This post first appeared at Earth Policy Institute.

People do not normally leave their homes, their families, and their communities unless they have no other option. Yet as environmental stresses mount, we can expect to see a growing number of environmental refugees. Rising seas and increasingly devastating storms grab headlines, but expanding deserts, falling water tables, and toxic waste and radiation are also forcing people from their homes.

Advancing deserts are now on the move almost everywhere. The Sahara desert, for example, is expanding in every direction. As it advances northward, it is squeezing the populations of Morocco, Tunisia, and Algeria against the Mediterranean coast. The Sahelian region of Africa—the vast swath of savannah that separates the southern Sahara desert from the tropical rainforests of central Africa—is shrinking as the desert moves southward. As the desert invades Nigeria, Africa’s most populous country, from the north, farmers and herders are forced southward, squeezed into a shrinking area of productive land. A 2006 U.N. conference on desertification in Tunisia projected that by 2020 up to 60 million people could migrate from sub-Saharan Africa to North Africa and Europe.

In Iran, villages abandoned because of spreading deserts or a lack of water number in the thousands. In Brazil, some 250,000 square miles of land are affected by desertification, much of it concentrated in the country’s northeast. In Mexico, many of the migrants who leave rural communities in arid and semiarid regions of the country each year are doing so because of desertification. Some of these environmental refugees end up in Mexican cities, others cross the northern border into the United States. U.S. analysts estimate that Mexico is forced to abandon 400 square miles of farmland to desertification each year.

In China, desert expansion has accelerated in each successive decade since 1950. Desert scholar Wang Tao reports that over the last half-century or so some 24,000 villages in northern and western China have been abandoned either entirely or partly because of desert expansion.

China is heading for a Dust Bowl like the one that forced more than 2 million “Okies” to leave their land in the United States in the 1930s. But the dust bowl forming in China is much larger and so is the population: China’s migration may measure in the tens of millions. And as a U.S. embassy report entitled Grapes of Wrath in Inner Mongolianoted, “unfortunately, China’s twenty-first century ‘Okies’ have no California to escape to—at least not in China.”

With the vast majority of the 2.3 billion people projected to be added to the world by 2050 being born in countries where water tables are falling, water refugees are likely to become commonplace. They will be most common in arid and semiarid regions where populations are outgrowing the water supply and sinking into hydrological poverty. Villages in northwestern India are being abandoned as aquifers are depleted and people can no longer find water. Millions of villagers in northern and western China and in northern Mexico may have to move because of a lack of water.

Thus far the evacuations resulting from water shortages have been confined to villages, but eventually whole cities might have to be relocated, such as Sana’a, the capital of Yemen, and Quetta, the capital of Pakistan’s Baluchistan province. Sana’a, a fast-growing city of more than 2 million people, is literally running out of water. Quetta, originally designed for 50,000 people, now has a population exceeding 1 million, all of whom depend on 2,000 wells pumping water from what is believed to be a fossil aquifer. In the words of one study assessing its water prospect, Quetta will soon be “a dead city.”

Two other semiarid Middle Eastern countries that are suffering from water shortages are Syria and Iraq. Both are beginning to reap the consequences of overpumping their aquifers, namely irrigation wells going dry. In Syria, these trends have forced the abandonment of 160 villages. And a U.N. report estimates that more than 100,000 people in northern Iraq have been uprooted because of water shortages.

A final category of environmental refugee has appeared only in the last 50 years or so: people who are trying to escape toxic waste or dangerous radiation levels. During the late 1970s, Love Canal—a small town in upstate New York, part of which was built on top of a toxic waste disposal site—made national and international headlines. Beginning in August 1978, families were relocated at government expense and reimbursed for their homes at market prices. By October 1980, a total of 950 families had been permanently relocated. A few years later, the federal government arranged for the permanent evacuation and relocation of all 2,000 residents of Times Beach, Missouri, after the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency discovered dioxin levels well above the public health standards.

While the United States has relocated two communities because of health-damaging pollutants, the identification of more than 450 “cancer villages” in China suggests the need to evacuate hundreds of communities. China’s Ministry of Health statistics show that cancer is now the country’s leading cause of death, and with little pollution control, whole communities near chemical factories are suffering from unprecedented rates of cancer. Young people are leaving for the city in droves, for jobs and possibly for better health. Yet many others are too sick or too poor to leave.

Another infamous source of environmental refugees is the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in Kiev, which exploded in April 1986. This started a powerful fire that lasted for 10 days. Massive amounts of radioactive material were spewed into the atmosphere, showering communities in the region with heavy doses of radiation. As a result, the residents of the nearby town of Pripyat and several other communities in Ukraine, Belarus, and Russia were evacuated, requiring the resettlement of 350,400 people. In 1992, six years after the accident, Belarus was devoting 20 percent of its national budget to resettlement and the many other costs associated with the accident.

When a devastating earthquake and tsunami hit Japan in March 2011, the ensuing nuclear crisis at the badly damaged Fukushima Daiichi power plant forced tens of thousands of people from their homes. Whether they will be able to return or will become permanently displaced is a question that remains unanswered.

Separating out the geneses of today’s refugees is not always easy. Often the environmental and economic stresses that drive migration are closely intertwined. But whatever the reason for leaving home, people are taking increasingly desperate measures. Some of their stories are heartrending beyond belief.

As a general matter, environmental refugees are migrating from poor countries to rich ones, from Africa, Asia, and Latin America to North America and Europe. Some of the largest flows will be across national borders and they are likely to be illegal. The potentially massive movement of people across national boundaries is already affecting some countries. The United States is erecting a fence along the border with Mexico. The Mediterranean Sea is now routinely patrolled by naval vessels trying to intercept the small boats of African migrants bound for Europe. India, with a steady stream of migrants from Bangladesh and the prospect of millions more to come, is building a 10-foot-high fence along their shared border.

Maybe it is time for governments to consider whether it might not be cheaper and far less painful in human terms to treat the causes of migration rather than merely respond to it. This means working with developing countries to restore their economy’s natural support systems—the soils, the water tables, the grasslands, the forests—and it means accelerating the shift to smaller families to help people break out of poverty. Treating symptoms instead of causes is not good medicine. Nor is it good public policy.

Adapted from World on the Edge by Lester R. Brown. Full book available online at www.earth-policy.org/books/wot.

Lester R. Brown is president of Earth Policy Institute, an organization dedicated to building a sustainable future. He has authored or co-authored over 50 books, the most recent of which is Plan B 4.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilization, and has received 24 honorary degrees and numerous awards, including the 1987 United Nations Environment Prize, a MacArthur Foundation “genius award,” and the 1994 Blue Planet Prize. He lives in Washington, D.C.

This article was reposted from: http://www.alternet.org/story/152253/

25 June, 2011
The Independent

Marine life facing mass extinction ‘within one human generation’ / State of seas ‘much worse than we thought’, says global panel of scientists

The world’s oceans are faced with an unprecedented loss of species comparable to the great mass extinctions of prehistory, a major report suggests today. The seas are degenerating far faster than anyone has predicted, the report says, because of the cumulative impact of a number of severe individual stresses, ranging from climate warming and sea-water acidification, to widespread chemical pollution and gross overfishing.

The coming together of these factors is now threatening the marine environment with a catastrophe “unprecedented in human history”, according to the report, from a panel of leading marine scientists brought together in Oxford earlier this year by the International Programme on the State of the Ocean (IPSO) and the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN).

The stark suggestion made by the panel is that the potential extinction of species, from large fish at one end of the scale to tiny corals at the other, is directly comparable to the five great mass extinctions in the geological record, during each of which much of the world’s life died out. They range from the Ordovician-Silurian “event” of 450 million years ago, to the Cretaceous-Tertiary extinction of 65 million years ago, which is believed to have wiped out the dinosaurs. The worst of them, the event at the end of the Permian period, 251 million years ago, is thought to have eliminated 70 per cent of species on land and 96 per cent of all species in the sea.

The panel of 27 scientists, who considered the latest research from all areas of marine science, concluded that a “combination of stressors is creating the conditions associated with every previous major extinction of species in Earth’s history”. They also concluded:

* The speed and rate of degeneration of the oceans is far faster than anyone has predicted;

* Many of the negative impacts identified are greater than the worst predictions;

* The first steps to globally significant extinction may have already begun.

“The findings are shocking,” said Dr Alex Rogers, professor of conservation biology at Oxford University and IPSO’s scientific director. “As we considered the cumulative effect of what humankind does to the oceans, the implications became far worse than we had individually realised.

“This is a very serious situation demanding unequivocal action at every level. We are looking at consequences for humankind that will impact in our lifetime, and worse, in the lifetime of our children and generations beyond that.” Reviewing recent research, the panel of experts “found firm evidence” that the effects of climate change, coupled with other human-induced impacts such as overfishing and nutrient run-off from farming, have already caused a dramatic decline in ocean health.

Not only are there severe declines in many fish species, to the point of commercial extinction in some cases, and an “unparalleled” rate of regional extinction of some habitat types, such as mangrove and seagrass meadows, but some whole marine ecosystems, such as coral reefs, may be gone within a generation.

The report says: “Increasing hypoxia [low oxygen levels] and anoxia [absence of oxygen, known as ocean dead zones], combined with warming of the ocean and acidification, are the three factors which have been present in every mass extinction event in Earth’s history.

“There is strong scientific evidence that these three factors are combining in the ocean again, exacerbated by multiple severe stressors. The scientific panel concluded that a new extinction event was inevitable if the current trajectory of damage continues.”

The panel pointed to a number of indicators showing how serious the situation is. It said, for example, that a single mass coral bleaching event in 1998 killed 16 per cent of all the world’s coral reefs, and pointed out that overfishing has reduced some commercial fish stocks and populations of “bycatch” (unintentionally caught) species by more than 90 per cent.

It disclosed that new scientific research suggests that pollutants, including flame-retardant chemicals and synthetic musks found in detergents, are being traced in the polar seas, and that these chemicals can be absorbed by tiny plastic particles in the ocean which are in turn ingested by marine creatures such as bottom-feeding fish.

Plastic particles also assist the transport of algae from place to place, increasing the occurrence of toxic algal blooms – which are also caused by the influx of nutrient-rich pollution from agricultural land.

The experts agreed that when these and other threats are added together, the ocean and the ecosystems within it are unable to recover, being constantly bombarded with multiple attacks.

The report sets out a series of recommendations and calls on states, regional bodies and the United Nations to enact measures that would better conserve ocean ecosystems, and in particular demands the urgent adoption of better governance of the largely unprotected high seas.

“The world’s leading experts on oceans are surprised by the rate and magnitude of changes we are seeing,” said Dan Laffoley, the IUCN’s senior adviser on marine science and conservation. “The challenges for the future of the ocean are vast, but, unlike previous generations, we know now what needs to happen. The time to protect the blue heart of our planet is now, today and urgent.”

The report’s conclusions will be presented at the UN in New York this week, when delegates begin discussions on reforming governance of the oceans.

The five great extinctions

The Cretaceous–Tertiary extinction (the End Cretaceous or K-T extinction) 65.5 Mya (million years ago)

Plankton, which lies at the bottom of the ocean food chain took a hard hit in an event that also saw the demise of the last of the non-avian dinosaurs. The giant mosasaurs and plesiosaurs also vacated the seas. An asteroid or volcano eruptions are thought to be to blame.

The Triassic–Jurassic extinction (End Triassic) – 205 Mya

Having a profound affect on sea and land, this period saw 20 per cent of all marine families disappear. In total, half the species known to be living on Earth at that time went extinct. Gradual climate change, fluctuating sea-levels and volcanic eruptions are among the reasons cited for the disappearing species.

The Permian–Triassic extinction (End Permian) 251 Mya

A period known as the “great dying” was the most severe of the earth’s extinction events, when 96 per cent of marine species were lost, as well as almost three-quarters of terrestrial species. The planet took a long time to recover from what has also been called “the mother of all mass extinctions”.

The late Devonian extinction 360–375 Mya

Three-quarters of all species on Earth died out in a period that may have spanned several million years. The shallow seas were the worst affected and reefs would not recover for another 100 million years. Changes in sea level and climate change were among the suspected causes.

The Ordovician–Silurian extinction (End Ordovician or O-S) – 440–450 Mya

The third largest extinction in Earth’s history had two peak dying times. During the Ordovician, most life was in the sea, so it was sea creatures such as trilobites, brachiopods and graptolites that were drastically reduced. In all, some 85 per cent of sea species were wiped out.

Waves of destruction

Case Study One in the panel’s report assesses the “deadly trio” of factors – global warming, ocean acidification and anoxia (absence of oxygen). Most if not all of the five global mass extinctions in prehistory carry the fingerprints of these “carbon perturbations”, the report says, and the “deadly trio” are present in the ocean today.

Case Study Two looks at coral reefs, and the fact that these “rainforests of the sea” (so-called for their species richness) are now facing multiple threats. The panel concluded that these threats acting together (pollution, acidification, warming, overfishing) will have a greater impact than if they were occurring on their own, and so estimates of how coral reefs will respond to global warming will have to be revised.

Case Study Three examines pollution, which is an old problem, but may be presenting new threats, as a wide range of novel chemicals is now being found in marine ecosystems, from pharmaceuticals to flame retardants, and some are known to be endocrine disrupters or can damage immune systems. Marine litter, especially, plastics, is a huge concern.

Case Study Four looks at over-fishing: it focuses on the Chinese bahaba, a giant fish which was first described by scientists only in the 1930s, but is now critically endangered: it has gone from discovery to near-disappearance in less than 70 years. A recent study showed that 63 per cent of the assessed fish stocks worldwide are over-exploited or depleted.

Michael McCarthy is the Environment Editor of The Independet

Re-posted from CounterCurrents.

Posted on May 17, 2010, Printed on May 25, 2010

http://www.alternet.org/story/146879/

After considering laughably titled solutions like the top hat (a containment dome), the junk shot (a pressurized blast of golf balls and shredded tires) and worse, British Petroleum has proven one thing above all else: When the fossil fool hits the fan, it simply has no plan.

The fact that BP was allowed to drill along the shores of the United States in spite of its unwillingness to plan and prepare for accidents is only stunning to those haven’t been paying attention to the feverish pace of deregulation since the rapacious Reagan conservatives took global culture by blitzkrieg. It certainly isn’t surprising to anyone who has been paying even slight attention to BP, which boasts a decorated resume of spills and screw-ups.

According to recent revelations, a blowout preventer that could have halted the Deepwater Horizon clustergush failed a crucial pressure test hours before the April 20 explosion, and was never tested by the government engineer who approved BP’s drilling operation. Those kinds of safety lapses are standard operating procedure, an oil industry whistleblower told the Huffington Post, saying he routinely witnessed 100 such shortcuts on BP rigs and others throughout 18 years of service in the sector. The fallback plan, a relief well, won’t be finished until after the summer, by which there will be little reason left to live in New Orleans. Great. 

But if you’ve been railing for decades against the fossil fuel sector for everything from deliberately removing safeguards that could have prevented what will likely end up being the worst U.S. oil disaster in history to its lethal emissions that could, in the extreme, end up warming planet Earth to the point that human habitation is an impossibility, well, this is all old, sad news. 

Cold Oil Turkey 

“While this is a horrible disaster, it occurs to me that Americans cannot accept the fact that getting oil out of the earth is dirty, difficult, hazardous work, with great risks for society,” said James Kunstler, author of The Long Emergency and Geography of Nowhere. “We don’t want to know about it, as long as we can drive comfortably to the strip mall, enjoy NPR and an iced beverage. When something happens to prick our bubble of unreality, we’re indignant.” 

The counter-argument to Kunstler’s hard-eged realism — which is thankfully gaining steam every day the Deepwater Horizon disaster gushes hundreds of thousands, if not a million, gallons of crude into the Gulf — is that further regulation and safety enforcement could put at least a partial stop to the fossil foolishness. Which means legally proving that BP, Halliburton and Transocean deliberately obviated what safety requirements existed so that the United States can conduct criminal proceedings which could then levy heftier damages than $75 million cap on liability under the Oil Pollution Act of 1990, which itself was hastily enacted by Congress under President George H.W. Bush shortly after the 1989 Exxon Valdez disaster.

It also means exacting deeper regulation on the nation’s compromised Minerals Management Service, which the Department of the Interior is considering splitting into two separate agencies. From taking drugs and having sex with energy company reps to being exempted from delivering detailed environmental analyses, the MMS is a controversy-soaked frat house. And its parent agency at Interior is the same hot mess. It’s obvious that, when it comes to America’s oil regime, the lunatics are drilling the asylum into the bedrock. So it’s probably no surprise that neither agency returned several calls for comment. 

But add it up and it’s one hell of a cleanup for a country with an unceasing appetite for hyperconsumption but little stomach for hard work. Which is why the blame-game theory, while it makes for good theater and hopefully better punitive damages, is still a red herring distracting us from the environmental disaster’s prime suspect: All of us.

“BP, Haliburton and Transocean will all be financially punished for this, and they, along with other oil companies, will say, ‘Screw you, America, we’re moving our operations to Angola,’” added Kunstler. “All of this shucking and jiving over blame is a Chinese fire drill concealing the fact that we are all complicit in this disaster, and refuse to even consider changing our underlying behavior.” 

But this is what most junkies do, when the drugs start to wear off and run out: Keep tapping that vein. A new Associated Press/GfK poll on the spill released in mid-May supports that madness. While 42 percent of respondents felt that the Obama administration is properly prosecuting the spill, even more, 50 percent to be exact, are cool with further coastal drilling for oil and gas. In spite of all that has happened, they’d rather drill for what’s left of our domestic oil supply than prepare, plan and proselytize for our inevitable post-oil future. Itinerant laziness is the true culprit in this spill. BP, MMS and other alphabet nightmares are monsters of our own consumptive creation. 

“In the most general terms, I think the answer to drilling problems is better regulation and taxes to fund cleanup efforts,” explained Mother Jones and Washington Monthly journalist Kevin Drum, who like Kunstler is a peak oil theorist. “Because the plain fact is that drilling is going to happen one way or another, as long as we’re addicted to oil. And the answer to that is unrelated to drilling at all.” 

When it comes to killing addiction, the first stage is always acknowledging one. Optimistic estimations of peak oil theory explain that global supply will start dwindling in 2020, a clear-sighted metaphor if there ever was one. Even without factoring in the always reliable underestimation that leads to disasters like Exxon Valdez and Deepwater Horizon, that’s only a decade to get our heads and engines together. In other words, a light-speed snapshot of time compared to the insane workload. 

“The administration needs to take this opportunity to explain the multiple hidden costs to our addiction to fossil fuels,” argued Center for American Progress climate analyst Joseph Romm, the author of Straight Up: America’s Fiercest Climate Blogger Takes on the Status Quo Media, Politicians, and Clean Energy Solutions. “As we’re finding out with Goldman Sachs, you just can’t let the industry regulate itself. But ultimately we have to get off the addiction. If the administration doesn’t help us do that, it will be an incomprehensible missed opportunity.” 

“We need a serious carbon tax and serious climate legislation to reduce our reliance,” said Drum. “I care a lot more about that than I do about the specific issues related to oil rig safety.” 

Infinite Step Recovery 

The prospects for such serious campaigns against carbon are practically dead in the water, just like the collateral damage washing up in Louisiana and elsewhere in the Gulf. The current climate legislation drafted by senators John Kerry and Joseph Lieberman is a capitulation to the fossil fuel industry, offering concessions like increased offshore drilling and a doubtlessly unregulated cap-and-trade derivatives market in exchange for greenhouse gas limits. This mind-numbing arrogance and collusion between the energy sector and rich nations is precisely what led to the failure of last year’s climate summit in Copenhagen, according to ex-World Bank economist Sir Nicholas Stern, who crunched the numbers in 2006 and decided that doing nothing about global warming would end up costing the world around $5 trillion dollars and rising.

The prospects for this year’s retreat in Cancun similarly suck. The Obama administration’s special climate envoy Todd Stern admitted in May that the United States will probably have no climate bill in place by the time it gets to Mexico. Factor in robust public support for further coastal drilling in the midst of the Deepwater Horizon disaster and it becomes clear that the political will to change our energy game is weak.  

But the political capital to be reaped by anger over the spill is strong. On May 13, senators Barbara Boxer, Ron Wyden, Dianne Feinstein, Patty Murray, Maria Cantwell and Jeff Merkley introduced legislation to ban offshore oil drilling along the West Coast. California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger withdrew support for a drilling operation off the coast of Santa Barbara. On the other side of the country, Florida representative Corrine Brown has proposed similar legislation, while governor Charlie Crist has suggested a possible constitutional amendment mandating the same. 

Yet the Obama administration is openly supporting not an outright ban on offshore drilling, but Kerry and Leiberman’s weak-kneed concessions. Their bill does include provisions that allow states to ban operations within 75 miles of their coastlines, as well as a sweetener that allows them to siphon off larger revenue from those operations. But they should already have that anyway. And the Deepwater Horizon clustergush occurred over 40 miles offshore; Kerry and Lieberman’s bill would have bought the Gulf coast a few extra days before it was soaked in oil. Plus, fisheries and other natural environments utterly necessary to the economic and civic health of the entire country aren’t strictly on the coastline; some are miles offshore, closer to the rigs than you or I. 

Take a look at what the Department of the Interior calls “President Obama’s comprehensive energy plan for the country,” and it’s clear that we’re in for much more, not less, offshore drilling. The color-coded graphics tell it all: Exploration and production plans to cruise northeastward up from the Western and Central Gulf of Mexico to its Eastern region and up into the South and mid-Atlantic. Same goes for the comparatively oily Alaskan region. According to the World Wildlife Fund, Shell Oil starts  drilling in Alaska’s cold Chuchki and Beaufort seas starting in July. 

“The Arctic region is, in nearly every respect, the exact opposite of the temperate conditions of the Gulf of Mexico,” said WWF president and CEO Carter Roberts. “Technology simply does not exist to clean up a spill in Arctic waters. And, unlike the Gulf with its robust response apparatus close at hand, the Coast Guard lacks the capacity to adequately respond to a spill in the Arctic.” 

While the West Coast is currently off-limits, the Interior reminds, especially given the new legislation from Boxer and company, it’s just a matter of diminishing supply until we start tapping that vein. If not for the Deepwater Horizon disaster, we might already have. But with public support and White House support fully behind further offshore drilling, and the paranoid specters of foreign terrorism rearing their fear-inducing heads up in Times Square and Arizona, it’s probably going to be a long time before the United States does anything substantial about the Deepwater Horizon incident, much less greater oil exploration or even climate change.  

But one thing is most likely certain: We won’t be ready as a nation to mandate change until the peak oil gong rings in 2020, or earlier. And by then, it could be too late. 

“Big Oil has obviously funded major disinformation campaigns to mislead the public about the threat of global warming, and the worst-case scenarios for a spill,” Romm said. “But at some point, the painful reality of warming will be so clear that we will be desperate and start to do things differently. But what we need to do first and foremost is pass a climate and clean-energy bill. That is our top priority: Get off the unsafe dirty fuels of the 20th century and get on the safe fuels of the 21st century like wind and solar, which never run out.”

Scott Thill runs the online mag Morphizm.com. His writing has appeared on Salon, XLR8R, All Music Guide, Wired and others.

by carl zimmer

Human civilization has had a stable childhood. Over the past 10,000 years, as our ancestors invented agriculture and built cities, the Earth remained relatively stable. The average global temperature fluttered slightly, never lurching towards a greenhouse climate or chilling enough to enter a new Ice Age. The pH of the oceans remained steady, providing the right chemical conditions for coral reefs to grow and invertebrates to build shells. Those species, in turn, helped support a stable food web that provided plenty of fish for us humans to catch. The overall stability of the past 10,000 years may have played a big part in humanity’s explosion.

Now, ironically, civilization has become so powerful that it can reshape the planet itself. “We have become a force to contend with at the global level,” as Johan Rockstrom of the Stockholm Resilience Center in Sweden, puts it. Humans have changed the chemistry of Earth’s oceans, lowering their pH and causing ocean acidification. We are shifting the composition of the atmosphere, raising levels of carbon dioxide higher than they’ve been in at least the past 800,000 years.

A number of scientists have warned in recent years that if we keep pushing the planet this way, we will cause sudden, irreversible damage to the systems that made human civilization possible in the first place. Typically, they’ve just focused on one of these tipping points at a time. But in today’s issue of the journal Nature, Rockstrom and 27 of his fellow environmental scientists argue that we have to conceive of many tipping points at once. They propose that humans must keep the planet in what they call a “safe operating space,” inside of which we can thrive. If we push past the boundaries of that space — by wiping out biodiversity, for example, or diverting too much of the world’s freshwater — we risk catastrophe.

Unfortunately, the authors of the Nature paper maintain, we’ve already started pushing out beyond these boundaries without knowing where they actually are. “We’re sitting on top of a mesa right now, and we’re driving around, but we don’t have our lights on and we don’t even have a map,” says Jonathan Foley, a co-author of the new study and the director of the University of Minnesota’s Institute on the Environment. “That’s a dangerous way to move around.”

In their new study, Foley and his colleagues put down stakes to mark where they believe seven of these boundaries lie. By their estimate, we have already pushed beyond three of these boundaries, and are moving quickly toward the other four. “We’re running out of time,” says Rockstrom.

The new paper has already drawn strong reactions from other scientists, some glowing, some harsh. “This kind of work is critically important,” says Christopher Field, the director of the Department of Global Ecology at the Carnegie Institution at Stanford University. “Overall, this is an impressive attempt to define a safety zone.”

But other scientists wonder whether a planetary safety zone is a concept worth bothering with. “I don’t think this is in any way a useful way of thinking about things,” says Stuart Pimm, a conservation biologist at Duke University.

Rockstrom and his colleagues developed the concept of planetary boundaries from earlier work on how natural systems change. Those  changes are sometimes gradual, but they can also come in jolts. A lake, for example, can absorb a fair amount of phosphorus from fertilizer runoff without any sign of change. “You add a little, not much happens,” says Shahid Naeem of Columbia University, who was not involved in the Nature paper. “Add a little more, not much happens. Add a little… then, all of sudden, you add a little more and — boom! — phytoplankton bloom, oxygen depletion, fish die-off, smelliness. Remove the little phosphorus that caused the tipping of the system, and it does not reverse. In fact, you have to go back to much cleaner water than you would have imagined.”

In recent years, some scientists have argued that the entire planet behaves in a similar way. Adding extra greenhouse gases can raise the planet’s temperature in a steady, proportional rate. But there may come a point when the climate will get pushed into a drastically new state. Some climate scientists have argued, for example, that global warming may trigger the runaway collapse of ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica. Even if we then immediately stopped emitting greenhouse gases, the ice sheets would keep collapsing into the sea. And then we couldn’t do anything to reverse the change. “We don’t know how to refreeze the Greenland ice sheet,” says Rockstrom.

Rockstrom helped organize a workshop in Stockholm in April 2008 where environmental scientists talked about the other possible thresholds that might exist on a global scale. They concluded that there was good evidence for nine kinds of thresholds: climate change, ocean acidity, the ozone layer, freshwater use, the movement of nitrogen and phosphorus, the amount of land used for crops, aerosols (haze and other particles), biodiversity, and chemical pollution.

The scientists then reviewed each of those factors to mark boundaries that the world should not push beyond. “The idea is to say, ‘Let’s put up some guard rails,’” says Robert Costanza of the University of Vermont. “Maybe the guard rails are for a slope we could have taken and survived, but maybe not. We owe it to human civilization to be more careful.”

Ultimately, the scientists felt confident in estimating seven boundaries, three of which we have already pushed past. For one thing, they argue, we’ve already put too much carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. James Hansen, a NASA climate scientist and co-author of the Nature paper, has argued that to avoid catastrophic melting of ice sheets, we should keep carbon dioxide levels no higher than 350 parts per million. Before the Industrial Revolution, the concentration was at about 280 parts per million, but today we’re up to 387. In other words, we’ve moved out of the safe operating space — and into risky territory.

The scientists also argue that as we spread fertilizer on farmland and burn coal, we are pumping far too much nitrogen into the environment. Human activity releases 121 million tons of nitrogen, much of which ends up polluting rivers, lakes and oceans and potentially pushing their ecosystems into irreversible changes. At most, the scientists argue, less than 35 million tons of nitrogen would be a safe boundary.

The rate at which species are becoming extinct is also far beyond a safe boundary, according to the scientists. During most of the history of life, species have become extinct at a slow, fairly regular pace. And as old

species have become extinct, new ones have been evolving. There have been times when many species have become extinct at a much faster rate, and these pulses have sometimes ushered in a global collapse of ecosystems. The authors of the new Nature paper propose that to avoid collapse, the extinction rate cannot rise above 10 times the long-term background rate. Today, however, scientists estimate that the extinction rate is 100 to 1,000 times higher.

In five other areas, the scientists found, we have not yet crossed the boundary into the danger zone. As we release carbon dioxide, for example, some of it goes into the oceans and makes it more acidic. In acidic seawater, coral reefs have a harder time building skeletons, because the minerals they produce for their skeletons quickly dissolve. Invertebrates have the same trouble making shells. According to recent surveys, the ocean is now acidifying 100 times faster than at any time during the past 20 million years. Yet the Nature co-authors estimate that we have not yet reached the point where acidity may cause ecological collapse. But we are close.

While the paper makes for a sobering read, its authors think we should also find some cause for optimism in it. Humanity nearly crossed another threshold by destroying the ozone layer with chlorofluorocarbons. But we recognized the crisis in time and banned chlorofluorocarbons, allowing the ozone layer to slowly recover. If we had waited much longer we might have been too late to do anything. “We were able to avoid a global disaster,” says Rockstrom. He hopes we can do the same again, and keep human civilization from falling off the environmental mesa.

“The authors make a strong case for their selection of key boundaries,” says the Carnegie Institution’s Christopher Field, “and the proposed locations for the boundaries are conceptually reasonable.” Field said he would not be surprised if other researchers argue for shifting the boundaries based on further research. “But most would agree with the general theme that we are pushing very hard on the Earth system, so hard that we should not be surprised if key parts begin to break.”

Other researchers agree with the basic concept of the new paper, but question whether we should be trying to pin down planetary boundaries. Michael Mann, a climate scientist at Penn State University, agrees that there probably is a dangerous threshold for climate change, but he thinks that 350 parts per million might be too strict a limit. And on a practical level, Mann points out that the policies being considered by the U.S. Congress probably won’t even be able to keep carbon dioxide levels down to 550 parts per million in 2100. “I sometimes worry that there is the danger that if we dramatically move the goalposts and argue that 350 ppm must be the stabilization target, policymakers will just throw their hands up in futility,” says Mann, or reach instead for a quick-fix geoengineering scheme, “which frankly terrifies me.”

But some critics question the basic concept itself. “The notion of a single boundary is just devoid of serious content,” says Stuart Pimm. “In what way is an extinction rate 10 times the background rate acceptable?”

One reason that the concept of planetary boundaries is so provocative is that it highlights how much scientists don’t yet understand about the thresholds built into our planet. “I think this is interesting and I’m glad the paper is coming out,” says Naeem, “but it could lead to the false sense that we understand the biosphere better than we do.”

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Carl Zimmer writes about science for The New York Times and a number of magazines. A 2007 winner of the National Academies of Science Communication Award, Zimmer is the author of six books, including Microcosm: E. coli and the New Science of Life. In previous articles for Yale Environment 360, he has written about the high-tech search for a cleaner biofuel alternative and about using assisted migration to save species threatened by climate change.

Reposted from Environment 360.

Plots were constructed using the drainage mats and waterproofing systems typical of green roofs, but the growing material varied in depth from 4 cm, 7 cm, and 10 cm. Twelve species of Sedum were planted, fertilized, and watered once. The moisture of the growing material was measured at random times each week. Measurements of chlorophyll fluorescence were taken to monitor the health of the plants during a variety of environmental conditions.

Plants were monitored over the course of four years. Since the average lifespan of the inorganic components of a green roof is about 45 years, the researchers determined that it was important to study the longevity of the plants. The study found that the shallowest plot had the lowest moisture levels on average and dried the fastest after a rain. At the 4-cm depth, four species failed to exhibit significant growth over the 4-year period.

Five species showed no or little growth at the 7-cm depth, and six species showed no or little growth at a depth of 10 cm. Some species declined over the 4-year period at the varying depths. The remaining plants that flourished were the same species for all three depths (S. floriferum, S. sexangulare, S. spurium ‘John Creech’, and S. stefco). The 4-cm depth also included two other species (S. hispanicum and S. reflexum ‘Blue Spruce’).

Furthermore, the results indicate that, for the surviving and most-abundant species, there is no benefit to depths greater than 7 cm, which would appear to be good news considering shallow depths are more desirable because they make for lighter roof loads. “However, at deeper depths, these plants would likely be healthier, contain greater biomass, and be less susceptible to adverse environmental conditions. This study shows the importance of growing medium depth for plant performance and demonstrates the need for long-term evaluation of species for use in this green practice”, concluded the researchers.

###

The complete study and abstract are available on the ASHS Hortscience electronic journal web site: http://hortsci.ashspublications.org/cgi/content/abstract/44/2/401

Founded in 1903, the American Society for Horticultural Science (ASHS) is the largest organization dedicated to advancing all facets of horticultural research, education, and application. More information at ashs.org

Reposted from American Society for Horticultural Science

Eutrophication: Sources and Drivers of Nutrient Pollution finds that developing countries will see more nitrogen and phosphorus pollution in coastal and freshwater areas in the coming decades as a result of population and economic growth.

“More people and rising incomes will increase the demand for food, energy, land and other natural resources, which will ultimately lead to greater agricultural production and burning of fossil fuels to heat homes, power cars, and fuel industry,” added Selman, a senior associate and water-pollution expert at WRI.  

According to the research, worldwide per capita meat consumption is expected to rise by 14 percent by 2030. When factoring in population growth, the rise equates to an estimated increase of 53 percent in total meat consumed globally.  

Increased livestock production will have significant implications for the severity of nutrient pollution, particularly in countries without effective environmental regulations. For example, meat production in China has increased by 127 percent from 1990 to 2002, but fewer than 14,000 livestock operations have pollution controls.

Selman added that “one swine operation in the Black Sea region that is now closed had more than 1 million pigs and generated sewage equivalent to a town of 5 million people.”

The manure from these operations is often applied to fields as fertilizer and then leaches and runs off into nearby waterways. According to the report, 80 percent of the nitrogen used in swine production is excreted as manure or lost to the environment during the production of animal feed.

The report also suggests that the demand for energy will increase eutrophic conditions worldwide.  Total global energy consumption is expected to rise by 50 percent by 2030 and a majority of that will be in the developing world.

“Though renewable energy sources are being developed, fossil fuels such as coal, oil and natural gas, are expected to continue meeting 86 percent of global energy needs,” said Selman. “When fossil fuels are burned, they release nitrogen oxides into the atmosphere, which are then deposited to land and water through rain and snow.”

Some studies have found that atmospheric sources of nitrogen are a significant source of coastal pollution, particularly in industrialized countries with high NOx emissions. In the Chesapeake Bay, atmospheric deposition accounts for 30 percent of the nitrogen pollution found in the watershed.

“Because there are so many pathways, sources, and drivers of nutrient pollution, the policies that address eutrophication cannot be limited to traditional environmental regulations,” said Selman. “Instead, policymakers must look more broadly at agricultural, energy, land use, and public health policies and find ways that these policies can be designed to mitigate nutrient pollution.”

It may seem odd timing that many of us are heading to the nation’s capital early next month for a major act of civil disobedience at a coal-fired power plant, the first big protest of its kind against global warming in this country.

After all, Barack Obama’s in power. He’s appointed scientific advisers who actually believe in… science, and he’s done more in a few weeks to deal with climate change than all the presidents of the last 20 years combined. Stalwarts like John Kerry, Henry Waxman, and Ed Markey are chairing the relevant congressional committees. The auto companies, humbled, are promising to build rational vehicles if only we give them some cash. What’s to protest? Why not just give the good guys a break?

If you think about it a little longer, though, you realize this is just the moment to up the ante. For one thing, it would have done no good in the past: you think Dick Cheney was going to pay attention?

More importantly, we need a powerful and active movement not to force the administration and the Democrats in Congress to do something they don’t want to, but to give them the political space they need to act on their convictions. Barack Obama was a community organizer — he understands that major change only comes when it’s demanded, when there’s some force noisy enough to drown out the eternal hum of business as usual, of vested interest, of inertia.

Consider what has to happen if we’re going to deal with global warming in a real way. NASA climate scientist James Hansen — who has announced he plans to join us and get arrested for trespassing in the action we’re planning for March 2 — has demonstrated two things in recent papers. One, that any concentration of carbon dioxide greater than 350 parts per million in the atmosphere is not compatible with the “planet on which civilization developed and to which life on earth is adapted.” And two, that the world as a whole must stop burning coal by 2030 — and the developed world well before that — if we are to have any hope of ever getting the planet back down below that 350 number.

That should give you some sense of what Obama’s up against. Coal provides 50 percent of our electricity. That juice comes from hundreds of expensive, enormous plants, each one of them owned by rich and powerful companies. Shutting these plants down — or getting the companies to install expensive equipment that might be able to separate carbon from the exhaust stream and sequester it safely in some mine somewhere — will be incredibly hard. Investors are planning on running those plants another half-century to make back their money — the sunk costs involved are probably on the scale of those lousy mortgages now bankrupting our economy.

And if you think it’s tough for us, imagine the Chinese. They’ve been opening a coal-burning power plant a week. You want to tell them to start shutting them down when that coal-fired power represents the easiest way to pull people out of poverty across Asia?

The only hope of making the kind of change required is to really stick in people’s minds a simple idea: Coal is bad. It’s bad when you mine it, it’s bad for the city where you burn it, and it’s bad for the climate.

Happily, there’s no place that makes that point much more easily than the power plant Congress owns not far from the U.S. Capitol building. It’s antiquated (built today, it wouldn’t meet the standards of the Clean Air Act). It’s filthy — one study estimates that it and the other coal-fired power plants ringing the District of Columbia cause the deaths of at least 515 people a year. It’s among the largest point sources of CO2 in the capital. It helps support the mining industry that is scalping the summits of neighboring West Virginia, Virginia, and Kentucky. Oh, and it would be easy enough to fix. In fact, the facility can already burn some natural gas instead, and a modest retrofit would let it convert away from coal entirely.

Not only that, but it’s owned by Congress. They don’t need to ask any utility executives. They could just have a vote and do it — as easy as you deciding to put a new, clean furnace in your basement. It would even stimulate the local economy.

All of which means it’s the perfect target. Not because shutting it down would do much, except for the people who live right nearby. But because it’s a way to get the conversation started. When civil disobedience works, it’s because it demonstrates some willingness to bear a certain amount of pain for some larger end — a way to say, “Coal is bad enough that I’m willing to get arrested.” Which is not the biggest deal on earth, but if you’re going to be asking the Chinese, say, to start turning off their coal-fired plants, you can probably keep a straighter face if you’ve made at least a mild sacrifice yourself.

There are dangers in this kind of strategy too. It could turn people off, make them think that global warming protesters are crazy hippies harkening back to the ’60s. I don’t mind hippies in the slightest, but when the writer Wendell Berry and I sent out the original invitation to this action, we asked that those who wanted to be arrested wear their dress clothes. And not just because it’s serious business — but also in hopes of discouraging the hardcore anarchists and troublemakers attracted to such events, sort of in the way that convenience stores play classical music to keep folks from loitering outside.

The other danger is that it might convince activists that this is the most important work to do, the main tool in the toolbox. That’s almost certainly not true, which is why it’s appropriate that Powershift, the huge gathering of young people the same weekend in D.C., will focus on lobbying on Capitol Hill that Monday morning of the protest. Lobbying first, sitting-in second. And third, and most important of all, the suddenly swelling movement toward symbolic action next fall on a global basis. 350.org, the campaign I helped found, is looking for new ways to make a point, with a global day of action on Oct. 24 that will link people up from high in the Himalayas to underwater on the Great Barrier Reef to… Your Town Here.

A little Facebook, a little Twitter, and a little sitting down in the street where the police don’t want you. We’ve got to see what works!

Bill McKibben is the author of 10 books, most recently Deep Economy: The Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future. He is a scholar in residence at Middlebury College in Vermont.

Reprinted from Alternet.org.

Walmart Sam’s Choice Brand Exceeds Legal Limits in California

WASHINGTON – Ten popular U.S. bottled water brands contain mixtures of 38 different pollutants, including bacteria, fertilizer, Tylenol and industrial chemicals, some at levels no better than tap water, according to laboratory tests recently conducted by Environmental Working Group (EWG).

Walmart‘s Sam’s Choice at several locations contained contaminants exceeding California’s bottled water quality standards and safety levels for carcinogens under the state’s Safe Drinking Water and Toxic Enforcement Act. Giant Food’s Acadia brand consistently retained the high levels of cancer-causing chlorination byproducts found in the suburban Washington DC tap water from which it is made.

Overall, the test results strongly indicate that the purity of bottled water cannot be trusted.

“It’s buyer beware with bottle water,” said Jane Houlihan, Vice President for Research at EWG. “The bottled water industry promotes its products as pure and healthy, but our tests show that pollutants in some popular brands match the levels found in some of the nation’s most polluted big city tap water systems. Consumers can’t trust that what’s in the bottle is anything more than processed, pricey tap water.”

“For years the bottled water industry has marketed their product with the message that it is somehow safer or purer than tap water,” said Wenonah Hauter, executive director of the non-profit consumer advocacy group Food & Water Watch. “This new report provides even more evidence that the purity of bottled water is nothing more than a myth propagated to trick consumers into paying thousands times more for a product than what it is actually worth.”

Laboratory tests conducted for EWG at one of the country’s leading water
quality laboratories found 38 contaminants in ten brands of bottled water purchased from grocery stores and other retailers in nine states and the District of Columbia. The pollutants identified include common urban wastewater pollutants like caffeine and pharmaceuticals, an array of cancer-causing byproducts from municipal tap water chlorination, heavy metals and minerals including arsenic and radioactive isotopes, fertilizer residue and a broad range of industrial chemicals. Four brands were also contaminated with bacteria.

Unlike tap water, where consumers are provided with test results every year, the bottled water industry does not disclose the results of any contaminant testing that it conducts. Instead, the industry hides behind the claim that bottled water is held to the same safety standards as tap water. But with promotional campaigns saturated with images of mountain springs, and prices 1,000 times the price of tap water, consumers are clearly led to believe that they are buying a product that has been purified to a level beyond the water that comes out of the garden hose.

Americans paid $12 billion to drink 9 billion gallons of bottled water last year alone. Yet, as EWG tests show, several bottled waters bore the chemical signature of standard municipal water treatment — a cocktail of fluoride, chlorine and other disinfectants whose proportions vary only slightly from plant to plant. In other words, some bottled water was chemically almost indistinguishable from tap water. The only striking difference: the price tag. The typical cost of a gallon of bottled water is $3.79 – 1,900 times the cost of a gallon of public tap water.

Unlike public water utilities, bottled water companies are not required to notify their customers of the presence of contaminants in the water, or, in most states, to tell their customers where the water comes from, how it is purified, and if it is spring water or merely bottled tap water. Given the industry’s refusal to make available data to support their claims of superiority, consumer confidence in the purity of bottled water is simply not justified.

The bottle water industry has also contributed to one of the biggest environmental problems facing the world today. Only one-fifth of the bottles produced by the industry are recycled. The remaining four-fifths pile up at landfills, litter our neighborhoods and foul our oceans. About halfway between Hawaii and California, an area twice the size of Texas is awash in millions of plastic water bottles and other indestructible garbage.

Read the Reports Executive Summary here.

Read entire report here.

Reprinted from the Environmental Working Group.

UC researchers have found that more than 30 percent of American public schools are within 400 meters, or a quarter mile, of major highways that consistently serve as main truck and traffic routes.

Research has shown that proximity to major highways-and thus environmental pollutants, such as aerosolizing diesel exhaust particles-can leave school-age children more susceptible to respiratory diseases later in life.

“This is a major public health concern that should be given serious consideration in future urban development, transportation planning and environmental policies,” says Sergey Grinshpun, PhD, principal investigator of the study and professor of environmental health at UC.

To protect the health of young children with developing lungs, he says new schools should be built further from major highways.

“Health risk can be mitigated through proper urban planning, but that doesn’t erase the immediate risk to school-age children attending schools that are too close to highways right now,” he adds. “Existing schools should be retrofitted with air filtration systems that will reduce students’ exposure to traffic pollutants.”

The UC-led team reports its findings in the September 2008 issue of the Journal of Environmental Planning and Management, an international scientific journal. This is believed to be the first national study of school proximity and health risks associated with major roadways.

For this study, Grinshpun’s team conducted a survey of major metropolitan areas representative of all geographical regions of the United States: Atlanta, Boston, Cincinnati, Denver, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, Memphis, Minneapolis and San Antonio.

More than 8,800 schools representing 6 million students were included in the survey. Primary data was collected through the U.S. Department of Education’s National Center for Education Statistics.

Schools within this data set were then geocoded to accurately calculate distance to the nearest interstate, U.S. highway or state highway.

Past research on highway-related air pollution exposure has focused on residences located close to major roads. Grinshpun points out, however, that school-age children spend more than 30 percent of their day on school grounds-in classrooms, after-school care or extracurricular activities. 

“For many years, our focus has been on homes when it comes to air pollution. School attendance may result in a large dose of inhaled traffic pollutants that-until now-have been completely overlooked,” he adds.

These past studies suggest this proximity to highway traffic puts school-age children at an increased risk for asthma and respiratory problems later in life from air pollutants and aeroallergens.

This includes research from the UC Cincinnati Childhood Allergy and Air Pollution Study (CCAAPS) which has reported that exposure to traffic pollutants in close proximity to main roads has been associated with increased risk for asthma and other chronic respiratory problems during childhood.

Grinshpun’s team found that public school students were more likely to attend schools near major highways compared to the general population. Researchers say the rapid expansion of metropolitan areas in recent years-deemed “urban sprawl”-seems to be associated with the consistent building of schools near highways.

“Major roads play an important role in the economy, but we need to strike a balance between economic and health considerations as we break ground on new areas,” says Alexandra Appatova, the study’s first author. “Policymakers need to develop new effective strategies that would encourage urban planners to reconsider our current infrastructure, particularly when it comes to building new schools and maintaining existing ones.”

The state of California, for example, has passed a law prohibiting the building of new schools within 500 feet (168 meters) of a busy road. New Jersey is moving a bill through the legislature to require highway entrance and exit ramps to be at least 1,000 feet from schools.

This study was funded in part by grants from UC’s Center for Sustainable Urban Engineering and the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences. UC’s Patrick Ryan, PhD, and Grace LeMasters, PhD, also participated in this study. Appatova was an intern in UC’s department of environmental health when the study was being conducted.

Reprinted from University of Cincinnati

(NaturalNews) A swirling, floating garbage dump in the North Pacific Ocean twice the size of the United States has been noticed in recent years and is growing at a swift pace. It is called the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. The number of plastic pieces in the Pacific Ocean has tripled in the last ten years and the size of the accumulation is set to double in the next ten unless the use of disposable plastics is reduced.

While this “trash continent” is not thick enough to be walked on, from the ocean surface to a depth of 30 feet, the plastic is floating at a concentration six times that of its neighboring zooplankton, the most abundant animal type of life both by number and total weight. The plastic can reach concentrations of a million pieces per square mile.

Most of this plastic debris originates from land as trash, being swept out by rivers or the tide. About one fifth comes from ships’ cargo and oil platforms. Toothbrushes, cigarette lighters and syringes have accumulated here and everything from Nike sneakers to plastic yellow ducks has been lost from cargo ships.

Due to undesirable wind patterns, most sailors have avoided this area and a natural lack of nutrients in this ocean region has given fishermen reason to look for fish elsewhere. The translucent quality of the plastic just below the water’s surface prevents satellites from detecting it. These two factors have prevented the sheer vastness of the garbage accumulation from being noticed until recently.

This region of the ocean is called the North Pacific Gyre. Warm tropical air descends in a clockwise rotation over this vast area of over 10 million square miles. These wind patterns create comparable ocean currents which circle around a center point between California and Japan. The nature of the North Pacific Gyre has created two garbage patches on either side of the Hawaiian Islands. The Eastern Pacific Garbage Patch is between California and Hawaii and is twice the size of Texas. The Western Pacific Garbage Patch on the other side of Hawaii is smaller, but still massive. The patches are connected by a 6,000 mile long current which itself can accumulate significant amounts of trash.

All debris that comes within this gyre can be caught in the rotation and concentrated toward the center. The result: 100 million tons of plastic circulating in the northern Pacific according to Charles Moore, the American oceanographer who discovered the extent of this accumulation. This is equal to all the plastic produced by the world in one year.

Until recently, debris in this region did not accumulate because it was easily broken down by microorganisms. However, the production of plastics and their prolific distribution across the globe for the last few decades has been the trump card played to the decomposers of the ocean. Unlike wood and cotton, which can be broken down into such things as carbon dioxide and water within months to years, nothing in the ocean can biodegrade plastics.

The plastic from the 1950s that floated out to the ocean is still there in pieces and will be for a long time.

In the sea, forces of the sun, the waves and collisions with other solids break plastics into smaller pieces and eventually into individual molecules, but this is not the same as biodegradation. As the pieces get smaller they are still plastic and become more harmful. They act like sponges for many chemical toxins, such as DDT and PCBs, and concentrate the toxins up to a million times the levels found in the surrounding water. The plastic pieces, whether mistaken for food or so microscopic as to be unavoidable, are consumed by seabirds and fish, which in turn make it to our dinner plates. This can have disastrous consequences for food webs and human health. Many of these chemicals have hormone disrupting properties that affect both animals and humans.

The world produces at least 100 million tons of plastic each year and about ten percent makes it to the oceans. However, the problem lies deeper than just the surface. About 70 percent of plastic products sink to the bottom. Of the 30 percent that floats, most of it aggregates into patches within gyres.

There has been evidence of a high concentration of plastic in at least one of the other four major ocean gyres in the world.

Great quantities of the trash from these garbage patches have washed up on shores, covering beaches in California and especially the islands of Hawaii.

Chris Parry, a public education program manager who works for the California Coastal Commission in San Francisco said, “At this point, cleaning it up isn’t an option. It’s just going to get bigger as our reliance on plastics continues… The long-term solution is to stop producing as much plastic products at home and change our consumption habits.”

Cleaning up this vast quantity of plastic and garbage would cost billions of dollars. Despite the high price tag, the consequences of creating so much permanent trash should be talked about.

Everyday changes can help to limit the growth of this garbage patch. Reducing your use and purchasing of plastic products will lower the production of plastics. Properly disposing of plastics that you come into contact with will slow their accumulation in the environment.

Sources:

((http://science.howstuffworks.com/great-…)

((http://www.naturalhistorymag.com/master…)

((http://www.greenpeace.org/international…)

((http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.c…)

About the author

Tom Mosakowski is working toward completing his BS in Biochemistry. He can be contacted at TomMosakowski@gmail.com

Reprinted from Natural News.

In the first study of its kind, Donner and Chris Kucharik of the University of Wisconsin quantify the effect of biofuel production on the problem of nutrient pollution in a waterway. Their findings will appear in the March 10 edition of the Proceedings of the National Journal of Sciences.

The researchers looked at the estimated land and fertilizer required to meet proposed corn-based ethanol production goals. Recently, the U.S. Senate announced its energy policy aims of generating 36 billion gallons annually of ethanol by the year 2022, of which 15 billion gallons can be produced from corn starch. The corn-ethanol goal represents more than three times than triple the production in 2006.

“This rush to expand corn production is a disaster for the Gulf of Mexico,” says Donner, an assistant professor in the Dept. of Geography. “The U.S. energy policy will make it virtually impossible to solve the problem of the Dead Zone.”

Nitrogen and phosphorus from agricultural fertilizer have been found to promote excess growth of algae in water bodies – a problem that’s common across North America and in many areas of the world.

In some cases, decomposition of algae consumes much of the oxygen in the water. Fertilizer applied to cornfields in the central U.S. – including states such as Illinois, Iowa, Nebraska and Wisconsin – is the primary source of nitrogen pollution in the Mississippi River system, which drains into the Gulf of Mexico.

Each summer, the export of nitrogen creates a large “Dead Zone” in the Gulf of Mexico, a region of oxygen-deprived waters that are unable to support aquatic life. In recent years, it has reached over 20,000 km2 in size, which is equivalent to the area of New Jersey.

Donner and Kucharik’s findings suggest that if the U.S. were to meet its proposed ethanol production goals, nitrogen loading by the Mississippi River to the Gulf of Mexico would increase by 10-19 per cent.

To arrive at this figure, Donner and Kucharik combined the agricultural land use scenarios with models of terrestrial and aquatic nitrogen cycling.

“The nitrogen levels in the Mississippi will be more than twice the recommendation for the Gulf,” says Donner. “It will overwhelm all the suggested mitigation options.”

The results of the study call into question the assumption that enough land exists to fulfill current feed crop demand and expand corn and other crop production for ethanol.

The study concludes that increasing ethanol production from U.S. croplands without endangering water quality and aquatic ecosystems will require a substantial reduction in meat consumption.

###

Reprinted from University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

What they may not realize is that the small streams running through their neighborhoods play a critical role in filtering out the nitrogen that feeds the algae blooms.

A new study published in this week’s edition of the journal Nature by 31 scientists from across the country sheds new light on streams’ role as a nitrogen filter, and uncovers data that show increases in nitrogen caused by human activities can make it harder for the streams to do their jobs.

“The filtering is a serial process and it’s bigger than any one stream,” said Patrick Mulholland, the study’s lead author and a researcher with the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, and Oak Ridge National Laboratory. “What you see in your backyard, though, matters to the health of coastal oceans.”

Excess nitrogen in streams is caused in large part by human activities, particularly overuse of nitrogen-based fertilizers, said Mulholland, and as nitrogen accumulates in increasingly larger bodies of water, it feeds the harmful algae growth that leads to red tide.

In addition, the excessive growths of algae consume large amounts of oxygen when they die and decompose, sometimes enough to make the water unable to support many forms of aquatic life. This problem has been especially pronounced in recent years in the Gulf of Mexico, impacting regional fisheries.

Mulholland and his colleagues, including UT Knoxville professor Lee Cooper, studied how a special, easily traceable form of nitrate made its way through 72 different streams across the U.S. and in Puerto Rico. They found that algae, fungi and bacteria in the streams consumed the nitrate, in essence causing the stream to store the nitrogen.

Nitrate — used in the study because it is the most common form of nitrogen pollution — also was permanently removed from the streams by certain bacteria that converted it into harmless nitrogen gas in a process called denitrification.

The researchers used the data they collected from the individual streams to create a model of how streams work to remove nitrogen. In doing so, they found that the streams are most effective as nitrogen filters when they were not overloaded with nitrogen from fertilizers and other human activity.

“There’s a relationship between the concentration of nitrogen and how efficiently the streams can remove it,” Mulholland said. “With too much nitrogen, they can be overloaded and unable to process the nitrogen as well.”

He said the results showed that nitrogen was removed most effectively in cases where the nitrate entered the stream network near its origins and had the chance to make its way through a number of increasingly larger streams before moving into larger bodies of water, such as lakes, esturaries and the ocean.

“If we want to improve the situation, we need to do a better job reducing nitrogen inputs to our waters,” he said.

The streams included in the study were located across a wide variety of regions and in areas where land is put to a number of different uses in order to get a broad perspective on how streams act as nitrogen filters.

###

The research was funded by a grant from the National Science Foundation to the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. Nature is one of the world’s leading multidisciplinary scientific research journals.

Reprinted from University of Tennessee at Knoxville.

One of the most startling realizations of the study is that Americans are now using so many medications that their own biological waste products are becoming large-scale environmental pollutants. Yet neither the EPA nor drug companies have yet said anything useful about attempts to protect the environment from the chemical toxicities of pharmaceutical waste. Drug companies have so far pretended the problem doesn’t exist. Their goal is to simply sell more drugs, and they seem to be entirely unconcerned about what happens after a typical medication consumer flushes the toilet and sends the toxic chemicals downstream.

If trace amounts of multiple pharmaceuticals are now in the tap water supplies, it also means that any use of tap water involves the further spread of those pharmaceutical chemicals. Watering your lawn, for example, means spraying small amounts of pharmaceuticals on your lawn. For ranchers, watering their cows, pigs or chickens also means dosing those animals with small amounts of pharmaceuticals, and for public schools in the affected cities, all the water fountains used by the children are now functioning as mass medication dispensing machines.

The most dangerous medical experiment in the history of our nation

The mass medication of America has now turned into a grand medical experiment that exposes infants, children, expectant mothers, senior citizens, voters, law enforcement officers, doctors and everybody else to a combination of drugs known to have extremely dangerous, mind-altering side effects when taken in full doses. And yet this mass medication of the population is being conducted with no doctor visits, no prescriptions, no consent and no medical assessment whatsoever. It is essentially a mandatory medication carpet-bombing of the entire population.

We can only guess what the results will be a generation from now. But clues can be gathered by watching the impact of such drugs on aquatic organisms. Amphibians exposed to very low doses of these types of chemicals, for example, begin to grow dual sex organs and suffer widespread infertility problems. Deformities in fish are being increasingly reported in rivers, and the world’s oceans now have over a hundred “dead zones” where agricultural runoff and medication runoff have combined to form a toxic aquatic poison that kills all fish. This is the same water being used to create tap water in U.S. cities.

What’s in recycled urine, anyway?

I remember hearing people snicker when they learned that NASA was recycling urine on the space shuttle and that astronauts would be drinking each other’s recycled urine. Well guess what, folks? In major U.S. cities, almost everybody is drinking somebody else’s recycled urine!

And guess what’s in that urine? Toxic medications, caffeine, painkillers, and a cocktail of other chemicals like personal care product fragrances, pesticides and more. It’s enough to make you sick. Literally.

Guess what else? This is the water used to make sodas and other beverages at local bottling plants. So every time you pick up a can of soda and drink it, not only are you getting the dangerous chemicals intentionally added to those sodas — like aspartame and phosphoric acid — you’re also getting trace amounts of medication chemicals recycled from other peoples’ urine, too! Yum!

Water treatment plants don’t remove medication chemicals from the water!

Many consumers mistakenly believe that water treatment plants actually remove these contaminants, but that’s not true. Municipal water treatment facilities do remove large solids (like dirt, sand and leaves), but they only sanitize the water by adding chlorine to kill microorganisms. They don’t actually remove toxic chemicals from the water. Only distillation — a highly energy-intensive process — removes everything from the water (including the minerals).

A few cities treat their water with ozone, which is a far healthier method that avoids the use of toxic chlorine (which is linked to bladder cancer). Ozonation can break down some — but not all — medications. So what about countertop filters that use carbon blocks? I’m going to find out the answer to that question later this week when I interview Aquasana, the company that makes countertop filters and shower filters. I’ll be sure to ask them for technical details about the ability of their filters to remove trace amounts of pharmaceuticals. That’s suddenly an increasingly important question to consumers who don’t want to consume toxic chemicals in their water.

Terrorists couldn’t have done a better job of poisoning America

What’s really interesting in all this is that the water supply is often cited as a security vulnerability to the nation; a weakness in the defense where terrorists could easily dump chemicals and poison the American people. But why would they bother? Drug companies have already poisoned the water supply for them!

And just in case the medication chemicals in the water aren’t enough to poison the nation, many water treatment facilities add even more poison in the form of artificial fluoride chemicals that cause bone loss and weaken the immune system. Terrorists could hardly do a better job of poisoning the water supply than what corporate America has done already… with the help of criminally negligent government regulatory agencies, of course.

That brings us to the Environmental Protection Agency, a corrupt organization that has now sold out to big business. Read the following article to learn how the EPA now conspires with the chemical industry to censor scientists who try to protect the public from toxic chemicals: http://www.naturalnews.com/022773.html

The EPA has taken no action whatsoever to regulate or eliminate the presence of pharmaceutical chemicals in the water supply. Apparently, the EPA doesn’t mind the fact that infants, babies and pregnant women are now drinking six different medications in their tap water. The agency remains either silent on the issue or in agreement with the corrupt scientists who say the levels of contamination are too low to really matter. But in truth, nobody knows the health effects of combining multiple low-dose pharmaceuticals and feeding it to the population. Anybody who says there’s no risk of harm is simply lying.

How to avoid contaminated water

The solution to all this? On a personal level, you’ll need to avoid drinking tap water, period. Or filter it really well. Distillation, as I mentioned, is very energy intensive (which makes it bad for global warming), but it does get the water very, very clean. Other consumer-level water filters may remove some amount of pharmaceuticals, but I don’t have all the facts on that yet, so I’m not going to make any recommendations until I learn more.

But I am researching it, so stay tuned to NaturalNews.com and subscribe to our e-mail newsletter at http://www.naturalnews.com/readerregistration.html

I’ll be sure to e-mail an announcement when I have new information about the effectiveness of consumer water filters.

Get your medications for free!

The funny part in all this is that if medication trends continue and the presence of pharmaceuticals in the water supply continues to increase, it might get to the point where you no longer need to pay for medications at all! Need some anti-inflammatory drugs? Just drink the water!

Of course, it might be better described as “drinking Big Pharma’s kool-aid,” because the pharmaceutical industry is now founded on a cult-like belief in chemicals promoted by commissioned drug reps, psychiatric zealots and mind-numbed doctors. The level of irrational belief in the power of pharmaceuticals has reached such a fervor that it can only have been made possible by a mass brainwashing of gullible professionals. They have schools dedicated to this dark art — they’re called “med schools.”

Seriously, this tap water contamination is yet one more reason to consider leaving the city and moving closer to nature. America is now so intoxicated with medications that they’re showing up in the water! Do you realize how many people have to be taking (and flushing) drugs to get to that point? It means that the nation has become a chemical consumption quagmire that has now poisoned the people, the land, the air and the water.

The people of America deserve better. Problem is, they’re too drugged up to know it! Don’t you find it interesting, by the way, that the EPA is warning everybody about the environmental dangers of colloidal silver, yet utterly ignoring the environmental dangers of pharmaceutical antibiotics? It’s an interesting double standard…

###

About the author: Mike Adams is a natural health author and technology pioneer with a mission to teach personal and planetary health to the public He has authored and published thousands of articles, interviews, consumers guides, and books on topics like health and the environment, reaching millions of readers with information that is saving lives and improving personal health around the world. Adams is a trusted, independent journalist who receives no money or promotional fees whatsoever to write about other companies’ products.

Reprinted from Natural News.