Environmental Graffiti

They were tracking a suspicious boat in the dark. Shady figures lurked on board. They thought it was drug smuggling as the boat sailed across China’s Border… It turned out to be 270 crocodiles.

Saturday’s seizure in the southwestern region of Guangxi, was by far the largest this year and it prevented a hell of a lot of crocs from being made into handbags. Only 25 illegally captured crocodiles had been caught in the last six months. This time however, police found the animals bagged on board the ship. “Border police said that some underground leather factories bought crocodile skins to make shoes and bags,” Xinhua stated.

The animals, which are on China’s State Wildlife Protection list are part of a larger problem. Many conservationists have voiced concerns over China becoming a major market for endangered and illicit animal goods such as ivory. Demand is booming on the back of a growing economy.

The Chinese government pushed through regulations against the trade of products from endangered animals and plants on 1st September last year. The rules cover wildlife listed by the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora, or CITES, which China joined in 1980.

Severe flooding has affected four counties, four hundred thousand are without water, thousands have had to abandon their homes, and the cost will no doubt run into hundreds of millions of pounds.

Yet the housing minister, Yvette Cooper, doesn’t see a problem with building thousands of new homes on flood planes. Announcing a massive house building programme, she warned critics not to “play politics” with the flooding and attack building on flood planes. She told Radio 4’s Today Program that development had always taken place on flood planes, and the key was proper planning.

This comes the day after scientists admitted that heavy rains were a product of global warming and warned that extreme weather such as that seen over the last month will become increasingly frequent. Gordon Brown has acknowledged this, and increased the budget for flood protection accordingly. However, there seems to be a remarkable lack of joined up thinking by the government if it is planning to build several hundred thousand new homes that are then going to cost billions to keep dry.

Save big game hunting, Formula One motor racing is about the least environmentally friendly sport out there. The racing cars burn a staggering litre of fuel per kilometre and each one emits 17 tonnes of carbon dioxide per year. It’s an entire sport built around a wanton consumption of fossil fuels.

It seems hard to believe, therefore, that Formula One bosses have decided that the sport needs to go green. “Unless Formula One can become a contributor to the technology that might help the environment, it’s likely it will become a dinosaur,” Says Nick Fry, team principal of Honda racing.

The sport’s governing body, the FIA, has proposed a raft of measures supported by most of the teams, including Ferrari and Mercedes. By 2011 all the cars should be running on biofuels, and a device will be fixed to the cars to preserve brake energy. Nick Fry and others believe that if Formula One embraces these changes, it could become a technological pioneer for a greener automobile industry

Here’s Environmental Graffiti’s list of the five most influential environmental movers and shakers.

5. James Hansen runs NASAs Institute for Space Science and is Adjunct Professor of Earth and Environmental Sciences at Columbia. Since the 1980s he has consistently been testifying to Congress about the dangers of climate change. His pronouncements, on amongst other things the theory of a tipping point and what constitutes dangerous levels of carbon dioxide have been important is swaying public opinion towards accepting the reality of global warming. He has also alerted the world to the fact that the Bush administration has been pressuring and blackmailing climate change scientists into silence.

4. David Attenborough, the world’s best known television naturalist, has been spreading the gospel on the beauty of the natural world for decades. Uncountable numbers have learnt to love nature through his programs. More recently, he has become a vocal figure in efforts to educate the public about climate change, presenting the BBC’s ‘Saving Planet Earth’ season.

3. Arnold Schwarzenegger is chief executive of the world’s seventh largest economy, California. Frustrated at the anti-environmentalism of the Bush presidency, he has bypassed the federal government by introducing carbon emission reduction targets for his state, along with a raft of other environmental measures. He’s been looking a bit more tarnished recently though, following the clean air board furore.

2. Norman Borlaug, the 1970 Nobel Peace Prize winner has been a controversial figure within the green movement. His pioneering development of dwarf cereal strains allowed India and much of the rest of the developing world to feed itself, doubling their crop yield and preventing a perpetual famine that would have killed hundreds of millions. He is deeply opposed to the use of organic farming methods in developing countries, because of what has become known as the ‘Borlaug Hypothesis’. This states that the best way to protect the environment is to maximise the crop yield on the best available farmland, thereby preventing the destruction of forests and other ecosystems to provide more farmland. Its possible that without Borlaug’s dwarf crops, every forest between Nigeria and Korea would have been destroyed in an attempt to feed the world’s ever growing population.

1. Al Gore is the undisputed world leader of the environmental movement. As well as being VP for a bit, he’s been doing that slide show since the 1980s, the one he turned into an Oscar winning film last year. He’s also chairman of the Alliance for Climate Protection and the co-organiser of the Live Earth Concerts. No other single individual has done so much to convince the world that climate change is real. Recent poll data shows he could even be President if he wanted to…

An environmentalist was murdered yesterday, when a group of environmental activists were attacked by neo-Nazis in Siberia. The activists were protesting outside the Angarsk Electrolysis Chemical Plant near Lake Baikal when the attack occurred.

The twenty one environmental activists were set upon by fifteen mask wearers shouting neo-Nazis slogans. The attackers beat the protestors and attempted to burn their tents. Ilya Borodaenko, 21, died of head wounds, whilst four others are in a critical condition in intensive care.

Police have apprehended eight of the fifteen attackers, who are thought to be linked to a group that has also carried out attacks on traveller communities. The Russian government described the attack as a ‘pogrom’.

Ecotourism in Tibet is disastrously counterproductive for the Macacque Monkey, a new study has revealed. The start of tourism in Mount Huangshan Scenic Area in Anhui Province in 1991 has coincided with a huge increase in aggression and infanticide in the monkeys.

From almost total seclusion before 1991, the monkeys are now visited by tens of thousands of tourists every year, and the monkey’s habitat has been significantly restricted. Since 1991, infant mortality rates in the Tibetan Macacques has risen from 14.8% to 54.6% and researchers regularly found dead infant monkeys that had been mauled by older males.

There is also significant evidence that human contact and pressures on habitats have had a similar effect on chimpanzees. Those groups of primates found deep in the jungle away from human contact are far less aggressive than those who live close to humans. Often these groups have been restricted to habitats far smaller than would naturally be the case because of deforestation.

The obvious problems caused by human contact means that we need to reconsider how ecotourism works. Ecotourism certainly promotes the survival of many endangered species, both because it provides money for conservation projects but also because local communities then recognise the animals as a significant economic asset and so protect them. Yet mass tourism in these areas has too many adverse effects to be viable. How can the Macacque survive long term with an infant mortality rate of 54.6%? Perhaps the answer lies in restricting tourism to fewer tourists who pay more for the privilege, rather than allowing the vast numbers who currently visit Huangshan.

British Airways has been castigated over its climate change policy in a parliamentary report released today. The Environmental Audit Committee, chaired by Tim Yeo, has been investigating the extent to which airlines behave in an environmentally responsible way.

British Airways’ behaviour was described as ‘risible’ by the committee. Their carbon offsetting scheme came in for particular criticism, as despite being launched to great fanfare two years ago, it has offset the equivalent of only four return flights to New York. The airline runs fifty such flights weekly. MPs complained that BA made it almost impossible to use the scheme; it is not advertised and most employees seem ignorant of it. It is only possible to use it through the website, but it is almost impossible to find.

The committee also examined Virgin Atlantic and Silverjet, the business only airline. All three airlines came under criticism for their opposition to higher aviation fuel duty and green taxes. However, Silverjet was praised for its environmental awareness. The airline includes carbon offsetting in the price of a ticket and claims to be the world’s first carbon neutral airline.

Do you like your junk mail? Probably not. After sorting through it, you have to throw it away or (hopefully) recycle it. Not only is it annoying, but it’s very environmentally unfriendly.

Every year, 100 million trees are ground up to use in making junk mail, which adds up to 4.5 billion tons of trash each year. More than 28 billion gallons of water are also used in the process of making the junk mail. I could go on, but it would get boring. Anyway, the point is junk mail is bad for the environment.

So what can you do to fight the horrendous waste of resources? GreenDimes can help you. For a dime a day, they’ll reduce your junk mail by up to 90% and plant a tree every month for you.

Simmons blogs at Thoughts on the World and Thoughts on Global Warming. He can be reached at worldthoughts@gmail.com.

Just weeks after some of the worst floods in living memory displaced thousands and caused over a £1 billion in damage, it’s happening again. Flash floods are occurring up and down England and Wales, with meteorologists predicting up to 10cm of rain over the next twenty four hours.

Five people have had to be rescued by firefighters from the roof of a building in Barry, whilst the Hampshire and Berkshire are worst affected, with many roads closed. There have also been electricity cuts up and down the country. Do we really need any more conclusive evidence of climate change after the freak weather of the last month?

On Wednesday we reported that the world’s largest nuclear plant sat on top of an active geological fault line, the one that caused Monday’s earthquake. Well another day, another nuclear horror story, this time about a nuclear fuel facility in brush fire ravaged Idaho.

The facility, a US Department of Energy research campus, has had to close as a wildfire that has already consumed more than 5000 acres has is now less than 7 miles away. The facility, which houses three nuclear reactors and employs 700 people, has been surrounded by a ‘buffer zone’ of sand, despite the fact that officials at the centre denied the possibility of nuclear accidents.

Following strong winds and dry, hot weather much of the west is currently grappling with wildfire. 16,000 fire fighters are currently trying to control 72 bush fires across 11 states.