This past weekend I attended the River Rally in Portland Oregon; this annual event draws hundreds of hard working river activists who gather to discuss policy, tactics, and science, and to celebrate rivers. This was my first time attending the event in over ten years, and I was proud to return with the special goal of helping to host a delegation of environmentalists from China. Most of the delegates, including several Pacific Environment partners, had never been to the US, let alone Oregon. It was fun to show them around my home state and share in the excitement of Oregon’s lush green forests and pure, clean air!

The conference was highlighted by a noontime rally in downtown Portland’s Pioneer Square, to protest a proposed coal export terminal along the Columbia River. It was an unusually warm day, and spirits were high as a diverse lineup of speakers took to the stage, culminating in a speech by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. of the Waterkeeper Alliance. In addition, Xin Hao of Green Zhejiang gave a passionate talk, where he told the crowd, “China should not become the dumping ground for your coal industry. Our people need clean air, not dirty U.S. coal.” Xin Hao was met with high fives and hugs as he left the stage, and the entire Chinese delegation was energized by the warm welcome they received at the rally.

Xin Hao of Green Zhejiang at Coal Rally

But one Chinese colleague continued to ask me throughout the day, “Why do these American environmentalists care so much about coal?” I explained that coal pollutes the air and contributes to global warming, that coal pollutes rivers and wastes water resources, that coal extraction destroys mountain ecosystems which are headwaters for drinking water sources; and besides, there are better, cheaper ways to meet our energy needs. Yet my colleague still did not seem satisfied, as he recounted the many other serious forms of pollution that he faces in his region of work in China. Even though China is the world’s largest coal consumer (the US is the second largest), the industry’s impacts have been largely ignored, even by the Chinese environmental movement. Yet as the March protest against a coal fired power plant in Hainan shows, this could be changing.

A part of the reason coal has yet to become a hot issue in China is that powerful, state-owned companies largely control China’s coal industry and are difficult for environmentalists to target; but more and more, international corporations are getting involved in exploiting coal in China. And with US and Canadian companies now seeking feasible markets for their dirty coal in China and other Asian countries, a platform for global cooperation to stop the coal industry is needed more than ever. As one next step, some of our partner groups in China are interested in developing informational materials that expose the risks of coal dependency in terms of public health; Waterkeeper Alliance and Pacific Environment are seeking ways to support and foster these efforts.Coal Rally Against Exporting Coal Through Pacific Northwest

Pacific Environment recently hosted a group of four Russian environmental activists for a really great exchange program which brought them to eastern Washington and northern Idaho to meet with a spectrum of groups that are in varying capacities involved in agricultural burning and wildfire management. Over ten packed days, we met with community advocacy groups, farmers, state air quality regulators, tribal smoke managers, and United States Forest Service fire specialists and smokejumpers.

(Photo credit: Anton Beneslavskiy, Greenpeace-Russia) Washington State Department of Ecology’s Air Quality Program staff explain the decade-long negotiation process between farmers, regulators, and communities.

For a little over a year, Pacific Environment has been supporting several pilot projects in Russia aimed at reducing agricultural burning in Siberia and the Far East through a combination of public outreach and education, fire-fighting, and policy advocacy. The four participants all represent these interesting projects, and traveled to the US to discuss with their counterparts strategies for expanding and replicating the successes these groups have seen in changing field burning practices.

Agricultural burning is widespread across Russia – commercial and subsistence farmers alike set fire to their fields in the spring and fall, as this is the quickest and cheapest way to get rid of stubble and extra straw. Control over the practice is poor to non-existent, and intentionally-set fires that accidentally escape field perimeters cause the majority of forest fires in Russia. In addition to public safety and forest conservation concerns, agricultural burning in Russia(pdf) has a considerable impact on global climate. These fires are significant contributors of black carbon, or soot, in the Arctic: smoke columns from massive burning in Siberia carry the carbon north, and where it eventually settles on Arctic ice, darkening the ice and lowering its reflective potential – causing the ice to melt faster. The pilot project efforts will hopefully result in considerable reductions of black carbon from agricultural burning in the Arctic.

(Photo credit: Anton Beneslavskiy, Greenpeace-Russia) Wheat farmer Jeff Schibel gives participants a tour of his farm near Odessa, WA, explaining the permitted burning process and fire safety protocols.

Wheat farmers in eastern Washington State and northern Idaho also burn intensively after spring and fall harvests, and have for decades, but this practice is now very strictly regulated through a state-run permitting system, while bluegrass seed farmers may not burn at all. In the 1990s, the Washington and Idaho departments of ecology created the current burning regulations after a multi-stakeholder coalition led heated campaigns to ban wheat and grass straw burning because of the public health impact of the heavy smoke it sends into nearby communities. A decade of litigation and negotiations between state lawmakers, farmers associations, and communities produced field burning which favors public health over farmers’ frugality.

In Spokane, we met first with activists from Safe Air for Everyone/Save Our Summers, who led much of the local coalition-building and media efforts during the anti-burning campaign, and we were joined by one of the lawyers that helped argue the citizens’ case in court. Of greatest interest to the Russian guests were local organizing tactics and communications strategies. From here, we went to the Washington State Department of Ecology to learn about the state’s burning regulation system and the agency’s role as coordinator between all involved parties. The participants noted that the intensive coordination was time- and resource-intensive, but seemed to balance the goal of increasing burning safety with farmers’ needs.

We also met with the Air Quality Program managers at the Idaho State Department of Environmental Quality in Coeur d’Alene to learn about the state’s very similar burn permitting program and the agency’s work to balance environmental concerns and farmers’ residue management needs. The participants and agency staff talked in great detail about programs to train farmers in safe burning practices and monitoring protocols. In the following days we also visited staff from the Coeur D’Alene Tribe Air Quality Program and then the Nez Perce Tribe Air Quality Program; these agencies collaborate closely with WA and ID air quality managers to control smoke levels within the respective reservations and the shared regional airshed.

(Photo credit: Anton Beneslavskiy, Greenpeace-Russia) US Forest Service hotshot crew leaders give participants a tour of the agency’s aviation equipment and Smokejumper base.

The clear priority of our hosts in WA and ID is to protect community health during agricultural burning seasons, while the Russian participants and their organizations are less concerned with this aspect – the majority of large-scale field fires in Russia occur in areas that aren’t very densely populated. It is the local organizing, strategic media outreach, and state agency-coordinated negotiations that effectively changed burning behavior here that were of greatest relevance for our guests.

Other interesting and useful meetings included a visit with an agricultural researcher (born and raised on a wheat farm) from the Washington State University Dryland Research Station, where he shared his findings on the impact of burning on soil health and wheat crop yield. As it turns out, burning is not as unambiguously beneficial, as wheat farmers in both countries attest – science-based arguments such as these will add further merit to the pilot projects’ campaigns to promote non-burning alternatives in crop residue management. A few of the alternatives offered are no-till farming or plowing stubble back into the soil, but hopefully farmers will soon be able to capitalize on their straw by turning it into an energy resource. The owners of Gady Farms and the director of their NGO FarmPower gave us a tour of their unique facility that converts grass straw into synthetic gas. This project is still in the research phase, but it has great potential to further reduce burning practices while offering a clean, renewable energy resource!

(Photo credit: Anton Beneslavskiy, Greenpeace-Russia) Washington State University agricultural researcher William Schillinger explains crop studies on crop stubble utilization at the Dryland Research Station in Lind, WA.

Our visit to the US Forest Service offices in Missoula, Montana were equally educational – experts in forest fire management and community fire safety answered participants’ questions on forest fuels management, inter-agency coordination, and positive incentives to stimulate public participation in fire prevention and community fire-safety programs. Afterwards, the Russian participants – all volunteer firefighters at home – met with USFS Smokejumper hotshot crew leaders to talk about suppression tactics and team managements, then were treated to a tour of the aircraft and heavy equipment hangers.

Since going back home, exchange participants have stayed in touch with several of the groups they met during the tour, sharing more detailed information about aspects of their respective work, and discussing potential for future advising or trainings.

Lanzhou, the capital of Gansu Province in north-central China, has some of the worst air quality and traffic jams I have seen, even for China. But the city has an optimistic feel. When I visited a few weeks ago, the parks and green spaces were prodigiously adorned with spring festival lighting; and bright silk flowers had been painstakingly attached to the dormant shrubbery.  Even the traffic jams seemed friendly and patient.

Anti-Chopsticks Man, Lanzhou

This optimistic mood also could be felt at the offices of our long-time partner in Lanzhou, the grassroots environmental group Green Camel Bell. The group has steadily grown since we helped start the group in 2004 and now has seven staff members working on rural sustainable development, green transportation, water resource protection, and advancing environmental information disclosure. I went to Lanzhou for a week to in early March, 2012 to conduct trainings on fundraising planning, and solutions to non-point source water pollution, and to check on progress on Green Camel Bell’s water project.

During my visit, we ventured out from Lanzhou one day to look at hydropower development on a tributary to the Yellow River, the Tao River. We spoke with a farmer who had a portion of his land taken for one of the projects. Most of Gansu is characterized by yellow, crumbly hills made of Loess – a fine, silty soil that is difficult to cultivate. Farmers in the Tao River basin are better off than in other areas because of the river’s broad floodplain provides easier terrain and more fertile soil.

The farmer we spoke to said he willingly sold land to the hydropower plant, but on reflection he felt the power plant got too good a deal. Farmland is increasingly scarce, and farmers in this arid region often have to compete for clean water with new factories and hydropower plants. Climate change also seems to be decreasing water availability, and mining, landfills, and the country’s largest nuclear waste depository threaten groundwater security.

Hydropower Plant on Tao River

Though these challenges are daunting, the trip left me feeling energized by Green Camel Bell’s enthusiasm, and their skill in carving a niche for their important and sometimes controversial work. For example, this past year, they managed to convince the Environmental Protection Bureau in a nearby township to host an open information meeting with local community members, who were concerned about industrial pollution impacting their water supply. Green Camel Bell has worked consistently since the open information laws passed in China in 2008 to bring information on pollution risks and rights to similar communities in Gansu.

During my visit I also participated in a “Protect the Mother River” clean up event that took place in honor of the revolutionary peasant hero Lei Feng. Hundreds of Lanzhou residents from eight community and university green groups attended. As we gathered all varieties of trash from the banks of the Yellow River, Green Camel Bell volunteers measured water quality, and talked to participants about reducing, reusing, and recycling. These types of events – often called “happy water tours” in China – are a popular education method among many of Pacific Environment’s partners.

Volunteers at River Cleanup, Lanzhou

In addition to weekly “happy water tours,” this year Green Camel Bell is developing a new program that takes education one step further – to environmental problem solving through theater. During my visit I got to participate in the launch of Green Camel Bell’s new environmental theater workshop, headed by American volunteer Allegra Fonda-Bonardi. At the culmination of the multi-week workshop, Green Camel Bell will host China’s first environmental theater summit in Lanzhou, inviting community theater groups from around the country to participate in learning theater techniques to help resolve environmental conflict. I look forward to reporting on this ground-breaking event, and have high hopes for Green Camel Bell’s continued efforts at the frontier of China’s grassroots environmental movement!

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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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. (more…)

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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