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  • Gigantic break up in Arctic imminent

    The chunk that came off the glacier between July 10 and July 24 is about half the size of Manhattan and doesn’t worry Box as much as the cracks. The Petermann glacier had a larger breakaway ice chunk in 2000. But the overall picture worries some scientists.

    “As we see this phenomenon occurring further and further north — and Petermann is as far north as you can get — it certainly adds to the concern,” said Waleed Abdalati, director of the Center for the Study of Earth from Space at the University of Colorado.

    The question that now faces scientists is: Are the fractures part of normal glacier stress or are they the beginning of the effects of global warming?

    “It certainly is a major event,” said NASA ice scientist Jay Zwally in a telephone interview from a conference on glaciers in Ireland. “It’s a signal but we don’t know what it means.”

    It is too early to say it is clearly global warming, Zwally said. Scientists don’t like to attribute single events to global warming, but often say such events fit a pattern.

    University of Colorado professor Konrad Steffen, who returned from Greenland Wednesday and has studied the Petermann glacier in the past, said that what Box saw is not too different from what he saw in the 1990s: “The crack is not alarming… I would say it is normal.”

    However, scientists note that it fits with the trend of melting glacial ice they first saw in the southern part of the massive island and seems to be marching north with time. Big cracks and breakaway pieces are foreboding signs of what’s ahead.

    Further south in Greenland, Box’s satellite images show that the Jakobshavn glacier, the fastest retreating glacier in the world, set new records for how far it has moved inland.

    That concerns Colorado’s Abdalati: “It could go back for miles and miles and there’s no real mechanism to stop it.”

  • Ecuador passes charter of plant rights

    On July 7, the 130-member Ecuador Constitutional Assembly, elected countrywide to rewrite the country’s Constitution, voted to approve articles that recognize rights for nature and ecosystems.

     

    “If adopted in the final constitution by the people, Ecuador would become the first country in the world to codify a new system of environmental protection based on rights,” says Thomas Linzey, Executive Director of the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund.

    The following clauses will be included in the constitution that will be submitted to a countrywide vote, to be held 45 days after Assembly finishes its work later this month.

    Chapter: Rights for Nature

    Art. 1. Nature or Pachamama, where life is reproduced and exists, has the right to exist, persist, maintain and regenerate its vital cycles, structure, functions and its processes in evolution.

    Every person, people, community or nationality, will be able to demand the recognitions of rights for nature before the public organisms. The application and interpretation of these rights will follow the related principles established in the Constitution.

    Art. 2. Nature has the right to an integral restoration. This integral restoration is independent of the obligation on natural and juridical persons or the State to indemnify the people and the collectives that depend on the natural systems.

    In the cases of severe or permanent environmental impact, including the ones caused by the exploitation on non renewable natural resources, the State will establish the most efficient mechanisms for the restoration, and will adopt the adequate measures to eliminate or mitigate the harmful environmental consequences.

    Art. 3. The State will motivate natural and juridical persons as well as collectives to protect nature; it will promote respect towards all the elements that form an ecosystem.

    Art. 4. The State will apply precaution and restriction measures in all the activities that can lead to the extinction of species, the destruction of the ecosystems or the permanent alteration of the natural cycles.

    The introduction of organisms and organic and inorganic material that can alter in a definitive way the national genetic patrimony is prohibited.

    Art. 5. The persons, people, communities and nationalities will have the right to benefit from the environment and form natural wealth that will allow wellbeing.

    The environmental services are cannot be appropriated; its production, provision, use and exploitation, will be regulated by the State.

    “Public organisms” in Article 1 means the courts and government agencies, i.e., the people of Ecuador would be able to take action to enforce nature rights if the government did not do so.

  • Prince Charles slams genetic modification

    The mass development of genetically modified crops risks causing the world’s worst environmental disaster, The Prince of Wales has warned.

      Prince Charles warns GM crops risk causing the biggest-ever environmental disaster
    Listen: The Prince of Wales speaks out

    In his most outspoken intervention on the issue of GM food, the Prince said that multi-national companies were conducting an experiment with nature which had gone “seriously wrong”.

    The Prince, in an exclusive interview with the Daily Telegraph, also expressed the fear that food would run out because of the damage being wreaked on the earth’s soil by scientists’ research.

    He accused firms of conducting a “gigantic experiment I think with nature and the whole of humanity which has gone seriously wrong”.

    “Why else are we facing all these challenges, climate change and everything?”.

    Relying on “gigantic corporations” for food, he said, would result in “absolute disaster”.

    “That would be the absolute destruction of everything… and the classic way of ensuring there is no food in the future,” he said.”What we should be talking about is food security not food production – that is what matters and that is what people will not understand.

    “And if they think its somehow going to work because they are going to have one form of clever genetic engineering after another then again count me out, because that will be guaranteed to cause the biggest disaster environmentally of all time.”

    Small farmers, in particular, would be the victims of “gigantic corporations” taking over the mass production of food.

    “I think it’s heading for real disaster,” he said.

    “If they think this is the way to go….we [will] end up with millions of small farmers all over the world being driven off their land into unsustainable, unmanageable, degraded and dysfunctional conurbations of unmentionable awfulness.”

    The Prince of Wales’s forthright comments will reopen the whole debate about GM food.

    They will put him on a collision course with the international scientific community and Downing Street – which has allowed 54 GM crop trials in Britain since 2000.

    His intervention comes at a critical time. There is intense pressure for more GM products, not fewer, because of soaring food costs and widespread shortages.

    Many scientists believe GM research is the only way to guarantee food for the world’s growing population as the planet is affected by climate change.

    They will be dismayed by such a high profile and controversial contribution from the Prince of Wales at such a sensitive time.

    The Prince will be braced for the biggest outpouring of criticism from scientists since he accused genetic engineers of taking us into “realms that belong to God and God alone” in an article in the Daily Telegraph in 1998.

    In the interview the Prince, who has an organic farm on his Highgrove estate, held out the hope of the British agricultural system encouraging more and more family run co-operative farms.

    When challenged over whether he was trying to turn back the clock, he said: “I think not. I’m terribly sorry. It’s not going backwards. It is actually recognising that we are with nature, not against it. We have gone working against nature for too long.”

    The Prince of Wales cited the widespread environmental damage in India caused by the rush to mass produce GM food.

    “Look at India’s Green Revolution. It worked for a short time but now the price is being paid.

    “I have been to the Punjab where you have seen the disasters that have taken place as result of the over demand on irrigation because of the hybrid seeds and grains that have been produced which demand huge amounts of water.

    “[The] water table has disappeared. They have huge problems with water level, with pesticide problems, and complications which are now coming home to roost.

    “Look at western Australia. Huge salinisation problems. I have been there. Seen it. Some of the excessive approaches to modern forms of agriculture.”

    He said that the scientists were putting too much pressure on nature.

    “If you are not working with natural assistance you cause untold problems. which become very expensive and very difficult to undo.

    It places impossible burdens on nature and leads to accumulating problems which become more difficult to sort out.”

    In a keynote speech last year the Prince of Wales warned that the world faces a series of natural disasters within 18 months unless a £15 billion action plan is agreed to save the world’s rain forests.

    He has set up his own rain forest project with 15 of the world’s largest companies, environmental and economic experts, to try to find ways to stop their destruction.

    Only two weeks ago British GM researchers lobbied ministers for their crops to be kept in high-security facilities or in fields at secret locations across the country to prevent them from being attacked and destroyed.

    They spoke out after protesters ripped up crops in one of only two GM trials to be approved in Britain this year.

    Scientists claim the repeated attacks on their trials are stifling vital research to evaluate whether GM crops can reduce the cost and environmental impact of farming and whether they will grow better in harsh environments where droughts have devastated harvests.

  • Country towns fear water buy backs

    “You might be able to compensate the people who sell their licence, but how do you compensate the people who live in the town that depends on that licence?”

    Balonne Shire mayor, Donna Stewart, said the buyback was potentially “catastrophic” for her shire, which had lost 600 people in the last census and may have lost another 200 since August 2007.

    “We won’t be taking it lying down,” Ms Stewart said.

    “We’ll be knocking on the door, asking for compensation.”

    Green groups have suggested the Government use its buyback funds to purchase six key irrigation properties currently on the market or seeking finance, with the aim of putting 300 gigalitres back into the system in the short-term, and recovering 400GL a year in the long term.

    The list includes the 80,000-hectare Cubbie Station, the Balonne’s and Australia’s largest single irrigation enterprise, which has the capacity to hold 462,000 megalitres in its capacious storages.

    “I couldn’t put a dollar value on Cubbie,” Ms Stewart said. “Every-thing that we go to in this shire is supported by Cubbie.”

    Even if Condamine-Balonne irrigators stampede to sell licences when the buyback program opens in Queensland in September – an unlikely scenario, according to Ms Stewart – the water will do little to help the stricken lower Murray.

    The Murray-Darling Basin Commission estimates only 20 per cent of the water that crosses the border makes it to the lower Murray.

    Lower Murray Irrigation Associa-tion chairman, Richard Reedy, said the Queensland buyback might help in the long run. “But to be of any use right now, you would have to bring it all here in plastic bottles.”

  • Bee crisis in UK threatens food supply

    The BBKA president, Tim Lovett, said he was very concerned about the findings: “Average winter bee losses due to poor weather and disease vary from between 5% and 10%, so a 30% loss is deeply worrying. This spells serious trouble for pollination services and honey producers.”

    The National Bee Unit has attributed high bee mortality to the wet summer in 2007 and in the early part of this spring that confined bees to their hives. This meant they were unable to forage for nectar and pollen and this stress provided the opportunity for pathogens to build up and spread.

    But the BBKA says the causes are unclear. Its initial survey of 600 members revealed a marked north-south divide, with 37% bee losses in the north, compared to 26% in the south. “We don’t know why there is a difference and what is behind the high mortality,” said Lovett.

    The government recognises that the UK’s honeybee hives – run by 44,000 mostly amateur beekeepers – contribute around 165 million pounds a year to the economy by pollinating many fruits and vegetables. “30% fewer honeybee colonies could therefore cost the economy some 50 million pounds and put at risk the government’s crusade for the public to eat five portions of fresh fruit and vegetables a day,” Lovett warned.

    The Honey Association warned last month that English honey will run out by Christmas and no more will be available until summer 2009. It blames the shortage on fewer honeybees and farmers devoting more fields to wheat, which has soared in price but does not produce nectar.

    The UK’s leading honey company is so concerned by the crisis that it has pledged to donate money to honeybee research. From next month, for each jar of Rowse English honey sold in supermarkets 10p will be donated to a fund dedicated to improving the health of the nation’s honeybees.

    In the US, honey yields have been decimated by honeybee loses of 36%, many due to colony collapse disorder (CCD), a mysterious disappearance linked to the blood-sucking varroa mite, lethal viruses, malnutrition, pesticides, and a lack of genetic diversity. CCD has spread to Canada, France, Germany and Italy but has not yet been confirmed by government in the Britain.

    The BBKA is calling on the the UK government to put 8 million pounds over five years into researching honeybee losses and improving bee health.

    Farming minister, Lord Rooker, has predicted the demise of the honeybee within a decade. Last November, he told parliament: “We do not deny that honeybee health is at risk. Frankly, if nothing is done about it, the honeybee population could be wiped out in 10 years.”

    Yet the Department of Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) spends just 1.3 million pounds on bee health each year- less than one per cent of the bees’ value to the economy – with an additional 200,000 pounds for research.

    The National Farmer’s Union said it was essential for government to increase its funding of honeybee research. “Research is vital into varroa, bee breeding and the Nosema parasite,” said Chris Hartfield, NFU horticultural adviser. “We are talking about food security and world food supplies being put at risk.”
    Defra said a further 90,000 pounds had been allocated to the NBU this year to expand investigations into colony losses. It is currently consulting on a honeybee health strategy, with responses required by the end of this month.

    A Defra spokesman said: “Significant public funds are already provided to support this area of work but to ensure this intervention is effective, it it vital that work is driven by a well thought out strategy agreed by all relevant parties.”

  • Return of the population time bomb

    Or so it would seem. Ignoring that logic, most environmentalists today avoid half the equation. An emailer’s assertion was typical: “John, if everyone on Earth just consumed less, as they do in Mexico, say, we wouldn’t have exceeded carrying capacity.”

    It’s a simple notion: reduce per person consumption and end our environmental problems. And it lets us sidestep the issue of population size and growth, a subject of much concern in the 1960s and 1970s but taboo today.

    Why taboo? Much credit goes to pressure from social justice activists. They’ve insisted in recent decades that any focus on numbers inevitably violates the right of women to manage their own fertility.

    China’s one-child policy notwithstanding, humane, successful population programmes in countries as varied as Thailand, Iran, and Mexico contradict that assertion.

    Nevertheless, the criticism has cowed environmentalists and NGOs which once championed the population cause, influencing policy, pushing the subject off the agenda, or shifting the emphasis solely to “reproductive health” without the numbers.

    Looking then for a way around the problem of growing human numbers, most environmentalists now suggest a reduction in individual consumption is all we need to solve our ecological problems.

    Are they right? The work of the Global Footprint Network (GFN), home of the “ecological footprint,” points to the answer. Measuring consumption as the use of biologically productive land and sea, their data shows a global maximum sustainable footprint, at today’s population, of just under 1.8 global hectares (gha) per person. Currently, by drawing down nonrenewable resources, we’re a bit over 2.2gha, overshooting Earth’s limits by about 25%.

    What if everyone took the emailer’s advice and converged on Mexico’s level of per capita consumption? Resource use would plummet in developed countries while rising in many of the poorest. (Surely we could not deprive the latter of the chance to raise their standards of living?) But it wouldn’t get us to 1.8gha. At 2.6gha, Mexico’s footprint is 32% too high. A drop to the level of Botswana or Uzbekistan would put us in the right range.

    But that’s not low enough. We’d next have to compensate for UN projections of 40% more humans by the middle of the century. That would mean shrinking the global footprint to under 1.3gha, roughly the level of Guatemala or Nigeria.

    There’s more. The GFN authors point out their data is conservative, underestimating problems such as aquifer depletion and our impacts on other species. In response, the Redefining Progress group publishes an alternative footprint measure which has humanity not at 25%, but at 39% overshoot. But that too, the authors concede, is an underestimate.

    While in overshoot, moreover, we erode carrying capacity. Once we’d got to some level of consumption on a par with countries living today in abject poverty, we’d find there were fewer natural resources on which to draw than there had been when we started.

    Ultimately, there are limits to how much we can reduce per-person use of land, water, and other resources. A purposeful drop on the part of industrialised countries to consumption levels comparable to those of the poorest areas in the world is not only wholly unrealistic but, at today’s population size, would not end our environmental woes. Our sheer numbers prevent it.

    We have no alternative but to return our attention to population, the other factor in the equation. Already in overshoot, we must aim for population stabilisation followed by a decline in human numbers worldwide.

    Humane, empowering measures have documented records of success at reducing fertility rates. Most importantly, we have to provide easy access to family planning (pdf) options while educating parents through the media in the benefits of smaller families and family planning. We should educate and empower girls and women to give them options and help free them to make decisions concerning family size. And we should end government incentives for larger families. We must do these things internationally and vigorously, with a keen eye toward numbers, monitoring results and making adjustments accordingly.

    The stakes are too high to waste time evading the issue. Doing so is intellectually dishonest and a setup for global tragedy. It’s time environmentalists ended the silence on population.