Russia’s Kolskaya gas drilling platform sank approximately 200 miles off the coast of Sakhalin Island in the Okhotsk Sea on Saturday after completing an exploratory well on the Western Kamchatka Shelf. At least 16 crew members are dead and another 38 are still missing. Miraculously, 14 people were rescued from the freezing water. Environmental damage is expected to be minimal, as the platform’s fuel remains stored in hermetically sealed containers.

Russian media is already reporting that the towing operation, conducted in heavy seas during the winter storm season without sufficient safety equipment, violated several laws and safety protocols. A criminal investigation has already begun. Meanwhile, a damning video from a local news station in Murmansk (the home city for many of the Kolskaya’s crew) shows relatives of the missing captain and safety officer explaining that both men had unsuccessfully lobbied their superiors to delay the operation to avoid the Okhotsk Sea’s famously powerful storms.

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The Hawaiian culture places great emphasis on the word “Aloha,” which means love, peace, compassion, and charity. Hawaiians greet and bid farewell to their guests with Aloha. Unfortunately, there was no Aloha at this year’s APEC Summit (Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation) in Honolulu, Hawaii.  Sadly, a local Hawaiian youth was killed on the first day of the summit after scuffling with a U.S. federal agent who was hired as a security guard for the multi-day event. This caused bewilderment and a wave of protests from locals.

Honolulu, normally a peaceful vacation town, was not very friendly during the week of the summit and seemed to escalate into chaos. Roads were closed for world leaders and their entourages, causing massive traffic jams. According to witnesses, just the Chinese delegation alone, arrived with 1,000 members and that was only one of the 21 delegations in attendance. Thousands of armed soldiers and federal agents patrolled the perimeter of the tourist part of Honolulu-Waikiki, where the summit took place. Displaying weapons to cause fear in peaceful people is, unfortunately, a common practice in many countries. The meeting was held on Hawaii, far from the US mainland, where large-scale protests were unlikely. Yet, authorities and the APEC planning committee apparently decided to take special measures in light of recent Occupy Movement Protests in most large US cities.  To give you a sense of how much security was there, the US government spent $44 million to prepare for the summit, including $18 million for police and $10 million for “contingency expenses” such as 700 thousand units of non-lethal weapons, including 25 thousand pepper sprays, and even 3 thousand tasers, all purchased by American taxpayers.

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The blackout that shrouded San Diego in darkness in September demonstrated the problem with relying on power grids as they’re currently designed. The problem began at a substation in Arizona, and a series of triggering events caused failures all the way to San Onofre nuclear plant on the coast. At the cost of an estimated $100 million in damages, and major inconvenience to millions of people, the San Diego region received a crash course about the fragility of depending on a grid that runs mostly on distant sources of energy.

But it didn’t have to turn out this way. Four years ago a San Diego engineer, Bill Powers, published a groundbreaking report, San Diego Smart Energy 2020. The report was all about how to use off-the-shelf technologies in order to build and generate power locally to enhance the existing grid, and provide protection against these sorts of events. The report isn’t a pie-in-the-sky vision of the future. It uses affordable technologies that are available and ready to deploy. It’s a practical guide that includes a 20 percent reduction in energy usage through existing efficiency measures and 2,000 megawatts of local solar projects. To back up the solar, which doesn’t generate at night, Powers’ report proposes 700 new megawatts of small co-generation facilities, similar to what is already in use at Qualcomm, UCSD, SDSU, and Children’s Hospital, which are highly efficient users of natural gas.

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I have now spent two amazing months in the United States working as a Community Solutions Program Fellow with Pacific Environment’s Alaska Program.  This experience has  given me a global perspective on the struggles faced by the environmental movement and the natural resource extraction sector and will no doubt improve my work with my home organization, the Zimbabwe Environmental Law Association (www.zela.org ).  In Zimbabwe, my work focuses mainly on improving community benefits, securing community rights, protecting the environment and promoting transparency and accountability in the diamond and black granite mining sector.  In Alaska, my fellowship with the Pacific Environment has centered on oil and gas development and its negative impacts on the environment and Indigenous communities.  While I have never worked on oil and gas, I have found the work to be intriguing and similar to my work back home, specifically as it relates to community rights.

I have already learned many important things about the global environmental movement during my fellowship so far. First, I realized that impacts from natural resource extraction activities are similar across the world and come with disastrous consequences on both the environment and on communities.  I have found that this is the same whether it is hard rock mining or oil and gas extraction in the U.S.  In Zimbabwe, mining continues to result in environmental pollution and community rights violations, as decisions are made without provisions for viable alternatives for local communities. Often times their land is left completely decimated.  In the same manner, oil and gas extraction in the Arctic poses a threat not just to the Arctic environment but to the lives and cultural rights of Indigenous peoples.  These similarities have shown me the need to learn from the work of organizations in the U.S. and to share my experiences when I return to work in Zimbabwe. I have realized that there is a need to strengthen international networks to ensure global advocacy and lobbying efforts at various international arenas including United Nations platforms. Read the rest of this entry »

Endangered Snow Leopard

Every fall, Pacific Environment gathers the leading environmental experts and activists in Siberia and the Russian Far East for the region’s most anticipated, preeminent strategy meeting. We call it the “Sosnovka Coalition,” in honor of the town where the first meeting was held 13 years ago. Although each Sosnovka meeting is different due to location and current priorities, the spirit and the excitement of seeing old friends and meeting like-minded people remain the same from year to year. During the four days of intensive strategy discussions, Sosnovka members reflect, analyze and come up with important decisions that will shape the conservation landscape for the next year. Newly invited members of the coalition receive hands on experience and the most up-to-date legal and technical information from Russia’s brightest environmental leaders. No wonder that some coalition members jokingly describe the meeting as a four-day PhD program!

Sosnovka traditionally m eets in the city or region that is home to the most acute environmental threat. This year’s meeting was held in the Republic of Altai, where plans to construct a gas pipeline threaten the native nature and culture. The proposed pipeline would bisect a UNESCO World Heritage Site and a plateau that indigenous Altains consider sacred.  If built, the pipeline will deliver gas directly to China and the accompanying infrastructure would threaten to destroy the critical habitats of rare and endangered species, including the argali sheep and snow leopard. By selecting Altai as a meeting place, we helped raise regional awareness of this threat while building the capacity and visibility of local environmental and indigenous organizations.

Horses in Uch-Enmen Nature Park ( Photo: Elena U)

This year’s meeting was organized and hosted by two of Pacific Environment’s longtime partners in Altai: The Foundation for Sustainable Development of Altai (FSDA) and Tengri School of Spiritual Ecology. We’ve been working with both organizations since 2006, supporting several specific projects and assisting with capacity building and leadership initiatives.

Some of the most heated discussions at this year’s meeting focused on traditional topics such as legislation, oil and gas development, mining, forestry, protected areas, hydrological dam development, and alternative energy. New topics, such as working with media and social networks, blogging, and use of new technology also drew interest. The most divisive debate concerned collaboration with political parties. Some members support the tradition of separating environmentalism from politics and keeping Sosnovka independent from political parties, while others seek an opportunity to use the upcoming presidential election as an opportunity to push national political campaigns to incorporate an environmental platform. The debate is not over. It has changed from a face-to-face meeting into an online discussion.

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Last week, Governor Jerry Brown proved me right.  He DOES like our Oceans.

In what environmentalists and advocates would call a double victory, our Governor not only signed a landmark bill to save sharks but he also signed a law that forces Big Oil to pay their share for oil spill safety in California’s waters.  By signing the Oil Spill Bill (AB 1112), oil companies will now pay their part to fund California’s Oil Spill Safety program.  And with this, we get increased oversight and monitoring of the highest of spill risks – all in better efforts to prevent a catastrophic oil spill.

No doubt, this is a wise decision.  The consequences would have been far worse otherwise.  As I have indicated in earlier posts, if this bill was not signed into law, the state would no longer have sufficient funds to run the state’s oil safety program, forcing cuts to program and staff as early as 2012, and leaving protection of California’s coastline in doubt.   This bill now requires oil companies, like BP, to pay an over-due increase in fees on each barrel of oil that enters our state to pay for the program, thus sending a clear message that our state is taking oil spills seriously.

We must realize that oil is a dirty business and as long as our demand for it continues and the industry continues to supply it, we will always have to deal with the associated risks.  It was only a few years ago that California experienced the Cosco Busan disaster, over a year ago that our nation experienced the BP disaster in the Gulf, and right now New Zealand is dealing with their own oil spill catastrophe.

This bill is important. So, great job California! And, thank you Assemblymember Jared Huffman for introducing this great bill and many thanks to the advocacy work of several environmental groups and respective supporters who urged our Governor to act on this bill!

Green Anhui made its first breakthrough in addressing Anhui Province’s water pollution challenges when it successfully eradicated chemical companies from the village of Qiugang. The campaign was later featured in the academy award nominated documentary, the Warriors of Qiugang, which was released last year. With a young staff of seven, Green Anhui continues to help clean up Qiugang following the village’s epic struggle with chemical companies. The organization already has two ambitious new targets: Lake Chao in central Anhui, and the Xingan River in the South.

On our visit, we met Wang Wei, who directs the organization’s water program, at the Xingan River project site. In contrast to the heavily polluted Huai River watershed, where Qiugang is located, the Xingan River flows through hilly terrain that is home to China’s famous holy mountain, Huangshan. The mountain has been the subject of poets and painters in China for millennia, and for good reason. Its steep spires rising out of lush bamboo forests are stunningly artistic.

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The City of Wuhu

Anhui Province is a bit smaller than the state of California, and lies inland to the west of the sprawling, wealthy metropolitan regions of Nanjing and Shanghai. We came to Anhui to meet with Wuhu Ecology Center as well as its cousin organization, Green Anhui, whose office is in the Anhui Provincial Capital of Hefei. These two organizations are the only environmental non-governmental organizations in Anhui. Young, understaffed, and idealistic, these organizations face incredible obstacles trying to take the region’s polluters to task.

Gray, acrid smog met us the day we arrived in Wuhu, a giant city on the banks of the Yangtze which is China’s largest inland river coal harbor. We walked in the smoldering sun along the river with a crop of Wuhu Ecology Center’s new volunteers, taking in the newly redeveloping downtown. The Director of Wuhu Ecology Center, Tian Qian, pointed out fishing boats crowding the mouth of a small tributary as it entered the Yangtze: “The boats flush their garbage directly into the river…sometimes this whole area is full of algae.”

But the impact of fishing boats is a drop in the bucket compared to the industrial pollution entering the waterways here. Later, we cabbed out to an industrial development zone where we were introduced to one of the region’s many waste incineration plants. The smell of garbage and burning metal filled the air as we strolled down a dirt road adjacent to the plant. And in the distance, barely visible through the smog, we could just make out the insignia of the Chinese car manufacturer Chery and the high grey walls surrounding the automobile brand’s production base.

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The past few months have been busy for the budding environmental organization Green Stone. First, they stopped a plan to cut down 1,000 trees for a new subway line in the city of Nanjing, in Jiangsu Province. Next, they exposed a case of persistent, carcinogenic water pollution in one of Apple’s printed circuit board supply chains in the city of Kunshan (see Apple Report). The day before I arrived for a three day visit last month, one of Nanjing’s largest corporations called the Green Stone office, asking what they could do to improve their pollution record. Meanwhile, the Provincial Environmental Protection Bureau has asked Green Stone to be patient as they work to address the hundreds of pollution information disclosures requested by the group. “I think they are kind of afraid of us,” Green Stone’s Director Li Chunhua laughed.

The key to Green Stone’s recent success is not necessarily experience (their staff of three are all in their mid-twenties) but courage, charisma and recruiting. On a windy Sunday morning, we met staff and a group of 25 water monitoring volunteers by the edge of the Qinhuai River, the main river that bisects Nanjing City.  Most of the volunteers were under thirty years of age, including a few new freshmen from nearby universities. Everyone’s spirits were high as we embarked on one of Green Stone’s bi-monthly “river walks,” to collect water quality samples using donated equipment, and to survey visitors to the river. Most were male retirees, folks who have been coming to the river in their leisure hour for decades. “The river stinks when it’s not flowing,” one of our survey participants observed. “It needs to flow. When it doesn’t move the pollution gets worse.”

The Qinhuai River flows into the much larger Yangtze, the source of Nanjing’s water supply. The Qinhuai used to be much more polluted, at least on the surface. In the past decade, Nanjing has spent hundreds of millions of US dollars to clean up the river. Upstream farms were shut down due to their use of agricultural chemicals, and wastewater infrastructure has been improved. During our river walk we observed garbage patrol boats with long-handled scoops picking up every visible scrap of trash.

But with water pollution, there is often more than what meets the eye. As we conducted our basic water quality tests, a volunteer from Nanjing University held a tiny bottle filled with pink water up to a laminated chart, to “read” the levels of dissolved oxygen in the sample. “It looks like a four,” he said, indicating a significantly depressed level of dissolved oxygen. Since there is little farming left on the Qinhuai, the problem is likely being caused by untreated urban sewage and runoff.

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What a nice way to end the week!  Our Governor signed a bill today to ban the trade of shark fins in California.  We are thrilled that California has taken the right step towards doing their part to curb their contribution to the global shark fin trade.  While California wasn’t necessary the leader on this one (as states including Hawaii, Oregon and Washington have already passed similar bans), our state has certainly joined a courageous effort to crack down on one of the leading contributors of shark species decline, which is the international shark fin trade.  And the message is certainly clear – that California is taking shark conservation serious.  We can only hope that other states will also follow suit now that the entire West coast has taken action.  So, kudos to Assemblymemen Fong and Huffman for introducing this great bill and thank you Governor for caring about sharks and our oceans!

But wait, we’re not quite done yet. If oceans are on his mind, Gov. Brown has yet to decide on the fate of another important bill that will protect our oceans and environment and that is The Oil Spill Preparedness Act, or AB 1112.  This law would tighten up our state’s oil prevention standards while ensuring that there are adequate funds to manage these programs— and paid for by Big Oil, and not the citizens of California.  If this law does not pass, California’s waters will be at risk of devastating and costly oil spills which have severe impacts on our marine environment and public health.  Let’s cross our fingers that our Governor will also sign this bill that will assure California’s coasts and wildlife will be protected from the threat of oil spills.  We need a double victory for our oceans!