The Linnean Society of London is to publish a biological survey of the Yasuní National Park located in Ecuador’s Amazon basin. Studying an area of just two hectacres, a team of German scientists counted over a 100 different species. Most surprising was the find that ten different species of bats roosted in the zone. It is unclear how so many different species of bats coexist.
Unfortuntately, Yasuní is threatened by logging and oil and gas exploration.
My own personal fascination is with catepillars. I just think them amazing. In the first video, check out the one at the 1:10 mark and another at the 1:39 mark. Just amazing. In my native Colombia, I have seen so many amazing specimens. Frogs in Colombia are unbelieveable. The second video boasts a giant tree sloth that has to scurry for safety when its tree is felled by loggers.
Al Jazeera’s Inside Story asks if the Union for the Mediterranean will work and if Nicolas Sarkozy, the French president, is the right man to spearhead the ambitious project. The following videos are interviews with a panel of experts that includes Ignasi Guardans Cambó, Saad Djebbar and Isabel Schäfer. Ignasi Guardans Cambó is a Catalan politician and Member of the European Parliament with the CiU (CDC), Member of the Bureau of the Alliance of Liberals and Democrats for Europe and is vice-chair of the European Parliament’s Committee on International Trade. Maître Saad Djebbar is Deputy Director of the CNAS. He is a well-known lawyer and political analyst and an associate fellow at the Royal Institute for International Affairs at Chatham House. He appears regularly in the Arab and British media as a commentator on North African affairs. Isabel Schäfer is an Assistant Professor of Middle Eastern Studies at the Freie Universität Berlin.
President Sarkozy has spearheaded this effort and the inaugural session was held in Paris. All 27 European Union members and 16 non-EU countries including representatives from the Palestinian Authority from the Mediterranean attended the meeting. Only Libya did not attend.
Broadly speaking, the new Union of Mediterranean is aimed at fostering North-South cooperation across the Mediterranean on subjects such as immigration, the environment and terrorism. So far, the meeting seems to be a coming out party for Syria. Syria’s Assad and Israel’s Olmert sat in the same room, marking the first time a Syrian President had ever been in the same room with an Israeli Prime Minister. The event was carefully choreographed so that the two would not cross path though. Sryrian President Bashar al-Assad said it could take between six months to two years to reach a peace agreement with Israel if the two sides, who have held indirect negotiations, agreed to face-to-face talks. In addition, Syrian diplomatic recognition of Lebanon was assured. Syria and Germany signed a repatriation agreement.
“Demand for land to grow food, fuel crops and wood is set to outstrip supply, leading to the probable destruction of forests, a report warns.”
The report in question was drafted by the coalition Rights and Resources Initiative focused on global forest policy. They advocate sustainable management of forestry as well as respects for the people living in and from the forests in their rights not to be forcibly displaced by logging companies who deprive them of their livelihood. As stated in the BBC,
““Arguably, we are on the verge of a last great global land grab,” said RRI’s Andy White, co-author of the major report, Seeing People through the Trees.
“It will mean more deforestation, more conflict, more carbon emissions, more climate change and less prosperity for everyone.”
Rising demand for food, biofuels and wood for paper, building and industry means that 515 million hectares of extra land will be needed for growing crops and trees by 2030, RRI calculates.
But only 200 million hectares will be available without dipping into tropical forests.”
Well, for logging companies and well as the biofuel and ranging sector, there is no problem: let’s just tap into these tropical forests. But this would make climate change worse since deforestation already accounts for 20% of carbon emissions. But the need for both fuel and food has triggered land speculation and whatever the global financial markets want, they usually get. It is a very unequal battle between Big Money and the rights of indigenous people to land.
Cross-posted from The Global Sociology Blog. My post, my views.
As an addendum to my post of the Bhopal disaster, I would like to bring into the discussion the Risk Society theory that is, in my view, fundamental to the understanding of contemporary society in the global context.
What do the Bhopal industrial disaster, the Chernobyl nuclear reactor meltdown, the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, the epidemics of mad cow disease, and the widespread use of genetically modified crops have in common? According to German sociologist Ulrich Beck, they all indicate the rise of a world risk society.
According to Beck (1992), the world risk society is a product of modernity. Since the industrial revolution, one of the major large-scale societal issues was the reduction of scarcity. The solution was to develop and use technology to produce enormous numbers of goods and increase the general level of wealth for the populations of industrial societies. This was successful: scarcity is hardly a problem in post-industrial societies (core areas). If anything, abundance is. Generally speaking, people no longer starve in developed countries, quite the contrary, obesity has become a problem.
However, this mass production of goods has been accompanied by the production of “bads” or, in other words, risks. Beck defines risk as “a systematic way of dealing with hazards and insecurities induced and introduced by modernization itself. Risks, as opposed to older dangers, are consequences which relate to the threatening force of modernization and to its globalization of doubt" (1992: 21). As such, risks have several characteristics that distinguish them from dangers in previous periods of human history.
Nearly one-third of the small animals that make up the most massive and elaborate structures in coral reefs face an elevated risk of extinction from global warming and various local problems, an international group of scientists reported Thursday.
The worldwide assessment of more than 700 species of corals showed that 32.8% were threatened with extinction, especially those that formed large mounds or intricate branches resembling antlers.
Coral reefs provide hiding places and a habitat for 25% of all marine life and are a major source of food for the poor and of tourist revenue in tropical countries.
Some of the threats are global, including elevated ocean temperatures that have stressed corals so much that they are “bleached” bone-white. A massive bleaching brought on by warmer waters in the 1998 El Niño resulted in a vast decline of the world’s reefs.
Corals also face excessive and destructive fishing and polluted runoff that buries them under sediment or bathes them in nutrients that fuel out-of-control growth of algae and bacteria.
Located in on the shores of Lago Argentino in Argentina’s Patagonia, the Perito Moreno Glacier is an amazing site, a huge expanse of ice visible from the placid forested shores of the lake. The pressure from the waters of the lake had carved out a tunnel through the glacier and today that tunnel collapsed in spectacular fashion. The report below is from Argentinian television.
This report also from Argentine television is narrated.
Indigenous people in Perú began a 72 hour national strike on Monday against a proposed law by the government of Alan Garcia that strikes at indigenous title to the land in the Amazon Basin. The Peruvian government wants to open up these lands to natural gas development. The strike ended yesterday with the worst disturbances in the regional capital of Madre de Dios in southeastern Perú where the state house was burned. Elsewhere around the country, there were numerous road blocks and protests. A total of 216 people were arrested and 21 policemen were injured. These strikes have been gaining force since late last year when the law was first proposed.
The above video is from Candamo National Park in Perú’s Amazon Basin. I once went on a Smithsonian expedition to the Manu National Park which is one of the world’s Living Edens. These areas are incredibly fragile. That trip to Manu ranks as one of the best I have ever taken.
In September 2007 a proposed bill was to be deliberated by the Peruvian Congress to reduce the size of a key National Park by 200,000 hectacres. Candamo is a megadiverse site and cannot be allowed to be the target of gas companies, as its natural resources are far more valuable in the long term. For more information, please visit Macaw Monitoring International or Salvemos Candamo. Since then, a local and international outcry has seen the halting of the movement of this bill through congress, and most recently, a denial of its existence. This site contains information on the background of this attempt to desecrate one of Peru’s most sacred natural resources.
More about the Ley de la Selva in Perú below the fold.
Those of us old enough to have lived through the 1980s remember Bhopal as a major industrial disaster. On December 3, 1984, an accident at the Union Carbide pesticide plant (UC was bought by Dow Chemical in 2001) released poisoned gas that killed an official estimate of approximately 3,800 people (actually doctors on site claim that 15,000 died within a month). Over 500,000 have been affected by inhaling the gas.
This is something Muhammad Yunus warned about in his latest book: the Corporate Social Responsibility is often just a disguise for profit-making activity, which he opposes. Yunus is in favor of full social entrepreneurship: no profits involved. Take the case of Ethos, the bottled water, which the New Internationalist calls “bullshit in a bottle” (I agree). What is Ethos?
“In what is quite possibly the last word in cynical advertising, Starbucks and PepsiCo have teamed up with Matt Damon (the Hollywood star who drives a Toyoto Prius to save money, not to be part of an ‘environmental trend’, so he says) to distribute a brand of ‘charitable’ bottled water called Ethos.”
What’s wrong with that? First, it is environmentally bad: we need to reduce the amount of bottled water we use in our countries. We have perfectly good tap water (it is even sometimes bottled and sold to us as bottled water). And if it has a little taste, get a Brita filter, ok? Our societies invested a lot of money so we could turn on the tap and get clean water, which went a long way to improve our health and living conditions.
And of course, plastic bottles are, well, plastic… petroleum products. We should reduce our use of those, as much as possible. We should Think Outside the Bottle.
And of course, we should also be careful with our consumption of water. Here is a map of water use, from the great Worldmapper website.
Collapse, if and when it comes again, will this time be global. No longer can any individual nation collapse. World civilization will disintegrate as a whole. Competitors who evolve as peers collapse in like manner.
– Joseph A. Tainter, The Collapse of Complex Societies, 1988
Are humans smarter than yeast? On one level, yes. We can manipulate our environment to some degree to our advantage. On another level, no. It won’t do us much good when we fall victim to a law of nature called “overshoot and collapse.”
In biological terms, overshoot and collapse is the tendency of any population to grow exponentially, at x per cent a year, until said population overshoots its resources (land, food and water) and then collapses. A few factors can keep a population in check, predation for example. We don’t have any. There’s no one keeping us in check. There aren’t enough great whites, burmese pythons or siberian tigers on the planet to make .001% dent in our numbers. Normal predation rates of say zebras by lions are more in order of 5% per year. That is out of a herd of 100 zebras, 5 will fall prey to lions in any given year. Lions are the primary predators for zebras but zebras have other secondary predators such as hyenas, crocodiles, leopards, wild dogs and cheetahs. Even a pyhton can take a colt now and then. Humans are not on any one’s lunch menu as a regular item. Blue plate special very now and again. So we are prone to overshoot and collapse tendencies. We have done it before and are headed that way again. Talk to any Anastazi lately? How about a Mayan? But those were localized collapses affecting human populations in a very small area. The next one will be global because the problem is now global.
Exponential growth rates tackle doubling of any factor. To determine how fast something will double, 70 divided by the rate of growth will provide the answer. For example, a country growing at 2% a year will double in size in 35 years — 70/2 = 35. A country growing at 7% (70/7 = 10) will double in ten years. I’ll point this out since I do not have any children and I am an evolutionary dead-end but the likelihood of a human overshoot and collapse by 2030 is approaching 100%. The current population growth rate is 1.14%. It doesn’t sound like much does it? Now do the math (70/1.14). 61 years. That means that in 2068, the population of the planet should hit 13 billion. It won’t becuse society should begin to collapse when another biological law kicks in — carrying capacity.
Carrying capacity is the supportable population of an organism, given the food, habitat, water and other necessities available within an ecosystem is known as the ecosystem’s carrying capacity for that organism. Most biologists and energy specialists put that number somewhere between eight and nine billion. Exceed carrying capacity and collapse ensues.
So it is important to look at our economic model in these terms. We are a sowing the seeds of our own destruction.
