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.

Just off the coast of New York is the Gulf Stream. It’s a weird current that moves warm water from the Equator northward to the Arctic.

I swam in its bounty every summer as a kid on Cape Cod. I felt lucky because lots of my friends had homes on the other side of the Cape, and the water there was much colder. But the current is reportedly slowing down. And that means colder water along its northern stretches, such as Cape Cod. In other words, my kids may not be as lucky as I was to swim in warm water and snub noses at their friends; the water will be equally as cold.

Of course there could be more serious consequences of the Gulf Stream slowing.

If you recall the film The Day After Tomorrow, the reason New York and northern latitudes went into deep freeze was because the current stopped abruptly. Scientists say the current won’t scream to a halt; that was Hollywood fantasy. But a slowing has its own dramatic consequences — mostly more extreme winter temperatures in northern regions.

The Guardian newspaper best describes the Gulf Stream for the general public: “The current is essentially a huge oceanic conveyor belt that transports heat from equatorial regions towards the Arctic circle. Warm surface water coming up from the tropics gives off heat as it moves north until eventually, it cools so much in northern waters that it sinks and circulates back to the south. There it warms again, rises and heads back north. The constant sinking in the north and rising in the south drives the conveyor.

“Global warming weakens the circulation because increased meltwater from Greenland and the Arctic icesheets along with greater river run-off from Russia pour into the northern Atlantic and make it less saline which in turn makes it harder for the cooler water to sink, in effect slowing down the engine that drives the current.”

Warmer areas and factors such as the Gulf Stream get less attention in the context of global warming because higher degrees in areas of higher temperatures create marginal differences. If the temperature were heading in the opposite direction, on the other hand–getting colder–all eyes would be on the Equator and things like the Gulf Stream. It’s worth looking at the world’s hot spots today because, ironically, they may make the world colder in the age of global warming. And those extreme weather conditions will need to be dealt with too.  

From that perspective The Day After Tomorrow is already here: Last year some of the coldest temperatures on record were recorded…in some of the world’s warmest areas.

Global warming shouldn’t be ignored in warm areas either. 

Underwater photographer Joel Paschal spoke with me while I was onboard the Alguita as it was being loaded with unripe fruit, supplies, and was passing Coast Guard inspection for its voyage west to California from Hilo, Hawaii. Joel worked with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to document the cleanup of the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands, including Midway and the French Frigate Shoals.

Hilo is one of the wettest cities on Earth—the wettest in the U.S., as a matter of fact–and Joel and I bunkered down below as rain pelted the deck. This dispatch tells the horror of our impact on distant places—places we don’t see.

“It’s tremendous to think about how remote you are. You’re on an island far away from any people but you see our impact. Somehow the Earth is so…connected. You can go to the most remote island on Earth and there’s garbage on it,” Joel says. The Northwestern Hawaiian Islands begin 300 miles northwest of Honolulu and extend for 1200 nautical miles.

President Bush in 2006 declared the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands a marine national monument. But that doesn’t mean there isn’t trash on them. Fishnets, some 20 miles long wash up. Bottle caps, lighters, pieces of toys and parts of an airplane from World War II, are just a few of the things Joel says he found there—on a cleanup trip that lasted three months.

The most disturbing find: refuse ingested by seabirds, killing them. More than 10,000 seabirds are killed annually, according to the WWF, because they ingest trash or get caught up in fishnets. Indeed, more than 300,000 whales, dolphins, and porpoises die each year along with a quarter million sea turtles because of long line fishnets.

We’re still sending tons of trash into the seas. We have rampant disregard for marine life. We can easily make better choices to lessen our effect on the marine eco system. We just need to know how. We need to be better informed. We need to make it stop.

According to one study conducted two years ago, 90% of the fish and shellfish species that are hauled from the ocean to feed people worldwide may be gone by 2048.

We should be celebrating our ocean life, not killing it.

We need better policies to enforce clean up measures.

Three trillion pieces of plastic are floating in the Pacific Ocean, with 46,000 pieces per square mile throughout all the oceans of the world. About 85% of that refuse comes from land—trash from picnics, beach outings, and general litter gets caught up with wind and makes its ways to sea. Or rivers and streams carry it out.

I’m recently back from the middle of the Pacific where I sailed onboard the research vessel Alguita as it prepped to trawl the Eastern Garbage Patch (an area twice the size of Texas that floats between San Francisco and Hawaii).

Miles offshore Hilo, Hawaii, I hung with Captain Charles Moore and his crew as they began their winter voyage to California. Their mission is to investigate the size and scope of the plastic debris that pollutes the area to better understand its effect on marine life.

But the most devastating experience I had was on Kamilo Beach, just past the southern most point of the United States on the Big Island. Moore’s Algalita Institute claims this is the most polluted beach in the US.

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