon population took a dramatic pace in the late 90s: the paralysis of the power led to outrageous poaching. Experts estimate the volumes of poaching to exceed the levels of legal harvesting by eleven times. The situation in the Azov Sea region is even worse: poachers cast up to 40 thousand fishnets every year, harvesting 50 times more sturgeons than fishermen with official licenses.
On top of that, sturgeon has been overtaken by another disaster. The females’ share has been shrinking in Sturgeon populations. The normal sex ratio in a population should be equal, whereas the actual ratio is approximately 12 female to 88 male sturgeon species. All this due to the fact that sturgeons are caught primarily for caviar, the value of which is far and away higher than that of sturgeon meat. A few male species are therefore left for fish soup, while the rest of the male catch is released. Furthermore, the fish processing farms would only buy the catch in the 1:1 proportion, and there’s no reasoning with them. Half of females, that’s it! According to experts, the status of sturgeon species generally, as well as in specific basins may be described as catastrophic. In the Caspian Sea, the main sturgeon basin, the catches over the two last decades dropped by 17 to 20 times, in the Azov basin the decrease is 36 times compared to 1936 and 17 times compared to 1952. The catch in Siberian sturgeon in the Ob River has dropped disastrously as well. Over 60 years, from 1935 to 1994, it dropped by 122 times, and over 9 years from 1985 to 1994, by 7 times.
The UN and the Fish
On 3 March, 1973 the UN Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES) was signed in Washington. CITES is the main mechanism that controls and regulates trade in rare and endangered species of wild animals and plants worldwide. The Convention has a number of Appendices, which list all those endangered species. At the moment, 152 states, including Russia, have signed the Convention.
Last June the Convention Secretariat warned the four Caspian states (Russia, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan), that it would seek to apply an embargo on caviar expert unless these four states enforce their sturgeon stock protection measures. The warning apparently took effect, since at the Paris meeting the countries assented to one-year embargo on sturgeon catch. Now that’s how it looks like in practice. The countries are authorized to sell the spring spawning stock caviar until the 2001 quotas set by CITES will have been exhausted.
CITES embargo warnings shouldn’t be taken as idle threats. Obviously, we are used to weak enforcement of western market regulations in Russia. But the force of CITES is in its ability to regulate the western market itself. Any inspection there that has doubts about the authenticity of the product license has the right to put a fine on the retailer and confiscate the goods. Yet, another problem arises: how to identify the origin of the sturgeon?
That’s what Dr. Ruben, leading ichthyologist, has told ITOGI Magazine: "Let’s assume that according to the papers the caviar originates from the Persian sturgeon. To prove it, one should make a lab analysis. Each of the sturgeon species has a unique sequence of nucleotides that form the DNA. But the US lab analysis uses a pat of B cytochrome gene, whereas it is proved that the B cytochrome of the Russian, the Siberian and the Persian sturgeon is identical. So from the scientific point of view, such analysis cannot be validated, especially in the absence of samples collection."
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Still in spite of the failures of lab analysis, western retailers are cautious about buying caviar on the side. As the story goes, once Russian tourists brought a few cans of caviar each to the US, with no certificates, of course, expecting to get a bargain. To their surprise, no one wanted to buy a single can of caviar from them. Finally, one retailer yielded: "The hell with you, I’ll take five of those at 5 bucks each! And that’s for personal consumption." This is on CITES enforcement in the West.
However, as for CITES’s imperative request to enforce anti-poaching measures, most experts consider it impossible to fulfill. "CITES urges us to develop anti-poaching measures, says George Ruben, which we’ have already elaborated plenty, but what’s the good of it? They are all left on paper. Fish police should chase poachers, confiscate fishing equipment, impose penalties. However, given the rampant corruption, the police are inoperative. The rivers are netted in broad daylight, and the fish police just bypass those areas.
The Volga Delta and Dagestan are known as distressed regions, with high unemployment. That’s why everyone depends on fishing. Stellate Sturgeon suffers from the economic collapse. In Dagestan, sturgeon business is a throwback of the feudalism. All catch goes to "the master". A few fishermen have boats on their own and sell their catch themselves; others work for "the master" for food.
Sea trawling is another common way of sturgeon commerce in Dagestan. Usually trawlers are owned by high-ranking officials. A trawler owned, for instance, by a "Dagryba" fishery company, puts out to sea absolutely legally, with a license for some smaller fish. Evidently, nobody cares to trawl this fish, what’s trawled is sturgeon. Frontier guards are either fled or bribed. While coastal fishing is somewhat of an amateur activity, trawling is already a serious business. They say, once a similar trawler discharged about two KamAz trucks of sturgeons. A fish police boat wished to inspect the cargo. Suddenly, a local water police boat appeared out of nowhere. Rifles from both sides, the game ended in a draw. The trucks smoothly drove away…
As a result the illegal catch volumes exceed those reported to the state by far. It is also noteworthy, that according to the Russian Fisheries Committee, the legal catch quotas for caviar are not taken up completely. Thus, the 1999 export quota was 162 tons, whereas the official catch was reported as 42 tons. The question of how much was caught illegally may be considered rhetorical: who counted it? According to the CITES, the yearly illegal catch is about 1100 tons, equivalent to US$100 million.
The Caviar Route
The reasonable question is where do these zillions of illegal caviar go? Experts say about 10 per cent of the total illegal catch goes abroad. At the CITES meeting in Paris, the representatives of Russia, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan argued that the ban on legal export would not stop caviar smuggling in the region. By saying this, they hinted at Iran, immune from CITES sanctions. "A substantial share of Azerbaijani caviar is being smuggled via Iran at the moment," gives his opinion Vyacheslav Mironov, Director General of the ‘Russian Caviar’ Trading Company. "Nobody assessed Iran’s sturgeon resources. The existing Persian sturgeon is known to spawn in Volga and Ural rivers. Iran has only one spawning river, up in the mountains. How come this only spawning river may produce 82 tons of caviar, just as much as the remaining Caspian States altogether? Unfortunately, to prove that, a large-scale tagging program should had been carried out years ago, but this had not been done," adds George Ruben.
It is worth mentioning though, that the major caterer of illicit caviar to the world market is Turkey, not Iran. Turkey is the destination of the illicit caviar floods from all CIS Caspian States. That’s where the caviar is packaged and given the ‘made in Turkey’ label, and then re-exported to other countries. Given the fact that Turkish sturgeon resources are not enough to swear by. Still, until 1997 Turkey had been declaring the annual catch quotas of 120 tons, which is 30% higher than Russia’s bid. It went so far that the CITES session in Harare, Zimbabwe put forward a proposal to embargo caviar re-export and reserve the right of the trade in caviar to the sturgeon-producing countries exclusively.
Yet the caviar has first to reach Turkey somehow. One of the major routes is Black Sea Ports, first of all Novorossiysk. When a ship is about to set off for Turkey, Russian and Ukrainian salesmen are approached by some people who insist to buy caviar from them. Aggressively enough not to dare to refuse. And the salesmen are eager to take it, knowing that on the Turkish embarcadero, other people, who would buy the caviar from them at a higher price, would meet them.
The Turks make an effort to legalize the imported caviar. To do that, Turkish middlemen buy out the lists of Russian and Ukrainian salespeople from small hotels, and sign over legal import of five cans of caviar by each of the salesmen appearing in those lists. No import tax is therefore paid. Caviar import via land border is cleared likewise. Salesmen are just about enough for every transaction. Only 10% of the illegal caviar goes abroad, the rest (90%) is consumed domestically.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Everyone knows where the illegal caviar concentrates, in what cities; how it is being shipped to Moscow, by what routes, in what warehouses it is being stored. The starting points are Volga Delta and Dagestan. If the caviar originates from Makhachkala, it is shipped up north, to a town called Artesian. Then it may go two ways: one along the Volga River, by trucks, via Nizhny Novgorod; the other directly to Voronezh city. Voronezh cold storages are Russia’s main terminals. Moreover, everyone knows how much one should slip at each of the block posts, it is also of general knowledge that the containers in the refrigerators only have a thin layer of vegetables concealing caviar underneath, and that’s how the customs are cleared. Then the caviar is expedited to Moscow region, as a rule. All markets fall within a certain sphere of influence. Mytishi market, for instance, is where Ukrainians trade in Azov Sea caviar, whereas Cheremushki market specializes in Caspian Sea caviar. Practically all Moscow cold storages are involved in illicit caviar trade. They sub-lease their premises to some shady companies storing unidentified goods. Some time ago, the Moscow Fish and Water Inspection initiated an investigation, which did not succeed. As for the State Fisheries Committee, it could apparently be one of the beneficiaries. Some private sources testify that even legal fish brigades sell to the State no more than 20–25% of their catch," says Alexey Vaisman, coordinator of TRAFFIC (Trade Records Analysis of Flora and Fauna in Commerce) – Russia, an organization that monitors illegal trade in wildlife.
Strangle the trade?
The aforesaid suggests a dark forecast. "Banning the legal export will not help to bring to an end illegal business," grieves George Ruben. "The total catch will decrease by 10%, but 90% will remain. That’s why the export embargo is pointless."
TRAFFIC ecologists suggest a different approach. "Trade, that’s what should be strangled. Once there’s no demand from salesmen, the poaching problem is resolved," advocates Alexey Vaisman. "TRAFFIC opposes to the embargo idea. If Russia is shut off from the caviar export, the country will lose money necessary for subsidizing fish processing farms, whereas poaching will persist. TRAFFIC suggests to keep caviar export as is, but to embargo domestic trade. We realize this measure will not be popular, but Russia’s market is entirely illegal from fancy boutiques to fish markets." TRAFFIC proposes to ban street market trade in sturgeon species.
"Russian police are unable to process any papers, due to their venality and clumsiness. Here’s a simple decision for simple people: no trade, that’s it. It doesn’t matter whether the caviar is legal or not. One of the examples where such scheme works is weapons: you cannot trade in weapons on the street, right? Same thing with caviar: a complete embargo on domestic trade," says Alexey Vaisman. Alas, it is not that clear how to implement such a ‘simple’ decision. Caviar is nonetheless neither drugs nor weapons. The Penal Code does not stipulate caviar trade. Formally, in Moscow (and the capital is the largest consumer of the product) caviar trade in city markets is prohibited, according to a city regulation. However, the caviar does not seem to disappear from Moscow street markets. The reason is that violating the caviar trade regulation would only entail administrative penalty, i.e. a fine.
AquaUNcultural Russia
In fact, there’s another way to improve the situation. At the present time, seven fish restocking farms operate in the Volga Delta. Almost all Beluga sturgeons, about 60% of Russian sturgeon, and 40% of Stellate sturgeon are being re-stocked artificially. Besides, there’s an option called "aquaculture", a farm where sturgeons are bred exclusively for sale, thus easing the pressure on natural population. Vendible sturgeons should weight about 1.5 to 2 kg. Sturgeons put on the necessary weight before too long and hence the expenses are quite moderate. In 2000, the "aquacultures" produced around fifteen hundred tons of fish, whereas the overall catch in Russia, including Siberia, did not exceed eight hundred tons. This year, the State Fisheries Committee is planning to produce in ‘aquacultures’ up to two thousand tons of fish. On the other hand, artificially bred fish does not produce caviar. To get the caviar, a female should be grown for 12-15 years, and the costs are forced up. And yet, the State Fisheries Committee considers the options of artificial breeding for caviar.
As a side note, artificial caviar breeding has been tested long ago in France, and French caviar is now competing with Russian caviar. In 1970s, France accepted as a gift from the Soviet Union some Lena River sturgeons. The French created a fish farm with caviar producing females. The caviar is fertilized, then incubated, and that’s how the young fish is born. The young fish is leased to small fish farms for growth. France has about 50 tons of fish meat every year as a result. Two years ago France was producing one ton of caviar as well, and the plan for the next few years is to increase the artificially produced caviar volumes up to five tons.
Unfortunately, "aquacultures" are far from being a popular business in Russia. The investments are high, and the payoff is expected no earlier than after 5 to 10 years. Not profitable. "I’ve talked to some businessmen suggesting to create an ‘aquaculture’ using the outlets of a power plant," says George Ruben. "No, the answer was, we want a net profit ratio of 40 per cent and up, with no long-term investments."
So, it looks like while the grass grows, the horse starves. Kenneth Stancell, CITES Committee chair assures that the limiting measures regarding caviar exports from CIS adopted in Paris are right and will be efficient for addressing alarmingly plummeting sturgeon stocks in the Caspian basin. Russia, unwilling to fall out with international organisations, signed a compromise agreement on export ban. The result, however, may prove to be counter-productive.
Death wish - 4 part series
The human race looks like it's going the way of the dinosaurs: We're driving ourselves to extinction. Starting today, in a dramatic series of articles, Globe and Mail reporter ALANNA MITCHELL goes to the world's environmental disaster zones to find out just how desperate the situation is - and what might save us from ourselves
By Alanna Mitchell, The Reuters - IUCN Environmental Media Awards 2001
Winner - North America, the Caribbean and Oceania. 06/02/2001, The Globe and Mail
Humanity has a death wish? It sounds like a glib joke, but unless you assume people can thrive on a poisoned, parched, denuded and fuel-less planet, the suggestion that our actions are tantamount to collective suicide seems more serious by the day.
Earth's population has surpassed six billion and is rising by about 78 million people a year (United Nations experts expect it to peak at about 10 billion), constantly increasing the need to tap into natural resources. Enterprise may be free, but the energy crunch is growing so severe that gasoline prices soon may hit $1 a litre. South of the border, a Texas oil man who now sits in the White House is urging his nation to jack up supply rather than decrease demand.
Closer to home, fish-deprived Newfoundland sees water, water everywhere and suddenly wonders what's so wrong with bulk exports. Ontario's common-sense revolutionaries try to reconcile their affection for high-density livestock production with the way it fouls the province's drinking water.
Conflicts like these have been mounting at such a rate that even those willing to pay an ecological price for progress are shocked at the inflation rate.
Environmentalism still suffers from the stereotype that it is a kind of global do-goodism, in which "tree-hugging" charity toward wildlife trumps the human need for jobs and economic development. But what if eco-friendliness is really a matter of cold, keen-eyed self-interest -- of preventing our own extinction?
Like the global climate, the debate is about to get hotter. Today is not only the launch of Canada Environment Week, the annual exercise in eco-consciousness raising, it's the ninth anniversary of the Earth Summit, the great gathering in Rio de Janeiro that put the environment on the front burner.
Or did it? With the celebration on Monday of yet another eco-event, the UN's annual World Environment Day, preparation begins in earnest for Rio Plus 10, the follow-up summit slated for next year in Johannesburg. An estimated 64,000 participants are expected to take stock of the situation and decide what can be done to rekindle the environmental flame.
There may not be much time. As actor Harrison Ford, an ardent environmentalist, told Alanna Mitchell, The Globe and Mail's earth sciences reporter: "We all know we are losing parts of the biotic continuum at each and every step. We have no idea, really, what finally the effects of those losses will be."
How bad is it? To find out, The Globe sent Mitchell around the world. After visiting the Middle East, the Far North, South America and the badlands of Alberta, she concluded that the ancient Greeks' theory of the four elements needs an update. The relationship between earth, air, water and fire is now subject to the pervasive influence of a fifth element -- humanity.
As Ford, an active board member of Washington-based Conservation International, puts it: "Human interference with the natural order of our planet is the biggest factor in why it is now so fragile."
We are using and abusing water so quickly that nature cannot replenish its supply. So much forest cover has been lost that there is now more carbon dioxide in the air than at any other time in three million years. Temperatures are rising at unprecedented rates; ice caps and permafrost are melting. In fact, climate change is so advanced that experts fear some parts of the world will lose the ability to feed themselves and fall prey to disease.
With the ecosystem breaking down, 24 per cent of all mammal species are at serious risk of extinction, along with 30 per cent of fish, 25 per cent of reptiles, 20 per cent of amphibians and 12 per cent of the birds, according to the World Conservation Union.
Unless something changes soon, species will go extinct faster now than they did when the dinosaurs died out -- all, ironically, at the hand of Homo sapiens, the big winner when the dinosaurs surrendered the Earth. Our new understanding of that "extinction spasm," and what it implies about our current predicament, is the subject of today's opener to Mitchell's startling four-part series.
The next two parts of the series support that admittedly bleak picture, with humans acting the role of a suicidal horde, like the apocryphal march of the lemmings.
But in the finale, Mitchell finds hope deep in the virgin rain forest of Suriname that even if the situation is desperate, humanity can do one thing the lemming cannot: We can change our behaviour.
Death Wish Part 1
Focus Saturday, June 2, 2001
A world-renowned Canadian has a fascinating new theory to explain why
the great prehistoric beasts died out -- and he can't help but wonder whether humanity will share their fate. Philip Currie shares his findings with ALANNA MITCHELL, and points out that...
… at least the dinosaurs had an excuse
They call it the day the dinosaurs died. It happened 65 million years ago when a massive asteroid punched through the atmosphere and hit Earth with the energy of a hundred million hydrogen bombs. Rocks vapourized on impact and animals burned to a crisp as fire engulfed whole continents, filling the skies with soot. Tidal waves swept the planet.
Then the darkness came and, as a result, the cold. Until, months later, the vast amounts of carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere by the explosions formed a greenhouse gas so potent that it reheated the climate to lethal temperatures.
By the time the temperature had returned to normal, a span of several millenniums, Earth had undergone the fifth great extinction spasm in its history. Perhaps half of all life forms had been wiped out, including the dinosaurs that had ruled the world for 150 million years and were the most sophisticated creatures it had ever seen.
At least, that's the accepted wisdom. But a Canadian expert has come up with a new theory that not only paints a different picture of just why the dinosaur era ground to a halt, but also has an ominous implication for today's dominant life form: extinction. It's a brisk but gloriously sunny spring day, and Philip Currie and I are in the windswept Alberta badlands looking for dinosaur bones. He shivers in a light jacket, with his hands in his jean pockets and his eyes on the ground. Then he stoops, pokes a long forefinger into the dust and uncovers what looks like a bit of rock.
But the internationally renowned paleontologist and head of research at one of the world's biggest dinosaur museums knows instantly that it is not rock. It is a piece of fossil -- from a plant eater, to be specific, most likely the duck-billed hadrosaurus, a resident of the region 70 million years ago. Note the roughness that was once the spongy interior of the bones plant eaters developed to support their great bulk, he explains. Meat eaters such as Tyrannosaurus rex had hollow bones bolstered by an extremely dense outer layer.
Moments later, Currie crouches again, folding his long legs beneath him like a cricket. Triumphantly, he pries loose something that looks just like a square bit of mosaic. "Tendon!" he announces, smiling. The creature was indeed a duckbill -- it had tendons running down the spine to stiffen its tail.
This is what Alberta is like for a paleontologist. The badlands that run from Currie's base at the Royal Tyrrell Museum in Drumheller, east of Calgary, south to Dinosaur Provincial Park make up the world's most exquisite bone bed. At any one time, literally millions of fossils are exposed. More complete skeletons have emerged from these few square kilometres than anywhere else on Earth. Big fossils are so plentiful that native people used to consider them proof positive that giants once roamed the planet.
Just as the badlands have lots of evidence of how the dinosaurs lived, they are also uniquely placed to furnish clues about the critical moment when they died.
Until now, most researchers have accepted the asteroid theory as presented in such scientific works as T. rex and the Crater of Doom,written by Walter Alvarez, an esteemed geophysicist at the University of California at Berkeley.
Alvarez, the son of Nobel Prize-winning physicist Luis Alvarez, spent more than a decade researching his thesis that an extraterrestrial body was to blame. In 1991, he finally uncovered the impact site in Mexico, buried under what is now the north coast of the Yucatan Peninsula.
"Rocks are the key to Earth history, because solids remember but liquids and gases forget," he writes in his book. "Retrieving these long-lost memories is the business of geologists and paleontologists, of people who have chosen to be the historians of the Earth."
Currie is one such "historian," but he now suspects that Alvarez does not have the part about the dinosaurs quite right. After 25 years in the field, the Ontario-bred, McGill-educated paleontologist has developed a hypothesis of his own.
He believes that the dinosaurs were in serious trouble when the asteroid hit. For millions of years, they had been struggling to cope with the impact changing weather patterns had had on their ecosystems. So many species had died off that the assault from space was the final blow for the few that remained -- if, that is, there were any left at all.
Had the calamity come 10 million years earlier, Currie theorizes, the dinosaurs still would have had enough species and a deep enough gene pool to allow some to survive. As a result, evolution might have taken a vastly different course. The Age of Mammals might never have happened, let alone the Age of Man.
If he is right, the dinosaurs' demise amounts to a dire warning for modern humanity. We are taxing the planet's resources so much that we are pushing species and entire ecosystems over the brink. Currie fears that as we take more and more pieces out of the delicate machinery of Earth, we make ourselves more and more vulnerable just as the dinosaurs were. The result: a much greater chance that a catastrophe, whether another asteroid, a disease or something yet unimagined will spark Armageddon.
"You reduce diversity and then something really major happens," he says, "and you've got a problem."
There is a critical difference, though, between what happened to the dinosaurs and what is happening today. Dinosaurs were the victims of fate. Homo sapiens is orchestrating its own downfall. Humans have become a force of nature -- and a malignant one. In effect, we have joined earth, air, water and fire to become the fifth element.
Scientists are finding that each of the planet's critical life-support systems is in jeopardy. Water supplies are being poisoned and exhausted. The air is now so polluted with humanity's carbon dioxide that the weather is being altered. As well, humans have cleared so much of the forest cover and tilled so much land that the carbon cycle has ceased to work properly.
Even fire seems to have lost the power the ancients believed it has over life and death. Now, humans determine what lives and what dies. Because of our actions, 24 per cent of mammal species are in danger of extinction. As well, one-quarter of all reptiles are at risk, plus one-fifth of amphibians, nearly one-third of fish and one in every eight birds, according to the World Conservation Union.
These figures are so high that scientists believe that unless the pace slows, species will vanish more rapidly now than when the dinosaurs died out. The terrible irony is that Homo sapiens, the big winner from the dinosaurs' extinction, is responsible.
Actor Harrison Ford has devoted himself to changing all this, through his work as a board member of Washington-based Conservation International. "Human interference with the natural order of our planet," he explained to me last week, "is the biggest factor in why it is now so fragile."
The risks are huge. "We all know we are losing parts of the biotic continuum at each and every step," he says. "We have no idea, really, what finally the effects of those losses will be." Phil Currie is famous mostly for his work on theropods, the upright meat eaters such as the fearful T. rex, and he is much more interested in their heyday during the Cretaceous period than he is in their demise. But over the past 25 years, as he has mined the Alberta bone beds, he has uncovered many clues to the dinosaurs' mysterious extinction that he cannot ignore.
He casts himself back about 80 million years to a time when Dinosaur Provincial Park was a coastal lowland, a delta something like the mouth of the modern Mississippi. A sea covered most of Saskatchewan and Manitoba and the Gulf of Mexico went all the way to the Arctic Ocean. There were no polar ice caps and the mighty Rocky Mountains would not emerge for 15 million more years.
Alberta's climate was sultry, like Florida's today. Instead of scrub brush, there were forests of cypress trees and redwoods towering over lush ferns and some of the planet's first flowering plants. The air was heavy with the scent of magnolia.
The region not only supported a huge animal population, it was also well-suited to preserving them after death. Many died in water, allowing sediment to cover them and eventually produce fossils. But the bonus for modern science was the Ice Age.
Flip forward to about 12,000 years ago, when Homo sapiens was just emerging from its caves and the woolly mammoth roamed the land. As the glaciers retreated, they carved remorselessly through the landscape, peeling off hundreds of metres of geological beds to expose the glory of the dinosaurs.
Currie points to a bald outcropping against the clear sky. And then another. They are rounded, as if a gigantic hand has scooped them into a sculpture. But the layers that run across these figurative outcroppings are set down with geometric precision -- the black seam represents a mucky wet period in Alberta's past, the grey shows when forests covered the land, the sandy one is the residue of an epoch of fast rivers.
Because these sequences are so precise, Currie can determine which dinosaurs lived when. The fossils tell him that 80 million years ago, at least 35 species lived in southern Alberta. Seventy million years ago, the tally had fallen to 20 to 25. And five million years after that -- right before the asteroid hit -- there were just six.
"Whether you look at the big picture or the small," he says, "we are saying that there was a reduction in the diversity of dinosaurs over the last 10 million years -- and that would suggest that, in western North America, something big is going on."
Something like this: In the millions of years before the dinosaurs went extinct, the seas began to pull back from the continents. The Gulf of Mexico inched south, the Arctic Ocean north. Inland seas began to vanish in South America and Australia. As that happened, Currie says, continental climates were established for the first time in eons. That meant warmer days and colder nights. And even though the climatic change was gradual, many of land-living dinosaurs could not adjust.
"The deterioration of the temperature doesn't have to be a lot," Currie says.
Another clue to the dinosaur dropoff is the size of the ones that were left at the end. They were big and, strange as it may seem today, nature tends to favour big animals over small ones, if climate and environment remain stable. They live longer, are less active and need to eat proportionately less to survive. (As well as the dinosaurs, the world has seen a rhino that stood 18 feet at the shoulder, amphibians with skulls the size of a dining-room table, bisons the size of elephants, birds 10 feet tall.)
But big creatures do not cope well with rapid change and the six dinosaur species still on the scene when the asteroid hit included the towering T. rex and hefty triceratops, and others that were among the biggest of their families. So not only was the gene pool thin, it was also a bit slow on its feet.
To science, the point at which the asteroid fell marks the end of the Cretaceous Period and the beginning of the Tertiary Period, and is known as the K/T boundary. (The T is for Teriary and K is from "Kreide," which is "creta" in German.) Alberta's geological record of what happened at that time on land is most clear, but what it shows is baffling. For one thing, there are no dinosaur bones. If dinosaurs died en masse, where are the bones?
"We know absolutely not a thing about the dinosaur at the boundary," explains David Eberth, a Tyrrell geologist and paleontologist. "I just about fell out of my chair last year when I realized that."
This alone does not prove that dinosaurs were already extinct. But it does mean there is no proof, so far, that they were still alive. The record also shows quite clearly that Earth's climate had undergone a sharp change and was becoming more harsh. Quickly. Rapid change makes it difficult for life to adapt. Species were dying.
Scanning the fossil-laden hills of the badlands, it is hard not to think of the incredible pace of today's climate change. Already, there is more carbon dioxide in the air than at any other time in three million years, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reported this year. Arctic Sea ice is 40-per-cent thinner than it was 40 years ago. Glaciers around the world are vanishing. Scientists believe that the pace is faster than what preceded the K/T boundary -- the fastest, in fact, in Earth's history. The K/T boundary does not look all that remarkable. Dennis Braman, a specialist in plant microfossils at the Tyrrell,is holding a piece of it in his hands -- a sliver of claystone sediment between one centimetre and two centimetres thick that is packed between layers of mudstone and coal.
It represents perhaps a decade, an unimaginably small slice of Earth's 4.6 billion years of existence, but an unimaginably important one: a rare geochemical marker of a single point in time across the planet.
Braman is one of the scientists who, leaping off Alvarez's findings, have taken the boundary apart molecule by molecule, spore by spore. A major surprise has been the astonishing amount of iridium -- the so-called "iridium spike" -- found along the boundary all over the world. Iridium is a very rare element -- on Earth. Extraterrestrial bodies have lots of it.
As well, there is "shocked" quartz (crystal is so finely fractured that it resembles miniature graph paper), a concentration of unusual primordial microdiamonds and an array of bizarre amino acids, all of which Braman says point to something falling from the sky.
Above the boundary is between half a centimetre and two centimetres of what Braman calls an "impoverished zone." It should be a good spot to find pollens and other evidence of life -- but hardly any is there to be found. "Something very major happened," he says. "But there seem to be other things happening before." No one knows better than a dinosaur scholar that extinction is normal. Phil Currie is no alarmist. But he has read first-hand the history of Earth. He has seen the calamitous results of rapid ecosystem change, has catalogued the imperatives of evolution. The parallels between then and
now haunt him.
He fears that humans are doing something no other plant or animal has done: defying the law of evolution. We have forestalled natural selection and unleashed our own series of extinctions. We have sidestepped the nasty effects of human evolution, but we have failed to cash in on the benefits of continual evolution. That means our sick do not necessarily die off, but we have not developed the biological nimbleness to adapt to new challenges.
"Right now," he says, "we're blindly going along and destroying things and that could ultimately contribute to our own destruction. As long as things keep going like this, we really aren't doing much to ensure our own future."
And not just our own. The future of thousands of other creatures that have survived the evolution wars of billions of years hangs in the balance. And the unknown ways they contribute to the functioning of the planet.
Is he right? Has humanity really become what amounts to the fifth element? Some experts agree. "I can say, undeniably, that human actions are so profound that they equal the forces of nature," Will Steffen says from his office in Stockholm. A chemist, Steffen is in charge of the International Geosphere-Biosphere Program, which brings together a decade of research on how the natural world is changing.
Asked whether the planet is robust enough to withstand the shock of human interference, he replies that it is hard even to tell where the point of no return is. "Can humans actually push the Earth into operating in a different state that's not suitable for human civilization? That's way beyond scientific enterprise."
Modern researchers now believe that the ancients conjured up the notion of the griffin -- the monstrous winged hound of Zeus with a lion's body and an eagle's head -- after seeing bones of the protoceratops found in the Gobi Desert. Legend helped them make sense of a world they did not really understand.
Today, however, there is no such escape in myth. Science has told us how species evolve and die out and the role Homo sapiens plays in that. And now, scientists such as Phil Currie are beginning to read the lessons the fossils have to teach, rather than relying on imagination.
The question, Currie says, is what we make of it. "We do recognize our past. It's a very important advantage we should have. We think of more than just food and surviving -- and that's something that definitely didn't go on during the Cretaceous.
"But if things play out and we drive ourselves to extinction, then what do we really accomplish by doing things differently? Nothing." He shakes his head. The logic escapes him.
Coming Up
Death Wish: Will humanity self-destruct? Are we really facing the end of the world as we know it?
Next week, as the series continues, award-winning earth sciences reporter Alanna Mitchell travels to the Middle East, Canada's Arctic and finally the South American jungle to assess the planet's predicament and its prospects for survival.
Monday: The water crisis
Tuesday: The big melt
Wednesday: A glimmer of hope
06/02/2001
The Globe and Mail
Metro
F4
"All material Copyright (c) Bell Globemedia Publishing Inc. and its licensors. All rights reserved."
Focus 06/04/2001
The Globe and Mail Metro Page A8
"All material Copyright Bell Globemedia Publishing Inc.
and its licensors. All rights reserved."
The world's 'single biggest threat'
Water - Canadians may take it for granted, but some countries will do almost anything
to ensure an adequate supply. The Death Wish series resumes with ALANNA MITCHELL
braving the heat of the Joranian desert to visit Azraq, the legendary oasis that humanity bled dry.
Deep in the parched desert of Jordan lies the oasis at Azraq, famed throughout the recorded history of the Middle East for what used to be here.
For a quarter-million years, water flowing from its ancient subterranean springs made it one of the world's great resting places for migrating birds. Hippos, zebras and lions came to drink here, and archeologists have found a fossilized jaw bone so old that it may be the missing link between the African and Asian branches of the elephant family.
Drawn both by the fresh water and plentiful prey, early humans settled here before almost anywhere else. Historians think Moses spent his 40 years in the nearby desert and the Romans considered Azraq so vital that they built a fortress here. Later, Arab kings added castles so they could hunt and then feast in luxury. And during the First World War, Lawrence of Arabia wandered in from the misery of the sand and found a place "radiant with half-memory of the luminous silky Eden." From the main castle at Azraq, he launched his famous attack on the Turks at Damascus.
That was then. Today, all that remains is a cruel caricature of an oasis. The springs that gave life for millenniums are dead now, dried and gone. The land has broken open into great, deep fissures. Heat rises inexorably from ground where marshy grasses once grew.
It took humans just 13 years to kill the oasis. Desperate for water, Jordanians began pumping from Azraq in earnest in 1980. By 1993, the birds were gone and the marsh plants slowly dried up and died. Around the same time, Azraq was declared an international ecological disaster.
Since then, a heroic attempt has been made to resurrect part of the oasis and the progress has been seen worldwide as a great ecological rehabilitation. But it is there on sufferance. At the flick of a politician's pen, the meagre green in this expanse of desert could vanish.
What's more, as Jordanians continue to pump too much from the oasis, the freshwater left is becoming less capable of keeping surrounding salt caches at bay. The experts are saying it is only a matter of time before the freshwater left in the oasis becomes undrinkable. Water is so fundamental that humanity defines it in many ways. To science, it is the combination of hydrogen and oxygen that produces a liquid essential to life -- the medium for nearly all chemical reactions in living organisms. To metaphysics, it is not only the prerequisite to life, but also possibly its origin. And in ecclesiastical terms, water is a symbol of cleansing, renewal, acceptance and rebirth -- an emblem of faith in the future.
But this necessity of life is not evenly distributed around the globe. Canada, blessed with the world's biggest freshwater supply, takes it for granted -- or sees it as the next big export item.
Not so in the Middle East, with a population that doubles every few decades and a landscape that for the most part looks a lot like Jordan's: 85 per cent sand. Jordanians use about 200 cubic metres of water a year. The world average is 7,700.
And the Middle East is hardly alone in its worries over water. An estimated 500 million people on the planet now live in countries critically short of water. By 2025, that figure will leap to three billion.
Already, the "severe water scarcity presents the single biggest threat to future food production," argues Sandra Postel, director of the U.S.-based Global Water Policy Project, "Even now," she wrote in the February, 2001, issue of Scientific American, "many freshwater sources . . . are stressed beyond their limits."
A new euphemism -- water vulnerability -- has been coined to describe the looming shortage, which ranks, along with the planet's disappearing forest cover and the rapid change in its climate, as one of the great threats to modern life. Like the other injuries to the planet, this water problem has been orchestrated by humanity -- now such a powerful force that it rivals the four elements the ancient Greeks believed make up the universe.
Water should be the ultimate renewable resource. According to its natural cycle, it evaporates, collects in the air and then falls as rain. Some of it leaves the planet's surface, eventually filtering through the purifying barrier of Earth and recharging underground aquifers. The net sum of water on the planet does not change.
But humans are bungling their stewardship of freshwater stores all over the world -- even, as Canadians well know, in places blessed with an abundance.
Not only has pollution destroyed part of the water supply, but human development has reduced the amount of water that exists in its most useful state: liquid. As global warming drives Earth's temperatures upward, notes Roger Street, a specialist in climate change at Environment Canada, the atmosphere retains more and more water in vapour form.
And as irrigated agriculture grows, humans have been drilling ever deeper, in effect "mining" subterranean water so quickly and on such a grand scale that vital reservoirs simply cannot replenish themselves.
Levels in some parts of Mexico are falling as much as three metres a year, and the High Plains Aquifer, which lies beneath the heartland of the United States and supplies about 30 per cent of the nation's irrigation supply, is in an alarming decline.
Closer to home, the Abbotsford Aquifer in British Columbia is polluted with nitrates, the waste products of farming. It supplies more than 100,000 people in Abbotsford and neighbouring Washington state, but almost three-quarters of the samples taken since 1992 have shown unsafe nitrate levels. Some were nine times what is considered tolerable.
The International Water Management Institute has catalogued the double-fronted attack on the water table in north China's Fuyang Basin. Industry is siphoning off the surface water and polluting it while farmers have resorted to drilling wells to irrigate their crops. The result has been disastrous. From 1967 to 2000, the water table in the basin has fallen as much as 50 metres.
In parts of South Asia, humans have extracted so much of the underground supply that this normally pristine source is too feeble to keep out the contaminants contained in the surrounding land. The natural ability of Earth to purify the water has been spoiled simply by lack of volume.
And where people are not overtaxing the water supply, they are poisoning it with everything from toxic waste to fertilizers, pesticides and raw sewage. Such abuse can exact a heavy toll -- witness the cancer rate among those exposed to Cape Breton's notorious tar ponds and the citizens ravaged by E. coli in Walkerton, Ont. Back in the Jordanian desert, it is easy to see why the landscape's inhospitability is legendary. The heat makes the horizon shimmer. The sand is so fine that it is more like a powder. Each footstep sends up a puffy cloud above ankle height where it hangs in the blistering air before settling down again. The fine grit seems to combine chemically with body salt and sweat to form a new, intractable substance that is impossible to remove from clothes and shoes.
The Bedouins are the only humans to survive the desert efficiently, aided by their camels. As I walk around this desolate place, I see a baby camel, tethered by its front legs to a post, much as a North American would leash up a puppy. Its owners, draped in thin cotton cloth, sit grinning nearby.
There are few other animals in sight. Birds and flowers wait for a sprinkle of rain to come before they appear. That usually amounts to less than 14 millimetres -- about half an inch -- a year. But for the past four years, it has, according to Jordan's Royal Society for the Conservation of Nature, been zero.
Near the oasis, however, the air seems transformed as if by magic. It smells fervid and promising.
This is the slim portion that has been painstakingly, expensively brought back from the dead. It is a poignant symbol of the adaptability of nature.
There is no natural surface water here any more. All the vibrant springs that once permanently fed the oasis -- at one time there were more than 10 -- have been drained dry. All the water now used to keep a bit of the oasis wet -- 1.5 million cubic metres a year -- is pumped from deep below, likely from fossil stores collected thousands of years ago.
In 1977, Jordan recognized the great significance of Azraq by designating the site as a "wetland of international importance" under the Ramsar Convention, a global environmental treaty named for the Iranian city in which it was signed 30 years ago. That means independent experts have deemed it fundamental to the regulation of a vital water system and to supporting a rich selection of species (Canada's 36 such sites cover 13 million hectares, or almost 20 per cent of Ramsar's worldwide total).
But in 1990, with the Jordanians pumping out twice as much water as the aquifer could replenish, Azraq was placed on the convention's black list, a recognition that it had become terribly degraded. The concern was not just for the wildlife. The Ramsar report points out that unless the drainage is reduced, seawater will invade, eventually turning the aquifer salty and unfit for drinking. "Only the timing of such an occurrence is in any doubt," the report says.
That frightening prospect sparked the attempt to rehabilitate the oasis, financed in part by money promised by international organizations as a result of the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro in 1992. Now, there is a visitor's centre and a short wooden path.
And water. Once it returned to the surface, the oasis came back to life. Dessicated rhizomes grew plump again and sprouted, and fish eggs nobody knew could survive so many years in the dusty soil mysteriously rehydrated and hatched. Then the birds began to return, drawn by the glinting water back to this essential link in their migration route. So once again it is possible to see purple herons and Egyptian nightjars and laughing doves. The honey buzzard flies by every now and then. The steppe eagle is back.
It is impressive, given that seven years ago, Azraq was a dust bowl without a single bird species to its credit, but still a far cry from a 1967 Jordanian survey that counted 347,000 specimens. By all counts, Azraq today is anything but Azraq in its natural state. Plant life consists mostly of reeds, which take over when little else will grow. The water level used to be neck-high, but now it is so shallow that minnows kick up ripples wherever they swim.
Farther along, the path leads to a cracked depression -- all that remains of the mighty Ain Soda Pool, the spring that lay at the ecological heart of the oasis. The sign posted here for visitors is blunt. "Once this spring poured millions of litres of water across the marshlands every day," it reads. "By 1993, it was dead." The killing started in earnest on Nov. 15, 1980, when the pumps started sending about 900 cubic metres an hour to charge the thirsty taps of Amman, the capital. That year, roughly 15 million cubic metres were taken from the Azraq Basin, three-quarters of the amount Jordan deemed a safe yield.
By the following year, 15 artesian wells had been drilled to the northwest of the oasis to help extract purified ground water. Ten years later, the draw had reached 39 million cubic metres a year, roughly double what the basin can sustain, and the government had developed Jordan's main military air base just southwest of Azraq. (Officials will not say how much water the base uses.)
By 1993, the oasis was a dusty garbage dump. The rescue efforts started a year later, and by 1997, a small portion of the wetlands had come back. But little else has changed. Official records show that last year, 37 million cubic metres of water were pumped out of the oasis. On top of that, area farmers relied on 500 illegal wells to irrigate their fields.
Jordan is fiercely proud of Azraq's international significance, but the government is under unrelenting pressure to keep up supplies to Amman, which relies on the oasis for one in every four glasses of water drunk by its more than two million residents. How long it will allow the 1.5 million cubic metres of fossil water to feed the resurrected wetland remains unclear. The initial commitment was five years and is soon to run out.
But there is a problem even if the flow to the surface continues. Fossil water is, by definition, a finite commodity. At some point, it runs out.
I am touring the site with geomorphologist Roger Crofts, chief executive of Scottish Natural Heritage. He examines a chart in the visitors centre that explains the exponential increase in pumping levels. "They're using up their environmental capital," he says. Is it sustainable? I ask. "No," he adds shortly. "I don't think it is."
But the Jordanians are not the only ones mortgaging the future. Deep beneath the east flank of the Rocky Mountains, stretching through South Dakota down to the Texas Panhandle, lies one of North America's great bodies of underground water.
The High Plains Aquifer has fed agriculture in parts of this massive area for about 100 years, defying the predictions of early explorers that this desolate plain could not support human life. Now, farmers in eight states covering an area of 480,000 square kilometres grow wheat and other grains in the world's largest expanse of cropland supported by irrigation. And parts of the aquifer are running out. By 1980, the water level in the Texas Panhandle had fallen more than 30 metres since irrigation began, says Tom Pedersen of the University of British Columbia, a leading authority on international water issues.
By 1998, it had dropped another 12 metres -- 1.5 of them in 1997-98, an abnormally wet period in that part of the world. What would a truly dry year -- Prof. Pedersen says one is bound to come along soon -- do to the aquifer? The prospects are frightening.
"We are squandering our strategic reserves of water," he says, echoing his Scottish colleague. "We act as if it is an infinite resource. This will be the focus of intense political concern in the future." And what do the Jordanians do with all the water being drained out of Azraq?
It would be hard to accuse them of wasting it. On average, each citizen uses just 85 litres a day, says Elias Salameh, a geologist and water specialist at the University of Jordan. In neighbouring Syria and Lebanon, he says, average consumption is 125 litres while in Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states, the daily figure is more like 400. North Americans? From 500 to 600 litres.
Where a Canadian city would have greenery, Amman offers only dust. Sprinklers are absent. It is so dry that flies land on people just to drink their perspiration. And soldiers are posted at many intersections.
Peace eludes this part of the world, and water is a key factor in the unrest because Israel controls so much of it. Last fall, Libya's radical leader, Moammar Gadhafi, visited Jordan for the first time in more than 20 years -- to demonstrate his support for a $730-million (U.S.) pipeline to link Amman with another ancient aquifer at Disi, about 320 kilometres away. Libya is paying for concrete pipes to be built along nearly half the route and has given a $100-million (U.S.) grant to get the project going.
Of course, water megaprojects have a great deal of history in this part of the world. Sandra Postel, of the Global Water Policy Project, is fond of telling the story of ancient Sumer, the world's first known civilization. Starting 6,000 years ago, it thrived because the Sumerians settled in the rich Mesopotamian fields between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers, and discovered how to divert water to their crops.
This nourished a rich civilization famed not only for harvests of wheat and barley but also for fluted golden cups, bowls of black obsidian and the imposing ziggurats said to be architectural templates for the biblical tower of Babel.
All this lasted for 2,000 years until a shortcoming in Sumerian technology became apparent. The soil, flooded and dried out time and time again, became poisoned with salt and other impurities. Agriculture failed. The civilization crumbled. The face of drought Azraq's current appearance belies its rich and wondrous past as the source of life for plants, animals and humanity alike.
Jordan has mounted a highly touted campaign to revive part of the oasis. To do so, unfortunately, it is using water that can't be replaced.
-30-
Robbing Peter
Water is a shape shifter that can be a solid, a liquid or a gas, depending on what the temperature is. Because of global warming, Earth's atmosphere has a vastly greater appetite for water as a vapour, the form
least useful to anything else in the environment.
Single use only
Prehistoric or 'fossil' water has been trapped for eons in deep subterranean reservoirs such as the High Plains Aquifer beneath this stretch of the central United States. Tapping into them has allowed development in regions otherwise unable to sustain it. Unfortunately, such sustenance has its limits. The
aquifers are being drained at an alarming rate and simply can't be replenished.
Water torture
From 1900 to 1995, global water consumption rose sixfold -- more than double the rate of population growth. Over all, water is abundant, but unevenly distributed. In some areas, usage is so high that surface supplies literally are shrinking and ground-water reserves are being depleted faster than they can be replenished by precipitation.
The United Nations has compared water consumption with availability and found that countries with a supply problem contain one-third of the world's population -- a figure it expects
could rise to two-thirds by 2025. If growth trends persist, industrial water consumption may double in 25 years.
As food demand rises, so does agriculture's thirst, which now accounts for 70 per cent of all water consumption. But in developing countries, 60 to 75 per cent of irrigated water is lost to evaporation or runoff. As clean water grows scarce, competition for it increases. Yet pricing it high enough to discourage waste remains a sensitive issue -- especially in low-income countries reliant on irrigated agriculture.
Planners in China estimate that water used in industry generates more than 60 times the value
it does on the farm.
Pollution adds enormously to supply problems. Water quality in most developed countries has improved and yet wastewater is not necessarily treated before discharge. About half the population of the European Union's southern member states still does not have sewage treatment.
As an ecosystem, fresh water is biologically rich and plays a vital role.
But it has lost a greater proportion of its species and habitat than either dry land or the marine environment -- and the future looks grim.
Death Wish Part 3
Focus Tuesday, June 5, 2001
If you doubt global warming is serious, visit the Arctic with ALANNA MITCHELL. At first, the big melt confused the people of Sachs Harbour, who found themselves suddenly catching salmon and spotting bizarre bird species from the south. But now they're worried -- the rising temperatures are wreaking havoc with the environment and with their way of life
How the North is getting burned
To someone who doesn't live up here at the top of the world, the cold
is as hard to take as the perpetual polar night.
It's late January and bitter as a twin-engine Beech 99 coasts in the half-light of the season's endless dusk, a few hundred feet above the Arctic Ocean. The unheated 10-seater is on its way to the tiny hamlet of Sachs Harbour on Banks Island. Everybody on board is wearing heavy goose-down parkas, mitts, and unwieldy Sorel winter boots.
Knees are pressed together and hands are stuffed under arms. Some of us are numb.
On the ground, the trees disappeared nearly two hours ago as the plane took off from the Western Arctic frontier town of Inuvik, and even there, they were stumpy and sparse. At Sachs Harbour, the permafrost is so tenacious trees can't even take root.
At least, not yet. The temperature is about - 35 degrees but, as frigid as that is, it's still 25 degrees higher than normal.
Global climate change has had an incredible impact on the Far North.
Winters are milder than before and summer temperatures are rising to such a degree that barn swallows and robins have appeared for the first time in the collective memory of the Inuvialuit. To widespread local astonishment, salmon are swimming in the sea.
Mosquitoes, once unheard-of this far north, can now survive here, in one of the handful of human settlements that cling to the biggest polar desert on the planet.
In fact, the warming has been so significant that the Arctic ice, which for thousands of years acted like a thick insulating tuque keeping the entire planet on climatic course, has begun to shrink -- alarmingly.
As the Beech 99 nears Sachs Harbour, some the Inuvialuit on board, long-residents of the hamlet, point down through the eerie afternoon twilight and shake their heads. The sea ice looks like a sheet of frosted glass that has been dropped on a concrete floor. Parts of it are shattered. Between the shards, great dark stretches of the Arctic
Ocean are visible.
This is not right. It is deep winter. This ice should be thick. It should be dependable. The Inuvialuit know that the changes threatens the way of life they have had for thousands of years.
So even in such a remote corner of the world, humanity's ability to influence the course of nature -- to serve as a "fifth element" along with earth, water, air and fire -- is taking its toll.
And there is no relief in sight. Greenhouse-gas pollution doesn't stop at the dissolving Arctic: The big melt in turn sets in motion planetary weather patterns that range from dire to catastrophic to lethal, climate scientists say. And they fear it's evidence that humanity has condemned itself to go the way of the dinosaurs.
The Inuvialuit are trained in subtleties. That's how they have learned to live at the outer limits of what humans can endure. Where the uninitiated look at the Arctic landscape and see numbing sameness, the Inuvialuit read critical differences.
For the past few years, their hunters have been patiently noting changes in their surroundings for the Winnipeg-based International Institute for Sustainable Development. The data are compared with the minutely detailed knowledge the hunters' forebears have handed down orally for hundreds of years.
Rosemarie Kuptana, 47, the most famous product of Sachs Harbour, is a member of the institute's board. She caused a sensation last November when she presented her community's dramatic findings during the international climate-change talks held in The Hague in a video that has now been broadcast around the world.
For the first time, delegates to the negotiations charged with finding a way to implement the Kyoto protocol on curbing greenhouse gases saw hard evidence of how pollution in the atmosphere is affecting the once pristine polar desert. They will wrestle with the issue again next month, at talks in Bonn.
Kuptana rose to international prominence through her lifelong efforts to have national and international governments respect her people's language, culture and geography.
She was born in the Arctic (just after her father William had come back from sealing) and sent to residential school in Inuvik at the age of 7 (where she was known as No. 475). She was president of the Inuit Tapirisat of Canada for much of the 1990s, and worked with the Inuit Circumpolar Conference for many years. Now, she lives just outside Ottawa and works with the IISD.
She turned her attention to climate change in the early 1990s, long before it gained its current high profile. She has known of the issue all her life. Her grandfather John Kaolok, a respected community leader and visionary, had prophesied years ago that the sea would grow warm.
His vision is kept alive today in the stories told by his daughter, Kuptana's mother. Sarah Kuptana was born sometime early in the century -- she isn't sure when -- and is now the eldest of the community elders, the keeper of the Sachs Harbour legends.
Her people are not scientists, Sarah says in Inuvialuktun, the ancient, richly descriptive dialect of the people of the Western Arctic. Her cadence rises and falls like an incantation. But they understand how the ice is supposed to work, how it has worked for centuries, and they have read its changes with fatalism.
Her father saw the coming warmth as good for the Inuvialuit. They would stop suffering so much from the cold, he predicted, and begin to live more like people down south -- at least until the heat took hold.
"My dad even said: 'It's going to be so changed down south. People are going to be hungry.' And I heard this long ago," Sarah says. " 'The weather is going to change. The animals are going to suffer first. They are going to be gone.' "
Three years ago, in the spring of 1998, the people of Sachs Harbour suddenly knew the legends were right. The changing weather went far beyond normal Arctic capriciousness. Usually, spring is a leisurely affair. The sun -- asleep through the winter -- vaults full into the sky, drenching the frost-blasted ground with the beginnings of colour. Then the residents, long cooped up in their sturdy houses, move onto the land -- travelling about 30 kilometres to the west to set up camp for fishing and hunting.
It's a convivial time, marking the end of the great, six-month darkness.
There is a steady supply of meats such as muskox and caribou. First, the people spend weeks fishing in Kuptan Lake, Middle Lake, and Fish Lake. Then, once the geese begin to fly overhead, the yearly hunt for them begins. The spring ritual usually takes weeks.
In 1998, however, the spring melt happened in just three days. The people went out on snowmobiles to make their fishing camps and then couldn't get back to Sachs Harbour because snow had given way to mud. The community was shocked.
John Keogak, a master hunter, says he couldn't help but think of what the ice was like back in the early 1970s when he went polar-bear hunting for the first time. It was solid, limitless, he says, sitting on his living-room floor as a chunk of the muskox thaws on his kitchen counter. He would stay out for days at a time, even weeks.
Now, the ice goes out only four or five miles from shore. It's thin and shifts around a lot. He can't risking camping on it. In fact, he won't set foot on it without a hand-held global positioning unit that tracks his whereabouts via satellite, plus a barometer to tell when the air pressure drops. When the pressure blows out, it's time to turn back because the ice is dodgy.
The sea ice isn't all that's melting. The permafrost is in retreat as well and has begun releasing strange, dark pieces of wood that have been frozen for all living memory -- they are the almost-fossilized remains of a forest that grew here thousands of years ago when the climate was warmer.
Usually people here find wood only when it washes ashore from much farther south; now they have something that Keogak says burns like coal once it has been dried out.
Sarah Kuptana gave birth to Rosemarie on the ice, and thought nothing of it. The ice was part of her domain. She can look across miles and miles of it in the half-light and tell where the cracks are, reading it just as she reads the sky and the stars and the land.
Now she is sitting cross-legged on the dark-green chesterfield in her living room in one of the 50 or so snow-encrusted houses that hug the forlorn coast near the Beaufort Sea. Next to her, hands on her belly, sits her younger sister Edith Haogak, who is in her early 70s.
On the low table in front of them, next to the television remote control, is a hunk of raw flesh Sarah has been eating. The house carries the dark scent of old blood and fish.
She lifts a frail arm. Her voice deepens. Her father's visions -- and the growing evidence that they are coming true -- have a secret potency here because of the story she's poised to tell. Long ago, she says, a little boy died in their community. Her father came upon him and began to pray. The boy got up.
She takes off her glasses for emphasis and waves her hand in front of her face. "I saw it with my own eyes."
Edith nods in agreement. The boy was Phillip Haogak, her late husband.
Of course, people here do not rely exclusively on ancient parable or empirical evidence to understand how the world works. Keogak, for example, has ventured south of 60 degrees and seen for himself.
In November, as Sachs Harbour hit the international stage, he went to Ottawa to help lobby for action against climate change. He was widely quoted on what's happening in Sachs Harbour. The next day, people recognized him in the streets of the nation's capital and greeted him as a hero.
In 1997 he travelled to Harare to attend a meeting on the international trade of endangered species. Some of the local Zimbabweans -- Mr. Keogak has dubbed them "campfire people" because they burn freshly cut wood -- were trying to revive trade in elephant ivory. He supported them and the indigenous way of life they were trying to protect.
Back in Sachs Harbour, he chuckles about his travels and especially about all the recognition he got in Ottawa. But there's a sober message underneath.
"I don't think the rest of the world is going to stop at anything," he says.
"I don't think there's anything we can say or do that will turn things back."
Already, the Arctic sea ice is 40 per cent thinner than it was 40 years ago, scientists reckon. It has shrunk in area by 14 per cent in 25 years and the decline is projected to get far, far worse.
The state of the ice has been the subject of anxious scrutiny. Scientists have concluded that the Arctic, with its brutish weather, is the first place on Earth where the effects of climate damage are being felt and where they will cut the deepest over time. By its very nature, ice is exquisitely susceptible to the changes sparked by the human damage to the planet -- in this case gaseous emissions.
The best scientific analysis, published by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change this year, shows that there is a greater concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere today than at any other time in 20 million years. Methane levels -- from cattle and landfills -- are at their highest in at least 420,000 years. There's more nitrous oxide, given off by the chemical industry and agriculture, in the air today than there has been for a millennium.
In turn, those gases affect the climate, causing warmer average temperatures and a greater tendency to storms, floods, droughts and other extreme weather. The fallout for humans is unknown. Projections, though, are that this amount of climate damage will be cataclysmic for the human species and for the planet systems that support it. No aspect of modern life will remain untouched, from the security of food and water, to the spread of disease, to the global economic systems.
Scientific and political experts face a bleak prospect: The next few decades must provide a transition from the industrial age to a new era based on other sources of power. Europe is working on a solution, but the requisite alchemy is not even on the horizon for the huge population of polluters who occupy North America.
Even if humanity stopped pumping these gases into the air today, the Earth's surface temperature and sea levels would continue to rise for centuries.
And as for the ice, it will continue to react to the warming of the climate for thousands of years to come, long after humans have lived through or died from all the other catastrophes projected to hit.
The ancient ice, first to change, will be the last to stop.
Despite the warming, Sachs Harbour in winter still seems fiercely Arctic to an outsider. My lungs close up from the cold as I walk outside. The snow is squeaks under my feet.
But that sense of the immutable Arctic disappears at the top of a hill behind the hamlet where the Inuvialuit bury their dead. The graves, each surrounded by a circle of rounded stones, should be flush to the permafrost ground.
Instead, as I stand here with the freezing wind burning my skin, facing the Arctic Ocean, I see that some of the graves have begun to sink. The permafrost, a living thing to the Inuvialuit, seems to be melting from underneath.
Rosemarie Kuptana is the bridge between this bitter, sunken graveyard and the powerful people who could slow down the damage. To her, the sorry graveyard of Sachs Harbour is just the latest sign of the invasions of her land. There was the church, the state, technology, industry, business. All these have tried to erode her culture. Now, even the climate -- the real definer of her people -- is being damaged.
"This could be the ultimate intrusion: the pollution of global warming," she says in an interview. "Most of the people polluting our climate probably don't know we exist."
For Rosemarie, though, the battle to make those in power aware of what's happening goes far beyond her people, her land, even her country. She uses the skills and subtle knowledge of her mother, aunts, and grandfather to tell people they are fouling the planet. She delivers her message not only as an Inuvialuit, but also as a mother and a citizen of the Earth.
"People don't get the big issues sometimes."
Polluters may not get the point, but the residents of Sachs Harbour can't avoid it.
Tonight, most of them have gathered in the school gymnasium, braving the brittle cold for a hamlet meeting. They are to see for the first time the film the IISD crew has made of their startling chronicle of climate change.
It's also a feast. The tables are laden with such exotic foods as turkey, ham and macaroni salad, along with homemade fried bread, which is a staple here. The children race around in glee, holding styrofoam cups filled with Jell-O.
Later, some of them will slip up under their mother's open outside shirt -- mothers always wear two here -- and sleep against her back as she ties its loose ends around her waist. It's like a Snugli in reverse, keeping the child safe and warm.
Sarah Kuptana is here. She has been carried in and now sits in a wheelchair, bright eyes taking it all in. Before the meeting begins, she offers a prayer. Her voice fills the air, an urgent voice speaking in Inuvialuktun, a language now known to just a handful of people. The children are stone silent, taking in the power of her words, although many do not understand them.
She is giving thanks -- for the food, the scientists, the meeting of two cultures. But most urgently of all, she is praying -- for the Earth.
Companion piece:
Why the ice matters
More than the Inuvialuit way of life depends on the ice. The snow and ice at the top of the world are critical to regulating the global climate system. Even small changes in the status quo can spark major change.
Snow and ice act as insulation, keeping heat in the sea and land rather than releasing it into the atmosphere. As they melt, that barrier weakens, pushing a massive amount of heat energy into the air, which, in turn, helps to melt more ice and snow.
Some climate models conclude that if all the Arctic sea ice were to vanish, the heat of the ocean would warm the air above it by 20 to 40 degrees in winter.
Along with the heat comes evaporation, and then, inevitably, precipitation in the form of rain or snow. The most likely scenario is that climate change will transform the forsaken, frigid desert that is the Arctic today into a humid, far warmer place.
The ice and snow also bounce light into the atmosphere; as they melt, the exposed land and water absorb that energy instead. It's a phenomenon that feeds on itself: As the surface melts, it absorbs more and more energy, melting more surface and then absorbing yet more energy. And so on.
In the end, as more heat enters the atmosphere, temperature and wind patterns change. Henry Hengeveld, the Canadian government's science adviser on climate change, explains that winds move around the world primarily to equalize the heat. And where they go, so goes rain.
As for the northern sea ice, scientists estimate that it is 40 per cent thinner than 40 years ago and covers 14 per cent less area than 25 years ago. They predict that things are going to get a lot worse.
Feeling the heat
When it comes to the big melt, Canada's Far North is not alone.
Glaciers in the Peruvian Andes also are vanishing, as are the icefields of Africa's mighty Mount Kilimanjaro. The changes are so fast and so dramatic that the experts predict many glaciers that are not near the poles will disappear within as little as a decade.
North America, meanwhile, has glaciers in the Columbia Icefield melting at what appears to be an exponential rate; so-called "permafrost" that no longer lives up to its name; and, of course, the old, blue-tinged, multi-year sea ice in the Western Arctic that is turning to water. Climate scientists now talk freely about the days to come when the Northwest Passage through the Arctic Ocean will open as a trade route.
All in all, the study of the cryosphere (Earth's frozen parts) has gone from being a bit of an academic backwater to a celebrity field of study.
The profession now has an inside joke -- there are more of them but they have increasingly less to study.
Death Wish Part 4
Focus Wednesday, June 6, 2001
The man with the plan to save the planet
Russell Mittermeier doesn't believe that life on Earth is doomed, but the clock is ticking. To conclude this series, the dynamic scientist and president of Conservation International takes ALANNA MITCHELL deep into South America's equatorial rain forest to demonstrate that, despite all the damage humanity has done, Homo sapiens can co-exist with nature
'Lie flat on your stomach on the bottom of the boat and protect your head," instructs the scientist, wrapping his arms around his own neck and ears to show what he means.
"Remember, harpies don't bother to soar. They blast through the forest canopy and simply rip their prey out of the trees."
Or canoes.
We are in a leaky dugout canoe hacking our way down a vine-infested river deep in the Amazonian rain forest of Suriname not far from the equator. Somewhere near here, a local man has spotted a specimen of Harpia harpyja,the fearsome harpy eagle. Considered the mightiest raptor on the planet, it weighs up to nine kilos, boasts a wingspan of more than two metres and preys on sloths and other large animals. The bird is vicious and known to be aggressively unfriendly with trespassers.
Small wonder that early explorers named it after the monstrous half-woman, half-bird of Greek myth.
Not that the harpy is the only threat around. The mosquitoes probably carry malaria. The water is filled with piranhas. On shore, the diamond-headed bushmaster snake rules the undergrowth with
inch-long fangs that can sever a limb.
So why are we here? Because the harpy is so rare that in his 30 years of working in the jungle, the scientist, Russell Mittermeier, has seen just two. He anxiously scans the treetops until the guides suddenly point to the upper branches of a towering kapok tree. There sits a mother guarding her young. Sharp eyes unblinking, she is immobile. For the moment.
Some of us shriek. But not Mittermeier. It's his best harpy sighting yet.
He whips out his binoculars, chortles and settles in to watch. "That is really cool, guys," he says. "Really cool."
In many ways, Russell Mittermeier is like the harpy eagle. As president of Conservation International, an organization that has gone from splinter group to cutting edge in only 14 years, he is considered by many to be the world's mightiest environmentalist.
An eminent primatologist with a PhD from Harvard University (and a lifelong Tarzan fixation), he does not hesitate to blast through obstructions in the hunt for solutions. As a result, he racks up successes -- a quality that makes him a rare bird in today's rather luckless fight for the future of the planet.
"For conservation to be a success, you have to understand you're fighting a war -- you cannot be timid," explains Peter Seligmann, CI's fierce chairman and chief executive. In 1989, he lured Mittermeier away from the World Wildlife Fund because "normal barriers don't seem to bother him. He's adventurous. He's willing to go places other people don't want to go to."
And Mittermeier is driven. He carries a stopwatch and two
spiral-bound journals -- one personal, the other scientific -- so that he can time everything he does and compare it with his previous best. He has more than 350 scientific publications under his belt. In 1999, he was named "hero of the planet" and given cover-story treatment in Time magazine.
This high-test approach also pretty much sums up the way CI operates.
Forged over a weekend in January, 1987, when Seligmann and about 50 others grew disillusioned with the Nature Conservancy, the organization marches to its own drummer. It believes that countries can build an economy on conservation principles. That means taking the needs of local communities into account -- and working with
companies.
Some environmentalists consider co-operating with business heresy, Seligmann insists that CI has no truck with corporate villains. But businesses are needed to help to build an economy, he says. And they are appealingly vulnerable -- to shareholders, markets, press and profits. "Could we win the war without them?" he asks. "Absolutely not."
All this urgency is prompted by the mounting scientific evidence that humans are doing great harm to the biological processes that keep the planet alive. As this damage mounts, we are becoming a force so powerful that we rival the ancient four fundamental elements thought to make up the universe.
Unlike earth, air, water and fire, though, we -- the fifth element -- are malignant. So Mittermeier and his colleagues have set themselves an ambitious goal: to preserve as much of Earth's remaining biological real estate as they can. And they have decided that some of that real estate is more important than others.
CI concentrates on so-called "hot spots of biodiversity," a slender roster of countries -- largely in tropical areas -- that make up 1.4 per cent of Earth's land surface but contain about 60 per cent of all terrestrial species. If they are lost, the consequences to nature -- and the humans dependent on it -- would be incalculable.
It's a threat of extinction rivalled in scope only by the spasm that extinguished the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. And Mittermeier's controversial strategy -- indeed, his own fiery drive to implement it -- is considered by many to be the best hope of avoiding the carnage.
I have accompanied Mittermeier to Suriname to see how he does it.
And therefore, what the hopes are.
The former Dutch colony on South America's northeast coast has
become a poster child for good environmental practices. Very thinly populated, with 440,000 inhabitants clustered mainly in the tidy coastal capital, Paramaribo, it contains one of the world's few remaining pristine rain forests. It is paradise compared with the hell of such hot spots as the moonscape that is Haiti.
Not that Suriname is immune to the currents of human folly. Natives in the area once practised cannibalism, and 300 years ago, slavery powered the sugar-plantation economy that made the place so valuable that the Dutch gave up the island of Manhattan to get their hands on it.
But modern Suriname has opted for the ecological high road and much of the credit goes to Russ Mittermeier.
He first came here in 1975, a precocious 25-year-old monkey
researcher anxious to find the perfect tropical rain forest to do field studies for his doctorate. He wound up spending the better part of three years in Suriname's untouched interior, becoming the first to map the comparative ecology of all eight indigenous species of monkey.
In the process, he fell in love with country and its people -- a fantastical mixture of cultures from Creole to black to Javanese to Hindustani to Amerindians, all overlaid with the obsessive Dutch need for order.
So in 1995, when Malaysian and Indonesian loggers announced that they wanted to cut three million hectares, about 20 per cent of the country, Mittermeier says he "got turfy."
Earlier, Suriname's government had granted a logging concession that
brought in few stumpage fees, but destroyed the forest. Afraid the same would happen, but on a much larger scale, Mittermeier lobbied President Jules Albert Wijdenbosch, who turned away the loggers and set aside 10 per cent
of the country -- 1.6 million pristine hectares -- as the Central Suriname Nature Reserve, which was quickly declared a World Heritage Site.
To support the reserve, Mittermeier helped to launch a special fund that, at $8-million (U.S.), is now more than halfway to its $15-million goal. The money it will generate far exceeds any revenues from logging. And the forest stands.
As well as visiting the elusive harpy, Mittermeier wants to go and see a long-lost cultural treasure that has recently come to light: the ancient, sacred rock carvings in the caves of Werehpai. Discovered a year ago by a native hunter, the caves are believed to have been inhabited by cannibals, and Mittermeier wants to assess them as a tourist draw -- to show the local chiefs that they can make big money when the rain forest is left standing.
So along with about a dozen tribesmen we are tramping toward the caves through a magnificent stretch of dense jungle near the native village of Kwamalasemutu near Suriname's southern edge. Hundreds of species of tree arch high above, liane vines looping down through their branches, fantastical buttresses holding them up in the thin tropical soil. The forest is so wet, so hot, that to a northern nose, it smells like stewed rhubarb.
Mittermeier's eyes remain fixed on the ground, watching for poisonous snakes, ferocious army ants, softball-sized tarantulas and other lethal things he mentions only if he needs to.
Before being allowed into the caves, we are frisked by Trio hunters armed with machetes and rifles. We are terribly alert. Our shirts and pants are drenched in sweat, more now from fear than from exertion, and the taste of salt is strong on our lips. It is not clear what is ahead.
And then, the caves of Werehpai.
There are probably fewer than a dozen, connected in a bewildering maze.
Some are easily large enough to stand in; others require a belly crawl. Every
surface is carved with the outlines of large crude figures. The face of a paramount
chief, with his elaborate headdress; a bushmaster poised to strike in vengeance.
Perhaps a human figure with stomach excised.
Just beyond is a broad, flat stone that looks like a table but has the feel of a sacrificial altar. And everywhere the same image is repeated over and over: a single, wrenching face, eyes wide open mouth stretched in terror. Such haunting images make it impossible not to think of the legend, or at least the version being told these days.
Werehpai, it seems, was a member of the Akijo tribe, the cannibals said to have lived in the caves for thousands of years. Thought to have been much more advanced than other tribes, they could paint, draw and weave but they also used their advanced knowledge for evil rather than good. One day, during an attack on another tribe, they kidnapped two young children -- brother and sister -- and gave them to Werehpai to raise as her own.
But the arrangement was not permanent. When the children had grown, the girl (whose name has not been recorded) was taken from Werehpai and subjected to the terrifying and bizarre Akijo ritual. First, she was tattooed all over her body. Then she was eaten alive -- kept conscious for two days while her body parts were removed.
Werehpai had come to love the children and knew that a similar fate was in store for the boy, Aturai, so she helped him to escape and find his way home. Aturai exacted his revenge by returning with an army and using skills he had learned from the Akijo to destroy them in a battle in the caves.
Today, the people of Kwamalasemutu believe that the sacred carvings in the cave commemorate that battle. In their presence, Mittermeier is uncharacteristically silent. This, he reckons, is the largest collection of cave carvings ever found in Amazonia. But of all the clues to human behaviour he has come across, it's one of the least comfortable.
Farther on, there is a much more concrete cause of fear. A jaguar, the deadliest land predator in South America, has made a home here in the caves. Bones of a peccary, or wild pig, it has caught for lunch are laid out on another rock, broken and sucked clean of marrow.
The smell of the cat is so acrid, so overpowering that I ask Mittermeier if the animal could still be here, hiding in a shadow. Maybe, he answers, shrugging, but humans only occasionally fall prey to jaguars. Near the end of the maze, Kamainja Panashekung, the hunter who stumbled on the entrance to the caves while he was looking for his lost dog, shows Mittermeier the final prize. Hidden behind a rock plate are two prehistoric carving tools, likely the ones the artists used. Mittermeier shakes his head in awe. They probably have not been touched for thousands of years, he says, but look like they were left there just yesterday.
He is excited. Ecotourists would pay serious money for an adventure trip to see the untouched jungle, the village, the eagle and the caves, he tells the locals. It could mean sustained income for a people who live mostly as hunters and gatherers.
But there is one problem, he adds: the tourists would want to see monkeys in the trees, not being shaved in preparation for the cooking pot like the tufted capuchin bagged by a hunter the night before. Brought to camp for us to see, its fists were clenched in the spasm of death. As its hair was shaved away, I could see its skin, white as a child's. Mittermeier does not fit the usual perception of a radical environmentalist. For one thing, he is a pragmatist: If forests are at stake, he will negotiate with dictators and with corporations.
"A lot of what corporations do is drive the world," he says. "They are more permanent and consistent than governments. And governments listen to them. You just have to get corporations doing the right things."
This may sound counterintuitive coming from an eco-pioneer, but Mittermeier is not driven by sanctimony or a thirst for social justice. An excellent biologist, he is simply fascinated by Homo sapiens, its behaviour and its cultures -- the same way he is intrigued by the viper.
"Vipers are more predictable," he quips. "That's the nice thing about them."
In fact, he sees humans in somewhat the same way his idol Tarzan does, as curious creatures who share a few similar characteristics with him. That means he is immune to outrage at their actions. Even when he talks about catastrophic human stupidity, the harshest description he can muster is to say it was "irritating."
And like the king of the jungle, he seems something of a guy's guy. He can tell you minute details about the weird camouflage patterns of any forest toad, but, after 26 years of coming to Kwamalasemutu, he has no idea how old the women are when they start to have children.
Mittermeier grew up in the Bronx. An only child (his father was a stamp collector), he embraced Tarzan as "someone I always wanted to be like," and decided that his route to the jungle had to take him through Harvard. He narrowly missed as an undergraduate, ending up at Dartmouth instead, but succeeded at the graduate level and received his doctorate at 27, thanks to his work with the monkeys of Suriname.
That same year, 1977, he became the youngest person ever to lead the prestigious primate specialist group of the World Conservation Union's Species Survival Commission, a post he has kept ever since. Realizing that tropical forests around the world were vanishing, he put together a global strategy on primate conservation within months.
The document changed the course of monkey research the world over by focusing attention on their habitat. "I knew what I wanted to do," he says with a shrug. "Most people don't."
This quickness is a blessing, but also can be a curse. The most serious failing colleagues can find with him is that he is so visionary others can't keep pace.
"It may be difficult for people who do not immediately share his enthusiasms to catch up with him," says Willem Udenhout, a former prime minister of Suriname and its ambassador to the United States and Canada during most of the 1990s. "He needs an interpreter."
Now the CI executive director here, Udenhout says forest preservation has become part of Suriname's economic plan and national identity. "The important thing is that many, many people in the core of Suriname's business community realize that much of Suriname's financial future relies on pristine forests."
By the same token, he says, "environmentalists who are innocent of economics have no audience." Mittermeier's trip would not be complete without a flight deep into the interior to Asidonhopo, a village populated by Suriname's "Bush Negroes" -- the descendants of slaves who fled the Dutch to live in the jungle.
The place looks like something straight out of Africa -- the short, black and relentlessly muscular people along with their art forms, bright clothing and even the ritual scarification of a woman.
Mittermeier has been here so often he knows some of the children by name -- but the women scare him. One, he says, walked up to him once and said: "You do me." His wife, he explained, would not like that. "She's not here," came the reply.
Mittermeier has come to touch base with Songo Aboikonie, the Granman, or paramount chief of the Saramaccans tribe. The chief's name translates as "the boy is clever" and he is renowned for his tactical skill in representing his 20,000 people spread over 61 villages.
Rather than speak directly, the chief delivers his message through a bassia,or deputy, and it is harsh. Have the Saramaccans not always been Mittermeier's friends? Why don't they see a penny of the $15-million support for the new nature reserve just beyond their traditional land? Their buildings are crumbling, their young men go next door to French Guiana to work and Suriname's government does not help them enough. What will Mittermeier do for his friends?
The CI contingent shifts uneasily. They were not expecting this question and so do not have a ready answer. But in the morning, it becomes clear how the Granman got his name. He has a plan of his own. Before breakfast, he has an elegant handwritten letter delivered to Mittermeier. It is a formal expression of interest in seeing the headwaters of the Suriname River -- traditional Bush Negro land – protected forever. It is a unexpected coup -- potentially a huge area near the Central Suriname Nature Reserve.
Mittermeier is flabbergasted. "That's pretty cool," he says. But an irritated Granman is no threat
compared with the piranhas that infest Amazonian rivers. Throughout the trip, Mittermeier has been
merrily taking swims, saying they are unlikely to attack unless you are bleeding. Though, he adds, they will bang up against you to test you out. "Ping, ping, ping," he says, imitating the feel of fish on skin.
Mittermeier is not foolhardy -- he is as savvy about personal danger as he is about the dangers to Earth. But he will not let either slow him down.
When we leave Asidonhopo and reach the stunning Raleigh Falls in the Central Suriname Nature Reserve, he tackles the fear of the fish. He is sitting on the deck of a cabin above a sandy stretch of the river's shore and tosses a piece of cooked chicken into the shallows. It takes a minute, but the first piranha -- finger-sized, with a V-shaped neon-red tail -- finds the treasure. Others follow. Mittermeier provides the soundtrack: "Bam. Bam. Bam."
By the time the water clears, the chicken has vanished. His entourage is shell-shocked. Mittermeier chuckles and walks away. "Cute," he says. And, of course, these are the tiny piranhas. Later, some large ones are hauled out of the water; they have teeth as big as a dog's.
Finally, I realize that the piranhas have become a metaphor. Fear of them -- just like the fear of challenging the forces that injure the planet -- is strongest when imagined and never faced. Plainly, this is not the time for timidity. We descend to the river for a swim. And for supper, we eat the frisbee- piranhas. They are full of bones and sweet meat.
Mittermeier loves the area around Raleigh Falls more than any other. His research station from the 1970s is just down the river.
Smack in the middle of his research area is the Voltzberg, a piece of sheer, primeval Guyana shield poking up hundreds of metres through the jungle floor at a 45-degree angle on its gentlest face.
Mittermeier once climbed it in 11 minutes ("some macho thing"), but usually takes about 20 minutes. This is only the second time since the reserve was created that he has been up. It's brutally hot. Wild pineapple and vanilla cling to the bare rock. Bush Negro guides climb in bare feet. Mittermeier slows down to help one of the group who has an injured foot, letting others reach the summit first -- a huge sacrifice. Still, he notes, looking at the stopwatch, he made it in 19 minutes, which is not bad.
Looking around, he can see to Brazil, Guyana and French Guiana. Right to the horizon in all directions, it is one of the rarest sights on the planet: pristine forest devoid of human habitation. But for his intervention three years ago, a large part of it would have been logged.
Macaws fly overhead. Deep below the forest canopy, a red-faced howler monkey's roar reverberates through the forest the way it must have thousands of years ago.
Mittermeier could bask. But he doesn't. "It's already history," he says of the creation of this reserve. "It's one part of an enormous global puzzle and there are dozens of other pieces to fall into place."
But if he does not bask, he also does not despair, even though he has seen almost all the worst destruction humans have wrought on the planet. He has seen the devastation of the Azraq Oasis in Jordan. He has read the dire predictions of the climate scientists.
He has watched as his beloved primates become scarcer. Today, 150 of the 600 species are in terrible trouble. Fifty-five of those are right on the edge of extinction. But faith is built into his DNA. Homo sapiens, he maintains, is not a suicidal species. It's just that we are half a step away from living in caves, and we have to learn that Earth's resources will not go on forever.
Standing up here, with one of the world's great optimists, surveying one of the last pieces of unbroken tropical wilderness the planet has to offer, it's tempting to have hope. After all, humanity has advanced and shed other self-destructive practices -- think of slavery and cannibalism. Unlike the legendary Akijo, humanity is capable of using advanced knowledge for good.
Plus, the planet can be astonishingly forgiving. It has mysterious powers to heal -- if given the chance it needs.
At last, Mittermeier sits down. The sun has begun to wane. We are all in need of a rest before we go back down the mountain. But then one of his colleagues calls: "Russ, there's a king vulture!" In an instant, Mittermeier jumps up, squinting into the sky. Binoculars at the ready. "You see a king?" He runs over. His eager face is full of light.
End
Companion piece: Why the stars come out
Conservation International has attracted some very high-profile supporters, including an active board of directors that includes media czar Barry Diller, Gordon Moore, chairman emeritus of Silicon Valley's Intel Corp., and perhaps best known of all, actor Harrison Ford.
A passionate conservationist, Ford told me recently that he is drawn by "the strategic capacity of CI, the ability to move surely and quickly. It's the tenacity, the vigour of the group."
As well, he is impressed by how strongly science infuses the group's mandate, and by how much the staff members who grew up in hot-spot countries help to make strategy. "We are not," hew says, "imposing solutions from afar."
The support is more than verbal. CI now raises about $50-million (U.S.) a year -- 21/2 times the annual budget of Greenpeace's U.S. operation. Last month alone, a glittering fundraising dinner in New York that Ford helped to arrange brought in about $1-million.
The affair featured Richard Leakey, the famed Kenyan conservationist and student of early man, as guest speaker, along with NBC-TV News anchor Tom Brokaw as master of ceremonies and political humour from Will Ferrell and Darrell Hammond of television's Saturday Night Live.
Thanks to such support, CI is now a major player, along with the World Wildlife Fund and the Nature Conservancy, that employs 1,000 scientists and field staff in 32 countries. Canadians hold some key posts: Claude Gascon is senior vice-president for field support and Rebecca Ham is a specialist in primates and Africa.
Ford says that mitigating the human misuse of the environment is the biggest issue facing our species. "There's enormous urgency to it," he says. Cool heads and ... From the rare and fearsome harpy eagle to the tiniest tree gecko, the people of Suriname have decided to preserve their species-rich wilderness for future generations by rejecting large-scale resource extraction that doesn't take into account its impact on nature.
Companion piece:
Hot spots
Russell Mittermeier's beloved Suriname may be in good ecological shape, but Conservation
International has designated more than two dozen 'hot spots' around the world that are not.
These are regions it considers vital to the planet's well-being but in serious danger because
of human activity.
Topping the list is the tropical forest that follows the Andes from
Venezuela to Argentina, taking in parts of Colombia, Ecuador, Peru and Bolivia.
The region boasts 45,000 to 50,000 plant species (18 to 20 per cent of Earth's total).
Of that, 20,000 are found nowhere else -- as are 677 of the region's 1,666 bird species.
But only 25 per cent of the original 1.258 million square kilometres of forest remain in
their original condition, because of seasonal burning and livestock grazing, agriculture,
mining, oil drilling and extensive cultivation of the opium poppy.
What CI is doing
Peru: Developing resource-extraction practices reduce environmental impact. Ecuador: Working with business to market buttons and other products made from the ivory-like nuts of the tagua tree.
Colombia: Co-operating with coffee producers on national standards for ecologically sound growing practices, such as planting under the canopy of existing forests to leave habitat in tact.
Bolivia: Training rain-forest villagers to develop a locally run ecotourism trade.
Venezuela: Creating a conservation corridor to connect the country to similar corridors in neighbouring states.
Death Wish: Will humanity self-destruct?
This concludes the four-part series on the state of the global environment that has taken
award-winning earth sciences reporter Alanna Mitchell to western Canada, the Far North,
the Middle East and now South America.
By Alanna Mitchell, The Reuters - IUCN Environmental Media Awards 2001
Winner - North America, the Caribbean and Oceania. 06/02/2001, The Globe and Mail
Humanity has a death wish? It sounds like a glib joke, but unless you assume people can thrive on a poisoned, parched, denuded and fuel-less planet, the suggestion that our actions are tantamount to collective suicide seems more serious by the day.
Earth's population has surpassed six billion and is rising by about 78 million people a year (United Nations experts expect it to peak at about 10 billion), constantly increasing the need to tap into natural resources. Enterprise may be free, but the energy crunch is growing so severe that gasoline prices soon may hit $1 a litre. South of the border, a Texas oil man who now sits in the White House is urging his nation to jack up supply rather than decrease demand.
Closer to home, fish-deprived Newfoundland sees water, water everywhere and suddenly wonders what's so wrong with bulk exports. Ontario's common-sense revolutionaries try to reconcile their affection for high-density livestock production with the way it fouls the province's drinking water.
Conflicts like these have been mounting at such a rate that even those willing to pay an ecological price for progress are shocked at the inflation rate.
Environmentalism still suffers from the stereotype that it is a kind of global do-goodism, in which "tree-hugging" charity toward wildlife trumps the human need for jobs and economic development. But what if eco-friendliness is really a matter of cold, keen-eyed self-interest -- of preventing our own extinction?
Like the global climate, the debate is about to get hotter. Today is not only the launch of Canada Environment Week, the annual exercise in eco-consciousness raising, it's the ninth anniversary of the Earth Summit, the great gathering in Rio de Janeiro that put the environment on the front burner.
Or did it? With the celebration on Monday of yet another eco-event, the UN's annual World Environment Day, preparation begins in earnest for Rio Plus 10, the follow-up summit slated for next year in Johannesburg. An estimated 64,000 participants are expected to take stock of the situation and decide what can be done to rekindle the environmental flame.
There may not be much time. As actor Harrison Ford, an ardent environmentalist, told Alanna Mitchell, The Globe and Mail's earth sciences reporter: "We all know we are losing parts of the biotic continuum at each and every step. We have no idea, really, what finally the effects of those losses will be."
How bad is it? To find out, The Globe sent Mitchell around the world. After visiting the Middle East, the Far North, South America and the badlands of Alberta, she concluded that the ancient Greeks' theory of the four elements needs an update. The relationship between earth, air, water and fire is now subject to the pervasive influence of a fifth element -- humanity.
As Ford, an active board member of Washington-based Conservation International, puts it: "Human interference with the natural order of our planet is the biggest factor in why it is now so fragile."
We are using and abusing water so quickly that nature cannot replenish its supply. So much forest cover has been lost that there is now more carbon dioxide in the air than at any other time in three million years. Temperatures are rising at unprecedented rates; ice caps and permafrost are melting. In fact, climate change is so advanced that experts fear some parts of the world will lose the ability to feed themselves and fall prey to disease.
With the ecosystem breaking down, 24 per cent of all mammal species are at serious risk of extinction, along with 30 per cent of fish, 25 per cent of reptiles, 20 per cent of amphibians and 12 per cent of the birds, according to the World Conservation Union.
Unless something changes soon, species will go extinct faster now than they did when the dinosaurs died out -- all, ironically, at the hand of Homo sapiens, the big winner when the dinosaurs surrendered the Earth. Our new understanding of that "extinction spasm," and what it implies about our current predicament, is the subject of today's opener to Mitchell's startling four-part series.
The next two parts of the series support that admittedly bleak picture, with humans acting the role of a suicidal horde, like the apocryphal march of the lemmings.
But in the finale, Mitchell finds hope deep in the virgin rain forest of Suriname that even if the situation is desperate, humanity can do one thing the lemming cannot: We can change our behaviour.
Death Wish Part 1
Focus Saturday, June 2, 2001
A world-renowned Canadian has a fascinating new theory to explain why
the great prehistoric beasts died out -- and he can't help but wonder whether humanity will share their fate. Philip Currie shares his findings with ALANNA MITCHELL, and points out that...
… at least the dinosaurs had an excuse
They call it the day the dinosaurs died. It happened 65 million years ago when a massive asteroid punched through the atmosphere and hit Earth with the energy of a hundred million hydrogen bombs. Rocks vapourized on impact and animals burned to a crisp as fire engulfed whole continents, filling the skies with soot. Tidal waves swept the planet.
Then the darkness came and, as a result, the cold. Until, months later, the vast amounts of carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere by the explosions formed a greenhouse gas so potent that it reheated the climate to lethal temperatures.
By the time the temperature had returned to normal, a span of several millenniums, Earth had undergone the fifth great extinction spasm in its history. Perhaps half of all life forms had been wiped out, including the dinosaurs that had ruled the world for 150 million years and were the most sophisticated creatures it had ever seen.
At least, that's the accepted wisdom. But a Canadian expert has come up with a new theory that not only paints a different picture of just why the dinosaur era ground to a halt, but also has an ominous implication for today's dominant life form: extinction. It's a brisk but gloriously sunny spring day, and Philip Currie and I are in the windswept Alberta badlands looking for dinosaur bones. He shivers in a light jacket, with his hands in his jean pockets and his eyes on the ground. Then he stoops, pokes a long forefinger into the dust and uncovers what looks like a bit of rock.
But the internationally renowned paleontologist and head of research at one of the world's biggest dinosaur museums knows instantly that it is not rock. It is a piece of fossil -- from a plant eater, to be specific, most likely the duck-billed hadrosaurus, a resident of the region 70 million years ago. Note the roughness that was once the spongy interior of the bones plant eaters developed to support their great bulk, he explains. Meat eaters such as Tyrannosaurus rex had hollow bones bolstered by an extremely dense outer layer.
Moments later, Currie crouches again, folding his long legs beneath him like a cricket. Triumphantly, he pries loose something that looks just like a square bit of mosaic. "Tendon!" he announces, smiling. The creature was indeed a duckbill -- it had tendons running down the spine to stiffen its tail.
This is what Alberta is like for a paleontologist. The badlands that run from Currie's base at the Royal Tyrrell Museum in Drumheller, east of Calgary, south to Dinosaur Provincial Park make up the world's most exquisite bone bed. At any one time, literally millions of fossils are exposed. More complete skeletons have emerged from these few square kilometres than anywhere else on Earth. Big fossils are so plentiful that native people used to consider them proof positive that giants once roamed the planet.
Just as the badlands have lots of evidence of how the dinosaurs lived, they are also uniquely placed to furnish clues about the critical moment when they died.
Until now, most researchers have accepted the asteroid theory as presented in such scientific works as T. rex and the Crater of Doom,written by Walter Alvarez, an esteemed geophysicist at the University of California at Berkeley.
Alvarez, the son of Nobel Prize-winning physicist Luis Alvarez, spent more than a decade researching his thesis that an extraterrestrial body was to blame. In 1991, he finally uncovered the impact site in Mexico, buried under what is now the north coast of the Yucatan Peninsula.
"Rocks are the key to Earth history, because solids remember but liquids and gases forget," he writes in his book. "Retrieving these long-lost memories is the business of geologists and paleontologists, of people who have chosen to be the historians of the Earth."
Currie is one such "historian," but he now suspects that Alvarez does not have the part about the dinosaurs quite right. After 25 years in the field, the Ontario-bred, McGill-educated paleontologist has developed a hypothesis of his own.
He believes that the dinosaurs were in serious trouble when the asteroid hit. For millions of years, they had been struggling to cope with the impact changing weather patterns had had on their ecosystems. So many species had died off that the assault from space was the final blow for the few that remained -- if, that is, there were any left at all.
Had the calamity come 10 million years earlier, Currie theorizes, the dinosaurs still would have had enough species and a deep enough gene pool to allow some to survive. As a result, evolution might have taken a vastly different course. The Age of Mammals might never have happened, let alone the Age of Man.
If he is right, the dinosaurs' demise amounts to a dire warning for modern humanity. We are taxing the planet's resources so much that we are pushing species and entire ecosystems over the brink. Currie fears that as we take more and more pieces out of the delicate machinery of Earth, we make ourselves more and more vulnerable just as the dinosaurs were. The result: a much greater chance that a catastrophe, whether another asteroid, a disease or something yet unimagined will spark Armageddon.
"You reduce diversity and then something really major happens," he says, "and you've got a problem."
There is a critical difference, though, between what happened to the dinosaurs and what is happening today. Dinosaurs were the victims of fate. Homo sapiens is orchestrating its own downfall. Humans have become a force of nature -- and a malignant one. In effect, we have joined earth, air, water and fire to become the fifth element.
Scientists are finding that each of the planet's critical life-support systems is in jeopardy. Water supplies are being poisoned and exhausted. The air is now so polluted with humanity's carbon dioxide that the weather is being altered. As well, humans have cleared so much of the forest cover and tilled so much land that the carbon cycle has ceased to work properly.
Even fire seems to have lost the power the ancients believed it has over life and death. Now, humans determine what lives and what dies. Because of our actions, 24 per cent of mammal species are in danger of extinction. As well, one-quarter of all reptiles are at risk, plus one-fifth of amphibians, nearly one-third of fish and one in every eight birds, according to the World Conservation Union.
These figures are so high that scientists believe that unless the pace slows, species will vanish more rapidly now than when the dinosaurs died out. The terrible irony is that Homo sapiens, the big winner from the dinosaurs' extinction, is responsible.
Actor Harrison Ford has devoted himself to changing all this, through his work as a board member of Washington-based Conservation International. "Human interference with the natural order of our planet," he explained to me last week, "is the biggest factor in why it is now so fragile."
The risks are huge. "We all know we are losing parts of the biotic continuum at each and every step," he says. "We have no idea, really, what finally the effects of those losses will be." Phil Currie is famous mostly for his work on theropods, the upright meat eaters such as the fearful T. rex, and he is much more interested in their heyday during the Cretaceous period than he is in their demise. But over the past 25 years, as he has mined the Alberta bone beds, he has uncovered many clues to the dinosaurs' mysterious extinction that he cannot ignore.
He casts himself back about 80 million years to a time when Dinosaur Provincial Park was a coastal lowland, a delta something like the mouth of the modern Mississippi. A sea covered most of Saskatchewan and Manitoba and the Gulf of Mexico went all the way to the Arctic Ocean. There were no polar ice caps and the mighty Rocky Mountains would not emerge for 15 million more years.
Alberta's climate was sultry, like Florida's today. Instead of scrub brush, there were forests of cypress trees and redwoods towering over lush ferns and some of the planet's first flowering plants. The air was heavy with the scent of magnolia.
The region not only supported a huge animal population, it was also well-suited to preserving them after death. Many died in water, allowing sediment to cover them and eventually produce fossils. But the bonus for modern science was the Ice Age.
Flip forward to about 12,000 years ago, when Homo sapiens was just emerging from its caves and the woolly mammoth roamed the land. As the glaciers retreated, they carved remorselessly through the landscape, peeling off hundreds of metres of geological beds to expose the glory of the dinosaurs.
Currie points to a bald outcropping against the clear sky. And then another. They are rounded, as if a gigantic hand has scooped them into a sculpture. But the layers that run across these figurative outcroppings are set down with geometric precision -- the black seam represents a mucky wet period in Alberta's past, the grey shows when forests covered the land, the sandy one is the residue of an epoch of fast rivers.
Because these sequences are so precise, Currie can determine which dinosaurs lived when. The fossils tell him that 80 million years ago, at least 35 species lived in southern Alberta. Seventy million years ago, the tally had fallen to 20 to 25. And five million years after that -- right before the asteroid hit -- there were just six.
"Whether you look at the big picture or the small," he says, "we are saying that there was a reduction in the diversity of dinosaurs over the last 10 million years -- and that would suggest that, in western North America, something big is going on."
Something like this: In the millions of years before the dinosaurs went extinct, the seas began to pull back from the continents. The Gulf of Mexico inched south, the Arctic Ocean north. Inland seas began to vanish in South America and Australia. As that happened, Currie says, continental climates were established for the first time in eons. That meant warmer days and colder nights. And even though the climatic change was gradual, many of land-living dinosaurs could not adjust.
"The deterioration of the temperature doesn't have to be a lot," Currie says.
Another clue to the dinosaur dropoff is the size of the ones that were left at the end. They were big and, strange as it may seem today, nature tends to favour big animals over small ones, if climate and environment remain stable. They live longer, are less active and need to eat proportionately less to survive. (As well as the dinosaurs, the world has seen a rhino that stood 18 feet at the shoulder, amphibians with skulls the size of a dining-room table, bisons the size of elephants, birds 10 feet tall.)
But big creatures do not cope well with rapid change and the six dinosaur species still on the scene when the asteroid hit included the towering T. rex and hefty triceratops, and others that were among the biggest of their families. So not only was the gene pool thin, it was also a bit slow on its feet.
To science, the point at which the asteroid fell marks the end of the Cretaceous Period and the beginning of the Tertiary Period, and is known as the K/T boundary. (The T is for Teriary and K is from "Kreide," which is "creta" in German.) Alberta's geological record of what happened at that time on land is most clear, but what it shows is baffling. For one thing, there are no dinosaur bones. If dinosaurs died en masse, where are the bones?
"We know absolutely not a thing about the dinosaur at the boundary," explains David Eberth, a Tyrrell geologist and paleontologist. "I just about fell out of my chair last year when I realized that."
This alone does not prove that dinosaurs were already extinct. But it does mean there is no proof, so far, that they were still alive. The record also shows quite clearly that Earth's climate had undergone a sharp change and was becoming more harsh. Quickly. Rapid change makes it difficult for life to adapt. Species were dying.
Scanning the fossil-laden hills of the badlands, it is hard not to think of the incredible pace of today's climate change. Already, there is more carbon dioxide in the air than at any other time in three million years, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reported this year. Arctic Sea ice is 40-per-cent thinner than it was 40 years ago. Glaciers around the world are vanishing. Scientists believe that the pace is faster than what preceded the K/T boundary -- the fastest, in fact, in Earth's history. The K/T boundary does not look all that remarkable. Dennis Braman, a specialist in plant microfossils at the Tyrrell,is holding a piece of it in his hands -- a sliver of claystone sediment between one centimetre and two centimetres thick that is packed between layers of mudstone and coal.
It represents perhaps a decade, an unimaginably small slice of Earth's 4.6 billion years of existence, but an unimaginably important one: a rare geochemical marker of a single point in time across the planet.
Braman is one of the scientists who, leaping off Alvarez's findings, have taken the boundary apart molecule by molecule, spore by spore. A major surprise has been the astonishing amount of iridium -- the so-called "iridium spike" -- found along the boundary all over the world. Iridium is a very rare element -- on Earth. Extraterrestrial bodies have lots of it.
As well, there is "shocked" quartz (crystal is so finely fractured that it resembles miniature graph paper), a concentration of unusual primordial microdiamonds and an array of bizarre amino acids, all of which Braman says point to something falling from the sky.
Above the boundary is between half a centimetre and two centimetres of what Braman calls an "impoverished zone." It should be a good spot to find pollens and other evidence of life -- but hardly any is there to be found. "Something very major happened," he says. "But there seem to be other things happening before." No one knows better than a dinosaur scholar that extinction is normal. Phil Currie is no alarmist. But he has read first-hand the history of Earth. He has seen the calamitous results of rapid ecosystem change, has catalogued the imperatives of evolution. The parallels between then and
now haunt him.
He fears that humans are doing something no other plant or animal has done: defying the law of evolution. We have forestalled natural selection and unleashed our own series of extinctions. We have sidestepped the nasty effects of human evolution, but we have failed to cash in on the benefits of continual evolution. That means our sick do not necessarily die off, but we have not developed the biological nimbleness to adapt to new challenges.
"Right now," he says, "we're blindly going along and destroying things and that could ultimately contribute to our own destruction. As long as things keep going like this, we really aren't doing much to ensure our own future."
And not just our own. The future of thousands of other creatures that have survived the evolution wars of billions of years hangs in the balance. And the unknown ways they contribute to the functioning of the planet.
Is he right? Has humanity really become what amounts to the fifth element? Some experts agree. "I can say, undeniably, that human actions are so profound that they equal the forces of nature," Will Steffen says from his office in Stockholm. A chemist, Steffen is in charge of the International Geosphere-Biosphere Program, which brings together a decade of research on how the natural world is changing.
Asked whether the planet is robust enough to withstand the shock of human interference, he replies that it is hard even to tell where the point of no return is. "Can humans actually push the Earth into operating in a different state that's not suitable for human civilization? That's way beyond scientific enterprise."
Modern researchers now believe that the ancients conjured up the notion of the griffin -- the monstrous winged hound of Zeus with a lion's body and an eagle's head -- after seeing bones of the protoceratops found in the Gobi Desert. Legend helped them make sense of a world they did not really understand.
Today, however, there is no such escape in myth. Science has told us how species evolve and die out and the role Homo sapiens plays in that. And now, scientists such as Phil Currie are beginning to read the lessons the fossils have to teach, rather than relying on imagination.
The question, Currie says, is what we make of it. "We do recognize our past. It's a very important advantage we should have. We think of more than just food and surviving -- and that's something that definitely didn't go on during the Cretaceous.
"But if things play out and we drive ourselves to extinction, then what do we really accomplish by doing things differently? Nothing." He shakes his head. The logic escapes him.
Coming Up
Death Wish: Will humanity self-destruct? Are we really facing the end of the world as we know it?
Next week, as the series continues, award-winning earth sciences reporter Alanna Mitchell travels to the Middle East, Canada's Arctic and finally the South American jungle to assess the planet's predicament and its prospects for survival.
Monday: The water crisis
Tuesday: The big melt
Wednesday: A glimmer of hope
06/02/2001
The Globe and Mail
Metro
F4
"All material Copyright (c) Bell Globemedia Publishing Inc. and its licensors. All rights reserved."
Focus 06/04/2001
The Globe and Mail Metro Page A8
"All material Copyright Bell Globemedia Publishing Inc.
and its licensors. All rights reserved."
The world's 'single biggest threat'
Water - Canadians may take it for granted, but some countries will do almost anything
to ensure an adequate supply. The Death Wish series resumes with ALANNA MITCHELL
braving the heat of the Joranian desert to visit Azraq, the legendary oasis that humanity bled dry.
Deep in the parched desert of Jordan lies the oasis at Azraq, famed throughout the recorded history of the Middle East for what used to be here.
For a quarter-million years, water flowing from its ancient subterranean springs made it one of the world's great resting places for migrating birds. Hippos, zebras and lions came to drink here, and archeologists have found a fossilized jaw bone so old that it may be the missing link between the African and Asian branches of the elephant family.
Drawn both by the fresh water and plentiful prey, early humans settled here before almost anywhere else. Historians think Moses spent his 40 years in the nearby desert and the Romans considered Azraq so vital that they built a fortress here. Later, Arab kings added castles so they could hunt and then feast in luxury. And during the First World War, Lawrence of Arabia wandered in from the misery of the sand and found a place "radiant with half-memory of the luminous silky Eden." From the main castle at Azraq, he launched his famous attack on the Turks at Damascus.
That was then. Today, all that remains is a cruel caricature of an oasis. The springs that gave life for millenniums are dead now, dried and gone. The land has broken open into great, deep fissures. Heat rises inexorably from ground where marshy grasses once grew.
It took humans just 13 years to kill the oasis. Desperate for water, Jordanians began pumping from Azraq in earnest in 1980. By 1993, the birds were gone and the marsh plants slowly dried up and died. Around the same time, Azraq was declared an international ecological disaster.
Since then, a heroic attempt has been made to resurrect part of the oasis and the progress has been seen worldwide as a great ecological rehabilitation. But it is there on sufferance. At the flick of a politician's pen, the meagre green in this expanse of desert could vanish.
What's more, as Jordanians continue to pump too much from the oasis, the freshwater left is becoming less capable of keeping surrounding salt caches at bay. The experts are saying it is only a matter of time before the freshwater left in the oasis becomes undrinkable. Water is so fundamental that humanity defines it in many ways. To science, it is the combination of hydrogen and oxygen that produces a liquid essential to life -- the medium for nearly all chemical reactions in living organisms. To metaphysics, it is not only the prerequisite to life, but also possibly its origin. And in ecclesiastical terms, water is a symbol of cleansing, renewal, acceptance and rebirth -- an emblem of faith in the future.
But this necessity of life is not evenly distributed around the globe. Canada, blessed with the world's biggest freshwater supply, takes it for granted -- or sees it as the next big export item.
Not so in the Middle East, with a population that doubles every few decades and a landscape that for the most part looks a lot like Jordan's: 85 per cent sand. Jordanians use about 200 cubic metres of water a year. The world average is 7,700.
And the Middle East is hardly alone in its worries over water. An estimated 500 million people on the planet now live in countries critically short of water. By 2025, that figure will leap to three billion.
Already, the "severe water scarcity presents the single biggest threat to future food production," argues Sandra Postel, director of the U.S.-based Global Water Policy Project, "Even now," she wrote in the February, 2001, issue of Scientific American, "many freshwater sources . . . are stressed beyond their limits."
A new euphemism -- water vulnerability -- has been coined to describe the looming shortage, which ranks, along with the planet's disappearing forest cover and the rapid change in its climate, as one of the great threats to modern life. Like the other injuries to the planet, this water problem has been orchestrated by humanity -- now such a powerful force that it rivals the four elements the ancient Greeks believed make up the universe.
Water should be the ultimate renewable resource. According to its natural cycle, it evaporates, collects in the air and then falls as rain. Some of it leaves the planet's surface, eventually filtering through the purifying barrier of Earth and recharging underground aquifers. The net sum of water on the planet does not change.
But humans are bungling their stewardship of freshwater stores all over the world -- even, as Canadians well know, in places blessed with an abundance.
Not only has pollution destroyed part of the water supply, but human development has reduced the amount of water that exists in its most useful state: liquid. As global warming drives Earth's temperatures upward, notes Roger Street, a specialist in climate change at Environment Canada, the atmosphere retains more and more water in vapour form.
And as irrigated agriculture grows, humans have been drilling ever deeper, in effect "mining" subterranean water so quickly and on such a grand scale that vital reservoirs simply cannot replenish themselves.
Levels in some parts of Mexico are falling as much as three metres a year, and the High Plains Aquifer, which lies beneath the heartland of the United States and supplies about 30 per cent of the nation's irrigation supply, is in an alarming decline.
Closer to home, the Abbotsford Aquifer in British Columbia is polluted with nitrates, the waste products of farming. It supplies more than 100,000 people in Abbotsford and neighbouring Washington state, but almost three-quarters of the samples taken since 1992 have shown unsafe nitrate levels. Some were nine times what is considered tolerable.
The International Water Management Institute has catalogued the double-fronted attack on the water table in north China's Fuyang Basin. Industry is siphoning off the surface water and polluting it while farmers have resorted to drilling wells to irrigate their crops. The result has been disastrous. From 1967 to 2000, the water table in the basin has fallen as much as 50 metres.
In parts of South Asia, humans have extracted so much of the underground supply that this normally pristine source is too feeble to keep out the contaminants contained in the surrounding land. The natural ability of Earth to purify the water has been spoiled simply by lack of volume.
And where people are not overtaxing the water supply, they are poisoning it with everything from toxic waste to fertilizers, pesticides and raw sewage. Such abuse can exact a heavy toll -- witness the cancer rate among those exposed to Cape Breton's notorious tar ponds and the citizens ravaged by E. coli in Walkerton, Ont. Back in the Jordanian desert, it is easy to see why the landscape's inhospitability is legendary. The heat makes the horizon shimmer. The sand is so fine that it is more like a powder. Each footstep sends up a puffy cloud above ankle height where it hangs in the blistering air before settling down again. The fine grit seems to combine chemically with body salt and sweat to form a new, intractable substance that is impossible to remove from clothes and shoes.
The Bedouins are the only humans to survive the desert efficiently, aided by their camels. As I walk around this desolate place, I see a baby camel, tethered by its front legs to a post, much as a North American would leash up a puppy. Its owners, draped in thin cotton cloth, sit grinning nearby.
There are few other animals in sight. Birds and flowers wait for a sprinkle of rain to come before they appear. That usually amounts to less than 14 millimetres -- about half an inch -- a year. But for the past four years, it has, according to Jordan's Royal Society for the Conservation of Nature, been zero.
Near the oasis, however, the air seems transformed as if by magic. It smells fervid and promising.
This is the slim portion that has been painstakingly, expensively brought back from the dead. It is a poignant symbol of the adaptability of nature.
There is no natural surface water here any more. All the vibrant springs that once permanently fed the oasis -- at one time there were more than 10 -- have been drained dry. All the water now used to keep a bit of the oasis wet -- 1.5 million cubic metres a year -- is pumped from deep below, likely from fossil stores collected thousands of years ago.
In 1977, Jordan recognized the great significance of Azraq by designating the site as a "wetland of international importance" under the Ramsar Convention, a global environmental treaty named for the Iranian city in which it was signed 30 years ago. That means independent experts have deemed it fundamental to the regulation of a vital water system and to supporting a rich selection of species (Canada's 36 such sites cover 13 million hectares, or almost 20 per cent of Ramsar's worldwide total).
But in 1990, with the Jordanians pumping out twice as much water as the aquifer could replenish, Azraq was placed on the convention's black list, a recognition that it had become terribly degraded. The concern was not just for the wildlife. The Ramsar report points out that unless the drainage is reduced, seawater will invade, eventually turning the aquifer salty and unfit for drinking. "Only the timing of such an occurrence is in any doubt," the report says.
That frightening prospect sparked the attempt to rehabilitate the oasis, financed in part by money promised by international organizations as a result of the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro in 1992. Now, there is a visitor's centre and a short wooden path.
And water. Once it returned to the surface, the oasis came back to life. Dessicated rhizomes grew plump again and sprouted, and fish eggs nobody knew could survive so many years in the dusty soil mysteriously rehydrated and hatched. Then the birds began to return, drawn by the glinting water back to this essential link in their migration route. So once again it is possible to see purple herons and Egyptian nightjars and laughing doves. The honey buzzard flies by every now and then. The steppe eagle is back.
It is impressive, given that seven years ago, Azraq was a dust bowl without a single bird species to its credit, but still a far cry from a 1967 Jordanian survey that counted 347,000 specimens. By all counts, Azraq today is anything but Azraq in its natural state. Plant life consists mostly of reeds, which take over when little else will grow. The water level used to be neck-high, but now it is so shallow that minnows kick up ripples wherever they swim.
Farther along, the path leads to a cracked depression -- all that remains of the mighty Ain Soda Pool, the spring that lay at the ecological heart of the oasis. The sign posted here for visitors is blunt. "Once this spring poured millions of litres of water across the marshlands every day," it reads. "By 1993, it was dead." The killing started in earnest on Nov. 15, 1980, when the pumps started sending about 900 cubic metres an hour to charge the thirsty taps of Amman, the capital. That year, roughly 15 million cubic metres were taken from the Azraq Basin, three-quarters of the amount Jordan deemed a safe yield.
By the following year, 15 artesian wells had been drilled to the northwest of the oasis to help extract purified ground water. Ten years later, the draw had reached 39 million cubic metres a year, roughly double what the basin can sustain, and the government had developed Jordan's main military air base just southwest of Azraq. (Officials will not say how much water the base uses.)
By 1993, the oasis was a dusty garbage dump. The rescue efforts started a year later, and by 1997, a small portion of the wetlands had come back. But little else has changed. Official records show that last year, 37 million cubic metres of water were pumped out of the oasis. On top of that, area farmers relied on 500 illegal wells to irrigate their fields.
Jordan is fiercely proud of Azraq's international significance, but the government is under unrelenting pressure to keep up supplies to Amman, which relies on the oasis for one in every four glasses of water drunk by its more than two million residents. How long it will allow the 1.5 million cubic metres of fossil water to feed the resurrected wetland remains unclear. The initial commitment was five years and is soon to run out.
But there is a problem even if the flow to the surface continues. Fossil water is, by definition, a finite commodity. At some point, it runs out.
I am touring the site with geomorphologist Roger Crofts, chief executive of Scottish Natural Heritage. He examines a chart in the visitors centre that explains the exponential increase in pumping levels. "They're using up their environmental capital," he says. Is it sustainable? I ask. "No," he adds shortly. "I don't think it is."
But the Jordanians are not the only ones mortgaging the future. Deep beneath the east flank of the Rocky Mountains, stretching through South Dakota down to the Texas Panhandle, lies one of North America's great bodies of underground water.
The High Plains Aquifer has fed agriculture in parts of this massive area for about 100 years, defying the predictions of early explorers that this desolate plain could not support human life. Now, farmers in eight states covering an area of 480,000 square kilometres grow wheat and other grains in the world's largest expanse of cropland supported by irrigation. And parts of the aquifer are running out. By 1980, the water level in the Texas Panhandle had fallen more than 30 metres since irrigation began, says Tom Pedersen of the University of British Columbia, a leading authority on international water issues.
By 1998, it had dropped another 12 metres -- 1.5 of them in 1997-98, an abnormally wet period in that part of the world. What would a truly dry year -- Prof. Pedersen says one is bound to come along soon -- do to the aquifer? The prospects are frightening.
"We are squandering our strategic reserves of water," he says, echoing his Scottish colleague. "We act as if it is an infinite resource. This will be the focus of intense political concern in the future." And what do the Jordanians do with all the water being drained out of Azraq?
It would be hard to accuse them of wasting it. On average, each citizen uses just 85 litres a day, says Elias Salameh, a geologist and water specialist at the University of Jordan. In neighbouring Syria and Lebanon, he says, average consumption is 125 litres while in Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states, the daily figure is more like 400. North Americans? From 500 to 600 litres.
Where a Canadian city would have greenery, Amman offers only dust. Sprinklers are absent. It is so dry that flies land on people just to drink their perspiration. And soldiers are posted at many intersections.
Peace eludes this part of the world, and water is a key factor in the unrest because Israel controls so much of it. Last fall, Libya's radical leader, Moammar Gadhafi, visited Jordan for the first time in more than 20 years -- to demonstrate his support for a $730-million (U.S.) pipeline to link Amman with another ancient aquifer at Disi, about 320 kilometres away. Libya is paying for concrete pipes to be built along nearly half the route and has given a $100-million (U.S.) grant to get the project going.
Of course, water megaprojects have a great deal of history in this part of the world. Sandra Postel, of the Global Water Policy Project, is fond of telling the story of ancient Sumer, the world's first known civilization. Starting 6,000 years ago, it thrived because the Sumerians settled in the rich Mesopotamian fields between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers, and discovered how to divert water to their crops.
This nourished a rich civilization famed not only for harvests of wheat and barley but also for fluted golden cups, bowls of black obsidian and the imposing ziggurats said to be architectural templates for the biblical tower of Babel.
All this lasted for 2,000 years until a shortcoming in Sumerian technology became apparent. The soil, flooded and dried out time and time again, became poisoned with salt and other impurities. Agriculture failed. The civilization crumbled. The face of drought Azraq's current appearance belies its rich and wondrous past as the source of life for plants, animals and humanity alike.
Jordan has mounted a highly touted campaign to revive part of the oasis. To do so, unfortunately, it is using water that can't be replaced.
-30-
Robbing Peter
Water is a shape shifter that can be a solid, a liquid or a gas, depending on what the temperature is. Because of global warming, Earth's atmosphere has a vastly greater appetite for water as a vapour, the form
least useful to anything else in the environment.
Single use only
Prehistoric or 'fossil' water has been trapped for eons in deep subterranean reservoirs such as the High Plains Aquifer beneath this stretch of the central United States. Tapping into them has allowed development in regions otherwise unable to sustain it. Unfortunately, such sustenance has its limits. The
aquifers are being drained at an alarming rate and simply can't be replenished.
Water torture
From 1900 to 1995, global water consumption rose sixfold -- more than double the rate of population growth. Over all, water is abundant, but unevenly distributed. In some areas, usage is so high that surface supplies literally are shrinking and ground-water reserves are being depleted faster than they can be replenished by precipitation.
The United Nations has compared water consumption with availability and found that countries with a supply problem contain one-third of the world's population -- a figure it expects
could rise to two-thirds by 2025. If growth trends persist, industrial water consumption may double in 25 years.
As food demand rises, so does agriculture's thirst, which now accounts for 70 per cent of all water consumption. But in developing countries, 60 to 75 per cent of irrigated water is lost to evaporation or runoff. As clean water grows scarce, competition for it increases. Yet pricing it high enough to discourage waste remains a sensitive issue -- especially in low-income countries reliant on irrigated agriculture.
Planners in China estimate that water used in industry generates more than 60 times the value
it does on the farm.
Pollution adds enormously to supply problems. Water quality in most developed countries has improved and yet wastewater is not necessarily treated before discharge. About half the population of the European Union's southern member states still does not have sewage treatment.
As an ecosystem, fresh water is biologically rich and plays a vital role.
But it has lost a greater proportion of its species and habitat than either dry land or the marine environment -- and the future looks grim.
Death Wish Part 3
Focus Tuesday, June 5, 2001
If you doubt global warming is serious, visit the Arctic with ALANNA MITCHELL. At first, the big melt confused the people of Sachs Harbour, who found themselves suddenly catching salmon and spotting bizarre bird species from the south. But now they're worried -- the rising temperatures are wreaking havoc with the environment and with their way of life
How the North is getting burned
To someone who doesn't live up here at the top of the world, the cold
is as hard to take as the perpetual polar night.
It's late January and bitter as a twin-engine Beech 99 coasts in the half-light of the season's endless dusk, a few hundred feet above the Arctic Ocean. The unheated 10-seater is on its way to the tiny hamlet of Sachs Harbour on Banks Island. Everybody on board is wearing heavy goose-down parkas, mitts, and unwieldy Sorel winter boots.
Knees are pressed together and hands are stuffed under arms. Some of us are numb.
On the ground, the trees disappeared nearly two hours ago as the plane took off from the Western Arctic frontier town of Inuvik, and even there, they were stumpy and sparse. At Sachs Harbour, the permafrost is so tenacious trees can't even take root.
At least, not yet. The temperature is about - 35 degrees but, as frigid as that is, it's still 25 degrees higher than normal.
Global climate change has had an incredible impact on the Far North.
Winters are milder than before and summer temperatures are rising to such a degree that barn swallows and robins have appeared for the first time in the collective memory of the Inuvialuit. To widespread local astonishment, salmon are swimming in the sea.
Mosquitoes, once unheard-of this far north, can now survive here, in one of the handful of human settlements that cling to the biggest polar desert on the planet.
In fact, the warming has been so significant that the Arctic ice, which for thousands of years acted like a thick insulating tuque keeping the entire planet on climatic course, has begun to shrink -- alarmingly.
As the Beech 99 nears Sachs Harbour, some the Inuvialuit on board, long-residents of the hamlet, point down through the eerie afternoon twilight and shake their heads. The sea ice looks like a sheet of frosted glass that has been dropped on a concrete floor. Parts of it are shattered. Between the shards, great dark stretches of the Arctic
Ocean are visible.
This is not right. It is deep winter. This ice should be thick. It should be dependable. The Inuvialuit know that the changes threatens the way of life they have had for thousands of years.
So even in such a remote corner of the world, humanity's ability to influence the course of nature -- to serve as a "fifth element" along with earth, water, air and fire -- is taking its toll.
And there is no relief in sight. Greenhouse-gas pollution doesn't stop at the dissolving Arctic: The big melt in turn sets in motion planetary weather patterns that range from dire to catastrophic to lethal, climate scientists say. And they fear it's evidence that humanity has condemned itself to go the way of the dinosaurs.
The Inuvialuit are trained in subtleties. That's how they have learned to live at the outer limits of what humans can endure. Where the uninitiated look at the Arctic landscape and see numbing sameness, the Inuvialuit read critical differences.
For the past few years, their hunters have been patiently noting changes in their surroundings for the Winnipeg-based International Institute for Sustainable Development. The data are compared with the minutely detailed knowledge the hunters' forebears have handed down orally for hundreds of years.
Rosemarie Kuptana, 47, the most famous product of Sachs Harbour, is a member of the institute's board. She caused a sensation last November when she presented her community's dramatic findings during the international climate-change talks held in The Hague in a video that has now been broadcast around the world.
For the first time, delegates to the negotiations charged with finding a way to implement the Kyoto protocol on curbing greenhouse gases saw hard evidence of how pollution in the atmosphere is affecting the once pristine polar desert. They will wrestle with the issue again next month, at talks in Bonn.
Kuptana rose to international prominence through her lifelong efforts to have national and international governments respect her people's language, culture and geography.
She was born in the Arctic (just after her father William had come back from sealing) and sent to residential school in Inuvik at the age of 7 (where she was known as No. 475). She was president of the Inuit Tapirisat of Canada for much of the 1990s, and worked with the Inuit Circumpolar Conference for many years. Now, she lives just outside Ottawa and works with the IISD.
She turned her attention to climate change in the early 1990s, long before it gained its current high profile. She has known of the issue all her life. Her grandfather John Kaolok, a respected community leader and visionary, had prophesied years ago that the sea would grow warm.
His vision is kept alive today in the stories told by his daughter, Kuptana's mother. Sarah Kuptana was born sometime early in the century -- she isn't sure when -- and is now the eldest of the community elders, the keeper of the Sachs Harbour legends.
Her people are not scientists, Sarah says in Inuvialuktun, the ancient, richly descriptive dialect of the people of the Western Arctic. Her cadence rises and falls like an incantation. But they understand how the ice is supposed to work, how it has worked for centuries, and they have read its changes with fatalism.
Her father saw the coming warmth as good for the Inuvialuit. They would stop suffering so much from the cold, he predicted, and begin to live more like people down south -- at least until the heat took hold.
"My dad even said: 'It's going to be so changed down south. People are going to be hungry.' And I heard this long ago," Sarah says. " 'The weather is going to change. The animals are going to suffer first. They are going to be gone.' "
Three years ago, in the spring of 1998, the people of Sachs Harbour suddenly knew the legends were right. The changing weather went far beyond normal Arctic capriciousness. Usually, spring is a leisurely affair. The sun -- asleep through the winter -- vaults full into the sky, drenching the frost-blasted ground with the beginnings of colour. Then the residents, long cooped up in their sturdy houses, move onto the land -- travelling about 30 kilometres to the west to set up camp for fishing and hunting.
It's a convivial time, marking the end of the great, six-month darkness.
There is a steady supply of meats such as muskox and caribou. First, the people spend weeks fishing in Kuptan Lake, Middle Lake, and Fish Lake. Then, once the geese begin to fly overhead, the yearly hunt for them begins. The spring ritual usually takes weeks.
In 1998, however, the spring melt happened in just three days. The people went out on snowmobiles to make their fishing camps and then couldn't get back to Sachs Harbour because snow had given way to mud. The community was shocked.
John Keogak, a master hunter, says he couldn't help but think of what the ice was like back in the early 1970s when he went polar-bear hunting for the first time. It was solid, limitless, he says, sitting on his living-room floor as a chunk of the muskox thaws on his kitchen counter. He would stay out for days at a time, even weeks.
Now, the ice goes out only four or five miles from shore. It's thin and shifts around a lot. He can't risking camping on it. In fact, he won't set foot on it without a hand-held global positioning unit that tracks his whereabouts via satellite, plus a barometer to tell when the air pressure drops. When the pressure blows out, it's time to turn back because the ice is dodgy.
The sea ice isn't all that's melting. The permafrost is in retreat as well and has begun releasing strange, dark pieces of wood that have been frozen for all living memory -- they are the almost-fossilized remains of a forest that grew here thousands of years ago when the climate was warmer.
Usually people here find wood only when it washes ashore from much farther south; now they have something that Keogak says burns like coal once it has been dried out.
Sarah Kuptana gave birth to Rosemarie on the ice, and thought nothing of it. The ice was part of her domain. She can look across miles and miles of it in the half-light and tell where the cracks are, reading it just as she reads the sky and the stars and the land.
Now she is sitting cross-legged on the dark-green chesterfield in her living room in one of the 50 or so snow-encrusted houses that hug the forlorn coast near the Beaufort Sea. Next to her, hands on her belly, sits her younger sister Edith Haogak, who is in her early 70s.
On the low table in front of them, next to the television remote control, is a hunk of raw flesh Sarah has been eating. The house carries the dark scent of old blood and fish.
She lifts a frail arm. Her voice deepens. Her father's visions -- and the growing evidence that they are coming true -- have a secret potency here because of the story she's poised to tell. Long ago, she says, a little boy died in their community. Her father came upon him and began to pray. The boy got up.
She takes off her glasses for emphasis and waves her hand in front of her face. "I saw it with my own eyes."
Edith nods in agreement. The boy was Phillip Haogak, her late husband.
Of course, people here do not rely exclusively on ancient parable or empirical evidence to understand how the world works. Keogak, for example, has ventured south of 60 degrees and seen for himself.
In November, as Sachs Harbour hit the international stage, he went to Ottawa to help lobby for action against climate change. He was widely quoted on what's happening in Sachs Harbour. The next day, people recognized him in the streets of the nation's capital and greeted him as a hero.
In 1997 he travelled to Harare to attend a meeting on the international trade of endangered species. Some of the local Zimbabweans -- Mr. Keogak has dubbed them "campfire people" because they burn freshly cut wood -- were trying to revive trade in elephant ivory. He supported them and the indigenous way of life they were trying to protect.
Back in Sachs Harbour, he chuckles about his travels and especially about all the recognition he got in Ottawa. But there's a sober message underneath.
"I don't think the rest of the world is going to stop at anything," he says.
"I don't think there's anything we can say or do that will turn things back."
Already, the Arctic sea ice is 40 per cent thinner than it was 40 years ago, scientists reckon. It has shrunk in area by 14 per cent in 25 years and the decline is projected to get far, far worse.
The state of the ice has been the subject of anxious scrutiny. Scientists have concluded that the Arctic, with its brutish weather, is the first place on Earth where the effects of climate damage are being felt and where they will cut the deepest over time. By its very nature, ice is exquisitely susceptible to the changes sparked by the human damage to the planet -- in this case gaseous emissions.
The best scientific analysis, published by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change this year, shows that there is a greater concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere today than at any other time in 20 million years. Methane levels -- from cattle and landfills -- are at their highest in at least 420,000 years. There's more nitrous oxide, given off by the chemical industry and agriculture, in the air today than there has been for a millennium.
In turn, those gases affect the climate, causing warmer average temperatures and a greater tendency to storms, floods, droughts and other extreme weather. The fallout for humans is unknown. Projections, though, are that this amount of climate damage will be cataclysmic for the human species and for the planet systems that support it. No aspect of modern life will remain untouched, from the security of food and water, to the spread of disease, to the global economic systems.
Scientific and political experts face a bleak prospect: The next few decades must provide a transition from the industrial age to a new era based on other sources of power. Europe is working on a solution, but the requisite alchemy is not even on the horizon for the huge population of polluters who occupy North America.
Even if humanity stopped pumping these gases into the air today, the Earth's surface temperature and sea levels would continue to rise for centuries.
And as for the ice, it will continue to react to the warming of the climate for thousands of years to come, long after humans have lived through or died from all the other catastrophes projected to hit.
The ancient ice, first to change, will be the last to stop.
Despite the warming, Sachs Harbour in winter still seems fiercely Arctic to an outsider. My lungs close up from the cold as I walk outside. The snow is squeaks under my feet.
But that sense of the immutable Arctic disappears at the top of a hill behind the hamlet where the Inuvialuit bury their dead. The graves, each surrounded by a circle of rounded stones, should be flush to the permafrost ground.
Instead, as I stand here with the freezing wind burning my skin, facing the Arctic Ocean, I see that some of the graves have begun to sink. The permafrost, a living thing to the Inuvialuit, seems to be melting from underneath.
Rosemarie Kuptana is the bridge between this bitter, sunken graveyard and the powerful people who could slow down the damage. To her, the sorry graveyard of Sachs Harbour is just the latest sign of the invasions of her land. There was the church, the state, technology, industry, business. All these have tried to erode her culture. Now, even the climate -- the real definer of her people -- is being damaged.
"This could be the ultimate intrusion: the pollution of global warming," she says in an interview. "Most of the people polluting our climate probably don't know we exist."
For Rosemarie, though, the battle to make those in power aware of what's happening goes far beyond her people, her land, even her country. She uses the skills and subtle knowledge of her mother, aunts, and grandfather to tell people they are fouling the planet. She delivers her message not only as an Inuvialuit, but also as a mother and a citizen of the Earth.
"People don't get the big issues sometimes."
Polluters may not get the point, but the residents of Sachs Harbour can't avoid it.
Tonight, most of them have gathered in the school gymnasium, braving the brittle cold for a hamlet meeting. They are to see for the first time the film the IISD crew has made of their startling chronicle of climate change.
It's also a feast. The tables are laden with such exotic foods as turkey, ham and macaroni salad, along with homemade fried bread, which is a staple here. The children race around in glee, holding styrofoam cups filled with Jell-O.
Later, some of them will slip up under their mother's open outside shirt -- mothers always wear two here -- and sleep against her back as she ties its loose ends around her waist. It's like a Snugli in reverse, keeping the child safe and warm.
Sarah Kuptana is here. She has been carried in and now sits in a wheelchair, bright eyes taking it all in. Before the meeting begins, she offers a prayer. Her voice fills the air, an urgent voice speaking in Inuvialuktun, a language now known to just a handful of people. The children are stone silent, taking in the power of her words, although many do not understand them.
She is giving thanks -- for the food, the scientists, the meeting of two cultures. But most urgently of all, she is praying -- for the Earth.
Companion piece:
Why the ice matters
More than the Inuvialuit way of life depends on the ice. The snow and ice at the top of the world are critical to regulating the global climate system. Even small changes in the status quo can spark major change.
Snow and ice act as insulation, keeping heat in the sea and land rather than releasing it into the atmosphere. As they melt, that barrier weakens, pushing a massive amount of heat energy into the air, which, in turn, helps to melt more ice and snow.
Some climate models conclude that if all the Arctic sea ice were to vanish, the heat of the ocean would warm the air above it by 20 to 40 degrees in winter.
Along with the heat comes evaporation, and then, inevitably, precipitation in the form of rain or snow. The most likely scenario is that climate change will transform the forsaken, frigid desert that is the Arctic today into a humid, far warmer place.
The ice and snow also bounce light into the atmosphere; as they melt, the exposed land and water absorb that energy instead. It's a phenomenon that feeds on itself: As the surface melts, it absorbs more and more energy, melting more surface and then absorbing yet more energy. And so on.
In the end, as more heat enters the atmosphere, temperature and wind patterns change. Henry Hengeveld, the Canadian government's science adviser on climate change, explains that winds move around the world primarily to equalize the heat. And where they go, so goes rain.
As for the northern sea ice, scientists estimate that it is 40 per cent thinner than 40 years ago and covers 14 per cent less area than 25 years ago. They predict that things are going to get a lot worse.
Feeling the heat
When it comes to the big melt, Canada's Far North is not alone.
Glaciers in the Peruvian Andes also are vanishing, as are the icefields of Africa's mighty Mount Kilimanjaro. The changes are so fast and so dramatic that the experts predict many glaciers that are not near the poles will disappear within as little as a decade.
North America, meanwhile, has glaciers in the Columbia Icefield melting at what appears to be an exponential rate; so-called "permafrost" that no longer lives up to its name; and, of course, the old, blue-tinged, multi-year sea ice in the Western Arctic that is turning to water. Climate scientists now talk freely about the days to come when the Northwest Passage through the Arctic Ocean will open as a trade route.
All in all, the study of the cryosphere (Earth's frozen parts) has gone from being a bit of an academic backwater to a celebrity field of study.
The profession now has an inside joke -- there are more of them but they have increasingly less to study.
Death Wish Part 4
Focus Wednesday, June 6, 2001
The man with the plan to save the planet
Russell Mittermeier doesn't believe that life on Earth is doomed, but the clock is ticking. To conclude this series, the dynamic scientist and president of Conservation International takes ALANNA MITCHELL deep into South America's equatorial rain forest to demonstrate that, despite all the damage humanity has done, Homo sapiens can co-exist with nature
'Lie flat on your stomach on the bottom of the boat and protect your head," instructs the scientist, wrapping his arms around his own neck and ears to show what he means.
"Remember, harpies don't bother to soar. They blast through the forest canopy and simply rip their prey out of the trees."
Or canoes.
We are in a leaky dugout canoe hacking our way down a vine-infested river deep in the Amazonian rain forest of Suriname not far from the equator. Somewhere near here, a local man has spotted a specimen of Harpia harpyja,the fearsome harpy eagle. Considered the mightiest raptor on the planet, it weighs up to nine kilos, boasts a wingspan of more than two metres and preys on sloths and other large animals. The bird is vicious and known to be aggressively unfriendly with trespassers.
Small wonder that early explorers named it after the monstrous half-woman, half-bird of Greek myth.
Not that the harpy is the only threat around. The mosquitoes probably carry malaria. The water is filled with piranhas. On shore, the diamond-headed bushmaster snake rules the undergrowth with
inch-long fangs that can sever a limb.
So why are we here? Because the harpy is so rare that in his 30 years of working in the jungle, the scientist, Russell Mittermeier, has seen just two. He anxiously scans the treetops until the guides suddenly point to the upper branches of a towering kapok tree. There sits a mother guarding her young. Sharp eyes unblinking, she is immobile. For the moment.
Some of us shriek. But not Mittermeier. It's his best harpy sighting yet.
He whips out his binoculars, chortles and settles in to watch. "That is really cool, guys," he says. "Really cool."
In many ways, Russell Mittermeier is like the harpy eagle. As president of Conservation International, an organization that has gone from splinter group to cutting edge in only 14 years, he is considered by many to be the world's mightiest environmentalist.
An eminent primatologist with a PhD from Harvard University (and a lifelong Tarzan fixation), he does not hesitate to blast through obstructions in the hunt for solutions. As a result, he racks up successes -- a quality that makes him a rare bird in today's rather luckless fight for the future of the planet.
"For conservation to be a success, you have to understand you're fighting a war -- you cannot be timid," explains Peter Seligmann, CI's fierce chairman and chief executive. In 1989, he lured Mittermeier away from the World Wildlife Fund because "normal barriers don't seem to bother him. He's adventurous. He's willing to go places other people don't want to go to."
And Mittermeier is driven. He carries a stopwatch and two
spiral-bound journals -- one personal, the other scientific -- so that he can time everything he does and compare it with his previous best. He has more than 350 scientific publications under his belt. In 1999, he was named "hero of the planet" and given cover-story treatment in Time magazine.
This high-test approach also pretty much sums up the way CI operates.
Forged over a weekend in January, 1987, when Seligmann and about 50 others grew disillusioned with the Nature Conservancy, the organization marches to its own drummer. It believes that countries can build an economy on conservation principles. That means taking the needs of local communities into account -- and working with
companies.
Some environmentalists consider co-operating with business heresy, Seligmann insists that CI has no truck with corporate villains. But businesses are needed to help to build an economy, he says. And they are appealingly vulnerable -- to shareholders, markets, press and profits. "Could we win the war without them?" he asks. "Absolutely not."
All this urgency is prompted by the mounting scientific evidence that humans are doing great harm to the biological processes that keep the planet alive. As this damage mounts, we are becoming a force so powerful that we rival the ancient four fundamental elements thought to make up the universe.
Unlike earth, air, water and fire, though, we -- the fifth element -- are malignant. So Mittermeier and his colleagues have set themselves an ambitious goal: to preserve as much of Earth's remaining biological real estate as they can. And they have decided that some of that real estate is more important than others.
CI concentrates on so-called "hot spots of biodiversity," a slender roster of countries -- largely in tropical areas -- that make up 1.4 per cent of Earth's land surface but contain about 60 per cent of all terrestrial species. If they are lost, the consequences to nature -- and the humans dependent on it -- would be incalculable.
It's a threat of extinction rivalled in scope only by the spasm that extinguished the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. And Mittermeier's controversial strategy -- indeed, his own fiery drive to implement it -- is considered by many to be the best hope of avoiding the carnage.
I have accompanied Mittermeier to Suriname to see how he does it.
And therefore, what the hopes are.
The former Dutch colony on South America's northeast coast has
become a poster child for good environmental practices. Very thinly populated, with 440,000 inhabitants clustered mainly in the tidy coastal capital, Paramaribo, it contains one of the world's few remaining pristine rain forests. It is paradise compared with the hell of such hot spots as the moonscape that is Haiti.
Not that Suriname is immune to the currents of human folly. Natives in the area once practised cannibalism, and 300 years ago, slavery powered the sugar-plantation economy that made the place so valuable that the Dutch gave up the island of Manhattan to get their hands on it.
But modern Suriname has opted for the ecological high road and much of the credit goes to Russ Mittermeier.
He first came here in 1975, a precocious 25-year-old monkey
researcher anxious to find the perfect tropical rain forest to do field studies for his doctorate. He wound up spending the better part of three years in Suriname's untouched interior, becoming the first to map the comparative ecology of all eight indigenous species of monkey.
In the process, he fell in love with country and its people -- a fantastical mixture of cultures from Creole to black to Javanese to Hindustani to Amerindians, all overlaid with the obsessive Dutch need for order.
So in 1995, when Malaysian and Indonesian loggers announced that they wanted to cut three million hectares, about 20 per cent of the country, Mittermeier says he "got turfy."
Earlier, Suriname's government had granted a logging concession that
brought in few stumpage fees, but destroyed the forest. Afraid the same would happen, but on a much larger scale, Mittermeier lobbied President Jules Albert Wijdenbosch, who turned away the loggers and set aside 10 per cent
of the country -- 1.6 million pristine hectares -- as the Central Suriname Nature Reserve, which was quickly declared a World Heritage Site.
To support the reserve, Mittermeier helped to launch a special fund that, at $8-million (U.S.), is now more than halfway to its $15-million goal. The money it will generate far exceeds any revenues from logging. And the forest stands.
As well as visiting the elusive harpy, Mittermeier wants to go and see a long-lost cultural treasure that has recently come to light: the ancient, sacred rock carvings in the caves of Werehpai. Discovered a year ago by a native hunter, the caves are believed to have been inhabited by cannibals, and Mittermeier wants to assess them as a tourist draw -- to show the local chiefs that they can make big money when the rain forest is left standing.
So along with about a dozen tribesmen we are tramping toward the caves through a magnificent stretch of dense jungle near the native village of Kwamalasemutu near Suriname's southern edge. Hundreds of species of tree arch high above, liane vines looping down through their branches, fantastical buttresses holding them up in the thin tropical soil. The forest is so wet, so hot, that to a northern nose, it smells like stewed rhubarb.
Mittermeier's eyes remain fixed on the ground, watching for poisonous snakes, ferocious army ants, softball-sized tarantulas and other lethal things he mentions only if he needs to.
Before being allowed into the caves, we are frisked by Trio hunters armed with machetes and rifles. We are terribly alert. Our shirts and pants are drenched in sweat, more now from fear than from exertion, and the taste of salt is strong on our lips. It is not clear what is ahead.
And then, the caves of Werehpai.
There are probably fewer than a dozen, connected in a bewildering maze.
Some are easily large enough to stand in; others require a belly crawl. Every
surface is carved with the outlines of large crude figures. The face of a paramount
chief, with his elaborate headdress; a bushmaster poised to strike in vengeance.
Perhaps a human figure with stomach excised.
Just beyond is a broad, flat stone that looks like a table but has the feel of a sacrificial altar. And everywhere the same image is repeated over and over: a single, wrenching face, eyes wide open mouth stretched in terror. Such haunting images make it impossible not to think of the legend, or at least the version being told these days.
Werehpai, it seems, was a member of the Akijo tribe, the cannibals said to have lived in the caves for thousands of years. Thought to have been much more advanced than other tribes, they could paint, draw and weave but they also used their advanced knowledge for evil rather than good. One day, during an attack on another tribe, they kidnapped two young children -- brother and sister -- and gave them to Werehpai to raise as her own.
But the arrangement was not permanent. When the children had grown, the girl (whose name has not been recorded) was taken from Werehpai and subjected to the terrifying and bizarre Akijo ritual. First, she was tattooed all over her body. Then she was eaten alive -- kept conscious for two days while her body parts were removed.
Werehpai had come to love the children and knew that a similar fate was in store for the boy, Aturai, so she helped him to escape and find his way home. Aturai exacted his revenge by returning with an army and using skills he had learned from the Akijo to destroy them in a battle in the caves.
Today, the people of Kwamalasemutu believe that the sacred carvings in the cave commemorate that battle. In their presence, Mittermeier is uncharacteristically silent. This, he reckons, is the largest collection of cave carvings ever found in Amazonia. But of all the clues to human behaviour he has come across, it's one of the least comfortable.
Farther on, there is a much more concrete cause of fear. A jaguar, the deadliest land predator in South America, has made a home here in the caves. Bones of a peccary, or wild pig, it has caught for lunch are laid out on another rock, broken and sucked clean of marrow.
The smell of the cat is so acrid, so overpowering that I ask Mittermeier if the animal could still be here, hiding in a shadow. Maybe, he answers, shrugging, but humans only occasionally fall prey to jaguars. Near the end of the maze, Kamainja Panashekung, the hunter who stumbled on the entrance to the caves while he was looking for his lost dog, shows Mittermeier the final prize. Hidden behind a rock plate are two prehistoric carving tools, likely the ones the artists used. Mittermeier shakes his head in awe. They probably have not been touched for thousands of years, he says, but look like they were left there just yesterday.
He is excited. Ecotourists would pay serious money for an adventure trip to see the untouched jungle, the village, the eagle and the caves, he tells the locals. It could mean sustained income for a people who live mostly as hunters and gatherers.
But there is one problem, he adds: the tourists would want to see monkeys in the trees, not being shaved in preparation for the cooking pot like the tufted capuchin bagged by a hunter the night before. Brought to camp for us to see, its fists were clenched in the spasm of death. As its hair was shaved away, I could see its skin, white as a child's. Mittermeier does not fit the usual perception of a radical environmentalist. For one thing, he is a pragmatist: If forests are at stake, he will negotiate with dictators and with corporations.
"A lot of what corporations do is drive the world," he says. "They are more permanent and consistent than governments. And governments listen to them. You just have to get corporations doing the right things."
This may sound counterintuitive coming from an eco-pioneer, but Mittermeier is not driven by sanctimony or a thirst for social justice. An excellent biologist, he is simply fascinated by Homo sapiens, its behaviour and its cultures -- the same way he is intrigued by the viper.
"Vipers are more predictable," he quips. "That's the nice thing about them."
In fact, he sees humans in somewhat the same way his idol Tarzan does, as curious creatures who share a few similar characteristics with him. That means he is immune to outrage at their actions. Even when he talks about catastrophic human stupidity, the harshest description he can muster is to say it was "irritating."
And like the king of the jungle, he seems something of a guy's guy. He can tell you minute details about the weird camouflage patterns of any forest toad, but, after 26 years of coming to Kwamalasemutu, he has no idea how old the women are when they start to have children.
Mittermeier grew up in the Bronx. An only child (his father was a stamp collector), he embraced Tarzan as "someone I always wanted to be like," and decided that his route to the jungle had to take him through Harvard. He narrowly missed as an undergraduate, ending up at Dartmouth instead, but succeeded at the graduate level and received his doctorate at 27, thanks to his work with the monkeys of Suriname.
That same year, 1977, he became the youngest person ever to lead the prestigious primate specialist group of the World Conservation Union's Species Survival Commission, a post he has kept ever since. Realizing that tropical forests around the world were vanishing, he put together a global strategy on primate conservation within months.
The document changed the course of monkey research the world over by focusing attention on their habitat. "I knew what I wanted to do," he says with a shrug. "Most people don't."
This quickness is a blessing, but also can be a curse. The most serious failing colleagues can find with him is that he is so visionary others can't keep pace.
"It may be difficult for people who do not immediately share his enthusiasms to catch up with him," says Willem Udenhout, a former prime minister of Suriname and its ambassador to the United States and Canada during most of the 1990s. "He needs an interpreter."
Now the CI executive director here, Udenhout says forest preservation has become part of Suriname's economic plan and national identity. "The important thing is that many, many people in the core of Suriname's business community realize that much of Suriname's financial future relies on pristine forests."
By the same token, he says, "environmentalists who are innocent of economics have no audience." Mittermeier's trip would not be complete without a flight deep into the interior to Asidonhopo, a village populated by Suriname's "Bush Negroes" -- the descendants of slaves who fled the Dutch to live in the jungle.
The place looks like something straight out of Africa -- the short, black and relentlessly muscular people along with their art forms, bright clothing and even the ritual scarification of a woman.
Mittermeier has been here so often he knows some of the children by name -- but the women scare him. One, he says, walked up to him once and said: "You do me." His wife, he explained, would not like that. "She's not here," came the reply.
Mittermeier has come to touch base with Songo Aboikonie, the Granman, or paramount chief of the Saramaccans tribe. The chief's name translates as "the boy is clever" and he is renowned for his tactical skill in representing his 20,000 people spread over 61 villages.
Rather than speak directly, the chief delivers his message through a bassia,or deputy, and it is harsh. Have the Saramaccans not always been Mittermeier's friends? Why don't they see a penny of the $15-million support for the new nature reserve just beyond their traditional land? Their buildings are crumbling, their young men go next door to French Guiana to work and Suriname's government does not help them enough. What will Mittermeier do for his friends?
The CI contingent shifts uneasily. They were not expecting this question and so do not have a ready answer. But in the morning, it becomes clear how the Granman got his name. He has a plan of his own. Before breakfast, he has an elegant handwritten letter delivered to Mittermeier. It is a formal expression of interest in seeing the headwaters of the Suriname River -- traditional Bush Negro land – protected forever. It is a unexpected coup -- potentially a huge area near the Central Suriname Nature Reserve.
Mittermeier is flabbergasted. "That's pretty cool," he says. But an irritated Granman is no threat
compared with the piranhas that infest Amazonian rivers. Throughout the trip, Mittermeier has been
merrily taking swims, saying they are unlikely to attack unless you are bleeding. Though, he adds, they will bang up against you to test you out. "Ping, ping, ping," he says, imitating the feel of fish on skin.
Mittermeier is not foolhardy -- he is as savvy about personal danger as he is about the dangers to Earth. But he will not let either slow him down.
When we leave Asidonhopo and reach the stunning Raleigh Falls in the Central Suriname Nature Reserve, he tackles the fear of the fish. He is sitting on the deck of a cabin above a sandy stretch of the river's shore and tosses a piece of cooked chicken into the shallows. It takes a minute, but the first piranha -- finger-sized, with a V-shaped neon-red tail -- finds the treasure. Others follow. Mittermeier provides the soundtrack: "Bam. Bam. Bam."
By the time the water clears, the chicken has vanished. His entourage is shell-shocked. Mittermeier chuckles and walks away. "Cute," he says. And, of course, these are the tiny piranhas. Later, some large ones are hauled out of the water; they have teeth as big as a dog's.
Finally, I realize that the piranhas have become a metaphor. Fear of them -- just like the fear of challenging the forces that injure the planet -- is strongest when imagined and never faced. Plainly, this is not the time for timidity. We descend to the river for a swim. And for supper, we eat the frisbee- piranhas. They are full of bones and sweet meat.
Mittermeier loves the area around Raleigh Falls more than any other. His research station from the 1970s is just down the river.
Smack in the middle of his research area is the Voltzberg, a piece of sheer, primeval Guyana shield poking up hundreds of metres through the jungle floor at a 45-degree angle on its gentlest face.
Mittermeier once climbed it in 11 minutes ("some macho thing"), but usually takes about 20 minutes. This is only the second time since the reserve was created that he has been up. It's brutally hot. Wild pineapple and vanilla cling to the bare rock. Bush Negro guides climb in bare feet. Mittermeier slows down to help one of the group who has an injured foot, letting others reach the summit first -- a huge sacrifice. Still, he notes, looking at the stopwatch, he made it in 19 minutes, which is not bad.
Looking around, he can see to Brazil, Guyana and French Guiana. Right to the horizon in all directions, it is one of the rarest sights on the planet: pristine forest devoid of human habitation. But for his intervention three years ago, a large part of it would have been logged.
Macaws fly overhead. Deep below the forest canopy, a red-faced howler monkey's roar reverberates through the forest the way it must have thousands of years ago.
Mittermeier could bask. But he doesn't. "It's already history," he says of the creation of this reserve. "It's one part of an enormous global puzzle and there are dozens of other pieces to fall into place."
But if he does not bask, he also does not despair, even though he has seen almost all the worst destruction humans have wrought on the planet. He has seen the devastation of the Azraq Oasis in Jordan. He has read the dire predictions of the climate scientists.
He has watched as his beloved primates become scarcer. Today, 150 of the 600 species are in terrible trouble. Fifty-five of those are right on the edge of extinction. But faith is built into his DNA. Homo sapiens, he maintains, is not a suicidal species. It's just that we are half a step away from living in caves, and we have to learn that Earth's resources will not go on forever.
Standing up here, with one of the world's great optimists, surveying one of the last pieces of unbroken tropical wilderness the planet has to offer, it's tempting to have hope. After all, humanity has advanced and shed other self-destructive practices -- think of slavery and cannibalism. Unlike the legendary Akijo, humanity is capable of using advanced knowledge for good.
Plus, the planet can be astonishingly forgiving. It has mysterious powers to heal -- if given the chance it needs.
At last, Mittermeier sits down. The sun has begun to wane. We are all in need of a rest before we go back down the mountain. But then one of his colleagues calls: "Russ, there's a king vulture!" In an instant, Mittermeier jumps up, squinting into the sky. Binoculars at the ready. "You see a king?" He runs over. His eager face is full of light.
End
Companion piece: Why the stars come out
Conservation International has attracted some very high-profile supporters, including an active board of directors that includes media czar Barry Diller, Gordon Moore, chairman emeritus of Silicon Valley's Intel Corp., and perhaps best known of all, actor Harrison Ford.
A passionate conservationist, Ford told me recently that he is drawn by "the strategic capacity of CI, the ability to move surely and quickly. It's the tenacity, the vigour of the group."
As well, he is impressed by how strongly science infuses the group's mandate, and by how much the staff members who grew up in hot-spot countries help to make strategy. "We are not," hew says, "imposing solutions from afar."
The support is more than verbal. CI now raises about $50-million (U.S.) a year -- 21/2 times the annual budget of Greenpeace's U.S. operation. Last month alone, a glittering fundraising dinner in New York that Ford helped to arrange brought in about $1-million.
The affair featured Richard Leakey, the famed Kenyan conservationist and student of early man, as guest speaker, along with NBC-TV News anchor Tom Brokaw as master of ceremonies and political humour from Will Ferrell and Darrell Hammond of television's Saturday Night Live.
Thanks to such support, CI is now a major player, along with the World Wildlife Fund and the Nature Conservancy, that employs 1,000 scientists and field staff in 32 countries. Canadians hold some key posts: Claude Gascon is senior vice-president for field support and Rebecca Ham is a specialist in primates and Africa.
Ford says that mitigating the human misuse of the environment is the biggest issue facing our species. "There's enormous urgency to it," he says. Cool heads and ... From the rare and fearsome harpy eagle to the tiniest tree gecko, the people of Suriname have decided to preserve their species-rich wilderness for future generations by rejecting large-scale resource extraction that doesn't take into account its impact on nature.
Companion piece:
Hot spots
Russell Mittermeier's beloved Suriname may be in good ecological shape, but Conservation
International has designated more than two dozen 'hot spots' around the world that are not.
These are regions it considers vital to the planet's well-being but in serious danger because
of human activity.
Topping the list is the tropical forest that follows the Andes from
Venezuela to Argentina, taking in parts of Colombia, Ecuador, Peru and Bolivia.
The region boasts 45,000 to 50,000 plant species (18 to 20 per cent of Earth's total).
Of that, 20,000 are found nowhere else -- as are 677 of the region's 1,666 bird species.
But only 25 per cent of the original 1.258 million square kilometres of forest remain in
their original condition, because of seasonal burning and livestock grazing, agriculture,
mining, oil drilling and extensive cultivation of the opium poppy.
What CI is doing
Peru: Developing resource-extraction practices reduce environmental impact. Ecuador: Working with business to market buttons and other products made from the ivory-like nuts of the tagua tree.
Colombia: Co-operating with coffee producers on national standards for ecologically sound growing practices, such as planting under the canopy of existing forests to leave habitat in tact.
Bolivia: Training rain-forest villagers to develop a locally run ecotourism trade.
Venezuela: Creating a conservation corridor to connect the country to similar corridors in neighbouring states.
Death Wish: Will humanity self-destruct?
This concludes the four-part series on the state of the global environment that has taken
award-winning earth sciences reporter Alanna Mitchell to western Canada, the Far North,
the Middle East and now South America.
Water, Water, Everywhere
Conflict. Disease. Inept governance, inadequate resources. While our water woes continue to plague us, Kenya's amazing Constructed Wetlands are turning millions of litres of sewage and commercial effluent into clean water, cost effectively and in harmony with the environment.
By Dee Raymer, The Reuters - IUCN Environmental Media Awards 2001
Winner - English-speaking Africa.
In Kenya, the hopelessly overoptimistic slogan "Clean water for all by the year 2000" vanished quietly into the bad joke cupboard sometime during the mid 1990s. Combined estimates from the Ministry of Water and Natural Resources and UNICEF indicate that 52% of our rural population now has no access to safe or adequate water. This national average belies the grimmer picture in certain areas – in North Eastern Province only 17% have safe water, in Makueni 16% and in Migori and West Pokot, a mere 6%.
During the past year, the majority of Kenyans would have been grateful for any water during the many prolonged periods when taps, wells, boreholes and rivers ran dry. Better-informed Kenyans also know that, thanks to a deadly combination of environmental abuse and a thirty-fold population increase since 1900, Kenya has few options for reliable sources of clean water supply in the future. Galloping deforestation (as ever in the run-up to an election) is reducing yields of hitherto reliable resources, and it is said that water from the huge Tana/Galana/Sabaki lifeline river network is no longer fit to drink, untreated, along its entire course.
In real terms, increasingly unsafe and scarce water supplies, combined with our often criminally irresponsible disposal of wastewater, translate into human tragedies. Witness the recent typhoid and malaria outbreaks in Embu district, with critically ill and dying patients, four to a bed or on floors in undermanned, under-equipped hospitals. The Daily Nation of March 5th reported 30-35 hospital admissions daily. More than 700 people with typhoid, malaria, or both, had been admitted up to that point; 90 had died.
Be assured that this outbreak will not be the last of its kind. Even groundwater, assumed by many to be ‘safe’, is becoming dangerous. E. coli counts in analyses done by the Kenya Industrial and Research Development Institute last year of water from rural springs ranged from 35 to 1,800 per 100 ml. The World Health Organisation’s criterion for potability is zero; a count of 1,800 fails to meet its safe standard for any form of irrigation.
As we continue to pollute our dwindling fresh water resources and the environment with our filthy discharges, some urban and peri-urban boreholes have begun yielding water with E.coli counts similar to those in raw sewage from public toilets: it may look rather better, but drinking it untreated will soon see you in the doctor’s waiting room.
In Nairobi’s Eastlands slums, it is not uncommon to see residents drawing water from the Nairobi River and its tributary, the Gitathuru – scarcely better than open sewers nowadays. Flourishing market gardens are watered directly from these rivers, as well as from sewer mains that are sometimes deliberately fractured for the ‘regulated organic nutrients’ (the current politically-correct term, I believe, for human shit), within. Can any Nairobian guarantee that they have never eaten any of that very healthy looking produce?
The situation is very simple, and it is dire: if we don’t clean up our wastewater for safe reuse, we shall simply run out of water altogether.
From toilet to tap, and back again
Most western cities recycle their wastewater, its revolting taste a testimony to the amount of chemical treatment involved. Whether or not we subscribe to the health lobby’s view that the principal chemicals used – alum and chlorine – are thoroughly detrimental to our long-term health, our collective immune systems are unquestionably under siege from modern technology’s liberal chemical contributions to what we eat, drink and breathe.
The viewpoint slowly being forced upon realists was voiced recently by a senior Kenya Wildlife Service officer, describing his revulsion and disbelief on discovering 15 years ago that water from urban toilets, after treatment, eventually comes back out of urban taps. "The whole concept," he said, "was totally unacceptable to me then – but we had not yet approached our present crisis point. Now I see all too clearly that one-time water use is impossible if we hope to have access to any water at all."
So what are the treatment options?
Conventional wastewater treatment relies on machinery and chemicals - long detention in unattractive and expensive concrete ponds, then stirring and aeration using machinery powered by electricity or fossil fuels, followed by chemical treatment to ensure compliance with public health criteria before reuse.
After installation, however, a number of factors conspire to thwart the works. High operational costs, mechanical breakdowns, the frequent unavailability of spare parts (or the budget to buy them), power cuts, the human error factor and the need for large technical workforces bode ill for reliable and sustainable operation of such systems in developing countries. History shows all too clearly that such high-tech and inappropriate solutions to wastewater management and treatment tend to hiccough erratically from aid package to aid package, punctuated by long periods of breakdown.
On March 10th, several weeks after the start of Embu’s typhoid outbreak, the Daily Nation reported municipal councillors admitting that raw sewage has been allowed to "flow untreated into rivers for a long time." The same admission was made last year in Kisumu (only this time the economically vital Lake Victoria served as receptacle for the discharge), and probably could and should just as easily be made in other towns all across the country.
There are alternatives, however. Millions of years before we came along with our technological obsessions, nature had already developed an elegant means of water purification. She evolved the wetland, whose complex ecology cleans up dirty water using efficient biological processes. It has taken us a long time to appreciate that neither concrete, machinery nor rigid drawing-office shapes need to be involved.
The first generation of wetlands used in dealing with wastewater were natural swamps that simply provided handy dumping grounds for sewage. While the practice is now banned in most countries due to its extremely negative effects on existing wetland ecologies, marked improvements noted in water quality as it progressed through the wetlands began to interest researchers.
At the Max Planck Institute in Germany during the late 1950s, Dr Kathe Siedl began investigating the workings of submerged gravel beds that proved remarkably effective in breaking down heavy biological loadings in polluted water. The gravel bed hydroponics (GBH) system, planted with pollution-tolerant aquatic plants, has become the first element in many designs for constructed wetlands.
Whereas the discharge of wastewater into natural wetlands causes serious ecological disruption, constructed wetlands (CWs) are a different matter, being purpose-designed for each situation and installed where no wetland existed previously. There is no ecology in a new CW so, as conditions modify and life forms arrive (my goodness, how they do!) each can choose the part of the system it prefers – more tolerant organisms at the start where polluted water enters the system, and less tolerant ones further along as the natural purification process progresses.
CWs come in all sizes, from domestic to municipal scale, and there are numerous design options, but all CWs operate on the same principles of natural water purification. Water passes through a succession of connected ponds, and along the way microbes, plants and other life forms use our pollutants as nutrients (see ‘How it works’, page 20). The concept of constructed wetlands differs radically from that of any other wastewater treatment system; as a biological system, its efficiency relates directly to the health of its ecology and biodiversity. A CW is designed specifically to replicate the clean-up functions of a natural wetland by offering habitat to as many life forms as possible, whether micro-organisms, plants, invertebrates or vertebrates.
Gaining ground
Constructed wetlands now recycle wastewater all over the world, from Lakeland in Florida, USA (pop. 79,000) to Lallaing in northern France (pop. 15,000). The city of Auckland, New Zealand is partially served by a CW.
While temperate southern Africa has over 120 constructed wetlands, the concept is very new in tropical Africa, somewhat ironically, as the climate here is ideal for maximum biological activity nearly year-round. One Kenyan installation that came on-line in 1994 now handles up to 80,000 litres of wastewater daily (a residential person equivalent of 1,200) from the busy Carnivore Restaurant and Splash water park in Nairobi.
There are now at least seven fully-operational CWs in Kenya – two in Nairobi: the one just mentioned and another at the Karen Country Club. Two hotels have employed them: one treats sewage from Abercrombie and Kent’s Olonana luxury tourist camp in the Maasai Mara, another at the Amboseli Serena. Another CW installed by Eastern Produce Ltd at Nandi Hills handles tea factory and toilet effluent. In Naivasha, horticultural giant Homegrown Ltd. has installed both an agro-chemical buffer for the Lake and a CW that treats water from a commercial laundry operation and a horticultural pack-house.
All of these systems comply with responsible discharge criteria and, between them, return over 500,000 litres of clean water daily to various surface water systems, nearly 200 million litres per year. In some cases the discharge is actually cleaner than the receiving waters. If a significant percentage of major water users, particularly in industry, were to follow suit, we might not have a water crisis.
Three new CWs, one each at Timau, Nandi Hills and Kericho, should have come on-line by the time this issue of Ecoforum goes to press. Funding is being sought for another at the Kenya Wildlife Service headquarters in Langata, to discharge to one of the dams of the Nairobi National Park, and several more are at advanced discussion stage. Before long, I imagine that water discharged by some CWs may have to be recovered for general reuse. To ensure compliance with public health guidelines for drinking water, ultraviolet in-line treatment units could be installed between CW and storage tanks as a healthier alternative to chemical bombardment.
So far all CWs in Kenya have been implemented with private sector initiative and investment. Public sector officials and others from large organisations supposedly concerned with health and environment have seen CWs and many appear to be dumbfounded. That nature can effect better and cheaper water purification than concrete and machinery, while offering an attractive habitat for birds, wildlife and many small aquatic creatures whose natural habitats are under increasing threat seems, at least initially, to be beyond their willing acceptance.
Large scale horticultural producers and processors have already discovered (possibly to their initial surprise) that there are tangible financial benefits to be reaped from eco-friendly CWs. Environmental impact inspectors from their overseas client companies are enthralled by them. Approval thus earned reflects favourably in securing market share for their export produce, particularly during less buoyant trading times, and future budgets are being earmarked for further CWs on their farms and estates.
As with solar power, there is an initial capital outlay, but operational costs are modest; one or two staff, trained on the job, manage routine work successfully on all existing CWs (see ‘How Much?’ page 21). Casual help is sometimes enlisted to help with seasonal harvesting of abundant plants. In a community system, if properly controlled, sheep and goats could surely do much of the mowing!
As a community-based concept, CWs have almost limitless potential in Africa. A system could be hand-dug with pooled community labour, offering year-round growth potential for food crops in designated seepage zone areas. Napier grass as supplementary stock feed for dry weather would thrive, thatching and handcraft materials could be harvested sustainably, and aquaculture in the later, cleaner ponds of the system would provide a source of protein and income. Water of reliable quality would be available to all, perhaps under the control of a village committee.
A further aspect often overlooked is a CW’s educational potential – students at all academic levels tour them and are thrilled. Municipalities in other countries that have them report keen community pride in their CWs, many of which double as wildlife and bird sanctuaries. Some have become famous stopover points along major bird migration routes. They offer recreational possibilities as well as being extremely pretty; used in housing schemes, CWs could be incorporated into public spaces as hard-working ornamental components. With CWs, wastewater treatment can come out of hiding and be admired, a major shift from our normal out-of-sight-out-of-mind attitude.
We have here the option of a positive and eco-friendly way forward in dealing with East Africa’s current and future water crises. Those in the private sector who have pioneered the way are convinced, and repeat business is coming in from those who, in a manner of speaking, took the first plunge. Commercial companies may be more agile in their approach to problems than monolithic institutions where inertia and the status quo too often substitute for dynamic, informed decision-making, but they too would do well to follow, albeit at their more leisured pace, the private sector’s trailblazing.
Let the Naysayers Neigh
Naysayers and environmental illiterates will, alas, be with us always (I believe the Flat Earth Society still
exists?). There are those of a certain inflexible mentality, sometimes further handicapped by highly technical training, who refuse to believe that the CW concept can work. Whether this is due to intellectual rigidity, a genuine belief that nothing new can exist beyond the scope of their training, or a perceived threat to their percentages, we may never know.
I was extremely fortunate that a series of bright postgraduates, all working on their MSc theses, conducted their practical research programmes at the Splash CW during its first three successive years of operation – Kelvin Khisa (Moi University, School of Environmental Studies), Daniel Nzeng’ya (Moi U, SES) and Jane Nyakang’o (IHE, Delft, Netherlands). Their studies, as well as layman’s observations – show conclusively that a well-designed and managed CW can and does work superbly. I myself learned a great deal from our collaboration.
I have only two slight concerns about the successful future of CWs in eastern Africa: the quality of design and of management. Engineers can prove a hard nut to crack when it comes to understanding the ecological requirements of design; contours on plans indicating – as on any map – varying degrees of slope, have been executed as rigid benches. Verticals and horizontals are emphatically not required! But even with a good engineering design, the engineer’s part ends with completion of the works, when environmental management takes over. A CW is a two-part exercise.
One installed CW "designed" by someone who thought they knew it all does not and cannot work, since it fails to meet many of the ecological criteria. Base contours are lacking, while precipitous embankments preclude the establishment of any sort of ecology. Two civil engineers (both, let it be said, with a financial interest in having their proposals accepted), of one CW they saw advised that all plants should be removed from the GBH, and that SCs require ‘proper’ concrete slab edgings. A mule is unlikely to win the Derby, and unfortunate instances like this can do much to discredit the CW concept. CW design is not particularly difficult, but it does require reasonable appreciation of ecological requirements.
Management is less difficult and devolves around identifying the right person, with ecological sensitivities, to train on the job. Educational levels are not significant – of the two best hands-on CW managers I know in the country (so far!), one is a graduate of Egerton University, the other of Standard Four!
How it Works
With the exception of the riparian buffer scheme on a commercial farm in Naivasha, which cleanses horticultural runoff through some 2 kms of varied-depth, intensively planted lagoons and oxbow channels, CWs in Kenya consist of four basic design elements – a gravel-bed hydroponics (GBH) section followed by a series of three gravity-fed open ponds or ‘surface cells’ (SCs).
From the septic tank, which handles primary digestion of solids, sewage is piped into the GBH, which is simply a sunken, walled rectangular pond lined with gravel (see photo below). Dimensions of the GBH are determined by the daily volume of wastewater. Alternating baffle walls are built across it at regular intervals, to about two-thirds of its width, which force water into taking a serpentine flow-course through the GBH, maximising the flow-distance while eliminating stagnant areas.
An even layer of substrate (graded crushed ballast 60-80 cm deep, depending on the type of wastewater being treated) is spread throughout onto a well-compacted base, to about 15 cm below the top of the baffle walls. Influent water is distributed across the width of the first channel by a spreader pipe.
The substrate does not, as many people imagine, provide physical filtration of pollutants, but a home for bacteria. During the time a GBH takes to fill, the ubiquitous, mainly anaerobic bacteria that feed on and digest sewage begin to colonise all surfaces of the substrate.
As soon as the GBH is filled and discharging into the first surface cell, planting may begin. Only a fairly restricted range of species will tolerate the harsh conditions – reeds, bullrushes and sedges being the chief contenders. These are planted into the substrate with their roots in contact with the water just beneath, and may need initial support until firmly rooted. Once established, they remove some 10% of pollutants as nutrients, but their major contribution to the workings of the GBH is the unique adaptation evolved by emergent swamp plants, to oxygenate their own root systems – which is why they can grow standing in water, where terrestrial plants would drown. This creates habitats for aerobic bacteria within the lower levels of the substrate and enhances efficient breakdown within the GBH.
Discharge from the GBH enters a level control chamber that determines the top water level within the gravel bed, and from here it is piped or channelled by gravity to a collection chamber before entering the first surface cell. Water entering SC1 is, for the first time, exposed to sunlight and air. The rapid appearance of green algae, which cannot survive in heavily polluted water, bears witness to the efficiency of the GBH breakdowns. These microscopic plants, and the oxygen they produce freely during daylight hours, kick-start the further breakdown of both biological and chemical pollutants, while providing an important early link in the food chain.
Pollution removal processes occurring in a wetland are so many and varied that we may never understand them all, but thanks to copious research already undertaken, we do know the conditions that enable them to take place and are therefore able to design the SCs for maximum efficiency by contouring the bases. Because of this, a healthy, well-designed CW will always out-perform a natural wetland, using a smaller area.
Good SC design ensures that, by offering a wide range of habitats, both aerobic and anaerobic, biodiversity is encouraged. Water is made to take the longest possible path between influent and effluent, while shallows and deeps ensure thorough mixing and turning along the way. By replicating a full range of conditions found in a natural wetland, a CW aims to attract a similar diversity of life forms, and each has its role to play in the purification process.
So where do the pollutants go? Some, including heavy metals, are taken up as nutrients or adsorbed onto base sediments and submerged parts of plants. Progressively rising levels of dissolved oxygen facilitate further chemical and biological breakdowns and transformations. In the shallows, UV rays from sunlight kill pathogens and there is evidence to suggest that the roots and stems of many aquatic plants exude disinfectant substances. Another removal pathway relies on passing nutrients up the food chain until they leave the system as nutrients rather than pollutants: kingfishers, for example, eat fish that have eaten daphnia that have eaten green algae that has fed on nutrients in the water. These processes continue throughout the SCs, usually three in number.
A well-designed CW’s energy sources are gravity, sunlight and a diverse ecology. It has no need of machinery, chemicals, electricity, fossil fuels or a large technical workforce. It outperforms conventional systems and is, moreover, attractive, eco-friendly and educational. And no, it is not all done by smoke and mirrors, but rather by understanding nature’s aeons-old technology, and having the sense to turn it to our advantage.
How Much?
The first question most people ask on seeing a Constructed Wetland for the first time is, "How much does one cost?" To which the appropriate answer might be, "How long is a piece of string?" The cost of any CW is determined by one constant and a number of variables.
The Constant
This is relatively straightforward, determined by the volume of daily discharge from the septic tank preceding the first part of a CW system. In better-class housing with baths or showers and flushing toilets, daily usage of water per person is in the region of 90 litres. On this basis, for each person using the system, and depending on effluent quality, a total surface area of between 4.5 and 5.0 square metres should be allowed. The maximum occupancy figure is used in calculation. Many backyard gardens could accommodate small domestic CW systems. Each house in Camphill Village in Gloucestershire, UK, for example, has its own.
The volume of excavation may be calculated at 55% of the total surface area, so that the volume of soil to be excavated from 45 square metres would be 24.75 cubic metres.
The Variables
Septic tank: where no septic tank exists, one of appropriate size would have to be installed and, on commercial premises, grease traps on the kitchen wastewater line.
Method of excavation: earth moving machine time is expensive but, provided work can be supervised knowledgeably, smaller systems may be hand-dug at a considerable saving. Hand-dug open ponds for a CW commissioned in 1997 and dealing with 30,000 litres of wastewater throughput daily on an almost level site cost Kshs 220,000/- ($US 3,500 at 1997 rates). The same work if machine-dug could have been expected to cost nearly three times as much. The total cost of this particular installation, with the client using his own labour and resources to install the gravel bed and pipe connections, was probably in the region of Kshs 450,000 ($7,150).
Site characteristics, which include: a) Topography – the steeper the site, the more extensive the earthworks to create lower-side embankments and thus the higher the cost, and b) Geology – excavation into rock underlying shallow soils is expensive, and into rock alone, probably prohibitive.
Water storage: a final storage reservoir or pond may be required, at additional cost.
Provision of storm-water overflows: potential catchment for a system serving 1,000 people would be 30,000 litres during a 6mm storm, and 5.4 million litres in the course of an average rainfall year in the Nairobi area.
Plumbing: the length and type of plumbing connections required from the septic tank to the CW will affect the total cost. A pump, secure housing, electrical connections and additional plumbing will be needed if treated water is to be recovered. Since a CW is usually gravity-fed, final discharge will be at its lowest point.
Professional fees.
In contrast to the example given above, a larger installation in 1996 (50,000 litres per day) machine-dug on a medium-steep slope, and where both pumps and extensive pipework were needed to consolidate wastewater from two different sources in a collection chamber above the gravel bed, the overall cost was Kshs 3.6 million ($US 63,500 at 1996 rates).
Establishing a Wetland Ecology
The challenge facing the environmental manager of a new constructed wetland (CW) is to establish a healthy and diverse wetland ecology as swiftly as possible – a fascinating exercise and perpetual learning process. To begin at the beginning: while the bacteria that perform startling breakdowns within the first element, the gravel bed hydroponics section (GBH), are ubiquitous in sewage, it can take months for their populations to build up to appreciable levels in a new environment. The quality of processing will suffer meanwhile. If, however, a new GBH is ‘seeded’ a few days after filling commences, using water discharged by a mature GBH, the process is speeded enormously.
With early ‘seeding’, plantings of front-line pollution-tolerant GBH species such as Typha latifolia (bullrush), Phragmites australis and Cyperus spp. (sedge grasses) will establish fairly soon once final top water level (TWL) is reached. This may otherwise take several months, since early conditions may be too harsh even for these hardy plants.
Once TWL is reached in the first open pond, or surface cell (SC1), planting there can begin. Vegetation forms the baseline of the ecology; besides taking up pollutants as nutrients, it offers habitat and shelter to many life forms of all sizes. Emergent plant species help to oxygenate the water, as do the microscopic plants that constitute green algae. Since oxygen brings life, terrestrial runner grasses, which deoxygenate the water, should not be allowed to invade it. The rather tedious task of removal is much reduced once riparian plantings that tend to keep it back have become properly established.
Tall clumping plants such as Phragmites or the very pretty Arundo donax variegata need generous spacings between them, to allow establishment of a diversity of smaller plants between, and since a well-planted and managed CW is extremely pleasing to the eye, to leave viewpoints open. Virtually any plants that are found in sunny damp or seasonally waterlogged situations are useful in a CW context – plantains, the bushy polygonums, smaller reeds, rushes and sedges, arum lilies and even cannas if one would like the odd splash of colour. Sourcing a range of them in the first instance may involve some local travel, armed with plastic bags, buckets and jembes (hoes). Most of these plants, once established by the water’s edge, will extend into the shallows and outwards within the boundaries of the seepage zone.
The free-floating water lettuce, Pistia stratiotes, is very useful but prefers the cleaner end of the system. Unlike the other ‘floaters’ – Eichornia crassipes, the infamous water hyacinth, and Salvinia molesta - it is not classed as a noxious aquatic weed, although it increases rapidly during rains, when harvesting becomes necessary (no more than a quarter of the free water surface should be covered). The wading birds love it. It may also be used as supplementary livestock feed or good green manure and makes excellent compost.
Birds are attracted to a new CW from an early stage. Water birds introduce a suprising range of small organisms via feet, feathers or gut, while the seed-eaters will contribute seed of many new plant species – if you can persuade them to linger. The intelligent manager will encourage this by providing assorted perches with rock or log groupings near the water and, most effectively, a few dead trees or large twiggy branches stuck into the ground at intervals (see photo page 17). Nature requires only a little encouragement to work on your behalf! Bird diversity, of course, increases with more interesting habitats and nesting sites as vegetation matures. 153 bird species have so far been recorded in and around the Splash CW in Nairobi.
As soon as water in SC2 reaches discharge level, planting may begin there and, similarly, in SC3 once that has filled. Should any desirable plant refuse to grow at SC1, it is always worth trying it again further along the system where conditions are better.
When selecting trees for planting, indigenous species, having an established niche in the ecology, are always preferable to exotics. Except in very large CWs, avoid the water-greedy and invasive-rooted Ficus (fig) family. Do not plant trees on embankments where their roots might cause weaknesses or even leaks, and keep any trees with heavy leaf-fall to the downwind sides of SCs.
Frogs have an astonishing ability to locate new water, and are the first aquatic vertebrates to arrive. Any early tendency to overbreed will be checked in due course by the arrival of hammerkops, herons, green water snakes (non-poisonous!) or even marsh terrapins.
Once shorelines are fully vegetated, fish may be introduced. I prefer to use omnivorous species since they will not impact too heavily on any one aspect of the ecology, and have found a good mix to be guppies (Poecilia reticulata) as a small fish and Nile tilapia (Oreochromis niloticus) as a larger one. These are by no means the only options. Introduce fish halfway along SCs 2 and 3. SC1 is usually still too polluted to ensure their survival.
While those of a more "bunny-hugging" bent may dislike the idea of multiple murders taking place at all levels within the food chain, it is these that stabilise an ecosystem, whose dynamic balance depends on a food supply for each species. In nature everything eats something else. Within the pyramid of life (many smaller creatures at the base, giving way to fewer, larger species towards the apex) predators occur higher than their prey, take longer to reproduce and are generally less pollution-tolerant.
Problems stemming from imbalances arise when conditions for predators are impossible and prey flourish unchecked. The unmanaged discharge of polluted water, for example, makes mosquitoes very happy. Their larvae are not dependent on water quality for survival, and polluted surroundings ensure the absence of the robber flies, frogs, many carnivorous aquatic invertebrates, birds and most certainly fish that would otherwise control them.
In a healthy ecosystem predators control the pests. This explains the importance of biodiversity – that several controls and workers for each problem or process are present. A number of organisms all working on one particular process make for speed and efficiency. If any mishap should befall one, plenty of back-up remains and the system continues to work. In a weakened or damaged ecology such safeguards may be scant – or entirely lacking.
The environmental manager’s job is not to interfere but to encourage, as well as to note all new arrivals, the gaps they fill and interactions between them and the existing life forms. Each, as a brick in the strong wall of a healthy ecology, has a function within the system, or it would not be present (remember the maxim that in nature everything is connected to everything else?). Given favourable nudging, the ecology will establish a healthy balance; ignorant interference is unhelpful.
A surprising degree of biological maturity may, with good and sympathetic management, be achieved within a year. Aquatic Ecology professors and lecturers from several overseas universities state that significant biological maturity in a new CW takes 3-5 years. In Kenya, aided by sound management and tropical conditions, we have proved otherwise!
While our climate is certainly a help, I know of one installation here done to plans bought from overseas, which has developed no significant ecology in five years. The engineer, seeing it as a purely engineering exercise, simply walked away – imagining no doubt that all else would occur spontaneously. It probably will, given time.
An early maturing ecology is encouraged, as in any pioneer situation, by soil improvement, establishing vegetation and managing it. In the first instance this requires mulching all exposed soil and making new plantings with compost, to speed a baseline for the ecology. On slopes, mulch may be secured by making light brushwood ‘fences’ (10 cm high is sufficient) at intervals along contours, and securing these with wooden pegs. They prevent erosion of newly disturbed soil and will trap any loose seed, also offering protection and a little shade to seedlings as they germinate. Undesirable weeds such as datura or Mexican marigold should be uprooted before they can set seed, and left to lie as additions to the mulch. Ripe seeds of any desirable plants may be scattered to await germination with rain.
The primary object is to cover the ground with vegetation, and in this context two useful plant species are the vigorous succulent Aptenia cordifolia and the sweet potato (Ipomea batatas). Both will be crowded out in due course by taller vegetation, but in the interim help to modify conditions.
Ongoing management of the vegetation is the single most important maintenance task and does not require a degree in rocket science. Dying vegetation repollutes the water, while harvesting of plants that have passed their best leads to fresh growth and increased nutrient uptake. Establish and manage the vegetation right, and all else will follow.
‘Biological indicators’ are a vital monitoring tool. The presence of fish fry shows that adults are happy enough to breed, for example, while the absence of kingfishers from a surface cell they used to frequent may indicate a problem with the fish. If a water sample shows no significant change, the answer may lie in over-predation; pieces of piping, some roof ridge tiles or a few small wire mesh cylinders placed in the shallows will provide refuges for the fish.
Various ‘biotic indices’ exist – lists of aquatic invertebrates, classified from 1 –10 depending on their sensitivity to pollution, with 10 being the most sensitive. Knowing the scores of even a few offers valuable information on the health of any given body of water. Most water bugs and beetles are rated at 5, while dragonflies, depending on species, rate 6-8. The presence of these in and around an SC shows that you are at least halfway there in terms of water purification.
As diversity builds up and biological maturity approaches, improvement in a CW’s performance is mirrored by a change in samples taken in clear bottles from various points along the system. The more variation in colour, the less stable the ecology; as the various pinks and greens of early days gradually give way to clearer water, the environmental manager knows that this is the indication of a good job, well executed.
"I have become very attached to the CW at Chemomi. Every lunch hour I rest in that park and appreciate it. It provides a very conducive environment for relaxation, and is really great – unlike the sewage areas of other institutions.
"The CW has provided two great benefits, one in cleaning the waste discharge from the [tea] factory, and two in providing an ecofriendly area which has turned into a park. The few people who have realised the importance of conserving and protecting the environment like this need to be encouraged and indeed emulated. I have become interested in learning more about environmental issues with a view to putting them to practical use in my village at home…"
Simion K. Koech, Accountant, Eastern Produce (K) Ltd, Nandi Hills
"In Kenya, the focus on water management has been almost entirely directed towards the supply cycle, with relatively little attention paid to disposal. The introduction of the Environmental Management and Co-ordination Act, 1999, will require all operators of trade and industrial undertakings to apply for an effluent discharge license and, if granted, ensure that they comply with the standards imposed. In our experience, constructed wetlands have proved to be an extremely effective and low-cost means of treating a wide range of effluents.
"Their informality in terms of plan layout renders them particularly suitable for location in areas unsuitable for either growing or building. They have transformed these areas into oases of vegetation, aquatic and bird life. The presence of these natural flora and fauna in the mature areas of the wetlands, both in and along the margins of the ponds we have constructed, are a striking demonstration of the natural processes at work. The quality of effluent achievable offers very real opportunities for recycling."
- Richard Fox, Services Director, Homegrown
(K) Ltd, Naivasha, and Civil Engineer
"Our recent visit [to the Splash wetland] was an eye opener in many respects. I have visited many wastewater treatment plants, but the constructed wetland seems unique in that the water is biologically purified without need of expensive machinery, electricity or fossil fuels. It works so well that some fauna from the adjacent Nairobi National Park find this a better place and defect to the wetlands! The birdlife is impressive. There seems to be an ecobalance between the various organisms found there. It is a valuable learning resource; the Hotel Management students that I brought along were very impressed, as evidenced in their vote of thanks."
- John K.M. Wandaka, Lecturer in Environmental Studies, Tourism Dept, Utalii College
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Dee Raymer began writing seriously in 1996 when, as a landscaper, she was commissioned to write the first eco-friendly gardening book for Eastern Africa. Down to Earth, an all-colour hardback, was published to acclaim in 1998. She was approached to address broader environmental issues in articles appearing in Ecoforum, Executive and Swara magazines and The East African newspaper.
Her interest in, and involvement with, the environment had grown from working for conservationist clients in Kenya's arid north. There she developed a deep respect for the observed integrity and resilience of unspoilt drylands ecologies. A residential course in sustainable land-use and management at Fambidzanai Training Centre, Zimbabwe, consolidated her field observations of cause and effect, and of the successional cycles occurring within all healthy ecosystems.
These understandings were invaluable when pioneering the use in Kenya of Constructed Wetlands (CWs) for wastewater purification. The first was installed in 1994 for a client with a major sewage problem, and is now one of eleven in operation. Discharges, purified to compliance standards, return to surface water systems for safe use by others.
Her dream? The widespread adoption of CWs in tropical Africa as the technology of choice in curbing environmental pollution, improving public health, creating new wetland ecosystems and addressing the vast problems caused by unclean and over-subscribed fresh water sources. She has progressed from landscaper to committed eco-bore, and intends to remain thoroughly "infectious."
Past awards:
By Dee Raymer, The Reuters - IUCN Environmental Media Awards 2001
Winner - English-speaking Africa.
In Kenya, the hopelessly overoptimistic slogan "Clean water for all by the year 2000" vanished quietly into the bad joke cupboard sometime during the mid 1990s. Combined estimates from the Ministry of Water and Natural Resources and UNICEF indicate that 52% of our rural population now has no access to safe or adequate water. This national average belies the grimmer picture in certain areas – in North Eastern Province only 17% have safe water, in Makueni 16% and in Migori and West Pokot, a mere 6%.
During the past year, the majority of Kenyans would have been grateful for any water during the many prolonged periods when taps, wells, boreholes and rivers ran dry. Better-informed Kenyans also know that, thanks to a deadly combination of environmental abuse and a thirty-fold population increase since 1900, Kenya has few options for reliable sources of clean water supply in the future. Galloping deforestation (as ever in the run-up to an election) is reducing yields of hitherto reliable resources, and it is said that water from the huge Tana/Galana/Sabaki lifeline river network is no longer fit to drink, untreated, along its entire course.
In real terms, increasingly unsafe and scarce water supplies, combined with our often criminally irresponsible disposal of wastewater, translate into human tragedies. Witness the recent typhoid and malaria outbreaks in Embu district, with critically ill and dying patients, four to a bed or on floors in undermanned, under-equipped hospitals. The Daily Nation of March 5th reported 30-35 hospital admissions daily. More than 700 people with typhoid, malaria, or both, had been admitted up to that point; 90 had died.
Be assured that this outbreak will not be the last of its kind. Even groundwater, assumed by many to be ‘safe’, is becoming dangerous. E. coli counts in analyses done by the Kenya Industrial and Research Development Institute last year of water from rural springs ranged from 35 to 1,800 per 100 ml. The World Health Organisation’s criterion for potability is zero; a count of 1,800 fails to meet its safe standard for any form of irrigation.
As we continue to pollute our dwindling fresh water resources and the environment with our filthy discharges, some urban and peri-urban boreholes have begun yielding water with E.coli counts similar to those in raw sewage from public toilets: it may look rather better, but drinking it untreated will soon see you in the doctor’s waiting room.
In Nairobi’s Eastlands slums, it is not uncommon to see residents drawing water from the Nairobi River and its tributary, the Gitathuru – scarcely better than open sewers nowadays. Flourishing market gardens are watered directly from these rivers, as well as from sewer mains that are sometimes deliberately fractured for the ‘regulated organic nutrients’ (the current politically-correct term, I believe, for human shit), within. Can any Nairobian guarantee that they have never eaten any of that very healthy looking produce?
The situation is very simple, and it is dire: if we don’t clean up our wastewater for safe reuse, we shall simply run out of water altogether.
From toilet to tap, and back again
Most western cities recycle their wastewater, its revolting taste a testimony to the amount of chemical treatment involved. Whether or not we subscribe to the health lobby’s view that the principal chemicals used – alum and chlorine – are thoroughly detrimental to our long-term health, our collective immune systems are unquestionably under siege from modern technology’s liberal chemical contributions to what we eat, drink and breathe.
The viewpoint slowly being forced upon realists was voiced recently by a senior Kenya Wildlife Service officer, describing his revulsion and disbelief on discovering 15 years ago that water from urban toilets, after treatment, eventually comes back out of urban taps. "The whole concept," he said, "was totally unacceptable to me then – but we had not yet approached our present crisis point. Now I see all too clearly that one-time water use is impossible if we hope to have access to any water at all."
So what are the treatment options?
Conventional wastewater treatment relies on machinery and chemicals - long detention in unattractive and expensive concrete ponds, then stirring and aeration using machinery powered by electricity or fossil fuels, followed by chemical treatment to ensure compliance with public health criteria before reuse.
After installation, however, a number of factors conspire to thwart the works. High operational costs, mechanical breakdowns, the frequent unavailability of spare parts (or the budget to buy them), power cuts, the human error factor and the need for large technical workforces bode ill for reliable and sustainable operation of such systems in developing countries. History shows all too clearly that such high-tech and inappropriate solutions to wastewater management and treatment tend to hiccough erratically from aid package to aid package, punctuated by long periods of breakdown.
On March 10th, several weeks after the start of Embu’s typhoid outbreak, the Daily Nation reported municipal councillors admitting that raw sewage has been allowed to "flow untreated into rivers for a long time." The same admission was made last year in Kisumu (only this time the economically vital Lake Victoria served as receptacle for the discharge), and probably could and should just as easily be made in other towns all across the country.
There are alternatives, however. Millions of years before we came along with our technological obsessions, nature had already developed an elegant means of water purification. She evolved the wetland, whose complex ecology cleans up dirty water using efficient biological processes. It has taken us a long time to appreciate that neither concrete, machinery nor rigid drawing-office shapes need to be involved.
The first generation of wetlands used in dealing with wastewater were natural swamps that simply provided handy dumping grounds for sewage. While the practice is now banned in most countries due to its extremely negative effects on existing wetland ecologies, marked improvements noted in water quality as it progressed through the wetlands began to interest researchers.
At the Max Planck Institute in Germany during the late 1950s, Dr Kathe Siedl began investigating the workings of submerged gravel beds that proved remarkably effective in breaking down heavy biological loadings in polluted water. The gravel bed hydroponics (GBH) system, planted with pollution-tolerant aquatic plants, has become the first element in many designs for constructed wetlands.
Whereas the discharge of wastewater into natural wetlands causes serious ecological disruption, constructed wetlands (CWs) are a different matter, being purpose-designed for each situation and installed where no wetland existed previously. There is no ecology in a new CW so, as conditions modify and life forms arrive (my goodness, how they do!) each can choose the part of the system it prefers – more tolerant organisms at the start where polluted water enters the system, and less tolerant ones further along as the natural purification process progresses.
CWs come in all sizes, from domestic to municipal scale, and there are numerous design options, but all CWs operate on the same principles of natural water purification. Water passes through a succession of connected ponds, and along the way microbes, plants and other life forms use our pollutants as nutrients (see ‘How it works’, page 20). The concept of constructed wetlands differs radically from that of any other wastewater treatment system; as a biological system, its efficiency relates directly to the health of its ecology and biodiversity. A CW is designed specifically to replicate the clean-up functions of a natural wetland by offering habitat to as many life forms as possible, whether micro-organisms, plants, invertebrates or vertebrates.
Gaining ground
Constructed wetlands now recycle wastewater all over the world, from Lakeland in Florida, USA (pop. 79,000) to Lallaing in northern France (pop. 15,000). The city of Auckland, New Zealand is partially served by a CW.
While temperate southern Africa has over 120 constructed wetlands, the concept is very new in tropical Africa, somewhat ironically, as the climate here is ideal for maximum biological activity nearly year-round. One Kenyan installation that came on-line in 1994 now handles up to 80,000 litres of wastewater daily (a residential person equivalent of 1,200) from the busy Carnivore Restaurant and Splash water park in Nairobi.
There are now at least seven fully-operational CWs in Kenya – two in Nairobi: the one just mentioned and another at the Karen Country Club. Two hotels have employed them: one treats sewage from Abercrombie and Kent’s Olonana luxury tourist camp in the Maasai Mara, another at the Amboseli Serena. Another CW installed by Eastern Produce Ltd at Nandi Hills handles tea factory and toilet effluent. In Naivasha, horticultural giant Homegrown Ltd. has installed both an agro-chemical buffer for the Lake and a CW that treats water from a commercial laundry operation and a horticultural pack-house.
All of these systems comply with responsible discharge criteria and, between them, return over 500,000 litres of clean water daily to various surface water systems, nearly 200 million litres per year. In some cases the discharge is actually cleaner than the receiving waters. If a significant percentage of major water users, particularly in industry, were to follow suit, we might not have a water crisis.
Three new CWs, one each at Timau, Nandi Hills and Kericho, should have come on-line by the time this issue of Ecoforum goes to press. Funding is being sought for another at the Kenya Wildlife Service headquarters in Langata, to discharge to one of the dams of the Nairobi National Park, and several more are at advanced discussion stage. Before long, I imagine that water discharged by some CWs may have to be recovered for general reuse. To ensure compliance with public health guidelines for drinking water, ultraviolet in-line treatment units could be installed between CW and storage tanks as a healthier alternative to chemical bombardment.
So far all CWs in Kenya have been implemented with private sector initiative and investment. Public sector officials and others from large organisations supposedly concerned with health and environment have seen CWs and many appear to be dumbfounded. That nature can effect better and cheaper water purification than concrete and machinery, while offering an attractive habitat for birds, wildlife and many small aquatic creatures whose natural habitats are under increasing threat seems, at least initially, to be beyond their willing acceptance.
Large scale horticultural producers and processors have already discovered (possibly to their initial surprise) that there are tangible financial benefits to be reaped from eco-friendly CWs. Environmental impact inspectors from their overseas client companies are enthralled by them. Approval thus earned reflects favourably in securing market share for their export produce, particularly during less buoyant trading times, and future budgets are being earmarked for further CWs on their farms and estates.
As with solar power, there is an initial capital outlay, but operational costs are modest; one or two staff, trained on the job, manage routine work successfully on all existing CWs (see ‘How Much?’ page 21). Casual help is sometimes enlisted to help with seasonal harvesting of abundant plants. In a community system, if properly controlled, sheep and goats could surely do much of the mowing!
As a community-based concept, CWs have almost limitless potential in Africa. A system could be hand-dug with pooled community labour, offering year-round growth potential for food crops in designated seepage zone areas. Napier grass as supplementary stock feed for dry weather would thrive, thatching and handcraft materials could be harvested sustainably, and aquaculture in the later, cleaner ponds of the system would provide a source of protein and income. Water of reliable quality would be available to all, perhaps under the control of a village committee.
A further aspect often overlooked is a CW’s educational potential – students at all academic levels tour them and are thrilled. Municipalities in other countries that have them report keen community pride in their CWs, many of which double as wildlife and bird sanctuaries. Some have become famous stopover points along major bird migration routes. They offer recreational possibilities as well as being extremely pretty; used in housing schemes, CWs could be incorporated into public spaces as hard-working ornamental components. With CWs, wastewater treatment can come out of hiding and be admired, a major shift from our normal out-of-sight-out-of-mind attitude.
We have here the option of a positive and eco-friendly way forward in dealing with East Africa’s current and future water crises. Those in the private sector who have pioneered the way are convinced, and repeat business is coming in from those who, in a manner of speaking, took the first plunge. Commercial companies may be more agile in their approach to problems than monolithic institutions where inertia and the status quo too often substitute for dynamic, informed decision-making, but they too would do well to follow, albeit at their more leisured pace, the private sector’s trailblazing.
Let the Naysayers Neigh
Naysayers and environmental illiterates will, alas, be with us always (I believe the Flat Earth Society still
exists?). There are those of a certain inflexible mentality, sometimes further handicapped by highly technical training, who refuse to believe that the CW concept can work. Whether this is due to intellectual rigidity, a genuine belief that nothing new can exist beyond the scope of their training, or a perceived threat to their percentages, we may never know.
I was extremely fortunate that a series of bright postgraduates, all working on their MSc theses, conducted their practical research programmes at the Splash CW during its first three successive years of operation – Kelvin Khisa (Moi University, School of Environmental Studies), Daniel Nzeng’ya (Moi U, SES) and Jane Nyakang’o (IHE, Delft, Netherlands). Their studies, as well as layman’s observations – show conclusively that a well-designed and managed CW can and does work superbly. I myself learned a great deal from our collaboration.
I have only two slight concerns about the successful future of CWs in eastern Africa: the quality of design and of management. Engineers can prove a hard nut to crack when it comes to understanding the ecological requirements of design; contours on plans indicating – as on any map – varying degrees of slope, have been executed as rigid benches. Verticals and horizontals are emphatically not required! But even with a good engineering design, the engineer’s part ends with completion of the works, when environmental management takes over. A CW is a two-part exercise.
One installed CW "designed" by someone who thought they knew it all does not and cannot work, since it fails to meet many of the ecological criteria. Base contours are lacking, while precipitous embankments preclude the establishment of any sort of ecology. Two civil engineers (both, let it be said, with a financial interest in having their proposals accepted), of one CW they saw advised that all plants should be removed from the GBH, and that SCs require ‘proper’ concrete slab edgings. A mule is unlikely to win the Derby, and unfortunate instances like this can do much to discredit the CW concept. CW design is not particularly difficult, but it does require reasonable appreciation of ecological requirements.
Management is less difficult and devolves around identifying the right person, with ecological sensitivities, to train on the job. Educational levels are not significant – of the two best hands-on CW managers I know in the country (so far!), one is a graduate of Egerton University, the other of Standard Four!
How it Works
With the exception of the riparian buffer scheme on a commercial farm in Naivasha, which cleanses horticultural runoff through some 2 kms of varied-depth, intensively planted lagoons and oxbow channels, CWs in Kenya consist of four basic design elements – a gravel-bed hydroponics (GBH) section followed by a series of three gravity-fed open ponds or ‘surface cells’ (SCs).
From the septic tank, which handles primary digestion of solids, sewage is piped into the GBH, which is simply a sunken, walled rectangular pond lined with gravel (see photo below). Dimensions of the GBH are determined by the daily volume of wastewater. Alternating baffle walls are built across it at regular intervals, to about two-thirds of its width, which force water into taking a serpentine flow-course through the GBH, maximising the flow-distance while eliminating stagnant areas.
An even layer of substrate (graded crushed ballast 60-80 cm deep, depending on the type of wastewater being treated) is spread throughout onto a well-compacted base, to about 15 cm below the top of the baffle walls. Influent water is distributed across the width of the first channel by a spreader pipe.
The substrate does not, as many people imagine, provide physical filtration of pollutants, but a home for bacteria. During the time a GBH takes to fill, the ubiquitous, mainly anaerobic bacteria that feed on and digest sewage begin to colonise all surfaces of the substrate.
As soon as the GBH is filled and discharging into the first surface cell, planting may begin. Only a fairly restricted range of species will tolerate the harsh conditions – reeds, bullrushes and sedges being the chief contenders. These are planted into the substrate with their roots in contact with the water just beneath, and may need initial support until firmly rooted. Once established, they remove some 10% of pollutants as nutrients, but their major contribution to the workings of the GBH is the unique adaptation evolved by emergent swamp plants, to oxygenate their own root systems – which is why they can grow standing in water, where terrestrial plants would drown. This creates habitats for aerobic bacteria within the lower levels of the substrate and enhances efficient breakdown within the GBH.
Discharge from the GBH enters a level control chamber that determines the top water level within the gravel bed, and from here it is piped or channelled by gravity to a collection chamber before entering the first surface cell. Water entering SC1 is, for the first time, exposed to sunlight and air. The rapid appearance of green algae, which cannot survive in heavily polluted water, bears witness to the efficiency of the GBH breakdowns. These microscopic plants, and the oxygen they produce freely during daylight hours, kick-start the further breakdown of both biological and chemical pollutants, while providing an important early link in the food chain.
Pollution removal processes occurring in a wetland are so many and varied that we may never understand them all, but thanks to copious research already undertaken, we do know the conditions that enable them to take place and are therefore able to design the SCs for maximum efficiency by contouring the bases. Because of this, a healthy, well-designed CW will always out-perform a natural wetland, using a smaller area.
Good SC design ensures that, by offering a wide range of habitats, both aerobic and anaerobic, biodiversity is encouraged. Water is made to take the longest possible path between influent and effluent, while shallows and deeps ensure thorough mixing and turning along the way. By replicating a full range of conditions found in a natural wetland, a CW aims to attract a similar diversity of life forms, and each has its role to play in the purification process.
So where do the pollutants go? Some, including heavy metals, are taken up as nutrients or adsorbed onto base sediments and submerged parts of plants. Progressively rising levels of dissolved oxygen facilitate further chemical and biological breakdowns and transformations. In the shallows, UV rays from sunlight kill pathogens and there is evidence to suggest that the roots and stems of many aquatic plants exude disinfectant substances. Another removal pathway relies on passing nutrients up the food chain until they leave the system as nutrients rather than pollutants: kingfishers, for example, eat fish that have eaten daphnia that have eaten green algae that has fed on nutrients in the water. These processes continue throughout the SCs, usually three in number.
A well-designed CW’s energy sources are gravity, sunlight and a diverse ecology. It has no need of machinery, chemicals, electricity, fossil fuels or a large technical workforce. It outperforms conventional systems and is, moreover, attractive, eco-friendly and educational. And no, it is not all done by smoke and mirrors, but rather by understanding nature’s aeons-old technology, and having the sense to turn it to our advantage.
How Much?
The first question most people ask on seeing a Constructed Wetland for the first time is, "How much does one cost?" To which the appropriate answer might be, "How long is a piece of string?" The cost of any CW is determined by one constant and a number of variables.
The Constant
This is relatively straightforward, determined by the volume of daily discharge from the septic tank preceding the first part of a CW system. In better-class housing with baths or showers and flushing toilets, daily usage of water per person is in the region of 90 litres. On this basis, for each person using the system, and depending on effluent quality, a total surface area of between 4.5 and 5.0 square metres should be allowed. The maximum occupancy figure is used in calculation. Many backyard gardens could accommodate small domestic CW systems. Each house in Camphill Village in Gloucestershire, UK, for example, has its own.
The volume of excavation may be calculated at 55% of the total surface area, so that the volume of soil to be excavated from 45 square metres would be 24.75 cubic metres.
The Variables
Septic tank: where no septic tank exists, one of appropriate size would have to be installed and, on commercial premises, grease traps on the kitchen wastewater line.
Method of excavation: earth moving machine time is expensive but, provided work can be supervised knowledgeably, smaller systems may be hand-dug at a considerable saving. Hand-dug open ponds for a CW commissioned in 1997 and dealing with 30,000 litres of wastewater throughput daily on an almost level site cost Kshs 220,000/- ($US 3,500 at 1997 rates). The same work if machine-dug could have been expected to cost nearly three times as much. The total cost of this particular installation, with the client using his own labour and resources to install the gravel bed and pipe connections, was probably in the region of Kshs 450,000 ($7,150).
Site characteristics, which include: a) Topography – the steeper the site, the more extensive the earthworks to create lower-side embankments and thus the higher the cost, and b) Geology – excavation into rock underlying shallow soils is expensive, and into rock alone, probably prohibitive.
Water storage: a final storage reservoir or pond may be required, at additional cost.
Provision of storm-water overflows: potential catchment for a system serving 1,000 people would be 30,000 litres during a 6mm storm, and 5.4 million litres in the course of an average rainfall year in the Nairobi area.
Plumbing: the length and type of plumbing connections required from the septic tank to the CW will affect the total cost. A pump, secure housing, electrical connections and additional plumbing will be needed if treated water is to be recovered. Since a CW is usually gravity-fed, final discharge will be at its lowest point.
Professional fees.
In contrast to the example given above, a larger installation in 1996 (50,000 litres per day) machine-dug on a medium-steep slope, and where both pumps and extensive pipework were needed to consolidate wastewater from two different sources in a collection chamber above the gravel bed, the overall cost was Kshs 3.6 million ($US 63,500 at 1996 rates).
Establishing a Wetland Ecology
The challenge facing the environmental manager of a new constructed wetland (CW) is to establish a healthy and diverse wetland ecology as swiftly as possible – a fascinating exercise and perpetual learning process. To begin at the beginning: while the bacteria that perform startling breakdowns within the first element, the gravel bed hydroponics section (GBH), are ubiquitous in sewage, it can take months for their populations to build up to appreciable levels in a new environment. The quality of processing will suffer meanwhile. If, however, a new GBH is ‘seeded’ a few days after filling commences, using water discharged by a mature GBH, the process is speeded enormously.
With early ‘seeding’, plantings of front-line pollution-tolerant GBH species such as Typha latifolia (bullrush), Phragmites australis and Cyperus spp. (sedge grasses) will establish fairly soon once final top water level (TWL) is reached. This may otherwise take several months, since early conditions may be too harsh even for these hardy plants.
Once TWL is reached in the first open pond, or surface cell (SC1), planting there can begin. Vegetation forms the baseline of the ecology; besides taking up pollutants as nutrients, it offers habitat and shelter to many life forms of all sizes. Emergent plant species help to oxygenate the water, as do the microscopic plants that constitute green algae. Since oxygen brings life, terrestrial runner grasses, which deoxygenate the water, should not be allowed to invade it. The rather tedious task of removal is much reduced once riparian plantings that tend to keep it back have become properly established.
Tall clumping plants such as Phragmites or the very pretty Arundo donax variegata need generous spacings between them, to allow establishment of a diversity of smaller plants between, and since a well-planted and managed CW is extremely pleasing to the eye, to leave viewpoints open. Virtually any plants that are found in sunny damp or seasonally waterlogged situations are useful in a CW context – plantains, the bushy polygonums, smaller reeds, rushes and sedges, arum lilies and even cannas if one would like the odd splash of colour. Sourcing a range of them in the first instance may involve some local travel, armed with plastic bags, buckets and jembes (hoes). Most of these plants, once established by the water’s edge, will extend into the shallows and outwards within the boundaries of the seepage zone.
The free-floating water lettuce, Pistia stratiotes, is very useful but prefers the cleaner end of the system. Unlike the other ‘floaters’ – Eichornia crassipes, the infamous water hyacinth, and Salvinia molesta - it is not classed as a noxious aquatic weed, although it increases rapidly during rains, when harvesting becomes necessary (no more than a quarter of the free water surface should be covered). The wading birds love it. It may also be used as supplementary livestock feed or good green manure and makes excellent compost.
Birds are attracted to a new CW from an early stage. Water birds introduce a suprising range of small organisms via feet, feathers or gut, while the seed-eaters will contribute seed of many new plant species – if you can persuade them to linger. The intelligent manager will encourage this by providing assorted perches with rock or log groupings near the water and, most effectively, a few dead trees or large twiggy branches stuck into the ground at intervals (see photo page 17). Nature requires only a little encouragement to work on your behalf! Bird diversity, of course, increases with more interesting habitats and nesting sites as vegetation matures. 153 bird species have so far been recorded in and around the Splash CW in Nairobi.
As soon as water in SC2 reaches discharge level, planting may begin there and, similarly, in SC3 once that has filled. Should any desirable plant refuse to grow at SC1, it is always worth trying it again further along the system where conditions are better.
When selecting trees for planting, indigenous species, having an established niche in the ecology, are always preferable to exotics. Except in very large CWs, avoid the water-greedy and invasive-rooted Ficus (fig) family. Do not plant trees on embankments where their roots might cause weaknesses or even leaks, and keep any trees with heavy leaf-fall to the downwind sides of SCs.
Frogs have an astonishing ability to locate new water, and are the first aquatic vertebrates to arrive. Any early tendency to overbreed will be checked in due course by the arrival of hammerkops, herons, green water snakes (non-poisonous!) or even marsh terrapins.
Once shorelines are fully vegetated, fish may be introduced. I prefer to use omnivorous species since they will not impact too heavily on any one aspect of the ecology, and have found a good mix to be guppies (Poecilia reticulata) as a small fish and Nile tilapia (Oreochromis niloticus) as a larger one. These are by no means the only options. Introduce fish halfway along SCs 2 and 3. SC1 is usually still too polluted to ensure their survival.
While those of a more "bunny-hugging" bent may dislike the idea of multiple murders taking place at all levels within the food chain, it is these that stabilise an ecosystem, whose dynamic balance depends on a food supply for each species. In nature everything eats something else. Within the pyramid of life (many smaller creatures at the base, giving way to fewer, larger species towards the apex) predators occur higher than their prey, take longer to reproduce and are generally less pollution-tolerant.
Problems stemming from imbalances arise when conditions for predators are impossible and prey flourish unchecked. The unmanaged discharge of polluted water, for example, makes mosquitoes very happy. Their larvae are not dependent on water quality for survival, and polluted surroundings ensure the absence of the robber flies, frogs, many carnivorous aquatic invertebrates, birds and most certainly fish that would otherwise control them.
In a healthy ecosystem predators control the pests. This explains the importance of biodiversity – that several controls and workers for each problem or process are present. A number of organisms all working on one particular process make for speed and efficiency. If any mishap should befall one, plenty of back-up remains and the system continues to work. In a weakened or damaged ecology such safeguards may be scant – or entirely lacking.
The environmental manager’s job is not to interfere but to encourage, as well as to note all new arrivals, the gaps they fill and interactions between them and the existing life forms. Each, as a brick in the strong wall of a healthy ecology, has a function within the system, or it would not be present (remember the maxim that in nature everything is connected to everything else?). Given favourable nudging, the ecology will establish a healthy balance; ignorant interference is unhelpful.
A surprising degree of biological maturity may, with good and sympathetic management, be achieved within a year. Aquatic Ecology professors and lecturers from several overseas universities state that significant biological maturity in a new CW takes 3-5 years. In Kenya, aided by sound management and tropical conditions, we have proved otherwise!
While our climate is certainly a help, I know of one installation here done to plans bought from overseas, which has developed no significant ecology in five years. The engineer, seeing it as a purely engineering exercise, simply walked away – imagining no doubt that all else would occur spontaneously. It probably will, given time.
An early maturing ecology is encouraged, as in any pioneer situation, by soil improvement, establishing vegetation and managing it. In the first instance this requires mulching all exposed soil and making new plantings with compost, to speed a baseline for the ecology. On slopes, mulch may be secured by making light brushwood ‘fences’ (10 cm high is sufficient) at intervals along contours, and securing these with wooden pegs. They prevent erosion of newly disturbed soil and will trap any loose seed, also offering protection and a little shade to seedlings as they germinate. Undesirable weeds such as datura or Mexican marigold should be uprooted before they can set seed, and left to lie as additions to the mulch. Ripe seeds of any desirable plants may be scattered to await germination with rain.
The primary object is to cover the ground with vegetation, and in this context two useful plant species are the vigorous succulent Aptenia cordifolia and the sweet potato (Ipomea batatas). Both will be crowded out in due course by taller vegetation, but in the interim help to modify conditions.
Ongoing management of the vegetation is the single most important maintenance task and does not require a degree in rocket science. Dying vegetation repollutes the water, while harvesting of plants that have passed their best leads to fresh growth and increased nutrient uptake. Establish and manage the vegetation right, and all else will follow.
‘Biological indicators’ are a vital monitoring tool. The presence of fish fry shows that adults are happy enough to breed, for example, while the absence of kingfishers from a surface cell they used to frequent may indicate a problem with the fish. If a water sample shows no significant change, the answer may lie in over-predation; pieces of piping, some roof ridge tiles or a few small wire mesh cylinders placed in the shallows will provide refuges for the fish.
Various ‘biotic indices’ exist – lists of aquatic invertebrates, classified from 1 –10 depending on their sensitivity to pollution, with 10 being the most sensitive. Knowing the scores of even a few offers valuable information on the health of any given body of water. Most water bugs and beetles are rated at 5, while dragonflies, depending on species, rate 6-8. The presence of these in and around an SC shows that you are at least halfway there in terms of water purification.
As diversity builds up and biological maturity approaches, improvement in a CW’s performance is mirrored by a change in samples taken in clear bottles from various points along the system. The more variation in colour, the less stable the ecology; as the various pinks and greens of early days gradually give way to clearer water, the environmental manager knows that this is the indication of a good job, well executed.
"I have become very attached to the CW at Chemomi. Every lunch hour I rest in that park and appreciate it. It provides a very conducive environment for relaxation, and is really great – unlike the sewage areas of other institutions.
"The CW has provided two great benefits, one in cleaning the waste discharge from the [tea] factory, and two in providing an ecofriendly area which has turned into a park. The few people who have realised the importance of conserving and protecting the environment like this need to be encouraged and indeed emulated. I have become interested in learning more about environmental issues with a view to putting them to practical use in my village at home…"
Simion K. Koech, Accountant, Eastern Produce (K) Ltd, Nandi Hills
"In Kenya, the focus on water management has been almost entirely directed towards the supply cycle, with relatively little attention paid to disposal. The introduction of the Environmental Management and Co-ordination Act, 1999, will require all operators of trade and industrial undertakings to apply for an effluent discharge license and, if granted, ensure that they comply with the standards imposed. In our experience, constructed wetlands have proved to be an extremely effective and low-cost means of treating a wide range of effluents.
"Their informality in terms of plan layout renders them particularly suitable for location in areas unsuitable for either growing or building. They have transformed these areas into oases of vegetation, aquatic and bird life. The presence of these natural flora and fauna in the mature areas of the wetlands, both in and along the margins of the ponds we have constructed, are a striking demonstration of the natural processes at work. The quality of effluent achievable offers very real opportunities for recycling."
- Richard Fox, Services Director, Homegrown
(K) Ltd, Naivasha, and Civil Engineer
"Our recent visit [to the Splash wetland] was an eye opener in many respects. I have visited many wastewater treatment plants, but the constructed wetland seems unique in that the water is biologically purified without need of expensive machinery, electricity or fossil fuels. It works so well that some fauna from the adjacent Nairobi National Park find this a better place and defect to the wetlands! The birdlife is impressive. There seems to be an ecobalance between the various organisms found there. It is a valuable learning resource; the Hotel Management students that I brought along were very impressed, as evidenced in their vote of thanks."
- John K.M. Wandaka, Lecturer in Environmental Studies, Tourism Dept, Utalii College
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Dee Raymer began writing seriously in 1996 when, as a landscaper, she was commissioned to write the first eco-friendly gardening book for Eastern Africa. Down to Earth, an all-colour hardback, was published to acclaim in 1998. She was approached to address broader environmental issues in articles appearing in Ecoforum, Executive and Swara magazines and The East African newspaper.
Her interest in, and involvement with, the environment had grown from working for conservationist clients in Kenya's arid north. There she developed a deep respect for the observed integrity and resilience of unspoilt drylands ecologies. A residential course in sustainable land-use and management at Fambidzanai Training Centre, Zimbabwe, consolidated her field observations of cause and effect, and of the successional cycles occurring within all healthy ecosystems.
These understandings were invaluable when pioneering the use in Kenya of Constructed Wetlands (CWs) for wastewater purification. The first was installed in 1994 for a client with a major sewage problem, and is now one of eleven in operation. Discharges, purified to compliance standards, return to surface water systems for safe use by others.
Her dream? The widespread adoption of CWs in tropical Africa as the technology of choice in curbing environmental pollution, improving public health, creating new wetland ecosystems and addressing the vast problems caused by unclean and over-subscribed fresh water sources. She has progressed from landscaper to committed eco-bore, and intends to remain thoroughly "infectious."
Past awards:
The Great Cats of Russia
The life of the terrible and beautiful beasts today entirely depends on the willingness and ability of the people to live side-by-side with them.
By Boris Zhukoy, Itogi Magazine,
Regional Winner - East Europe, The Reuters - IUCN Media Award - 2000
PLANETMATES
If you ask a Russian man what is the most well-known and remarkable wild animal in his country, he will probably say the bear, the wolf, or the elk. The Siberian tiger, which is often featured in books, newspapers and on TV, is not easily remembered. The image of an exotic rapacious beast is too unusual for Russia. And the fact that two more giant wild cats live in the country - the Far Eastern and Snow Leopards, - is not known by many people.
Nevertheless, these magnificent animals, the image of which is so connected with the Eurasian civilizations, remain a reality in Russia. But, unfortunately, one cannot say for sure "and will remain". All three species of the big wild cats are now included in the international and the national Red Books. For two subspecies, their Russian ecotopes are the last refuge on Earth.
How many tigers can lodge in taiga?
Less than half a century ago, there lived eight subspecies of the tiger in the world. Now, three of them remain only in zoological museums and lucky hunter's collections. And while the tigers of Java and Sumatra, who lived only on these islands, diminished because of their narrow geographic space, the same can not be said about the Turanean tiger. It lived on a great territory, from Turkey to the East Kazakhstan and from the costs of the Persian Gulf to the upper stream of Yrtysh river. It's name was given to one of two main rivers of Mesopotamia. In the poem, "The Knight in a Tiger Skin", the hero was wearing its skin. It was last seen in 1969. In 1973, zoologists received a newly-stripped skin. That is all that remained of the beast, which was unlucky enough to live in places that attracted mankind.
Their grievous fate could be shared by the fourth subspecies - the Siberian tiger. In the middle of the 20th century, its wild population was only 30 to 40 animals. They were scattered throughout the isolated remote corners of Sikhote-Alyng, Manchuria and Amur region. The life of the tiger subspecies was saved by a miracle: in 1947, when the work of "taming the Nature" was in full swing, the USSR unexpectedly declared a perfect prohibition on shooting this dangerous carnivore. And in spite of the fact that some limited trade was going on (shooting some tigers which ambushed at people or cattle; poaching; catching some tiger-kittens alive for the circus and the zoo), the population of the Siberian tiger stopped dropping, and from the middle of the 1960s, it began to grow swiftly. By the end of the 1980s, there were about 400 wild Siberian tigers. In addition, through the world's zoos, even more Siberian tiger were saved. There are now more than than 600 Siberian tigers.
This splendid result was nearly ruined in the 1990s, because, among other reasons, commercial trade was added to the usual poaching, there were confrontations between tigers and field hunters, the defending of cattle and dogs, and shooting tigers for fear or for fun. Poachers always worked by the request of the many army officers, who, upon leaving the Far East, wanted to have a tiger or leopard skin as a souvenir. Now many of the military settlements around Habarovsk and Prymorie are desolated, and for those few officers who continue their service, the tigers are not interesting because they have a lot of other problems. But today, the poachers supply the foreign markets of alternative medicine - primarily China. This sort of trade can swallow any number of fells, skins, bones, glands and other parts of a tiger, and the purchasers can pay a "fabulous" (in local calculation) price for them. By the middle of the last decade, about 100 beasts were killed every year, dropping the population to 250. But financial support received from international ecological organizations helped establish an effective anti-poaching team, and kept closer control over the preserved territories. At the same time, China took on very hard punitive measures against the dealers and consumers of the tiger-based medicine. It did not stop the criminal business altogether, but the menace to the existence of the tiger population was avoided. The last estimate of the population of the tiger in Russia was between 400 and 450. There are, at best, 20 wild Siberian tigers outside Russia; possibly they are the same beasts, continually crossing the Russian-China borders.
To tell the truth, many scientists whose main interest is in the tiger, suppose that the registration of footprints is hardly accurate. Galina Salkina from the Lazo Reserve thinks that there are 250 tigers. So it is possible to relax a little - the Siberian tiger managed to avoid extinction. In the future, the beast will live constantly side by side with man. Neither man nor tiger are ready for it.
For a full life, the tiger needs to eat at least one hoofed animal (a sika deer, a boar, a musk deer, a roe, for example) a week. The tiger is not very squeamish and easily changes its "menu". To supply such food, there must be a herd of not less than 300 animals. It should probably be even larger, about 400 to 500 deer and boars. Such a herd needs a large wooden place of habitation. For example, the plot for a female tiger is between 300 and 500 square kilometers, because she is more settled than a male tiger, and she uses the sources of food more efficiently. The accounts show that even if the Siberian tiger inhabits all its former territories, including the left shore of the Amur-River, there will be place for only 550 or 600 beasts. But for this purpose, people must help the tiger to return to the left shore, and the living space of the woods must stay in tact.
Howe
By Boris Zhukoy, Itogi Magazine,
Regional Winner - East Europe, The Reuters - IUCN Media Award - 2000
PLANETMATES
If you ask a Russian man what is the most well-known and remarkable wild animal in his country, he will probably say the bear, the wolf, or the elk. The Siberian tiger, which is often featured in books, newspapers and on TV, is not easily remembered. The image of an exotic rapacious beast is too unusual for Russia. And the fact that two more giant wild cats live in the country - the Far Eastern and Snow Leopards, - is not known by many people.
Nevertheless, these magnificent animals, the image of which is so connected with the Eurasian civilizations, remain a reality in Russia. But, unfortunately, one cannot say for sure "and will remain". All three species of the big wild cats are now included in the international and the national Red Books. For two subspecies, their Russian ecotopes are the last refuge on Earth.
How many tigers can lodge in taiga?
Less than half a century ago, there lived eight subspecies of the tiger in the world. Now, three of them remain only in zoological museums and lucky hunter's collections. And while the tigers of Java and Sumatra, who lived only on these islands, diminished because of their narrow geographic space, the same can not be said about the Turanean tiger. It lived on a great territory, from Turkey to the East Kazakhstan and from the costs of the Persian Gulf to the upper stream of Yrtysh river. It's name was given to one of two main rivers of Mesopotamia. In the poem, "The Knight in a Tiger Skin", the hero was wearing its skin. It was last seen in 1969. In 1973, zoologists received a newly-stripped skin. That is all that remained of the beast, which was unlucky enough to live in places that attracted mankind.
Their grievous fate could be shared by the fourth subspecies - the Siberian tiger. In the middle of the 20th century, its wild population was only 30 to 40 animals. They were scattered throughout the isolated remote corners of Sikhote-Alyng, Manchuria and Amur region. The life of the tiger subspecies was saved by a miracle: in 1947, when the work of "taming the Nature" was in full swing, the USSR unexpectedly declared a perfect prohibition on shooting this dangerous carnivore. And in spite of the fact that some limited trade was going on (shooting some tigers which ambushed at people or cattle; poaching; catching some tiger-kittens alive for the circus and the zoo), the population of the Siberian tiger stopped dropping, and from the middle of the 1960s, it began to grow swiftly. By the end of the 1980s, there were about 400 wild Siberian tigers. In addition, through the world's zoos, even more Siberian tiger were saved. There are now more than than 600 Siberian tigers.
This splendid result was nearly ruined in the 1990s, because, among other reasons, commercial trade was added to the usual poaching, there were confrontations between tigers and field hunters, the defending of cattle and dogs, and shooting tigers for fear or for fun. Poachers always worked by the request of the many army officers, who, upon leaving the Far East, wanted to have a tiger or leopard skin as a souvenir. Now many of the military settlements around Habarovsk and Prymorie are desolated, and for those few officers who continue their service, the tigers are not interesting because they have a lot of other problems. But today, the poachers supply the foreign markets of alternative medicine - primarily China. This sort of trade can swallow any number of fells, skins, bones, glands and other parts of a tiger, and the purchasers can pay a "fabulous" (in local calculation) price for them. By the middle of the last decade, about 100 beasts were killed every year, dropping the population to 250. But financial support received from international ecological organizations helped establish an effective anti-poaching team, and kept closer control over the preserved territories. At the same time, China took on very hard punitive measures against the dealers and consumers of the tiger-based medicine. It did not stop the criminal business altogether, but the menace to the existence of the tiger population was avoided. The last estimate of the population of the tiger in Russia was between 400 and 450. There are, at best, 20 wild Siberian tigers outside Russia; possibly they are the same beasts, continually crossing the Russian-China borders.
To tell the truth, many scientists whose main interest is in the tiger, suppose that the registration of footprints is hardly accurate. Galina Salkina from the Lazo Reserve thinks that there are 250 tigers. So it is possible to relax a little - the Siberian tiger managed to avoid extinction. In the future, the beast will live constantly side by side with man. Neither man nor tiger are ready for it.
For a full life, the tiger needs to eat at least one hoofed animal (a sika deer, a boar, a musk deer, a roe, for example) a week. The tiger is not very squeamish and easily changes its "menu". To supply such food, there must be a herd of not less than 300 animals. It should probably be even larger, about 400 to 500 deer and boars. Such a herd needs a large wooden place of habitation. For example, the plot for a female tiger is between 300 and 500 square kilometers, because she is more settled than a male tiger, and she uses the sources of food more efficiently. The accounts show that even if the Siberian tiger inhabits all its former territories, including the left shore of the Amur-River, there will be place for only 550 or 600 beasts. But for this purpose, people must help the tiger to return to the left shore, and the living space of the woods must stay in tact.
Howe