Blogs / Better Planet

I received a query today from a reporter asking me about litter and the problems associated with cigarette butts. Are they, he wanted to know, the biggest environmental problem on the planet?

The question is loaded and points to a really interesting diagnosis: What IS the biggest environmental problem on the planet? The answer is subjective, of course. If you are talking about global warming then coal plants are the biggest problem on the planet. If you are talking about natural resource preservation then deforestation is the biggest problem. Insert water for life sustainability and disease, or plastics for waste. To be sure, cigarettes are no one’s friend: Neither health nor the environment. In fact, in terms of litter, they are the biggest source of it: More than two billion pounds of cigarette butts are discarded worldwide – more than two pounds for every person in China. I use that country as an example because as I traveled from Beijing southward along the Silk Route, people still smoked a lot – everywhere. In Southeast Asia too people light up.

Smokers’ waste is rather easy to calculate. Figure out how many cigarettes are smoked and you’ll find out how many butts are tossed. You can’t recycle ‘em. One thing I’d like to know is the emission factor, or pollution due to smoking.

If any one has ideas or data, I’d be interested in hearing from you.

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.

 AFP

The Financial Times above-the-fold headline today screams India considers ban on trading in food futures.

It reports, “India’s finance minister said on Monday he was considering a blanket ban on trading in food futures, underlying growing concerns in Asia over the role of hedge funds and financial market traders in the recent surge in commodities prices. If India imposes a ban, it would come only five years after the country introduced such futures trading as part of a broader push to develop India as a leading financial centre.”

Last week National Public Radio ran a special report on the food crisis and many of the experts interviewed agreed on Wall Street’s role in the increased prices of food worldwide. Bidding up the prices of futures is one thing, but farmers don’t sell futures–they sell real products in the here and now. They don’t get the benefit of those price increases. Rather, they are mired in a market full of price controls. It would make sense, of course, for them to hedge their prices in case of supply issues: Sell at market prices but at the same time buy futures, and get the benefit of price upswings to re-invest in their farms. But they can’t. It’s too expensive for farmers to hedge these days. Besides, the market is so volatile that a downswing in prices on the futures markets means a wipe out of capital in the bank accounts today and no crops for tomorrow.

Elevators are the businesses getting most squeezed. They buy raw products from farmers and distribute them.

As The New York Times explains, “Since 1959, grain producers have been able to hedge the price of their wheat, corn and soybean crops on the Chicago Board of Trade through the use of futures contracts, which are agreements to buy or sell a specific amount of a commodity for a fixed price on some future date.

More recently, the exchange has offered another tool: options on those futures contracts, which allow option holders to carry out the futures trade, but do not require that they do so. Trading in options is not as effective a hedge, farmers say, but it does not require them to put up as much cash as required to trade futures. These tools have long provided a way to lock in the price of a crop as it is planted, eliminating the risk that prices will drop before it is harvested. With these hedging tools, grain elevators could afford to buy crops from farmers in advance, sometimes a year or more before the harvest. But that was yesterday. It simply is not working that way today. Futures, for example, are less reliable. They work as a hedge only if they fall due at a price that roughly matches prices in the cash market, where the grain is actually sold. Increasingly — for disputed reasons — grain futures are expiring at prices well above the cash-market price.”

The disputed reasons The New York Times is alluding to are professional investors. The rise in index funds and commodities traders and vehicles is putting the price of food—survival for many people around the world—into the hands of investors and speculators.

India is on to something, and the rest of the world should follow suit and consider tighter controls for commodities trading.

The Pope’s recent visit to New York got me thinking about the role of religion in helping to preserve the planet, or as evangelical adherents put it: Creation Care.

The world’s major religious leaders are rallying around the green movement, and for the first time in history unifying the world’s major religions around one cause: environmental protection. The National Religious Partnership for the Environment is the entity they are most using to spread the word of the green God. The NRPE is comprised of representatives from the Catholic Church, various Protestant and Evangelical denominations, as well as the Jewish faith. It says, “When people from across the religious spectrum cry out with one voice against environmental injustice and the abuse of creation, the world takes notice. When hands reach across religious divides to mend and tend a frayed and fragile portion of the earth, they may accomplish together what none could do alone.” Indeed, when you consider the mass of followers these religions represent, a unified call to action is powerful stuff.

Reverend Richard Cizik who represents a big chunk of the Evangelical Christian constituents—30 million—tells me in a brief conversation via his cell phone as he races around Washington, DC lobbying politicians for better global warming policies why he and other adherents are so concerned about the environment: “It’s about caring for Creation, what God gave us. We need to take that responsibility seriously.” He then goes on to quote historians, philosophers and, of course, The Bible, about the importance of environmental consciousness and caring. “In Genesis, we are told to care for the Earth. The Earth is not ours to abuse. It is God’s Creation. He gave us the responsibility to care for it for Him,” Cizik says.

To be sure, many Muslims are also environmentally mindful. They cite the Quran and the Islamic belief that the Earth is a sanctuary that should be cared for. Think what you will about any religion or even Creation itself, but you have to admit that there is a certain morality in caring for the planet. It’s something we can all feel good about and actually do something about. We can all do little things that help preservation.

The religious green movement is a good thing for the future of the planet – and maybe even beyond.

Image: BBC

The New York Times on Monday reported in an article entitled, “In Lean Times, Biotech Grains Are Less Taboo” that “Soaring food price and global grain shortages are bringing new pressures on governments, food companies and consumers to relax their longstanding resistance to genetically engineered crops. In Japan and South Korea, some manufacturers for the first time have begun buying genetically engineered corn for use in soft drinks, snacks and other foods. Until now, to avoid consumer backlash, the companies have paid extra to buy conventionally grown corn. But with prices having tripled in two years, it has become too expensive to be so finicky.”

Today, Grist, the environmental blog, picked up on that and said, “In fact, the few giant companies that dominate the global food system are fattening themselves on higher prices, consolidating their grip over the world’s palate.”

I’m chiming in to say that GMOs shouldn’t be the Band-Aid to the world’s food crisis. Here’s why: We are jumping the gun. The jury is still out on GMOs and their affect on the natural environment.

Remember, GMOs only came around about a decade ago. Sure some have been taken to task for taking to task GMO manufacturers. (Nature had to retract an article on GM maize.)

Meanwhile, organic farmers say, done correctly, their way is just as effective if not more in natural resource savings. (See Michael Pollan’s take on this in The Omnivore’s Dilemma.)

I look at GMOs like I do nuclear energy: A resort — but of the last kind.

“Every one is saying ‘climate change’ now instead of ‘global warming.’” That statement was uttered to me by a Discovery Channel producer.

I’m appearing on one of their new, green shows (‘Supper Club’) soon and the producer was walking through the format with me. She paused during our conversation: “What does ‘green’ mean now anyway?”

To be sure this producer knows full well what “green” means. But she was asking an astute question about the way in which the green label is being used. Is it to define global warming? Is it about natural resources? Recycling? Actions? Things? What?

For example today, Earth Day, of course, there is a lot of discussion about all things green. Many green web sites are choosing to ignore the day to make the case that it should be like any other. (We should be green every day is their point.) Last year many green sites even pooh-poohed Earth Day as a marketing ploy.

Sure, lots of products are being launched today. You’ll read about new books, films, web sites, even cleaning essentials. (Clorox announced a new line today.) Still, environmentalists should look to Earth Day itself before questioning the dilution of the word “green” to mean all things and be part of what’s known as commercial greenwashing.

Earth Day, founded in 1970, says it is “committed to expanding the definition of ‘environment’ to include all issues that affect our health, our communities and our environment, such as air and water pollution, deteriorating schools, public transportation and access to jobs, rising rates of asthma and cancer, and lack of funding for parks and recreation.”

That’s a pretty broad definition of the word “environment.” It even makes “green” look too narrow.        

In the jungles of Malaysian Borneo not far from the Indonesian border (which is where the accompanying photo was taken) palm oil is being grown more than anywhere else on Earth. You see it on the side of the road, deep in the rainforest, almost everywhere.

Malaysia is the largest producer of palm oil in the world. It’s feeding the massive demand for palm that’s come into play for our food (palm is the second most used edible oil after soy) and perhaps even our fuel (palm is being used in Europe as a source of biofuel). Palm oil is in a lot of unlikely things. It’s in our French fries, potato chips, even our toothpaste. Also, ever wonder where PalmOlive soap gets its name? Palm. It’s frequently used as generic vegetable oil too.

The pervasive use of palm oil is becoming a problem because it’s destroying the lowland forest of the Island of Borneo. Orangutans are being endangered. Loads of other species are being displaced. Borneo actually holds more species than anywhere else on Earth.

I myself while in Borneo have seen saltwater crocodiles, different types of monkeys, snakes, wild boars, orangutans and many species of flora. Equating these wonders to my toothpaste is a big mental leap. But it is what the WWF wants. It’s looking to create sustainable palm oil production by enforcing certain means of farming that would carry through to product labels.

I, for one, would like to see greater transparency along those lines.It would certainly help me the next time I am at the grocery store and pick up a pack of chips. I wouldn’t have to wonder how many orangutans got booted from their homes to accommodate my munchies. Clearer labeling would help us all make better and more informed choices about our connections to nature.        

Lots of people are chasing torchbearers these days in protest of China’s oppressive policies toward Tibet. But few are asking why China really wants Tibet in the first place.

A glance through history and you’ll see the hegemonic reasoning for China’s  confiscation of Tibetan land. But today’s rationale for Tibetan control is likely due to China’s need and huge appetite for natural resources to keep its fast growth growing.

The Himalayan Mountains provide freshwater to more than half the world’s population, and that includes the Chinese. Gushing water there also gives a boost to China’s need for energy: about 30% of China’s hydroelectric power comes from Tibet. Moreover, a new hydroelectric plant being considered along the Yarlung Zangbo River would become the world’s largest hydroelectric power station, if engineering reports are to be believed. Beyond water, Tibet is already China’s biggest provider of geothermal energy, and holds a heaping of peat, which can be used as alternative energy source.

And that’s not all. A new mineral reserve found under the Tibetan Plateau is worth billions, as much as $128 billion, according to some estimates. Tibet is rich in mineral deposits, currently holding China’s fourth richest reserves of muscovite, a mineral important to its huge electronics industry, as well as its defense industry. Muscovite is used as fireproofing.

Then there is wasteland. China uses Tibet as a massive dumping ground for its waste.

In short, the campaign to control Tibet and its people is less about lamentable political philosophy and more about land grab.

Given this reality, it might be more productive for the Tibetan people, and their apparently active followers around the globe, to begin politicking around resource access and allowances (carving out land titles) than to try and stomp out Olympic torches.

The Dalai Lama, the religious leader of most of the Tibetan people, has already let it be known that he would attend the Olympics in Beijing, if invited. And he has implored protestors to stop hassling those carrying the Olympic torch.   

Maybe it’s time to focus on the core of the conflict between Tibet and China. Although that may become uncomfortable for many: Those natural resources are largely used to produce products for the West. Europe is China’s biggest trading partners followed by the US.

Activists might do better by the planet by changing their clothes than by forcing changing upon the Olympic relay routes.

Noted thinker Lester Brown says the US’s way of dealing with the environment is much like Enron’s dealing with finances: it’s keeping costs off the books.

Speaking at the Aspen Environment Forum and quoting a raft of statistics and others, Brown says, “Socialism collapsed because it did not tell the economic truth. Capitalism may collapse because it does not tell the environmental truth.”

So, do tell, right? What’s this silver bullet, this magic elixir that will sober us up and get us on track with environmental fixes? Taxes. Yes, the dreaded word that you’ll only perhaps hear mumbled out of a politician’s mouth.

“We need taxes on coal, not income,” Brown says. Of course there’s more. A whole lot more of a strategy that Brown lays out in Plan B, his new book, on how to go from ignorance and arrogance to understanding and proper utilization of resources.

He too looks to the sun for much of the solution. Forty million homes in China, he points out, have already switched to rooftop solar water heaters. By 2020, 110 million homes are expected to have rooftop solar water heaters in China, fully proving enough hot water for almost half a billion people. Algeria, he also notes, is developing enough solar power and transmission lines to export energy to Spain. 

Meantime, there are things we can do. If all the world switched to CFL bulbs we’d reduce energy demand by 12%, or the equivalent of 700 coal plants.

But at the center of Brown’s Plan B is the economy. We have to completely restructure it, he says to take into account the world’s natural resources, which are now subject to subsidy and odd trading between nations. The challenge can be met by raising public awareness. And the key driver in that is the media.

In other words we have to get the word out that the world is in an environmental crisis and showcase specific ways to fix it. If this conference is any evidence, that is occurring rapidly. The New York Times, Washington Post, NPR, ABC News, National Geographic and other news media in attendance here say they are stepping up their coverage—mostly via the Internet.

Budgetary constraints keep environmental news off the air and the front pages much of the time. But they try.

So again, it can be said, it all goes back to the economy. Environmental truths must be told.

As another noted environmentalist and thinker, Amory Lovins, noted in a speech he gave here: the US provides $250 billion in energy subsidies.

As I write that, AAA is reporting that gas prices have reached a new high per gallon.

Things aren’t adding up. And that’s just how things began to unravel for Enron too.

In a candid conversation with an audience here at the Aspen Environment Forum, eminent biologist/naturalist EO Wilson said soccer moms are killing off bio-education because they don’t let their children experience nature.

In what he calls the “soccer mom syndrome” Wilson said the worst thing a parent can do for a child is to take him or her to a botanical garden where all the trees are marked and labeled. Instead, “Go to the seashore and give them a pale pail and bucket. Let them experience nature…and then come back and ask questions,” Wilson said, admittedly paraphrasing Rachel Carson’s advice. Carson famously wrote the book “Silent Spring.”

Wilson, who is compiling an encyclopedia of life (www.eol.org), which will describe every species known to man, didn’t back down when a woman from the audience said that she would “forgive him” for the soccer mom comment.

“Don’t,” he responded. “Think on it.”

Wilson filled more than an hour of questions and answers with witty remarks and barbs. And to be sure, his tone was playful. Yet, there was a seriousness behind his “soccer mom” remarks that struck a cord with many people in the audience: Have children been largely cut off from nature because of technology?

Many people agreed that they have, with video games, the Internet and structured play times replacing — as comedian George Carlin commented in a recent skit — sitting outside in a yard with a stick wondering how to entertain themselves.

That creative process — kinesthetic — is perhaps immunizing children from nature and therefore creating a social environment that entails less caring for the outdoors and all its splendors, people said.

It’s an interesting discussion in an age when children’s schedules and days are filled with all sorts of activities–but leave little time for children to entertain themselves outside.

Wilson said there is nothing to fear with nature. “I feel more afraid sometimes in big cities than when I step into a rainforest,” he said.

Appreciation, in other words, can only be had by first-hand experience. Virtual surrogates just won’t do.

Soccer moms take note and, I’m sure, some offense.