News Alert: Land and water defenders are opposing the creation of a dam across the Zambezi River. They are requesting support to highlight concerns. We encourage you to comment on the Environmental and Social Impact Assessment (ESIA) before it closes on January 25th. The Zambezi River Authority needs to capture grievances for their Responses Report for the ESIA.
The Environmental Resources Management (ERM) is in receipt of a report from a stakeholder. They have collated feedback from other stakeholders living in the Project Area of Influence in Zambia and Zimbabwe. Reports from community members living in the Project Area of Influence, have noted, that people are nervous to speak out against the BGHES Project, or even raise concerns and ask questions.
There is a strong feeling that in Zambia, largely due to historical context, that people cannot speak out against what the government is saying or doing for fear of retribution. Such retribution may be subtle or non-violent, such as having your livelihood taken away, rather than open threats/ acts of violence.
Batoka Gorge Hydro Electric Scheme (BGHES)
The proposed BGHES Project is seen as government driven and, therefore, people are not willing to question it. There is not a culture of speaking out against government, as such, people who may be opposed to the BGHES might not voice their opinion for fear of the consequences.
It has been reported that there have been threats of violence against people living in the Project Area of Influence who have opposed or questioned the BGHES Project.
There is no written documentation to ‘evidence’ or support this claim, however, it was noted that if people wanted to report threats, they do not know who they can report to. Local police, and even local traditional and government leadership, are not necessarily trusted to act on such information, and are typically seen as part of a government structure seeking to suppress opposition.
It was also noted that the ESIA report states that there are no migratory fish species that would be affected by the construction of the dam. However, stakeholders disagree with this statement, noting that there are in fact migratory fish species that would be impacted detrimentally by the presence of a dam. The stakeholder has, therefore, questioned whether the specialist report was rushed or perhaps written under instruction/coercion. Put simply, it is likely the environmental impacts have not been made clear. We suspect the author was paid to minimize the harm we know to be likely as a result of this project.
“the review and comment period for the draft ESIAs will remain open until such time that the Authority and ERM are able to hold the ESIA disclosure meetings, or until further notice is given by the Authority and ERM. Your input remains key in the updating and finalization of the ESIA studies and stakeholders are encouraged to continue reviewing the draft ESIAs and to submit questions and comments to ERM: batokagorgehes@erm.com”
Stakeholders can access the draft ESIA reports and Non-Technical Summaries (NTSs) through the project website, www.erm.com/BGHES-ESIA and at the public locations previously communicated.”
Featured image: Brian McMorrow, CC BY-SA 2.5, via Wikimedia Commons
Over 90% of the excess heat due to global warming is absorbed by the oceans.
Heat content change in the upper 2000 meters of the global ocean. (Advances in Atmospheric Sciences, January 2021)
Even with the Covid-19-related small dip in global carbon emissions due to limited travel and other activities, the ocean temperatures continued a trend of breaking records in 2020. A new study by 20 scientists from 13 institutes around the world, reported the highest ocean temperatures since 1955 from surface level to a depth of 2,000 meters.The study was published in Advances in Atmospheric Sciences on January 13. It concluded with a plea to the policymakers and others to consider the lasting damage warmer oceans that can be caused as they attempt to mitigate the effects of climate change.
“Over 90% of the excess heat due to global warming is absorbed by the oceans, so ocean warming is a direct indicator of global warming — the warming we have measured paints a picture of long-term global warming,” said Dr. Cheng Lijing, lead author of the study and associate professor with the International Center for Climate and Environmental Sciences at the Institute of Atmospheric Physics (IAP) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS).
“However, due to the ocean’s delayed response to global warming, the trends of ocean change will persist at least for several decades, so societies need to adapt to the now unavoidable consequences of our unabated warming. But there is still time to take action and reduce our emissions of greenhouse gases.”
Using a method developed by IAP, the researchers calculated the ocean temperatures and salinity of the oceans down to 2,000 meters with data taking from all available observations from various measurement devices from the World Ocean Database. They found that in 2020 the upper 2,000 meters of the world’s oceans absorbed 20 more Zettajoules than in 2019. By comparison, all human activities use about one-half of a zettajoule each year.
“Why is the ocean not boiling? Because the ocean is vast. We can imagine how much energy the ocean can absorb and contain, and, when it’s released slowly, how big the impact is.”
The researchers reported other effects, such as ocean salinity pattern amplification and more stratification due to the upper layer warming quicker than the deeper sections. Both changes could cause harm to ocean ecosystems.
“The fresh gets fresher; the salty gets saltier. The ocean takes a large amount of global warming heat, buffering global warming. However, the associated ocean changes also pose a severe risk to human and nature systems.”
Cheng noted the 2020 wildfires that ravaged Australia, parts of the Amazon region, and the west coast of the United States.
“Warmer oceans and a warmer atmosphere also promote more intense rainfalls in all storms, especially hurricanes, increasing the risk of flooding. Extreme fires like those witnessed in 2020 will become even more common in the future. Warmer oceans also make storms more powerful, particularly typhoons and hurricanes.”
The researchers will continue to monitor the ocean temperatures and the impacts of warming on other oceanic characteristics, such as salinity and stratification.
“As more countries pledge to achieve ‘carbon neutrality’ or ‘zero carbon’ in the coming decades, special attention should be paid to the ocean. Any activities or agreements to address global warming must be coupled with the understanding that the ocean has already absorbed an immense amount of heat and will continue to absorb excess energy in the Earth’s system until atmospheric carbon levels are significantly lowered.”
Derrick Jensen interviews activists each week. This week Derrick interviews Cayte Bosler.
Cayte is an investigative environmental journalist and a graduate student at Columbia University. She researches solutions for protecting biodiversity and has worked with land-based communities and wildlife defenders throughout Latin America. Her interest is in chronicling community-led resistance to exploitation and ecological abuse to inspire resistance elsewhere. Today we talk about whales.
[Whales] are some of the most elusive creatures on the planet. They spend 99% of their lives under water, far beyond any of our observational tools. Even with the sliver of what we do know, it’s so fascinating.
We’ve only barely begun to understand their rich languages and music. It wasn’t a common knowledge until 1970s that whales could sing. We heard them singing on these amazing recordings that were release then and were part of what inspired this very effort to save them.
We don’t even know their migration routes or where they go in the oceans. A few years ago, we discovered – I’ve trouble with the word discovered. It’s not like out there waiting for us to discover them. But, they were discovered to science, off the coast of Japan species species of beaked whales.
There are about 89 species of cetaceans known to science. Cetaceans include whales, dolphins and porpoises. They’re generally categorized into baleen whales and toothed whales.
Baleen whales are the massive gentle giants. The blue whales, which is one of the biggest creatures ever to exist on planet Earth. Some fun facts: Their heart is the size of a car. Their tongue alone weighs more than an elephant. It’s said that they can fill 2000 balloons with a single breath. (I hope no one actually goes out and tries to test this. That will be a lot of plastic pollution we don’t want.) Some other baleen whales are right whales, humpback whales, or some of the most studied ones, minke whales, grey whales.
Even to understand where their feeding grounds are, we’re using tools like GPS to locate them. That’s really important so we can avoid collisions with ships and some other threats.
They’re just so intriguing. They have some of the biggest brains. We’re starting to try to come up with all these experiments to interact with them, have conversations even. It’s really a shame because I studied lots of different animals and I fall so in love with them and what they are capable of, and at the same time, I’m learning how we’re losing them, and the richness they bring to the world and how that’s being ousted as well.
Reporting from amidst fields of fracking wells in Colorado, Trinity La Fay writes about the conscious experience of being in relationship to the place she lives, and the disconnect between people and land needed to maintain the destruction.
On the Colorado Rising website, the maps of oil and gas rigs light up the area just above where I live, past my friend’s house halfway up the state, all the way up and out along the plain in a great sweep. Like some demented statistical X, the active wells appear in a sea of blue dots: the abandoned wells. Combined, they swarm completely around the jagged Rocky Mountains, a rising, desperate sea of exploitation.
I remember when the word fracking was used as a supplemental television curse. The way that they said it seemed perfect, as if they understood that it was a primary contributing source of the doom. The story was about a people who, ejected from a poisonous Earth, had colonized in space only to be pursued repeatedly by a predatory cybernetic race. A race they had created. I think stories are important. So does Joseph Campbell, but, as Mary Daly quotes him regarding child victims of sati (the Hindu practice of burning widows alive in the funeral pyres of their late husbands):
“In spite of these signs of suffering and even panic in the actual moment of the pain of suffocation, we should certainly not think the mental state and experience of these individuals after any model of our own more or less imaginable reactions to such a fate, for these sacrifices were not properly individuals at all.”
While I have visions of flickering relatives keening at the river’s edge, smell burning hair, feel the air being sucked from my lungs: he does not imagine their stories are relevant to his experiences.
So, harrumph.
Scrolling out on the Drilling Maps.com site, I see that we, at least, have the resistance of Mountain Range.
Texas; Oklahoma; Louisiana; Mississippi; Kansas; Michigan; the border between North Dakota and Montana. Just about every square inch from Cleveland, Ohio to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania to Charleston, West Virginia: like fire, the red dots blend. The names of places are all but erased behind them. I cannot see Arkansas written, but I know it is there. From Pennsylvania’s border with New York; all the way down California; all the way up from the Gulf of Mexico to the ice of the Beaufort Sea.
From the Great Lakes down to the Rio Grande; like a ring of fire around the coast of South America, like accidents waiting to happen from the Gulf of Oman to the Barents Sea; like sinking islands from the Arabian Sea to the Yellow Sea to the Tasman Sea. From the North to the South Pacific: companies know no boundaries.
The beneficiaries of these companies, the responsible, I wonder if they learn these names.
I wonder if they are all unreachably psychopathic, or stupid, or if it matters. The dead squirrel on the road; the stoodup friend; the barren landscape full of ghosts: to their experience, it does not matter if it was cruelty or carelessness.
Besides making it possible to set aflame the now undrinkable water that results from such enterprise, whose footage abounds online, Elementa, Science of the Anthropocene, hosts a special collection forum of “Oil and Natural Gas Development: Air Quality, Climate Science and Policy” wherein an article by Chelsea R Thompson, Jacques Hueber and Detlev Helmig, entitled Influence of oil and gas emissions on ambient atmospheric non-methane hydrocarbons in residential areas of Northeastern Colorado discusses ozone levels and calls it abstract.
Like Paul R. EhrlichPaul R. Ehrlich and Carl Sagan in The Cold and The Dark: The World After Nuclear War, everyone agrees that this is not working. Unlike that pivotal conference, however, modern realizations are lost in a desperate sea of distractions. Here is what The Cold and The Dark said abstractly:
“- survivors would face starvation [as] global disruption of the biosphere could ensue. In any event, there would be severe consequences, even in the areas not affected directly, because of the interdependence of the world economy. In either case the extinction of a large fraction of the Earth’s animals, plants, and microorganisms seems possible. The population size of Homo sapiens conceivably could be reduced to prehistoric levels or below, and extinction of the human species itself cannot be excluded.”
Boundaries are underrated.
According to me. Lots of people like to travel; I’m not into it. I have fallen in love with every landscape I’ve seen, but then, I didn’t get to know them. I live in a hard place that I know very well. Wendell Berry and Wes Jackson have a wonderful conversation during which they speak about the necessity of listening to the Others that are places to care for and live with them, and also the joy of being of a place: the intimacy that comes from noticing what cannot be observed in passing. It can be argued that Amber is ancient light that has been stored and that Jet is ancient darkness. Like Saga, they keep our stories. Shale; Oil; Gas; Tar: these exhumed ancestors seem to bellow as they burn that we wake sleeping titans at our peril. Or, as the article put it:
“The findings presented here suggest that oil and gas emissions have a large-scale regional impact on ambient [non methane hydrocarbons] levels, thereby impacting a large population of [-] residents, and representing a large area source of ozone precursors. The short-chain alkanes exhibit strong correlations with propane in Erie/Longmont, Platteville, and within Denver, supporting the conclusion of widespread impact of [oil and natural gas] emissions.”
They recommend further monitoring.
Trinity La Fey is a smith of many crafts, has been a small business creatrix since 2020; published author; appeared in protests since 2003, poetry performances since 2001; officiated public ceremony since 1999; and participated in theatrical performances since she could get people to sit still in front of her.
Ehrlich, Paul & Harte, John & Harwell, Mark & Raven, P & Sagan, C & Woodwell, George & Berry, Joseph & Ayensu, E & Ehrlich, A & Eisner, T. (1984).Long-Term Biological Consequences of Nuclear War. Science (New York, N.Y.). 222. 1293. 10.1126/science.6658451.
This article written by Cypress Hansen describes the harm caused to large mammals due to pollutants and toxic chemicals entering our seas and oceans. Cypress suggests these beings offer a significant indicator of the health of earth’s waters.
Dozens of whales and dolphins that beached themselves on the U.S. Atlantic Coast contained high levels of pollutants and heavy metals in their blubber and liver tissues, a new study shows.
For the first time, scientists detected the widely used antibiotic Triclosan and the popular herbicide Atrazine in rare species that spend their lives hundreds of kilometers offshore.
While the findings suggest these toxins may contribute to the demise of marine mammals, more research is needed to determine direct cause and effect.
Marine mammals stranded on beaches in the southeastern United States died with high levels of pollutants stored in their organs and blubber, researchers reported recently in Frontiers in Marine Science.
“Marine mammals are like a litmus test for the ecosystem,”
said lead author Annie Page-Karjian, clinical veterinarian at Harbor Branch Oceanographic Institute, Florida Atlantic University. “Looking at them and the toxins they’re exposed to gives us a snapshot of what is happening in the marine environment.”
Thousands of chemicals from households, farms and factories quietly enter the ocean every day. Some readily absorb onto bits of another common pollutant: plastic. When mistaken for food by small animals like plankton and anchovies, plastic enters the food chain—along with the chemicals it soaked up.
While the amount of toxins eaten by one anchovy is minuscule, most marine mammals are apex predators, eating hundreds of fish, squid or krill each day. Through a process called bioaccumulation, small amounts of ingested toxins concentrate in carnivores over time, compromising their immune systems and bodily functions.
The researchers collected autopsy data from 83 toothed whales and dolphins that washed up in Florida and North Carolina between 2012 and 2018. They examined 46 bottlenose dolphins (Tursiops truncatus), 21 pygmy sperm whales (Kogia breviceps), and small numbers of animals from nine other species.
The team screened liver and blubber samples for heavy metals like mercury, lead and arsenic. They also checked for Triclosan, an antibiotic used in dozens of household products; Atrazine, an herbicide used on corn and sugarcane fields; and a handful of plasticizing chemicals such as BPA and NPE, found in countless products from food containers to clothing.
“We found some of the highest mercury concentrations that have ever been reported in any living thing anywhere, ever,”
Page-Karjian told Mongabay. Two bottlenose dolphins found stranded in Waves, North Carolina, and North Palm Beach, Florida, had more than 1,400 micrograms of mercury per gram of tissue (1,400 parts per million) in their livers. Just 10 parts per million of mercury can cause neurological damage in human fetuses.
Besides toxins in their tissues, every animal had a number of physical maladies including kidney deterioration, thyroid tumors and chronic liver disease. . .
This article was written by Cypress Hansen and published on 24 November 2020 in Mongabay. You can read the full, original article here:
