By Rosemary Ahtuangaruak

As an Inupiat who lives on the coast of the Arctic Ocean, I live a traditional lifestyle — hunting, fishing, whaling, gathering, and sharing our traditional way of life as our elders taught me. It is my duty to ensure the lifestyle that was passed down throughout generations continues in the face of multiple threats, including increased shipping.

As sea ice continues to recede in the Arctic, we are seeing an increase in the vessels that travel through our ocean. These ships can harm the marine environment with increased noise and pollution. Currently, the International Maritime Organization (IMO) is developing a mandatory set of regulations for vessels traveling in Arctic waters. However, they are doing it with little input from the people who will be most impacted by increased shipping.

Indigenous peoples who live a traditional way of life have an inherent right to make decisions about regulations that will impact us. I am calling on the U.S. delegation to the IMO, who has an obligation to consult with Tribes, to guarantee our concerns are addressed.

Wetlands are an incredible environmental resource, providing critical habitat for countless animals and plant species, and natural water filtration and storage.  Wetlands help regulate water tables during floods and storm surges, and also serve an important carbon storage function. It is alarming, then, that our wetlands are degrading faster than any other ecosystem type, primarily due to climate change and development.

In honor of World Wetlands Day today, we at Pacific Environment would like to highlight some of the great work being done by our partners in wetlands around the Pacific Rim.  In particular, we would like to acknowledge the work of Dauria and the Rivers without Boundaries Coalition to assist WWF-Amur and the Daursky Biosphere Reserve in their efforts to protect the Ramsar wetlands within the transboundary Amur River basin in eastern Russia at the China-Russia border.  We would also like to acknowledge our partners in China, the China Mangrove Conservation Network, for their work on protecting ancient Looking-glass mangroves.

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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 27^th, 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…)

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 2^nd, 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…)

Originally posted on ChinaDialogue.net

Since late June, almost 1000 American consumers have written letters to Steve Jobs and Apple’s Public Relations Department urging them to address concerns of China’s Green Choice Alliance regarding heavy metal pollution from suppliers in China.

The IT industry is well known for its toxic legacy in its disposal cycle, but little attention has been paid to the environmental impacts of its production. In 2009, more than 4000 people, mostly children, were afflicted with lead poisoning in China inspiring the Green Choice Alliance to initiate a campaign to clean up multinational’s IT supply chains.  The Alliance is taking action where the government is unable to, namely targeting brand-conscious multinationals to attract public and media attention to the cause. (more…)

I was born and grew up along a tributary of the Pearl River, the Fenjiang in Foshan. In the early 90s, one of our favorite pastimes during the warm summer nights, was to get “yeshao” or “midnight snacks” at the dozens of outdoor eateries that sprang up along “Fenjiang”, the Fen River. These eateries would cook up greasy but tasty fried noodles, fried rice and various seafood stir fries. Vegetables and dishes were washed with water directly pulled up in buckets from the river. No one thought much of it.

By the time I returned from my first trip home after immigrating to the US, in 1998, things had turned badly. The Fenjiang smelled like the Soy Sauce factory nearby and had many different colors similar to the textiles coming out of another factory. In my most recent trip last year, the river didn’t smell as bad, but still look dead, if not poisonous. People had different ideas as to which factories caused the pollution, but everyone accepted the situation as inevitable and never bothered with finding out the truth. Then this week came a timely and well investigated Greenpeace report on the companies that are poisoning the Pearl River and the larger political context which are allowing the situation to deteriorate. It answered so many questions and highlighted the urgency to speak up.

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Beijing, China

Posted by Xiu Min Li

Beijing was wet and grey this morning. There was no chance for a blue sky!  Today I met with Yu Zhijiao of CLAPV, the short name for Center for Legal Assistance to Pollution Victims. Established in 1998, CLAPV is the foremost legal aid center in China for victims of environmental pollution. The center is involved in a wide range of programs to promote China’s environmental laws: it conducts legal research, produces popular guides to increase public understanding of environmental laws, trains lawyers, judges and NGOs on legal advocacy and it also runs a hotline for pollution victims.

I met with Yu Zhijiao, the Assistant Director of CLAPV. She was a short, baby-faced woman who recently completed her PhD at the university; she just started working full time at the center. Like many who spent most of their life in the academic world, she was confident and plainly dressed. She spoke very softly and even when she was being critical about something, her voice seemed to convey the opposite.

The center is doing some really good work, representing pollution victims that have no where to turn for their grievance. There’s a victim’s hotline staffed by volunteers five days a week to take reports. People can also write letters or send emails, faxes, etc. I asked her how many complaints they received on a daily basis. She said an average of six or seven. I was shocked. For a country of 1.3 billion people and with such notorious environmental record, I would expect the country’s only hotline for victims of environmental pollution to be receiving hundreds of calls. But then again the center is staffed by one volunteer a day, using one phone line. Yu explained to me that when she first started, the phone would ring off the hook throughout the day. She realized that it was because the center got a lot of publicity when it first got started. Their director, Wang Canfa, was constantly being interviewed by newspapers and televisions programs. But the center proved unequipped for the massive amounts of complaints it was getting from across the country. Since then, they’ve limited their publicity and the calls gradually went down. Now the center is dealing with about 14 active cases with an additional 4 cases pending further investigation to determine their eligibility.

My main question today was regarding the new Public Disclosure of Environmental Information Law that went into effect in May of this year. The center has been utilizing it on behalf of the alleged victims of environmental pollution. Yu showed me an information request form for one of their clients. Two fish farmers from Henan province suspected that a shoe factory nearby the farm was polluting the river and killing their fish. They called the center and this form was filled out for them. I looked at the form and found that it contained fairly technical terminology. One has to know what information to request in order to get the right information. An ordinary person would not know how to request the right information. Yu then explained to me that this is a case that has already been accepted by the center and two lawyers from Henan province are now dealing with it, with support from the Center. The plaintiffs in this case, the fish farmers, were suing for compensation of their lost fish.

I asked Yu how this type of litigation lawsuit fairs in China’s legal culture. She said it is still very rare that judges would grant financial rewards to victims of environmental pollution. More often than not, the judges would order the polluting factories to stop its practice. That is the best they could hope for.