Hungry For Resources, China Takes the Gospel of Profit to Latin America

If you take an inventory of all the stuff you have in your home, just about everything except the butter in your butter dish came from China. Their factories churn out boatloads of everything: televisions, guitars, microwave ovens, etc. They even make American flags in China. And the emerging middle class in that big country of over a billion people wants to have refrigerators, cars, and other modern luxuries of their own.

All this production and consumption requires raw materials. This might be good news to the people living in Peking and Shanghai, but there are parts of the rest of the world where the new industrious and acquisitiveness of the Chinese is making some big problems.

            Already heavily exploited by the industrial West, Latin America is now the number one place for China’s foreign direct investment, putting ever more pressure on the region’s countries to increase their often heavily polluting and environmentally degrading resource extraction. A Chinese mining company is currently flattening an entire 13,000-foot mountain in Peru for copper, silver, and molybdenum. Ecuador has plans to auction off more than 11,000 square miles of pristine Amazon rainforest, an area larger than the state of Massachusetts, to Chinese oil companies. Other incidences of intensive mining or agricultural practices dot the map of Latin America.

            The juggernaut of commerce and trade, besides degrading the environment, disrupts the lives of the peoples who live in proximity to these extraction activities. To mine the Peruvian mountain, the Chinese are trying to move an entire village of 5000 individuals to a site several miles away, and the indigenous groups in the Ecuadorian Amazon say that the drilling that the Chinese oil companies plan for their region threatens their traditional way of life.

            During a time of great faith, the Spaniards forced conversions on the indigenous people that they encountered in the New World. Today, the prayers of robed priests and sanctity of crucifixes have given way to the magic of business executives and the miracle of money, whether it be dollars or yuans. As it was back in the time of the conquistadores, this movement and disruption of people’s lives amounts to a type of cultural bullying, disregarding their ways of life and forcing them into the world of productivity and profit.

            While the Chinese companies are ripping up a 13,000-foot mountain and drawing oil out of the rainforest, they will not only displace the folks who live there geographically, they will displace them mentally as well. People have no choice but to think differently when their worlds turn upside down. As with the conversion to Christianity centuries ago, people in small Peruvian villages and the Amazon rainforest will be given the gospel of profit and the saving grace of the Protestant work ethic.

            The Chinese—once so different from us, commies marching under the banner of Mao—now dress in suits and make international business investments. And soon the indigenous peoples of Latin America will think in terms of dollars and yuans. They too will want their refrigerators and cars. Whose mountains will they turn to for their copper? Which rainforest will they go to for their oil?

EPA: More Than Half of Our Rivers in Poor Shape

The EPA has found that more than half of this country’s rivers are in poor shape, with only 21 percent found to be in good condition. Most of the rivers are the victims of nutrient pollution from phosphates and nitrates that are washed into the waterways from farms, urban areas and sewers. This is in general what is called nonpoint source pollution, meaning that it doesn’t flow into the river by a pipe or culvert, but is washed in with general drainage from the adjacent land.

            Believe it or not, there has been progress in cleaning up our streams and lakes since the enactment of the Clean Water Act over 40 years ago. And at least the Cuyahoga doesn’t catch fire anymore. But to have 55 percent of our rivers—70 percent in the eastern part of our country—to be suffering badly from pollution is unacceptable. We can do better than that.

OK, The Cuyahoga no longer burns, but our waters are still impaired.

California State Parks: Clear That Chaparral, We Need to Plant Some Trees in Cuyamaca State Park!

Shaking my head and thinking, “They should know better,” is about the only reaction I can have in this situation.

            In 2003, with humidity hovering around ten percent and foehn desert winds, locally known as Santa Anas, blowing through the canyons and valley at 60 to 70 mile an hour, one of the most destructive series of fires swept through San Diego County. One of these fires, known as the Cedar Fire, burned about a quarter of a million acres. Much of the area that went up in flames was the pine forest and oak woodland in the Cuyamaca Rancho State Park.

            In the intervening years chaparral, mostly ceanothus, has taken root in the old forest stands. This is a natural occurrence after a forest fire. After a disturbance to an ecosystem, such as a fire, plants known as pioneer species will take root. Ceanothus is such a pioneer plant. These plants will reestablish the soil ecology after the disturbance. In time, other species will take root. These secondary succession species will displace the pioneer species. After many years, a forest or other “mature” plant community will once again dominate the landscape. The next big fire or disturbance will set the stage for this to happen all over again. This is a natural cycle. It goes on all the time.

California State Parks Department is trying to ignore this natural process and jumpstart the forest of Cuyamaca by burning and removing the ceanothus and other chaparral and planting pine trees. This is disrupting the natural succession and putting in jeopardy the soil ecology that pioneer species create.

            The chaparral grew from a seed bank that had been in the soil for scores of years. If the these plants are not allowed to mature and produce flowers and seeds, the next time there is a catastrophic fire in the Cuyamacas, there will not be the necessary seed bank to start the pioneer succession, and the natural cycle will be broken.

A path in a chaparral covered canyon. People don't think of this when they think about nature. photo: nobodyhikesinla.com

California State Parks Department is getting money to clear the chaparral and plant the trees. Companies get carbon credits for financing this project, as the trees are carbon sinks as they grow. Ironically, the chaparral has done a fine job of sequestering carbon. As the Parks Department burns and masticates the chaparral, that sequestration is lost.

I suspect that there is also an ecology of aesthetics and expectations in this scenario as well. When people conjure an image of “nature,” alpine forests and hillsides of oaks are often what they see in their mind’s eye. Though it is the plant community that dominates most of California, chaparral is easily dismissed as brush. The psychology of fire—a very complicated topic when it comes to chaparral that I don’t have the time or space to go into here—also plays a part in the general disregard toward chaparral.

When these folks go see nature, they expect to see what they think what nature is, and that’s oaks and pines, so the State Parks of California will give it to them all the sooner. Tourists and campers don’t have the patience that Mother Nature has.

What people think of when they think of nature photo: vrbo.com

There is much more about this, including some of the legal aspects of what is going on in this situation over at the Chaparral Institute.

Dr. James Hansen Honored as a Rebel With a Cause

In the early to mid seventies, working at NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, Dr. James Hansen assembled a team to perform climate modeling of the earth and found some of the first reliable and predictive computer models of global warming. In the late eighties the testimony that he gave before Congress was noted for its drama and certitude that yes, we did have a problem. The CO2 we were pumping into the air was warming our world, and if we didn’t curtail this process, heat waves and droughts lay in our future.[i]

            Hansen has not tired of warning the rest of us about global warming. In more recent years he has gone beyond speaking at seminars and writing articles in journals and has taken up work as an activist. He’s been arrested, along with Daryl Hannah, protesting the Keystone Pipeline and mountaintop removal, both of which, besides causing environmental damage to their immediate environments, add or will add greatly to global warming.

            Yesterday, Conservation Colorado announced that James Hansen will be honored as their “Rebel With a Cause” at their annual gala to be held in June. Looking back over the decades, Hansen certainly deserves the recognition. Is the Nobel Committee taking note?

James Dean caused a ruckus in the fifties still from Rebel Without a Cause Warner Bros. 1955

James Hansen is causing a ruckus now, and he doesn't even need a leather jacket and cigarette photo Goddard Institute for Space Studies

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[i] Philip Shabecoff, Special to The New,York Times. Sharp cut in burning of fossil fuels is urged to battle shift in climate. New York Times June 24, 1988

Rand Paul: Mountaintop Removal Is Just "Missing a Hill Or Two Here and There"

Hot off his revival of the Senate tradition of filibustering for hours and hours over the administration’s foreign, and possibly domestic, drone strike policy, Rand Paul took the number one slot as their presidential choice in 2016 at the recent Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) held in DC last week.

When he speaks about mountaintop removal, Paul couches his approval of the mining practice in terms of property rights, which are, along with their ideas of “small government” and their views of the U.S. Constitution, one of the sacrosanct components for the libertarians' utopia. For Paul, if a coal company owns land, they can mine it any which way they want to. Of the destruction of Kentucky’s landscape caused by mountaintop removal, he goes on to say, “I don’t’ think that anyone is going to be missing a hill or two here and there.” And that’s pretty much it, when it comes to Rand Paul’s take on mountaintop removal.

            It makes my head spin that anybody who talks like this could be seriously considered for any public office, let alone the presidency of the United States. Is it that Paul has been so blinded by the vacuously constructed Ayn Rand view of the world that he simply believes that one of the most destructive mining practices the world knows is allowed because a coal company owns a plot of land? Or is Paul simply using the rhetoric of one of the extreme ends of the GOP to give cover to the mountaintop removal mining companies?

            A lot of folks at CPAC want him to be the next president. How crazy is that?

Just "missing a hill or two here and there." The mining operation close to Whitesburg, Kentucky, the state that Rand Paul represents in the Senate. photo from mountainroadshow.com

Testing Methods For Eradicating Algerian Sea Lavender

More on the Algerian sea lavender project at Dog Beach. We’ve gotten the area of infestation mapped. Yesterday we started a project to see the effectiveness of differing eradication methods. We chose three methods: pulling the invasive plants out by hand, scraping them from the landscape with garden tools, and “solarization,” covering the plants with black plastic to deprive them of sunlight.

            Solarizing was the easiest method, just spreading the plastic out over the sea lavender. The other two methods took a lot more time, about 20 minutes to scrape a 6 x 6 plot and about twice as long to hand pull a plot of the same size.

About 75 percent cover by Algerian sea lavender

Nonnative and invasive species are big problem worldwide. They reduce species diversity and can affect crop yields. The continental United States has been invaded by more than 1,500 nonnative plants. Florida and California share the distinction of having the most nonnatives, with each state plagued with about 1,000 unwelcome taxa from around the world.

            As you can see from the photograph, the Algerian sea lavender really takes over. The plots we treated were about 75 percent covered with the unwelcome plant. It pushes out native pickleweed (Salicornia virginica), as well as rare and endangered species like grab lotus (Lotus nuttallianus). Stay tuned for updates on this project.

Algerian sea lavender removed by scraping

A plot being solarized to kill the Algerian sea lavender

Freedom to Farm Act: Shielding Slaughterhouses and Meatpacking From Public Scrutiny

This sounds like something out of a country with a “Ministry of Truth.” And these developments are also nauseating.

            In an effort to keep the eyes of the public out of their slaughterhouses, meat processing plants, and over-crowded feed lots, the meat and dairy industries are pushing legislation in several states that would make it a crime to notify the public as to what actually goes on in the production of our food. Bills circulating in the state houses of Indiana, Arkansas, and Pennsylvania would make it a crime to take videos at agricultural facilities. Similar legislation is being proposed in California and several other states. The American Legislative Exchange Council, or ALEC, a business backed conservative “think tank,” is providing much of the push for these laws.

            These “Ag Gag” laws are in response to academics, journalists, and activists who have shown us slaughterhouse conditions that would be recognizable to Sinclair Lewis, who chronicled his experiences in the meat packing yards of Chicago just over a century ago. Modern day men and women in the mold of Lewis have taken videos of cows being cruelly prodded with forklifts and veal calves being skinned alive. New School University assistant professor of politics Timothy Pachirat spent several years working in modern slaughterhouses and meatpacking in Omaha, Nebraska. Without the veneer of fiction that Lewis used in “The Jungle,” he describes the conditions of modern slaughterhouse work and his often stomach-churning experiences with his recent book “Every Twelve Seconds.” The book’s publication prompted the Iowa legislature to pass and the governor to sign HF 589, which makes it a criminal offence for a journalist or activist to get a job at a slaughterhouse or other agricultural facility with the intent of exposing the conditions of the places that bring us much of our food.

            In the last 30 years our food has become less safe to eat. Meat processing is now performed on a grand scale, with hundreds or thousands of pigs or cows being processed at the same time. The tainted meat from one animal now has the ability to taint thousands of pounds of hamburger or sausage shipped to dozens of states. You would think that this would prompt greater scrutiny by our government for the safety of our food, but budget cuts to the FDA that started with the Reagan administration have lead to fewer FDA workers inspecting more and more food.

            Exposing cruel or unsanitary conditions at a slaughterhouse or stockyard should make lawmakers and policy makers take notice, passing stricter food standards or providing more food inspectors, but in true “ignorance is strength” fashion, states are giving greater cover to meat and dairy producers to operate without public scrutiny. Adding to this Orwellian scenario, some of these laws label those who expose the dark underbelly of producing pork bellies as terrorists. That’s right. Taking a video of unsanitary meat processing puts you in the same league as Osama bin Laden.

And while we see less and less of how our food is produced, more people will get sick and more people will die from food poisoning. Thanks a lot, Ministry of Truth!

Eradicating Algerian Sea Lavender in San Diego

I know I post a lot here about news stories, but I thought I would start including some of the things that I’m involved with on a personal level as well. Here goes.

I’ve volunteered with the San Diego River Park Foundation for a number of years now. And I’m really excited about this latest development, at least as far as my involvement with the organization goes. I’ve been working with a couple interns on an infestation of Algerian sea lavender (Limonium ramosissimum). This is an invasive of Mediterranean origin that plagues California estuaries from here in San Diego up the coast to San Francisco.

As an exotic or invasive, it hasn’t been around a very long time, so strategies for eliminating it have yet to be developed. Our first step has simply been to figure out exactly where it is. So far Winnie and Kayla, the two interns, have mapped out where the sea lavender is growing. They are also investigating strategies that have been used to eliminate similar exotics and exotic plants that are found in similar estuary environments.

Where the Algerian sea lavender has encroached in the estuary of Dog Beach at the mouth of the San Diego River

Weaker Standards For Selenium on the Horizon For West Virginia: House Passes Law Allowing For Weaker Standards Today

Well, it looks like West Virginia will be changing the standards for selenium in its rivers and streams. The West Virginia House of Representatives approved the legislation that would allow for weaker standards today. The bill has the votes in the State Senate, and Governor Earl Tomblin has said that he will sign the legislation.

            Even considering the state of politics in the Mountain State, it’s at least somewhat surprising that the bill received no opposition in the House, passing with a vote of 99 to 0. Isn’t there at least one representative in West Virginia who is not totally beholden to Big Coal? Not one representative to consider the health of his constituents or the life in the streams and rivers of his state?

            Of course the anti-environmental rhetoric that has been fueled by big business and the GOP crops up in this debacle and makes one’s head spin. The West Virginia House Judiciary Chairman, Tim Miley, said the bill should be passed “so that the coal industry is not crippled.” It's hard for me to think of an industry that has been able to eviscerate the United Mine Workers union and rip off the tops of hundreds of West Virginia’s mountains with impunity as being crippled.

            Miley referred to “punishing fines” on the coal industry for violations of existing selenium standards. Well, a fine is intended to be punishing. That the coal companies have been allowed to pay such small fines for serious violations of safety and pollution for too long is the real crime.

Snowquester Hits DC, Global Warming Hearings Cancelled, Irony Abounds

As the Snowquester has hit Washington, offices in the nation’s capitol have been closed, and much of the business of government is being postponed until the snowplows and warmer weather make the streets and sidewalks passable.

            And the winter storm has forced the cancellation of Congressional hearings on global warming. For most folks, this is amusing irony. But of course there will be those, like the Fox News and the Heartland Institute, who will play this up for all it’s worth. Just wait and see.

Big Coal Wants Weaker Selenium Standards For West Virginia's Waters

A coal industry sponsored bill in West Virginia, considered by that state’s House of Representatives, would allow West Virginia to disregard federal recommendations and set its own standards for the amount of selenium that can be released from coal mines.

            Selenium occurs naturally in the environment. A little bit of it is very good. Your body uses trace amounts of the element to make antioxidants, which can fight off cancer. The thyroid gland also uses selenium. There are foods rich in selenium. Bacon has lots of it, so does shrimp. Like a lot of things, you can also get too much selenium. Too much selenium can give you bad breath. Much more can cause kidney and liver problems. Too much selenium can kill you, too.

            Selenium affects animals as well. A 2010 study of the streams of West Virginia, mandated by state legislation, concluded that high levels of selenium were associated with deformities of fish larvae. In some streams that had high selenium levels, 20 percent of some fish species had deformities.

            Most likely because of the recent lawsuits it has faced over selenium pollutions, the coal industry wants to disregard the science and allow for much higher selenium concentrations in the waterways of West Virginia. Looking at the scars of the land in West Virginia from surface mining, it’s hard to believe that the coal companies need to have the rules that allow for their large-scale mining operations weekend even further. But that looks to be the case here.