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Managing director of Ebono Institute and major sponsor of The Generator, Geoff Ebbs, is running against Kevin Rudd in the seat of Griffith at the next Federal election. By the expression on their faces in this candid shot it looks like a pretty dull campaign. Read on

  • Food,famine & climate change: How we feed the world on 85p t

     

    One month ago, says Jirma, both Barwaco and Mohamed were at death’s door. Their muscles were wasting, their hair was turning orange, and they were showing sure signs of marasmus, a type of malnutrition caused by a diet deficient in protein and carbohydrates. When Jirma first saw them he feared for their lives. Now, with the Plumpy’nut provided by Irish charity Concern Worldwide, they have recovered nearly 10% of their body weight – the difference between life and death for a young child. In another week or two they will move on to a corn and soya blend flour and in two months they should have recovered completely.

    Just 10 years ago, their chances of survival would have been slim unless they had been admitted with their mother to a specialised clinic. The severe malnutrition they have experienced may yet lead to stunting and possibly brain damage, but they will survive without ever knowing how close they came to death.

    Barwaco and Mohamed are the smiling face of starvation averted, but their mother Fatima is one of a new group of people – the 100 million extra who the UN estimates have been left hungry and malnourished in the past year in the wake of the global recession, high food prices and growing environmental disaster.

    We walked with the family several miles down a wide, mountain-ringed valley to their village just over the Ethiopian border. Land that should have been full of crops and livestock was now baked hard in the third major drought to have hit Kenya in less than eight years. Many of the village’s cattle had been sent hundreds of miles away in the hope of finding better pasture. Most of the small animals had been sold or eaten, and all that was left in the village were a few thin chickens and goats and some very hungry people.

    We sat on low wooden stools outside Fatima’s mud and thatched house with three of her other children, Rachna, Alima and Gibril. “What does hunger feel like? Let me tell you,” she said. “For a start, I feel very, very weak. When I wake up I just want to eat something. My stomach cries. And when I go to sleep – well, I never sleep properly. I don’t dream about food, no. But it’s all I think about. I have known droughts before, but this is the hungriest I have ever been. One old man and an old woman have died of hunger in this village this year. There will be more.”

    Only last year she and her husband Emoy had 20 cows and 10 goats – more than enough, she believed, for everyone. But the crops they planted withered when successive rains failed, and one by one the cattle have died. Then personal disaster struck. Just a few weeks ago Fatima’s husband left home, ostensibly to find work in Moyale, a regional market town about 20 miles away. In fact, Fatima knows he is now living there with his second wife, with whom he has had 12 children. Fatima says he is too old to get a job and does not expect to see him again, or be sent any money.

    So she’s been left with a few goats and seven hungry children. Every few weeks she must sell a goat, and at this rate she will have none left by mid-October. “I used to have butter from the cows; we would sell the bulls for a good price and buy good food. A bull used to get us 15-18,000 shillings [£128-153],” she says.

    Observer Food : Plumpy'nut and food crisis in Kenya, Fatima shows her entire food store Fatima with two of her children and her entire food store: one sack of scrawny maize stalks that a neighbour gave her. Photograph: John Vidal

    She brings out her entire food store – one small sack of scrawny maize stalks. “A neighbour gave it to me. In the morning we don’t eat anything. At around 4pm, I will prepare a maize porridge. That means pounding the maize for an hour. Then I mix the maize flour with water, and I will add a few beans and salt. We will eat this evening, but what I cook will never satisfy. It’s a very small amount.” Do the children complain? “Of course they do, all the time, especially when they see our neighbour cooking. Hunger leaves them more open to diseases, like colds and malaria. But they love the Plumpy’nut. They fight over it. I have to stop them.”

    “I really like milk,” says Alima, her eldest daughter. “I want to drink it all the time, but I never get it.”

    Just 15 years ago, the UN, western charities, governments and some food companies all thought that world hunger could be more or less eradicated. Politicians and agronomists reasoned that there had never been so much food grown in the world, and better seeds and improved technologies appeared to be keeping up with rapid population growth. India and China’s dash for economic growth was taking millions of people a year out of out of poverty, trade was booming, and food prices in the global market were declining. There were, said World Bank economists and world leaders, reasonable grounds for thinking that the 750 million hungry people in the world then could be reduced to less than 350 million by 2015. Every rich country dutifully signed up to the millennium development goals and pledged to halve world hunger by 2015.

    Fat chance. What no one foresaw was that oil prices would peak in 2007, and then all grain and fertiliser prices would double. No one expected, either, the credit crunch or the recession, or the massive takeover of cropland in the US and elsewhere to grow fuel for cars. No one thought developing countries would be hit so hard by a recession brought on by the west putting tens of millions of people out of work; or that food prices would not drop when the oil price fell. They were blind to the food riots that took place in more than 30 countries last year, and despite warnings by climate scientists, they did not take into account the deep droughts that have kept hitting major food-growing countries such as Australia and places like Kenya and Texas year after year.

    The world is now officially going backwards on food supplies, with more people malnourished than ever before in history. In August the UN said it expected 642 million people in Asia and 265 million in sub-Saharan Africa – more than one billion people – to go hungry this year. A new World Bank report last month predicted a further 25 million children could be hungry by 2050.

    “A four-decade positive trend of nations pulling themselves out of hunger has been reversed,” says Josette Sheeran, head of the UN’s World Food Programme, which provides emergency food for more than 100 million of the most vulnerable people. “Poor households all over the developing world are eating fewer and less nutritious meals, and many are cutting back on healthcare and schooling for children. Unless the world responds, we are in danger of losing a generation to hunger and malnutrition. We have the know-how, the tools and the technology to feed the world. Let history not say of our generation that we let the opportunity of ending hunger slip through our fingers.”

    But hunger – real, long-term, gnawing hunger, the kind that Fatima’s family knows but no one in Britain ever experiences – is officially on the march from sub-Saharan Africa to Asia. Only in Latin America have absolute numbers reduced in the past 30 years. In September there were food emergencies in Kenya, Yemen, Somalia, Syria, Ethiopia, Chad, Congo DRC, Sudan, Guatemala, Pakistan and a dozen other countries.

    Kenya is particularly worrying because while it has always known droughts, it has seldom been short of food. “The situation here is not good,” says Koki Kaylo, Concern’s nutritionist in northern Kenya, on the frontline of the growing crisis. “Acute malnutrition rates among children under five are over 20% in some areas – well above the 15% emergency threshold. We have seen 300 cases of severely malnourished children like Barwaco and Mohamed in just a few months. Normally you might expect to see only 200 in a year. The situation will certainly get far worse by February [when the next crops can be expected].

    “People are eating nothing but maize porridge now. That’s just carbohydrates and leads to oedema, water retention, swollen legs. It’s the beginning of starvation. Here you mainly see the wasting of muscles. This is very common already.” Malnutrition, she says, is still poorly understood, but is known to lead to stunting of growth, brain impairment, frailty, attention deficit disorder and worse. Even with 29 outpatient therapeutic programme centres and 32 supplementary feeding programmes, she admits it’s only a pinprick in the sea of need. Nearly half of all communities in northern Kenya now officially depend on food aid, either from the UN or from the government, which has appealed for $230m to feed 3.8 million people who they expect to be seriously affected by hunger in the next six months.

    But the world has made progress in at least one respect. “We are not killing people [with hunger] as we did 20 years ago,” says Yves Horent, the European community’s head of humanitarian aid in Nairobi. “Things have improved enormously. We don’t have many deaths from hunger nowadays. We’re become very good at keeping people alive technically with foods like Plumpy’nut. We have techniques to save people. We can keep mortality rates low. It’s incredibly efficient. We can save children, no problem. Just 20 years ago this would not have been possible. The cost of a life saved is now very cheap – €20-€40 will save a life. We can give vouchers, so people can access food easily. Fifteen years ago that would have been unheard of. We can deal with 20 million people. Now where there is free access or there are no blocks [to humanitarian groups] to working in a country, we can move thousands of tonnes of food. We won’t see people dying in thousands again, like in Ethiopia in 1984. People tried their best then, but the science was not as good as now. In the mid-1980s, we had very few professional aid workers and only a few nutritionists,” he says.

    But while the humanitarian groups have become incredibly good at saving people, the worry is that no one is addressing the causes of growing hunger. “Part of the problem is that we have become expert in a very artificial way now. We can take a child who is almost dead and revive her. But we cannot stop it happening again and again. We cannot prevent the problem,” he says.

    The reality of emergency aid today, he says, is that the millions of hungry people who are kept on a drip-feed of food aid from governments and the UN are out of sight. More than 100 million people now depend on UN food aid just to survive, not just to get them over a disaster or a temporary emergency, but to stay alive for years at a time. More than 5 million people in Ethiopia, similar numbers in Southeast Asia and sub-Saharan Africa, 1 million in Kenya and more in Burma, Somalia, Yemen, Chad and India are kept permanently just above the starvation levels. There may be no full-scale humanitarian emergencies any more, but people are left in a perpetual state of chronic hunger.

    Now there are ominous signs that rich countries are withdrawing even this safety net. Following the recession, countries have pledged less than half the money needed to feed the hungry. Even as hunger is increasing, the World Food Programme is nearly $3bn short and is having to close offices, cut operations and slash rations to millions of people who have no way of earning money to buy food. The previous UN minimum daily supply of 2,100 calories has been cut to 1,050 – about three tins of baked beans; the absolute bare minimum for a healthy diet.

    The economic crisis all over the world has pushed incomes down and increased unemployment, says Sheeran. “The food crisis is not over in the developing world. In fact, the situation is more alarming in many countries than it was even a year ago. There’s nothing more basic than food. If people don’t have it, one of three things happen: they revolt, they migrate or they die.”

    Actually UN food supplies never get to everyone in need, and whole communities that are cut off from roads, not favoured by politicians or that are just hard to access get left out of emergency feeding programmes. In Mathare slum in Nairobi – the second largest in the country, with nearly 800,000 people living in desperate poverty in a maze of tin shacks – the chances of food being distributed to the neediest by the government is practically nil. Help is left to charities, churches and individuals.

    Magdaline Gitahe of the Redeemed Gospel Church helped distribute food from Concern Worldwide and other charities to 2,000 people in Mathare in the first week of September. The numbers who are hungry are far greater than the UN or others know, she says. “They have little idea of the size of the problem. There is far more hunger than there was just a year ago. Maize used to cost 40 shillings [34 pence] a pack last year; now it costs 200 [£1.70]. Sugar was 50 [42p]; now it’s 115 [98p].

    “Bread milk, flour, salt – everything has gone up. People are cutting back on food every way they can. We take porridge without sugar, tea is no longer a priority, and instead of buying a big bag of sugar we buy little ones. Water has become very expensive. Last year the government gave out some food. This year we have had nothing. More and more hungry people are coming to us for the first time. Children are dropping out of school because they have empty stomachs. We cannot keep up,” says Gitahe.

    Alice Wanjiru received a bag of maize and some sugar from Gitahe. Alice has eight people to feed, including a disabled daughter who begs in Nairobi city centre, and her dead sister’s three children. She earns no more than £1.25 a day washing clothes and collecting plastic for recycling. “We don’t have food in the morning, just a cup of tea. We cannot afford to cook at lunch. So we eat in the evening but often we go to sleep without food,” she says.

    “People here in Mathare are mostly unemployed and uneducated,” says Gitahe. “They do casual jobs. The women wash clothes, the men work on construction sites. Some hawk, and sell paraffin or water. The situation is very bad. To spread out the benefits, we only give food to one person in each family. Many people are still dying of hunger. I have seen people fall down because they are so weak.”

    Mary Magure, a single mother with five children who lives in one room in the slum, says she speaks for thousands in her situation. “It’s almost impossible to survive now. I buy food in the street so we don’t have to buy paraffin or charcoal. I don’t have lunch, just the occasional meal in the evening. The best meal I could possibly cook now is maize flour. I can’t possibly afford rice – perhaps a packet of maize and some greens. When there’s no food and no money, the family just has to understand,” she says.

    She fears, but she does not know, that her children may be prostituting themselves to eat, and she starts crying. “When you are hungry, you start to imagine things. People become desperate. Everyone here needs food. Right now life is a very big challenge.” OFM

    To donate to Concern Worldwide, go to www. concern.net/en or call 0800 410 510

    PLUMPY’NUT A French scientist trying to fight malnutrition discovered the answer in an unlikely place: his own breakfast table.

    By Rebecca Seal

    Dr André Briend spent years trying to come up with a food that could be fed to seriously malnourished children which didn’t need reconstituting with water. Most therapeutic foods used during famines were expensive powdered milks that relied on clean water – something that tends to be in short supply in places where people are at risk of starvation. Small children fed these products once they returned to their villages from feeding stations could develop water-borne diseases like dysentery – just as likely to kill them as their lack of food.

    Paediatric nutritionist Briend was desperate to change this situation but had no breakthrough until, one morning in 1999, he noticed a pot of Nutella sitting on his kitchen table. The chocolate and nut spread was the inspiration he’d been searching for, and he began experimenting with puréed chocolate bars and sweets, mixed with the kind of vitamins and minerals malnourished children need urgently. Plumpy’nut was the result: a foil pouch the size of an adult fist, filled with peanut butter, sugar and a mixture of other vital nutrients. Each pack contains 500 calories, and with two servings a day, a severely underweight toddler can put on up to 2lb a week. At about £12.50 for 56 packs over four weeks – the most required to get a child back to health, followed by just one pack a day to keep them going – it’s cheaper than milk. No water is required, the packs keep for up to two years (unlike their milky predecessors, which spoilt in the heat). For small children whose tummies have shrunk, the paste can deliver a lot of easy-to-digest mono-unsaturated fats and protein in a small portion. Even better, because parents can take away a week’s supply, most people don’t need to stay in a feeding centre.

    Plumpy’nut is now made by a company called Nutriset in France, but because that’s relatively expensive, they also provide the required “slurry” of nutrients to local partners in places like Niger. Concern Worldwide has developed the idea still further, by working with hundreds of farmers in Malawi, and in future also in Ethiopia and Zambia, to make ready-to-use-therapeutic foods (RUTF) using ingredients like sesame seeds or chickpeas, which further cuts down transport and import costs. The resulting products are usually given names which translate as the local words for medicine. The UN is aiming for 80,000 tons of RUTF to be produced in Africa in the next five years.

  • The other inconvenient truth: the crisis in global land use

     

    Unfortunately, this positive shift in the national zeitgeist has had an unintended downside. In the rush to portray the perils of climate change, many other serious issues have been largely ignored. Climate change has become the poster child of environmental crises, complete with its own celebrities and campaigners. But is it so serious that we can afford to overlook the rise of infectious disease, the collapse of fisheries, the ongoing loss of forests and biodiversity, and the depletion of global water supplies?

    Although I’m a climate scientist by training, I worry about this collective fixation on global warming as the mother of all environmental problems. Learning from the research my colleagues and I have done over the past decade, I fear we are neglecting another, equally inconvenient truth: that we now face a global crisis in land use and agriculture that could undermine the health, security, and sustainability of our civilization.

    Our use of land, particularly for agriculture, is absolutely essential to the success of the human race. We depend on agriculture to supply us with food, feed, fiber, and, increasingly, biofuels. Without a highly efficient, productive, and resilient agricultural system, our society would collapse almost overnight.

    But we are demanding more and more from our global agricultural systems, pushing them to their very limits. Continued population growth (adding more than 70 million people to the world every year), changing dietary preferences (including more meat and dairy consumption), rising energy prices, and increasing needs for bioenergy sources are putting tremendous pressure on the world’s resources. And, if we want any hope of keeping up with these demands, we’ll need to double, perhaps triple, the agricultural production of the planet in the next 30 to 40 years.

    Meeting these huge new agricultural demands will be one of the greatest challenges of the 21st century. At present, it is completely unclear how (and if) we can do it.

    If this wasn’t enough, we must also address the massive environmental impacts of our current agricultural practices, which new evidence indicates rival the impacts of climate change. Consider the following.

    Already, we have cleared or converted more than 35 percent of the earth’s ice-free land surface for agriculture, whether for croplands, pastures or rangelands. In fact, the area used for agriculture is nearly 60 times larger than the area of all of the world’s cities and suburbs. Since the last ice age, nothing has been more disruptive to the planet’s ecosystems than agriculture. What will happen to our remaining ecosystems, including tropical rainforests, if we need to double or triple world agricultural production, while simultaneously coping with climate change?

    Freshwater decline. Across the globe, we already use a staggering 4,000 cubic kilometers of water per year, withdrawn from our streams, rivers, lakes and aquifers. Of this, 70 percent is used for irrigation, the single biggest use of water, by far, on the globe. As a result, many large rivers have greatly reduced flows and some routinely dry up. Just look at the Aral Sea, now turned to desert, or the mighty Colorado River, which no longer sends any water to the ocean, for living proof. And the extraction of water from deep groundwater reserves is almost universally unsustainable, and has resulted in rapidly declining water tables in many regions of the world. Future water demands from increasing population and agricultural consumption will likely climb between 4,500 and 6,200 cubic kilometers per year, hugely compounding the impacts of climate change, especially in arid regions.

    Widespread pollution. Agriculture, particularly the use of industrial fertilizers and other chemicals, has fundamentally upset the chemistry of the entire planet. Already, the use of fertilizers has more than doubled the flows of nitrogen and phosphorus compounds in the environment, resulting in widespread water pollution and the massive degradation of lakes and rivers. Excess nutrient pollution is now so widespread, it is even contributing to the disruption of coastal oceans and fishing grounds by creating hypoxic “dead zones,” including one in the Gulf of Mexico. Given our current practices, future increases in food demand will dramatically increase water pollution and ecosystem destruction through agricultural effluent. Ironically, the fertilizer runoff from farmlands compromises another crucial source of food: coastal fishing grounds.

    Greenhouse gas emissions. Last, but certainly not least, land use is also one of the biggest contributors to global warming. Of the three most important man-made greenhouse gasses — carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide — land use and agricultural practices, including tropical deforestation, emit 30 percent of the total. That’s more than the emissions from all the world’s passenger cars, trucks, trains and planes, or the emissions from all electricity generation or manufacturing. Compared to any other human activity, land use and agriculture are the greatest emitters of greenhouse gasses. The vast majority comes from deforestation, methane emissions from animals and rice fields, and nitrous oxide emissions from heavily fertilized fields. Yet, for some reason, agriculture has been largely able to avoid the attention of emissions reductions policies.

    The list of environmental impacts from agricultural land use goes on and on — and clearly threatens human well-being and the health of the biosphere as much as global warming. In fact, in a recent paper in Nature, a number of us documented “planetary boundaries” where large-scale environmental changes could result in catastrophic tipping points. Of those changes, an equal number were tied to climate change and CO2 emissions as were connected to land-use and agriculture.

    From these newly revealed facts, it’s clear that we must consider multiple inconvenient truths. The future of our civilization and our planet requires that we simultaneously address the grand challenges of climate change and land use, ultimately finding new ways to meet the needs of our economy, our security and the environment. Anything less will be a complete catastrophe.

    So, what are the solutions to the global land crisis? Here are just a few to start with.

    First, acknowledge the problem. Even in circles of well-informed scientists and agricultural experts, the notion that our land use and agricultural practices rival climate change as a global environmental threat comes as a big surprise. Clearly we need to have a larger international conversation about this issue, on par with the recent efforts of the climate change community and Al Gore, to give it the attention it deserves.

    Invest in revolutionary agricultural solutions. The Obama administration has invested billions of dollars into new energy technology, research and infrastructure, and aggressive plans for new climate mitigation policies are being developed. These strategies are important, but I wonder where the stimulus funding for new “out of the box” agricultural research is? Where are we investing public dollars in revolutionary approaches to feeding the world, while reducing the environmental impacts of agriculture? These might include the development of new hybrid crops, designed to use water and nitrogen more efficiently, or the invention of perennial crops that don’t need to be planted every year. Don’t such ideas count as national priorities, too? Can’t we afford to launch a “Greener” Revolution?

    Bridge the artificial divide between production agriculture and environmental conservation. We cannot solve these problems by boosting agricultural production at the expense of the environment, nor can we ignore the growing need for food in the name of preserving natural ecosystems. Instead, we must find ways to simultaneously increase production of our agricultural systems while greatly reducing their environmental impacts. This is not going to be easy. Yet, drawing on the lessons from recent research, including the successes and failures of local organic practice, combined with the efficiency and scalability of commercial agriculture, will be crucial. In recent years, for example, U.S. farmers — working with agricultural experts — have dramatically improved practices in the corn and soybean belt, cutting down on erosion, nutrient loss, and groundwater pollution, even as yields have continued to increase. As a first step, advocates of environmental conservation, organic farming and commercial agriculture all need to put down their guns and work toward solving the problems of food security and the environment — with everyone at the table.

    Providing for the basic needs of 9 billion-plus people, without ruining the biosphere in the process, will be one of the greatest challenges our species has ever faced. It will require the imagination, determination and hard work of countless people from all over the world, embarked on one of the noblest causes in history.

    But the first step is admitting we have more than one problem.

  • Congo Forests in Climate Context

     

    “They delivered emphatically two messages,” said Carter Roberts, the president of the World Wildlife Fund, who attended the talks. “This program for saving the Congo was a fundamental pillar of their vision for the future of their countries,” he said, adding that they emphasized the global benefits of forest conservation. “You can’t solve climate change without saving the Congo and building the financial mechanisms to do the same,” he said.

    The United States has spent nearly  $100 million over the past eight years to cosponsor the Congo forest partnership. But the United States’ contribution has remained stagnant as newer partners like Britain, France and Germany have pledged as much as $50 million annually.

    The money goes toward combatting illegal logging, mining and poaching in  the basin, an area roughly the size of Texas that is home to almost 12,000 species of plants, birds, and mammals, including gorillas and chimpanzees. Most of the basin’s forests remain intact, and the rate of clearing is slower than in the Amazon or Indonesia, partly because outside investment has allowed the Congo’s nations to shift their economies to resources other than timber.

    But the African contingent at the talks here worried that forests could start to fall if negotiators pursuing a new climate treaty fail to include incentives to conserve so-called low-risk forests like those in the Congo. Agricultural, logging and mining companies that might be forced out of the Amazon or Indonesia by tighter restrictions might see the Congo basin as a ripe target, leaders here said.

     Denis Sassou-Nguesso, president of Congo and the lead negotiator for the African Union on climate change, said that domestic pressures on forests have to be countered with other kinds of economic opportunity. “When countries sacrifice a large portion of their grounds for protected areas,” he said, “you cannot ask them not to touch the forests and not give them anything.”

  • Green shoots in the desert

    Green shoots in the desert

    The Arab world no longer dismisses environmentalism as a western luxury. Abu Dhabi is leading the way in averting disaster

    The Arab world is gradually awakening to the massive environmental challenges ahead for the region.

    The environmental movement has long been regarded with suspicion in the developing world. For two centuries, the west has had a more or less free hand to pollute with impunity, deplete the planet of natural resources, exterminate most of its stock of wildlife that might pose any kind of threat to human safety and wipe out biodiversity not only in its own backyard but also across the planet.

    Given this trail of destruction and distrust, it is perhaps unsurprising that well-meaning and far-sighted eco-warriors out to protect cuddly killer cats, hug trees against the deforester’s axe and fume over emissions have often been viewed as little more than latter-day missionaries sent out to subdue the restive natives and keep them from aspiring to better things.

    This unfortunate perception was partly a coincidence of history. Although environmental campaigners in Europe and north America are as old as the industrial revolution, widespread social awareness of environmental degradation did not emerge until after the second world war, with the industrialised level of destruction wrought by that conflict and the fearful potential consequences of the nuclear age.

    At about the same time, the newly independent former colonies embarked on a postcolonial drive for rapid industrialisation and the desire and ambition to match and perhaps better western standards of living. Despite the emergence of cleaner and greener technologies, this was largely done with little regard for the environmental impact of modernisation, partly because developing countries could not afford the new technologies.

    In recent years, many developing countries, faced with massive environmental degradation and poor air and water quality, have reached a similar stage in their industrialisation cycle as Europe and the west were at in the 1950s and 1960s, with the environmental movement gradually becoming more than a fringe concern. This, coupled with the impacts already being felt by climate change and the massive upheavals ahead, means they are slowly awakening to the reality that development and the environment are not two separate entities.

    In the Arab world, although direct industrialisation has slowed down over the past three decades, modernisation has not – stressing the environment enormously. The region may be the world’s main petrol pump, but this finite resource is rapidly dwindling and dependence on it has affected air quality in large urban centres and on the coastal plains where half of the region’s population lives. Major investment in harnessing the region’s massive solar resources makes both economic and environmental sense.

    In addition, although climate change largely carries a “made in the west” label, the region is set quite literally to take the heat for it. Both temperatures and populations are expected to rise over the coming decades, causing water reserves to diminish, or at best stagnate, and desertification to accelerate. This means that scarce water will become even scarcer. Rising sea levels could also threaten major coastal population centres.

    Faced with all these emerging challenges, it is unsurprising that the latest Arab Human Development Report dedicated an entire chapter to the environment and natural resources.

    As in many other areas, Arab leaders do not always set a good example. Take King Muhammed VI of Morocco, whose enthusiasm for cars prompted him to take the outrageous step of chartering a Hercules transporter plane to fly his Aston Martin from Rabat to Britain for repairs. Before we laugh off those eccentric and peculiar Arab leaders, it is worth recalling that the US president – who travels abroad with two planes and an entire fleet of cars – has a carbon footprint estimated to be the equivalent of 2,200 energy-guzzling US households.

    A group of independent experts has produced a report dedicated to the region’s environment. The Arab Environment Future Challenges Report estimates that environmental degradation costs the region about 5% of its GDP.

    The document also identified Abu Dhabi as a trailblazer in environmental action, commending its environment strategy for 2009 to 2013 as a “model” for other countries to emulate. Environmental action in the small emirate is also reaching the grassroots and the new generation. For instance, 50 Abu Dhabi schools are in the process of “going green” and reducing their ecological footprint.

    A few weeks before the Copenhagen climate conference, Beirut will play host to the 2009 conference of the Arab Forum for Environment and Development where a new report will be released and experts will debate what action needs to be taken. As occurred at Kyoto and may well happen in Copenhagen, it remains to be seen whether greater awareness of our heavy-footed environmental bootprint will translate into effective and sustained action.

     

  • STOP CAPITALISM DEFINING HUMAN NATURE

     

    When what were regarded in a more primitive age as negative attributes are magically re-formed so they shine as virtues, it is easy to persuade ourselves that these represent human nature. It gives us permission, as it were, to be intemperate, self-indulgent and greedy. The morality of economic growth and expansion has invaded the psyche, the inner sites where people struggle with how to be a good person; and now reigns as the ultimate revelation of what it means to be human.

    The success of industrial society depends on this grim account of “reality”. “You can’t change human nature” is the first article in the credo of capitalism; a mildly sorrowful recognition that human beings are “essentially” selfish, irremediably “fallen” in fact: and this exhibits continuity in what might, at first sight, seem a radical break with Christian teaching.

    If the first article of capitalism has been the unalterability of human nature, its second has been a relentless remaking, domination and plunder of the rest of the natural world. Nature itself has been infinitely pliable, to be used and shaped to any purpose “humanity” proposes. Whole continents have been subjugated, forests felled, watercourses diverted, the earth gutted, seas fished to extinction; only human nature, remains triumphant, invincible.

    The weight of the dazzling iconography of production and consumption, together with these vices-become-virtues leaves no room for other, eclipsed visions of the better world that this one might have been, but can no longer be, since these have been colonised by one of the many possible versions of prosperity or well-being. If the western view of the world has prevailed over all others, this is not so much a sign of its providential truth as of its physical power.

    If this story of human purposes contains some truth, that truth conceals an even greater falsehood. It is undeniable that human beings have always longed for more, have yearned for possessions that will serve as a bulwark against existential desolation, as an illusion against eternity – the tombs of history are strewn with precious objects to accompany the deceased even into the afterlife. But, no one has ever before seriously believed that bliss is to be attained in this brief life, even those who have professed total faith in the pursuit of happiness.

    Religion has always taught the necessity for restraint, limits and the impossibility of transcendence in this world. The ideology of limitless growth turns this on its head: it injects an otherworldly cosmology into an ostensibly secular context. Instead of promising happiness in the hereafter, it offers a happy eternity in the here-and-now. These doctrines are far more impossible of fulfilment than the dogmas of any religious faith; for while it cannot be proved that there is no afterlife, it is obvious that perpetual happiness in a life limited by insecurity, pain and loss is a vain endeavour. This is why much of the resistance to capitalist ideology comes from the religious; since priests, imams and intermediaries with the other world are well aware that it is their territory that is being trampled.

    The conviction that the natural world is ours for the taking, but that human nature remains closed to change, has led directly to multiple global crises – climate change, growing inequality, and, less noted, but perhaps even more significant, a pervasive, doomed and morbid desire for the unattainable. It has now been recognised that disturbance of the biosphere, an addiction to progress, the accumulated effects of human action, have led directly to global warming; but there has been – understandably – far greater reluctance to recognise the role of an unalterable human nature in the achievement of this melancholy state.

    This equation cannot be selectively modified, since it is, in its way, a holistic view of the world. Any resolution of the threats posed by globalisation requires a reversal of the ideology: the very opposite is needed of the cynical, taken-for-granted fatalism about the nature of humanity, for this has led to immobilism and sense of powerlessness in engaging effectively with the present crisis.

    The most urgent work is to address this fiction of human nature, which is viewed as the only fixed point in the constant churning of feverish change and growth. Human nature is not as it has been painted by the self-justifying prophets of economic ideology. It is one thing to compel people to behave in a particular way and then to approve the outcome of such conduct as in accord with human nature. If there is no public space for other attributes of humanity, this bleak view will inevitably crowd out our capacity for generosity, selflessness, sacrifice and kindness. We know these things exist: only they are barred, proscribed guests from the sombre economic banquet, except for the crumbs of philanthropy of leftovers. Ruthless, self-centred, individualistic – if these characteristics are rewarded, who will not cultivate them, leaving human virtues to be practised furtively, in the secrecy of a private life where they have been incarcerated as spoilers of the economic game?

    “We must change nature, but we can’t change human nature” has been the cry of the most serious conservationists of all, those who would conserve intact the dominant unjust paradigm. Even for the modest aim of 10:10 to work effectively in Britain, other human possibilities will have to be aroused from the common grave of unsettling ideas; among them, a reawakening of the resourcefulness, creativity and flexibility of people, which alone can mitigate our baleful effects upon the planet.

    Perhaps there are, for the rich, other ways of being prosperous, and for the poor, other pathways out of poverty than those we know. But they remain blocked by the immoveable conviction that the disciplines of the market economy – that alliance of destructiveness of nature and the inviolability of our human nature – are still the only route to the realisation of our deepest dreams and avoidance of our worst nightmares.

    It has now been generally acknowledged that the plunder of nature must cease; but without confronting the source of those predations, our chances of survival are becoming smaller by the day. Some radical questions arise, not the least of which is why it has become so difficult to distinguish between the nature of industrialism and the industrialising of our own nature?

  • Aboriginal fire management cuts CO2 in Australia

    Aboriginal fire management cuts CO2 in Australia

    From Our World, part of the Guardian Environment Network 

    A bushfire burns in the Kiewa valley towards the town of Dederang, in Victoria.

    A bushfire burns in Australia in February 2009. Photograph: Torsten Blackwood/AFP/Getty Images

    Fire has been used by Bininj (Aboriginal) people for managing habitats and food resources across northern Australian over millennia. The secret of fire in our traditional knowledge is that it is a thing that brings the land alive again. So we don’t necessarily see fire as bad and destructive — it can be a good thing.

    Unfortunately, today fire is not being well looked after in many places in Northern Australia. However, it continues to be managed well around the outstations where people live all the time, such as at Kabulwarnamyo, where I live. To go forward, we need to encourage our children in the ways of the past. Fire must be managed and people must be living on their country (tribal land) to manage that fire.

    As a Bininj man from Nangark of the Gurrguni clan, I hold much knowledge regarding my people’s traditional use of fire and have a great responsibility to ensure that this knowledge is passed down to younger generations, and more importantly, that this knowledge is still used and practised into the future to keep our country alive and healthy.

    Bininj perspective on climate change
    Bininj people have experienced very dramatic climate changes that have been happening since long before Balanda (white people) settled in our country. In our beliefs, our ancestors have been here from the beginning, when the earth was still soft and when some animals were like people before they became the animals we know today.

    Our old people used to tell us dreamtime stories that happened a long time ago; stories about animals, birds and reptiles, and how they’ve gone through those processes of change.

    When our ancestors saw changes happening, they started to adapt to the changes by looking out for solutions of how to live and survive. They were hunters and gatherers that looked for food and good places to live and enjoy a new kind of life in changed circumstance. When walking about, they would cover the whole area as part of their role as land managers — looking after our country according to our traditional land management practices.

    Our people have lived through periods of great change. Knowledge of what they’ve experienced through those changes has been passed down from one generation to another.

    The Great Drought
    One story that is still talked about by our old people concerns a great drought. Balanda have their bible story about a great flood, but we have a story about a great drought.

    When springs and rivers dried up, the first people, or Nayiyunki, were desperately walking around looking for water when they came across a paper bark tree that had a hump like a camel’s, with drinkable water in it.

    So they used their stone axes to crack the humped side of the paper bark tree and out came the water to save their lives. We call the hump and the water that comes from it Djidjindok. Nayiyunki lived on that drinking water from the tree for long periods until water came back in springs and creeks.

    We don’t know exactly when this happened, but we do know that Balanda (white) scientists are able to tell us that this part of Australia went through very dry periods between about 35,000 and 18,000 years ago.

    Sea level rise
    Another story our people talk about is how Northern Australia was attached to Papua New Guinea. It was one big land and the Nayiyunki (first people) walked around managing the whole landscape, looking for better hunting places or lakes stocked full of fish.

    There are stories from Maningrida, now on the edge of the Arafura Sea that separates us from Papua New Guinea. Just off from Maningrida township is Entrance Island. It lies about 3 kms from the nearest land, at Ndjudda Point.

    Our people remember when the Island was connected to the mainland. In the middle, was a big billabong — a big wetland area full of fish and geese, water chestnuts and water lilies, and other game for hunting. It was a very well known wetland place for our past generations and today people still talk about this lost wetland. When the sea level rose, all that wetland went under the seawater.

    At Goulburn Island, the people there still have more stories about these times — stories about islands where people used to live that are there no longer.

    Human made climate change
    So we have been experiencing climate changes for long-long periods up until today’s generations. But the climate changes previously experienced were brought on by nature. They were not climate changes brought on by people, like in the situation we face today.

    Nayiyunki, our first people, watched the way nature worked. They looked at how things changed at the yearly scale and named six seasonal movements for the calender — Bangerreng, Yekke, Wurrkeng, Gurrung, Gunumeleng and Gujewek.

    These are the six calendar cycles of movement for our hunting and gathering purposes. People knew when the seasons changed by seeing the signs and signals in nature that marked those changes. We see changes in winds and clouds and rain; we read the changing seasons through the flowering of plants and grasses; we read the movement of birds and other animals.

    These seasonal calendars have been built up over thousands of years, but now our old people and even middle-aged people like me are seeing that the seasons start to look wrong. We see that things are not really happening when they should be.

    Our old people are confused. They don’t know what’s happening. These are the signals that tell us when we should be burning grass or when we can find the food we want. Scientists tell us the monsoon stopped for more than 10,000 years a long time ago. What would our world be like if we didn’t have the monsoon to give a regular annual cycle for growing, drying and burning grasses. What would tropical Australia be like if it had years of drought, like down south? It’s a scary thought.

    People move around to observe signs of what things are there and what things aren’t there. If things aren’t there then people know that something is going wrong somewhere.

    When changes happened before, the Nayiyunki knew the country very well through their observations. They would talk to spiritual beings and ask for their help and to show them in their dream, so that they could be ready for unexpected events.

    Nayiyunki were able to deal very well with the changes in their time because these were changes made by mother nature. These were natural climatic changes that happened from the first generation. But the changes we are looking at today are not natural changes — they are caused by human behaviour. People, not nature, are responsible.

    Our challenge, our contribution
    Our present generation, we hear media news about global warming. Changes are happening and everybody around the world is running around madly trying to figure out a way to tackle the problems.

    Though for us, the Bininj people, climate change is not new topic, since we have the stories about the changes that happened many-many years ago before our generation, we are very worried about what is affecting us today. Like sometimes we see that the wet season comes in at the wrong time.

    In recent years we have experienced strong cyclones — Cyclone Monica set a new mark for violent storms and we had unexpected floods hitting our communities. Sometime we hear our old people saying these things are happening because our sacred objects are not happy with us because of disturbances to the sacred land. Dynamite and mining, big machines and roads, these are all things that worry our people.

    Within Northern Australia our country has changed in a big way ever since I was born. These are the most visible symptoms that I see:

    (1) the human population has tripled since I was child;

    (2) our people have been losing our language and culture;

    (3) feral weeds and animals are entering our community;

    (4) establishment of towns and settlement;

    (5) mining happening in our country; and

    (6) changing weather, and more.

    Feral animals and weeds are changing our natural environment. Large animals like buffaloes are damaging our landscape and weeds are already within our communities and our home-lands.

    Traditional fire management has changed in a big way. Traditional practices, like travelling on foot, are not happening these days like they used to. People have changed in many ways because of the contemporary forces from outside.

    We all, Balanda and Bininj, have to look at what we can do to fix the damage that is being done to the climate by greenhouse gases and so on.

    Out there at Kabulwarnamyo, we are tackling climate change by bringing back and strengthening our traditional burning, the tools that we have used for thousands of years for managing our landscape.

    By bringing back our way of land management and making it strong for the future, we are doing our bit to help the world deal with climate change.

    • Dean Yibarbuk is Secretary of Warddeken Land Management Limited