Today's New York Times details a $64 million U.N. pledge to help clean up "the worst environmenal disaster in Lebanese history," a huge 87-mile Mediterranean oil slick off the Lebanese and Syrian coast.
UNEP has a useful environmental impact page including photos and maps delineating the slick and damaged coastline. In recent years UNEP has gone in after conflicts to do environmental assessments. Reports on Afghanistan, Iraq, Bosnia, Kosovo, Liberia, Palestinian Territories, etc. are online and detail the additional costs of war.
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bookerly Posted 4:57 pm
19 Aug 2006
If we want to stop global warming, we need to look not only at what individuals need to do, but also at what institutions need to do. One of the biggest polluters world wide is the US military. And does anything think that they are concerned about global warming?
The money we have spent on destroying one country, Iraq (and we should say so far, since neither the destruction nor the spending shows any sign of abating) could have converted the US to sustainable energy (by the estimates of those opposed to the idea) AND helped a lot of the developing countries make the conversion as well.
Folly. Folly.
patrick
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caniscandida Posted 6:48 pm
19 Aug 2006
My professional life is basically in the Mediterranean -- in liberal-arts stuff, true, not in science -- and it amazes me how vulnerable, and apparently doomed, the marine life is, on the one hand, but clearly doing their best to show themselves to be resilient, on the other. They need all the help they can get.
And it would be helpful if people would stop fighting wars in their neighborhood.
(And it goes without saying, that would be helpful for the people too.)
Dicit Patricius: "Folly. Folly." No truer Chinese fortune cookie have I ever read.
Historical note: The Phoenicians, i.e. the ancient Lebanese, made the richest, most luxurious dye for textiles known to the ancient world, i.e. purple, from a small bunch of gastropods, Muraena spp., found off their coast. One wonders if any of those little conches are still left.
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