The place where fishermen returned the collected crude oil has a nice name, Golden Bay Bridge. To 35 year old fisherman Cui Zhanyou, it has become a bridge of no return.
On the evening of July 27th, when Cui was transporting barrels of oil to the collection center, his boat was overturned by rough waves. After days of searching, Cui’s family still could not find a trace of him. (more…)
Photo: Greenpeace
In the very recent memory of Tom Beeke, a passionate Canadian birder, Dalian’s Jinshitan resort was still his land of discovery. Tom got a job as English teacher at Dalian Maple Leaf International School several years ago. Besides living close to the sandy beach, it was also a great treat being able to venture around Jishintan coast, bushes and wetlands to watch birds. This summer, Tom’s new book, Birds of Dalian, hit the local book market.
Dalian, located on the East Asia-Pacific Flyway of migratory birds, is an important stopover site for birds migrating between Siberia and Australia. For those birds, who are now in Siberia, their journeys south will soon start. For this year’s new chicks, their first ever encounter with the coasts, islands and the sea around Dalian will begin one month later. (more…)
Back in July, Igor and I went to visit a partner who conducts anti-poaching patrols in the Nalichego Nature Park, not far from Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky. We had to take a boat to his home within the park and, after a day-long tour, rode back to the truck to head home. As we turned a corner we saw the following image:
Right there, in the middle of a federal park on waters where any fishing equipment beyond a spinning rod is banned, we caught two men stringing a net across the mouth of a key spawning river.
I realized just how complacent poachers can be on Kamchatka, but it also revealed how a little support in the right places can significantly ameliorate the problem. Our partner in this park will likely catch several similarly complacent poachers this season. And if we can find more committed partners like him to conduct similar work, we can show poachers that their illegal work will not be tolerated by the locals who care the most about healthy salmon populations.
Zhong Yu of Greenpeace bears witness to the Dalian oil spill (Photo: Greenpeace)
Twenty-two years ago, when my high school classmates unfolded a banner with the words “Save Our Seas!”, we put the Greenpeace logo on the banner. At that time, we were protesting marine debris littering the coasts of Dalian.
Now, twenty-two years since that unofficial Greenpeace banner hung in 1988, Dalian received its first official support from Greenpeace with the deployment of several Greenpeace teams to respond to the massive oil spill in Dalian.
Zhong Yu, senior action coordinator with Greenpeace China, was not prepared for what she saw nor for what she would encounter. Like many clean up workers and local fishermen, Zhong did not wear protective gear when she walked into thick crude oil along the beach. The photo of her wearing a red Greenpeace T-shirt and blue jeans was the first telling image from Greenpeace bearing witness to the Dalian disaster. (more…)
Olkhon is the third-largest lake-bound island in the world, and the largest in Lake Baikal with an area of 730 square kilometers (280 sq mi). On the evening of July 2nd, I arrived in Khuzhir, the administrative center of the Olkhon Island. I planned to spend the weekend finalizing a grant proposal and meeting with local activists.
I went for a run along the lake when I arrived. The last time I visited the island was in 1998, with a crew of filmmakers who I accompanied as an interpreter and a local chaperone. At the time, the island did not have electricity. In fact, the few people that did live there lived off diesel generators which supplied enough electricity for basic lighting, cooking, and an hour or two of TV in the evening. Back then, there were only a few foreigners who used to stride along the streets of Khuzhir, attracting a lot of attention from local kids. There were one or two grocery stores and a couple of tourist guest houses. One of the most famous guest houses was run by the island’s local interpreter, Nikita Bencharov, who had extra wooden cabins and some sites for tents in his backyard. (more…)
This week, just days after BP finally capped the hemorrhaging well in the Gulf, President Obama issued an Executive Order delivering a first-ever National Ocean Policy (NOP). Instead of 20 different agencies administering more than 140 unique laws, often with conflicting purposes, in a piecemeal fashion, we will now have a guiding vision for all federal agencies with a mandate for protection and restoration of our coasts, oceans, islands and Great Lakes.
While the new policy can’t prevent a blow-out like the Deepwater Horizon it can prepare us much better to address such accidents, before they occur. The NOP is the result of a yearlong public process that considered input from many stakeholders including commercial fisherman, conservationists, scientists, the recreational community, business owners and thousands of citizens. In San Francisco, over 500 people packed the hearing to weigh in on the question of how to best manage our shared ocean resources.
Kolya is the kind of boss that everyone at once pray
s they will have and dreads they will end up with. As a leader he is nearly flawless; knowledgeable, experienced, and deadly calm under pressure. As a teacher, he is all of these things, but also impatient, short-tempered, and sarcastic.
Kolya is the indigenous Even hunter and mountain man who led me, Tatiana Indanova, a PE partner who monitors water quality, two Muscovite botanists, his son Zhenya, and a local friend on a week-long expedition through the Kamchatka wilderness to conduct Indanova’s water quality monitoring project, collect samples of Kamchatka’s flora, and find some escaped reindeer.
From day one, I knew what kind of leader Kolya would be: as we packed our belongings into our saddlebags, I found myself standing around, unsure how to pack and not wanting to get in the way. As Kolya packed some of my things, he stopped for a moment to pull off his jacket. “Too hot?” I asked, hoping to strike up a conversation. “Yeah,” he replied with a grin, but looking me dead in the eyes, “because I’m not just standing around.” I still chuckle when I remember how he scolded his son’s friend for pulling in a net too slowly: “Pull harder, dammit, you’re not undressing a girl!” (more…)
Posted by Jon Spaulding
The Russian environmental community won a victory in late May when a Pacific Environment partner NGO, Geblerovsky Ecological Society (GES) successfully challenged the commercial logging company Birch and the government agency that issued the permit to clear-cut a ‘protected’ forest reserve in pristine, remote Altai Krai, in southern Siberia. On May 27, the regional court ruled against the logging company and their government allies, ordering an immediate halt to destructive clear-cutting in the roughly 90,000 acre Zalesovsky Forest Reserve, a rare and ancient taiga ecosystem that is home to bear, moose, and many other species, some of them officially listed as endangered. This victory resulted from Pacific Environment’s funded project work to GES on Public Forest Monitoring.
The decision sets a legal precedent of national significance by using Russian citizens’ constitutionally guaranteed right to a healthy environment to win a court case against a government agency. It also is indicative of the potential power grassroots NGOs have in promoting respect for the rule of law in Russia.
GES executive director Aleksey Gribkov acknowledged that the victory would not have been possible without the legal advice of a growing network of allied NGOs throughout Russia that Pacific Environment has been helping to cultivate over the past twenty years.
With a current grant from Pacific Environment, GES defends critical habitat for protecting endangered species and conserving Altai’s unique biodiversity. The project, Public Forest Monitoring, taps into many Russians’ discontent with government and commercial abuse of public resources, and focuses on recruiting and training regional volunteer activist groups to detect illegal poaching of wildlife and illegal logging of protected forests.
For over ten years, GES has focused on biodiversity issues, conducting conservation activities in nature preserves, assisting in the creation of school-based forest stewardship programs, monitoring conservation lands, conducting environment education, and leading anti-poaching raids.
To learn more about our Russia Program, visit www.pacificenvironment.org/russia.
Posted by Carrie Thompson, Associate Director of Trust for Mutual Understanding and a long-term supporter of Pacific Environment.
Since the explosion on the Deepwater Horizon oil rig of April 20th, we have all been watching in horror as the disaster and its gravity slowly unfold. An industrial accident that brings the loss of eleven lives is heartbreaking in and of itself. That followed by the realization two days later that an untold amount of oil was spewing from a broken pipe is almost too much to bear. And even though I now live over 1500 miles away, the tragedy strikes a deeply personal note, as I grew up on the Gulf Coast. I have a hard time thinking about the spill without crying.
I have a complicated relationship with oil. Growing up in Houston, both of my parents, in one way or another, worked for oil companies. But if we are being honest, we all have a complicated relationship with oil since we live in a country where we expect to be able to walk into a room, flip a switch, and have light. We depend on oil for our transportation, our system of distribution, for our modern conveniences, for every aspect of modern life—we are all dependent on oil, and while the ever present threat of climate change looms for our future, the oil spill in the Gulf reminds us of the immediate danger of this dependence. (more…)
In early April, 34 Chinese environmental NGOs wrote letters to 29 IT companies regarding members of their supply chains violating Chinese environmental laws and regulations. The list included suppliers for global brands like Apple, IBM, Intel, Sony and Lenova.
Ten days of mostly silence on the part of these companies led to a press conference that attracted widespread media attention and finally some responses. According to an insider source, some companies claimed that these violations took place before they became buyers; others made vague promises of investigations and redress. Hundreds of letters and phone calls are being exchanged between the parties and much work is still needed to be done. (more…)
