Staples Inc., the world's largest office-supply retailer, ends its contracts with Asia Pulp & Paper Co. (APP) because of its environmental practices

Office-supplies retailer Staples Inc. has severed all contracts with Singapore-based Asia Pulp & Paper Co. Ltd., one of the world's largest paper companies, in a move that shows concerns over forest destruction and global warming are having an impact on big U.S. paper buyers.

Until recently, Staples sourced about 9% of its total paper supply from APP and used the paper for its own Staples-branded stock, mainly photocopy and office paper. Staples had stuck with the company even as other large paper sellers in the U.S., Europe and Asia, including Office Depot Inc., stopped buying from APP in recent years because of alleged environmental misdeeds.

The Framingham, Mass., company canceled its contracts late last month, said Mark Buckley, vice president for environmental issues at Staples. Staples is expected to announce the move next week.

"We decided engagement was not possible anymore," Mr. Buckley said. "We haven't seen any indication that APP has been making any positive strides" to protect the environment. Remaining a customer of APP was "at great peril to our brand," he added.

APP representatives didn't return calls seeking comment. In the past, it has said it is moving toward relying for all of its wood on plantation trees but needs to cut natural forest to maintain production levels.

APP runs one of Asia's largest pulp mills on the Indonesian island of Sumatra and has operations in China. The retailers worry that APP is destroying natural rainforest to feed its mills.

Concerns over rainforest destruction have been heightened in recent months because new data show that Indonesia is the world's third-largest emitter of carbon dioxide, the heat-trapping greenhouse gas, behind the U.S. and China. Fires set to clear natural forests and forested peat swamps after they have been logged are the major cause of those emissions.

APP last year sought permission to use an environmentally friendly logo issued by the Forest Stewardship Council. In October, after inquiries from The Wall Street Journal about APP's planned use of the logo, the FSC barred the company from using it.

Here is the full article from the Wall Street Journal.

When Sustainable Hydropower becomes Unsustainable - Lake Mead Could Dry Up by 2021 warn researchers from Scripps Institution of Oceanography

There is a 50 percent chance Lake Mead, a key source of water for millions of people in the southwestern United States, will be dry by 2021 if the climate changes as expected and future water use is not limited, warn researchers at Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California-San Diego.

Without Lake Mead and neighboring Lake Powell, the Colorado River system has no buffer to sustain the population of the Southwest through an unusually dry year, or worse, a sustained drought.

In such an event, water deliveries to cities such as Las Vegas, Los Angeles and San Diego would become unstable and variable, say research marine physicist Tim Barnett and climate scientist David Pierce.

The researchers say that even if water agencies follow their current drought contingency plans, it might not be enough to counter natural forces, especially if the region enters a period of sustained drought or human-induced climate changes occur as currently predicted.

"We were stunned at the magnitude of the problem and how fast it was coming at us," said Barnett. "Make no mistake, this water problem is not a scientific abstraction, but rather one that will impact each and every one of us that live in the Southwest."

"It's likely to mean real changes to how we live and do business in this region," Pierce added.

The researchers estimate that there is a 10 percent chance that Lake Mead could be dry by 2014. They further predict that there is a 50 percent chance that reservoir levels will drop too low to allow hydroelectric power generation by 2017.

Lake Mead is the largest human-made lake and reservoir in the United States. It is located on the Colorado River about 30 miles southeast of Las Vegas, Nevada, in the states of Nevada and Arizona. Formed by water impounded by Hoover Dam, it extends 110 miles behind the dam, holding approximately 28.5 million acre feet of water.

Barnett and Pierce conclude that human demand, natural forces like evaporation, and human-induced climate change are creating a net deficit of nearly one million acre-feet of water per year from the Colorado River system that includes Lake Mead and Lake Powell. This amount of water can supply roughly eight million people.

Their analysis of Federal Bureau of Reclamation records of past water demand and calculations of scheduled water allocations and climate conditions indicate that the system could run dry even if mitigation measures now being proposed are implemented.

The Lake Mead/Lake Powell system includes the stretch of the Colorado River in northern Arizona. Aqueducts carry the water to Las Vegas, Los Angeles, San Diego, and other communities in the Southwest. Currently the system is only at half capacity because of a recent string of dry years, and the team estimates that the system has already entered an era of deficit.
"When expected changes due to global warming are included as well, currently scheduled depletions are simply not sustainable," wrote Barnett and Pierce in their paper, "When will Lake Mead go dry?," which has been accepted for publication in the peer-reviewed journal "Water Resources Research," published by the American Geophysical Union.

Barnett and Pierce note that a number of other studies in recent years have estimated that climate change will lead to reductions in runoff to the Colorado River system. Those analyses consistently forecast reductions of between 10 and 30 percent over the next 30 to 50 years, which could affect the water supply of between 12 and 36 million people.

Barnett said that the researchers chose to go with conservative estimates of the situation in their analysis, though the water shortage is likely to be more dire in reality.

The team based its findings on the premise that climate change effects only started in 2007, though most researchers consider human-caused changes in climate to have likely started decades earlier. They also based their river flow on averages over the past 100 years, even though it has dropped in recent decades. Over the past 500 years the average annual flow is even less.

"Today, we are at or beyond the sustainable limit of the Colorado system. The alternative to reasoned solutions to this coming water crisis is a major societal and economic disruption in the desert southwest; something that will affect each of us living in the region," the report concludes.
The research was supported under a joint program between UC San Diego and the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and by the California Energy Commission.

Here is the full article.

For Peru's Indians, Lawsuit Against Big Oil Reflects a New Era - Outsiders, NGOs and High-Tech Tools Help Document Firms' Impact

NUEVO JERUSALEM, Peru -- Tomás Maynas Carijano strolled through his tiny jungle farm, pinching leaves, shaking his head. The rain forest spread lushly in all directions -- covering what oil maps call Block 1AB.

"Like the trunk of that papaya, the cassava and bananas are also dying," said the spiritual leader of this remote Achuar Indian settlement in Peru's northern Amazon region. "Before Oxy came, the fruits and the plants grew well."

Oxy is Occidental Petroleum, the California-based company that pulled a fortune from this rain forest from 1972 to 2000. It is also the company that Maynas and other Achuar leaders now blame for wreaking environmental havoc -- and leaving many of the people here ill. Last spring, U.S. lawyers representing Maynas and 24 other indigenous Peruvians sued Occidental in a Los Angeles court, alleging that, among other offenses, the firm violated industry standards and Peruvian law by dumping toxic wastewater directly into rivers and streams.

The company denies liability in the case.

For indigenous groups, the Occidental lawsuit is emblematic of a new era. The Amazon region was once even more isolated than it is today, its people largely cut off from environmental defenders in Washington and other world capitals who might have protected their interests. Now, Indians have gained access to tools that level the playing field -- from multinational lawsuits to mapping technologies such as Google Earth.

Oil companies that once traded money and development for Indians' blessings are increasingly finding outsiders getting involved. "History has shown that oil companies will cut corners if someone isn't watching," said Gregor MacLennan of Shinai, an internationally funded civic group in Peru. "We try to get to local communities first to help them make informed decisions about oil companies and the changes they bring."

Lured by global energy prices, Peru is placing record bets on Amazon energy lodes: Last year the country's concessions agency, PeruPetro, signed a record 24 hydrocarbon contracts with international oil companies. EarthRights International, a nonprofit group that is helping represent the plaintiffs in the Achuar case, says half of Peru's biologically diverse Amazon region has been added to oil maps in the last three years.

Occidental pumped 26 percent of Peru's historic oil production from Block 1AB before selling the declining field to Argentina's Pluspetrol in 2000. "We are aware of no credible data of negative community health impacts resulting from Occidental's operations in Peru," Richard Kline, a company spokesman, said in an e-mail statement.

Kline said that Occidental has not had operations in Block 1AB in nearly a decade and that Pluspetrol has assumed responsibility for it. Occidental made "extensive efforts" to work with community groups and has a "long-standing commitment and policy to protect the environment and the health and safety of people," he said.

The California-based group Amazon Watch has joined the suit as a plaintiff, and the case is now inching through U.S. courts. In a federal hearing scheduled for Feb. 11, company lawyers will ask a judge to send the case to Peru, where Indians say corruption and a case backlog will hurt their chance of winning.

(A mining company just argued that it was not fair to be tried in a foreign court: Supreme Court Decision Rattles Canadian Mining Industry – Right to Pollute Under Threat – Teck Cominco Execs Vow Fight, say No to Cleaning Environment )
Learning Their Rights

The primitive trumpet -- a hollowed cow's horn -- brayed over this gritty river community at sundown. Residents of Nuevo Jerusalem, the Achuar settlement on the Macusari River, trudged up a path, toting shotguns and fishing nets. Some stepped down from palm huts, walking to the meeting in twos and threes. Soon, Lily La Torre was on stage.

"I've come to give you news of the Oxy suit," said La Torre, a Peruvian lawyer and activist working with Maynas's legal team. Barefoot women in dirty skirts circled the room, serving bowls of homemade cassava beer.

La Torre distilled legal strategies into simple terms. She told villagers that the case had been moved to the federal level in the United States. "Now they are trying to move the lawsuit to Peru," she said in Spanish, pausing for an Achuar interpreter. "But we must pray that the suit stays in the U.S. We know it cannot survive in Peru."

Later, as people approached her with questions, a man who was looking on said in broken Spanish: "When Oxy came, we did not know our rights. Now we do."

In addition to alleging that Occidental illegally dumped toxic wastewater, the Achuar suit accuses the company of generating acid rain with gas flares, failing to warn Indians of health dangers and improperly storing chemical wastes in unlined pits.
The "irresponsible, reckless, immoral and illegal practices" left Maynas and his people with poisoned blood, polluted streams and empty hunting grounds, the suit says. Plaintiffs want damages, declaratory and injunctive relief, restitution and disgorgement of profits. One woman is suing on behalf of her child, whose death she alleges is related to environmental contamination.

Last spring, before the Achuar case was filed, a team of health experts, lawyers and scientists funded by EarthRights International said in a report that the wells, pipelines and other infrastructure built here by Occidental had directly caused water and soil contamination, which in turn has caused health problems for many local people in Block 1AB.

Kline said the report contained "inflammatory misstatements, unfounded allegations and unsupported conclusions" and failed to provide basic information that would help determine whether oil operations contributed to the alleged environmental and health problems. "Nonetheless . . . we will evaluate the claims and the lawsuit and respond accordingly," he said.

A Technological Assist

Environmental groups are going beyond word of mouth and lawsuits to assist indigenous groups.

One day last fall, Guevara Sandi Chimboras was bouncing a pickup truck along a remote oil road near the Achuar community of Jose Olaya. Carrying a digital camera, notepad and a Global Positioning System transceiver donated by the civic group Shinai, Sandi walked through a grassy field to a pool of stagnant water. With a stick, he dug up a clump of glistening, pungent mud, and sniffed.

"The companies say these sites are clean," he said. "They won't believe us without documented photos. With words, they don't believe us."

There are no mass media in the rain forest. But Shinai has translated a U.S.-made documentary about the Achuar's problems into Machiguenga, the language spoken by Indians in southeastern Peru, where a U.S.-backed natural gas project is underway. The group uses DVD players powered by solar panels and generators to show the film to Indians considering agreements with oil companies.
Meanwhile, Google Earth is proving to be an omniscient eye. Peter Kostishack, a Colorado-based rights activist, uses the application to record coordinates and satellite images of rain forest erosion and post them on his blog. With help from the U.S.-based Amazon Conservation Team, Indians in Brazil's Amazon Basin have used Google Earth imagery to spot river discoloration caused by illegal mining operations.

"Many times a company claims natives don't have the technical knowledge to understand that it is doing the best it can, when in fact it may be doing as little as possible," said Bill Powers, chief engineer of E-Tech International, a nonprofit engineering firm based in California that provides Indians with technical expertise.

"We make it a battle of equals, at least in the knowledge area," he said.

Here is the full article.

Chile’s Mother of God Island to Receive Govt. Protection – Environmental Patrimony Grounds Cited – Island has no Counterpart Anywhere else in Chile

French And Chilean Explorers Highlight Unique Characteristics Of Isolated Southern Island

(Jan. 14, 2008) An isolated and inclement island in far southern Chile’s Region XII is gaining some worthy attention and much needed protection, thanks to moves by the Chilean government and to a series of Franco-Chilean expeditions.

Isla Madre de Dios (Mother of God), located about a day’s boat trip north-west of Puerto Natales, is a largely unexplored, 270,000-acre area of rock, wind and sea that - unlike most of the other countless islands in the mind-bogglingly intricate Patagonian archipelago - belongs to neither a national park nor reserve.

But just recently the island received a measure of protection from the government’s Ministry of National Patrimony, which included it among the estimated 900,000 acres of land the government body now controls throughout the country. Any private interests wanting to develop on the island, in other words, must now go through and be approved by the Ministry.

“We clearly have information that tells us this place is highly valuable in terms of patrimony – environmental patrimony,” Pablo Mecklenburg, head of the Ministry’s patrimony division, told the Patagonia Times (a sister publication to The Santiago Times).

“Part of our task, specifically the division I lead, has to do with taking care of and protecting our natural patrimony in Chile. We think that this is a territory that under the country’s existing protection schemes (the national park and reserve system) enjoyed very little representation. We took this action in order to preserve this space, which has no counterpart anywhere else in Chile,” he added.

The island has also benefited of late from a series of joint French-Chilean expeditions led by a group called Centre Terre. The group, which includes experts from Chile’s Universidad de Chile and Universidad Católica, is helping shed light on the island’s rich biological, geographical and cultural assets.

Last week the group embarked on its third expedition since 2000, when they first began the onerous task of exploring the island’s long and intricate perimeter. This time around the Centre Terre scientists and spelunkers plan to visit the island’s western and northern faces.

The modern day explorers also plan to revisit several of Madre de Dios’ unique and frighteningly deep caves and crevices. One of those caves, “el Sumidero del Futuro” (the Sink of the Future), is thought to go down at least 376 meters, making it the deepest in Chile. In addition, the Centre Terre team will return to the 305-meter “Sima del Descanso” (Chasm of Rest), which they discovered on their last expedition, in 2006.

On that same trip, the group stumbled across some 50 cave paintings thought to be made by former Alacalufe inhabitants. The Alacalufe are an indigenous people that inhabited the Patagonia archipelago long before the arrival of European explorers and traders. Evidence of Alacalufe presence in the zone dates back to 6,000 B.C. In the 17th century, when the nomadic indigenous group first made contact with Europeans, their population is estimated to have been between 2,500-3,000.

In 2003, an 80-year-old Alaculfue woman named Fresia Allessandri passed away, bringing the dwindling tribe one step closer to extinction (ST, Oct. 30, 2003). Allessandri (born Jérawr Asáwer) took her name from former Chilean President Arturo Allessandri, who was Chile’s leader at the time of her birth.

Most of the remaining Alacalufe, also known as the Kaweskar, reside near an Air Force base on Puerto Eden in Chile's Region XI. A recent count indicated that there were 12 full-blood members of the ethnic group based there, two of whom are students and only return for holidays. Other people of Alacalufe origin have moved to the southerly towns Punta Arenas and Puerto Natales, where most work in traditional artisan goods or in the local fish-collecting trade. Ethnologists have been making attempts to record the unique language spoken by the Alacalufe people while they still can.

“We, together with this group from France, want to continue collecting information about the island’s archaeological and biological aspects,” said Pablo Mecklenburg. “Once we’ve finished, we’ll decide what use to make of the island. And when I say ‘use,’ I do so taking liberties with the language, because the use could be total conservation.”

New Green Party Forms in Chile - Promises Mother of All Battles Over HidroAysen

Promises “Mother of All Battles” Against Patagonia HydroAysén Dam Project

(Jan. 21, 2008) After a year of jumping legal hurdles, the Partido Ecologista (or Green Party) was recognized on Jan. 11 in the El Diario Oficial, the official government registry. Led by Universidad de Concepción political scientist Félix González, the party will be formally introduced to the public this week.

Well-known environmentalists Sara Larrain, director of Chile Sustentable, Ecology Policy Institute director Manuel Baquedano and Renace National director Isabel Lincolao also joined González in forming the party. These older activists will take on a supporting role in the party, but want a new generation to step into leadership roles.

During a meeting last week with Chile’s Secretary General José Viera-Gallo, the directors of the new party introduced a 10-point list that will define the party’s relationship with the government. The list, known as the “Chagual Agreement,” outlines promises made by Michelle Bachelet to the green movement when she was running for President in 2005. Bachelet signed the agreement during her campaign.

“We have restated our intention to respect this agreement,” Viera-Gallo told the Chilean daily La Nación.

The new party will not align itself with either the center-left governing Concertación coalition or the rightist opposition Alianza. In past elections, environmentalists have aligned themselves with the Concertación, but recent decisions by Bachelet’s government led them to disassociate themselves from the established blocs of Chilean politics.

During the Wednesday meeting at La Moneda, González outlined “two critical points” connected with the Chagual Agreement that trouble environmentalists. The first was the Zanelli Commission, a body created to study the possibility of developing nuclear energy in Chile. The environmentalists claim President Bachelet promised not to consider nuclear energy when she signed the agreement. Secondly, González said that the government has not made a decision on the labeling of genetically-modified foods.

González told the Santiago Times that Minister Viera-Gallo “assured us that the nuclear matter will not (…) go much further than what the Zanelli Commission has already done. On the subject of genetically altered foods, he told us that the government had no intention of approving them.”

Viera-Gallo also tried to pacify the Green Party’s worries by comparing the US$200,000 the government gave to the Zanelli Commission to the more than US$6 million in direct subsidies it has given to renewable energy through Corfo (the Corporation for Development of Production).

González explained to the Santiago Times that the Green Party is necessary because a “cultural change” is taking place in Chile. He argued that people are becoming more concerned about how environmental issues affect them, which allows his party to propose new topics. In order to get its message out, the party plans to use “alternative media” that is not owned by interests that can influence the way news is written.

The goal of the party is to be a “distinct alternative,” González said. “We don’t come from the political class, we are not going to be in Juntos Podemos (the far left coalition called Together We Can), we are not going to be on the right, and we are not going to be in the Concertación, because they don’t represent us. This is the principal message.”

González also said the party will form part of the growing international fight against the HydroAysén project. He described environmentalists’ efforts to thwart the dam initiative as “the mother all battles” because they are up against three industrial giants: Colbun, ENDESA and Transelec.

If approved by the government, HidroAysén’s multi-dam project could generate as much as 2,750 MW of electricity, roughly equivalent to about 20 percent of Chile’s current generating capacity. The project, slated for the region’s two largest rivers – the Baker and the Pascua – has an estimated price tag of US$2.5 billion.

That figure does not include an additional US$1.5 billion likely needed to build a 1,200 mile transmission line between southern Region XI, an area also known as Aysén, and central Chile, where the electricity would be consumed. HidroAysén is still working out details with Transelec, a Canadian-owned electricity transport company, over the costs and route of the extensive line.

The project has generated no small amount of opposition, particularly from environmentalists – both in Chile and abroad – who say the dams, reservoirs and transmission line would cause irreparable damage to pristine southern Chile. (ST, Jan. 14)

The party plans to run candidates in October’s municipal elections, hoping for five percent of the vote. According to their website, before being legally recognized in Chile, the party was incorporated into the International Green Parties, through the Federation of Green Parties of America. The party has been an active member of the Federation for four years.

Here is the full article.

Anti-Corruption, Anti-Poverty & Environmental NGO Ban Lifted by Gabon Government – NGOs Accused of Interfering in the Country’s Politics

LIBREVILLE, Jan 16 (Reuters) - Gabon has lifted a ban on 22 non-government organisations a week after it suspended them for criticising the way in which state resources were being spent in the oil-producing central African country.

Publish What You Pay (PWYP), a global campaigner for transparent use of petroleum and mining revenues, said the government ended the suspension late on Tuesday, which had affected the members of its coalition in Gabon and other groups.

"This is a major victory for civil society in Gabon and affirms our ability to operate freely and speak out on public interest issues," said Marc Ona, president of Brainforest, one of the suspended NGOs, and coordinator of PWYP Gabon.

Gabonese Interior Minister Andre Mba Obame said on Jan. 9 that four coalitions made up of anti-corruption, anti-poverty and environmental campaign groups had been temporarily banned for interfering in the country's politics.

The coalitions had issued a lengthy statement criticising the government on a wide range of issues from oil spending to unemployment.

The communique said Gabon had an excessive number of ministers, had funded election campaigns with huge sums of public money at the expense of roads, hospitals and schools, and that mining deals were awarded with no regard for the environment or local people.

PWYP said the suspension contravened Gabon's membership of the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative, a global scheme to eliminate corruption in the minerals sector which envisages the active participation of civil society groups.

The discovery of oil in the 1960s made Gabon one of Africa's first oil exporters and, on paper, gave its small population of around 1.5 million one of the highest incomes per head on the world's poorest continent.

But despite outward signs of prosperity along the slick oceanfront of the capital Libreville, a third of the population live below the poverty line, according to the United Nations.

Here is the full article.

Feedback: Do Canadian Investors Care About Conservation Issues and what Canadian Companies are Doing In Patagonia, Chile?

Daniel Mosquin, Bioinformatics and Web Manager from the University of British Columbia Center of Plant Research writes:

On the heels of the 5000th comment posted (on the UBC Botanical Garden Forum) a couple days ago, today's milestone achieved is the 1000th entry (on the 999th consecutive day, due to the double entry earlier this year). What better way to celebrate than with violets?

For most of you, I'll guess that you've never encountered violets that looked like these before. It is unfortunate that these plants never flowered in the garden before dying, so I don't have any photographs of them in bloom, nor have I been able to track down an online photograph elsewhere. Images of related species of rosulate (“leaves forming a rosette”) violets in bloom do exist, though they are also rare.

For examples, scroll down to the middle of the page in Alpine Garden Society Expedition to Northern Patagonia: November-December 2005 for photographs of six different species of rosulate violets.

Like the other species in the link above, Viola atropurpurea is also native to Patagonia, i.e., southern South America. Within the violet genus, these rosulate species are all grouped together in the Section Andinium, named for the Andes.

A description of the species is available from the Rock Garden Plant Database: Viola atropurpurea. The peculiar growth-form helps individuals survive the high-altitude environment by reducing water loss, ameliorating sub-freezing temperatures for the entire above-ground plant, optimizing light interception and protecting the apical meristem, or the growing tip of the plant, from temperature damage.

On the subject of Patagonia and land conservation: a couple weeks ago, the local weekly independent newspaper had an article about a Canadian company planning “to industrialize Patagonia for the first time”; see: Canadian pension funds linked to controversial project in Patagonia. In a world of environmental ills, I'm particularly incensed about this one as I seem to be partly responsible for this project through both my country's pension plan and perhaps my workplace plan. I'm going to be asking a few questions in the new year about this... In the meantime, this topic led me to discover the weblog Patagonia Under Siege and find this summary article about the issues via onearth.

Here is the full article.

Thanks Daniel!

the Patagonia Under Siege Staff

(For other concerned Canadian investors who are interested in what their mining companies are doing around the world, see: Canadian Mining Companies Run Amok )

The Plastic Killing Fields - Pacific Ocean Gyre Garbage Patch Grows to the Size of Texas

Continents of garbage in the oceans are killing marine life and releasing poisons that enter the human food chain.

In one of the few places on Earth where people can rarely be found, the human race has well and truly made its mark. In the middle of the Pacific Ocean lies a floating garbage patch twice the size of Britain. A place where the water is filled with six times as much plastic as plankton. This plastic-plankton soup is entering the food chain and heading for your dinner table.

For hundreds of years, sailors and fisherman have known to avoid the area between the Equator and 50 degrees north latitude about halfway between California and Hawaii. As one of the ocean's deserts, the North Pacific Subtropical Gyre lacks the wind that sailors need to survive, as well as the nutrients to support large fish or the men who hunt them.

But 10 years ago, Captain Charles Moore took a short cut through the airless doldrums in his catamaran, Alguita, and caught sight of something that changed his life. As he looked out at what should have been a clear blue ocean, Moore saw a sea of plastic. As far as he could see, day after day, were bottles, wrappers and fragments of plastic in every colour.

Historically, the ocean's circular currents have led to accumulation of flotsam and jetsam in the subtropical high, where the waste has biodegraded with the help of marine micro-organisms. But since humans developed a material designed for durability, which can survive exposure to any bacteria, the gyre has been filling with a substance it can't get rid of. Rather than biodegrading, plastic photodegrades, breaking down in the sunlight into smaller and smaller pieces. But no matter how small it gets, it's still plastic, and causes havoc when it enters the stomachs of marine life.

Ian Kiernan, the Australian who founded Clean Up the World, started his environmental campaign 20 years ago after he became appalled by the amount of rubbish he saw on an around-the-world solo yacht race. He'll never forget the first time he saw the gyre.

"It was just filled with things like furniture, fridges, plastic containers, cigarette lighters, plastic bottles, light globes, televisions and fishing nets," Kiernan says.

"It's all so durable it floats. It's just a major problem."

He picks up an ashtray filled with worn-down coloured pieces of plastic. "This is the contents of a fleshy-footed shearwater's stomach," he says. "They go to the ocean to fish but there ain't no fish - there's plastic. They then regurgitate it down the necks of their fledglings and it kills them. After the birds decompose, the plastic gets washed back into the ocean where it can kill again. It's a form of ghost fishing, where it goes on and on."

With gyres in each of the oceans, connected by debris highways, the problem isn't restricted to the North Pacific Gyre. It is estimated there are more than 13,000 pieces of plastic litter on every square kilometre of the ocean surface.


The United Nations Environment Program says plastic is accountable for the deaths of more than a million seabirds and more than 100,000 marine mammals such as whales, dolphins and seals every year. A Dutch study in the North Sea of fulmar seabirds concluded 95 per cent of the birds had plastic in their stomachs. More than 1600 pieces were found in the stomach of one bird in Belgium.

Since his first encounter with the gyre in 1997, Moore has returned several times and created the Algalita Marine Research Foundation to study the problem. The Canadian filmmaker Ian Connacher joined Moore in 2005 and again last year to film the garbage patch for his documentary, I Am Plastic. After a week of sailing from Long Beach, California, Connacher was not prepared for what he saw.

"Charlie once found a mile-long trail of Taco Bell wrappers which had plastic in them. I didn't see anything like that, but that's not the point, because it's the little bits that are really making it a plastic soup," Connacher says.

"The most menacing part is those little bits of plastic start looking like food for certain animals, or the filter feeders don't have any choice, they just pick them up." Then there's the plastic that doesn't float. Greenpeace reports that about 70 per cent of the plastic that makes it to the ocean sinks to the bottom, where it can smother marine life. Greenpeace says Dutch scientists have found 600,000 tonnes of discarded plastic on the bottom of the North Sea alone.

A study by the Japanese geochemist Hideshige Takada and his colleagues at Tokyo University in 2001 found that plastic polymers act like a sponge for resilient poisons such as DDT and polychlorinated biphenyls. Takada's team found non-water-soluble toxic chemicals can be found in plastic in levels as high as a million times their concentration in water.

As small pieces of plastic are mistaken for fish eggs and other food by marine life, these toxins enter the food chain. Even without this extra toxic load, eating plastic can be hazardous to the health.

In 2002 a study of hermaphrodite fish led Canadian scientists to link oestrogen in water to abnormal sex organs in fish. Several plastic additives have been found to mimic oestrogen. Some experts, such as Frederick vom Saal, a professor of biological sciences at Missouri University, say declining fertility rates in humans could be linked to exposure to synthetic oestrogen in plastics.

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Connacher believes as consumers learn more about the situation, many will respond positively. "We think products are going to be recycled, but they're not. We have become irresponsible with the way we use a lot of things, particularly disposable products."

Here is the full article.

Canada's oil sands - "There is nothing on this planet that compares with the destruction going on there".

FORT CHIPEWYAN, Alberta — Like a great silver snake, the Athabasca River glides though a spongy-wet wilderness of spindly forests, lakes and marshes 650 miles north of the U.S.-Canada border.

Breathe deeply, though, and you catch a whiff of fresh, hot tar. In the river, fish are speckled with shiny, wart-like blisters. And in the tiny Indian village of Fort Chipewyan, people are coming down with leukemia, bile duct cancer and other diseases.

Those who aren’t physically sick are worried sick. Much of their unease is directed upstream at a moonscape of strip mines, tailings ponds and clouds of dust and gases, including climate-warming carbon dioxide.

What’s being clawed from the earth there may surprise you. It’s America’s next tank of gas.

As reserves of crude oil tighten and gas prices soar, the quest for a backup energy source grows more heated. Already, a biofuels industry based on corn is booming. There are dreams of adding switch grass and wood chips to the mix, and perhaps one day running cars on cleaner hydrogen.

In northeast Alberta, though, the race for a stand-in fuel is taking a U-turn, one in which fleets of dinosaur-sized trucks and shovels larger than two-car garages are tearing apart a rich mosaic of woods and wetlands to extract some of the dirtiest fossil fuel on the planet — more than two-thirds of which is exported to the United States to be refined into gasoline, diesel and jet fuel.

All new fuels pose environmental challenges, but Alberta’s proxy petroleum is creating many, from the destruction of migratory waterfowl habitat to rising greenhouse gas emissions and growing concerns about pollution and cancer.

Last month, a new report catalogued industrial contaminants — from arsenic to mercury to polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons — downstream of the digging zone and concluded that more independent scientific inquiry is urgent.

Jim Law, the spokesman for Alberta’s minister of the environment, disputed the report’s conclusions, saying, “The development of the oil sands does not proceed at the expense of the environment.” But Kevin Timoney, an Alberta ecologist and the report’s author, disagreed.

“These compounds are already at levels sufficient to cause harm, [and] levels are increasing in concentration,” Timoney said. “There is no logical explanation ... other than industry activity.”

The stockpile of energy under Alberta’s swampy woodlands, an estimated 175 billion barrels of oil, is the largest reserve in the Western Hemisphere and the second-largest on Earth, behind Saudi Arabia.

This oil doesn’t slosh into a barrel like conventional petroleum. It clings to dark, gooey layers of sand and clay that look like cookie dough when dug out of the ground. Alberta’s oil isn’t really oil at all, but bitumen, used for canoe patching by early fur traders and more recently for road sealing and paving.

Coaxing bitumen out of sand and clay and upgrading it into synthetic petroleum is so costly and energy-intensive that for years most companies ignored the region.

When crude oil prices climbed over $50 back in 2004, however, companies began rushing to Alberta as if it were a new Persian Gulf. Today, that rush is a stampede.

The road from Edmonton to Fort McMurray — the frontier outpost where the digging starts — thunders with big-rig trucks hauling mining gear. In town, dollars flow so freely some call the place Fort McMoney. Near the airport, a billboard barks out the bonanza spirit: “We have the energy,” it says.

Already, Alberta’s tar sands oil field produces 1.3 million barrels a day, three times more than Alaska’s Prudhoe Bay. By 2016, daily output is expected to rise to 3 million barrels, exceeding the oil production of Venezuela.

Scores of companies are active in the area, from U.S.-based Chevron and ConocoPhillips to homegrown Petro-Canada. This year, projects, expansions and acquisitions totaling more than $50 billion have been announced.

From the air, the footprint of development reveals itself in a tic-tac-toe grid of oil service roads slicing into wild country, in the silver glint of pipelines and heavy equipment.

On the ground, a sign at one of the oldest operations, Syncrude-Canada’s Mildred Lake mine north of Fort McMurray, assures visitors that there is nothing modest about the place.

“Since operations began in 1978, we’ve moved over 1.4 billion tons of overburden,” the sign reads, referring to the rock and soil over bitumen deposits. “This is more dirt than was moved for the Great Wall of China, the Suez Canal, the Great Pyramid of Cheops and the 10 largest dams in the world, combined!”

The disturbance is so extensive that the United Nations Environment Program has placed Alberta’s tar sands oil field on its list of 100 hot spots of environmental change, a roster that includes the Yangtze River Valley, drowned by China’s Three Gorges Dam.

In coming years, oil development is expected to spider-web across a landscape more than three times as large as Lake Tahoe, making the Alberta oil field the largest industrial zone on Earth. Wetlands vital to migratory ducks and geese, trails worn smooth by centuries of wood buffalo and wilderness ponds where loons lift their crazy laughs will be lost.

“There is nothing on this planet that compares with the destruction going on there,” said David Schindler, an ecology professor at the University of Alberta, Edmonton. “If there were a global prize for unsustainable development, the oil sands would be the clear winner.”

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You can sense it in the frustration of biology professor Suzanne Bayley with the U.S. motorists who are fueling the boom.

“What bugs us the most is Americans are not really even attempting to conserve,” said Bayley, who teaches at the University of Alberta, Edmonton. “Why should we destroy our environment for a thousand years for people who are on a binge?”

With 5 percent of the world’s people, the United States burns 44 percent of the world’s gasoline, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. No nation plays a bigger role in keeping America on the road than Canada, which exports around 2.2 million barrels of oil a day to the United States, roughly a third of it from Alberta’s tar sands.

Here is the full article.

United States Supreme Court won't review a $1 Billion Dollar Ruling against Teck Cominco Mining Corporation for Clean-up of Columbia River

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Supreme Court declined Monday to intervene in an unusual case in which a Canadian company was held subject to the U.S. Superfund law for polluting the Columbia River in the Pacific Northwest.

A federal appeals court last year ruled that Teck Cominco Ltd., based in Vancouver, British Columbia, could have to pay a share of an estimated $1 billion to clean up Lake Roosevelt, a 150-mile stretch of the upper Columbia River behind Grand Coulee Dam.

The Columbia has been polluted for a century with heavy metals and black slag leaching downstream from Teck Cominco's lead and zinc smelter complex in Trail, British Columbia, 10 miles north of the U.S. border and about 135 miles north of Spokane.

The company asked the justices to overturn the appeals court ruling, arguing that the Superfund law does not apply to a Canadian company discharging hazardous waste unless it "arranged" (whereas acts of stupidity are okay?) for the contamination to end up in the United States. The pollution resulted from an "action of nature" (the force of gravity to be specific)— the southward flow of the river from Canada into the United States — the company said in court papers.

Solicitor General Paul Clement advised the court not take case for technical legal reasons. But Clement noted that the company discharged millions of tons of hazardous substances into the river just north of the border for 90 years. Likening the discharges to firing a gun across the border, Clement said that "it was inevitable that the river would carry the pollution directly into the United States."

U.S. and Canadian business interests as well as the British Columbia government urged the court to take the case. Left untouched, the appeals court ruling would complicate international relations and affect trade, they said in several briefs in support of Teck Cominco.

Under orders from provincial government regulators, Teck Cominco stopped discharging slag into the river in 1994 after Canadian studies showed the waste was toxic to fish and aquatic life.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency last year reached a voluntary settlement with Teck Cominco to study the extent and seriousness of the contamination. The company will pay about $20 million for the study.

(Had this happened in Chile the government would have taken care of it: Chile's Government fines itself for polluting the environment )

Here is the full article.

Chamber of Deputies Approves Chile Whale Sanctuary

[December 10, 2007] The Chamber of Deputies on Friday voted unanimously to preserve Chile's territorial waters as a whale sanctuary. With the creation of the whale sanctuary, all whale hunting will be prohibited in all of Chile’s waters.

The proposal, first sent to President Michelle Bachelet in a letter, was presented to the government last Monday (ST, Dec. 4). It now waits to be passed in the Senate.

The deputies' legislation included the Antarctic and islands zones in the most southern part of Chile as part of the whale sanctuary. The measure’s chief sponsor, Dep. Enrique Accorsi (PPD), said the deputies want to include this region in the whale sanctuary because it is an important refugee for Chile's migratory whale population. “No one should be allowed to assassinate whales in this region under any excuse,” he said.

The initiative, first put forth in October, is backed by more than 90 conservation and tourism organizations in Chile and abroad. It was spearheaded by Chile's Cetacean Conservation Center (CCC) with the support of Chile's National Confederation of Artesanal Fishermen (CONAPACH).

The whale sanctuary initiative has taken on greater urgency in light of Japan’s recently announced whaling expedition in the Antarctic, Australia and New Zealand. Not withstanding Japan's claim that “scientific research” is the reason for the whale hunt, much of their catch is sold in the marketplace. Accorsi spoke out about the Japanese on Friday.

“With this deception, the Japanese government is concealing a cruel profit from a likewise cruel market which, inevitably, will become extinct,” he said. Accorsi expressed his hope that the disappearance of whales is not inevitable.

Here is the full article.

Chile's interior minister resigns, second in month - Chileans dissatisfied they are not seeing more benefits from the copper bonanza

SANTIAGO, Chile (Reuters) - With her embattled government about halfway through its four-year term, Chilean President Michelle Bachelet accepted the resignation of Interior Minister Belisario Velasco on Thursday.

It was the second resignation by a Chilean minister in the past month, after Bachelet's top spokesman, Ricardo Lagos Weber, quit in early December, leaving the government 21 months into office.

"The president has signaled she wants to start the second half (of her term)," said Velasco. "We had a pleasant meeting this afternoon in which I handed her my resignation, non-negotiable, as the minister of the interior and ... it was accepted."

Bachelet's office did not announce a successor to replace Velasco.

Chile's first woman president's approval ratings are slipping amid rising crime and many voters blame her for failing to fix major problems with the public transit system in the capital of Santiago.

Chileans are also dissatisfied that they are not seeing more benefits from a copper bonanza that has driven the economy to three years of strong growth.

El Mercurio newspaper, citing sources in the government palace, La Moneda, said on its Web site that the outgoing Velasco was upset about being marginalized in important decisions.

His resignation came amid strong rumors of pending changes in the Cabinet. Bachelet's transport minister, Rene Cortazar, also offered his resignation in December, but she refused to accept it.

She last reshuffled her Cabinet in March last year, when she fired the defense, presidency, justice and transport ministers. She also split the duties of the mining ministry, creating a post of energy minister.

Here is the full article.

Revisiting the Valdivia CELCO industrial spill of 2005

For those that say the production of paper products is more important than the environmental impact they cause ... Here is the result. The images of what happened in Valdivia, Chile ... Black necked swans, falling on houses, dead, without life...

Background Reading:

CHILE: Pulp Mill Reopens Despite Charges of Killing Swans

The imminent reopening of a pulp mill that polluted a nature sanctuary in Chile has further fueled environmentalists' criticisms of the Ricardo Lagos administration -- and is setting the scene for future conflicts with indigenous and fishing communities.

José Araya, leader of the organisation Action for the Swans of Valdivia, told Tierramérica that the government's administrative resolutions on the matter have favoured businessman Anacleto Angelini, owner of the Celulosa Arauco y Constitución (Celco) plant, to the detriment of environmental standards.

(Corporations tend to get preferential treatment from the Government in Chile compared to the United States and Europe: US Environmental Protection Agency forces paper companies to begin $400 million clean-up project to deal with PCBs in the Fox River )

Celco announced on Aug. 10 that by the end of the month it would reopen the factory, located near the Carlos Anwandter Nature Sanctuary on the Río Cruces, in the southern province of Valdivia. It will start at 59 percent of its productive capacity, and is expected to reach full operation -- 550,000 tonnes of cellulose annually -- by January 2006.

On Jun. 8, the company voluntarily shut down the plant, in the wake of the scandal about altering the scientific report on which the Supreme Court of Justice based its ruling acquitting Celco of the massive die-off of swans in the nature sanctuary, and revoking the factory shutdown ordered by a lower court.

Celco's lawyers presented the Court with its own interpretation of the scientific report, which was written by experts at the University of Concepción, instead of providing the report itself.

Although the Court recognised the ploy, it did not change its ruling. On Aug. 5 the Angelini group received the backing of President Lagos, who said in Valdivia that the pulp mill should reopen its doors if it obeyed environmental standards.

The Río Cruces sanctuary was home to Latin America's greatest concentration of black-necked swans (Cygnus malencoriphus), with some 6,000 of these birds. Since October 2004, experts began to notice that many of the swans and other species were dying due to the waste from the cellulose plant dumped into the area's waters.

More than 500 black-necked swans died, and today in the marshes there are only 300, because the rest migrated as a result of the dwindling supply of the plant that serves as the birds' main sustenance, due to contamination from the factory, according to a study published in April by the Southern University of Valdivia.

Chile's National Commission on the Environment, CONAMA, had closed the factory on Jan. 18, but then authorised its reopening on Feb. 16.

The regional delegation of CONAMA on Aug. 10 gave its implicit approval of the reopening by indicating that a Jun. 6 resolution remains in effect that obligates Celco to maintain reduced output as long as it fails to comply with some of the environmental standards.

In Araya's opinion, these administrative resolutions are illegal. "According to all the precedents presented by citizens, recognised by the national political arena, this factory necessarily should be subject to a new environmental impact study."

The activist rejected the arguments by the factory's supporters in defence of the 300 direct jobs at Celco, and another 2,000 indirect jobs in the forestry sector.

"What needs to be done is a complete assessment of the pulp mill's social costs. Here there is an environmental cost that citizens are paying, that the country's natural heritage is paying. There is also a social cost, for the effects on (farming and tourism) activities of other residents of Valdivia," Araya said.

President Lagos supported the idea of building a channel so that the industrial liquid waste that Celco has been dumping in the Río Cruces would be diverted to the Pacific Ocean instead, off the coastal town of Queule, 80 km north of Valdivia.

The production of kraft cellulose from pine and eucalyptus is destined entirely for exports for making paper. The whitening technique, known as elemental chlorine free, is one of the most widely used in the world, and is based on chlorine dioxide.

While Lagos gave his blessing to the channel in the nearby coastal village of La Barra, an assembly of artisanal fisherfolk, environmentalists, residents and representatives of other groups rejected that solution.

One outspoken opponent is Alfredo Seguel, leader of the Coordinator of Territorial Entities, an umbrella group of more than 20 Mapuche indigenous communities, including the Lafkenche, whose members live in coastal areas.

"The people most affected would be the Lafkenches. There are precedents that cellulose, despite all the technology being used, is always going to contaminate. Here it would harm ecosystems, food sovereignty and also the cultural and religious rights of the Mapuche communities and of peasant farmers and fishers," Seguel told Tierramérica.

The Angelini group wants to divert the Celco wastewater to the ocean because it is the cheapest option, as the channel would cost 45 million dollars, while the construction of a closed circuit for eliminating the waste in the factory itself would cost 120 million dollars, said the indigenous leader.

Celco has responded by saying it complies with all of CONAMA's requirements for correcting the contamination over three phases.

Here is the full article.

CELCO anti-duct environmental groups must overcome challenging legal hurdles

Officials from Chile’s National Fishing Service (Sernapesca) told the Santiago Times Thursday that efforts by the Committee of the Defense of the Sea and Mehuín’s indigenous community to block a controversial waste duct project in Region XIV face an uncertain legal future.

Gabriel González, the chief of staff for Sernapesca’s undersecretary, visited the Mehuín area last week to hear the group’s concerns about coastal water pollution. The fishing village has been at the center of a bitter conflict since forestry company Celulosa Arauco (CELCO) first tried to build a waste disposal duct into its bay in 1996.

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That question is the heart of the issue. The new amendment, entitled the Law of Maritime Areas for Original Populations, stipulates that unclaimed waters be reserved for Chile’s indigenous fishing communities. Presently, the country’s fishing waters are parceled into “Areas of Use” that are assigned to a particular zone’s independent fishermen. According to Sernapesca regulations, the Areas of Use are reserved for the activities of Chile’s nearly 60,000 registered artesian fishers – and are non-transferable.

Eliab Viguera, president of the Committee for the Defense of the Sea, believes that Mehuín’s fishermen’s unions forfeited their right to the zone’s Area of Use by agreeing to cooperate in CELCO’s project, which opponents claim would destroy the area’s marine life and thus deprive the region’s fishing communities of their source of livelihood.

Consequently, he claims that the new provision should “automatically reserve the Area of Use of the Mehuín sector to the Lafquenche community fishermen, whose wish is to preserve their traditional way of life, not convert themselves into CELCO employees.”

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The Lafquenche community is not the only group that believes it has a valid claim to the area.

CELCO maintains that it reached a mutually-beneficially contract with the fishermen of Mehuín that will allow their waste duct project to move forward. The agreement, announced in October, paid the village’s fishermen’s unions US$8.9 million in exchange for their cooperation in the project, prompting accusations the company had “bought the conscience” of the local community.

CELCO, for its part, has consistently justified its strategy, despite recent demonstrations against the company in neighboring villages (ST, Dec. 3).

“We have reached an important long-term agreement with the fishermen of Mehuín, and we will not accept people taking advantage of the company’s willingness to engage in dialogue and reach agreements,” said Angel Romano, CELCO head of public relations for the Los Ríos region.

The company has until April 2009 to submit its Study of Environmental Impact for the project. The Committee for the Defense of the Sea and allied organizations hope to prevent CELCO from realizing even that initial step towards building the duct.

Here is the full article.

Oil Slick Threatens Patagonia Beaches in the Chubut Province of Argentina

Buenos Aires - At least 500 water birds have died in a huge oil slick washing up on the beaches of Patagonia and threatening southern Argentinia's storehouse of biodiversity, media reports said Friday.

The 15-square-kilometre slick was discovered Thursday in the Atlantic near the city Caleta Cordova in Chubut Province, and has covered at least four kilometres of beach, the reports said.

Patagonia is home to penguins and many rare bird species. The president of a local citizens group, Rene Tula, spoke of a 'serious tragedy.'

The pending environmental disaster has triggered an investigation and prompted environmental volunteers to the rescue on the beach, where they have been shovelling up oil clumps.

The central government in Buenos Aires has launched an emergency plan in cooperation with the Chubut government and ecology groups.

Investigators plan to use satellite photos of various firms in the region to identify the culprit. A smaller oil slick threatened the coast of Caleta Cordova in 2003.

Here is the full article.

The high human cost of inverted logic - policymakers assert that environmental protection, not environmental degradation, obstructs economic growth.

As world leaders meet in Bali to discuss Earth's rising temperatures, climate change is emerging as the central threat to our world's economic growth. The unprecedented attention to the issue is timely, but the crucial question is what national policy leaders will actually do to confront the underlying causes of climate change.

The root cause of climate change is environmental neglect, and related energy inefficiency accompanying the drive for rapid growth. Sadly, most policymakers and their economic advisers have wrongly held the view that it's environmental protection, not environmental degradation, that obstructs growth. This inverted logic comes at a high human cost.

While the world economy expanded sevenfold over the past century, global population increased from 1.6 to 6.5 billion, the world lost half the tropical forests, and carbon dioxide levels rose to 380 parts per million (from the pre-industrial 280 ppm). A rise in temperature of 0.74 degrees Celsius in the past century is causing sea levels to rise, melting glaciers and destroying biodiversity. Once CO2 levels exceed 450 ppm, the change in temperature could top the pre-industrial era by two degrees Celsius, enough to trigger massive climatic instability.

Aside from the global impact, the local damages of environmental devastation are great too. The losses in health and worker productivity from just particulate air pollution amount to 2-3% of GNP in some Asian countries. Water stress and losses from water pollution pose immediate threats to health and well-being, and such distress is on the rise. Deforestation and soil erosion are compounding the damages of natural disasters such as floods and wind storms - especially for the poorest, most likely to be in harm's way.

Along with this picture of environmental decay, there is the story of growth delivering social gains for the people. Where it has occurred, sustained growth has been the most powerful means to reduce poverty. East Asia may be the most striking example of the gains, where growth averaged more than 8% yearly for the past 25 years, and some 600 million people were lifted out of poverty. Developing countries still have to grow a great deal as their average income is still one-sixth that of rich nations.

So the question is how a country can continue to grow quickly without allowing environmental neglect to derail the process. The remarkable fact is that taking preventive measures to address the environmental concerns is a lot cheaper than waiting for the damage to occur and then trying to take curative actions - whether it's curbing water pollution or putting in adaptive reinforcement of structures in disaster-prone areas.

Here is the full article.

Pots and pans against climate change - Santiago restaurant owner battles global warming

To minimize its impact on the climate, a restaurant in Santiago is making more efficient use of heat and energy, purchasing "clean" electricity and carbon certificates.

The vegetarian restaurant El Huerto, here in the Chilean capital, is the country's first to take steps to reduce its climate-changing emissions.

(Read more about the restaurant here: Restaurante El Huerto )

And now, thanks to an independent initiative, anyone can join the effort via the Internet.

El Huerto, with a seating capacity for 100 diners, opened its doors in 1980 in the wealthy neighborhood of Providencia and today enjoys fame among those who love healthy food and nature.

Faithful to their ecological conscience, owners José Fliman and Nicole Mintz decided in June to go beyond their famed artichoke pies and grilled vegetables to neutralizing their carbon footprint. They wanted to reduce the amount of carbon dioxide -- the main greenhouse gas -- produced by their kitchen and by the service to their customers.

"We wanted to reduce our energy consumption and compensate for what we couldn't save," Fliman, who left the process in the hands of the non-governmental Institute of Ecological Policy (IEP), told Tierramérica.

The IEP first conducted an energy analysis of El Huerto, which was found to emit 64.65 tons annually of carbon dioxide through its consumption of electricity generated from fossil fuels, and direct consumption of fossil fuels like natural gas, paraffin, coal and benzene.

Then IEP drew up an energy saving plan for 12 percent monthly, providing practical advice and workshops to change the habits of the more than 20 workers at the busy restaurant.

"The presentation that they gave us about climate change made us aware of the seriousness of the problem," server Isabel Carvajal told Tierramérica.

The standard light bulbs were replaced with more efficient bulbs, leaks in the building were sealed to reduce the need for heaters in the winter, and awnings were installed on the windows to keep out the sun's heat in the summer.

The kitchen staff now covers the pots to reduce the time needed to cook the food, hot water is stored in thermoses, and unnecessary lights are turned off.

The final evaluation of the process will be done in November 2008. Meanwhile, the restaurant's owners decided to compensate for all the carbon dioxide emitted in 2007 by purchasing "clean" electricity and carbon bonds, earmarked to finance projects with low or zero production of greenhouse gases.

El Huerto purchases electricity from El Rincón, a hydroelectric plant that makes use of the natural energy in the flow of the rivers, without using dams to store water in reservoirs.

In August, the IEP certified that El Rincón produces clean energy, respecting the environment and the population, according to the standards of the European Green Electricity Network.

El Huerto also purchases carbon bonds from Climate Care, which utilizes the revenue to implement clean development projects in the name of its clients.

The restaurant paid 770 dollars for the "carbon compensation" for 2007. On Nov. 30 it paid about 295 dollars to El Rincón, which generates 2.4 kilowatts per hour. Climate Care, which issues certificates or permits to emit one ton of carbon for the price of 15 dollars, is due around 475 dollars.

Here is the full article.

Hydro-development & mining - of no benefit to Orissa, India's rural people

State Of Disgrace

Excerpted

Even on his pet industrialisation front, Navin’s report card is singularly bare. The ambitious Posco steel plant at Paradeep, the biggest of them all, has run into such rough weather that it is unlikely to take off in the foreseeable future. After burning its fingers in Kalinganagar, the government is wary of using force to break the resistance. It has even stepped aside and allowed the company to deal directly with the people for land. But that does not appear to have helped matters. The other two big-ticket investment proposals – Vedanta Alumina in Lanjigarh (Kalahandi) and Mittal steel plant in Patna (Keonjhar) – have fared no better. If anything, the movement against these two plants is getting stronger by the day. The mega UAIL alumina project, of course, has been in a limbo for nearly a decade now.

Kalahandi, Raygada, Jharsuguda, Sundargarh, Keonjhar – you name it, the resistance against industry is spreading rapidly throughout the state. People are skeptical about claims that industry will bring jobs for those who are going to be displaced. Similar promises made by industries that have already gone on stream have not been kept, so there’s no reason to believe that things would be different now or in the future. If anything, the scope for employing local people – a significant proportion of whom are tribals and semi literates – is diminishing fast with high technology and increased mechanisation. The locals see the promise of jobs is a mere ploy to make them vacate their land.

In the aftermath of the Kalinganagar bloodbath, the Navin Patnaik government sought to assuage the hurt of the people by coming out with a rehabilitation and reconstruction (R & R) policy. Though claimed as the best in the country, there were few takers for this sop and understandably so. After all, nearly a decade after being driven out of their homes to make way for the joint venture Nilachal Ispat Nigam Limited (NINL), just 115 of the 650 families have been rehabilitated so far. Even those who got the mandatory 10 decimal piece of land are yet to get the patta. If this was the more recent experience, the past experience has been much worse. By the government’s own admission, over 9, 000 families displaced by the first major developmental project in the state, the Hirakud dam, are yet to be rehabilitated.

Navin Patnaik may have become the darling of industrialists and the pink papers, but his affair with them has soured his relationship with the people of the state. If he has acquired even an iota of political understanding during his seven-year rule as Chief Minister, he can see that the industrialisation drive could well prove to be his undoing. May be he has already realised that. But so powerful are the forces that he has unleashed with his single-minded pursuit of industrialisation in the last three years that it would be very difficult for him to put the genie back in the bottle.

Here is the full article.

Chile’s National Environmental Commission (CONAMA) launches new website that contains detailed information about Chile’s most egregious polluters.

(Nov. 30, 2007) Chile’s National Environmental Commission (CONAMA) launched Thursday a new website that contains detailed information about Chile’s most egregious polluters. According to CONAMA, the webpage is intended to both improve transparency and increase citizens’ awareness about environmental issues.

The website, dubbed Emissions Register and Contaminants Transference (RETC), will contain profiles of more than 5,000 businesses based on information from 2005 to the present. Each profile will include details of the companies’ emissions records, incidents of chemical or other potentially hazardous leaks, and energy efficiency records. Additionally, the web site will include a forum where citizens can ask follow-up questions regarding the posted information.

CONAMA officials say that the site’s information, available only in Spanish, will be complied from other governmental organizations. For example, emissions information will come from the Health Ministry, National Statistics Institute (INE), the Santiago Metropolitan Region Sanitation Authority, and the Inter-ministerial Secretariat of Transportation Planning (SECTRA). Still, officials say that the data will not be fully available until mid December.

CONAMA also said the website has thus far received more than US$1 million in financing from a variety of domestic and international organizations, but did not disclose the names of specific donors.

Environmental NGOs reacted favorably to the creation of this new webpage, which they say could revolutionize citizen’s knowledge about Chile’s environment.

“This is the tip of the iceberg in terms of understanding the country’s environmental conditions. The fact that we now have access to this information allows us to become far more familiar with the country’s reality,” said Samuel Leiva, a Greenpeace Chile representative. “We will also be able to see if companies improve or worsen their records.” Leiva said not only Chile’s government, but NGOs and common Chilean citizens will now be able to monitor business practices.

For more information about the new website: http://www.retc.cl

Here is the full article.

Fighting the beaver invasion in South America

Transplant 25 pairs of beavers from their native North America to the southernmost part of South America, wait 61 years, and what do you get?

Entire forests of 300- to 400-year-old trees wiped out by a beaver population estimated at more than 100,000.

That's why one wildlife biologist from Bismarck spent two weeks on Tierra del Fuego last month as part of an international team of experts, who got a first-hand look at the massive destruction.

John Paulson, a district supervisor for the U.S. Department of Agriculture Wildlife Services in Bismarck, was among the four wildlife managers who were brought in to work up a feasibility study on eradicating the beavers, which are considered an invasive species in South America.

The leader of the four-person team was a Ph.D. from New Zealand. One team member was a Ph. D. from Australia and another a Ph.D. from Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y.

"All three are experts in the field of eradicating invasive species off of islands," Paulson said in an interview Wednesday. "I was honored to be with these guys."

What Paulson, who earned a bachelor's degree in wildlife management from the University of Minnesota, brought to the table was 20 years of working with beavers and a background in explosives.

"If we are going to bring any habitat back, we have to remove the beaver dams," he said. And blowing up the dam is the simplest was to dismantle the dams.

The trees most impacted by the beaver assault are the lenga, or white beech, Paulson said.

"They are a very sensitive tree to water, and the flooding from beaver dams is killing the trees," Paulson explained.

Unlike cottonwoods and similar trees in North Dakota, draining the water hasn't brought the lengas back.

"What they are seeing is zero revegetation," Paulson said.

And those beaver dams also are hurting tourism in the region, which is a destination for fly-fishers in search of trophy trout. Beaver dams prevent trout from migrating to spawn.

The island of Tierra del Fuego, which is about a third of the size of North Dakota, also is bustling spot for tour ships and penguin-watching.

"Skiing is big, too. There are ski resorts. It is on the southern tip of the Andes Mountains," Paulson said. Antarctica is only 300 miles south of Tierra del Fuego, he added. There also is a small timber industry.

"But it's the ecosystem damage that's so devastating," he said.

With no natural predators, and only a few trappers working the area, beavers are booming. Estimates put beaver colonies, or families, at one per linear kilometer of stream. No comparable numbers exist for North Dakota's beaver population, but Paulson guesses maybe one beaver colony per five to 10 miles of North Dakota waterway.

Their hosts flew and drove the team members over and throughout the region.

"The destruction and devastation there is far more than we see in the U.S.," Paulson said. "It was such ideal habitat when the beavers were brought over: food, shelter and water."

Their workdays typically started about 8 or 8:30 a.m. and ended about 8 p.m. Dinner, as is typical is the region, was after 9 p.m.

"I ate a lot of things I didn't know what I was eating, but all of it was good," Paulson said. "I certainly didn't lose any weight."

Spring was just starting during the team's trip. "The climate is similar to ours, but the winter is only two to three months," he said.

Paulson was one of two on the team who didn't speak Spanish.

"They had translators at all of the meetings. You'd get the meaning of what they said, but never all of it," he explained.

He also had praise for the resident biologists that had been dealing with the problem.

"Some talented biologists live there. They were very knowledgeable, cooperative and accommodating. We were treated hospitably, and we worked hard," he said.

The governments of Chile and Argentina paid for their trip, meals and lodging.

Beavers are working their way northward.

"They have found a few colonies on the peninsula (of mainland South America), and fishermen have caught beavers in their nets that were swimming from the island (Tierra del Fuego) to the peninsula," Paulson said.

Here is the full article.