Chances are, the average U.S. citizen has no idea that their demand for electricity might require that a Mexican village be flooded for a hydroelectric dam. The question is: if the environmental and human costs were known, would we consume just a little bit less?

As part of my own personal battle against under-estimating people, I’m betting that a little bit of knowledge would go a long way. That high environmental cost, which goes hand-in-hand with a slew of human rights abuses, is not likely to sit right, even if that average U.S. citizen is comfortably sipping a Coke in an air-conditioned movie theatre.

Come for a quick tour south of the border to hear how the Mexican countryside is being flooded to beef up our grid and what Mexican grassroots organizations are doing about it.

Food Sovereignty: Resistance and a Way Forward

Just outside of the city of Oaxaca, I spoke with Aldo Gonzalez from the Union of Organizations of the Sierra Juarez of Oaxaca (UNOSJO). He hikes through the Sierra Juarez mountains, lending a hand to Zapotec communities seeking food sovereignty. On the one hand, UNOSJO keeps an eye out for companies preying on community resources -- whether water, timber, minerals, or seed stock. On the other hand, UNOSJO promotes agroecological techniques so that families can grow adequate food for themselves and, in good years, sell surplus in local markets -- core principles of food soverignty. This work, supported by organizations like Grassroots International includes educating children and adults in simple terms about globalization’s threats, the policy environment that has eroded public support to small farmers and Zapotec techniques and traditions of caring for shared water and land.

Aldo was one of the first indigenous leaders in Mexico to detect genetically modified corn strains in Oaxacan fields and has seen firsthand that dams, mining, and maize don’t mix. “For the indigenous peoples of Mesoamerica, corn is our blood, our bones, our flesh,” Aldo told me. “Without corn, we’re nothing. For that reason, we’re not going to let anyone disfigure corn, rob it of its essence, kill it or kill us.” UNOSJO shares a vision of autonomy and sovereignty with other indigenous and peasant allies across Mesoamerica with which they work.

Increasing Pressures on Land and Territory

Judging by statistics of foreign direct investment, Mexico is “enjoying” a development boom. But who’s really enjoying it? The country’s economic upsurge is powered largely by transnational industries scouring indigenous lands for mineral-rich veins, windy plains and floodable canyons.

At a recent water and energy strategy forum, Professor Octavio Rosas Landa from the Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), presented a global energy matrix to farmers seeking to learn about how worldwide energy consumption threatens their natural resources.

Among the 400 farmers in attendance was Carlos Beas, director of UCIZONI, a Grassroots International partner working on food sovereignty in the Isthmus of Tehuantepec. “What do we get in exchange for our resources?” asked Beas, before he then answered his own question. “We get divisions in our community. Some people agree to rent their land. Other people are dead set against it. The government and the companies divide up our communities and where we used to live well together, now we fight.”

Raising questions about the costs of green energy, UCIZONI’s members are particularly concerned about the environmental impacts of a giant wind farm on Oaxaca’s isthmus that has ruined thousands of acres of agricultural land and provides meager revenue. As poor farmers that lead low-consumption lives, UCIZONI’s members have no need for increased energy supply.

Recent Mexican governments have chosen to put their increasingly imported eggs in the megaproject basket. Megaprojects are grand infrastructure works that tie Mexico into the global economy, offering a way for Mexico to sell its abundant natural resources and cheap labor around the world.

What broke Mexico’s farming economy and opened the floodgates to megaprojects?

Dammed if they Do…

Professor Landa described policies of the 80s and 90s, when Mexico was instructed by foreign creditors to abide by neo-liberalism and structural adjustment principles. The formula, replicated throughout the developing world, demanded that Mexico shrink its public spending by -- among other budget cuts -- removing public support for small farmers. Mexican farming families split apart when fathers and sisters had to leave for Mexican cities and the U.S. to seek work. In the 1990s, when constitutional reform broke up collective lands and the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) inundated Mexican markets with cheap U.S. corn, even more farmers went broke.

The water and energy forum was held outdoors in a rural schoolyard in Aguacaliente, Guerrero, a community slated to disappear under the rising waters of the proposed La Parota dam. In the eyes of the visitors that had come from afar to the forum to sleep on the hard ground under tarps in a schoolyard, Aguacaliente’s community organization, the Council of Communities Opposed to the Parota Dam (CECOP) is an inspiration that has thus far held back construction of the dam.

What’s behind the interest in Mexico’s land and minerals? You can probably imagine that it has a lot to do with Mexico’s insatiable neighbor to the north. In the U.S., economics and the environmental movement have prevailed to tear dams down rather than construct new ones. “In the U.S., if they propose a dam, there’s nearly a riot,” Professor Landa explained. “Energy companies look elsewhere to fulfill U.S. energy demand. Free Trade agreements like NAFTA make that a lot easier.” Poor and marginalized indigenous communities with little political power are easy targets for the world’s energy and mineral companies.

Participants at the forum learned that Mexico exports 40 percent of the energy that it produces. Through megaprojects like the Plan Puebla Panama, the U.S. seeks to fulfill its energy appetite through a regionalized electrical grid, stretching from Mexico to Colombia,. Sarah Gonzales, a leader of a growing resistance to high electrical rates, traveled 25 hours from Campeche to participate in the form. She said, “I came here upset about my high energy rates. Now that I see that we’re giving up our lands and minerals to produce energy for the U.S., I’m more convinced than ever that our fight is right. We’re proposing a fair “social” price for electricity.” Increasingly, communities are withholding electrical payments to the Federal Electrical Commission and using the funds to maintain their local energy infrastructure.

Sarah’s grassroots organizing doesn’t come without high costs. For her activism work, she went into hiding shortly after the forum and at the time of this writing is under arrest. Similarly, in the state of Oaxaca, Father Martin Octavio Garcia Ortiz, a priest whose parish sits close to the San Jose El Progreso mine has been slandered in the press of subversively applying liberation theology to his pastoral work. That is, he has encouraged parishioners to ask hard questions of a Canadian mining company, La Fortuna, whose mining operation threatens parishioners’ clean water. Dozens of farmers were recently beaten and arrested for peacefully blocking the entrance to the mine.

Insult to injury to the indigenous communities pillaged for their resources is that they are often criminalized for what might be considered upstanding citizen watchdog work. There was a strong feeling at the forum that the flow of U.S. weapons to Mexico’s police and military forces for its war on drugs contributes to the repression and violence.

A Hopeful Alliance Emerges

Given the necessity to work together towards food sovereignty, Oaxacan organizations like UNOSJO and Ser Mixe, a powerful land rights organization serving Oaxaca’s Mixe peoples, have recently joined hands to form a “Collective for Defense of Territorial Rights.”  There was a hopeful tenor to their inaugural forum entitled, “Weaving Resistance”. People saw silver linings in the negative economic trends, which they feel acutely as family members working in the U.S. send home less help. What will happen to these megaprojects if worldwide consumer demand drops? People expressed interest in working closely with United States’ organizations like Grassroots International to pressure the Obama administration to put international human rights ahead of “the American way of life.”

A participant in the “Weaving Resistance” forum shared, “When we take on a transnational mining company, they call us crazy. But what else are we going to do? It’s a big sacrifice; we have less time for our kids and work. So we can’t leave here without beginning to construct our own government, without proposing laws that protect us and our natural resources, and without working together to grow food for our families.”

It’s a long process of resistance and proposal to create a global economic system in which a hot summer day in New York doesn’t mean that another nameless Mexican village is targeted for inundation. Bless the Mexican activists in their resource rights struggles that place tortillas above air conditioners.

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What Do Coal and Dirty Dorm Rooms Have in Common?

At a Grist gathering in Washington, D.C., earlier this month, we were pleased to host New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman for a chat on the state of green. Our intrepid video expert was on hand to tape the event.

Friedman released Hot, Flat, and Crowded way back in October 2008 -- before the worst of the economic crash, before Obama, before the GM bankruptcy, before Waxman-Markey ... Lord it's been a long year! He's been updating the book for a paperback release in November, so I kicked things off by asking him how his thinking has evolved and how he's framing the book's update. Here's what he had to say:

Next, I asked him about globalization. He's known as a leading proponent of neoliberal trade policies that open global trade, capital, and resource flows, but many enviros these days wonder whether that go-go economic acceleration has contributed to our current environmental woes. Folks like Bill McKibben are questioning whether increased material wealth is making us happier or healthier any more.

Here's Friedman's response:

I want to thank Friedman again for taking the time to visit with us and for his always interesting and provocative thoughts on the issues at hand. As he said, he and Grist have a "spirited friendship," and all of us here look forward to continuing the dialogue.

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San Francisco Bay Area coalition urges focus on local economy

What will those hippies think of next? A coalition of groups in the San Francisco Bay Area is undertaking a push against globalization and the labor and environmental offenses it incurs. The coalition, which just released a 30-page plan, hopes to coordinate with business and government leaders to move the Bay Area toward a more sustainable, less exploitative economy. One of its main goals is to have environmental costs reflected in the price of goods -- for example, upping the price of electronics because of their disposal costs. The hope is to reduce "overdependence" on the global economy, according to the report; not, says coauthor John Talberth, to encourage isolationism. Next step: mobilizing the public with messages about the benefits of localization. It may be tough, as Don Shaffer of the Business Alliance for Local Living Economies admits: "It's well documented that people tend not to act unless there is a crisis." Also, everyone knows the best hemp products come from abroad.

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Obama going to Copenhagen

Ivory Coast scandal highlights illegal dumping of toxic waste

The recent dumping of toxic oil byproducts and subsequent deaths of eight citizens in Abidjan, Ivory Coast, has highlighted the shady world of illegal toxic-waste disposal. The practice of unloading nasties on developing countries was addressed by the U.N.'s Basel Convention in 1989 (you remember that one), but "[w]ith globalization, this has resurfaced, it is even on the increase," says Pierre Portas, deputy executive secretary of the Basel Convention Secretariat. Globalization indeed: the tanker that offloaded on the Ivory Coast -- which was impounded at an Estonian port yesterday -- was Korean-built, Greek-managed, Panamanian-flagged, and Dutch-chartered. And the Ivory Coast is far from alone. U.S. activists say 500 containers of computers were shipped to Lagos, Nigeria, every month last year, up to three-quarters of which were dumped and burned; a European watchdog said last year that nearly half of E.U. waste exports were illegal. But hey, at least that old monitor isn't taking up space in your garage anymore.

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Green communications technology heading to developing countries

Solar-powered internet and recycled cell phones are coming to a developing country near you. Internet access is widely heralded as a tool with the potential to transform the lives of low-income people, but construction of a wired network to remote villages is often prohibitively expensive. Enter the Green Wi-Fi project, which has developed a solar-powered wireless router that can run for up to four weeks even in prolonged periods of gray skies. Another organization aiming to increase global communication is the cleverly named ReCellular; with about 53 percent of the U.S. phone-recycling market, the company keeps some 75,000 functional cell phones from landfills every week, many of which it refurbishes and sells in developing countries. The March of Dimes and other charities raise funds by collecting used phones and selling them to ReCellular. Says ReCellular VP Mike Newman, "The fact that you can combine a business -- a profitable business -- with a useful service and a charitable good is a win, win, win." Game on.

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A logger drives his freshly cut mahogany logs upriver toward Ivochote, a scratchy, low-slung jungle town in Peru's eastern Amazon. Hoping to convert his illegal revenues into some weekend lovin', he takes maca, a traditional Peruvian libido enhancer. He heads to a nearby brothel, but its employees are too busy protesting pollution caused by a foreign mining company to entertain him. Frustrated and ready for action of any kind, he gives up and joins an angry crowd marching to Lima to oppose the 2006 U.S.-Peru Trade Promotion Agreement, signed in April.

Far-fetched, maybe -- but mahogany, maca, mining, and frustrated movements are all part of this controversial agreement, which lawmakers in Washington and Lima are preparing to ratify in coming weeks.

Bush with trade buddies in late 2005:
Presidents Alejandro Toledo of Peru and
Vincente Fox of Mexico, and former
Canadian Prime Minister Paul Martin.

Photo: Whitehouse.gov/Eric Draper.

What are the environmental impacts of the Peruvian free-trade agreement? Besides ramping up international trade and investment -- which can directly boost environmental damage -- critics say the deal peels away social and environmental safeguards, expands corporate power, and endangers biodiversity.

It's the same chorus of criticism that surrounded NAFTA and CAFTA. Washington's plan for taking those models into South America was the proposed (and politically stagnant) Free Trade Area of the Americas, which attracted public ire in 2001 and has yet to be resuscitated. Rather than deal with a unified front of nations, U.S. trade negotiators have recently pushed to ink separate agreements with Peru, Ecuador, and Colombia.

Activists are concerned about all of the deals, but in Peru the stakes are enormous. When it comes to trade worries, says Margrete Strand, a Sierra Club official in Washington, D.C., "environmentalists are unified that Peru is one of the most important countries."

Like Ecuador -- a poor country dependent on its exploitable natural resources -- Peru has become a friend to extractive industries over the years. High oil and ore prices mean governments are willing to put their countries on the selling block, and their land and people suffer for it. Critics say U.S. trade policy should help ensure that resource extraction makes as little ecological footprint as possible. The new agreement, they say, does not require parties to respect international environmental accords.

Case in point: Swietenia macrophylla, or big-leaf mahogany. Though it's covered by the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species -- a voluntary species-protection treaty between 169 governments, including the U.S. and Peru -- activists say Peruvian officials look the other way, granting logging permits without a baseline understanding of the mahogany population and failing to enforce regulations. The secretariat of CITES has criticized Peru for failing to live up to its promises. Meanwhile, the Natural Resources Defense Council and Defenders of Wildlife estimate that most of Peru's big-leaf mahogany exports are logged illegally, and that 80 percent of that tainted harvest winds up in the United States.

A copper mine in Tintaya, Peru.

Photo: Oxfam America.

The failure of the Peruvian free-trade agreement to force its parties to adhere to CITES or other multinational environmental accords irks greens and some lawmakers, including Rep. Lloyd Doggett (D-Texas). He has taken trade representatives to task in congressional hearings, a fact cheered by mainstream greens who say good trade law should, at the least, require adherence to environmental standards. Even better, they say, it should help build technical expertise in poor nations, so something like a mahogany count would be feasible.

A second concern is intellectual-property rights, the legal privilege granted over the products of human brain power. The new agreement is less lenient in this area -- but to the benefit of the U.S., critics say. That's where our imaginary logger's (very real) aphrodisiac enters the picture. The plant species known as maca, Lepidum meyenii, is a member of the radish family, and a poster child for biopiracy. It grows in the harsh and lonely altitudes of the Andes and is said to boost sex drive -- a fact our logger might have learned from his native Quechua ancestors. In 2001, this Andean treasure became a U.S. patent belonging to PureWorld Botanicals, Inc., a company said to have "unlocked maca's chemical secrets."

The Peruvian Coalition Against Biopiracy has called for the World Intellectual Property Organization to look into the matter, claiming the company violated international norms covering sustainable use of biodiversity. Marcos A. Orellana of the Washington, D.C.-based Center for International Environmental Law says the Convention on Biological Diversity -- an international treaty adopted in 1992 at the Rio Earth Summit -- ensures "the rights of indigenous communities to their traditional knowledge in areas such as medicines and seeds." It also mandates that they share the economic payoffs, which could steer profits from products like maca back into biodiversity programs.

The third major concern might be the most troubling. Were our logger's imaginary brothel town anything like Cajamarca, home to Latin America's largest gold mine, its residents would be smart to fear the aftershocks of the new trade agreement. That's because of a provision embedded within its pages -- an under-the-radar tool of U.S. trade negotiators that critics say lets foreign investors attack legitimate public-health and environmental protections.

It's known as the investor-state provision. And for a glimpse of what could happen if the agreement goes through, we need to rewind.

Life without lemons? A
protest poster warns of
mining's effects on local
farmers.

Photo: Earthworks.

For years, shoddy enforcement of Peru's already-lax environmental laws, combined with accidents, has meant big messes -- and increasing outrage on the part of residents. In 2004, Cajamarca's citizens protested plans by U.S.-based Newmont Mining to open another mine on Cerro Quilish, a nearby mountain. They said it would pollute a major watershed that feeds Cajamarca and a nearby farming valley, and took to the streets, fighting mad. Eventually Newmont, perhaps sensing that public anger would not dissipate, backed down.

Had the trade agreement been in place, says Miguel Palacin of CONACAMI -- a network of Peruvian communities that lobbies for stronger mining laws -- it would have put the kibosh on that kind of civil action. Investor-state provisions help protect corporations by letting them sue countries -- in secret, international arbitration -- for losses in anticipated revenues. In theory, Newmont could have sued the Peruvian government for untold amounts of cash for having had to abandon its plans.

In a poor country like Peru, says Palacin, such fines -- or even the threat of them -- could scare the government away from passing strong public-health or environmental laws that could jeopardize corporate profits. "Unbeknownst to many people, buried inside these kinds of trade agreements is a new and dramatic legal restriction on governments' ability to function," agrees John Echeverria, director of Georgetown University's Environmental Law and Policy Institute. (Neither the U.S. Trade Representative nor representatives of the Peruvian government responded to interview requests.)

Like snowballs rolling downhill, the investor-state and intellectual-property rights provisions have swelled as they moved south from NAFTA, Echeverria and other trade-law experts say. Expanded thresholds in one deal become new baselines for negotiating future deals. Mainstream greens in Washington point out, for instance, that Peru's investor-state provision is more corporate-friendly than its predecessors. A March letter [PDF] to Congress from groups including Friends of the Earth, Earthjustice, and the Sierra Club said the agreement provides foreign investors even greater rights to challenge environmental laws than does highly controversial CAFTA, approved last year.

"CAFTA gave investors the right to file suit against alleged breaches of natural resources contracts," the letter reads. "The U.S.-Peru FTA expands these rights by broadly defining natural resources contracts to include every aspect of the extractive, productive, and marketing processes. These new rights would enable multinational corporations to attack legitimate attempts by communities to protect their health and environment even if their activities are only tangentially related to natural resource extraction."

Critics also say the agreement makes it harder to get companies to avoid or account for mistakes, and Palacin says the deal will solidify a status quo that prefers corporate to community interests. Instead, he says, the deal should hold companies from the developed world to the more advanced environmental standards of their home countries.

With half of Peru's people living below the poverty line, and nearly 20 percent in extreme poverty, few Peruvians have the time to worry about such issues. Even if they do, it's hard to spot the facts in the current cloud of confusion. "I don't know it," a weathered Machiguenga Indian near the jungle village of Camisea said recently, when asked about the deal. "They talk about it, but nobody tells me what it is." His sentiment was echoed by others in the community.

But things may be changing. From Ecuador to Peru to Bolivia, indigenous groups that have historically been discriminated against are becoming more sophisticated and organized. They are rising up against traditional oligarchies and corporate thievery. And in Peru, the new trade agreement is emerging as a political condensation point, one that lassos disparate groups under the same cause. In fact, CONACAMI is organizing a march on the capital later this month to ask that the deal be put to a referendum.

Their proposal is backed by Ollanta Humala, a retired military colonel jockeying to become Peru's next president in runoff elections slated for early June. Like Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, who opposes trade links with the U.S. (except for his country's oil sales), Humala is against the trade deal. Meanwhile, his center-left opponent, former Peruvian President Alan Garcia, is warmer to it, but reportedly favors renegotiation. At the grassroots level, the anti-trade agreement front -- which has united labor unions, agriculture groups, students, small businesses, and transportation unions -- feels Humala is the candidate most on their side, says Palacin. But he stresses that the former military colonel is a political unknown whose party lacks history and organization.

And what if the Peruvian Congress doesn't listen to the people it represents? Will Peruvians shut down highways or pipelines like poor protestors have recently in neighboring Ecuador, where that Congress is considering a similar trade agreement with Washington? "Peruvians aren't like Ecuadorians," says a 56-year-old cab driver in Lima. "We don't make as many problems when we don't like something. But at some point the people will be tired enough to do something. Maybe this is the point."

If there is an uprising, Palacin admits there may be a government crackdown just as in Ecuador, where officials ordered troops to knock back protestors. "There is a risk for us," he says. "But we accept it. We don't have any other roads to take."

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Copenhagen panic is premature

Recently, in Moscow, at the meeting of G8 Finance Ministers, the Europeans gave us a repeat performance of an all-too-familiar pattern: they appeased George Bush at the expense of the global environment.

Show us the money.

Photo: iStockphoto.

At last year's Gleneagles summit of the G8 industrialized nations, the G8 leaders, led by the Europeans, invested considerable political capital to find common ground on climate change. While they failed to persuade George Bush to agree on what arrangements should take the place of the Kyoto Protocol when it expires in 2012, they persuaded Bush to join in calling climate change a serious problem that warrants urgent action. More specifically, Bush reaffirmed the United States' commitment to a 1992 climate treaty (which, unlike Kyoto, the United States has ratified). That treaty requires industrialized nations to assist developing nations to grow cleanly, and Bush pledged at Gleneagles to do more to help poor nations obtain climate-friendly energy technologies. The Gleneagles consensus was at best a limited success, but the commitment to work with developing nations on clean energy seemed promising.

Well, that was last year.

A few weeks ago, however, Bush proposed cutting U.S. funding by 50 percent for the leading global institution that helps poor nations acquire clean energy technologies. The Global Environment Facility, a little-known but critically important arm of three international agencies -- the World Bank, the U.N. Development Program, and U.N. Environment Program -- assists poor developing nations fight climate change, pursue sustainable development and manage their natural resources. To date the GEF has provided grants for 1,500 projects in 140 countries, and these projects have reduced climate pollution by an amount more than France or Italy emit annually. The GEF also has conserved about 689 million acres of national parks and protected areas, thereby helping secure livelihoods for poor and indigenous communities. The GEF, importantly, is the one and only official funding mechanism of the very climate treaty Bush promised to support at Gleneagles.

While the international community has suspected since November that President Bush plans to slash GEF funding, European leaders have remained silent and passive. Even though finance ministers from Germany, the U.K., France, and Italy help oversee the GEF, and also play a major role in implementing the Gleneagles commitments, they have yet to confront U.S. Treasury Secretary John Snow, let alone engage their heads of government to lobby the White House. Of course, Europe's silence has been devastating to the GEF's champions in America. U.S. environmental organizations have little standing to complain about Bush breaking international commitments if other major countries seem willing to accept America's backsliding.

The Bush administration claims that the GEF, like the United Nations, needs to be reformed. Greater efficiency and accountability are reasonable goals. That's why Europe rightly joined the United States in pushing through a reform package for the GEF only last year. In the wake of these recent successful reforms, America's proposed funding cuts are entirely indefensible.

Europe wailed publicly about Bush's rejection of Kyoto in 2001 but said remarkably little to the president and his senior advisers in private. The president could well conclude that Europe's professed interest in climate change was driven by domestic politics more than genuine concern. Since then, Europe has either failed to raise global climate change or other environmental concerns at the highest level, or has folded when rebuffed (see Gleneagles). It seems on course to be even less forceful this time. If Europe wants really to be a global leader on the environment, it needs to do more.

What specifically? First, it should state publicly that Bush's budget proposal for the GEF is completely at odds with America's international commitments and therefore unacceptable. Second, it should work constructively with the United States to strengthen the GEF through any necessary, sensible new reforms. Third, it should insist that the United States commit to continue to fully fund the GEF if further reforms are negotiated within the next year. The United States would have no legitimate basis for resisting this compromise.

Germany and the U.K are logical leaders of such an effort. Germany because Chancellor Angela Merkel, a former German minister of the environment, might well seek achievable opportunities that, without threatening the new, better German/U.S. relationship, would put it on a new footing -- an unsentimental partnership based on realistic attention to agendas important to both nations, replacing a partnership based heavily on gratitude and sentiment. And the U.K. because Prime Minister Tony Blair has made it clear, at Gleneagles and otherwise, that addressing climate change is a central aim of his administration.

Complacency regarding the GEF risks undermining one of the few tools the international community has to address greenhouse-gas emissions in developing nations. Meaningful action by those nations is a prerequisite to success in the global fight against climate change. Europe must rise to the occasion.

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Globalization Shmobalization

We greens spend a lot of time obsessing about how life as we know it is likely to end: in a slow, painful miasma of greenhouse gases; in the violent cross fire of a nuclear gang war; in mass ignominy, dead and bug-eyed in our folding chairs after endless rounds of fruitless policy discussions. But what the heck do we really know? Before the car was invented, people worried that the whole world would eventually be knee-deep in horse manure. Really, they did.

Keep it handy, just in case.

Photo: iStockphoto.

Environmentalism, by definition, is about life and death. But what kind? Depends who you ask. I talked to a few people to identify the most common end-of-the-world, planet-busting scenarios. Then I talked to a few more to find out how likely it is that those things will happen.

My point is not to make you throw in the towel, but to learn to accept the things we cannot change -- and continue to work at a frenzied but life-affirming pace to change the other ones, before they do us in.

Nanotechnology, the manipulation of wee things like molecules and atoms, may have enormous, positive implications for the planet. But big-frontal-lobes like nanotechie Eric Drexler and Sun Microsystems cofounder Bill Joy have predicted that self-replicating nano-robots will eventually run amok, converting everything into "gray goo." You think it's funny? Try this on for size: Adidas has introduced a running shoe with a microprocessor capable of performing 5 million calculations per second so you can avoid shin splints. You're gonna be in deep goo indeed when your smelly trainers hack into NORAD from the bottom of your gym bag.

The bad news: Some critics -- such as the Canadian nano-watchdog ETC Group, authors of the controversial paper The Big Down -- fear that we will goof and alter life irrevocably. Thus, they advocate putting the brakes on nanotech.

The good news: According to Christine Peterson, founder of the Foresight Nanotech Institute, nano-scientists are developing neato green stuff like cheaper, stronger solar cells, and are working toward earth-loving goals such as zero-waste manufacturing and new chemical-remediation techniques.

Something to think about during yoga: the earth resides in a swarm of 300,000 or so asteroids that travel around the sun with us like pesky gnats. The probability of a weighty asteroid hitting our planet is slight, but such an impact could be substantial. According to the B612 Foundation, a group of scientists aiming to alter the orbit of asteroids on humanity's behalf, a large (one-kilometer diameter) Near Earth Asteroid would explode with the energy of 70,000 megatons of TNT if it hit our planet. Holy vinyasa! While 65 percent of the one-km NEAs have been identified as non-threats, 35 percent remain an unnerving mystery.

The bad news: These kindly scientists need cash, international cooperation, and leadership. "No one is responsible for protecting earth from asteroid impacts," explains Rusty Schweickart, chair of the B612 Foundation (the name comes from the title character's asteroid home in The Little Prince).

The good news: According to the B612 folks, we now have the capability to anticipate and prevent an impact. They even designed a space tractor to tow or push away an NEA. And according to Near Earth Asteroid Tracking -- a celestial observatory funded by NASA to study asteroids and comets that goes by the happy acronym NEAT -- big asteroids impact the earth only once every 1,000 centuries on average.

Krakatoa and Mount St. Helens are mere pimples compared to supervolcanoes -- biggy-sized pustules capable of spewing enough magma, dust, and chemicals into the atmosphere to alter life on a global scale. Yellowstone National Park, that suppurate land of wolves and geysers and snow machines, is the caldera of a supervolcano, a source of wild internet rumor and Pompeii-ish dread. According to the Yellowstone Volcano Observatory, another catastrophic caldera-forming eruption would likely alter global weather patterns and, um, "human activity." Can you hear the distant drums? Oh my God, people, that's my heart beating!

The bad news: According to the U.S. Geological Survey, hazardous volcanic activity will continue, and because of increasing population, development, and air traffic, human exposure to it is increasing. Oh, and when it comes to preventing a volcanic eruption, we can't do diddly.

The good news: The ash from an eruption makes for one heck of a pretty sunset ... no, seriously: Programs like the USGS National Volcano Early Warning System can assess the hazards and alert those at risk. "It's not as if something is going to go kaboom in the middle of the night and nobody is going to know about it," says Tom Murray, a USGS scientist based in Anchorage. And although Yellowstone sits above a hotspot, YVO has not detected evidence of an imminent eruption.

Ready, set, glow.

Photo: iStockphoto.

Remember when Sting hoped the Russians loved their children too? Join me now in hoping that the uranium-enriching nations of France, China, Great Britain, India, and Pakistan (and possibly Israel, North Korea, and Iran) are all concerned with posterity. Oh, and speaking of generations, you're probably wondering what time it is on the Doomsday Clock created by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists in 1947 as a symbol of nuclear danger. Answer: It has been seven minutes to midnight since 2002. The clock will be re-calibrated in 2006, taking into consideration not only nukes but also other threats to humankind, such as biological weapons.

The bad news: Some people out there are seeking the biggest, baddest weapons of mass destruction they can get, and may not be concerned with Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists-type publicity stunts. (Of course, there are those -- and I won't name names [IRAN] -- who claim they're just gathering the ingredients for civilian power.)

The good news: According to Kennette Benedict, executive director of the Bulletin, the U.S. and Europe could turn back the clock if they collectively spent a mere $10 billion in the next few years to secure the remaining bomb-making nuclear material still in Russia. "It's a doable thing," she says.

Some evangelical Christians believe that, at a conveniently unspecified moment -- perhaps during Nip/Tuck -- true Christians will be transported to heaven in an event known as The Rapture. According to the Rapture Index (a thinly disguised blog of superstition and hate as far as this reporter can tell), you'd better throw some extra granola bars in your heavenly go-box, because we're at "fasten your seatbelts." Among the Rapture Index's somewhat redundant categories are climate, wild weather, and floods, all top scorers at five points apiece. "Beast government," meanwhile, brings in a disappointing three points.

The bad news: End-timers tend to believe "things are getting worse and worse and there's nothing human beings can do about it," says Bruce David Forbes, a religious studies professor at Morningside College. "If you have that view, why would you try to improve anything in the world?"

The good news: Not only do many mainstream Christians not believe in the Rapture, it's also as likely to happen as, say, Pleistocene rewilding. As Forbes, coauthor of Rapture, Revelation, and The End Times: Exploring the Left Behind Series, points out, history is littered with people who thought they knew when the end was near.

Last but not least is everyone's favorite: the death-by-carbon-emissions scenario. But exactly how does global warming kill? Will we get swept up in a swirl of chaotic weather, drown in a pool of melted ice sheets, or succumb to a bevy of hot-weather-loving diseases? All of the above. Maybe. According to Susan Joy Hassol, one of the lead authors of the Arctic Climate Impact Assessment, we're already committed to about another 1 degree Fahrenheit of global warming in this century, which our species could likely adapt to, albeit at some cost. But a worst-case scenario -- in which we lollygag on coming up with energy alternatives and instead burn all the oil and coal we can scrape out of the earth, thus raising average global temperatures 5 to 10 degrees F -- involves, at least by my interpretation, the following Rapture Index categories: floods, plague, wild weather, oil supply/price, global turmoil, beast government, and apostasy.

The bad news: While the rest of the world is trying to deal with this issue, the U.S. sorely needs a national policy that limits CO2 emissions. "We're still speeding in the wrong direction," says Hassol.

The good news: By taking the necessary measures to address global warming, the U.S. could also decrease our dependency on foreign oil, clean up our air, improve our health, and boost our economy. "We can slow the rate and magnitude of global warming," says Hassol. "We have the technologies and we know what we have to do."

The really good news: We might even do it.

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Globalization Shmobalization

Organic farmers in U.S. losing business to foreign growers

Organic is seen as a niche that helps smaller American farmers endure, but a sizeable chunk of the organic foods sold in the U.S. are being sourced from overseas suppliers. The U.S. Department of Agriculture estimates that as much as $1.5 billion of organic food was imported in 2002, while perhaps $125 million worth was exported. Some food producers say they shop abroad for organics because the domestic supply is inadequate, but also because imports can be a lot cheaper. The U.S. currently offers few subsidies or financial incentives to farmers to go organic, and since chemical-free foods typically take more labor to produce, high costs keep many farmers out of the organic market altogether. Some domestic organic growers argue that consumers expect certified organic food to be homegrown, and that certifying overseas producers doesn't help the local environment. Says Wende Elliot, founder of an organic livestock cooperative, "It's great to clean up China and Argentina, but that doesn't help our local drinking water situation in Iowa."

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Obama going to Copenhagen

At a fork in the road, our guide points to the right. "That's the main road there," he says. "We'll go on this smaller road, deep into the jungle." A glance to the left reveals a narrow, unpaved track, which he tells us is used primarily by logging trucks. It's the dry season in Myanmar, and dead leaves hang like bats above us. The truck's idling motor blends with the cacophony of insects.

Beasts of burden.

Photos: Jennifer Hile.

I'm sitting next to one of Asia's most dedicated elephant conservationists, Sangduan "Lek" Chailert. In 1995, Lek sold her home and car, using the proceeds to start the Elephant Nature Park sanctuary in her native Thailand. She also runs a program called Jumbo Express, bringing free medical care to the animals and their owners in the countryside.

Lek's nickname means "little." She barely tops five feet, and looks to weigh around 100 pounds -- yet she's spent her adult life throwing a shoulder against the monumental downhill slide of Asian elephants. Three years earlier, I had made a documentary about the sanctuary for National Geographic. A few months of following her around with a camera had left me in awe of her work; when she invited me to meet her for this trek, I jumped at the chance.

Lek -- whose shaman grandfather was once awarded an elephant for saving a man's life -- has heard that the animal's numbers in Myanmar (formerly known as Burma) are relatively stable. That's a stark contrast to the rest of Asia, where populations have been shattered by poaching and deforestation. "This country," she tells me, "is one of the last places of hope."

Myanmar is one of the last places in the world to see the centuries-old Asian tradition of domesticated elephants and their keepers working side by side. There are said to be hundreds of animals laboring throughout the country, but the very thing protecting elephants there may one day do them in. Many of them are used for logging; the country is home to more than half of Southeast Asia's remaining closed-canopy forest. As we plan our visit to logging camps in the central hinterlands, we know we will see a practice riddled with irony: these creatures are surviving because they're shielded from harm -- solely for the purpose of destroying their own habitat.

Just how many elephants we're talking about is unknown. As I prepared for my trip, I expected population numbers to be tough to find -- Myanmar's iron-fisted military government keeps it largely sealed off from outside observers -- but I was stunned to learn that current stats are all but nonexistent for all of Asia. A lack of funds, and often political will, means on-the-ground counts have been few and far between. (International wildlife conservation organizations have also faced criticism for working with ruthless leaders such as those in Myanmar for any purpose.)

Haul in a day's work.

Simon Hedges, Asian elephant coordinator for the Wildlife Conservation Society, confirmed my finding. He emailed me an article he coauthored for Conservation Biology in 2004. "For many forest elephant populations, existing knowledge is often so inadequate that even deciding which are the most important populations to protect is not possible," the authors wrote. "The frequently cited global estimate of 30,000 to 50,000 Asian elephants is often acknowledged as little more than an educated guess ... Astonishingly, these estimates of the global population have been accepted without revision for a quarter of a century, despite major losses of Asian elephant habitat over this period."

When we spoke, Hedges was preparing to launch a study of the number and distribution of elephants in Myanmar's Hukaung Valley. Its vast forests provide ideal habitat, and scientists hope to find robust populations there. "What we already know about [the country], however, suggests there are smaller numbers of elephants than people had hoped," he told me.

Wildlife biologist Peter Leimgruber, of the conservation unit of the Smithsonian's National Zoological Park, has spent years studying the country and its wild herds. Results from a recent search are called "sobering" on the Smithsonian's website. Leimgruber's team sighted wild elephants only twice, and the amount of dung they encountered "implies populations are significantly smaller than expected," he told me.

"I definitely would still consider the country a stronghold for the species," Leimgruber says, citing the amount of remaining forest and the importance of elephants to the culture. "But it's amazing how much we don't know."

What we do know is this: Asian elephants once grazed by the Yangtze River in China and in the dark forests of Sumatra. Their range covered nearly 3.5 million square miles. Now it's estimated at about 188,000 square miles total -- a 95 percent reduction -- spread across 13 countries. It's a patchwork of shrinking forests, fast being dismantled and piled into the logging trucks that rumble along the continent's back roads.

My trip with Lek started four days ago at a guest house next to the glittering, colossal temple of Shwedagon in Yangon (Rangoon). We rented a car and headed for the small town of Taungoo, in central Myanmar. I was beginning to wonder if we'd manage to find any elephants, given the grim statistics. But it didn't take long. Just outside Yangon, we saw our first -- in chains.

Myanmar's Department of Forestry keeps albino elephants on display for the general public. With pink skin covered in short white hair, these curiosities looked as if they'd been sprinkled with powdered sugar. They stared back at me with eyes the color of pearls. I watched as the youngest paced back and forth, reaching toward the others, bellowing and trumpeting with frustration. He will most likely spend the rest of his life tethered to this platform. White elephants, considered sacred throughout Asia, are said to bring peace and prosperity to a nation. Leave it to a military junta to shackle their good omens.

Lek and I didn't linger. As we drove off, she mused on the complexities of the situation. "In Asia, elephants are a very mystical creature, a holy animal," she said, important to both Hinduism and Buddhism. "But the elephant is also used for work and making money." That contradiction means the animals are both revered and violently subdued throughout Asia.

When we reached Taungoo, we asked the manager of our guest house to find Maung Soe, a guide whom Lek had met three months earlier, and -- poof -- within a half hour he appeared. "Easy to find elephant logging camps," he assured us. "Be ready at 5:30 tomorrow morning."

Now, on our fourth day out, we've been driving for five hours when Maung Soe points out the fork in the road. Before continuing on, Lek and I hop out to stretch our legs. She spies elephant dung, then soldiers -- evidence of what we came here hoping to find, and what we most hoped to avoid.

As the soldiers approach, wearing olive-green uniforms with old rifles slung over their shoulders, I realize they are younger than I'd expect. It's quickly obvious that they aren't concerned with us. No one asks for passports, a bribe, or any of the other harassments you hear foreigners subjected to in this hermetic kingdom. Instead, they tell us they're here to monitor logging operations, pointing to the small hut where they stay. It reminds me of a stranded whale carcass: ribs of bamboo arch across the top, with a few pieces of ripped, gray canvas overhead. A fetid trickle of river runs adjacent.

Trucks pick up where trunks leave off.

It's no surprise the government keeps an eye on logging. In 2004, the timber trade brought in $430 million -- 15 percent of the country's export earnings, according to the U.K.-based Global Witness. Of that, $300 million came from teak; Myanmar provides 75 percent of the international supply of that popular wood.

In fact, increasing global demand for teak and other woods means the illegal trade is flourishing. "The most severe logging is taking place in northern Myanmar" along the border with China, explains John Buckrell, a campaigner for Global Witness. In recent years, he says, "over 98 percent of the timber imported annually into China across the border was illegal." Buckrell adds that the area has been described as "one of the world's hottest biodiversity hotspots."

But logging with elephants may actually be keeping the devastation in check. "The cutting is done selectively, one tree at a time, as opposed to clear-cutting," explains Matthew Lewis of the World Wildlife Fund's Asian Mammal Conservation program. "That does a lot less damage to the forest" and doesn't require new roads to be built.

And though the work is hard on the animals -- especially on their skin and spines, Lek tells me -- it may be better than the alternative. When domesticated elephants are replaced by logging machinery, Lewis says, their numbers usually plummet. They are often abandoned and become crop raiders, likely to be shot by farmers. Or -- like many of the 3,000 elephants that were put out of work when Thailand outlawed logging in 1989 -- they wander dusty city streets as a tourist attraction. There is little wild to return to.

Lek and I shake hands with the soldiers, then jump back in the truck, bumping along for another three hours. The engine dies periodically. When the driver gets out, he sinks into ankle-deep dirt as soft and thick as fresh snow. We haven't seen an elephant today, but we've passed 16 logging trucks so far, their open beds piled sky-high.

We drive southwest all day and the next before reaching the village of Pyaung Chaung Wa, a cluster of bamboo huts along a shallow river. It's dusk, and the men are coming home from a day's work; Lek and I are both thrilled to see a line of elephants stretched behind them. Four adult animals lumber along, while one baby stays within trunk's reach. She periscopes her trunk in our direction when she sees us, sniffing the air, then darts behind her mother's formidable backside.

The villagers gather the animals by the river and slide off their harnesses. The elephants, wearing bells around their necks, wander slowly down the bank to graze. The late-afternoon light casts the scene in a dark, filtered gold.

Maung Soe points Lek and me toward a small, open platform where we'll sleep. It stands on stilts near the river; chickens nest beneath the floor. Children gather around us, and Lek starts giving out whistles and balloons donated by a volunteer at her sanctuary. In no time, every child is blowing like crazy.

"I worry that maybe one day there will be no elephants left," says Lek that evening, after a dinner of soup with fried noodles and basil cooked over an open fire. "I think without them, maybe all of Asia [will be] like an empty culture." As we talk, a crowd of people three deep encircles our sleeping platform. Every time I open my backpack or camera case, heads crane to see inside. Travelers are rare in this area, and TV and radio nonexistent. Tonight, Lek and I are the villagers' entertainment.

At dawn on my second morning at camp, the surrounding canyons blurred by mist, I see the elephants marching slowly toward the village with a hodgepodge of men and boys. I join the mahouts, or elephant keepers, to bathe the elephants in the river, tossing bucketfuls of frigid water over massive gray backs. The villagers are clearly surprised at my interest in their daily life, but are welcoming and helpful. (Women in this society are strictly caregivers and cooks, but as a foreigner, I'm exempted from social norms.)

After the bath, the mahouts tie a wooden harness to each animal and we head into the jungle, a trail of chains dragging behind us. We hike to a hillside where the villagers had cut down a dozen trees a few days earlier. Now the mahouts de-limb the trees with an axe. Then they quickly wrap the chain attached to the first elephant's harness around the base of one of the trees. Bamboo whips hover threateningly as she starts moving. "Chiti! Shet tho!" the mahout hollers. Maung Soe translates the directions behind me: "Left! Forward!" The elephant maneuvers carefully down the steep hillside, the tree dragging behind at odd angles, catching on debris.

At the bottom of the hill the elephant crashes into the river, deep enough in places for the 500-pound log to half-float behind her. The rest of the elephants and their cargo soon follow. The caravan begins making fast progress, kicking up spray. The canyon walls tower above us, and bird calls echo all around. I feel as if I've stepped into an ancient painting.

Later that morning, near the village, one of the elephant keepers points out a monster tree protruding horizontally from the base of a cliff. He guesses it weighs well over a ton. It fell years ago, and looks cemented into the granite rocks. Nonetheless, soldiers have ordered the villagers to extricate it so it can be used to build a nearby bridge. With trepidation, the men chain two elephants to the ancient tree.

The animals trumpet with the effort of trying to heave it forward. The men start shouting commands, hitting the elephants with bamboo whips, urging them on. The tree doesn't budge. The elephants are straining so hard, their foreheads come within a few feet of the ground with every tug.

Never break the chain.

With a loud crack, part of a chain snaps, and one of the elephants hits the ground hard, face first. A lesion on her stomach, probably from the friction of the chain, bursts open. The pressure of the work is obvious as the elephant struggles back to her feet. Today, this team catches a break. It is considered bad luck for an elephant to be seriously injured, so the men don't tempt fate. They quietly take off the chains and let the elephants off to graze -- the soldiers will have to wait.

Back at camp, I'm eating more noodle soup when I look up to see an elephant dragging our overheated truck up a hill in the distance. Maung Soe had been fiddling with the engine, trying to figure out why it kept quitting, and it died again. The villagers decided to help out by using the local power source. Now Maung Soe sits behind the wheel as the truck moves forward, driver's-side door thrown open, trying to rev the engine back to life.

While I stare at the scene, a few people around me stare at a Vanity Fair magazine I've pulled out of my pack. I find myself wondering if we've already done too much damage to the truck's engine to salvage it. And then I can't help but think of the piecemeal destruction I've already seen, and of the work of Lek, Leimgruber, and Hedges. Theirs is an uphill battle indeed.

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U.S. efforts to find fossil-fuel supplies overseas will create significant climate disruption, harming not only people in those countries but folks at home, according to a lawsuit filed against the federal government by a coalition of green groups and U.S. cities. Ranging from Greenpeace to the city of Oakland, Calif., coalition members want fossil-fuel development projects in developing nations on five continents to be halted while their impacts are assessed under the National Environmental Policy Act. The Bush administration tried to have the suit dismissed, but U.S. District Judge Jeffrey White recently ruled it could proceed. White found that coalition members had shown sufficient evidence that their "concrete interests" are threatened by the projects, and that the risks might be meliorated if the environmental studies are performed. Oakland, for instance, is concerned about future flooding, storm surges, and drought. The Bush administration has not yet decided whether to appeal.

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Obama going to Copenhagen

The way China has catapulted itself onto the Monopoly board of global capitalism has caught most Western leaders on the hop. Like Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid looking back at their pursuers, top U.S. and European Union businesspeople are wondering, "Who are those guys?"

Yuan-a make a deal?

After all, how much do we know about the China National Petroleum Corp., which yesterday bid $4.18 billion for PetroKazakhstan, a Canadian oil company with big reserves in Central Asia? Or Haier, which earlier this year tried to nab U.S. white-goods company Maytag? Or Lenovo, which bought IBM's PC business? How do you pronounce corporate acronyms like CNOOC (the China National Offshore Oil Corp., which recently tried to purchase Unocal), SAIC (the Shanghai Automotive Industry Corp., which fought Nanjing Automotive Corp. for Britain's Rover), or TCL (the TV company that bought France's Thomson Electronics)?

China has been a global trade presence since well before Marco Polo trekked there, but, as the recent flurry of successful and attempted acquisitions of major Western brands suggests, its influence has surged of late. If you like the German spectator sport of schadenfreude, one delicious consequence of this is watching presidents, prime ministers, and CEOs from other nations scramble for position in the rapidly rearranging global business turf. Countless commentators have raised questions about the economic and global security implications of this rearrangement, but the murmur about the potential environmental and social consequences has been far more subdued.

Take CNOOC. Earlier this month, the company withdrew its $18.5 billion offer to buy Unocal in the wake of a political firestorm in the United States. That firestorm was triggered not by the company's corporate-responsibility record, which would have been a reasonable subject for discussion, but rather by the idea of selling off a U.S. oil company that some regard as a national strategic asset. On that issue, we go along with Thomas Friedman, who wrote in The New York Times that, "if China wants to overpay for a second-tier U.S. energy company, that's China's business. Anyway, the more starved Americans are for oil, the sooner we will adopt alternatives and get off this drug once and for all."

But Friedman made a deeper point -- one that's not going away with the CNOOC bid off the table. As he put it, China and America have become economic "Siamese twins." He writes, "We have slipped into a symbiotic relationship with another major power that is neither a free market nor a democracy." That, surely, is the real issue. How can we help bring China -- and other emerging economies -- up to speed on environmental, human-rights, and anticorruption protections?

One major obstacle to doing so is the hypocrisy of many Western approaches to globalization. After years of insisting they were 100 percent committed to free markets and no-holds-barred globalization, political and business leaders in the U.S. and E.U. are having their bluff called by China, Inc. From the East looking West, it's increasingly clear that, in fact, Americans were 100 percent committed to Americanization, Europeans to Europeanization, and so on. It's hardly surprising, then, if some Chinese business leaders view Western concerns about corporate social responsibility and sustainable development as little more than protectionist trade barriers.

Still, that hardly makes legitimate concerns about the environment and worker rights disappear. Today's China is awash in contrasts. The newest factories, whether churning out cars or pharmaceuticals, are among the best in the world. At the same time, the country has some of the worst sweatshops and some of the most dangerous working conditions; think of the endless stream of coal-mine disasters that kill hundreds, if not thousands, of Chinese miners every year.

The civil society and nongovernmental-organization (NGO) sectors are gradually gaining their feet, but those feet are still tightly bound by government controls that massively constrain NGO evolution and censor what such organizations can say. Instead of expanding civil liberties and liberalizing economic policy simultaneously (as some other governments are doing), China's leaders are trying to increase economic health while maintaining tight political controls -- in the hope, apparently, that wealth will suppress the nascent appetite for democracy.

It's hard to say whether this high-stakes gamble will succeed. On the one hand, Public Security Minister Zhou Yongkang recently told a closed meeting that 3.76 million Chinese took part in 74,000 mass protests last year alone. On the other, such public activism can hardly be taken for granted; the London Times reported last week that China has created elite police squads in 36 cities to crush protests.

What is certain, though, is that anything that enables China to operate without civil-sector watchdogs should make the rest of us uneasy, not just about the nation's growing economic clout, but also about its environmental reach. (Air pollution from the country's great urban-industrial concentrations is now turning up as far afield as Canada. And that's to say nothing of the country's coal-powered carbon-dioxide emissions that will help accelerate global climate change.) In a July 2005 survey by Toronto-based polling company GlobeScan, over 300 sustainability experts worldwide were asked whether they thought China would adopt the "best environmental and energy technologies and practices available." Forty-four percent thought it unlikely, against 28 percent who were confident that China would rise to the occasion.

One of the optimists is eco-designer Bill McDonough, whom we bumped into in Beijing, at the Fortune Global Forum this May. As chair of the China-U.S. Center for Sustainable Development, he believes China will be forced to become a leading incubator of environmental innovation simply because the in-country collision between people's needs and the ability of natural systems to support them is already so acute. As he notes, "The Chinese have to build new housing for 400 million people in 12 years." General Electric Chair and CEO Jeff Immelt also sees China's impending crises as a huge opportunity for sustainability solutions, telling Fortune, "While Europe has been a driver for innovation in cleaner technologies, China promises to be its market."

Having met people from CNOOC, PetroChina, and Sinopec, it's clear to us that sustainable development will be a tough sell in China. That said, we share McDonough and Immelt's optimism, not least because of two meetings we had with Vice Minister Pan Yue, deputy director of the State Environment Protection Administration. He and SEPA have stalled dozens of major development projects that ignored environmental laws. The fact that anyone would even try to stop the juggernaut, let alone succeed, is encouraging.

We owe people like Pan all the support we can offer. We must use the oft-claimed leverage gained by engaging China as a trade partner to help its leaders and citizens fight for new rights and responsibilities. Otherwise, we risk having our own undermined.

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Led by U.S., five nations craft new climate-change pact

Australia, China, India, South Korea, and the U.S. have secretly negotiated a global-warming pact that could steal the spotlight from the Kyoto Protocol -- or so the U.S. hopes. According to advance word from a meeting of Asia-Pacific nations in Laos, this fledgling "Asia-Pacific Partnership for Clean Development and Climate" emphasizes the development and sharing of as-yet-unspecified new technologies to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions, rather than Kyoto-style emissions caps. South Korea, China, and Australia are all major coal exporters with much to gain from continued global reliance on fossil fuels, while both the U.S. (the world's biggest greenhouse-gas polluter) and Australia have long objected to Kyoto as unfairly giving a pass to developing nations. Reactions are just starting to emerge: The chair of the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says the new deal "does not interfere with the Kyoto Protocol," and lauds plans for technology exchange. Japan has also voiced support. But the leader of Australia's Greens says the new pact would divert taxpayer money "from developing clean renewable technologies to try and make burning coal less dirty."

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Obama going to Copenhagen

Macaws and effect in Central America.

A year ago, President Bush signed the Central American Free Trade Agreement. Since then, the controversial plan has inspired protests across the U.S. and in Central America. And while past trade agreements have been ratified by Congress in less than two months, the Bush administration has delayed the vote on CAFTA multiple times, unable to rally the support needed for it to pass.

The latest vote is scheduled for this month, but CAFTA's passage is by no means inevitable. Many Democrats and some Republicans, having learned from the fallout of NAFTA -- for example, the loss of hundreds of thousands of U.S. manufacturing jobs -- are expected to vote against it. They're taking this stand because the agreement is weak on both labor and environmental standards, and because they are beginning to realize such treaties promote not free trade, but corporate trade.

The environmental movement has also learned from NAFTA. An impressive coalition of professional and grassroots organizations is fighting CAFTA on the basis that it "would allow foreign investors to challenge hard-won environmental laws and regulations, and fails to include adequate measures to ensure environmental improvement throughout Central America and the United States." Members include Friends of the Earth, Earthjustice, Sierra Club, League of Conservation Voters, Natural Resources Defense Council, and U.S. Public Interest Research Group, among others.

Missing from this fight is an elite subset of the movement: the international biodiversity conservation organizations. Not one of the four major groups in this field -- Conservation International, the World Wildlife Fund, The Nature Conservancy, and the Wildlife Conservation Society -- has demonstrated the courage to oppose CAFTA, despite ample opportunity over the past year.

When asked about his organization's position on CAFTA at a recent talk at the University of California-Berkeley, Kent Redford of WCS replied that his organization "does not engage in policy work." (The speech, offering an indication of priorities, was titled, "Has Poverty Alleviation Abducted Conservation?") Conservation International's vice president for conservation and government said, "We don't have a position." A World Wildlife Fund representative wrote, "WWF has not been tracing CAFTA either in Central America or in our U.S. office. As a result, we don't have a position on CAFTA ..." Nor has The Nature Conservancy stated a position.

Their silence is inexcusable. Consider the immediate threats CAFTA poses in a region that, while accounting for less than 1 percent of the world's land mass, is estimated to hold 8 to 10 percent of the planet's species:

In the face of these outrageous threats, how to explain the silence of these four groups, which are so well-endowed in budgets and policy staff?

We might look to an important paradigm shift. In the heady days after the 1992 Rio Earth Summit, all of the major biodiversity groups embraced the concept of sustainable development. But over the past few years, the conservation pendulum has been swinging back to a stricter preservationist ideology. Little by little, the international conservation organizations have shifted to market-based approaches to conservation.

A decade after Rio, at the Johannesburg World Summit on Sustainable Development, these groups championed public-private partnerships. They also lauded the new reign of "ecosystem services," whereby any aspect of the environment can be had, for a price. It's not that the big organizations don't "do" policy; rather, they do only a certain kind of free-market policy work.

To facilitate the uptake of this free-market approach, international conservation groups have opened their doors to transnational corporate leaders. Today, three-quarters of Conservation International's board and half of the slots on The Nature Conservancy's board are given to representatives of major corporations -- including Wal-Mart and Gap, Inc., two companies actively lobbying in support of CAFTA. Are these corporate dollars a Faustian bargain for the international environmental movement? Are they subtly distracting these large conservation organizations from seeing the links between political economy and environmental degradation?

In these final critical weeks of debate, we need the lobbying support of the international conservationists working in Central America. Together, the four major groups control well over half of conservation dollars available worldwide, and wield enormous influence. Their partnerships with in-country organizations make them perfectly suited to lobby both on the ground and in Washington, D.C. They could give detailed testimony about CAFTA's impact on the regional environment. They could also lend support to the courageous Central Americans who have already spoken out vociferously against CAFTA.

Conservation International, World Wildlife Fund, The Nature Conservancy, and Wildlife Conservation Society: it's time. We challenge you, with all your resources and your clout, to see beyond corporate interests. Join the many others in the environmental community who oppose this dangerous trade agreement.

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Jared Diamond.

I will always think of Jared Diamond as the man who, for the better part of the late 1990s, somehow made the phrase "east-west axis of orientation" the most talked-about kind of orientation there was -- freshman, sexual, or otherwise. His 1997 Pulitzer Prize-winning book Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies began with a simple question -- "Why did Pizarro conquer the Incas and not the other way around?" -- and then managed to tell, over the course of only 400-odd pages, the history of why humanity has turned out the way it has. For most readers (and there were millions), Guns was their first exposure to theories of geographic determinism. To broadly simplify, Diamond's book posited that human populations on continents with a primarily east-west orientation benefited from a more consistent climate and therefore developed more quickly than those living on continents with a north-south orientation. It had the kind of paradigm-shifting impact that happens with a book only once every few years, and it turned Diamond -- a professor of geography at UCLA -- into something of a rock star.

If Guns venerated the role that geographic chance played in societal development, Diamond's newest book, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, restores human agency to the picture. Through a grab bag of case studies that range from the Mayan Empire to modern China, Diamond tries to distill a unified theory about why societies fail or succeed. He identifies five factors that contribute to collapse: climate change, hostile neighbors, trade partners (that is, alternative sources of essential goods), environmental problems, and, finally, a society's response to its environmental problems. The first four may or may not prove significant in each society's demise, Diamond claims, but the fifth always does. The salient point, of course, is that a society's response to environmental problems is completely within its control, which is not always true of the other factors. In other words, as his subtitle puts it, a society can "choose to fail."

Collapse by Jared
Diamond, Viking
Books, 592 pgs.,
2005.

Diamond then identifies the 12 environmental problems that are portents of doom: destruction of natural habitats (mainly through deforestation); reduction of wild foods; loss of biodiversity; erosion of soil; depletion of natural resources; pollution of freshwater; maximizing of natural photosynthetic resources; introduction by humans of toxins and alien species; artificially induced climate change; and, finally, overpopulation and its impact.

These issues, which dovetail neatly with the flashpoints of the modern environmental movement, will be familiar enough to readers of Grist. But while the factors that Diamond believes lead societies to collapse may be clear, his definitions of both "society" and "collapse" are less so. "Collapse" can refer to complete extinction (Pitcairn Island), population crash (Easter Island), resettlement (Vikings), civil war (Rwanda), anarchy (Somalia, Haiti), or even just the demise of a political ideology (the disintegration of the Soviet Union). His definition of "society" is equally vague; he variously uses it to refer to a settlement (e.g., various Viking communities), a nation (ranging from Rwanda and Haiti, two of the smaller countries in the world, to China, one of the largest), a state (Montana), and an island (Easter). Each individual example makes sense, but as analogues -- to each other or to the situation in today's globalized world -- they often falter.

The best examples in Collapse are those that avoid this apples-and-oranges problem by comparing two societies at the same moment in time and in the same place, such as the chapters on the Greenland Norse and on Hispaniola. In the case of the Vikings, as one historian said, they came to Greenland, "it got cold, and then they died." But somehow, Diamond rejoins, the Greenland Inuit came, stayed, and survived -- right up until this day. The point? Cold or not, the Greenland Norse didn't have to die. Diamond elucidates how they mistreated their environment (without even realizing it in some cases) and refused to adapt to its variations. The Vikings, Diamond notes in his customary casual style, had a "bad attitude" and thought the Inuit were "gross weirdos." As a result, they didn't adapt to the Greenland environment as the Inuit did, and, eventually, starved to death.

Although it's the chapter on Greenland that has thus far won the most acclaim, Diamond's treatment of contemporary Hispaniola might be more relevant to the complexities of today's world. Two countries share the island -- the Dominican Republic and Haiti. Their resources, climate, religion, and history as colonies are markedly similar. And yet, their current situations couldn't be more divergent. Haiti is the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere. Only 1 percent of its land is covered in forest, compared to 28 percent in the D.R. While the D.R. is by no means rich, its economy continues to grow, its environment is protected, and it reaps the benefits of munificent relations with the international community. In Haiti, there are too many people, too few resources, too few jobs, and, at the moment, scarcely a government. Diamond argues that the proximate cause of collapse in a society like Haiti -- a coup d'état or a flood resulting from a hurricane, for instance -- is only a manifestation of the ultimate cause: the mismanagement of its environment and resources.

These days, many Haitians -- and indeed much of the rest of the developing world -- face a stark choice: protecting the environment or eating. If it weren't for foreign aid, Haiti could never support its population. And while the D.R. is a magnificent success by comparison, it's important not to underestimate the similar tension it faces between the forces of development and the fight for environmental preservation. The difference is that the D.R.'s leaders and citizen-activists had the foresight to protect their environment before it was beyond repair.

This is an essential issue in Collapse, because Diamond's goal in historicizing our understanding of the relationship between a society's development and its environment is to prove that the two impulses are not antithetical. Much as Guns, Germs, and Steel was crafted in part as a response to books like The Bell Curve, which had managed to repopularize theories of racial determinism, Collapse is partly a response to the dominant environmental discourse in the United States today, which holds that environmental concerns are secondary to economic and security concerns. Rather, Diamond argues, environmental concerns are at least equal in importance, and inextricably linked, to all other aspects of a society's success. His examples imply that, when it comes to the environment, a stitch in time means more than saving nine -- it's the difference between keeping and losing your shirt.

Collapse is a long book, and because Diamond is a guileless writer, you understand right from the introduction why he thinks societies falter, and to a certain extent what he thinks we should do about it. If you take it as a given that Diamond will prove his thesis (and I'm certainly not suggesting that you should), you could read the introduction and the last few chapters and get the point. But then you'd miss out on what Jared Diamond does best: tell stories.

Like Guns, much of Collapse is propelled by a quasi-Socratic question-and-answer style. The questions are sometimes obvious ("How did so many societies make such bad mistakes?"), sometimes poignant ("What did the Easter Islander who cut down the last palm tree say while he was doing it?" "Did he shout 'Jobs, not trees!'" Diamond wonders), sometimes charmingly pointy-headed ("Which year did he go there and in which month? Did he find any stored hay or cheese left?"). The larger ones establish the contours of the book, while the smaller ones fill in the details that render what could be a tedious tome delightful: the fact that 1816 had no summer due to a volcanic eruption in Indonesia, say, or that there are only 578 U.S. college students studying mining. But there are also the meatier details of Diamond's profession: how to carbon date, how to read tree rings, and, in a hilarious example of mad science, how to date the middens of packrats. (Packrat middens, in case you don't know, are urine balls that, even thousands of years after they're excreted, still taste surprisingly sweet. Yes, taste.)

Diamond's sense of humor and eye for detail breathe life into people, places, and subjects that are foreign to most readers. He's always been good at this -- he can take a community of Easter islanders who've been dead for hundreds of years and make them sound like your next-door neighbors. So when Diamond makes a case study of the people who actually are his next-door neighbors -- the residents of Montana's Bitterroot Valley -- his analysis is particularly compelling.

When Diamond first visited Montana 50 years ago, it was one of the most prosperous and environmentally pristine states in the U.S. Today, it's one of the poorest, with a grim environmental outlook. Global warming, leach mining, tourism, and libertarian values knock heads in a particularly violent way under the Big Sky. From dairy owners and politicians to mine workers and militia members to wealthy Californians who daytrip to Montana in their private jets, Diamond describes a community of such diverse and conflicting interests that miracles are more likely to solve its problems than any kind of compromise.

The trouble is, Montana's problems have to be solved. Its glaciers are disappearing, many of its mines are polluting the land and water, and its old industries -- farming, mining, and ranching -- are bordering on extinction. But the old guard has one idea of what to do about it, the new billionaire landowners another, the farmers another, the miners another, the teachers another, and so on. Diamond has fewer hard and fast answers about what should be done in Montana -- the place he knows best -- than he does about any other case study.

Whether such profound clashes can be resolved, Diamond argues, comes down to that great buzzword of 2004: values. He suggests that the "bad attitude" label that he used for the Vikings could be applied to the libertarian streak in Montanans, the inability of U.S. citizens to learn from past events like, say, the 1973 fuel crisis, and, notably, the reluctance of environmentalists to engage the proponents of business development. "Perhaps the crux of success or failure of a society is to know which core values to hold onto, and which ones to discard and replace with new values," Diamond writes. In many ways, the main point of Collapse is to get us to assess the environmental impact of our values -- whatever they are -- and do something about the ones that don't work.

The examples Diamond cites where this has actually happened provide the grace notes to Collapse -- moments when the book becomes less about failure and more about how a society might beat the odds and come out on top. For instance, Diamond devotes a large section of his conclusion to outlining examples of successful collaborations between corporations and environmentalists. If these examples sometimes seem rather rosy, that might be part of Diamond's plan. "My motivation is the practical one of identifying what changes would be most effective in inducing companies that currently harm the environment to spare it instead," he writes. To that end, he saves some of his sharpest tongue-lashing for average citizens, who could put more pressure on lawmakers, on corporations, and on themselves (mostly in the form of taxes) to clip the fuse of the environmental time bombs. In a world where public companies are legally required to maximize their profits, the burden is on citizens to make it unprofitable to ruin the environment -- for an individual, a company, or a society as a whole.

For Diamond, there is no project more urgent facing the world today. Late in the book, he puts two maps of the world side by side. One map highlights today's environmental trouble spots, the other highlights political trouble spots. The two maps are identical, and seem to provide striking visual proof of Diamond's thesis: poor environmental management leads to violent conflict and the brink of collapse. Of course, it would be easy to fill a map with politically stable nations that are suffering from environmental troubles (China, the U.S., and Australia, to use some of Diamond's own case studies from the book), and there are places of conflict where environmental troubles are not a significant issue -- Kosovo and Northern Ireland come to mind. Diamond's tendency to present his theories in overly neat packages like these makes Collapse occasionally feel like a game of Sim Society. You might reasonably find yourself thinking, "If I planted just enough forests and remembered to eat my fish and not let my sheep graze for too long, I could be as successful as the Inuit or the shoguns of Japan (barring Godzilla), and would never succumb to the fate of the Vikings or contemporary Rwanda." Considering that Edward Gibbon spent over a thousand pages on the fall of Rome alone, it's easy to see how Diamond's 20-to-40 page thumbnails on societies' declines can seem like caricatures.

It's small soft spots like these maps that have led some critics to call Diamond a fearmonger. But Collapse is more warning than prophecy, and the sheer number of examples Diamond provides -- dozens of versions of what might happen, because it already has -- is what gives the book its admonitory power. Even if its disparate stories never perfectly meld into one convincing argument, the scope of the work is breathtaking. And if I read Diamond's ambitions right, he'd rather Collapse be read as an imperfect call to action than a perfect work of airtight logic. Ultimately, the proof of Collapse's value will not lie in the book itself, but in what people are inspired to do after reading it.

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Dear Umbra,

Why is Wal-Mart evil? This is really a request for more information. I have often heard that the company has a weak environmental track record, treats its employees poorly, and generally is Satan incarnate. However, when challenged on this position, I have no data. My opponents argue that shopping in bulk reduces packaging. I also have to admit that a case of Pellegrino for $10 pulls me closer to the dark side. I am growing weak. Please combat my temptation with information. Hurry before I have lost my soul.

James
Washington, Penn.

Dearest James,

Why Wal-Mart is evil is too philosophical a question for the likes of me, but I can produce some evil-sounding data. Keep in mind, however, that you may like the Wal-Mart world; cheap carbonated water may rank above healthy unions and livable wages in your personal priorities. I doubt it, but I want to recognize that each of us is a unique person with unique thoughts and opinions.

Anywhere, America.

Photo: Wikipedia.

Wal-Mart's impressively effective business practices have led to the spread of Sam Walton's Arkansas discount store to 5,000 locations in 10 countries, with $256 billion in global revenue in 2003. Wal-Mart prides itself on (and sells itself on) low prices. You yourself are swayed by them, and they constitute the only argument anyone has been able to muster in favor of the chain.

Sadly, in our economy, low prices and wide profit margins are considered good, while work conditions and environmental and social impact are seldom considered at all. If they were, we would have a very different assessment of Wal-Mart's business model, considering the company's enormous adverse impact on: industry wages and state health care programs (more on this below), on sprawl (with its attendant problems of impervious surfaces, destruction of open space, miles driven, air quality, petroleum production, and the death of downtowns), on agriculture (size and sustainability of farms worldwide), on international manufacturing plants and their environmental ramifications (one word: China), on small-business ownership (adieu, ma 'n' pa) -- I could go on. All of these are environmental issues of the most essential kind -- issues, that is, about the physical terrain of our daily lives.

Although the directly observable environmental downsides of giant international outlets sited in strip malls across the world are certainly plentiful enough, I think the success of Wal-Mart has a meta-impact of similar magnitude. I believe Wal-Mart, and the businesses forced to follow its lead or die, are creating a culture of scarcity in the United States.

Consider this: If Wal-Mart, the country's largest employer, offers unlivable wages and shoddy benefit packages, a giant group of employed people -- Wal-Mart workers -- are struggling to make ends meet. (It's a strange feedback cycle, to tout your own low prices while expanding the numbers of the working poor.) In California, Wal-Mart is exacerbating rather than easing health care and welfare burdens on individuals and taxpayers. A study [PDF] out of the University of California at Berkeley found that California Wal-Mart employees earned significantly lower wages than average large retail employees in the state, and employee families used higher proportions of public welfare programs. Berkeley researchers and several other Wal-Mart watchers pieced together the company's wage structure [PDF] from testimony in a class action lawsuit against the behemoth. Cashiers earn annual wages that fall below the federal poverty line for a family of three. Families of California Wal-Mart workers used health care programs at rates 40 percent higher than large retail employees as a whole.

In short, Wal-Mart disables and replaces small businesses that may have provided health care coverage and higher wages to employees, forcing people to ask the government for assistance or go without health care -- ultimately the costliest solution. Meanwhile, those businesses able to survive around a Wal-Mart are joining the race to the bottom. Grocery megastores involved in long union strikes in California over the past year repeatedly cited the need to compete with Wal-Mart as the central problem on their side of the battle over wage and benefit packages.

Income level is no indicator of support for environmental preservation, but in this culture of scarcity that Wal-Mart has helped to create, too many of us are left feeling as though there is not enough to go around. One consequence is that environmental programs become easy prey for pollutocrats, who cast them as costly anti-business hindrances. Whether this cumulative environmental impact of Wal-Mart, at both the meta- and micro-level, is worth cheap Pellegrino is yours to decide.

Philosophically,
Umbra

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International Battle Over GM Food Continues

In other genetic modification news, skirmishes over the safety and labeling of GM foods are erupting this week in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, as delegates from around the world convene to discuss the Cartagena Protocol on Biosafety. The U.N. accord, which went into force last September, governs cross-border trade in GM foods, with strict requirements on shipment labeling and legal liability. The U.S., by far the world's largest producer of GM crops, has refused to sign the protocol and has appealed to the World Trade Organization to take action against European countries with extremely restrictive import controls on GM food. U.S. intransigence on labeling was among the targets of a report from Friends of the Earth, which claimed that after 10 years, GM food has not proven safer or cheaper than ordinary crops and has not solved hunger problems even in countries where it is common. Meanwhile, GM opponents were dismayed at the announcement on Monday that China will allow imports of GM crops.

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Enviros Accuse Malaysia of Enabling Illegal Timber Smuggling

The Environmental Investigation Agency and the Indonesian environmental group Telapak yesterday accused the Malaysian government of turning a blind eye to the widespread trafficking of timber illegally logged from Indonesia. According to an investigative report by the two groups, large quantities of the endangered tropical hardwood ramin are smuggled from Indonesia to Malaysia and made into furniture for export with falsified documentation. The illegal logging destroys the habitat of rare species such as orangutans, sumatran rhinos, and sun bears. The EIA and a number of U.S. environmental groups called on the U.S. government to impose sanctions against Malaysia because of the alleged smuggling. Malaysia vehemently denied the accusations.

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Invasive Species in Ballast Water Messing With World's Oceans

Ships that carry ballast water -- used to balance and stabilize the vessels -- also carry thousands of aquatic species across the globe to foreign habitats, where they can have environmentally catastrophic effects. Recognizing this as one of the top four environmental problems facing the world's oceans (along with pollution, overfishing, and habitat destruction), 100 countries are expected to sign a U.N. treaty this week calling for regulation of ballast-water use in vessels around the world. Ballast water "can transfer pathogens and other micro-organisms and invasive species that have the capacity to distort and destroy the delicate [ecosystem] balance," said Efthimios Mitropoulos, secretary general of the International Maritime Organization (IMO). "Once introduced, they can be virtually impossible to eliminate and, in the meantime, may cause havoc." The IMO estimates that more than 10 billion tons of ballast water are transported each year, a number that will only rise as trade increases.

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Soft drinks made in India by PepsiCo Inc. and Coca-Cola Co. contain levels of toxic pesticides -- including lindane, DDT, malathion, and chlorpyrifos -- high enough to cause cancer or immune-system failure over time. Such was the conclusion of an Indian parliamentary report released yesterday, confirming similar findings by the Delhi-based Center for Science and Environment released last summer. Tests showed that Pepsi's fizzy drinks contained 36 times the pesticide levels allowed under European Union standards, Coke's 30. Although the companies denied that their drinks are unsafe, the report is widely expected to hurt the $1.6 billion Indian market for soda and lead to more stringent public-safety regulations in the world's most populous democracy. Says CSE head Sunita Narain, "Their report is historic and reads almost like a manifesto for environmental action in the country."

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