Blogs / Better Planet

AP

When will an international task force be set up to identify potentially lethal formulas for environmental disaster? The US government knew about the faulty levies off the coast of New Orleans. Tsunami watchers knew the potential dangers in Sri Lanka, Indonesia, India and Thailand. Last year the Bangladesh tragedy was also foreseen. Now comes Myanmar. More than 22,000 people dead and 41,000 missing.

Nature’s coastal protectors are mangroves. They are dwindling and weakened worldwide due to environmental destruction. Fell trees, soil erodes and weakens, shorelines recede, mangroves disappear and storms have clearer paths to crash – harder and faster.

Hauntingly the following was reported by AP and featured on the web site for the Mangrove Action Project, which has offices in the US, Indonesia, Asia, and Latin America. Many of the staff come from the Peace Corps and other international human rights organizations (Notice the headline and dateline):

Environmental problems loom in Myanmar

14 October 2007By MICHAEL CASEYBANGKOK, Thailand - Truckloads of illegal timber cross the Myanmar border to sawmills in China, while markets along the Thai border openly sell bear paws, tiger skins and elephant tusks.Further inland, the repressive military regime plans to dam one of Asia’s purest rivers, and allows gold and gem mines to tear up hillsides and pollute groundwater for quick cash.Myanmar has become notorious in the region for ignoring international and its own environmental laws in a single-minded effort to make the money that environmentalists say helps keep the regime in power.”They may have laws on the books but they mean extremely little,” said Sean Turnell, an expert on the Myanmar economy with Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia. “I would say environmental considerations mean zero to them. It wouldn’t even enter their heads.”After decades of self-imposed isolation, the junta in the late 1980s began courting foreign investors with offers of stakes in gem mines, forest tracts and hydroelectric projects. Foreign investment allowed the regime to double its military to 400,000 soldiers while offering neighbors like China and Thailand access to cheap raw materials and energy to feed their growing economies.A Myanmar government spokesman did not respond to a request for comment on its environmental record. Chinese government officials could not be reached for comment and Thailand denied its investment in Myanmar contributes to the country’s environmental destruction.Hardest hit in the rush to develop the country formerly named Burma have been its rivers and forests, environmentalists say.

Several months ago, in a tall office tower in the center of Mumbai, Debi Goenka, one of India’s most well-known environmentalists, showed me and a small international audience of environmental activists, a film about mangrove destruction in India. Debi, who used to live on the seashore, has moved to miles away to the top of a hill.

He did it, he said, because he knows what’s coming…

It’s time we alert the rest of the world to the places most environmentally tenuous.

“If you go up to a native in the middle of the jungle and ask him if he wants money, he’ll say yes. If you ask him if he wants to sell land and get rich he’ll say yes too. But that is not an informed decision. If you took him up in a small plane and showed him the deforestation or took him to a river that is being polluted where he can no longer fish, he may have a different answer,” says Dr. Mark Plotkin, president of the Amazon Conservation Team organization and a Time magazine Hero for the Planet.

But natives aren’t privy to this point of view. They are relegated to their lives in the jungle – until that is taken away. And then what happens? They are forced to urban areas where they can survive – their ability to subsist off the land having been taken away.

Urbanization brings with it poverty and slums and disease for those who can ill-afford to live higher up the ladder of society.  

In the Amazon jungle big businesses come into town, pay natives for rights to their land, kick them off or encroach upon it, forcing displacement.

Way out in the middle of the jungle through wetlands, creeks, rivers and forest a young family of four subsists happily of their land. They have fruits, vegetables, fish, keep livestock, and hunt. They live in a virtual Eden. Closer, though, eco lodges are being built. Energy producers scout the area. And illegal timber producers are a constant threat.

The two children, three and four, bring me crayons and comic books. We sit on the floor of their hand-built home and draw and color. A rooster pokes its head through the door. It stretches its neck, checks us out, cackles and zips off.

It’s warm. I’m served a fruit smoothie. There isn’t the sound of any thing artificial: no plane, car, boat, machine, TV, nor radio.

Wind thick with humidity comes and passes us by as it lofts high into the palm trees where leaves rustle, mimicking the sound of rain splattering the ground. The humidity will inevitably draw wetness too, as it does every day this time of year.

Now it’s moments of warmth, engagement, curiosity, and struggles to communicate and understand. 

Which brings me to REDD: reduced emissions from deforestation and degradation. It’s a UN proposal that would pay countries not to deforest and give them the same carbon emission credits as countries get in the developed world. It was proposed last year at the United Nations conference on climate change in Bali.

It’s the type of program that gives people opportunities to make informed decisions, or I should say more decisions than just whether or not they would indeed like some money to help them survive.

Already certain governors in the state of Amazonia pay some of their constituents NOT to clear their land. They see the bigger picture. We certainly should too.

As I finish coloring, my three-year-old instructor shakes her head and points out what I did wrong. I drew outside the line.

I didn’t know I wasn’t supposed to.