With our organization based in San Francisco, our thoughts are of course with all of the people in Southern California suffering from the raging wildfires.  And we have to ask whether or not global warming is contributing to the conditions leading to the fires.  Here’s a good article by Amy Goodman that starts to explore these connections:  Global Warming Link to Natural Disasters:  http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/opinion/336682_amy25.html 

Meanwhile, scientists are not giving us much more reason to hope.  Check out this article, which says that carbon dioxide emissions are growing even faster than expected:http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/nationworld/2003968367_co223.html. 

This makes me wonder what we are doing to end our addiction to fossil fuels.  Yesterday, Rachel from our Alaska program was with a delegation of native peoples in Washington D.C. asking Congress to slow down the rush to drill for oil both onshore and offshore in the Arctic.  Industry is pushing the U.S. government to open up Arctic lands and waters and zone the Arctic for oil and gas.  This at the same time that we’re already facing the catastrophic and life-threatening impacts of global warming, and our greenhouse gas emissions just continue to spiral upwards out of control?  As Rachel says in this press release (http://www.pacificenvironment.org/downloads/10-23AKNativepressrelease_FINAL.pdf), “they need to move beyond oil.” 

This past weekend, I attended the memorial service for Bill Davoren, an old friend and colleague.  Bill founded the Bay Institute and recently passed away at the age of 83.  He was an elder in our movement.  I was lucky to have the opportunity to work alongside Bill when Pacific Environment had its offices in Fort Cronkhite on the Pacific Ocean in the early 1990s.   

He first retired from the federal government in 1981 and founded the Bay Institute.  Ten years later, he retired for the second time, this time from the Bay Institute.  But he couldn’t stop working – he founded the Aral Sea Information Committee to build connections with Central Asian environmentalists who were fighting the destruction of the Aral Sea – one of the Soviet Union’s worst environmental disasters.  That’s when I met Bill. 

Bill was an old-west style cowboy who had moved to the Bay Area when working for the Department of Interior.  Originally from Colorado, he was always a committed environmentalist, trying to figure out how to stop crazy water diversion schemes and protect our water resources.  He tried working within the system, and eventually realized that the best way to keep the system honest was to watchdog the system from the outside. 

At the memorial services, people remembered Bill as a “raging environmentalist.”  Yes, he was one of the good guys who would read endless amounts of water policy, go to all the public meetings, and pester government officials to keep them honest.  He knew how government worked and was always ready to help push them for better water policy. 

I don’t think of Bill as “raging.”  I think of him as a jovial mentor who was always trying to do the right thing.  He was one of the people who taught me that we need constant vigilance to watchdog government and business – and that you can have a sense of humor at the same time!   

Yesterday I attended the annual Business Ethics Network conference.  Business Ethics Network, or BEN, links together activists and businesspeople who are working to make corporations more responsible.  It’s a great conference that brings together people from the environmental, social justice, labor, public health, and other movements. 

I was inspired by the stories we heard – about how the Campaign for Safe Cosmetics has convinced 600 companies to stop using dangerous chemicals in lipstick and other cosmetics, about how our colleagues at Earthworks are leading a corporate campaign to reform destructive gold mining practices, and about how a campaign targeted publishers and printers to make sure Harry Potter would be printed on old-growth-free and recycled paper.  Special kudos go to our friends and colleagues at Forest Ethics – some of the leaders in the corporate campaign world – who earlier this year convinced Victoria’s Secret to stop using old growth pulp from British Columbia to print its catalog.  Even better, Forest Ethics just helped turn its work with Victoria’s Secret into a promise by the British Columbia government to protect 5 million acres of mountain caribou habitat in inland British Columbia.  Amazing! 

We’re working to transform corporations as well – from our work in Sakhalin and Alaska to make sure Shell becomes more responsible in its offshore drilling practices to our efforts in California to stop the import of Liquefied Natural Gas, yet another fossil fuel contributing to global warming that we don’t need.  Fighting corporations is only part of the battle.  The other part is transforming the corporations so that they can be responsible and act for the public good.

SEOUL, SOUTH KOREA:  Flight schedules meant that I had a day in Korea on my way back from the Russian Far East.  There are virtually no reliable flights directly between the U.S. West Coast and the Russian Far East — even though they are geographically so close — and the most reliable way to get from the west coast to the regions we work in Russia is through Korea.  And while the airport in Seoul is world-class, I was pleased for the opportunity to escape into Seoul. 

In Seoul, I met with Korea Federation for Environmental Movement (KFEM) and Green Korea United.  These are the two leading grassroots environmental groups in Korea; both do very impressive work.  Korean non-governmental organizations are surprisingly strong, partly as a result of the strong civil society that emerged out of Korea’s democratic reforms in the late 1980s.  Every time I visit Seoul, I am amazed to see the popular demonstrations that occur on a daily basis. 

While Korea’s environmental movement is very strong domestically, they are not as well known internationally.  Of course, both KFEM and Green Korea are so busy with their domestic issues — from protecting wetlands and migratory birds to fighting toxic pollution left over by the U.S. military presence, from fighting the nuclear industry to stopping dams.  KFEM and Green Korea have taken on climate change as a major campaign, and they are even working to protect biodiversity that has flourished within the no-man’s land of the de-militarized zone (DMZ) that separates North and South Korea. 

Korean groups are becoming more concerned about the impacts of Korean companies and investment throughout the Pacific Rim.  KFEM is campaigning to stop Daewoo’s environmental impacts in Burma.  And they are concerned about Korea National Oil Company’s plans to extract oil from the Western Kamchatka Shelf — a rich area for fisheries in the Russian Far East. 

I hope we can learn from the amazing successes of Korea’s domestic environmental movement to build environmental efforts around the Pacific Rim!  

From the village of Bychikha, Khabarovsk Region, Russian Far East:  Vasily didn’t bring a guitar this year.  Somehow, his guitar had broken, no one else in Vladivostok had a guitar they were willing to loan, and he showed up empty-handed. 

No matter for all the participants in our annual Sosnovka conference, though.  Sosnovka gathers leading environmentalists from Siberia and the Russian Far East, with a few folks from Moscow sprinkled in for good measure.  Now in its 9th year, the friendship and trust among Sosnovka members runs deep.  They gather to discuss the most critical environmental issues affecting the region:  from large oil and gas pipelines to mining projects, from changes in Russian environmental laws to forests and protected areas. 

As always, we never had enough time to delve deeply into the issues.  Too many issues, too little time.  But we touched upon the main issues in our conference discussions, and then people split off into small working groups or by twos and threes to talk about the issues that mattered to them. 

It was great to see people from all over Siberia and the Russian Far East, covering territory more vast than we in the U.S. can imagine.  We had folks from Krasnoyarsk and Yakutsk, from Sakhalin and Magadan, covering the entire region from Altai in the west to Kamchatka in the east. 

In the end, Vasily figured out how to get a guitar in Khabarovsk.  And thus, we continued the Sosnovka tradition, singing Russian folk songs late into the night, every night, and into morning.  Sure, people didn’t sleep much.  But everyone came away re-inspired and recharged, ready to battle for the environment in their remote regions for another year.  Sure, Sosnovka is great because of the issues we discuss.  But Sosnovka is even better because of the friendships and the people that provide the foundation for the environmental movement in Siberia and the Russian Far East. 

Sakhalin’s economy depends on fishing.  Take Aniva District, for example:  one fish inspector told me that 70-80% of the local economy is tied to fishing.  And most of that is for salmon. 

So it’s no surprise that one of the major concerns for people on Sakhalin about oil and gas development is its impacts to salmon.  Shell has been roundly criticized by environmentalists and even the Russian government for the impacts to salmon spawning streams from its pipeline construction. 

Under Russian law, companies have to pay for damages to natural resources.  So Shell provided $11 million to the Sakhalin Fisheries Agency as compensation for its damage to salmon.  Regardless of the fact that this amount is too low, I was most amazed about how the Sakhalin Fisheries Agency then decided to use this money.  The Fisheries Agency used the compensation to reconstruct an enormous fish hatchery on the Taranai River.  The reconstruction included building a barrier that blocks fish from going upriver so that all the salmon can be taken at the hatchery.  Essentially, this will destroy the fisheries in the upper part of the watershed.  

Shell and the Sakhalin Fisheries Agency should know better.  It’s much smarter to spend money to protect healthy wild salmon habitat than to build hatcheries that just lead to more threats to wild salmon.  Instead, they’ve just doubled the damage to salmon from Sakhalin-II and oil and gas development.  In the indigenous Ainu language, Taranai River means “Fish River.”  Too bad this fish river is being killed. 

Russians love their dachas.  Dachas are summer garden houses, and many people – especially retired pensioners – will spend all summer on these small plots of land growing vegetables and flowers.  We visited a dacha collective on the edge of Prigorodnoye in southern Sakhalin.  The love and effort that these “dachniki” (dacha folk) have put into their land was obvious.  They showed us their flowers, berries, potatoes, and even grapes – yes, grapes! – that they have grown on their dachas over the last 30 years.  They fed us plums and apples from their trees and gave us homemade wine. 

But these dacha owners are fighting with Shell.  Their dachas are just 1200 meters from Shell’s enormous LNG plant in southern Sakhalin, part of the Sakhalin-II project.  Originally, the LNG plant was supposed to have a 3.5-kilometer buffer zone.  At least that’s what the environmental impact review said, which was approved by the Russian government.  After all, if an accident were to occur at the LNG plant, the blast zone itself could cover 3 kilometers, including everything in this dacha community.  But if the buffer zone was 3.5 kilometers, Shell would have had to pay to resettle these dacha owners.  Shell’s solution?  Let’s make the buffer zone just 1 kilometer, and then Shell doesn’t have to resettle anyone. 

Shell is in the process of commissioning its LNG plant, and as a result, has been flaring gas since early July.  You can see the flare 24 hours a day, even from the dachas.  They say they no longer need to turn on lights on their upper floors because of the flare.  Worst of all, you can smell the flare from the dachas.  They said that yesterday, the area was covered with black smoke from the flare.  Some days, if they are downwind, they say the smell is unbearable.  We’re helping them to start monitoring their air quality and send air samples to laboratories for analysis.  Meanwhile, some of the dacha owners can’t even spend the night at their dachas anymore due to the air pollution and the noise from the LNG plant.  Dozens of dacha owners have already abandoned the area, fed up with Shell and construction of the LNG plant, although dozens more are hanging on because of their love of the land. 

The dacha owners are still demanding that Shell commit to a resettlement plan that would comply with international standards.  But Shell is refusing to take responsibility for its actions.  There is a certain beauty in Russian dachas, and Shell doesn’t seem to realize how much the ‘dachniki’ love their land.  The ‘dachniki’ have invested so much of their sweat and time into tending the land, growing fruits and vegetables.  I felt like I am seeing a part of Russia die as these dacha owners are being forced out by Shell. 

Continuing our trip here on Sakhalin, we traveled north over the last few days to visit indigenous reindeer herders and indigenous fish camps.  The Uilta people in Sakhalin traditionally herd reindeer, while the Nivkh people are fishers.  Both peoples are being impacted by enormous oil and gas projects in Northeastern Sakhalin led by Shell and Exxon. 

We used a Gaz-66 – an enormous Russian truck that can pretty much deal with any road conditions – to drive out to the reindeer herders.  After getting near to the area we hiked for about half a mile through lichen, dwarf birch, and dwarf pine to find the camp.  We saw berries and mushrooms as we walked – this “forest-tundra” area was very rich.  The herders we met had about 60 reindeer.  Only about 17 Uilta continue to herd reindeer.  Indigenous peoples such as the Uilta in Russia have had to adapt to constant changes – from forced collectivization and forced resettlement into large towns under the Soviets, to adapting to the market economy and a collapse of government subsidies in the 1990s, to massive oil and gas developments on their traditional territories over the last several years.  Traditions have been lost, although a number of indigenous peoples in Russia – including the herders who we met – are trying to restore the traditions. 

The herders said that ever since Exxon built an enormous oil processing complex, the reindeer have been forced out of their traditional calving area.  The noise, lights, and constant traffic from this processing facility are too much for the reindeer.  The herders are worried about survival rates among the reindeer calves as they do what they can to increase the reindeer population. 

The Nivkh fishers are also worried about the impacts of Shell and Exxon’s projects on their traditional fishing lifestyles.  They spend the summers in fish camps spread out along the bays of Northeastern Sakhalin and come there year-round to fish saffron cod, char, and salmon.  We arrived in time to see some of our indigenous partners fishing for salmon and then shared a wonderful traditional meal.  But the Nivkh grandmothers we talked with are worried – they say that more and more often, they come across fish that have sores and blisters or that smell like oil.  They don’t know why this is, and the oil companies have refused to study the problem.  

Their frustrations with the oil and gas developments led the Nivkh, Uilta, and other indigenous peoples to blockade roads to Shell and Exxon’s projects in 2005.  As a result, Shell agreed to an indigenous peoples’ development plan that provides a council with $300,000 per year over 5 years.  But what happens after these five years are up?  In our conversations, we learned that many indigenous peoples are concerned that the money from this plan won’t really be used to help with restoring and protecting their traditional culture.  Instead, they know that they’re the ones who will stay in northeastern Sakhalin.  The oil companies will leave Sakhalin, and the native peoples will be left with the mess. 

Vasily, a reindeer herder, told us that all he really wants is “calm.”  He wants a calm place to herd reindeer and restore his people’s traditions.