Jan McGirk2013-05-25T03:00:22-04:00Jan McGirkhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/author/index.php?author=jan-mcgirkCopyright 2008, HuffingtonPost.com, Inc.HuffingtonPost Blogger Feed for Jan McGirkGood old fashioned elbow grease.Review: Our Dying Planettag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.13771722012-03-24T13:23:11-04:002012-05-24T05:12:01-04:00Jan McGirkhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/jan-mcgirk/Our Dying Planet, his latest book, published by University of California Press. It's full of nasty surprises.
For instance, Sale examines the impact of the world's petroleum and coal use. When 250 million years' worth of stored carbon is released into the atmosphere during just 150 years, there are consequences. Nearly one-third of the carbon dioxide spewed into the air gets absorbed by the ocean, turning saltwater increasingly acidic, especially in relatively shallow reef areas.
My review of this important book about the future of life on a warmer earth is posted on ChinaDialogue, an international website where China and the world discuss the environment. ]]>Review: Rimbaud in Java, The Lost Voyagetag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2011:/theblog//3.9845562011-09-29T10:46:24-04:002011-11-29T05:12:01-05:00Jan McGirkhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/jan-mcgirk/
In fact, the poet Arthur Rimbaud can be seen as a kind of anti-Rambo: a literary child prodigy, army deserter, and blue-eyed French fop who was up for adventure tourism some two centuries before annual swarms of young backpackers would dare to go abroad, clutching the Lonely Planet and their cell phones.
It sounds like an appropriate title for a Sly Stallone action movie sequel, but the punchy phrases are taken from an extraordinary prose poem, self-published by an openly gay teenager in 1873, which still is considered a milestone in French literature.
Rimbaud's hallucinatory words from A Season in Hell, along with his two other poetry collections, Le Bateau Ivre (The Drunken Boat) and Illuminations, won the boy poet white hot fame in the salons of Paris. Talk about runaway success: he promptly dropped out as soon as he reached adulthood and left all his symbolist cult followers in the lurch. He clocked up 50,000 kilometers, and spent 21 of the next 36 months on the road or the high seas to explore "the hot countries of his desire." Years later Rimbaud would end up running guns after a short stint trading coffee beans and feathers from far-flung European colonies in Africa and Arabia, his former fame kept secret.
The ultimate antihero, Rimbaud also was an adept linguist who mastered 10 foreign languages before he turned 20. He bridged sexual and sensual frontiers while indulging in copious amounts of absinthe (aka "the Green Fairy"), hashish, opium, and public scandal. He was wounded by one pistol-wielding married lover, the poet Paul Verlaine, and stabbed another who tried to silence him in public. No wonder this iconoclast youth became a decadent touchstone for the beats and the punks. Some two dozen biographies have attempted to decipher his talent over the years, but contained perplexing gaps and contradictions.
Jamie James, a novelist and former art critic for the New Yorker, has written an intriguing new book about this wild child poet that also leaps boundaries. Rimbaud in Java: The Lost Voyage is difficult to classify. Equal parts lit crit, biography, linguistic anthropology and social history, this non-fictional work examines the remaining mysteries about Arthur Rimbaud as a fugitive from justice and puts them into cultural context. It's documented that Rimbaud joined up as a mercenary soldier for the Dutch Colonial Army but went AWOL in the jungles of Java. Somehow, he managed to live on the lam in the tropics for nearly a month before making his way back to France. But how? And why? What might he have encountered? James spent nine years researching this pet project, originally intended as a novel, and it reads like a literary detective story crossed with the speculations of an erudite fanboy. He can be quite droll or catty -- not always the dogged sleuth -- and hints of feverish obsession draw the reader in.
"Rimbaud invented the artist as bad boy shtick, inspiring Jim Morrison, Patti Smith, Kurt Cobain plus legions of losers and wannabes," James told me in an email from Indonesia, where he has lived for the past 13 years. In his preface, he elaborated on his fascination:
"Rimbaud is one of those writers who can change a reader's life -- not in the sense of being an inspiration or a moral guide but by changing the way one thinks. "
James ultimately abandoned his fictional treatment because he was too enthralled by the poet's actual words and despaired of making up dialogue for a novel.
"Every previous attempt to put words in that pretty mouth that I was aware of had ended in unintentional burlesque," Jamie mused. "It seemed like an act of pure hubris to predict retroactively what this utterly original and unpredictable artist did in a place that was totally alien to him...Rimbaud habitually avoided doing things the easy way and he was never dull."
The resulting text is a spare 121 pages, pared down to the essential, and it examines intensely how the adolescent poet must have embraced his manhood. After trying to expand his conscious for years through cultivating hallucination and madness, Rimbaud might simply have had enough and decided to re-close his mind, get back in the closet, stay off the booze and pose as ordinary. Or maybe not. The crucial episode happened in Java, the furthest Rimbaud travelled from his small town in France.
The book details Rimbaud's inspiration and desperation to keep a low profile in a weird bygone Java replete with magic and carnal mysticism, then traces his travels back to Europe incognito as a deckhand aboard a steamer. Detours into sexual deviancy in the Victorian age and amorous French attitudes towards Orientalism and Islam are relevant and gripping.
Nearly all the French verses are translated by James himself, who confessed he
"quoted Rimbaud's writings at every plausible occasion...as fully as I thought I could get away with...The translation of poetry is a subjectivity as deep as wine or chocolate. The point is to create your own Rimbaud."
Unfailingly, James is up to the task, and a series of period graphics and color plates adds to the documentary feel of his unusual book, with the ruins of Borobudur displayed like a vintage cameo brooch on the cover. Rimbaud in Java: The Lost Voyage will be launched next week at the Ubud Writers and Readers Festival, in Bali.
Rimbaud in Java, The Lost Voyage by Jamie James
Didier Millet, 121 pages ]]>Feeding Frenzy -- No Winners in Coming Global Food Fighttag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2011:/theblog//3.8642892011-05-23T16:23:27-04:002011-07-23T05:12:01-04:00Jan McGirkhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/jan-mcgirk/Green Revolution and stave off world hunger, think again.
The Coming Famine, a sobering book by Julian Cribb, a veteran Australian science writer, warns that global food security will become the overriding concern for all mankind by around 2050, overshadowing financial upheaval and climate catastrophe, unless corrective action is taken soon.
Given the obesity epidemic now plaguing the developed world, the prospect of starvation for our grandchildren seems grotesquely ironic. But according to Cribb, diet and agriculture must be reinvented by mid-century. He outlines how, at our present rate of over-consumption and overpopulation, the global food supply cannot meet the projected peak in human numbers and increased demand.
Cribb cannot be dismissed as a hectoring doom-monger because he goes beyond polemics and outlines steps to help curb mankind's appetite for destruction. These include personal choices, such as having fewer babies or eating less meat, as well as big-picture solutions, such as geoengineering and eco-farming. Balancing local organic methods against advances by the multinationals that supply supermarkets with genetically modified crops and grain-fed Frankenfish is seen as essential.
"In the food wars to come, there will be no victors," Cribb prophesizes. One of his more controversial suggestions is to divert 10 percent of all military defense budgets in order to nourish a hungry planet, thereby preventing armed conflicts sparked by food insecurity or global warming migrants. He argues that doubling investment in research and development would boost new food supply and fund education about sustainability for farmers and consumers. Cutting food subsidies in the developed world is another pragmatic proposal to break down food trade barriers. Cribb also stresses how, in an age of scarcity, it is immoral for corporations, institutions or nations to own or withhold knowledge about food production.
The Coming Famine avoids the alarmist tone of Al Gore's slideshow in the 2006 film An Inconvenient Truth or Paul Ehrlich's 1968 bestseller The Population Bomb. In fact, Cribb writes nearly as persuasively and logically as Rachel Carson did in Silent Spring, the classic 1960s-era environmentalist wake-up call about pesticides in the food chain. His prose is accessible, reasoned and well sourced, backed up with maps and charts on land-use projections, population growth, regional climate change, drought trends, grain yields, fertilizer supply and the social impact of advanced farming methods. By synthesizing current evidence about climate, water, soil, energy, nutrients and demographics, he reaches out to mainstream readers who may be unfamiliar with specialist lingo or green talking points.
"Ordinary people are less confused about food than they are about climate," Cribb asserts. "Plus there are no 'food denialists' arguing we should grow less food. And leaders who do not ensure the people are fed usually end up swinging from lamp posts, so again, politicians are less tempted to inaction on food than they may be on climate."
The forecast is undeniably grim. Cribb notes: "As evaporation and transpiration increase with warming, irrigators may need up to one-fifth more water to grow the same amount of food -- at a time when cities will be taking water away from farmers, and rivers and aquifers everywhere will be drying up."
The continued neglect or abuse of our natural resources inevitably will lead to famine. It's more than a simple distribution problem and Cribb shows how curbing waste is essential. Half the food currently produced in the world gets thrown away. If all earth's citizens adopted the present-day American standard of living, he points out, we would need four planets. And as middle-class Chinese and Indians begin to eat more meat, so goes the rest of this planet. The "increased global mobility of the ravenous consumer" adds a new dimension to the problem, too. In rich countries, such as the United States and Australia, the average pet cat consumes more fish in a year than the average human does. Unrestrained, promiscuous consumption is becoming acceptable.
Cribb is not totally pessimistic, however. He points out that present-day levels of food production can be maintained "by reducing waste, recycling resources, developing alternative methods such as biocultures and algae farming, and reinvigorating research enterprise." Gourmet cookbooks may be viewed as obscenely self-indulgent one day, when dining on a swill of recycled urban nutrients becomes the norm.
But rather than gorging like pigs at the "trophosphere" -- Cribb's neologism for global food production resources, playing on the words "trough" and "troposphere," the lowest level of the earth's atmosphere -- people need to approach food in a way that's "efficient, sustainable and sparing."
The worst-case scenario -- when shortages of everything but people will converge and result in conflicts, waves of refugees, acidic oceans, increased health risks and famine -- is unlikely to be triggered by a single event, Cribb writes. "It will probably be a nonlinear crescendo of events brought on by growing regional scarcities of land, water, nutrients, fuels, technology, fish and skills -- scarcities that are already interacting with and amplifying one another." Cribb prefers to see this as a challenge rather than a reason to despair: "Our success as a species is founded on our ability to foresee danger -- and respond to it before it is too late."
The Coming Famine: The Global Food Crisis and What We Can Do to Avoid It, Julian Cribb, University of California Press, 2010.
Jan McGirk has reported on environmental issues and disasters in Asia, Latin America and the Middle East. This review was crossposted on the bilingual environmental journal, China Dialogue.
]]>Fast and Furious Opposition to High Speed Rail Gets U.S. Off Tracktag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2011:/theblog//3.8578502011-05-04T22:58:02-04:002011-07-04T05:12:01-04:00Jan McGirkhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/jan-mcgirk/
Federal plans to invest billions of dollars in a vast high-speed rail network are aggravating many right wing politicians, who refuse to be railroaded into support. As a focus of political division, high speed rail is gathering pace across the country. Conservative resistance will only hold America back, especially as gas pump prices approach five bucks per gallon.
An ambitious scheme to link all major American cities within 500 miles of one another by high-speed rail before the middle of the century is an achievable goal, according to a federation of state Public Interest Research Groups, called the United States PIRG. Building a sustainable transportation system that could ease road congestion, reduce air pollution and carbon emissions, and offer travelers in the United States more alternatives would seem to be a lofty bipartisan goal. Not quite yet, apparently. The online environmental journal, China Dialogue, explores the issue and examines the unexpected hostility:
Support for high-speed rail is seen as crucial to president Barack Obama's plans to revitalize the United States' neglected infrastructure and to create jobs. His political opponents now sneer at "ObamaRail" and are eager to derail the administration's US$53 billion (348 billion yuan) transportation scheme, even though widespread enthusiasm for these faster modern trains had been anticipated.
High-speed rail has come to mean more than getting from point A to point B. It is a new litmus-test issue that establishes political credibility. Proponents see a way to catch up with state-of-the-art mass transit in Europe and Asia and to cut travel costs for middle-class workers; skeptics tend to scorn high-speed rail enthusiasts for romanticising outmoded, overpriced conveyances that few car-owners or frequent flyers would bother to ride...
Washington's plans for Intercity bullet trains already are getting shot down. By spurning the federal money on offer for public transportation, politicians with libertarian tendencies hope to shore up their Tea Party support. First term Republican governors in three states - Florida, Ohio and Wisconsin- recently turned down billions of dollars in high speed rail (HSR) subsidies, and also lost potential jobs linked to project construction and railway operation.
Fiscal prudence is the reason cited by conservative politicians for rejecting the federal funds for high speed rail corridors. Republican governors Rick Scott, John Kasich, and Scott Walker justified their move, suggesting it would prevent their states' taxpayers from getting stuck with financial commitments for maintaining the newfangled trains or to cover the extra costs if these technologically advanced projects go over budget.
Some US vested interests - such as regional airlines, or the gasoline industry - may be less than thrilled with the prospect of bullet trains thundering across America at speeds up to 400 kilometres per hour. But even the chairman of China Southern Airlines is impressed with high velocity ground transport, though he worries about its effect on his market shares because bullet trains compete on about 25% of his routes. "High-speed rail has three advantages over air travel," Si Xianmin was quoted as saying in The Economist. "It is more convenient, more punctual and has a better safety record."
Creating jobs for Americans is a priority in today's economy, and libertarian critics worry that privately-owned fast train networks would be foreign-run. They contrast the cost of a mile of high-speed rail in China, roughly $15 million, with the estimated $40 million to $80 million per mile to build it inside the United States. Such concerns did not trouble the original railway barons. Historically, Chinese labor was essential to the American transcontinental railroad. Ninety percent of the workers who blasted tunnels and laid ties over the High Sierras in the nineteenth century were Chinese.
Even though it has been hailed by prominent environmentalist activists as a way to beat highway traffic jams and curb pollution from short-stop air travel, high-speed rail has not yet captivated the imagination of car-loving Americans in sprawling suburbs...
Environmental activists are anxious that high-speed rail in the United States be as "earth friendly" as possible, and have urged planners to commit to sustainable land-use and development patterns. A campaign website run by the Sierra Club, the country's oldest grassroots environmental group, points out further green attributes:
* HSR (high-speed rail) requires one-sixth of the energy per seat-mile of equivalent airline travel and one-third of the energy of automobile travel.
* HSR "recycles" railroad beds that can easily be 100 to 150 years old and thus feature energy-conserving grades.
* HSR stations strongly encourage the redevelopment of pedestrian & transit-friendly office districts.
* Electric HSR draws energy from the national power grid that utilizes otherwise impractical sources of "renewable" or domestic energy.
* Electric HSR transfers most pollution problems to large stationary power plants that offer the best chance for pollution control.
* Electric HSR can regenerate significant amounts of useful electric power as trains decelerate for curves and stations.
* Electric HSR locomotives and power distribution systems have remarkably long lives and low maintenance costs.
If the United States ignores an opportunity to reshape its economic geography with high-speed trains, it's likely to get left behind.
Excerpted from a longer article on www.chinadialogue.net ]]>Any Gauze in Gaza? Supply Shortages Add to Medical Misery Inside Striptag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2011:/theblog//3.8482842011-04-15T16:28:14-04:002011-06-15T05:12:01-04:00Jan McGirkhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/jan-mcgirk/medical patients inside Gaza.
A remedy is needed for the time lag between placing orders to authorities in the West Bank and the delivery of pharmaceuticals and medical supplies for Gaza's 1.5 million inhabitants, who have lived under siege for years. In the Lancet medical journal I reported that Norwegian diplomats hope to initiate negotiations between Gaza and Ramallah in order to solve this medical crisis through better logistics and monitoring.
Dr. Tone Hegna and Dr. Åse Vikanes, who followed the delivery of 200 pallets of medical supplies from Ramallah to Gaza in early February 2011, confirmed that many drugs and basic disposables remain in short supply, and that a bad situation is made worse by inadequate storage, transport and incineration facilities.
"The situation is heartbreaking," Dr Vikanes said. "Doctors we met were impressive but seemed frustrated. As physicians, we could see that the big challenge was seeing what to do but not being able to do it. Doctors must improvise with what's available or about to expire, and not according to international guidelines. It's so unpredictable. Planning a treatment for cancer is very difficult, for instance. Drug supply is very unstable and there are no backups."
Because of such uncertainties, radiation therapy for cancer would tend to be prescribed inside Gaza even when chemotherapy might be optimal. Dr. Hegna told me she is dismayed because radiotherapy is no longer available in the enclave. New MRI and X-Ray machines, which Israeli authorities fear might be used for terrorist attacks, are in short supply. Israel struggles to balance its security concerns with sensitivity to the medical needs of Palestinians, and Gaza's health ministry referred 1,523 cancer patients through Egypt or Israel in 2010, of whom 165 were children.
Cancer patients at Shifa hospital had received just one or two out of four scheduled chemo treatments and eventually died from the lack of continuity. Oncologists said 100 of 260 cancer patients at Gaza's largest hospital are unable to receive effective treatment because the required combination of several medicines is unobtainable.
The survey conducted by Hegna and Vikanes found that more than one third of these essential pharmaceuticals are missing completely, and barely 7 percent of the remainder exceed two months supply. There's a shortage of sutures, latex gloves, exchange transfusion sets for newborns, and ethyl alcohol.
Four doctors from the Physicians for Human Rights, Israel, on a rare overnight visit to Gaza were appalled that the sole CT machine available in the Nasser Children's hospital has been out of service for months. They reported that new drugs are not in use and that no blood tests were carried out in January because of equipment shortages.
Dr Vikanes warned that the biggest potential threat arises from the treatment of infectious disease. Using up large stocks of expensive advanced antibiotics before they expire rather than prescribing standard antibiotics promotes bacterial resistance that puts the closed society of Gaza at risk. Meanwhile, too many cases of diarrhea, pneumonia and skin infections go untreated.
In order to keep enough drugs in stock, pharmacists at Gazan hospitals sometimes request doctors to reduce a patient's dosage below the recommended levels. Those diagnosed with kidney failure, congenital heart disease, or organ transplant patients drugs suffer disproportionately.
Patient referrals abroad doubled last year, partly due to Gaza's drug shortage, and this hits the Gaza health ministry's budget hard. For example, the antivenom serum to treat a viper's bite would cost a little more than $19. Without it, a referral to hospital outside the enclave becomes essential, at an estimated cost of $832 per night. Vetting a patient's accompanying family members for a permit to use the Erez crossing into Israel costs precious time, too.
How to fix such a dire situation? Vikanes and Hegna suggest that impartial third parties, such as the International Red Cross or UNICEF, should regularly monitor donations from abroad and all shipments from the Ministry of Health in Ramallah to build trust and ensure transparency. To refill dwindling stocks of drugs and make the distribution of emergency medical supplies more efficient requires improved communication, they said.The Norwegian team determined that at least three months worth of essential medical supplies should be kept on hand in Gaza, with regular provisions ordered from Ramallah and delivered every other month, according to need.
http://www.icrc.org/eng/resources/documents/update/2011/palestine-israel-update-2011-03-18.htm
The Norwegian team also called for three large incinerators to insure proper disposal of expired pharmaceuticals. Ironically, this was only days before a health ministry warehouse in Jabaliya was shelled by Israeli fighter planes and medicines donated by international delegations went up in flames.
Fraught with such challenges, the health system in Gaza must operate under enormous strain. Without a careful plan to remedy the drug shortage, conditions for patients and medical staff are expected to deteriorate.]]>Wrong Revolution for a Hungry Planet That's Heating Uptag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2010:/theblog//3.7907942010-12-02T16:09:58-05:002011-05-25T18:15:22-04:00Jan McGirkhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/jan-mcgirk/
Government measures aimed at curbing global warming are a sure-fire way to steam up America's libertarian Tea Party populists, who tend to scoff at scientific warnings about the perils of greenhouse-gas emissions and the human component in climate change. Most of the Tea Party crowd rejects carbon regulation and trading schemes as unwanted interference from a "nanny state", notes a recent piece in China Dialogue. Sarah Palin, the shrill contrarian who was defeated as the Republican vice presidential candidate two years ago and later quit halfway through her term as governor of Alaska, panders to these climate-change "skeptics" by dismissing relevant research as "a bunch of snake oil science".
Republican John Boehner, the new speaker of the House of Representatives, Congress's lower chamber, has said: "The idea that carbon dioxide is a carcinogen that is harmful to our environment is almost comical." No one is laughing.
Championing cheaper energy and oil independence over environmental concerns is a reliable crowd-pleaser in pockets of middle America where the theory of evolution is also held in doubt. Overheated rhetoric is worrisome when the world's average temperature continues to climb. Although the first half of 2010 was the warmest ever recorded, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, 39 of the country's federal lawmakers have ridiculed global warming as a hoax or a conspiracy. One group of scientists is assembling a "rapid-response team" to counteract climate misinformation, but facts seem irrelevant to steadfast politicians who are reluctant to "flip flop" or change their minds.
As the world economic slump drags on, US lawmakers are turning a cold shoulder to progressive climate-change legislation because of the political costs, coupled with the price tag of subsidies and incentives to counteract polluters.
With the latest United Nations-led climate treaty summit under way in Cancún now, the United States has found itself in a jam. The prospects for achieving anything meaningful or legally binding at this big forum are fading fast. The sense of urgency about halting climate change seems to get lost in endless protocols and squabbles among the 190 participating countries.
In fact, Todd Stern, the US state department envoy to the Cancún meeting, told reporters bluntly: "No one is anticipating or expecting in any way a legal treaty to be done in Cancún this year. The focus at this point is on a set of decisions on the core issues."
It's a far cry from Barack Obama's green campaign rhetoric. He had pledged to cut greenhouse-gas emissions dramatically -- with a goal of 80% by mid-century -- and lead a new international global-warming partnership. He aimed to invest $150 billion over the next decade to develop and implement "climate-friendly energy supplies, protect our existing manufacturing base and create millions of new jobs." His goal was to double federal clean-energy research spending, while reducing dependence on foreign oil and trimming oil consumption by 35% before 2030. By 2025, he promised that 25% of America's electricity would come from renewable sources.
Because the Obama administration failed to pass its cap-and-trade program to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions this year, even while Obama's Democratic Party controlled both houses of Congress, world confidence in US leadership for carbon diplomacy has diminished. Political commitment without the legislation to back it up is not very convincing.
Todd Stern conceded that, "It is important for the United States to put in place its own full-scale plan for low carbon energy and reducing greenhouse gases. The more we can do that, we will have an even stronger voice in these discussions."
The European Union climate commissioner, Connie Hedegaard, observed tartly: "Until action is taken in the US, others have an excuse -- valid or not -- for not coming along. Many countries are asking themselves why they should take action as long as the biggest emitter in the developed world is unwilling to live up to its global responsibilities."
Internationally, there has been a political backlash against the endless foot-dragging on climate change. In mid-November, Mexico City's mayor, Marcelo Ebrard, called an emergency summit of 135 world mayors to his slightly less-polluted megalopolis where greenhouse-gas emissions have been slashed by 4% over the past two years.
Unwilling to wait for a top-down mandate, Ebrard appealed to grassroots activism to produce local action plans that are "measurable, reportable and verifiable".
"We're leading the way," said Los Angeles mayor Antonio Villaraigosa. "The national governments have tried to run away from their responsibility." But because cities own utilities and provide key services, municipal ordinances "can help change citizen behavior toward energy consumption," he said. Half of the world's population lives in urban areas now but, by 2050, that proportion will increase to two-thirds. Big cities already use up to 60% of global energy production and emit 70% of greenhouse gases. Mayors complain that the international deadlock on climate policy has prevented them from launching global warming mitigation projects typically financed by development banks.
"We want the chiefs of state and government to know in Cancún that the mayors of the world are committed to reduce the greenhouse-gas emissions but, for that, they must commit to increase the financial support in order to reach those goals in the short term," said Bertrand Delanoe, the mayor of Paris.
Julian Cribb, a notable Australian science writer and author of The Coming Famine, suggests pitting the world's energy behemoths against one another. He told china dialogue: "If China vowed to achieve their [green energy] target before America, it would engender competitive nationalism and set both economies on a clean energy fast-track. Invoking US national pride is one way to hush the kind of red-necked denialism we see today -- they won't want their own country to come second in a technological race. A challenge from China would make being clean and green a kind of international sport, as well as an economic and environmental goal."
The Coming Famine, which warns about future food security in a changed climate, also urges eco-activists to stress the links between global warming and food supply in order to "energize the climate debate".
"Climate change is most likely to be felt by the majority of people worldwide in the form of food shortages and big price hikes in the shops. This is something they can all understand, whereas atmospheric physics is a still bit arcane to the typical consumer," Cribb pointed out. "A degree or two of warming doesn't sound like much (to the average person who may not appreciate its implications) but a doubling in the price of bread or rice hits right where politicians least like it. I think the Chinese government knows that hunger spells civil strife and, potentially, revolution."
That's hardly the type of Green Revolution envisioned by the policymakers at Cancún.
Jan McGirk is a former correspondent for the Independent (London) and the Lancet, who has reported on environmental issues and disasters in Asia, Latin America and the Middle East. Crossposted on chinadialogue
]]>Checkpoint: Backscatter Fears and Naked Aggressiontag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2010:/theblog//3.7863122010-11-23T11:24:50-05:002011-05-25T18:15:22-04:00Jan McGirkhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/jan-mcgirk/
Americans on the go are increasingly upset about the intrusiveness of pre-boarding security checks at their airports, whether by full-body scanner or an enhanced pat-down. Perhaps lessons can be learned by examining the health effects on Palestinians who have for years submitted to similar security checks.
More than a quarter million Palestinians live in the shadow of the Israeli's separation barrier, particularly in spots where the barrier is jig-sawed to protect hilltop settlers in what they refer to as Judea and Samaria. Ostensibly to deter terrorists, a tall electrified fence and trench system disconnects many Palestinian families living in such isolated rural pockets from their families and jobs in the West Bank. (Gaza is entirely corralled, and any patients and accompanying medical staff who are permitted to leave the enclave undergo such body scans as well.) In order for West Bank residents to reach jobs outside these restricted zones, to see friends and relatives, shop, or even make bank deposits, an Israeli-issued permit is required. All permit-holders must line up to be checked by private Israeli armed security guards or national border police before they are allowed past the separation barrier.
Crossing the Reihan/Bartaa checkpoint into the rest of the West Bank entails a full body backscatter x-ray scan, using machines similar to the bulky TSA scanners at 60 American airports which have raised the hackles of travelers this month.
Like US pilots who object to any extra doses of radiation caused by these virtual strip-searches, many Palestinian women are reluctant to undergo full-body scans twice a day, repeatedly. Even though their refusal denies them access to work or to harvest family fields that lie on the other side of the barrier, many resist.
Two years ago, I interviewed more than a dozen women at a basic health clinic in Um el Reihan run by a Western foreign aid agency. Each one said she was too scared to enter a foreign-built machine that might endanger a pregnancy or reduce her fertility.
Dr Muthanna Jabbarin , who tends the day clinic inside Um el Reihan and returns to Jenin, is bothered that he has no access to data about the security equipment and the risk of malfunctions. He's unable to reassure worried patients who must go through the scanning machine twice daily about possible cancer risks. Several miscarriages, including one suffered by a woman in her eighth month, have raised his concerns. The doctor believes that the heat, the prolonged standing, and the anxiety all take a toll on expectant mothers.
In such a conservative community, many people feel violated because the security apparatus can see through their clothing and records each fold of flesh. Scars from a Caesarean birth or a circumcision will be readily apparent on the screen. Every one of these scans is scrutinized by young Israeli guards. Fears that the images will be kept or photographed on mobile phones and uploaded to the internet are widespread. Numerous Palestinian seamstresses, teachers, and students have abandoned the commute from their Um el Reihan enclave into the West bank to avoid the public humiliation. Now they are marooned in this tiny hamlet which receives no services from either the Palestinian authority or the Israeli government.
Not only are the 350 Palestinian residents of Um el Reihan unable to cross the old Green Line west of their village to enter Israel but, but even if they go east and stand on line for hours, many are delayed or prevented from visiting the rest of the Palestinian territory. Reihan/Bartaa checkpoint, with its requisite body scans and searches, has mutated this little community into a Mid-Eastern gulag. After the Transport Security Administration's latest controversy over backscatter strip searches and groin-thumping frisking, a few more jet-setting Americans may empathize with the plight of these folks.
McGirk was a special correspondent reporting from Gaza and the West Bank for The Lancet, a British medical journal.
]]>Challenge to California's Green Lawstag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2010:/theblog//3.7012752010-08-31T19:09:55-04:002011-05-25T17:30:22-04:00Jan McGirkhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/jan-mcgirk/Proposition 23. Bankrolled mostly by two Texas oil companies, Valero and Tesoro, this controversial measure on the November ballot would suspend the state's groundbreaking global warming laws before they go into effect and "terminate" the green legacy of Governor Arnold Schwarzegger. The Republican candidate, Meg Whitman, still hesitates to declare her position on this critical issue, while Democrat Jerry Brown is gung-ho against it.
Californians still view themselves as global trend-setters. Even though the bankrupt state is $20 billion in the red and its economy has dropped from ranking as the world's eighth largest down to 12th place, its blue-sky thinkers hanker for renewable energy and a boost in the green-job sector.
Most of California's consumer-protection measures, such as a cigarette-smoking ban in public places or mandatory smog regulators on cars, eventually go mainstream and are adopted in much of the United States. Whether this can happen with climate legislation, despite the economic downturn, remains to be seen.
Over on China Dialogue, an innovative website where China and the world discuss the environment, the Proposition 23 campaign is closely watched by academics, ecologists and alternative energy advocates. If passed, the so-called California Jobs Initiative, aka Dirty Energy Initiative, may have an adverse effect on the West Coast's green industry. The "Californication" of the Kyoto Protocol was seen by many as highly desirable, and Beijing reportedly will soon launch its own domestic carbon-trading program inspired by California's AB 23.
Governor Schwarzenegger's trade overtures to China's Jiangsu province, as well as to other foreign countries and provinces, have already yielded international collaboration in green technology for energy efficiency, but uncertainty over California's future energy policies is likely to hinder planning for new projects.
]]>Mexico's Mutant Kernels Ripen After GM Corn Ban Reversedtag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2010:/theblog//3.6164632010-06-18T10:42:37-04:002011-05-25T16:50:20-04:00Jan McGirkhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/jan-mcgirk/ China Dialogue, an environmental website, pharmers and their mutant kernels are under scrutiny. Excerpts from 'Corn Conundrums':
The decision to allow genetically engineered corn to be sown inside Mexico, the birthplace of this cereal crop, is anathema for many Mexicans. In the central highlands, where wild grass called teosinte was first cross-bred into the staff of life some 9,000 years ago, corn is viewed not only as a staple food but as a sacrament of Mesoamerican civilization. Some indigenous tribes in Mexico still worship Centeotl, the Aztec corn god who protects harvests, and passions run high if any threat to corn is perceived.
Yet laboratory-altered corn, patented by the seed giants Monsanto and Dow AgroSciences, is already ripening on 13 hectares in Sinaloa and Sonora states, and the first harvest is expected later this month. An analysis is due in July. Farm groups and environmentalists filed an appeal with the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights in February, arguing that Mexican officials have been unwilling or unable to prevent the illegal spread of genetically modified crops in their country and that it is too soon to permit biotech plantations before the consequences of genetic contamination - possibly irreversible - are fully understood. They are concerned that Mexican seed dealers have smuggled in thousands of sacks of genetically modified corn with impunity. The commission can refer cases to the Inter-American Human Rights Court if a government does not comply with its recommendations.
"Small producers will be affected the most [by GM contamination], since they use native corn seed; the bigger producers all use sterile hybrids anyway," says Kirsten Appendini, an agrarian economist from the Colegio de Mexico. "The dependency of farmers on one big company for buying seeds is undesirable."
"The worry is that everybody will be affected by genetically modified corn, environmentally, through the reduction of biodiversity," Appendini adds. "As for the health issues - we don't know the consequences over time. So if you eat tortillas, as we all do, there are unknown risks." The concern is that, by manipulating genes in a plant that is consumed, biotechnicians might eventually trigger allergies, toxins, adverse nutritional effects or new diseases.
Typically, a Mexican eats nearly 10 times as much corn each year as an American, so when French researchers at Caen University concluded that rats had suffered kidney and liver damage after being fed genetically modified corn, Mexicans paid attention. Greenpeace Mexico launched a new campaign, "Hands off our corn!", and rallied in front of the local Monsanto office in April this year. Local celebrities joined activists to complain that allowing fields of genetically modified corn in the country violates "the human, economic, social and cultural rights of farm communities and consumers".
They also demanded that the government enforce mandatory labeling on genetically modified foods so that consumers can make an informed choice to avoid them. Considering that genetically modified corn products are ubiquitous in a multitude of local and imported processed foods containing glucose, maltodextrin, cornstarch, corn gluten, corn syrup, corn oil and the like, the task could be a logistical nightmare.
The new technology can seem rather ominous. "Pharma-crops first caused the widespread alarm inside Mexico," explains George Dyer, an expert on corn affiliated with the University of California. "It's possible to grow different molecules, say vaccines or antibodies, within the corn. Some are intended to be eaten. Other times the medical product is removed from the grain and marketed. But in places where people keep seed stocks, this is problematical. Using staple crops like corn to grow swine medicine that is not intended for human consumption was perceived as a risk."
Many Mexicans were shocked when Epicyte, a Californian biotech firm that is now defunct, designed an experimental contraceptive corn in 2001. A technique that transformed corn plants into horticultural mini-factories that could grow contraceptives in the field was misunderstood and rumoured to be an out-of-the-box solution to world hunger - a way to lower the sperm count of the peasants by doctoring their diet.
Controversy has raged in Mexico ever since contamination from transgenic corn was detected 1,400 kilometres south of the US border in an Oaxaca field by agronomists at the University of California, Berkeley in 2001. And genetically modified corn StarLink, approved solely for animal feed, had mysteriously ended up in supermarket taco shells manufactured in Mexico the year before. The rhetoric on both sides has been heated; mutual mistrust and acrimony have mounted over the years.
Opponents of genetically modified corn are derided as hysterical "globofobicos" (literally: fearful of globalization) - resistant to scientific advancement and ideologically opposed to multinational corporations. On the other hand, Monsanto is vilified as a profiteering poison-vendor, responsible for inventing the military defoliant Agent Orange and polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), but now trying to rebrand itself as a benign agri-business innovator, with a mission to end world hunger through improved crop yields.
Helen Rimmer, food campaigner at Friends of the Earth, takes issue with this self-image: "GM crops don't feed the world - they simply make record profits for the big businesses that sell the patented seeds and chemicals needed to grow them."
Even Nina Fedoroff, a tireless supporter of genetically modified foods and the science and technology adviser to US secretary of state Hillary Clinton, recently admitted: "We preach to the world about science-based regulations but really our regulations on crop biotechnology are not yet science-based."
]]>Giving Up the Ghost Ships: Suisun Bay's Mothball Fleettag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2010:/theblog//3.6047132010-06-08T14:20:11-04:002011-05-25T16:45:26-04:00Jan McGirkhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/jan-mcgirk/
It's clear that the health risks from a fleet of decrepit U.S. navy troop ships and tankers, moored for nearly half a century in the shallow backwaters of San Francisco Bay, are being taken seriously at last. Before I am allowed to board any of the rusty warships -- which have been oozing oil, asbestos, dioxins, polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) and tonnes of heavy metals into the upper part of the bay for decades -- U.S. officials insist that I sign a liability waiver. Afterward, they warn me not to touch my eyes or consume any food until I undergo a thorough scrub.
Fifty-two of these Second World War-era vessels are finally being hauled away, one by one, from Suisun Bay after northern Californian environmentalists sued the Maritime Administration (MARAD) -- part of the US transportation department -- for violating the country's Clean Water Act and for illegally storing hazardous waste aboard the ships.
Even though government officials had known since at least 1997 about the dangers of pollution from the disintegrating ships, it took a milestone lawsuit, filed by three environmental watchdog groups and the regional water board, to improve maintenance and hasten the ships' removal from a tidal marsh at the mouth of the Sacramento River delta. A settlement was reached in late March 2010, four years after the final deadline set by the U.S. congress for removing the military vessels, formally known as the Suisun Bay Reserve Fleet. U.S. district court judge Garland Burrell ordered most of the ships to be scrapped, and it's an enormous task. Indeed, getting rid of defunct warships is a problem facing all nations with great navies, including China.
The ships in Suisan Bay usually loom up like a spectral flotilla in the dense tule fog beyond the Carquinez Strait bridge, but bright spring sunshine reveals the rot. Most of the vessels have been idle since the 1960s, waiting to be renovated for war duty. Some have been cannibalized for spare parts. The majority are beyond repair.
Half a dozen buzzards circle high overhead as I mount a gangway to reach the tainted anchorage of the ghost fleet. I clamber over the dilapidated decks with MARAD's project manager, Joe Pecoraro, who recently adapted low-tech methods, such as using organic filters to help staunch toxic discharges into the bay during storms. "We're working our way across the rows [of ships]," Pecoraro said. "And the worst go first."
The district court has ordered an inspection of the rotting vessels every 90 days. Lubricant and coolant leaks get detected and fixed, and water-pollution levels are sampled frequently. Loose paint chips are swept off all the ships' decks, and so far debris weighing about 125 tons has been sealed in 55-gallon drums and labeled hazardous waste. These are destined for treatment at California's Kettleman Hills hazardous waste facility, a controversial plant investigated after a spike in birth defects was detected nearby. Some toxic waste will also be sent to the states of Utah or Nevada.
Aboard the toxic ships, big birds of prey nest and snatch fish from the brackish waters. "We manage osprey tenancy, too," Pecoraro said, pointing out a heap of twigs and guano atop a smokestack. To discourage the ospreys, crews attempt to string nets across likely nesting spots for these protected raptors with two-metre wing spans. "We cannot touch the nests once the birds have laid eggs, so then we call in US Fish and Wildlife officials to handle them," he said. Owls, seagulls and pigeons also make messy forays onto the ships and are affected by the pollutants.
Eight ships from the fleet already have been scoured of poisonous paint chips and invasive parasites like barnacles, which might upset the ecological balance when towed elsewhere. Ballast water, too, is checked for contaminants. These vessels will go through the Panama Canal on a 45-day voyage to oblivion, ending up in a south Texan scrapyard along the coast of the Gulf of Mexico. "Sending them down to the docks in Brownsville, where trenches are dug into the channel and there is little environmental control, is far from ideal," noted one environmental lawyer. "But it's a start."
The plaintiffs in the lawsuit -- the National Resources Defense Council (NRDC), Arc Ecology, San Francisco Baykeeper, and the San Francisco Bay Regional Water Quality Control Board -- argued that by eliminating the ships now, the bay can be spared a further 50 short tons of toxins. At least 20 tons (18 tonnes) of mercury, lead, zinc and copper have leached from the fleet into the spawning grounds for chinook salmon and delta shrimp. Tidal surges have dispersed this pollution around the San Francisco Bay, which already contains excessive mercury levels due to heedless mining practices dating back to California's 1949 Gold Rush. Bay seafood is no longer sold on the retail market because of contamination, although thousands of sport fishermen regularly cook up their catch for friends and families.
"It is high time that the federal government removes all the rotting ships from the waters of Suisun Bay," declared Barbara Boxer, one of California's two U.S. senators, after the settlement was reached. "They are polluting our water and endangering public health."
Saul Bloom, Arc Ecology's executive director, said: "MARAD had been doing the minimum possible, just to keep these ships from sinking. Under the previous administration [of George W Bush], they had not been a big believer in compliance, as they were preoccupied with other things. They saw this fleet-recycling as a needless distraction. We had been concerned for many years."
Bloom's group runs an innovative program to combat military pollution and to assess war's long-term effects on the environment. "I saw the ghost fleet out in the bay 25 years ago," he said, "but there was no political will 'way back then to do anything. Ship recycling is a dirty, messy business."
In a San Francisco dry dock, the General John Pope, a transport ship that carried U.S. troops to battle in three wars, is hoisted atop blocks while BAE Systems work crews in protective gear erect a series of barriers to block leakage to the bay and power-hose the decks. Slabs of gritty brown residue, measuring at least five inches thick, get scraped from the hull, monitored and sorted. Large waste receptacles fill up with organic refuse destined for landfills, while others are crammed with toxic waste. Yet there is considerable nostalgia for this mighty rust bucket. A war veteran, Mike Brown, shows off the ship's vast dining hall to his son and reminisces about sailing from Okinawa to Vietnam with 3,300 other teenage US army conscripts in 1964. "It's the end of an era, man," he muses. "Everything's changed."
"We are following through on our commitment to clean and maintain these vessels in an environmentally sound manner," said MARAD's acting administrator, David Matsuda. MARAD conceded to scrubbing these ships in dry dock and protecting the San Francisco Bay by removing non-native invasive species, even though some technicians had questioned California's strict requirements about dealing with these potential environmental hazards. Some contended that since Spanish galleons first entered the bay 240 years ago, myriad parasites have been introduced from foreign waters, so the native habitat already is overrun by invasive species. The new agreement may be slightly more costly, but even more potential recycling revenue was lost because the price of scrap metal dropped while bureaucrats dithered.
The pace of disposal for the mothballed fleet in California seems unhurried: the 25 worst polluters must be hauled away to be dry dock within two and a half years, while the rest won't be cleared off until September 2017.
"Arc Ecology's concern is that ships might eventually get towed out to Saipan, a small American protectorate in the Marianas, in order to obtain savings and not run afoul of the trade laws in ship-breaking," Bloom said. "Well, it is not Bangladesh ... We don't have families living on the site, children under 14 risking their limbs and lungs, and losing on average 10 individuals per vessel. But we'll have to see about the likelihood that Saipan will comply with our human-rights values and environmental concerns."
Leases for a ship-disposal yard were granted in March to ship-breakers in Saipan, but no contracts have yet been signed.
Getting rid of these hulks cheaply is difficult. A high-profile campaign by Greenpeace against the appallingly hazardous conditions for laborers who dismantle ships by hand in Bangladesh, India and Pakistan led to a 1998 ban on outsourcing US navy ships to developing countries for scrap. Activists note that when stricter laws have been introduced to protect workers and the environment, the industry moves elsewhere. Ingvild Jenssen of the NGO Platform on Shipbreaking told The Ecologist magazine of "a continuous race-to-the-bottom and we fear that Africa will be the next destination if no measures are introduced".
China is eager to dominate the ship-breaking industry, and Hong Kong's chief executive Donald Tsang told the International Maritime Organization (IMO) last year that around 100,000 Chinese workers earn their living through ship recycling. According to a report in The Edge, a Singapore investment magazine, a new government subsidy for ship breakers who qualify for a "green licence" can add up to eight percentage points to a Chinese company's profit margin.
The potential loss of business to China may have panicked the Bangladeshis, who had led the world's ship-breaking business for years. Authorities in Dhaka amended their laws in April, no longer requiring certificates from environmental authorities in exporting nations to assure Bangladesh that incoming vessels were free of toxic substances. Green activists denounced the decision as "suicidal" and worried about exposing workers to contaminants causing cancer, tuberculosis and asthma, and further poisoning the environment.
In May, however, Bangladesh's high court restored the previous directives. Responding to a petition by the Bangladesh Environmental Lawyers Association (BELA), the court ruled that no ship can be imported for breaking without certification of non-toxicity from the exporting country.
Ecologists in the United States acknowledge the challenges of greener ship-recycling. But they tend to frown on other options, such as the US Navy's SINKEX Program, which uses old vessels for live-fire training exercises that send them to the ocean floor. MARAD also scuttles ships for use as artificial reefs, restores notable vessels as floating museums, or refurbishes them for non-profit humanitarian missions.
"There's a lot of work to be done," said Michael Wall, a lawyer with the National Resources Defense Council. "All Californians -- the millions who live near and cherish the bay, the tens of millions who drink water pumped from the bay-delta estuary -- can cheer, a little. We know, through internal memos and e-mails, that the Maritime Administration had been aware of the problem for more than a decade. So recognition of the problem and addressing it makes us hopeful. They have changed and corrected their practices before they cause further harm to a deeply imperiled ecosystem."
It's a lesson for other countries, too: concerned citizens can bring pressure to bear on their governments and safeguard the sea through the courts.
Jan McGirk is a former correspondent for The Independent (UK) who has reported on environmental issues and disasters in Asia, Latin America and the Middle East. She currently reports for China Dialogue ]]>Crumbs of Wisdom from The Bread of Angelstag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2010:/theblog//3.4753582010-02-24T16:47:38-05:002011-05-25T15:40:24-04:00Jan McGirkhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/jan-mcgirk/ The Bread of Angels, because of its twee title and all the blurbs likening it to that irritatingly neurotic travelogue, Eat, Pray, Love.
But once I started reading, I couldn't put this book down. The complex emotional struggles that Saldana recounts, in a vivid memoir of her year as a Fulbright scholar in Syria, hooked the imagination of this cynical former Middle East reporter. It's a raw and evocative read about a young woman's Damascene conversion. To find such empathy, exasperation, humor, humility, and tenderness in a single volume is rare. In a first book, it's remarkable.
At age 27, in a single year, Saldana ricocheted from Texas to Damascus, Massachusetts to Morocco, from Harvard yard to a teenage girls' madrassa. Her academic goal was to trace the prophet Jesus in Islamic tradition, and through immersing herself in such a severely foreign setting, the lovelorn grad student also hoped her shattered heart might heal. Happiness is a tall order, particularly when Middle Eastern wars send refugees spilling into cramped Syrian neighborhoods, her blunders in the Arabic language keep backfiring, and her own Christian faith falters. She contemplates chucking it all in to become a nun, and ultimately becomes smitten by a novice monk.
The resulting tale of an intellectual runaway is as intricate as the design etched on an Arabesque tray, with loops and whorls interlacing into startling patterns. Saldana is young and Catholic, and sometimes it feels as if we are eavesdropping in the confessional. Yet Saldana is observant and sharp, and avoids stereotyping the Arabs she encounters in the bazaar and the veiled girls she teaches inside a mosque classroom. It's an uncommon perspective.
With unflinching honesty, the pint-sized poet and divinity scholar from Texas processes and reprocesses what unfolds around her in the old quarter of Damascus and inside a stark desert monastery, while dissecting the failings of her intimate relationships with her lovers and with God.
Somehow Saldana sidesteps melodrama, even when a month-long spiritual retreat in silence morphs into an encounter with a self-deprecating "Woody Allen" Christ as intense as an LSD trip.
She writes:
At the monastery I will suspend time and space for a month, gradually relinquishing my hold on the exterior world, and enter into the landscape of the Bible...I will occupy my own mind, perhaps a more frightening terrain than any country to which I might travel.
The sense of place and history is acute in The Bread of Angels and the characters are authentic and warmly drawn:
"As an American living in Syria during the Iraq war, at a moment when my country was largely despised in the region, I could at least find comfort when I remembered the historical circumstances of the company I kept...I guess that all of us were outcasts, living in a neighborhood of exile...I began to feel I had access to almost every story that had ever existed in that part of the world... The unfortunate ones from across the region fled their homes during various conflicts...and made new homes in these neighborhoods: Christians, Muslims, and Jews; Armenians, Kurds, Circassians, and Palestinians; militant jihadis going to and coming from the war, hundreds of thousands of Iraqis fleeing their homeland, and finally, little old me."
]]>Herding Big Cats Won't Save the Wild Tigertag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2009:/theblog//3.3276892009-10-21T17:47:09-04:002011-05-25T14:25:20-04:00Jan McGirkhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/jan-mcgirk/nouveau riche are so vast that now African lions are killed and smuggled into China in order to supply "mock tiger" for the wineries. If parts from captive tigers could meet the demand, wild cats would be spared, according to some think tanks. But a new report puts these claims to the test -- and finds dangerous flaws in the economic arguments. The fur is flying over at chinadialogue, where the arguments are dissected.
Farming tigers in order to save them may turn out to be the equivalent of herding cats: an impossible undertaking with too many variables for sustained success. Yet this practice, which converts solitary predators into livestock for Chinese consumers, has been hailed as a pragmatic strategy for bringing the endangered tiger (panthera tigris) back from the brink of extinction. Wild tigers are increasingly scarce, and their population has declined sharply from an estimated 100,000 in 1900 to under 3,000 today.
At the Global Tiger Conservation Strategy Workshop in Nepal, scheduled for 26 to 30 October, 2009, the Environmental Investigation Agency (EIA) will present a new report which challenges some of the supply-side economics arguments put forth by tiger farm proponents.
Advocates of tiger farming, such as economist Barun Mitra, of New Delhi's Liberty Institute, have argued for years that plentiful stocks of tiger parts for sale in a free market would thwart poachers and crossborder profiteering. They maintain that it is a counter-intuitive way to safeguard the dwindling number of wild tigers that have evaded dynamite, snares and poison to survive in the swamps and forests of Asia and Siberia. Two subspecies, the Caspian and Balinese tigers, already have been wiped out.
Some Chinese officials have actively promoted tiger farms since the 1980s, when trade in body parts for traditional medicine was allowed, and Beijing now seems unwilling to phase them out, despite calls to do so by the World Bank and the United Nations' Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES).
Irregularities and inbreeding at several commercial tiger farms in Vietnam and Thailand -- tourist attractions where tiger cubs are bred intensively and routinely suckled on sows -- have added to the controversy over the risks of further commodifying the tiger. Bones reportedly sell for US$800 to $1,200 per kilogram on the retail black market. An adult tiger can supply five to 10 kilograms of dried bone, much more easily smuggled than its distinctive skin.
One Pacific Rim economist who has analyzed the tiger trade told chinadialogue that some of the bio-economical models put forth to support tiger farming are "not only flawed scientifically, but are rigged to yield the desired results." He added, "Tiger bone is a classic high-value, low-volume product and poaching it will always be cheaper than years of feeding a growing carnivore." The cited statistics vary, but poaching a wild tiger costs around US$20, compared to $4,000 to raise a cub to maturity. In either case, he pointed out,"potential profits are absolutely massive, especially as new commodities are created and marketed. Take tiger bone wine. It can be diluted almost infinitely."
When the Chinese State Forestry Administration, which oversees the country's wildlife, quietly approved domestic trade in "lawfully-sourced tiger and leopard skins and their products" back in December 2007, conservationists grew alarmed. The wildlife trade monitoring network, TRAFFIC, recently warned that such vague wording on an official document would be pounced upon as a loophole by Chinese tiger farmers.
Xu Hongfa, the director of the Shanghai Wildlife Forensic Laboratory who also coordinates TRAFFIC's China programmes, told the London Times: "I think these words could be used as a cover by tiger farmers to make tiger bone wine and they would try to argue that it doesn't just refer to skins."
Tiger bones steeped in vats of rice wine for up to nine years yield a potent pep tonic, considered a rare and prestigious gift amongst the Chinese elite. It's viewed as a delicacy comparable to shark fin soup. Lavish banquet toasts are made with this blackmarket brew, which can be obtained inside China, although penalties for selling it are severe. Customers reportedly pay up to US$180 per half liter.
Meanwhile, farmers from Guilin to Heilongjiang provinces have stockpiled the frozen carcasses of captive tigers, either killed in fights or put down when they grew too large to control, and are eager to recoup their investment.
Compared with the 10,000 captive tigers living in zoos or private facilities in the US, and at least 5,000 "mild tigers" bred at a dozen Chinese farms, the 40 or so wild tigers remaining inside China are vastly outnumbered and likely to vanish if the demand for tiger products is stimulated. Fewer than 3,000 breeding adult tigers are left in the wild anywhere in the world, and their present habitat is only 7% of the former range, which used to extend from south India to the Russian far east and from Sumatra to northern Myanmar (Burma). The big cats are most plentiful in India, where this year's tiger census already is underway.
India has directly challenged Chinese authorities over the ramifications of easing any restrictions on tiger trade, because the countries signed a bilateral protocol on tigers back in 1995. Keshav Varma, leader of the World Bank's Global Tiger Initiative, announced at the 58th meeting of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species Standing Committee (CITES): "Having carefully weighed the economics argument, we urge the CITES community to uphold the ban on wild tiger products and for all countries to continue to ban the domestic trade of wild tigers."
Western press accounts of tiger penis aphrodisiacs or tiger brain balm to cure acne annoy practitioners of Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM). Most spurn such folk potions, which are based on superstition, not medical theory. Even though some 100 million Chinese sufferers of arthritis might be prescribed tiger bone derivatives to ease joint inflammation if it were legal, herbal substitutions now are standard, and medical textbooks have been purged of venerable tiger-based remedies.
"I can say for sure that no one in the TCM community wants to reopen the tiger trade," said Lixin Huang, president of the American College of Traditional Chinese Medicine in San Francisco. "There is zero demand. This tiger farming proposal is a way to make money, not to treat the sick. It confuses the public. Any use will create a threat to wild tigers. How do we monitor it to control poaching, selling and production?"
Before Chinese farmers harvest their caged tigers' striped pelts or grind their bones for traditional medicines which have been outlawed for the past 16 years, a rethink might be in order.
Alasdair Cameron, of the EIA, contends that unleashing free market folly and legalizing the trade in parts from captive bred tigers will have "disastrous consequences for the wild tiger." He argues that a parallel trade in premium wild tiger products is bound to emerge once farmed tiger items hit the market, and that there is little incentive for tiger breeders to report inventory discrepancies, to help screen out wild tiger products or enforce the ban against their use. In fact, criminals will be tempted to process any contraband wild tiger parts through newly lawful channels.
The EIA review highlights flawed assumptions in some of the recent economic studies, noting a poor understanding of tiger biology and clandestine smuggling networks, as well as oversimplified supply and demand models. Fuzzy mathematical models that suggest tiger farming is a viable way to promote conservation have increasingly come under fire. Framing fearful symmetry in an equation is no doddle.
Economist G Cornelis van Kooten, of the University of Victoria in British Columbia, admits that he devised formulas "in spite of a paucity of data" and that factoring in a stigma effect was an afterthought, and "no empirical evidence for it exists." Currently he's refining his paper. "Markets where corruption is rife are tough to figure out," he said. "Ethically I am opposed to tiger farms, just as I am to large-scale pork production. But if society permits the latter, how can you castigate the Chinese and stop tiger farming? Allowing trade might not be a disaster. Habitat destruction and lost prey is the real threat to tigers."
The EIA report urges a cautious approach to speculative economic models and a commitment to reduce demand for tiger parts rather than boost a trade that has been in decline since 1993. It calls for tiger farms that intensively breed big cats to consolidate, declare and destroy all tiger parts, in accordance with past decisions taken by CITES. And, while several thousand wild tigers still stalk the night forests, the EIA recommends that wildlife activists draw attention to their successes and continue to raise awareness of the tigers' plight.
Jan McGirk is a former correspondent for the Independent, who has reported on environmental issues and disasters in Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East.
]]>Flying Rabbis, Lady Gaga and the "Spiders of Allah"tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2009:/theblog//3.2617342009-08-18T17:24:00-04:002011-05-25T13:50:23-04:00Jan McGirkhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/jan-mcgirk/purge swine flu from the airspace over Zion. And now Lady Gaga has arrived in Israel, wearing a spiked Star of David on her black leather fetish gear. Truth can be far weirder than fiction on the frontlines of holy war, whether the fight is against the H1N1 virus, moral depravity, or zealous terrorists clad in suicide vests.
After sojourns in the Holy Land, writers as diverse as Mark Twain and Allen Ginsberg have come away with the notion that, regardless of any outsider's road map, peace in the Middle East will be achieved...when pigs fly.
Enter James Hider, an intrepid war correspondent for the Times of London, who sometimes dyes his gingery eyebrows black to better blend in with the Arab Street. His prolific and authoritative coverage of conflict in Fallujah, Baghdad, Israel, the West Bank and Gaza for Rupert Murdoch's newspaper has been essential reading for years. Now, in his first book,The Spiders of Allah: Travels of an Unbeliever on the Frontline of Holy War, published this summer by St Martin's Griffin, Hider unleashes his dark humor and angry wit in a troll through the atrocities that result when religious fanaticism and ignorance are given unlimited fire power. Hider goes beyond the jaded truisms of most eyewitness post -- 9/11 war reportage. To Hider, an ardent atheist, religion in the Middle East has mutated beyond Karl Marx's "opium of the people" into "the crack cocaine of fanatical fundamentalism."
The book's odd title comes from an Iraqi urban myth which went viral online in the early days of the war. Jihadis were rumored to be onto a secret weapon: shrieking camel spiders "the size of dinner plates", primed to sprint at 25 mph on wight legs and attack infidel invaders like the US Marines. The timeline of Hider's personal chronicle sometimes is perplexing because the action surges ahead or casts back a couple of millennia. It's written in a self-deprecating Blackwater stream of consciousness -- complete with rapids, whirlpools, and the occasional snag.
As he gets "sucked back into the 3,000- year-old vortex of fighting between Israel and its neighbors", Hider jolts away from any anticipated script. For instance, his take on how the Islamist group Hamas and its Al Aqsa tv channel hijacked Disney characters to whip up pre-teen Palestinian martyrs against the Israeli occupation ends up in a rock fight with the "feral children" of Gaza, who get bored by the squeaky rodent on the program.
More thoughtful than the usual Gonzo danger junkie writing from a war zone, Hider doesn't tout his own brushes with death as courageous. At one point he castigates himself for his cynicism after he sees so many killings that they start losing news-worthiness. His eye for repellent detail, the kind of graphic description that copy editors would spike out of concern for readers at the breakfast table, has put me off Turkish delight forever. But there are other delights, particularly the droll accounts of unexpected encounters as he tracks sects and violence across the region.
Crossposted from Israelity Bites.]]>Swine Flu Outbreak in Israel?tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2009:/theblog//3.1915252009-04-26T19:42:11-04:002011-05-25T13:15:26-04:00Jan McGirkhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/jan-mcgirk/
Swine flu cases breaking out inside Israel? Sure, it's possible. An Israeli man, age 26, who had recently visited Mexico, has been hospitalized in Netanya, in the north of the country, while authorities try to determine whether he has come down with swine flu. Government officials said Saturday evening that there were no flu cases confirmed. Yet. An outbreak of the disease killed 81 people in Mexico City, and a milder form of swine flu, transmitted from human to human, reportedly has been detected inside the United States, too, in NY City, California,Texas and other states.
Pandemic fears are being stoked, particularly after some scientists determined that statistically, a killer flu epidemic is overdue, and that flu germs will spread quickly through jet travel. Already, international airports in Asia are measuring the body temperatures of arriving passengers (using technology leftover from the SARS and most recent avian flu scares). Some people are starting to stockpile influenza drugs like Tamiflu, which worked against the bird flu, and prices are going hog wild.
Astonishingly, it's just not wandering Israeli backpackers and North Americans doing Aliya who could bring the swine flu back to Israel. There are a few pig farms inside the country, too. Kibbutz Lahav, in the northern Negev, is a big pork producer. All the other Israeli pig breeders operate in a special zone up north, which is mainly run by Christian Arabs. It's the only place in Israel where raising pork is legal, and you don't want to be downwind of it if you can help it. Kibbutz Lahav, a Jewish-run farm, operates outside this zone. This kibbutz raises pigs for science and then eats the excess, which is a considerable amount of white meat, with 10,000 animals on the premises. Biotech research only goes so far. Consider the numbers of Thai farmworkers, Filipino caretakers, and Russian emigres to feed inside Israel, in addition to the demand for non-kosher pork sausage binges for secular Sabra. Some clever kiibutzniks are bringing home the bacon on this loophole.
Also consider Bombsniffing pigs, an innovative military use of swine. These porkers are not only efficient and cheap, but this method of munitions detection tends to freak out the Islamist guerrillas when the IDF brings the animals in doors to clear a booby trapped house or mosque. According to an article from 2004 by blogger Jeff Yaskowitz,
After a law passed in 1963 banning pig farming in Israel, kibbutzim stopped raising pigs. But the law allowed pigs to be raised for research purposes. Any surplus pigs were allowed to be slaughtered," Ratner says.
"Oh we have thousands of surplus pigs every season," he says with a wink, adding that the slaughterhouse is one of the most economically stable kibbutz endeavors.
"But we do indeed conduct medical research. None of that cosmetic testing stuff, mind you. But real research," Ratner says.
He declined to let me have a look at the pigpens to verify the age-old rumor that pigs are kept on wooden slats in order to get around the law that they cannot be raised on the Holy Land.
He says he never really paid attention to pigs' behavior until the energetic Zin showed up nine months ago with his idea to train pigs to find explosives.
"The pig was always seen as a pork chop, as food," Zin says. "But the aim is not to eat the pig, but to use their talents to clear mines.
"Mines are the garbage of war. We are taking this animal to clean up the garbage of war," Zin says.
This is a job that comes naturally to pigs. Besides, there are jobs that even dogs won't do.
"Dogs... prefer to sniff out people and cars and be in a social setting. They don't like to dig up the earth," Zin says.
After completing his military service training dogs in the elite Oketz unit, Zin traveled to Croatia, where he worked privately to locate mine fields with the help of dogs. When he was there he noticed wild boars roaming the area. While pigs excel at finding truffles, he had something else in mind.
"I watched how they behaved and came to the conclusion that they could be more efficient than dogs at sniffing out mines and explosives. I noticed that they constantly sniffed at the ground, their snouts always hovering above the earth. I got the impression that their sense of smell is incredibly well-developed.
"The pigs work and understand very quickly, maybe half of the time of the dogs," Zin says.
So far he has trained four pigs, all female.
Few visitors, Muslims Christians or Jews, would suspect that they could be at risk of swine flu inside the Holy Land!
Crossposted on israelitybites]]>Israelis Line Up For Pizza Obamatag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2009:/theblog//3.1585582009-01-16T17:22:21-05:002011-05-25T13:00:22-04:00Jan McGirkhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/jan-mcgirk/Israelity bites.
They deliver. And hope the new American President will, too.
On Hebron Road, quite close to the old Green Line in Jerusalem, Pizza Obama, a strictly kosher parlour, has been in business for the past two months. The owners keep it open til 1 am, and promise they'll be prepared to take your call in the middle of the night. Now Pizza Obama is gearing up for a brisk trade on Tuesday as lots of Israeli-Americans order in while they watch the swearing-in.
The proprietor shrugged when I inquired why there were no pizza joints named for President Peres or President Abbas. Or Dubya for that matter. Famously, Israelis were rather cool to the winning Democratic candidate, with the vast majority of those preferring Hillary Clinton, or a former military man like McCain in the White House.
"Ehhhh," he said, "It's a change we need."
Maybe Pizza Obama is the ideal place to try a Hawaiian Pizza (the usually horrendous pineapple-topped kind) as a nod to BHO's home state. It might be the best one on the menu, since Israeli pizza pies often come heaped with a mix of odd ingredients, from canned corn to tuna and Jerusalem artichokes, with crusts akin to a soggy bagel. Kosher, maybe, but not necessarily appetizing if you're fond of pepperoni and thin crust. The oregano is kept separate, because it's deemed an acquired taste and most locals prefer coriander. A side of hummous, anyone?
I was dumbfounded to learn how many thousands of pizzas are ordered up to feed hungry soldiers by patriotic Moms and Dads and diaspora relatives using Pizza IDF. These come piping hot from all over Israel, often from chains such as Pizza Hut, and not only from little independent parlours like Pizza Obama. All these deliveries are coordinated with security forces, too, and slices are doled out to armed forces and reservists on the Israeli side of the border. Given that so little food is let into the Gaza Strip, and the humanitarian crisis is spiralling there, it seems to be in bad taste.
