by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Apr 18, 2012 | Biodiversity & Habitat Destruction, Toxification
By Dahr Jamail / Al Jazeera
“The fishermen have never seen anything like this,” Dr Jim Cowan told Al Jazeera. “And in my 20 years working on red snapper, looking at somewhere between 20 and 30,000 fish, I’ve never seen anything like this either.”
Dr Cowan, with Louisiana State University’s Department of Oceanography and Coastal Sciences started hearing about fish with sores and lesions from fishermen in November 2010.
Cowan’s findings replicate those of others living along vast areas of the Gulf Coast that have been impacted by BP’s oil and dispersants.
Gulf of Mexico fishermen, scientists and seafood processors have told Al Jazeera they are finding disturbing numbers of mutated shrimp, crab and fish that they believe are deformed by chemicals released during BP’s 2010 oil disaster.
Along with collapsing fisheries, signs of malignant impact on the regional ecosystem are ominous: horribly mutated shrimp, fish with oozing sores, underdeveloped blue crabs lacking claws, eyeless crabs and shrimp – and interviewees’ fingers point towards BP’s oil pollution disaster as being the cause.
Eyeless shrimp
Tracy Kuhns and her husband Mike Roberts, commercial fishers from Barataria, Louisiana, are finding eyeless shrimp.
“At the height of the last white shrimp season, in September, one of our friends caught 400 pounds of these,” Kuhns told Al Jazeera while showing a sample of the eyeless shrimp.
According to Kuhns, at least 50 per cent of the shrimp caught in that period in Barataria Bay, a popular shrimping area that was heavily impacted by BP’s oil and dispersants, were eyeless. Kuhns added: “Disturbingly, not only do the shrimp lack eyes, they even lack eye sockets.”
“Some shrimpers are catching these out in the open Gulf [of Mexico],” she added, “They are also catching them in Alabama and Mississippi. We are also finding eyeless crabs, crabs with their shells soft instead of hard, full grown crabs that are one-fifth their normal size, clawless crabs, and crabs with shells that don’t have their usual spikes … they look like they’ve been burned off by chemicals.”
On April 20, 2010, BP’s Deepwater Horizon oilrig exploded, and began the release of at least 4.9 million barrels of oil. BP then used at least 1.9 million gallons of toxic Corexit dispersants to sink the oil.
Keath Ladner, a third generation seafood processor in Hancock County, Mississippi, is also disturbed by what he is seeing.
“I’ve seen the brown shrimp catch drop by two-thirds, and so far the white shrimp have been wiped out,” Ladner told Al Jazeera. “The shrimp are immune compromised. We are finding shrimp with tumors on their heads, and are seeing this everyday.”
While on a shrimp boat in Mobile Bay with Sidney Schwartz, the fourth-generation fisherman said that he had seen shrimp with defects on their gills, and “their shells missing around their gills and head”.
“We’ve fished here all our lives and have never seen anything like this,” he added.
Ladner has also seen crates of blue crabs, all of which were lacking at least one of their claws.
Darla Rooks, a lifelong fisherperson from Port Sulfur, Louisiana, told Al Jazeera she is finding crabs “with holes in their shells, shells with all the points burned off so all the spikes on their shells and claws are gone, misshapen shells, and crabs that are dying from within … they are still alive, but you open them up and they smell like they’ve been dead for a week”.
Rooks is also finding eyeless shrimp, shrimp with abnormal growths, female shrimp with their babies still attached to them, and shrimp with oiled gills.
“We also seeing eyeless fish, and fish lacking even eye-sockets, and fish with lesions, fish without covers over their gills, and others with large pink masses hanging off their eyes and gills.”
Rooks, who grew up fishing with her parents, said she had never seen such things in these waters, and her seafood catch last year was “ten per cent what it normally is”.
“I’ve never seen this,” he said, a statement Al Jazeera heard from every scientist, fisherman, and seafood processor we spoke with about the seafood deformities.
Given that the Gulf of Mexico provides more than 40 per cent of all the seafood caught in the continental US, this phenomenon does not bode well for the region, or the country.
BP’s chemicals?
“The dispersants used in BP’s draconian experiment contain solvents, such as petroleum distillates and 2-butoxyethanol. Solvents dissolve oil, grease, and rubber,” Dr Riki Ott, a toxicologist, marine biologist and Exxon Valdez survivor told Al Jazeera. “It should be no surprise that solvents are also notoriously toxic to people, something the medical community has long known”.
The dispersants are known to be mutagenic, a disturbing fact that could be evidenced in the seafood deformities. Shrimp, for example, have a life-cycle short enough that two to three generations have existed since BP’s disaster began, giving the chemicals time to enter the genome.
Pathways of exposure to the dispersants are inhalation, ingestion, skin, and eye contact. Health impacts can include headaches, vomiting, diarrhea, abdominal pains, chest pains, respiratory system damage, skin sensitisation, hypertension, central nervous system depression, neurotoxic effects, cardiac arrhythmia and cardiovascular damage. They are also teratogenic – able to disturb the growth and development of an embryo or fetus – and carcinogenic.
Cowan believes chemicals named polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs), released from BP’s submerged oil, are likely to blame for what he is finding, due to the fact that the fish with lesions he is finding are from “a wide spatial distribution that is spatially coordinated with oil from the Deepwater Horizon, both surface oil and subsurface oil. A lot of the oil that impacted Louisiana was also in subsurface plumes, and we think there is a lot of it remaining on the seafloor”.
Marine scientist Samantha Joye of the University of Georgia published results of her submarine dives around the source area of BP’s oil disaster in the Nature Geoscience journal.
Her evidence showed massive swathes of oil covering the seafloor, including photos of oil-covered bottom dwelling sea creatures.
While showing slides at an American Association for the Advancement of Science annual conference in Washington, Joye said: “This is Macondo oil on the bottom. These are dead organisms because of oil being deposited on their heads.”
Dr Wilma Subra, a chemist and Macarthur Fellow, has conducted tests on seafood and sediment samples along the Gulf for chemicals present in BP’s crude oil and toxic dispersants.
“Tests have shown significant levels of oil pollution in oysters and crabs along the Louisiana coastline,” Subra told Al Jazeera. “We have also found high levels of hydrocarbons in the soil and vegetation.”
According to the US Environmental Protection Agency, PAHs “are a group of semi-volatile organic compounds that are present in crude oil that has spent time in the ocean and eventually reaches shore, and can be formed when oil is burned”.
“The fish are being exposed to PAHs, and I was able to find several references that list the same symptoms in fish after the Exxon Valdez spill, as well as other lab experiments,” explained Cowan. “There was also a paper published by some LSU scientists that PAH exposure has effects on the genome.”
The University of South Florida released the results of a survey whose findings corresponded with Cowan’s: a two to five per cent infection rate in the same oil impact areas, and not just with red snapper, but with more than 20 species of fish with lesions. In many locations, 20 per cent of the fish had lesions, and later sampling expeditions found areas where, alarmingly, 50 per cent of the fish had them.
“I asked a NOAA [National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration] sampler what percentage of fish they find with sores prior to 2010, and it’s one tenth of one percent,” Cowan said. “Which is what we found prior to 2010 as well. But nothing like we’ve seen with these secondary infections and at this high of rate since the spill.”
“What we think is that it’s attributable to chronic exposure to PAHs released in the process of weathering of oil on the seafloor,” Cowan said. “There’s no other thing we can use to explain this phenomenon. We’ve never seen anything like this before.”
Read more from Al Jazeera: http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/features/2012/04/201241682318260912.html
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Apr 17, 2012 | Indigenous Autonomy, Lobbying
By Rachel Nuwer / The New York Times
At a casual glance, Lake Turkana in northern Kenya may not seem a fount of milk and honey. The temperature around the lake hovers around 100 degrees, and tourists are warned not to approach the water because of the crocodiles and vipers lurking among the volcanic rocks.
Yet Lake Turkana, the world’s largest permanent desert lake, is regarded by many anthropologists as the cradle of humankind. Today it serves a vital purpose for local indigenous communities that depend on its waters for fish and other resources; in 1997, citing its rich biodiversity, Unesco listed it as a World Heritage site.
Ikal Angelei, 31, one of the six winners of this year’s Goldman Environmental Prize, grew up playing on Lake Turkana’s dusty shores, chatting with old fishermen who sold their daily catch to her family and others. When she graduated from high school, she moved to the capital to study at the University of Nairobi, traveling later to the United States to earn a master’s degree in public policy and political science at Stony Brook University on Long Island.
Then she returned home and began working on community outreach for a group called the Turkana Basin Institute.
That’s when she learned about a proposed dam.
The chairman of the institute, Richard Leakey, approached her with a document outlining the plan for the dam, on the Omo River in Ethiopia — one of Lake Turkana’s lifelines. “He said to me, this is your people, your lake, your problem,” Ms. Angelei said in an interview. His words stirred her, she said, and she began researching the dam project in her spare time.
If completed, the Gibe 3 Dam() would be the largest hydroelectric plant in Africa and provide increased electrical power to Kenya and Ethiopia. But in a region more desperate for food than electricity, the dam would take a significant toll on water levels and thus on fisheries, potentially worsening relations between disparate communities that are already enmeshed in resource-based conflicts.
“At first, I thought, it can’t be real,” Ms. Angelei said. “I couldn’t imagine the area without the lake.” Reflecting on her father’s own anti-dam activism in the late 1980s, she began making phone calls, sending e-mails, and broadcasting appeals from a local radio station.
Day by day, her campaign gained resonance as more and more people from divided and marginalized local communities shared their stories with her. In 2009 she founded a grass-roots organization, Friends of Lake Turkana, to provide a unified voice for the peoples of the lake.
Together they demanded that the Kenyan government and investors in the dam halt the $60 billion project. To Ms. Angelei’s surprise, the World Bank, the European Investment Bank and the African Development Bank all withdrew their financing. Last year the Kenyan Parliament mandated that the government commission an independent environment assessment from Ethiopia.
“The feeling that the actual construction had lost its funding was amazing — it gives me hope that we can go on,” Ms. Angelei said.
The struggle is not quite over. China, the last big investor, is still pushing for construction. Ms. Angelei believes that ultimately governments will have to step up to put the Gibe 3 Dam to rest. “China may have green policies they’re trying to implement, but as long as there’s not a format for holding Chinese companies and banks accountable, then the policies do not work,” she said.
Taxpayers in Western countries could help by holding their governments responsible for backing flawed development projects, she added.
Although she has frequently been discouraged, Ms. Angelei said, witnessing the struggles of local families and women helped her keep her goal in sight. Often she was approached by strangers who could offer her little more than blessings and encouragement, she said: “It was seeing the look in people’s eyes that kept me going.”
For her efforts to protect her community, Ms. Angelei was awarded the Goldman Prize in the African regional category; each year, the prize is also awarded to a recipient in Asia, Europe, an island nation, North America and South or Central America. Each honoree receives an award of $150,000. (The program was initiated in 1990 by Richard and Rhoda Goldman, civic leaders and philanthropists in San Francisco.)
“These are people who normally go unrecognized but do so much of the work,” said Lorrae Rominger, the deputy director of the prize program. “Hopefully, when they go back to their country, people will look, listen, stop and want to know more about what they’re doing,” she said of the recipients.
As a young woman living in an an area where violence is out of check, Ms. Angelei stood out for “taking this risk upon herself and making such a big difference,” Ms. Rominger said.
Ms. Angelei said that struggling to make a difference is not easy but that not trying means becoming part of the problem. Her father often cited the adage that “it’s better to die on your feet than to live on your knees,” she said. “Even if you don’t win, at least you’re opening the platform for others after you.”
From The New York Times: http://green.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/04/16/to-fight-a-dam-rather-than-live-on-your-knees/
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Apr 16, 2012 | Biodiversity & Habitat Destruction, Climate Change
By Sindya N. Bhanoo / The New York Times
Mountain pine beetles attack and kill weak pine trees, boring into bark to lay their eggs. They attack the trees in hordes, and their larvae feed off fungi in the trees.
Now, the beetles are reproducing twice a year instead of once, and millions of trees are dying as a result.
The beetle species is several million years old, and historically larvae grow to be adults in July or August every year. But it has been getting warmer earlier in the year, and larvae mature faster and emerge as early as May. These new beetles then immediately lay eggs, and a second generation of adult beetles emerges as early as July because summers are so warm, said Scott M. Ferrenberg, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Colorado at Boulder and an author of a study in the coming issue of The American Naturalist.
The researchers did their work at Niwot Ridge in Boulder County, at an elevation of 10,000 feet. Several decades ago, pine beetles were not found at that elevation, Mr. Ferrenberg said. “The invasion of that habitat above 9,000 feet has happened after several decades of significant warming,” he said.
He called the beetle phenomenon an epidemic, not limited to mountain pine beetles. Other trees are also under stress from other species of beetles.
“Spruce beetles and Douglas fir beetles are at epidemic levels,” he said. And southern pine beetles, typically found in the American South, are moving north.
“People are finding outbreaks in New Jersey,” Mr. Ferrenberg added.
From The New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/17/science/beetles-birth-explosion-puts-pine-trees-under-stress.html?_r=1
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Apr 15, 2012 | Colonialism & Conquest, Indigenous Autonomy, Toxification
By Amazon Defense Coalition
A lead Chevron lawyer has made the preposterous claim that the 30,000 Ecuadorian victims of the oil giant’s contamination are “irrelevant” to the court case that led to an $18 billion judgment against the company.
Doak Bishop, a Chevron lawyer from the American firm King & Spalding, said the following before a panel of international investment arbitrators on February 15th:
“The plaintiffs are really irrelevant. They always were irrelevant. There were never any real parties in interest in this case. The plaintiff’s lawyers have no clients… There will be no prejudice to [the rainforest communities] or any individual by holding up enforcement of the judgment.”
Meanwhile, the Huffington Post published over a dozen photos of Ecuadorians who have died or have severe medical problems resulting from Chevron’s contamination. See here for photos, taken by Lou Dematteis.
By arguing that no Ecuadorians had been harmed or were in danger of being harmed, Bishop was trying to convince the panel of arbitrators that they should block the Ecuadorians from enforcing their judgment against Chevron in other countries, a strategy that has failed for multiple reasons. See here.
Chevron has a long history of trying to dehumanize the Ecuadorians by denying their very existence or by belittling their culture, said Pablo Fajardo, the lead lawyer for the communities.
In 2010, Chevron tried to claim the signatures of 20 of the 48 named plaintiffs in the lawsuit had been forged by their attorneys. The charge was quickly rebutted after the plaintiffs appeared before a public notary to affirm their signatures were legitimate. See here. Chevron engineers also belittled Ecuadorian indigenous leaders by making them wear Western clothes and suggesting that oil-laden streams were actually full of vitamins, according to published reports.
The existence and relevance of the Ecuadorians has been affirmed by multiple independent journalists, including those working for 60 Minutes, The Sunday Night Show in Australia, The New York Times and The Washington Post.
The $18 billion damage award, levied by an Ecuador court, will be used to clean up Chevron’s deliberate contamination of the rainforest and provide clean drinking water and health care to the residents of the company’s former concession area. The damage decimated indigenous groups and caused an outbreak of cancer, according to evidence relied on by the court in issuing the judgment. See this video for more information.
Chevron, under the Texaco brand, operated in Ecuador from 1964 to 1992. Chevron admitted dumping 16 billion gallons of toxic drilling fluids directly into waterways and streams relied on by local residents for their drinking water.
From PR Newswire: http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/chevron-lawyer-claims-that-victims-of-rainforest-contamination-are-irrelevant—-amazon-defense-coalition-147441865.html
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Apr 15, 2012 | Mining & Drilling, Toxification, Worker Exploitation
By John Sweeney / The Guardian
Glencore, the commodity and mining firm worth £27bn, stands accused in the Democratic Republic of Congo of dumping raw acid and profiting from children working 150ft underground.
The revelations come as the notoriously secretive Swiss-based company, which floated on the London Stock Exchange last year, seeks to merge with mining firm Xstrata in a £50bn-plus deal. When Glencore floated in London, five of its partners became billionaires, but the biggest winner was Glencore’s chief executive, Ivan Glasenberg, whose stake is worth £4bn. The company was founded in 1974 by Marc Rich, once one of the FBI’s 10 most wanted fugitives, but now pardoned and outside Glencore.
In his first television interview, Glasenberg said that Glencore took corporate responsibility seriously, saying: “We care about the environment. We care about the local communities.”
But an investigation by the BBC’s Panorama has found Glencore dumping acid into a river and it discovered children as young as 10 working in the Tilwezembe mine, which was officially closed by Glencore in 2008. International law prohibits anyone under 18 working in a mine. Undercover researchers at Tilwezembe found under-18s who climbed down hand-dug mineshafts 150ft deep without safety or breathing equipment to dig copper and cobalt.
Glencore’s flotation prospectus says it stopped operating at the mine in 2008 because of a fall in the price of copper. The metal has since bounced back to record highs. In the meantime, the mine has been taken over by a local firm that pays artisanal or freelance miners, including under-18s, fixed prices for copper-ore nuggets. Glencore still owns the concession and plans to restart mining.
The number of accidents at Tilwezembe is extraordinarily high: Panorama was told that 60 miners died there last year, making the mine one of the most dangerous in the world.
Glasenberg said: “We definitely do not profit from child labour in any part of the world. This is adhered to strictly.” The child miners were part of a group of artisanal miners whom Glasenberg said “raided our land in 2010 against all of our authorisation. We are pleading with the government to remove the artisanal miners from our concession”.
But there is strong evidence that Glencore receives copper indirectly from the child labour mine. Panorama tracked a lorry laden with copper from Tilwezembe for 27 hours to a plant run by a major Glencore partner in Congo, Groupe Bazano. Copper from the Bazano plant has then been sent to Glencore’s smelter in Zambia, according to documents obtained by the programme.
Glencore denies buying the metal from Bazano. On the issue of whether copper from Tilwezembe goes to the Bazano plant, Glasenberg said: “I don’t know what the Bazano plant does. We don’t buy copper from Groupe Bazano.”
Asked if Glencore had taken copper in the past from Groupe Bazano, Glasenberg replied: “No, we don’t buy copper from Groupe Bazano.” Told by Panorama there was documentary evidence to the contrary, he said: “It cannot be.” Glasenberg said the company operated a strict policy whereby all copper was mined correctly, placed in bags with numbered seals and then sent to the smelter.
For its part, Groupe Bazano said it did not profit from child labour and had not taken copper ore from Tilwezembe since the mine was closed by Glencore.
Glencore is also facing criticism for damaging the environment in Congo. For three years it has run a large copper refinery at Luilu in Katanga province. Ore containing minerals is burnt with acid to free up the copper but the heavily polluted waste has been pumped straight into the Luilu river.
Glencore’s acid waterfall stank of toxic fumes when I visited it a few weeks ago. Upstream, the river used by local people to wash and fish was clear; downstream of the Glencore pipe, there was brown sludge. One local complained: “Fish can’t survive the acid. Glencore lacks any respect for people. No one would do that to another human being. It’s shocking.”
A Swiss NGO tested the acidity of the wastewater and found a pH value of 1.9, where 1 is pure acid and 7 neutral.
Read more from The Guardian: http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2012/apr/14/glencore-child-labour-acid-dumping-row
