AFRICA
No chimp, thanks
Bush meat vendors in Ouesso, a city in the Republic of Congo, report
that an Ebola outbreak raging through the area has changed people’s
eating patterns. Ebola, a viral disease that causes severe internal
hemorrhaging and is fatal to 90 percent of the people who contract it,
is normally found in wild primates, often hunted for meat in Central
Africa.
With the outbreak in full swing, Congolese people are eating fish,
beef, or chicken, rather than chimpanzees, monkeys, or other primates.
By mid-March, nearly 100 people had died in the outbreak, as had a
shocking number of local great apes. Environmentalist Pierre Agnangoye
told ENS that of 800 gorillas that once lived in the Odzala Pack and
the Lossi Sanctuary, just 200 are left.
The big dry
Drought has hit hard this season in Africa. Pastures in South Africa
are withering and turning brown. Farmers in the Port Elizabeth area are
trucking in loads of feed they can normally grow on their own lands.
Alexandria Farmers’ Association Chairman Morrice Lavin told the East
Cape News that there was very little food left in the pastures, and
nearby farms are going on the auction block. “Liquidations are coming,”
he said. South African farmers are saying the drought is the worst in
80 years.
Farther north, UNICEF says that Ethiopian women and girls are suffering
sexual abuse after being forced from their homes by the drought
currently gripping the Horn of Africa.
The Ethiopian government says the drought there has affected 11 million
people. Thousands are forced from their homes in search of food or
employment. UNICEF warns that as women or young girls have few options
under such circumstances, they are often taken advantage of in return
for support.
ANTARCTICA
What do we want? Hot chocolate! When do we want it? Now!
The only continent where no wars have ever been fought has seen
multiple anti-war protests so far this year. Dozens of people
demonstrated in January and March at McMurdo Station, a US facility.
Even the South Pole’s Amundsen-Scott Station saw small demonstrations
on New Year’s Day and on February 15, a day on which millions of people
around the world marched to oppose war in the Middle East. “We were
only five rallying, probably the smallest protest in the world,” South
Pole resident Paolo G. Calisse said.
ASIA
The cost of war
A special report in the March 15 issue of New Scientist holds
frightening predictions for the fate of the environment in the wake of
the US invasion of Iraq. As we go to press, the US Defense Department
claims that oil wells are being set afire in the Basra region; the New
Scientist points out that similar fires in Kuwaiti oilfields set by the
Iraqi army acidified rain for months, and caused a pall of smoke that
darkened noontime skies in Kuwait City. In the previous Gulf War, 60
million barrels of petroleum spilled into hellish “lakes” that covered
almost 20 square miles, and which have poisoned 40 percent of Kuwait’s
groundwater. Similar spills in the important wetlands near Basra—part of the Tigris-Euphrates Delta complex—could prove devastating
to an already critically endangered landscape. After the first war,
Saddam dug massive canals to divert the wetlands’ water, thus
displacing the marsh residents who opposed his regime. Nine-tenths of
the marshes have dried up; the remainder lies on the route US forces
are taking to Baghdad.
Meanwhile, heavy armored vehicles are already tearing up the fragile
cryptogamic crust that holds the desert soils in place: damage from the
1991 war has loosed new dunes that threaten to smother Kuwait City. And
many Iraqis say they still suffer the effects of depleted uranium (DU)
used in US ordinance. DU bursts into hellish flames on impact,
spreading fine radioactive dust into the environment.
They take conservation seriously in Manipur
The underground Revolutionary People’s Front (RPF) in Manipur,
northeastern India, sent a harsh warning to illegal hunters of the
locally revered sangai by shooting two poachers in the legs in
February. The RPF aims to protect the sangai, or brow-eyed deer, from
extinction.
The poachers had chopped sangai meat in their possession when
apprehended by locals. They were handed over to police, indicted, and
granted bail before the RPF guerrillas got hold of them.
Same old dam story
In other news from Manipur, protest marked the reported signing of a
memorandum of understanding between the provincial government and
NEEPCO (North Eastern Electric Power Corporation) to build the
Tipaimukh Dam, which would flood more than 100 square miles of the
rural homeland of the tribal Zeliangrong to generate power for
city-dwellers in the Barak Valley. The 525-foot-tall dam would be built
near the border of Manipur and neighboring states Assam and Mizoram, in
a major seismic zone. 15,000 people would be displaced by the reservoir.
The cost of war, part 2
Afghanistan’s wetlands and birdlife are bearing the brunt of war and
drought. Ahmad Yusuf Nuristani, Afghan Minister of Irrigation, Water
Resources and Environment, told environment ministers attending a
Nairobi meeting of the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) Governing
Council that 99 percent of the country’s wetlands have dried up since
1998. The findings come from UNEP’s Afghanistan Post-Conflict
Environmental Assessment report, launched in Kabul.
The internationally significant Sistan wetlands on the Iranian border
are almost completely dry. The Helmand River, the main tributary of the
wetlands which drains 31 percent of Afghanistan’s land area, has run as
much as 98 percent below its annual average in recent years.
Four years of drought have compounded problems caused by mismanagement
of the river basin’s dams and irrigation schemes during two decades of
conflict.
Without a stable source of water, much of the natural vegetation of the
Sistan basin has died. The Iranian side of the Sistan wetland was
designated a Ramsar site—a globally important wetland—in 1975. At
that time, half a million waterfowl of 150 species were counted on the
Hamouni-e-Puzak wetland, two-thirds of which is in Afghanistan. The
count included eight globally threatened migratory birds, such as the
Dalmatian pelican and marbled teal.
In central Afghanistan, the UNEP assessment team found the national
waterfowl and flamingo sanctuaries at Dasht-e-Nawar and Ab-e-Estada
were also completely dry.
AUSTRALIA
A Valentine for Lake Cowal
Protesters entered the offices of Australia’s National Parks and
Wildlife Service in Sydney and gave Valentine’s Day cards to Director
General Brian Gilligan. The cards asked that no permit be granted to
Canadian mining company Barrick Gold to destroy Lake Cowal, the largest
natural lake in New South Wales, held sacred by local Aboriginal
people. Barrick would scar the site with an open-pit cyanide leach gold
mine. Similar protests occurred outside offices in Alstonville, Coffs
Harbour, Grafton, Port Macquarie, and Queanbeyan.
At the Sydney event, Neville “Chappy” Williams, traditional Wiradjuri
owner of Lake Cowal, said: “The area is rich in artifacts. Some are as
old as the pyramids of Egypt. Lake Cowal is our Dreaming Place and our
sacred site. It is Wiradjuri’s past, present and future.”
GM-free in Oz
The Labor government in New South Wales (NSW) vowed March 3 to ban
commercial release of genetically modified food crops if it was
re-elected.
NSW is the second Australian state (after South Australia) to propose a
ban. Tasmania and Western Australia are debating a stronger ban on all
GM crops. Without a ban in NSW, the Federal Gene Technology Regulator
could OK commercial release of some GM crops—especially canola—as
early as April. Australia’s winter oilseed canola planting season
begins April 25. Warren Truss, Australia’s Agriculture Minister, said
that a NSW ban on GM canola would hurt national trade, but conceded the
state has a legal right to enact such a ban. On March 22, the Labour
party won a resounding victory in New South Wales.
EUROPE
Ecosport
Every year, thousands of sporting events take place in Switzerland,
most of them accompanied by endless traffic and mountains of waste. The
Swiss Agency for the Environment, Forests and Landscape and the Swiss
Olympic Association created the “Prix Ecosport” to address the problem.
Presenters of events with more than 500 participants who take
environmental concerns into consideration and come up with creative
solutions will be rewarded. The winner will receive 50,000 Swiss francs
(about $35,000): advice and information will be offered free of charge
to every candidate.
NORTH AMERICA
Poor pikas
Pikas
may be the first North American mammals to fall victim to climate
change. Related to rabbits, American pikas (Ochotona princeps) live in
rocky, high-elevation habitats in the western mountains of North
America.
Pikas are particularly vulnerable to global warming because they live
on cool, moist mountain tops. As temperatures rise due to increasing
emissions of CO2 and other heat-trapping gases, pikas may well find
themselves trapped in increasingly small islands of livable habitat,
with no ability to migrate northward.
Goldman Prizes awarded
The 2003 Goldman Environmental Prize winners were announced and feted
at a ceremony in San Francisco, California on April 14. The Goldman
Prize, given annually to grassroots environmental heroes from around
the world, includes an award of $125,000, and has been called the
“Nobel Prize for the Environment.”
The 2003 winners: Forest protection activist Odigha Odigha of Cross River State, Nigeria, won unprecedented protections for
Nigeria’s last remaining rainforests, including a statewide logging
moratorium. Von Hernandez organized campaigns against
dioxin-spewing waste incinerators in the Philippines, culminating in
the world’s first nationwide incinerator ban. Peruvian community
organizer Maria Elena Foronda Farro ran a campaign to clean up Peru’s fishmeal industry, which dumps untreated industrial waste into streams. Pedro Arrojo-Agudo is the principal architect behind the campaign to stop Spain’s National
Hydrological Plan from damming and re-routing the country’s last
remaining free-flowing rivers. Australian Aboriginal elders Eileen Kampakuta Brown and Eileen Wani Wingfield are campaigning to block construction of a nuclear waste dump in their desert homeland. Julia Bonds of West Virginia is leading the campaign to stop mountaintop removal
coal mining, which is ravaging communities throughout Appalachia,
turning river valleys into mining waste dumps, driving up asthma rates
and forcing whole communities to abandon their homes. Look for more
information on 2003’s Goldman Prize winners in the Autumn 2003 EIJ.
Boxer’s rebellion
Amid florid language and dark mutterings of political payback, the US
Senate voted 52-48 to block a move to add opening the Arctic National
Wildlife Refuge to oil drilling to the congressional budget memo.
The tactical maneuver listed the sale of oil-drilling leases in the
Alaskan refuge as a source of $2 billion in revenue for the fiscal year
2004 budget.
California Senator Barbara Boxer led opponents of drilling, displaying
huge photos of the flower-bedecked coastal plain before the Senate
vote. Republican environmentalist Lincoln Chafee of Rhode Island
provided eloquent commentary as a former visitor to ANWR, calling the
refuge “the most beautiful place I’ve ever seen.”
Ted Stevens, the Alaska Republican senator who chairs the Senate
appropriations Committee, was equally evocative. “I’m mad enough to eat
nails right now,” Stevens said after the vote. “I just don’t like it
when people don’t keep their word to me.” Before the vote, Stevens had
threatened to retaliate in his committee against Senators who voted
against drilling. “People who vote against this today are voting
against me—and I will not forget it,” he said.
Oh, the few manatees
A Florida appeals court upheld state rules in March protecting endangered manatees from high-speed boats.
The Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission’s rules require
boats to slow down in Brevard County. Boaters and boat manufacturers
had claimed there were few manatees in Brevard County, and that the
speed limits were thus unnecessary. However, large numbers of manatees
have been spotted in Brevard County by aerial surveys conducted by
state marine researchers, including a record 790 in 1999. Since 1976,
at least 191 manatees are believed to have been killed by boats in
Brevard, more than in any other Florida county.
Poaching prickles
Some of the world’s rarest cacti grow in the Chihuahuan Desert, home to
a quarter of the globe’s 1,500 cactus species. But demand for rare
specimens by collectors and landscapers is depleting desirable species.
TRAFFIC, the wildlife trade monitoring network of World Wildlife Fund,
says that some cactus populations are threatened if harvesting isn’t
regulated.
“If we don’t reduce the demand for wild plants, especially cacti, from
the Chihuahuan Desert, we run the risk of jeopardizing populations and
losing species,” says TRAFFIC botanist Christopher Robbins.
OCEANIA
Invading invertebrates booting out native bugs
New Zealand’s insect world is changing. Wildlife biologists say that
new invertebrate arrivals are displacing—or eating—New Zealand’s
native invertebrates. “Introduced invertebrates pollute and dilute the
native fauna much as weeds do in a forest,“says Otago Museum
entomologist Brian Patrick, who warns that organisms introduced to eat
the invaders could further harm the environment.
“Introduced ants and wasps are the rats and stoats of the insect
world,” adds Auckland-based Peter Maddison, entomologist with Forest
and Bird, the Kiwi equivalent of the US Audubon Society. “New
Zealanders did not worry about deer at first, until they became an
obvious problem. We need to make sure we don’t repeat those mistakes,”
urges Maddison.
“In Auckland you are more likely to see South African preying mantis
than our native species,” says Forest and Bird’s Geoff Keey, “and the
katipo spider has found its way onto the threatened species list
because a South African spider has aggressively overtaken its natural
territory.”
SOUTH AMERICA
Chilean sea bass in trouble
Activists have urged South American countries to work together on
conservation and sustainable use goals for the fishery and trade in
Patagonian toothfish, sold in the US as “Chilean sea bass.”
Current estimates predict total collapse of the fishery within five
years and possibly as soon as two years. Toothfish are caught with
longlines, a practice that has a high by-catch rate—often killing
albatross and other seabirds. Chile is the world’s largest producer of
toothfish products. Around 80 percent of Chile’s and Argentina’s
toothfish catch, worth up to $130 million a year, is exported to Japan
and the US. Uruguay has boosted its catch from 163 tons in 1997 to
5,000 tons in 2001. Almost all of that catch is taken in high seas
areas beyond Uruguay’s national waters. Brazil and Peru plan to expand
into the fishery in the near future.
Peru copper smelter faces fines
Peru’s Energy and Mines Ministry has given Southern Peru Copper Co.
until June to plan an overhaul of its aging, polluting smelter on the
coast south of Lima, or face stringent fines. SPCC must capture 92
percent of the sulfur emitted from its Ilo smelter, which last year
processed about 1.3 million tons of copper concentrate.
SPCC’s majority stockholder (54.2 percent) is Mexican mining firm Grupo
Mexico, through its ASARCO subdivision. Phelps Dodge and Cerro Trading
each hold 14 percent of SPCC. Last year, ASARCO was blocked from
selling its interest in SPCC to its parent corporation, Americas Mining
Corp. The rather confusing transfer, touted as a debt restructuring
move, was lambasted by environmentalists as an attempt to to avoid
liability for environmental cleanup bills. Grupo Mexico owes the US
millions of dollars for cleanup of mining and smelter sites.
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