Thursday, 18 Jul 2002

Prawn-ography

Shrimp, those yummy (so we hear) pink crustaceans, gave us a whole new synonym for small things -- but in much of the world's coastal areas, the little critters are causing big problems. Ever since the World Bank underwrote the first Southeast Asian shrimp farm a generation ago, almost every country with a warm coastline has been hit by the fever for pink gold. But the industry has turned out to be a questionable investment and an almost unrelieved environmental nightmare: Shrimp farms have destroyed millions of acres of coastal cactus and mangrove forests, and they've turned many of the world's pristine estuaries into shrimp toilets. In Mexico, where small communities often welcome shrimp farms into the neighborhood, the number of shrimp producers nearly doubled between 1993 and 1998. But at what price? Writer Michelle Nijhuis looks for the answers, only on the Grist Magazine website.

Dredgers, Dredge Thyself!

In a sort of bureaucratic version of the ancient dictum, "Physician, heal thyself!", the troubled U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has announced a plan to cleanse itself from within. Its leaders, including Civil Works Director Maj. Gen. Robert Griffin, have unveiled a three-tiered program to improve the Corps' economic and environmental planning by enhancing internal training, using nationally accepted economic models, and creating regional teams of specialists to work on complex projects. In recent months, the Corps has come under fire for sloppy, misleading, and self-serving economic analyses of its projects; its critics have included such heavy hitters as the General Accounting Office, the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, the White House Office of Management and Budget, and internal Pentagon investigators. Not to mention environmentalists, who also question the current overhaul, fearing the Corps is just trying to look busy so that lawmakers don't take reform of the institution into their own hands.

A Cartridge in a Pear Tree

It's like a question some curious Grist reader might ask of Umbra, green guru extraordinaire: When your printer runs out of ink, what should you do with the empty cartridge? Turns out, plenty of schools and nonprofit organizations are collecting cartridges for recycling, motivated as much by good deals as good citizenship. Companies known as remanufacturers overhaul and refill inkjet and laser cartridges, then sell them at lower rates than the originals. One organization behind the recycling trend, the Funding Factory, says it has signed up 22,000 institutions, most of them schools, to send in empty ink cartridges (and also, more recently, cell phones). The institutions earn points for how many items they supply, and can redeem the points for cash, computers, or other school supplies. Overall, the Funding Factory program has given schools about $3 million in cash and equipment to date, and expects the number to rise to as much as $5 million by the end of the year. Other programs use similar setups to donate food to impoverished people.

Hill's Tree Blues

Just as some butterfly species head south every year, so apparently did Julia Butterfly Hill, the environmental activist who became an international cause celebre after she lived in a redwood tree in California for two years to protest planned logging in the area. Most butterflies don't wind up in prison, but that's precisely where the environmental activist is; Hill and seven others were jailed in Ecuador earlier this week for protesting a proposed oil pipeline that would cut through a virgin Andean cloud forest. The demonstrators were gathered outside of Occidental Petroleum, a U.S. oil company that is part of the consortium planning the 300-mile pipeline from the Amazon Basin to the Pacific Coast port city of Esmeraldas. About 95 miles of the pipeline would slice through Ecuador's Mindo-Nambillo Reserve, home to more than 450 bird species, 46 of them endangered. Hill underwent a four-hour deportation hearing yesterday, and a decision on her case is expected soon.