Tuesday, 05 Sep 2006

All the major candidates for Vermont's U.S. House and Senate seats pledged yesterday to support the strongest climate-change legislation in Congress, introduced by Sen. Jim Jeffords (I-Vt.) and Rep. Henry Waxman (D-Calif.). The impetus? A five-day march by hundreds of Vermonters calling for real action to address the climate crisis. Bill McKibben, who trekked all 50 miles, reports that the event changed Vermont politics -- and made him feel more hopeful than he has in nearly 20 years of climate activism.

Pulp Non-Fiction

Lax enforcement allows toxic sludge to overrun Chinese village

Here's China's environmental situation in a nutshell: In 2004, after a toxic spill into the Yellow River, two Chinese paper mills were fined $300,000 and ordered to install water-recycling and treatment equipment. They didn't. Instead, city officials built temporary wastewater containment pools beside the river. An environmental official ordered the city to shut down the factories if they continued to violate water-emission requirements. The factories continued; the city did nothing. In April 2006, a storm threatened to push wastewater from the pools into the river; fearing their refusal to comply with earlier orders would be exposed, officials diverted the wastewater into a three-mile strip beside the river, where several small villages stood. Farmers in the village of Sugai tried to build a dike, but the water was too high; liquid sludge sucked 57 homes into a polluted black lake. Three months later, the village remained uninhabitable, former residents had rashes, and the farmland was unworkable. Officials have declined to comment. Wouldn't you?


Think scrappy grassroots activism can't affect the goings-on at mega-multinationals? Think again. Amit Srivastava and his nonprofit India Resource Center mobilized students at the University of Michigan to call for Coca-Cola products to be banned from campus over alleged environmental and labor problems at Coke operations in India and Colombia. Now Coke's having its overseas facilities audited by independent parties. Such pressure on companies to behave greenly and fairly will only increase in the coming years, writes U of M professor Andrew Hoffman.

Aquaculture Shock

Farmed-fish supply rises, but still may not match demand

Farmed fish have nearly caught up to wild-caught fish as a source of the world's seafood, reported the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization yesterday. In 1980, just 9 percent of human-consumed fish came from aquaculture; now the number is 43 percent. "Catches in the wild are still high, but they have leveled off, probably for good," says lead report author Rohana Subasinghe. Thanks to rising populations and incomes, there may not be enough fish in the sea (or the farm) to feed rising global demand: about 116 million tons of fish, both farmed and wild-caught, were eaten in 2004, and about 38 million tons more were used for other purposes. The report estimates that an additional 40 million tons will be required by 2030 just to maintain current consumption levels. The growth of aquaculture, however, is hindered by lack of investment capital in developing countries, a shortage of land and fresh water, rising energy costs, and concern over environmental impact. You think peak oil is bad, wait 'til people can't get their Fish Stix.

Connect the Plots

Land corridors encourage biodiversity, says research in Science

Narrow strips of land that connect isolated natural areas encourage plant biodiversity, according to a new study in Science. The study confirms what ecologists have theorized for decades -- that areas connected by land corridors "retain more native species than do isolated patches, that this difference increases over time, and that corridors do not promote invasion by exotic species." Researchers studied test plots in South Carolina from 2000 to 2005, finding that linked-up patches of land had 20 percent more plant species than unconnected patches, thanks in part to enhanced seed dispersal and pollination by birds, insects, and rodents. The results add oomph to the argument that fragmentation of wild land by human activity is a major threat to biodiversity. Um, duh -- but the research, says lead author Ellen Damschen, is "the piece of scientific evidence that had previously been lacking."