photo by elycefeliz (Flickr Creative Commons)

By now many of you have probably heard of ‘greenwashing’, the practice by which businesses or organizations present an environmentally friendly image without backing it up with concrete green credentials. BP’s green flower logo and ‘Beyond Petroleum’ slogan are blatant examples of greenwashing. Perhaps even more bewildering and maddening is the fact that the production of certain types of so-called biofuels can result in more greenhouse gas emissions and environmental destruction than that of fossil fuels.

But what about actual green washing – as in cleaning our homes, clothes and bodies in environmentally friendly ways?

According to a piece in the Independent, what’s green or environmentally friendly, in terms of household cleaning products, isn’t always that simple.

Mick Bremans, chief executive of Ecover – the king of green cleaning – suggests that it’s actually their intent and effort to make products with the least amount of negative impact on the environment as possible that gives them credibility:

In fact, Bremans is making the point that no product, be it a lavatory cleaner, a hybrid car or a locally sourced punnet of strawberries, is technically environmentally friendly. Everything we make takes its toll on the planet in production and leaves its mark when disposed of. Instead, Ecover describes its products as “ecological”, to communicate that they are kinder to the environment than comparable products.

–Independent

Those are pretty fair statements, though I wonder how much we actually need strong cleaners in the home anyway.

From another article in the Independent:

For completely toxin-free and natural cleaning products, websites such as World Watch advocate making solutions out of common household items such as vinegar.

That’s right – regular, natural, inexpensive vinegar (white, not balsamic). It absorbs odors, is an effective glass cleaner, fights mold and mildew, and is a great fabric-softener. Baking soda is another good household cleaner.

No one is claiming (I hope) that you can disinfect surgical equipment with lemon juice, but rather that the need for potentially harmful, industrial strength cleaners and deodorizers in the home – such as bleach and chemical air fresheners – has been highly overstated by the companies selling these products.

For more tips on greener and safer products for everyday cleaning see this article from EmaxHealth:

Green Home Cleaners Can Replace Cancer Causing Chemicals

Additional resources:

Worldwatch Institute – Cleaning Products: What’s Behind the Shine?

Tennessee journalist – Five easy ways to help the Gulf

photo by Yersinia pestis (Yersinia on Flickr Creative Commons)

Butterflies in the UK are on the decline due to human activity and now the British public is being urged to participate in a nationwide survey called The Big Butterfly Count.

During Save Our Butterflies Week – July 24^th to August 1^st – residents of the UK are asked to take 15 minutes to go out and count butterflies in cities, parks, forests and fields.

But it’s not just because butterflies are pretty insects, they also play valuable roles in ecosystems and are seen as environmental bellwethers.

From an article in the Guardian:

Butterflies and moths are sensitive to environmental change, which makes them a good indicator of the state of the countryside. They are essential for the pollination of plants, and caterpillars provide food for many birds and other wildlife.

The past three years have seen butterfly numbers in the UK drop by unprecedented levels. During the past 50 years more than three quarters of British butterfly species have declined, according to a piece in the Telegraph.

The decline is blamed on a loss of the insects’ natural habitat, but also on fashions in UK gardening, such as landscaping public parks or building decking and small houses in private gardens.

President of the Butterfly Conservation, Sir David Attenborough, believes that besides being an important environmental survey, The Big Butterfly Count ‘should be great fun’.

In a reversal of Britain’s butterfly and moth situation, colorful European damselflies have been invading southern England. Damselflies were wiped out from the UK by flooding in the winter of 1953.

Their return is believed to be part of a larger trend of animals migrating due to climate change.

From an article in the Independent:

In fact, the march of the damselflies is only one aspect of a much wider, continuing invasion of southern Britain, possibly caused by the warming climate, by a range of continental creatures which can fly – both insects and birds. Insects in particular are flooding in, and over the past decade a whole series of continental bees, wasps, moths, butterflies, dragonflies and grasshoppers has appeared here.

Graham Land

Additional resources:

bigbutterflycount.org

photo by IUCNweb (Flickr Creative Commons)

The Economist recently featured an interview with ‘green economist’ Pavan Sukhdev on their regular segment ‘Tea with The Economist’.

Pavan Sukhdev is a study leader for The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity study (TEEB), a report commissioned by the G8+5 and funded by the European Union. He is special advisor and head of the UN Environment Program’s (UNEP) Green Economy Initiative, also funded by the EU/EC and Norway.

In the following video interview, Sukhdev discusses natural capital and economic as well as political solutions to preserving and encouraging biodiversity an environmentally conscious business practices.

Pavan Sukhdev on the green economy

The head of the UN Environmental Programme’s Green Economy Initiative on how to assign an economic value to nature

Graham Land

photo by Revolve Eco-Rally (Flickr Creative Commons)

The Prince of Wales, heir to the British throne, has founded an international project against ecological disaster, the International Sustainability Unit.

Prince Charles has long been involved in environmental issues and warned last year that there were less than 100 months left to avoid irreversible damage due to climate change.

The unit aims to address the depletion of the world’s natural capital by helping to create a consensus as to the best ways to enhance long-term food, water and energy security.

–Spokesman for Prince Charles

Besides climate change, other environmental issues close to the Prince’s heart include rainforest conservation, stopping overfishing, the preservation of ecosystems and promoting sustainable agriculture.

Read more on this story in the Telegraph:

Prince of Wales opens new front in global warming fight

Graham Land

Additional resources:

The Prince’s Charities International Sustainability Unit

photo by EnergyTomorrow (Flickr Creative Commons)

Due in part to the popularity of the environmental documentary film Gasland, the practice of natural gas extraction using hydraulic fracturing, alternately known as ‘fracking’ or ‘fracing’, has been the subject of much debate.

The process of hydraulic fracturing involves drilling into shale reservoirs and creating fractures by pumping in water. The principle environmental concerns regarding fracking are the contamination of wells and aquifers with chemicals used in the drilling process, air quality issues and the mismanagement of solid waste.

The spread of fracking for shale gas in the United States has already partially revolutionized the natural gas industry there and the process has both advocates and detractors. But what about in the rest of the world? With much of Europe’s gas being imported from Russia and oil getting a particularly bad rap due to the recent oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, might European nations turn to hydraulic fracturing to access gas from shale deposits? Some think so.

Others are less convinced, such as Katinka Barysch from the Centre for European Reform – a London-based pro-European integration think tank – see laws, infrastructure, economic conditions and other factors as hindrances to fracking taking off on the continent:

A couple of wells in Hungary have been abandoned as unpromising. In southern Sweden, environmental concerns may make gas extraction impossible irrespective of whether the geology proves suitable. In Poland, the country considered most promising, not a single well has been drilled so far.

However, Poland seems to be poised to start fracking. Read more about plans for hydraulic fracking in Poland in this Forbes article.

For more on the unfolding fracking controversy in the United States, see the following Al Jazeera English video report.

Gas exploitation angers residents

Graham Land

Additional resources:

Scientific American – What the Frack? Natural Gas from Subterranean Shale Promises U.S. Energy Independence–With Environmental Costs

Economist – Gas or hot air?

Economist – Oil companies dash for gas

source: gaslandthemovie.com

Gasland is a documentary film written and directed by Josh Fox which explores the practice of hydraulic fracturing, a widespread method used in drilling for natural gas in the United States.

Hydraulic fracturing, often referred to as ‘fracking’ (yes, like in Battlestar Galactica), fractures rock in order to get at natural gas deposits in shale reservoirs. Environmental concerns associated with fracking include the contamination of groundwater, issues with air quality, greenhouse gas emissions and areas surrounding sites becoming polluted with natural gas and toxic chemicals used in the hydraulic fracturing process.

Gasland starts out a bit haphazard, as if Fox doesn’t really know what he’s doing, but after a short while it really picks up. He’s been offered a tidy sum to allow natural gas drilling rights on his property in rural Pennsylvania, but has heard bad things about the process and the affects it has on the environment and on the health of the people who live near the gas wells. So he decides to check it out.

What Fox discovers is that since the Bush-Cheney administration took office in 2001, American land, private and perhaps more shockingly, supposedly protected federal public land has been extensively opened up for fracking, and made exempt from the Clean Air and Clean Water Acts. The list of complaints is as long as it is shocking: gas clouds hanging over someone’s house, household water that smells like turpentine, highly flammable natural gas coming out of faucets and a variety of serious health complaints.

That’s what you get when you let an industry regulate itself and cut the claws off the Environmental Protection Agency. BP, Exxon and Halliburton make tons of money, ruin environments and destroy lives.

Watch the trailer for Gasland below.

Graham Land

Additional resources:

Official Gasland website

Gasland review from Variety

Image Source: Flickr. By: Bas Kers.

Although Roundup has a reputation of being one of the top weed killers on the market and much safer than other chemical alternatives, there are still some stubborn weeds out there that are resistant to Roundup and have actually evolved over the past 34 years (since Roundup’s introduction). Unfortunately, this weed evolution has forced farmers (and others) to resort to some outdated and environmentally unsafe weed killing methods, particularly in the southern states.

Right now, there are at least 10 weed species in 22 states that refuse to let Roundup get the best of them, including Palmer Amaranth in Arkansas, and Water Hemp and Marestail in Illinois. All 3 of those species are known to grow very big, very quickly and produce tens of thousands of seeds at a time.

Now, the way Roundup works is it’s absorbed through the plants’ leaves and kills them by blocking the production of proteins they need to grow. Oh, and according to the EPA, you don’t really need to worry about the toxicity level of it because once it’s used, it attaches to the soil real quick and becomes inactive.

Monsanto (the company that introduced Roundup) also introduced seeds specifically created to survive Roundup, which means farmers could spray Roundup on their crops to remove the weeds growing alongside them. Today, Monsanto’s Roundup Ready seeds make up 90% of the nation’s soybean crops and about 70% of the corn and cotton.

However, as with all things in Nature, the weeds will learn how to adapt. The more the weed killer is used on them, the more they are able to change and evolve—and that is exactly what is happening. To compensate cotton farmers for damages and further herbicide use, the company is paying them $12 per acre.

To make matters worse, farmers are already resorting to the use of older chemicals, such as dicamba and 2,4-D. This has forced Monsanto and other companies to develop new seeds designed to be resistant to these herbicides, too. Both dicamba and 2,4-D (which is an ingredient in Agent Orange) can easily go beyond the areas where they are sprayed, thus posing a threat to nearby crops and other wild plants, which in turn could also threaten animals, too.

There is hope, though. Australia has been dealing with a similar problem since the mid-90s and developed other (safer) methods of weed control. One of the methods involves planting cover crops, such as rye, to keep the weeds at bay during winter and other times when corn or other crops aren’t in season.

It’s hard to say what the future of Roundup will be or if there will be a better solution for weed killing, but we can only hope they won’t depend on the use of older herbicides and chemicals for too long.

By Heidi Marshall

photo by Simone Ramella (source: Flickr Creative Commons)

In the 70s and 80s acid rain received lots of attention for being a scourge upon forests and freshwater lakes and streams, poisoning aquatic life, insects and humans as well as corroding monuments and buildings in urban areas.
Acid rain never went away, but its levels changed and its sources shifted. You see, acid rain is produced when either sulfur-oxides or nitrogen oxides interact with water in the atmosphere, reducing its ph levels and making it more acidic – resulting in nitric and sulfuric acids.

In the 70s and 80s the main source of acid rain was sulfur (or sulphur in the UK) emissions from coal plants. When the coal plants’ chimneys were fitted with flue gas desulphurisation equipment, enforced by environmental legislation in Europe and America, sulphur emissions went down – by as much as 85% in the UK, according to an article in the Independent.

From an article in Scientific American:

…whereas sulfur dioxide emissions decreased almost 70 percent from 1990 to 2008, emissions of one NOx—nitrogen dioxide (NO2)—went down only 35 percent for that same period, and amendment targets have yet to be made, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).

The principal causes of acid rain from nitric acid are gasses released from fertilizers used in industrial agriculture (both runoff and concentrated animal feeding) motor vehicle emissions and power plant emissions – again, coal burning.

Looks like poisonous acid rain is caused by more or less the same things that cause climate change.

As with climate change, Europe is ahead of the US on acid rain legislation. The Gothenburg Protocol to Abate Acidification, Eutrophication and Ground-Level Ozone was passed in 1999 and signed by 49 countries, but not by the US. Since Gothenburg, Europe’s nitrogen emissions have fallen by a third, while the US’s haven’t changed.

An increasing global population means more farming, more cars and more power. The growing acid rain problem – along with climate change and a host of other issues  – strengthens the position that the current models of industry, economic growth and lifestyle are simply unsustainable.

by Graham Land

Additional resources:

Independent – Car fumes raise spectre of 1980s revival nobody wants…acid rain

Telegraph – Acid rain could return because of car fumes

Paul Kingsnorth; photo by London Permaculture (source: Flickr Creative Commons)

UNCIVILISATION – aka the Dark Mountain Festival – took place over the last weekend in May at Llangollen, a small town in northwest Wales on the edge of the Berwyn Mountains. I’ve written a couple of times about the polemical Dark Mountain Project, a post-environmentalist movement that has given up on mainstream environmentalism, activism and politics – but not life, as I’ve been assured by DM founder Paul Kingsnorth – in favor of establishing a new movement and new way of life in the ‘age of decline’, which does not depend on current established economical/political/cultural models.

I did not attend UNCIVILISATION, which included speakers such as George Monbiot, Alistair MacIntosh and Mark Boyle, but I’ve read Kingsnorth’s post-festival blog entries on the Dark Mountain website in which he reflects on the festival and attempts to clarify DM’s evolving position. Here is an excerpt:

We do not dismiss technical or political responses to the crises we face, although we may question the assumptions behind them, and the extent to which they rely on wishful thinking. But they are not the focus of this project. Rather, we invite people to explore certain questions: in what ways are these crises rooted in our cultural assumptions, the stories we have told for generations and the ways in which we have seen the world? How do we disentangle ourselves from those assumptions? How can we forge cultural responses that undermine the poisonous myths we have inherited – the myths of humanity’s centrality, materialism, progress, the separation of ‘people’ from ‘nature’? Where do we find new stories, or old stories whose time has come? What other ways of seeing might alter our understanding of our situation? And how do we help send these stories and ways of seeing out into the world?

–Paul Kingsnorth, Dark Mountain Project

CNN Eco Solutions recently gave Dark Mountain a bit of coverage in a report that is considerably more positive than how they’ve been treated in the British press, particularly from the Guardian’s George Monbiot:

The Dark Mountain Project aims to unite people around the idea that mainstream environmentalism has lost touch with the natural world. It believes that the environmental movement has been co-opted by consumer capitalism and is obsessed with “greener” ways to maintain our standard of living.

It seems that Dark Mountain is less about what to do or what not to do, but more about perspectives and their own interpretation of realism (at the risk of sounding overly postmodern, we all have our own).

The legitimate worry that mainstream greens might have is the risk that DM could potentially draw away political support from their core of supporters and sow cynicism regarding the political process that they are so stiff-upper-lippedly trying to affect. On the other hand, it is obvious that a bit more realism is sorely needed in some cases.

The main difference between the folks at Dark Mountain and the environmental movement they hath forsaken, I believe, is practical rather than ideological. The problems are there, staring us in the face ­– but what do we do about them? Indeed, realistically, what can we do about them?

by Graham Land

Additional resources:

UNCIVILISATION

The Dark Mountain Project

photo by Steve Punter (source: Flickr Creative Commons)

Last week Queensland Alumina Limited was fined $90 thousand Australian (78k USD/63k euros) for an industrial incident that released caustic vapors within 6 km of their Gladstone alumina refinery last year. The company pleaded guilty to the charge of causing serious environmental harm.

According to a report by ABC News Australia, the main section of the refinery had not been inspected or maintained for up to 30 years.

Another Australian aluminum facility, the Rio Tinto Alcan bauxite and alumina mine east of Darwin, is being investigated by the Northern Territory department of resources due to a fuel leak of 70,000 liters, according to a report by the International Business Times.

Since aluminum (or aluminium) isn’t found in nature in its pure form, it is usually mined in the form of a soft ore called bauxite. Once a very difficult and expensive process, aluminum refining is still very energy intensive, requiring lots of power and water. In fact, aluminum used to be more valuable than gold. Now in some places it’s just more valuable than human lives.

Australia is by far the largest producer of bauxite, followed by China, Brazil and India. But it is the last country that has the most controversial bauxite-mining project, located in the eastern state of Orissa.

Vedanta resources, an India-based, partly British-owned mining firm, has been developing bauxite mining projects on tribal lands and plans to establish a mine on a hill which is considered crucial to local ecology, as well as the cultural and physical survival of local tribes. Vedanta has been accused of poisoning the local environment and committing human rights abuses.

Indian and international activist groups, such as Amnesty International and Survival International, have joined the cause of the tribes. Pressure has resulted in the Church of England and the Norwegian state pension fund withdrawing their investments from Vedanta due to ethical concerns.

From an ANI report:

If mining at the hills start, then the water left in the Bauxite, it will not be there. The alumina and aluminium smelters will contaminate the water after their use and the water will get finished in Kalahandi and Orissa.

–Vandana Shiva, activist.

For a well-known activist’s account of the plight of the tribes of Orissa in their desperate struggle to keep their land in tact, read this article in the Guardian entitled ‘The battle for Niyamgiri’ by human rights campaigner Bianca Jagger.

by Graham Land

photo by kqedquest (source: Flickr Creative Commons)

Haulage, or the commercial transport of goods by road, aka road freight, is a little discussed, but important environmental issue. The environmental impact of haulage is considered to be significantly higher than freight by rail or sea, due to its heavy production of pollution and greenhouse gasses. The damage and congestion inflicted upon roads is also an expensive burden on infrastructure.

Haulers – ‘hauliers’ in the UK – drive massive trucks called semis, tractor-trailers, 18 wheelers or big rigs in the US – ‘lorries’ in the UK – loaded with goods for transport from A to B. The haulage industry is well subsidized by many European governments (i.e. taxpayers) but is clearly environmentally unsustainable and inefficient in many cases. In the US, haulers are represented by the Teamsters, one of the largest and most powerful labor unions in the country.

For more information on the environmental impact of haulage check out this website:

Campaign for Better Transport – The facts on haulage

For a humorous take on the problems with haulage, check out this rant from comedian David Mitchell:

David Mitchell’s soap box: I hate lorries

Hauliers, polluting the environment, breaking bridges and slowing down traffic is not your God-given right.

Additional resources:

Guardian environment blog – Cross-channel shopping is the ultimate food miles madness

David Mitchell’s soap box

photo by ProgressOhio (source: Flickr Creative Commons)

A UN report entitled ‘Assessing the Environmental Impacts of Consumption and Production’, released Wednesday, states that eating less meat and dairy is necessary to avoid catastrophic effects of climate change, global hunger and energy shortages.

From an article in the Guardian:

As the global population surges towards a predicted 9.1 billion people by 2050, western tastes for diets rich in meat and dairy products are unsustainable, says the report from United Nations Environment Programme’s (UNEP) international panel of sustainable resource management.

There’s been a bit of a back and forth regarding how much the meat and dairy industries contribute to climate change. Back in March a study was presented to the American Chemical Society by Dr. Frank Mitloehner, which claimed that environmentalists have exaggerated the greenhouse gas emissions of meat and dairy production.

Right wing media like Fox News and the Daily Mail jumped all over this, claiming this proved that eating less meat has no impact climate. More responsible reports in the Telegraph and on BBC News simply pointed out that Mitloehner discovered a fault in the comparative analysis between emissions from livestock and transportation used in a UN report entitled ‘Livestock’s Long Shadow’ – a point which the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization conceded. Basically, the UN used a ‘confusing analogy’, but the bulk of the UN report was not discredited.

The new UN report states that economic growth needs to be ‘decoupled’ from the energy and agricultural industries due to the environmental impacts connected to increases in income. Population growth, combined with rising income and increased consumption creates more competition for dwindling resources and an unsustainable burden on the environment.

From an article in the Telegraph:

The report, that will be presented to world governments, said the only way to feed the world while reducing climate change is to switch to more a more vegetarian diet.

Meat Free Mondays, as recommended by Paul McCartney and IPCC chair Dr Rajendra Pachauri, is a pretty simple and tame way to move in this direction, yet it has also been met with ardent criticism. This is remarkable considering how these plainly unsustainable industries are growing in light of increasing meat consumption in both the developed world and the growing middle class of the developing world, especially in China.

And it’s not just meat, but industrialized agriculture and food production in general that needs to be examined.

From a piece in the Atlantic:

…all food production has global warming impacts, and some of the worst emitters have nothing to do with livestock. For example, wetland rice fields alone account for almost 30 percent of the world’s human-generated methane. British research has shown that highly processed vegetable foods such as potato chips have large carbon footprints. Some soy products in U.S. grocery stores are from croplands created by clear-cutting rainforests in Brazil. And researchers in Sweden discovered that the global-warming impact of a carrot varies by a factor of ten depending on how and where it’s produced. All of which shows that quitting meat does not absolve anyone’s diet of a connection to global warming.

Nor is it just climate change that factors into the environmental impact of agriculture – especially meat and dairy production – but also the massive consumption of fresh water, the use of nitrogen and phosphorus fertilizers, overfishing, deforestation and air and water pollution, just to name a few.

As the population grows, food production will also need to increase, which will require more efficient land and resource use. This is an advantage that vegetarian and vegan diets have over those high in meat and dairy.

by Graham Land

Additional resources:

UN report – Assessing the Environmental Impacts of Consumption and Production (PDF)

Image Source: Flickr. By: Alex Mahan.

There is something that happens in many rural areas around the globe. It’s a fairly common thing and it can also be a fairly dangerous thing, both to your health and to the environment. What am I referring to? Backyard Trash Burning.

Yes, in many rural areas—small towns or out in the country—people will burn their trash. Typically, the trash is burned in a burning barrel (usually a 55 gallon metal drum), though some will also burn their garbage in boxes, a wood stove, or even a small pit dug into the ground. Items that are burned consist of things you would usually find in a landfill or a recycling center, such as: paper, cardboard, plastics, and yard trimmings. The reason people burn their trash may vary, though it could be chalked up to a lack of a proper waste disposal facility in their area, a limit on the amount of trash that garbage trucks will take away per week (and thus the homeowner would have to find another way to dispose of any overflow trash), or it could be nothing more than simple laziness.

Burning a piece of paper or yard trimmings may not seem like such a bad thing, but when you factor in any kind of printing ink, coating, or other materials that might have weaseled their way into the trash pile, the effects from trash burning can be pretty bad. Here’s a basic run-down of some health effects from pollutants emitted from backyard trash burning:

Carbon Monoxide – This actually comes from burned leaves that do not complete combust. It can react with sunlight to create a ground-level ozone and it’s also absorbed through the bloodstream, which reduces the amount of oxygen that red blood cells can absorb and supply to body tissue.

Dioxins – These are released from items that contain even the smallest amount of chlorine. They remain in the environment for long periods of time and increase in concentration as they go up the food chain, which they enter by settling into water or onto vegetation. The dioxins will then be consumed by animals, which are consumed by other animals, and so forth. Too much exposure to dioxins can cause cancer, hormone system disruption, and immune system suppression.

Formaldehyde – This substance comes from pressed wood products, paints, coatings, siding, urea-formaldehyde foam, and fiberglass insulation. Some exposure to formaldehyde may cause skin rashes, nausea, watery eyes, breathing difficulties (coughing, chest tightness, etc.) or a burning sensation in the eyes and throat. However, long-term exposure to this pollutant may cause cancer.

Hexachlorobenzene (HCB) – This simply comes from trash burning. It’s a highly persistent toxin and degrades very slowly in the air, thus allowing it to travel long distances. HCB can accumulate in birds, marine animals, fish, lichens, and animals that feed on any of those things. Long-term and low-level exposure to HCB can damage a developing fetus, lead to kidney and liver damage, or cause fatigue and skin irritation.

Particle Pollution (or Particulate Matter) – This comes from trash or leaf burning and appears as tiny pieces of ash. These particles can contain other harmful pollutants, such as heavy metals, and they aren’t picky about age when it comes to damaging health conditions. If these particles find their way deep enough into your lungs, they can cause respiratory problems, heartbeat irregularities, and heart attacks.

These are but a few of the dangers that can come from backyard trash burning. Even leftover ash is a danger if it’s buried or scattered in a yard or garden. How? Well, ash can contain heavy metals. If the ash is buried in a garden, the growing plants will take up these metals and then people will be exposed to them. Those metals can also contaminate ground or surface water.

So, what can you do to eliminate or lessen the dangers of backyard trash burning? First of all, follow the 3-R mantra if you can (reduce, reuse and recycle). Many burnable items can also be recycled. Check out Earth911.com to find out where items can be recycled in your area. As for food scraps, try starting a compost pile! And if you have a bunch of yard trimmings to deal with, some of them may also go on a compost pile, or you could chip them up and use them as mulch. If you absolutely have to burn something, make sure you are following the local laws, don’t leave the fire unattended or build one bigger than you can control, and don’t burn anything on a windy day.

For more information about Backyard Trash Burning, check out these sites:

EPA: Backyard Trash Burning
What is Open/Backyard Burning?
DioxinFacts: Backyard Trash Burning: The Wrong Answer
Burning Trash
Rural Trash Burning vs. Recycling
Environmentalists Every Day: Know Your Trash Facts
Burning Issues

By Heidi Marshall

Amazon deforestation; photo by leoffreitas (source: Flickr Creative Commons)

Journalist Johann Hari is once again on the attack against the ties that bind environmental groups and big polluting corporations. (It’s all about money, in case you didn’t know).

In a recent article for the Independent, Hari treads similar ground as he did in his piece for The Nation entitled ‘The Wrong Kind of Green’. Hari is consistently polemical and comes from a strong standpoint, but as usual, he makes very good points that hardly any other journalists are talking about.

It has taken two decades for this relationship to become the norm among the big green organisations. Imagine this happening in any other sphere, and it becomes clear how surreal it is. It is as though Amnesty International’s human rights reports came sponsored by a coalition of the Burmese junta, Dick Cheney and Robert Mugabe. For environmental groups to take funding from the very people who are destroying the environment is preposterous – yet in the US it is now taken for granted.

–Johann Hari

Maybe groups like Conservation International (CI) and the Nature Conservancy (TNC) believe they can have more of an impact by working with the oil giants like BP rather than against them. Maybe they think they simply can’t compete without the cash infusion of big business. Starting to sound like the American political system, isn’t it? At the risk of sounding like a conspiracy theorist, who is really influencing who?

The problem is that these badges of green encouragement, which environmental organizations hand out to big corporations who deforest and pollute, actually make conscientious consumers buy the products that cause environmental devastation. Green activist groups basically act like de facto ad agencies, selling legitimacy to eco-criminals.

It is admittedly depressing to read about the selling out of the WWF and Sierra Club, but I encourage you to check out the entire article entitled ‘Polluted by profit: Johann Hari on the real Climategate’ in the Independent.

by Graham Land

Additional resources:

350.org

Nick Clegg and David Cameron; photo from The Prime Minister's Office (source: Flickr Creative Commons)

The Tory/Lib Dem coalition government has already announced agreements concerning its environmental policies. These include building a smart grid and initiating a high-speed rail network, scrapping plans to build a third runway at Heathrow Airport, and moving ahead with feed-in tariff systems.

The Conservatives and Liberal Democrats still disagree on the nuclear power issue, with the Conservatives in favor of the construction of new plants and the Lib Dems remaining against.

From an article in the Guardian:

Both parties are committed to pursuing a global deal to cut greenhouse gas emissions. But their differing enthusiasm for Europe, particularly the Eurosceptic MPs to the right of the Conservative party (not least Hague), may cause rifts over whether to back European negotiating positions.

Read more about the coalition’s environmental policies in this article in The Ecologist.

by Graham Land

Linfen, China: the most polluted city in the world; photo by sheilaz413 (source: Flickr Creative Commons)

Ecocide is relatively new word used to describe a practice that results in large-scale environmental damage or destruction. It is, in short, the murder of the environment.

Environmental lawyer Polly Higgins is campaigning the UN to have ecocide be considered an international crime against peace, similar to genocide and other crimes against humanity.

Higgins is quoted in an article from the Sydney Morning Herald:

Ecocide is in essence the very antithesis of life. It leads to resource depletion, and where there is escalation of resource depletion, war comes chasing behind. Where such destruction arises out of the actions of mankind, ecocide can be regarded as a crime against peace.’

If ecocide were to be deemed a crime against humanity or ‘crime against peace’, heavily polluters and other environmentally destructive industries would be held accountable in international courts for the damage they inflict on the planet.

The post-environmentalist Dark Mountain Project manifesto says we are living in the ‘age of ecocide’. To see why, check out the Guardian’s slide show of the ‘Ten worst ecocides‘, including the Alberta tar sands; the Great Pacific Garbage Patch; the city of Linfen in China; and the destruction and pollution of the Amazon rainforest.

by Graham Land

The Greendex survey is an annual study that measures consumption in terms of environmental impact among consumers from a sample of countries in both the developed and developing world.

Conducted by National Geographic and the polling firm GlobeScan, Greendex’s chief goal is to gauge the impact of consumer behavior within the energy, transportation, travel and consumer goods sectors.

This quantitative consumer study of 17,000 consumers in a total of 17 countries (14 in 2008) asked about such behavior as energy use and conservation, transportation choices, food sources, the relative use of green products versus traditional products, attitudes towards the environment and sustainability, and knowledge of environmental issues. A group of international experts helped us determine the behaviors that were most critical to investigate.

–National Geographic

In terms of sustainability, consumers from India, Brazil and China scored top, with those from the US, Canada and Japan at the bottom of the list. Greendex found that although the economic downturn partly fuelled a shift towards sustainable behavior between 2008 and 2009, environmental concerns among consumers also played a significant part.

Read National Geographic’s article on the Greendex survey, view the informative interactive 2009 Greendex map, download the full results of the survey and calculate your own Greendex on the National Geographic Greendex site.

by Graham Land

photo by Michael Foley Photography (source: Flickr Creative Commons)

Here is an extra clip from Age of Stupid director Franny Armstrong’s The Stupid Show in which young citizens of Dubai in the United Arab Emirates are interviewed about environmental attitudes in their country.

This could easily just be seen as a typical ‘laugh at the rich kids’ bit of reality TV. There is nothing exclusively Emirati about how these young people feel about environmental issues and how they live their lives. After all, Paris Hilton didn’t become an international star and yes, ‘role model’, for nothing. The ‘greed is good’ mantra didn’t die with legwarmers, hair mousse and other 1980s trappings. Give most kids a huge disposable income and they will use it selfishly and to have fun.

Of course, most young people in the world don’t have massive disposable incomes or access to flashy gas-guzzlers, but countless dream of it. Capitalism encourages this while making it possible for a select few in order to keep the dream alive. What’s shown in this video strikes me as nothing more than one version of the American dream being exported to the affluent UAE. Despite the Arabic music I was hearing the Beach Boys singing ‘Fun fun fun till her daddy took the T-bird away’ in my head while watching Dubai’s young and wild joyride on Dubai’s polluted beaches and openly rationalize about their lifestyle like any good rich kid would.

The Stupid Show – Extras – Report from United Arab Emirates

by Zeina Aboul Hosn

For a look at how the UAE matches up with other countries in terms of both per capita and total carbon emissions from fuel consumption, have a look at this informative graph in the Guardian, which is based on figures from the US Energy Information Administration. The UAE tops the per capita emissions list.

Also check out Franny Armstrong and UK energy and climate change minister Ed Miliband’s live blog from the UK election trail.

by Graham Land

photo by law_keven (source: Flickr Creative Commons)

A new major environmental book, entitled Silent Summer: The State of Wildlife in Britain and Ireland, offers up disturbing facts and figures about the human impact on nature in the British Isles. Celebrated naturalist, broadcaster and national treasure Sir David Attenborough has penned the forward to the book, a collaborative effort by 40 UK ecologists, which outlines the impacts of pesticides, population growth and intensive farming on British and Irish flora and fauna.

The 600-page book, edited by Norman Maclean, emeritus professor of genetics at Southampton University, lays bare the grim reversal in the populations of many butterflies, bees, flies and snails, and the virtual extinction of some species of moth.

–Telegraph

Silent Summer takes its name from the seminal 1962 work Silent Spring by marine biologist and nature writer Rachel Carson. Silent Spring is credited as a major force behind the global environmental movement the banning of the dangerous pesticide DDT.

Attenborough warns that such organisms make up the foundations of Britain’s ecosystems. “We tend to focus on the bigger animals and ignore the smaller ones — but small creatures like these are the basis of our entire ecosystems and they are disappearing faster than ever. That loss is transforming our wildlife and countryside,” he said.

–Sunday Times

Read more about Silent Summer and Sir David Attenborough’s statements in the Sunday Times and the Telegraph.

by Graham Land

Additional resources:

Silent Summer – Cambridge University Press

London Times – Rise up and save the hedgehog

In terms of development and environment, global capitalism can be compared to a dinner where a rich few eat all the food and leave the bill with their poor, unwilling hosts after tossing a stingy tip and some dinner notes onto the table.

The colonized, indigenous and poorest peoples of the world are the ones who suffer most from climate change, do the least to cause it and hold the least power to stop it.

The UNFCCC in Copenhagen last December may have called attention to the lower tier of the developing world, but it did not give them much of a say in the drafting of the accord. Copenhagen was largely considered a bitter disappointment for environmental groups and poor nations alike.

The World People’s Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth (WPCCC) which took place last week in Cochabamba, Bolivia, highlighted indigenous rights in relation to the climate crisis. The non UN-sanctioned talks were an alternative forum, unencumbered by the positions of the US and China that dominated Copenhagen. Despite distractions of football matches and strange comments by President Evo Morales about chicken causing baldness, the conference in Bolivia was a platform for voices that were barely included in Copenhagen’s ‘big boy’ talks.

The main points: a limit of one degree Celsius temperature rise, facilitated by a 50% cut in 1990 levels of greenhouse gas emissions by industrialized nations by 2020. These nations caused climate change and should therefore be required to pay a debt to for polluting the Earth’s atmosphere.

From an IPS article:

Among other proposals are the creation of a multilateral organisation to manage environmental issues, international recognition of the rights of Mother Earth, a ban on privatising knowledge, protection for climate migrants and the fullest respect for the rights and freedoms of indigenous peoples.

Here are quotes from two recommended opinion pieces concerning the conference in Bolivia.

Naomi Klein writes in the Nation:

Bolivia’s climate summit has had moments of joy, levity and absurdity. Yet underneath it all, you can feel the emotion that provoked this gathering: rage against helplessness. It’s little wonder. Bolivia is in the midst of a dramatic political transformation, one that has nationalized key industries and elevated the voices of indigenous peoples as never before. But when it comes to Bolivia’s most pressing, existential crisis–the fact that its glaciers are melting at an alarming rate, threatening the water supply in two major cities–Bolivians are powerless to do anything to change their fate on their own.

Joseph Huff-Hannon writes in the Guardian

“Including forests in the carbon market, it’s a terrible idea. They want to offset emissions by planting or protecting trees,” Jihan Gearon told me, an organiser with the Indigenous Environment Network, from Navajo country in the Southwest. “So corporations say, ‘Great! we’ll expand our emissions, but offset it by planting trees in the Amazon’. But in our network, which encompasses North and South America, we are seeing indigenous people displaced from their homes to ‘protect’ the land.”

I was amazed at the amount of negative comments about this conference following Joseph Huff-Hannon’s Guardian piece. Understandably, people don’t like to be blamed or lumped together due to the sins of their (maybe) ancestors. But I think a sense of entitlement sometimes runs even deeper. At the risk of making things a bit too black and white, never mind whose fault it is: inequality and injustice either bother you or they don’t. Climate change either worries you or it doesn’t. Plainly, platitudes about ’sharing the Earth’ don’t fit well with ideas of social Darwinism and Manifest Destiny, but those – obviously not yet outmoded – ideas are being put to the test by climate change. In other words, time to pay the bloody bill.

by Graham Land