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/

http://www.alternet.org/story/148519/

Maude Barlow gave this stirring plenary speech, full of hope even in the face of ecological disasters, to the Environmental Grantmakers Association annual retreat in Pacific Grove, California. Barlow, a former UN Senior Water Advisor, is National Chairperson of the Council of Canadians and founder of the Blue Planet Project. Barlow is a contributor to AlterNet’s forth-coming book Water Matters: Why We Need to Act Now to Save Our Most Critical Resource.

We all know that the earth and all upon it face a growing crisis. Global climate change is rapidly advancing, melting glaciers, eroding soil, causing freak and increasingly wild storms, and displacing untold millions from rural communities to live in desperate poverty in peri-urban slums. Almost every human victim lives in the global South, in communities not responsible for greenhouse gas emissions. The atmosphere has already warmed up almost a full degree in the last several decades and a new Canadian study reports that we may be on course to add another 6 degrees Celsius (10.8 degrees Fahrenheit) by 2100.

Half the tropical forests in the world – the lungs of our ecosystems – are gone; by 2030, at the current rate of harvest, only 10% will be left standing. Ninety percent of the big fish in the sea are gone, victim to wanton predatory fishing practices. Says a prominent scientist studying their demise “there is no blue frontier left.” Half the world’s wetlands – the kidneys of our ecosystems – were destroyed in the 20th century. Species extinction is taking place at a rate one thousand times greater than before humans existed. According to a Smithsonian scientist, we are headed toward a “biodiversity deficit” in which species and ecosystems will be destroyed at a rate faster than Nature can create new ones.

We are polluting our lakes, rivers and streams to death. Every day, 2 million tons of sewage and industrial and agricultural waste are discharged into the world’s water, the equivalent of the weight of the entire human population of 6.8 billion people. The amount of wastewater produced annually is about six times more water than exists in all the rivers of the world. A comprehensive new global study recently reported that 80% of the world’s rivers are now in peril, affecting 5 billion people on the planet. We are also mining our groundwater far faster than nature can replenish it, sucking it up to grow water-guzzling chemical-fed crops in deserts or to water thirsty cities that dump an astounding 200 trillion gallons of land-based water as waste in the oceans every year. The global mining industry sucks up another 200 trillion gallons, which it leaves behind as poison. Fully one third of global water withdrawals are now used to produce biofuels, enough water to feed the world. A recent global survey of groundwater found that the rate of depletion more than doubled in the last half century. If water was drained as rapidly from the Great Lakes, they would be bone dry in 80 years.

The global water crisis is the greatest ecological and human threat humanity has ever faced. As vast areas of the planet are becoming desert as we suck the remaining waters out of living ecosystems and drain remaining aquifers in India, China, Australia, most of Africa, all of the Middle East, Mexico, Southern Europe, US Southwest and other places. Dirty water is the biggest killer of children; every day more children die of water borne disease than HIV/AIDS, malaria and war together. In the global South, dirty water kills a child every three and a half seconds. And it is getting worse, fast. By 2030, global demand for water will exceed supply by 40%— an astounding figure foretelling of terrible suffering.

Knowing there will not be enough food and water for all in the near future, wealthy countries and global investment, pension and hedge funds are buying up land and water, fields and forests in the global South, creating a new wave of invasive colonialism that will have huge geo-political ramifications. Rich investors have already bought up an amount of land double the size of the United Kingdom in Africa alone.

We Simply Cannot Continue on the Present Path

I do not think it possible to exaggerate the threat to our earth and every living thing upon it. Quite simply we cannot continue on the path that brought us here. Einstein said that problems cannot be solved by the same level of thinking that created them. While mouthing platitudes about caring for the earth, most of our governments are deepening the crisis with new plans for expanded resource exploitation, unregulated free trade deals, more invasive investment, the privatization of absolutely everything and unlimited growth. This model of development is literally killing the planet.

Unlimited growth assumes unlimited resources, and this is the genesis of the crisis. Quite simply, to feed the increasing demands of our consumer based system, humans have seen nature as a great resource for our personal convenience and profit, not as a living ecosystem from which all life springs. So we have built our economic and development policies based on a human-centric model and assumed either that nature would never fail to provide or that, where it does fail, technology will save the day.

Two Problems that Hinder the Environmental Movement

From the perspective of the environmental movement, I see two problems that hinder us in our work to stop this carnage. The first is that, with notable exceptions, most environmental groups either have bought into the dominant model of development or feel incapable of changing it. The main form of environmental protection in industrialized countries is based on the regulatory system, legalizing the discharge of large amounts of toxics into the environment. Environmentalists work to minimize the damage from these systems, essentially fighting for inadequate laws based on curbing the worst practices, but leaving intact the system of economic globalization at the heart of the problem. Trapped inside this paradigm, many environmentalists essentially prop up a deeply flawed system, not imagining they are capable of creating another.

Hence, the support of false solutions such as carbon markets, which, in effect, privatize the atmosphere by creating a new form of property rights over natural resources. Carbon markets are predicated less on reducing emissions than on the desire to make carbon cuts as cheap as possible for large corporations.

Another false solution is the move to turn water into private property, which can then be hoarded, bought and sold on the open market. The latest proposals are for a water pollution market, similar to carbon markets, where companies and countries will buy and sell the right to pollute water. With this kind of privatization comes a loss of public oversight to manage and protect watersheds. Commodifying water renders an earth-centred vision for watersheds and ecosystems unattainable.

Then there is PES, or Payment for Ecological Services, which puts a price tag on ecological goods – clean air, water, soil etc, – and the services such as water purification, crop pollination and carbon sequestration that sustain them. A market model of PES is an agreement between the “holder” and the “consumer” of an ecosystem service, turning that service into an environmental property right. Clearly this system privatizes nature, be it a wetland, lake, forest plot or mountain, and sets the stage for private accumulation of nature by those wealthy enough to be able to buy, hoard sell and trade it. Already, northern hemisphere governments and private corporations are studying public/private/partnerships to set up lucrative PES projects in the global South. Says Friends of the Earth International, “Governments need to acknowledge that market-based mechanisms and the commodification of biodiversity have failed both biodiversity conservation and poverty alleviation.”

The second problem with our movement is one of silos. For too long environmentalists have toiled in isolation from those communities and groups working for human and social justice and for fundamental change to the system. On one hand are the scientists, scholars, and environmentalists warning of a looming ecological crisis and monitoring the decline of the world’s freshwater stocks, energy sources and biodiversity. On the other are the development experts, anti-poverty advocates, and NGOs working to address the inequitable access to food, water and health care and campaigning for these services, particularly in the global South. The assumption is that these are two different sets of problems, one needing a scientific and ecological solution, the other needing a financial solution based on pulling money from wealthy countries, institutions and organizations to find new resources for the poor.

The clearest example I have is in the area I know best, the freshwater crisis. It is finally becoming clear to even the most intransigent silo separatists that the ecological and human water crises are intricately linked, and that to deal effectively with either means dealing with both. The notion that inequitable access can be dealt with by finding more money to pump more groundwater is based on a misunderstanding that assumes unlimited supply, when in fact humans everywhere are overpumping groundwater supplies. Similarly, the hope that communities will cooperate in the restoration of their water systems when they are desperately poor and have no way of conserving or cleaning the limited sources they use is a cruel fantasy. The ecological health of the planet is intricately tied to the need for a just system of water distribution.

The global water justice movement (of which I have the honour of being deeply involved) is, I believe, successfully incorporating concerns about the growing ecological water crisis with the promotion of just economic, food and trade policies to ensure water for all. We strongly believe that fighting for equitable water in a world running out means taking better care of the water we have, not just finding supposedly endless new sources. Through countless gatherings where we took the time to really hear one another – especially grassroots groups and tribal peoples closest to the struggle – we developed a set of guiding principles and a vision for an alternative future that are universally accepted in our movement and have served us well in times of stress. We are also deeply critical of the trade and development policies of the World Trade Organization, the World Bank and the World Water Council (whom I call the “Lords of water”), and we openly challenge their model and authority.

Similarly, a fresh and exciting new movement exploded onto the scene in Copenhagen and set all the traditional players on their heads. The climate justice movement whose motto is Change the System, Not the Climate, arrived to challenge not only the stalemate of the government negotiators but the stale state of too cosy alliances between major environmental groups, international institutions and big business – the traditional “players” on the climate scene. Those climate justice warriors went on to gather at another meeting in Cochabamba, Bolivia, producing a powerful alternative declaration to the weak statement that came out of Copenhagen. The new document forged in Bolivia put the world on notice that business as usual is not on the climate agenda.

How the Commons Fits In

I deeply believe it is time for us to extend these powerful new movements, which fuse the analysis and hard work of the environmental community with the vision and commitment of the justice community, into a whole new form of governance that not only challenges the current model of unlimited growth and economic globalization but promotes an alternative that will allow us and the Earth to survive. Quite simply, human-centred governance systems are not working and we need new economic, development, and environmental policies as well as new laws that articulate an entirely different point of view from that which underpins most governance systems today. At the centre of this new paradigm is the need to protect natural ecosystems and to ensure the equitable and just sharing of their bounty. It also means the recovery of an old concept called the Commons.

The Commons is based on the notion that just by being members of the human family, we all have rights to certain common heritages, be they the atmosphere and oceans, freshwater and genetic diversity, or culture, language and wisdom. In most traditional societies, it was assumed that what belonged to one belonged to all. Many indigenous societies to this day cannot conceive of denying a person or a family basic access to food, air, land, water and livelihood. Many modern societies extended the same concept of universal access to the notion of a social Commons, creating education, health care and social security for all members of the community. Since adopting the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948, governments are obliged to protect the human rights, cultural diversity and food security of their citizens.

A central characteristic of the Commons is the need for careful collaborative management of shared resources by those who use them and allocation of access based on a set of priorities. A Commons is not a free-for-all. We are not talking about a return to the notion that nature’s capacity to sustain our ways is unlimited and anyone can use whatever they want, however they want, whenever they want. It is rooted rather in a sober and realistic assessment of the true damage that has already been unleashed on the world’s biological heritage as well as the knowledge that our ecosystems must be managed and shared in a way that protects them now and for all time.

Also to be recovered and expanded is the notion of the Public Trust Doctrine, a longstanding legal principle which holds that certain natural resources, particularly air, water and the oceans, are central to our very existence and therefore must be protected for the common good and not allowed to be appropriated for private gain. Under the Public Trust Doctrine, governments exercise their fiduciary responsibilities to sustain the essence of these resources for the long-term use and enjoyment of the entire populace, not just the privileged who can buy inequitable access.

The Public Trust Doctrine was first codified in 529 A.D. by Emperor Justinius who declared: “By the laws of nature, these things are common to all mankind: the air, running water, the sea and consequently the shores of the sea.” U.S. courts have referred to the Public Trust Doctrine as a “high, solemn and perpetual duty” and held that the states hold title to the lands under navigable waters “in trust for the people of the State.” Recently, Vermont used the Public Trust Doctrine to protect its groundwater from rampant exploitation, declaring that no one owns this resource but rather, it belongs to the people of Vermont and future generations. The new law also places a priority for this water in times of shortages: water for daily human use, sustainable food production and ecosystem protection takes precedence over water for industrial and commercial use.

An exciting new network of Canadian, American and First Nations communities around the Great Lakes is determined to have these lakes names a Commons, a public trust and a protected bioregion.

Equitable access to natural resources is another key character of the Commons. These resources are not there for the taking by private interests who can then deny them to anyone without means. The human right to land, food, water, health care and biodiversity are being codified as we speak from nation-state constitutions to the United Nations. Ellen Dorsey and colleagues have recently called for a human rights approach to development, where the most vulnerable and marginalized communities take priority in law and practice. They suggest renaming the United Nation’s Millennium Development Goals the Millennium Development Rights and putting the voices of the poor at the centre.

This would require the meaningful involvement of those affected communities, especially Indigenous groups, in designing and implementing development strategies. Community-based governance is another basic tenet of the Commons.

Inspiring Successes Around the Globe

Another crucial tenet of the new paradigm is the need to put the natural world back into the centre of our existence. If we listen, nature will teach us how to live. Again, using the issue I know best, we know exactly what to do to create a secure water future: protection and restoration of watersheds; conservation; source protection; rainwater and storm water harvesting; local, sustainable food production; and meaningful laws to halt pollution. Martin Luther King Jr. said legislation may not change the heart but it will restrain the heartless.

Life and livelihoods have been returned to communities in Rajasthan, India, through a system of rainwater harvesting that has made desertified land bloom and rivers run again thanks to the collective action of villagers. The city of Salisbury South Australia, has become an international wonder for greening desertified land in the wake of historic low flows of the Murray River. It captures every drop of rain that falls from the sky and collects storm and wastewater and funnels it all through a series of wetlands, which clean it, to underground natural aquifers, which store it, until it is needed.

In a “debt for nature” swap, Canada, the U.S. and The Netherlands cancelled the debt owed to them by Colombia in exchange for the money being used for watershed restoration. The most exciting project is the restoration of 16 large wetland areas of the Bogotá River, which is badly contaminated, to pristine condition. Eventually the plan is to clean up the entire river. True to principles of the Commons, the indigenous peoples living on the sites were not removed, but rather, have become caretakers of these protected and sacred places.

The natural world also needs its own legal framework, what South African environmental lawyer Cormac Culllinen calls “wild law.” The quest is a body of law that recognizes the inherent rights of the environment, other species and water itself outside of their usefulness to humans. A wild law is a law to regulate human behaviour in order to protect the integrity of the earth and all species on it. It requires a change in the human relationship with the natural world from one of exploitation to one of democracy with other beings. If we are members of the earth’s community, then our rights must be balanced against those of plants, animals, rivers and ecosystems. In a world governed by wild law, the destructive, human-centred exploitation of the natural world would be unlawful. Humans would be prohibited from deliberately destroying functioning ecosystems or driving other species to extinction.

This kind of legal framework is already being established. The Indian Supreme Court has ruled that protection of natural lakes and ponds is akin to honouring the right to life – the most fundamental right of all according to the Court. Wild law was the inspiration behind an ordinance in Tamaqua Borough, Pennsylvania that recognized natural ecosystems and natural communities within the borough as “legal persons” for the purposes of stopping the dumping of sewage sludge on wild land. It has been used throughout New England in a series of local ordinances to prevent bottled water companies from setting up shop in the area. Residents of Mount Shasta California have put a wild law ordinance on the November 2010 ballot to prevent cloud seeding and bulk water extraction within city limits.

In 2008, Ecuador’s citizens voted two thirds in support of a new constitution, which says, “Natural communities and ecosystems possess the unalienable right to exist, flourish and evolve within Ecuador. Those rights shall be self-executing, and it shall be the duty and right of all Ecuadorian governments, communities, and individuals to enforce those rights.” Bolivia has recently amended its constitution to enshrine the philosophy of “living well” as a means of expressing concern with the current model of development and signifying affinity with nature and the need for humans to recognize inherent rights of the earth and other living beings. The government of Argentina recently moved to protect its glaciers by banning mining and oil drilling in ice zones. The law sets standards for protecting glaciers and surrounding ecosystems and creates penalties just for harming the country’s fresh water heritage.

The most far-reaching proposal for the protection of nature itself is the Universal Declaration on the Rights of Mother Earth that was drafted at the April 2010 World People’s Conference on Climate Change in Cochabamba, Bolivia and endorsed by the 35,000 participants there. We are writing a book setting out our case for this Declaration to the United Nations and the world. The intent is for it to become a companion document to the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Every now and then in history, the human race takes a collective step forward in its evolution. Such a time is upon us now as we begin to understand the urgent need to protect the earth and its ecosystems from which all life comes. The Universal Declaration on the Rights of Mother Earth must become a history-altering covenant toward a just and sustainable future for all.

What Can We Do Right Now?

What might this mean for funders and other who share these values? Well, let me be clear: the hard work of those fighting environmental destruction and injustice must continue. I am not suggesting for one moment that his work is not important or that the funding for this work is not needed. I do think however, that there are ways to move the agenda I have outlined here forward if we put our minds to it.

Anything that helps bridge the solitudes and silos is pure gold. Bringing together environmentalists and justice activists to understand one another’s work and perspective is crucial. Both sides have to dream into being – together – the world they know is possible and not settle for small improvements to the one we have. This means working for a whole different economic, trade and development model even while fighting the abuses existing in the current one. Given a choice between funding an environmental organization that basically supports the status quo with minor changes and one that promotes a justice agenda as well, I would argue for the latter.

Support that increases capacity at the base is also very important, as is funding that connects domestic to international struggle, always related even when not apparent. Funding for those projects and groups fighting to abolish or fundamentally change global trade and banking institutions that maintain corporate dominance and promote unlimited and unregulated growth is still essential.

How Clean Water Became a Human Right

We all, as well, have to find ways to thank and protect those groups and governments going out on a limb to promote an agenda for true change. A very good example is President Evo Morales of Bolivia, who brought the climate justice movement together in Cochabamba last April and is leading the campaign at the UN to promote the Rights of Mother Earth.

It was this small, poor, largely indigenous landlocked country, and its former coca-farmer president, that introduced a resolution to recognize the human right to water and sanitation this past June to the UN General Assembly, taking the whole UN community by surprise. The Bolivian UN Ambassador, Pablo Solon, decided he was fed up with the “commissions” and “further studies” and “expert consultations” that have managed to put off the question of the right to water for at least a decade at the UN and that it was time to put an “up or down” question to every country: do you or do you not support the human right to drinking water and sanitation?

A mad scramble ensued as a group of Anglo-Western countries, all promoting to some extent the notion of water as a private commodity, tried to derail the process and put off the vote. The U.S., Canada, the UK, Australia and New Zealand even cooked up a “consensus” resolution that was so bland everyone would likely have handily voted for it at an earlier date. But sitting beside the real thing, it looked like what it was – an attempt, yet again, to put off any meaningful commitment at the UN to the billions suffering from lack of clean water. When that didn’t work, they toiled behind the scenes to weaken the wording of the Bolivian resolution but to no avail. On July 28, 2010, the UN General Assembly overwhelmingly voted to adopt a resolution recognizing the human right to water and sanitation. One hundred and twenty two countries voted for the resolution; 41 abstained; not one had the courage to vote against.

I share this story with you not only because my team and I were deeply involved in the lead up to this historic vote and there for it the day it was presented, but because it was the culmination of work done by a movement operating on the principles I have outlined above.

We took the time to establish the common principles that water is a Commons that belongs to the earth, all species, and the future, and is a fundamental human right not to be appropriated for profit. We advocate for the Public Trust Doctrine in law at every level of government. We set out to build a movement that listens first and most to the poorest among us, especially indigenous and tribal voices. We work with communities and groups in other movements, especially those working on climate justice and trade justice. We understand the need for careful collaborative cooperation to restore the functioning of watersheds and we have come to revere the water that gives life to all things upon the Earth. While we clearly have much left to do, these water warriors inspire me and give me hope. They get me out of bed every morning to fight another day.

I believe I am in a room full of stewards and want, then to leave you with these words from Lord of the Rings. This is Gandalf speaking the night before he faces a terrible force that threatens all living beings. His words are for you.

“The rule of no realm is mine, but all worthy things that are in peril, as the world now stand, those are my care. And for my part, I shall not wholly fail in my task if anything passes through this night that can still grow fair, or bear fruit, and flower again in the days to come.

For I too am a steward, did you not know?” —J.R.R. Tolkien

By Paul B. Farrell, MarketWatch

ARROYO GRANDE, Calif. (MarketWatch) — So what’s the biggest time-bomb for Obama, America, capitalism, the world? No, not global warming. Not poverty. Not even peak oil. What is the absolute biggest, one like the trigger mechanism on a nuclear bomb, one that’ll throw a wrench in global economic growth, ending capitalism, even destroying modern civilization?

The one that — if not solved soon — renders all efforts to solve all the other problems in the world, irrelevant, futile and virtually impossible?

News flash: the “Billionaires Club” knows: Bill Gates called billionaire philanthropists to a super-secret meeting in Manhattan last May. Included: Buffett, Rockefeller, Soros, Bloomberg, Turner, Oprah and others meeting at the “home of Sir Paul Nurse, a British Nobel prize biochemist and president of the private Rockefeller University, in Manhattan,” reports John Harlow in the London TimesOnline. During an afternoon session each was “given 15 minutes to present their favorite cause. Over dinner they discussed how they might settle on an ‘umbrella cause’ that could harness their interests.”

The world’s biggest time-bomb? Overpopulation, say the billionaires.

And yet, global governments with their $50 trillion GDP, aren’t even trying to solve the world’s overpopulation problem. G-20 leaders ignore it. So by 2050 the Earth’s population will explode by almost 50%, from 6.6 billion today to 9.3 billion says the United Nations.

And what about those billionaires and their billions? Can they stop the trend? Sadly no. Only a major crisis, a global catastrophe, a collapse beyond anything prior in world history will do it. Here’s why:

Civilizations collapse fast, crises trigger, leaders clueless

“One of the disturbing facts of history is that so many civilizations collapse,” warns Jared Diamond, an environmental biologist, Pulitzer prize winner and author of “Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed.” Many “civilizations share a sharp curve of decline. Indeed, a society’s demise may begin only a decade or two after it reaches its peak population, wealth and power.”

Other voices are darker, shrill: “We’re past the point of no return.” “It’s already too late.” “The end is near.” As with Rome’s collapse, it happens fast. Clueless leaders are caught off-guard, like Greenspan, Bernanke and Paulson a couple years ago.

Call it “WWIII: The Population Wars.” A few years ago Fortune analyzed a classified Pentagon report predicting that “climate could change radically and fast. That would be the mother of all national security issues” Population unrest would then create “massive droughts, turning farmland into dust bowls and forests to ashes.” And “by 2020 there is little doubt that something drastic is happening … an old pattern could emerge; warfare defining human life.” War will be the end-game: For capitalism, civilization, earth?

Diamond’s 12-part equation is very simple, fits perfectly with a global warfare scenario: “More people require more food, space, water, energy, and other resources … There is a long built-in momentum to human population growth called the ‘demographic bulge’ with a disproportionate number of children and young reproductive-age people.” And if the “bulge” stops for any reason, game over. Economic “growth” ends, killing capitalism.

So look closely: Diamond’s equation has 12 time-bombs. But note, the first two are the biggest triggers in the formula. The other 10 are derivative variables.

1. Overpopulation Multiplier

According to TimesOnline: A few months before the billionaires meeting Gates noted: “Official [U.N.] projections say the world’s population will peak at 9.3 billion [up from 6.6 billion today] but with charitable initiatives, such as better reproductive health care, we think we can cap that at 8.3 billion.” Still, that’s 23% more than today’s 6.6 billion.

Can it be stopped? In a recent special issue of Scientific American, population was called “the most overlooked and essential strategy for achieving long-term balance with the environment.” Why? Population’s the new “third-rail” for politicians. So they ignore it.

Yet, if all nations consumed resources at the same rate as America, we’d need six Earths to survive. Unfortunately that scenario is unstoppable. Because by 2050, while America’s population grows from 300 million to a mere 400 million, the rest of the world will explode from 6.3 billion to 8.9 billion, with over 1.4 billion each in China and India.

2. Population Impact Multiplier

Diamond warns: “There are ‘optimists’ who argue that the world could support double its human population.” But he adds, they “consider only the increase in human numbers and not average increase in per-capita impact. But I have not heard anyone who seriously argues that the world could support 12 times it’s current impact.” And yet, that’s exactly what happens with “all third-world inhabitants adopting first-world standards.”

Folks, we oversold the American dream. Now everyone wants it. Not just 300 million Americans, but 6.3 billion people worldwide are demanding more, more, more!

“What really counts,” says Diamond, “is not the number of people alone, but their impact on the environment,” the “per-capita impact.” First-world citizens “consume 32 times more resources such as fossil fuels, and put out 32 times more waste, than do the inhabitants of the Third World.” So the race is on: “Low impact people are becoming high-impact people” aspiring “to first-world living standards.” The American dream is now the global dream.

Warning: The “Impact Multiplier” will drive the global “WWIII-Population Wars” equation even if there is zero population growth to 2050!

In Diamond’s masterpiece, “Collapse,” the two key variables are what we call the “Over-Population Multiplier” and “Population Impact Multiplier.” Now let’s closely examine Diamond’s other 10 variables that are driving our “WWIII-Population Wars” equation:

3. Food

Two billion people, mostly poor, depend on fish and other wild foods for protein. They “have collapsed or are in steep decline” forcing use of more costly animal proteins. The U.N. calls the global food crisis a “silent tsunami.” Food prices rise making it worse for the 2.7 billion living below poverty levels on two dollars a day.

In “The End of Plenty,” National Geographic warns that even a new “green revolution” of “synthetic fertilizers, pesticides, and irrigation, supercharged by genetically engineered seeds” may fail. Why? A joint World Bank/U.N. study “concluded that the immense production increases brought about by science and technology the past 30 years have failed to improve food access for many of the world’s poor.”

Meanwhile, a Time cover story warns that America’s “addiction to meat” has led to farming that’s “destructive of the soil, the environment and us.”

4. Water

Diamond warns: “Most of the world’s fresh water in rivers and lakes is already being used for irrigation, domestic and industrial water,” transportation, fisheries and recreation. Water problems destroyed many earlier civilizations: “Today over a million people lack access to reliable safe drinking water.” British International Development Minister recently warned that two-thirds of the world will live in water-stressed countries by 2015.

Water will trade like oil futures as wars are fought over water and other basic essentials noted earlier in Fortune’s analysis of the Pentagon report predicting that warfare will define human life in this scenario of the near future.

5. Farmland

Crop soils are “being carried away by water and wind erosion at rates between 10 to 40 times the rates of soil formation,” much higher in forests where the soil-erosion rate is “between 500 and 10,000 times” replacement rate. And this is increasing in today’s new age of the 100,000-acre megafires.

6. Forests

We are destroying natural habitats and rain forests at an accelerating rate. Half the world’s original forests have been converted to urban developments. A quarter of what remains will be converted in the next 50 years.

7. Toxic chemicals

Often our solutions create more problems than they solve. For example, industries “manufacture or release into the air, soil, oceans, lakes, and rivers many toxic chemicals” that break down slowly or not at all. Consider the deadly impact of insecticides, pesticides, herbicides, detergents, plastics … the list is endless.

8. Energy resources: oil, natural gas and coal

Pimco manages $747 billion: equity, bonds and commodity funds. Manager Bill Gross recently described a “significant break” in the world’s “growth pattern.” He’s betting we’re past the “peak oil” tipping point. Consumer shopping will continue declining as economies grow very slowly in the future and “corporate profits will be static.”

A recent issue of Foreign Policy Journal warns of the “7 Myths About Alternative Energy.” Are biofuels, solar and nuclear the “major ticket?” No, they’re not, never will be.

9. Solar energy

Sunlight is not unlimited. Diamond: We’re already using “half of the Earth’s photosynthetic capacity” and we will reach the max by mid-century. In “Plundering the Amazon,” Bloomberg Markets magazine warned that Alcoa, Cargill and other companies “have bypassed laws designed to prevent destruction of the world’s largest rain forest … robbing the earth of its best shield against global warming.”

Free market capitalism may be the enemy of survival.

10. Ozone layer

“Human activities produce gases that escape into the atmosphere” where they can destroy the protective ozone or absorb and reduce solar energy.

11. Diversity

“A significant fraction of wild species, populations and genetic diversity has been lost, and at present rates, a large percent of the rest will disappear in half century.”

12. Alien species

Transferring species to lands where they’re not native can have unintended and catastrophic effects, “preying on, parasitizing, infecting or outcompeting” native animals and plants that lack evolutionary resistance.

In spite of the clear message in Diamond’s 12 time-bombs, he still says he’s a “cautious optimist.” What fuels his hope? Our leaders need “the courage to practice long-term thinking, and to make bold, courageous, anticipatory decisions at a time when problems have become perceptible but before they reach crisis proportions.”

Unfortunately, history tells us that cautious leaders are myopic, driven more by self-interest and nationalism than courage and long-term thinking. Eventually they’re caught off guard and their worlds collapse, fast. They only respond to crises.

And, yes, out of crisis may come opportunity. As Nobel economist Milton Friedman put it in his classic, “Capitalism and Freedom:” “Only a crisis — actual or perceived — produces real change” because in the aftermath of crisis “the politically impossible becomes politically inevitable.” Too many, however, delay and respond to crises with too little, too late.

Bottom line: The betting odds are 100% that global leaders will wait for a Pentagon-style “black swan” crisis before acting. Unfortunately, that delay positions the “WWIII: The Population Wars” dead ahead.

http://www.alternet.org/story/148335/

Meeting the growing demand for energy in the U.S., even through sustainable means, could entail greater threats to the environment, new research shows.

The study was carried out by Circle of Blue, a network of journalists and scientists dedicated to water sustainability, and could have implications not just for the relationship between energy demand and water scarcity in the U.S. but elsewhere in the world, as well. “It is not just that energy production could not occur without using vast amounts of water. It’s also that it’s occurring in the era of climate change, population growth and steadily increasing demand for energy,” explained Circle of Blue’s Keith Schneider, who presented the findings in Washington Wednesday.

“The result is that the competition for water at every stage of the mining, processing, production, shipping and use of energy is growing more fierce, more complex and much more difficult to resolve,” he said. About half the 410 billion gallons of water the U.S. withdraws daily goes to cooling thermoelectric power plants, and most of that to cooling coal-burning plants, according to the U.S. Geological Survey.

Meanwhile, climate change is leading to decreased snowmelt, rains and freshwater supplies, says Circle of Blue.

One of the things missing from the discussion, then, is the recognition that saving energy also saves water, the group contends.

The U.S. government has not been blind to the conflict between energy and water needs. The first part of a report commissioned by the U.S. Congress in 2005 laid out the consequences of not paying enough attention to water supply issues in increasing energy production. The second part, which would have laid out a research agenda and begun developing solutions, has yet to be made public, says Schneider.

He says the U.S. Department of Energy has declined repeated requests to explain why the report has not been published.

Energy demand in the U.S. is expected to increase by 40 percent as the U.S. population rises above 440 million by 2050. The water supply will not be able to support that growth, Schneider says.

Renewable sources of energy will certainly be a large part of trying to meet that energy demand, but these, too, come with a hidden water cost.

In 2009, the U.S. dedicated 23 million acres of public lands in six states for new solar electricity-generating plants as part of its economic stimulus package, which apportioned nearly 100 billion dollars for clean energy projects. Though the plan appeared promising, environmentalists soon began to point it could have damaging, unintended consequences. Schneider notes that criticism of the impact the water-cooled solar plants could have on water priorities in the U.S. Southwest even came from within the government.

“In arid settings, the increased water demand from concentrating solar energy systems employing water-cooled technology could strain limited water resources already under development pressure from urbanization, irrigation expansion, commercial interests and mining,” wrote Jon Jarvis, then head of the National Park Service’s Pacific West Region, in a February 2009 internal memo. “Solar generating plants that use conventional cooling technology use two to three times as much water as coal- fired power plants,” Schneider noted.

In other countries, the threat of water scarcity is even more pertinent.

Egypt, for example, has a population of approximately 82 million, but an annual water quota of about 86 billion cubic metres – and the population is expected to rise by more than 10 million people in the next decade.

Yet 30 European blue chip companies are set to invest 560 billion dollars over the next 40 years to build solar power plants in North Africa as part of the Desertec Industrial Initiative. Egypt, Morocco and Tunisia have agreed to work with the initiative. Comparing this project with the U.S.’s, Schneider notes that in an environment that faces even greater water scarcity than the southwestern U.S., such projects could prove disastrous. Circle of Blue calls the intersection of a rising demand for energy and diminishing supply water a “choke point”, but energy development – whether of the fossil fuel or renewable variety – is just one aspect of the water scarcity crisis that is unfolding in various regions of the globe.

Yemen is widely seen as the place where this scarcity will hit first and hardest.

“Analysts are worried Yemen could be the first country in the world to effectively run out of water,” said Christine Parthemore, a fellow at the Center for a New American Security, where she studies the intersection of natural resources and security issues. She spoke at a separate event Wednesday.

Yemen, which has no rivers and cannot afford desalination, is drawing water at around 400 times its replacement rate, she says, and this looming crisis is compounding other issues in the region, like the fact that Yemen has become a key recruiting spot for groups like al Qaeda.

“We are about to see water wars in the future,” said U.S. General Anthony Zinni. “We have seen fuel wars; we’re about to see water wars.”

Patrick O. Brown, a Stanford University biochemist, has changed science twice by giving stuff away. In the early 1990s Brown invented the DNA microarray, a tool that measures how cells make use of their DNA; he then showed researchers how to make their own, transforming genetic research. In 2000 he was one of three scientists who launched a free, online scientific journal called the Public Library of Science (PLOS); it has already broken the stranglehold of $200-a-year scientific publications like Science and Nature.

Now he is tackling an even bigger foe. Over the next 18 months Brown, 55, will take a break from his normal scientific work (finding out how a small number of genes are translated into a much larger number of proteins) in order to change the way the world farms and eats. He wants to put an end to animal farming, or at least put a significant dent in our global hunger for cows, pigs and chickens.

Brown, who has been a vegetarian for more than 30 years and a vegan for 5, notes that while livestock accounts for only 9% of human-caused carbon dioxide emissions, it accounts for 37% of human-caused methane (most of it emanating from the animals’ digestive systems) and 65% of human-caused nitrous oxide, according to the Food & Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. Both are far better at trapping heat than carbon dioxide, meaning that cows, chickens and their ilk have a larger greenhouse effect than all the cars, trucks and planes in the world.

The green cognoscenti are choosing animal husbandry as their new enemy. Jonathan Safran Foer, the bestselling novelist, has published articles declaring that he is raising his kids vegetarian because of the environmental consequences of meat farming and that if people are going to eat meat, they should consider eating dogs. Lord Stern, a professor at the London School of Economics, told the Independent that the West would have to become more vegetarian in order to combat global warming; without change in present trends, meat and milk output will double by 2050.

Brown brings scientific clout to the debate–he’s a member of the National Academy of Sciences and an investigator for the Howard Hughes Medical Institute–and a realization that the arguments for change need to be economic, not just ethical. Growing crops to feed animals requires a lot more land, energy and fertilizer than growing them to feed people, he says: 70% of the land that was once Amazon rain forest is dedicated to grazing. Even if scientists figure out how to make milk with stem cells, it’s unlikely they will be able to create milk with the same efficiency as they can corn or wheat.

“There’s absolutely no possibility that 50 years from now this system will be operating as it does now,” says Brown. “One approach is to just wait, and either we’ll deal with it or we’ll be toast. I want to approach this as a solvable problem.” Solution: “Eliminate animal farming on planet Earth.”

Diets are malleable. Thirty years ago nobody drank high fructose corn syrup. Now it’s a dominant part of the American diet. As Western diets move into China, people there are eating more beef. Brown argues that the key to removing meat from diets is to give foodmakers an incentive to make yummy vegetable-based fare. If vendors push the new foods, palates will follow.

Incentive? Brown thinks if he can convince food manufacturers that the costs of selling meat are too high, and rising, they’ll come around. Seemingly tiny changes in economics could make animal farming a lot less affordable. At the moment farmers around the world are arguing they should be immune from taxes and ceilings on greenhouse gases; if they are not exempt, the cost of meat will go up. Raising the price of water would have the same effect. It takes 1,000 liters of water to produce a liter of milk.

Brown plans to spend the first six months of his project hammering out economic models with colleagues, illustrating ways that animal farming is likely to become onerously expensive. Then he’ll take a year off to work with famous chefs and food researchers on tastier vegetarian dishes, and to develop a strategy to tackle the political, economic, legal, behavioral and food-security issues he’s sure to face.

If Brown can work it so that McDonald’s puts less meat in each Big Mac, that could count as a win. Until now little research has gone into making foods friendly to the environment.

“If you’re a big food producer now, this is absolutely inevitable,” he says. “You’d better start thinking ahead. You’d better seriously start investing and trying to find alternatives in order to stay alive.”

Republished from Forbes.com

Signatories of a statement issued by leading thinkers in development include five World Food Prize laureates, former heads of development agencies, former Ministers of Agriculture, and heads of the world’s leading alliance of agricultural research centers.

“No credible or effective agreement to address the challenges of climate change can ignore agriculture and the need for crop adaptation to ensure the world’s future food supplies,” according to the statement.

Crop adaptation refers to agriculture’s ability to withstand climate change. Farmers will encounter problems they have never before experienced: much greater weather variability, higher average temperatures, increased numbers of extremely hot days, shorter growing seasons, higher solar radiation, much greater moisture stress, added salinity from salt water incursion and irrigation systems, and new combinations of pests and diseases.

“The negative impact of climate change on agriculture, and thus on the production of food, could well place at risk all other efforts to mitigate and adapt to new climate conditions,” the signatories said. “The magnitude of change now being forecast, even in relatively optimistic scenarios, is historically unprecedented, and our agricultural systems are still largely unprepared to face it.”

The group called on negotiators to recognize the importance of crop diversity conservation and use as an essential element in the commitments they will make for climate change adaptation.

“It may be becoming more widely understood that agriculture will have to adapt to climate change, but just because it has to adapt, it does not mean it will,” said Gebisa Ejeta, winner of this year’s World Food Prize and Distinguished Professor of Agronomy at Purdue University. “Adapting crops to unprecedented conditions cannot be taken for granted. It requires rigorous research and complex, painstaking work and a serious commitment of public funding. This needs to be made an urgent priority for the sake of the billions whose future depends upon it.”

Studies by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR) predict that climate change will have dramatic impacts on food production. Some estimate that crop yields in some regions could drop by as much as one third in just two decades without immediate investments in developing new crop varieties.

“Getting agriculture ready for such dramatically new growing environments is not a trivial matter,” warned the signatories. “For agriculture to adapt, crops must adapt, but there is no ‘climate change gene,’ no single characteristic, that can ensure that they will retain, much less increase, their productivity in new climates. Concerted adaptation efforts will be required crop-by-crop, country-by-country, and internationally.”

The basis for crop adaptation is the genetic diversity found in more than 1500 seedbanks around the world. This irreplaceable resource is under threat due to poor funding and institutional politics around access to seed collections. The issue of crop diversity received worldwide attention in 2008 after the opening of the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, a fail-safe, safety back-up facility in the Arctic.

“Current institutional and financial arrangements, however, are inadequate to guarantee conservation of this priceless resource,” according to the statement. “Indeed, diversity is being lost—diversity that almost certainly holds the key to future crop adaptation. Moreover, the time required to integrate new traits into crop varieties can be a decade or more. We cannot wait for disaster before initiating action.”

The group is calling for small investments now that could easily ensure the availability of crop diversity. “Billions of dollars were promised this year for food security. Billions will likely be promised for climate change at Copenhagen. We ask the negotiators at Copenhagen to recognise how interwoven these issues are. Without effective investment in agricultural adaptation right now, future food security will quickly fall victim to climate change,” said Cary Fowler, Executive Director, Global Crop Diversity Trust.

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To view the full statement and list of signatories, please visit: www.croptrust.org/climateadaptation.

The mission of the Global Crop Diversity Trust is to ensure the conservation and availability of crop diversity for food security worldwide. Although crop diversity is fundamental to fighting hunger and to the very future of agriculture, funding is unreliable and diversity is being lost. The Trust is the only organization working worldwide to solve this problem. For further information, please visit: www.croptrust.org.

I gave a talk in South Texas recently on the environmental virtues of a vegetarian diet. As you might imagine, the reception was chilly. In fact, the only applause came during the Q&A period when a member of the audience said that my lecture made him want to go out and eat even more meat. “Plus,” he added, “what I eat is my business — it’s personal.”

I’ve been writing about food and agriculture for more than a decade. Until that evening, however, I’d never actively thought about this most basic culinary question: Is eating personal?

We know more than we’ve ever known about the innards of the global food system. We understand that food can both nourish and kill. We know that its production can both destroy and enhance our environment. We know that farming touches every aspect of our lives — the air we breathe, the water we drink, and the soil we need.

So it’s hard to avoid concluding that eating cannot be personal. What I eat influences you. What you eat influences me. Our diets are deeply, intimately and necessarily political.

This realization changes everything for those who avoid meat. As a vegetarian I’ve always felt the perverse need to apologize for my dietary choice. It inconveniences people. It smacks of self-righteousness. It makes us pariahs at dinner parties. But the more I learn about the negative impact of meat production, the more I feel that it’s the consumers of meat who should be making apologies.

Here’s why: The livestock industry as a result of its reliance on corn and soy-based feed accounts for over half the synthetic fertilizer used in the United States, contributing more than any other sector to marine dead zones. It consumes 70 percent of the water in the American West — water so heavily subsidized that if irrigation supports were removed, ground beef would cost $35 a pound. Livestock accounts for at least 21 percent of greenhouse-gas emissions globally — more than all forms of transportation combined. Domestic animals — most of them healthy — consume about 70 percent of all the antibiotics produced. Undigested antibiotics leach from manure into freshwater systems and impair the sex organs of fish.

It takes a gallon of gasoline to produce a pound of conventional beef. If all the grain fed to animals went to people, you could feed China and India. That’s just a start.

Meat that’s raised according to “alternative” standards (about 1 percent of meat in the United States) might be a better choice but not nearly as much so as its privileged consumers would have us believe. “Free-range chickens” theoretically have access to the outdoors. But many “free-range” chickens never see the light of day because they cannot make it through the crowded shed to the aperture leading to a patch of cement.

“Grass-fed” beef produces four times the methane — a greenhouse gas 21 times as powerful as carbon dioxide — of grain-fed cows, and many grass-fed cows are raised on heavily fertilized and irrigated grass. Pastured pigs are still typically mutilated, fed commercial feed and prevented from rooting — their most basic instinct besides sex.

Issues of animal welfare are equally implicated in all forms of meat production. Domestic animals suffer immensely, feel pain and may even be cognizant of the fate that awaits them. In an egg factory, male chicks (economically worthless) are summarily run through a grinder. Pigs are castrated without anesthesia, crated, tail-docked and nose-ringed. Milk cows are repeatedly impregnated through artificial insemination, confined to milking stalls and milked to yield 15 times the amount of milk they would produce under normal conditions. When calves are removed from their mothers at birth, the mothers mourn their loss with heart-rending moans.

Then comes the slaughterhouse, an operation that’s left with millions of pounds of carcasses — deadstock — that are incinerated or dumped in landfills. (Rendering plants have taken a nose dive since mad cow disease.)

Now, if someone told you that a particular corporation was trashing the air, water and soil; causing more global warming than the transportation industry; consuming massive amounts of fossil fuel; unleashing the cruelest sort of suffering on innocent and sentient beings; failing to recycle its waste; and clogging our arteries in the process, how would you react? Would you say, “Hey, that’s personal?” Probably not. It’s more likely that you’d frame the matter as a dire political issue in need of a dire political response.

Vegetarianism is not only the most powerful political response we can make to industrialized food. It’s a necessary prerequisite to reforming it. To quit eating meat is to dismantle the global food apparatus at its foundation.

Agribusiness has been vilified of late by muckraking journalists, activist filmmakers and sustainable-food advocates. We know that something has to be done to save our food from corporate interests. But I wonder — are we ready to do what must be done? Sure, we’ve been inundated with ideas: eat local, vote with your fork, buy organic, support fair trade, etc. But these proposals all lack something that every successful environmental movement has always placed at its core: genuine sacrifice.

Until we make that leap, until we create a culinary culture in which the meat-eaters must do the apologizing, the current proposals will be nothing more than gestures that turn the fork into an empty symbol rather than a real tool for environmental change.

James E. McWilliams, an associate professor of history at Texas State University at San Marcos and a recent fellow in the agrarian studies program at Yale University, is most recently the author of “Just Food.”

Republished from The Washington Post

COULD FOOD SHORTAGES BRING DOWN CIVILIZATION?

“In early 2008, Saudi Arabia announced that, after being self-sufficient in wheat for over 20 years, the non-replenishable aquifer it had been pumping for irrigation was largely depleted,” writes Lester R. Brown in his new book, Plan B 4.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilization (W.W. Norton & Company).

“In response, officials said they would reduce their wheat harvest by one eighth each year until production would cease entirely in 2016. The Saudis then plan to use their oil wealth to import virtually all the grain consumed by their Canada-sized population of nearly 30 million people,” notes Brown, President and Founder of the Earth Policy Institute, a Washington, D.C.-based independent environmental research organization.

“The Saudis are unique in being so wholly dependent on irrigation,” says Brown in Plan B 4.0.  But other, far larger, grain producers such as India and China are facing irrigation water losses and could face grain production declines.

A World Bank study of India’s water balance notes that 15 percent of its grain harvest is produced by overpumping. In human terms, 175 million Indians are being fed with grain produced from wells that will be going dry. The comparable number for China is 130 million. Among the many other countries facing harvest reductions from groundwater depletion are Pakistan, Iran, and Yemen.

“The tripling of world wheat, rice, and corn prices between mid-2006 and mid-2008 signaled our growing vulnerability to food shortages,” says Brown. “It took the worst economic meltdown since the Great Depression to lower grain prices.”

“Past decades have witnessed world grain price surges, but they were event-driven—a drought in the former Soviet Union, a monsoon failure in India, or a crop-withering heat wave in the U.S. Corn Belt. This most recent price surge was trend-driven, the result of our failure to reverse the environmental trends that are undermining world food production.”

These trends include—in addition to falling water tables—eroding soils and rising temperatures from increasing greenhouse gas emissions. Rising temperatures bring crop-shrinking heat waves, melting ice sheets, rising sea level, and shrinking mountain glaciers.

 With both the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets melting at an accelerating pace, sea level could rise by up to six feet during this century. Brown notes, “Such a rise would inundate much of the Mekong Delta, which produces half of the rice in Viet Nam, the world’s second-ranking rice exporter. Even a three-foot rise in sea level would cover half the riceland in Bangladesh, a country of 160 million people. And these are only two of Asia’s many rice-growing river deltas.”

“The world’s mountain glaciers have shrunk for 18 consecutive years. Many smaller glaciers have disappeared. Nowhere is the melting more alarming than in the Himalayas and on the Tibetan plateau where the ice melt from glaciers sustains not only the dry-season flow of the Indus, Ganges, Yangtze, and Yellow rivers but also the irrigation systems that depend on them. Without these glaciers, many Asian rivers would cease to flow during the dry season.”

The wheat and rice harvests of China and India would be directly affected. China is the world’s leading wheat producer. India is second. (The United States is third.) With rice, China and India totally dominate the world harvest. The projected melting of these glaciers if we stay with business as usual poses the most massive threat to food security the world has ever faced.

The number of hungry people, which was declining for several decades, bottomed out in the mid-1990s at 825 million. It then climbed to 915 million in 2008 and jumped to over 1 billion in 2009. With world food prices projected to continue rising, so too will the number of hungry people, leaving millions of families trying to survive on one meal per day.

“We know from studying earlier civilizations such as the Sumerians, Mayans, and many others,” says Brown, “that more often than not it was food shortages that led to their demise. It now appears that food may be the weak link in our early twenty-first century civilization as well.

“The world is entering a new food era, one marked by rising food prices, growing numbers of hungry people, and an emerging politics of food scarcity. As grain-exporting countries restrict or even ban exports to keep domestic food prices from spiraling out of control, importing countries are losing confidence in the market’s ability to supply their needs. In response, the more affluent ones such as Saudi Arabia, China, and South Korea are leasing and buying large tracts of land in developing countries on which to grow food for themselves.”

Among the countries in which large tracts of land are being acquired are Ethiopia and Sudan, both already heavily dependent on World Food Programme lifelines to stave off famine. In effect, the competition for land and water, in the form of land acquisitions, has crossed national boundaries, opening a new chapter in the history of food security.

Our early twenty-first century civilization is showing signs of stress as individual countries compete not only for scarce food but also for the land and water to produce it. People expect their governments to provide food security. Indeed, the inability to do so is one of the hallmarks of a failing state. Each year the list of failing states grows longer, leaving us with a disturbing question: How many failing states before our global civilization begins to unravel?

“Will we follow in the footsteps of the Sumerians and the Mayans or can we change course—and do it before time runs out?” asks Brown. “Can we move onto an economic path that is environmentally sustainable? We think we can. That is what Plan B 4.0 is about.”

Plan B aims to stabilize climate, stabilize population, eradicate poverty, and restore the economy’s natural support systems. It prescribes a worldwide cut in net carbon emissions of 80 percent by 2020, thus keeping atmospheric CO2 concentrations from exceeding 400 parts per million. “In setting this goal,” says Brown, “my colleagues and I did not ask what would be politically popular but rather what would it take to have a decent shot at saving the Greenland ice sheet and at least the larger glaciers in the mountains of Asia.”

Cutting carbon emissions will require both a worldwide revolution in energy efficiency and a shift from oil, coal, and gas to wind, solar, and geothermal energy. The energy efficiency revolution will transform everything from lighting to transportation. With lighting, for example, shifting from incandescents to compact fluorescent bulbs can reduce electricity use for lighting by 75 percent. But shifting from incandescents to the newer light-emitting diodes (LEDs) combined with light sensors can cut electricity use by more than 90 percent.

At least one of the new plug-in gas electric hybrids coming to market can get over 200 miles per gallon of gasoline. In the Plan B energy economy of 2020, most of the fleet will be plug-in hybrids and all-electric cars, and they will be running largely on wind-generated electricity for the gasoline equivalent of less than $1 per gallon.

The shift to renewable sources of energy is moving at a pace and on a scale we could not imagine even two years ago. Consider the state of Texas. The enormous number of wind projects under development, on top of the 9,000 megawatts of wind generating capacity in operation and under construction, will bring Texas to over 50,000 megawatts of wind generating capacity (think 50 coal-fired power plants) when all these wind farms are completed. This will more than satisfy the needs of the state’s 24 million residents.

Nationwide, new wind generating capacity in 2008 totaled 8,400 megawatts while new coal plants totaled only 1,400 megawatts. The annual growth in solar generating capacity will also soon overtake that of coal. The energy transition is under way.

The United States has led the world in each of the last four years in new wind generating capacity, having overtaken Germany in 2005. But this lead will be short-lived as China appears set to blow by the United States in new wind capacity added in 2009.

China, with its Wind Base program, is working on six wind farm mega-complexes with generating capacities that range from 10,000 to 30,000 megawatts, for a total of 105,000 megawatts. This is in addition to the hundreds of smaller wind farms built or planned.

Wind is not the only option. In July 2009, a consortium of European corporations led by Munich Re, and including Deutsche Bank, Siemens, and ABB plus an Algerian firm, announced a proposal to tap the massive solar thermal generating capacity in North Africa and the eastern Mediterranean. A German firm calculates that solar thermal power plants in North Africa could economically supply half of Europe’s electricity. Algeria, which has already completed its first solar thermal plant, has signed an agreement to supply Germany with solar-generated electricity. The Algerians note that they have enough harnessable solar energy in their desert to power the world economy. (No, this is not an error.)

“The soaring investment in wind, solar, and geothermal energy is being driven by the exciting realization that these renewables can last as long as the earth itself,” says Brown. “In contrast to investing in new oil fields where well yields begin to decline in a matter of decades, or in coal mines where the seams run out, these new energy sources can last forever.”

The combination of efficiency advances, the wholesale shift to renewable energy, and expansion of the earth’s tree cover outlined in Plan B would allow the world to cut net global carbon emissions 80 percent by 2020. In contrast to today’s global electricity sector, where coal supplies 40 percent of electricity, Plan B sees wind emerging as the centerpiece in the 2020 energy economy, supplying 40 percent of all electricity.

We are in a race between political tipping points and natural tipping points. Can we cut carbon emissions fast enough to save the Greenland ice sheet and avoid the resulting rise in sea level? Can we close coal-fired power plants fast enough to save at least the larger glaciers in the Himalayas and on the Tibetan Plateau? Can we stabilize population by lowering birth rates before nature takes over and halts population growth by raising death rates?

“Yes,” affirms Brown. “But it will take something close to a wartime mobilization, one similar to that of the United States in 1942 as it restructured its industrial economy in a matter of months. We used to talk about saving the planet, but it is civilization itself that is now at risk.

“Saving civilization is not a spectator sport. Each of us must push for rapid change. And we must be armed with a plan outlining the changes needed.

“It is decision time,” says Brown. “Like earlier civilizations that got into environmental trouble, we have to make a choice. We can stay with business as usual and watch our economy decline and our civilization unravel, or we can adopt Plan B and be the generation that mobilizes to save civilization. Our generation will make the decision, but it will affect life on earth for all generations to come.”

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.

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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

Their proposal is being unveiled at the World Ocean Conference 2009 in Manado, Indonesia, where leaders of six regional governments plus Australia and the United States are meeting to declare the largest-ever marine reserve in world history, the Coral Triangle Initiative.

“The catastrophic decline in the world’s coral reefs demands urgent management responses on two fronts,” say the researchers from the Australian Research Council’s Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies (CoECRS), The Australian Museum, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, James Cook, Perpignan and the United Nations Universities and The Nature Conservancy.

These are the “…reduction of immediate direct threats such as climate change, over-fishing and water pollution, and actions to protect or enhance the resilience of reef ecosystems in the face of existing and unavoidable future threats,” they say.

The key to saving threatened coral ecosystems is to maintain the links (connectivity) between reefs allowing larvae to flow between them and re-stock depleted areas, the team led by Pew Fellow Dr Laurence McCook of Australia’s Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority (GBRMPA) argues.

“Ecological connectivity is critically important to the resilience of coral reefs and other ecosystems to which they are linked,” says Dr McCook. “The ability of reefs to recover after disturbances or resist new stresses depends critically on the supply of larvae available to reseed populations of key organisms, such as fish and corals. For reefs to survive and prosper they must in turn be linked with other healthy reefs.”

The researchers propose six ‘rules of thumb’ for keeping coral ecosystems viable, based on the results of research carried out in the Bohol Sea in the Philippines, the Great Barrier Reef in Australia, and Kimbe Bay in Papua New Guinea.

These rules are:
(1) allow margins of error in extent and nature of protection, as insurance against unforeseen threats;
(2) spread risks among areas;
(3) aim to create networks of protected areas which (a) protect all the main types of reef creatures, processes and connections, known and unknown; (b) achieve sufficient protection for each type of reef habitat type, and for the whole region; (c) achieve maximum protection for all reef processes (d) contain several examples of particular reef types to spread the risk;
(4) protect whole reefs where possible; place buffer zones around core areas.
(5) allow for reef species to spread over a range of distances, especially 20-30 km; and
(6) use a range of conservation approaches, including marine protected areas.

The rules are designed to operate in a range of situations, including where detailed scientific knowledge of local coral reefs and their species is sparse, the team says in a review article in the journal Coral Reefs. 

Protecting reef connectivity and allowing reef species to freely recharge depleted areas is vital to ensuring that coral reefs remain resilient in the face of mounting human and climatic pressures.  To ignore the protection of connectivity until sufficient scientific data was available on all reefs would mean allowing reefs to continue to degrade for many decades to come. 

“The risks of inadequate management arising from ignoring connectivity are greater than those associated with any scientific uncertainty,” the researchers say.

Their review paper Management under uncertainty: guidelines for incorporating connectivity into the protection of coral reefs appears in the latest issue of the journal Coral Reefs. Its authors are L. J. McCook, G. R. Almany, M. L. Berumen, J. C. Day, A. L. Green, G. P. Jones, J. M. Leis, S. Planes, G. R. Russ, P. F. Sale and S. R. Thorrold. The work was funded jointly by the World Bank Coral Reef Targeted Research program and the ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies.

“The Coral Triangle Initiative is one of the most important marine conservation measures ever undertaken anywhere in the world and the first to span several countries.  It involves the six nations of Indonesia, the Philippines, Malaysia, Papua New Guinea, East Timor and the Solomon islands, and is as much about nation building and food security as it is about reef conservation” says Professor Terry Hughes, Director of the CoECRS, attending the Coral Triangle meeting today in Manado.

The ‘rules of thumb’ proposed in the research paper were an example of the sort of science being carried out across the region which will assist the Coral Triangle Initiative to achieve its goals, he said.

More information:
Dr. Laurence McCook, CoECRS and GBRMPA, +61 (0)7 4750 0787 or 0408 804765
l.mccook@gbrmpa.gov.au
Professor Terry Hughes, CoECRS and JCU, +61 (0)400 720 164
Jenny Lappin, CoECRS, 07 4781 4222
Jim O’Brien, James Cook University Media Office, 07 4781 4822 or 0418 892449
http://www.coralcoe.org.au/
http://www.woc2009.org/

Concentrations of carbon dioxide are increasing rapidly in the Earth’s atmosphere, primarily because of human activities. About one third of the carbon dioxide that humans produce by burning fossil fuels is being absorbed by the world’s oceans, gradually causing seawater to become more acidic.

However, such “ocean acidification” is not the only way that carbon dioxide can harm marine animals. In a “Perspective” published today in the journal Science, Peter Brewer and Edward Peltzer combine published data on rising levels of carbon dioxide and declining levels of oxygen in the ocean in a set of new and thermodynamically rigorous calculations. They show that increases in carbon dioxide can make marine animals more susceptible to low concentrations of oxygen, and thus exacerbate the effects of low-oxygen “dead zones” in the ocean.

Brewer and Peltzer’s calculations also show that the partial pressure of dissolved carbon dioxide gas (pCO₂) in low-oxygen zones will rise much higher than previously thought. This could have significant consequences for marine life in these zones.

For over a decade, Brewer and Peltzer have been working with marine biologists to study the effects of carbon dioxide on marine organisms. High concentrations of carbon dioxide make it harder for marine animals to respire (to extract oxygen from seawater). This, in turn, makes it harder for these animals to find food, avoid predators, and reproduce. Low concentrations of oxygen can have similar effects.

Currently, deep-sea life is threatened by a combination of increasing carbon dioxide and decreasing oxygen concentrations. The amount of dissolved carbon dioxide is increasing because the oceans are taking up more and more carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. At the same time, ocean surface waters are warming and becoming more stable, which allows less oxygen to be carried from the surface down into the depths.

In trying to quantify the impacts of this “double whammy” on marine organisms, Brewer and Peltzer came up with the concept of a “respiration index.” This index is based on the ratio of oxygen and carbon dioxide gas in a given sample of seawater. The lower the respiration index, the harder it is for marine animals to respire.

Brewer provides the following analogy, “Animals facing declining oxygen levels and rising CO₂ levels will suffer in much the same way that humans in a damaged submarine would suffer, once the concentrations of these gasses reach critical levels. Our work helps define those critical levels for marine animals, and will enable the emerging risk to be quantified and mapped.”

In the past, marine biologists have defined “dead zones” based solely on low concentrations of dissolved oxygen. Brewer and Peltzer hope that their respiration index will provide a more precise and quantitative way for oceanographers to identify such areas. Tracking changes in the respiration index could also help marine biologists understand and predict which ocean waters are at risk of becoming dead zones in the future.

To estimate such effects in the open ocean, the MBARI researchers calculated the respiration index at various ocean depths, for several different forecasted concentrations of atmospheric carbon dioxide. They found that the most severe effects would take place in what are known as “oxygen minimum zones.” These are depths, typically 300 to 1,000 meters below the surface, where oxygen concentrations are already quite low in many parts of the world’s oceans.

Previously, marine biologists have assumed that the effects of increasing carbon dioxide in the oceans would be greatest at the sea surface, where most of the gas enters the ocean. Such studies have predicted a doubling of pCO₂ (from about 280 to 560 micro-atmospheres) at the sea surface over the next 100 years. Brewer and Peltzer’s calculations suggest that the partial pressure of carbon dioxide will increase even faster in the deep oxygen minimum zones, with pCO₂ increasing by 2.5 times, from 1,000 to about 2,500 micro-atmospheres.

Previous studies have indicated that such oxygen minimum zones may expand over the next century. Brewer and Peltzer’s research suggests that the effects of this expansion will be even more severe than previously forecast.

According to coauthor Peltzer, “The bottom line is that we think it’s important to look at both oxygen and carbon dioxide in the oceans, rather than just one or the other.” The impact of these chemical changes may be minimal in well-oxygenated ocean areas, but as the authors point out in their paper, “We may anticipate a very large expansion of the oceanic dead zones.”

Reposted from the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI)

Research paper:

P. G. Brewer, E. T. Peltzer. Limits to marine life. Science. 2009. Vol 324, Issue 5925. April 17, 2009

Related links:

• MBARI research on The Emerging Science of a High CO₂ / Low pH Ocean
• MBARI research on the ocean chemistry of greenhouse gasses
• Peter Brewer’s research web pages
• Edward Peltzer’s research web pages
• Web pages describing MBARI research on carbon dioxide in the ocean

Rivers in some of the world’s most populous regions are losing water, according to a comprehensive study of global stream flows.

The research, led by scientists at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder, Colo., suggests that the reduced flows in many cases are associated with climate change, and could potentially threaten future supplies of food and water.

The results will be published May 15 in the American Meteorological Society’s Journal of Climate. The research was supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF), NCAR’s sponsor.

“The distribution of the world’s fresh water, already an important topic,” says Cliff Jacobs of NSF’s Division of Atmospheric Sciences, “will occupy front and center stage for years to come in developing adaptation strategies to a changing climate.”

The scientists, who examined stream flows from 1948 to 2004, found significant changes in about one-third of the world’s largest rivers. Of those, rivers with decreased flow outnumbered those with increased flow by a ratio of about 2.5 to 1.

Several of the rivers channeling less water serve large populations, including the Yellow River in northern China, the Ganges in India, the Niger in West Africa and the Colorado in the southwestern United States.

In contrast, the scientists reported greater stream flows over sparsely populated areas near the Arctic Ocean, where snow and ice are rapidly melting.

“Reduced runoff is increasing the pressure on freshwater resources in much of the world, especially with more demand for water as population increases,” says NCAR scientist Aiguo Dai, the lead author of the journal paper. “Freshwater being a vital resource, the downward trends are a great concern.”

Many factors may affect river discharge, including dams and the diversion of water for agriculture and industry.

The researchers found, however, that the reduced flows in many cases appear to be related to global climate change, which is altering precipitation patterns and increasing the rate of evaporation.

The results are consistent with previous research by Dai and others showing widespread drying and increased drought over many land areas.

The study raises wider ecological and climate concerns.

Discharge from the world’s great rivers results in deposits of dissolved nutrients and minerals into the oceans. The freshwater flow also affects global ocean circulation patterns, which are driven by changes in salinity and temperature, and which play a vital role in regulating the world’s climate.

Although the recent changes in freshwater discharge are relatively small and may only have impacts around major river mouths, Dai said the freshwater balance in the global oceans and over land needs to be monitored for long-term changes.

Scientists have been uncertain about the impacts of global warming on the world’s major rivers. Studies with computer models show that many of the rivers outside the Arctic could lose water because of decreased precipitation in the mid- and lower latitudes, and an increase in evaporation caused by higher temperatures.

Earlier, less comprehensive analyses of major rivers had indicated, however, that global stream flow was increasing.

Dai and his co-authors analyzed the flows of 925 of the planet’s largest rivers, combining actual measurements with computer-based stream flow models to fill in data gaps.

The rivers in the study drain water from every major landmass except Antarctica and Greenland and account for 73 percent of the world’s total stream flow.

Overall, the study found that, from 1948 to 2004, annual freshwater discharge into the Pacific Ocean fell by about 6 percent, or 526 cubic kilometers–approximately the same volume of water that flows out of the Mississippi River each year.

The annual flow into the Indian Ocean dropped by about 3 percent, or 140 cubic kilometers. In contrast, annual river discharge into the Arctic Ocean rose about 10 percent, or 460 cubic kilometers.

In the United States, the Columbia River’s flow declined by about 14 percent during the 1948-2004 study period, largely because of reduced precipitation and higher water usage in the West.

The Mississippi River, however, has increased by 22 percent over the same period because of greater precipitation across the Midwest since 1948.

Some rivers, such as the Brahmaputra in South Asia and the Yangtze in China, have shown stable or increasing flows. But they could lose volume in future decades with the gradual disappearance of the Himalayan glaciers feeding them, the scientists say.

“As climate change inevitably continues in coming decades, we are likely to see greater impacts on many rivers and the water resources that society has come to rely on,” says NCAR scientist Kevin Trenberth, a co-author of the paper.

Reposted from the National Science Foundation.

“Our tests strongly indicate that the purity of bottled water cannot be trusted,” the study authors write. “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.”

Researchers conducted comprehensive tests at the renowned University of Iowa Hygienic Laboratory on 10 leading bottled water brands, purchased from retailers in nine states and the District of Columbia (D.C.). A total of 38 toxic pollutants were detected altogether, with each brand containing an average of eight. Chemicals detected included fluoride, byproducts of chlorine-based disinfection, caffeine, pharmaceutical drugs, fertilizer residue, plasticizers, solvents, fuel propellants, arsenic, other minerals and heavy metals, and radioactive isotopes. Four brands also contained bacteria.

More than a third of the chemicals detected are not regulated by the bottled water industry. Voluntary industry standards regulate the following two-thirds, but water purchased in five states and in D.C. contained levels of some carcinogens in excess of even the industry’s standards.

“In other words, this bottled water was chemically indistinguishable from tap water,” the authors write. “But with promotional campaigns saturated with images of mountain springs, and prices 1,900 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.”

Further analysis at the University of Missouri found that when applied to breast cancer cells, one brand of water led to a 78 percent increase in proliferation rate compared with untreated cells. The addition of estrogen-blocking chemicals noticeably reduced this effect.

“Though this result is considered a modest effect relative to the potency of some other industrial chemicals … the sheer volume of bottled water people consume elevates the health significance of the finding,” the researchers write.

The researchers were unable to determine if estrogen-mimics in the water came from the water itself or had leached out of the plastic bottle.

In accordance with standard scientific practice, the report does not name the brands tested. Exceptions were made for the brands Sam’s Choice (Wal-Mart) and Acadia (Giant), however, which contained toxin levels high enough to violate California law.

Samples of both brands tested positive for trihalomethanes, which have been linked to reproductive disorders and cancer. The chemicals form when water disinfectants react with pollution. The water also contained bromodichloromethane, a carcinogen regulated under California law. In response, EWG is preparing a lawsuit against Wal-Mart to require that Sam’s Choice water contain the legally required notice: “WARNING: This product contains a chemical known to the State of California to cause cancer.”

Acadia-brand water is not sold in California.

Bottled water purchased from these brands also exceeded the bottled water industry’s voluntary standards.

“The bottled water industry boasts that its internal regulations are stricter than the FDA bottled water regulations,” the researchers write, “but voluntary standards that companies are failing to meet are of little use.”

Reprinted from NaturalNews.

The impact on reefs is a consequence of both ocean acidification caused by the absorption of carbon dioxide into seawater and rising water temperatures. Previous studies have shown that rising carbon dioxide will slow coral growth, but this is the first study to show that coral reefs can be expected to start dissolving just about everywhere in just a few decades, unless carbon dioxide emissions are cut deeply and soon.

“Globally, each second, we dump over 1000 tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere and, each second, about 300 tons of that carbon dioxide is going into the oceans,” said co-author Ken Caldeira of the Carnegie Institution’s Department of Global Ecology, testifying to the U.S. House of Representatives Subcommittee on Insular Affairs, Oceans and Wildlife of the Committee on Natural Resources on February 25, 2009. “We can say with a high degree of certainty that all of this CO2 will make the oceans more acidic – that is simple chemistry taught to freshman college students.”

The study was designed determine the impact of this acidification on coral reefs. The research team, consisting of Jacob Silverman, Caldeira, and Long Cao of the Carnegie Institution as well as Boaz Lazar and Jonathan Erez from The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, used field data from coral reefs to determine the effects of temperature and water chemistry on coral calcification rates. Armed with this information, they plugged the data into a computer model that calculated global seawater temperature and chemistry at different atmospheric levels of CO2 ranging from the pre-industrial value of 280 ppm (parts per million) to 750 ppm. The current atmospheric concentration is over 380 ppm, and is rapidly rising due to human-caused emissions, primarily through the burning of fossil fuels.

Based on the model results for more than 9,000 reef locations, the researchers determined that at the highest concentration studied, 750 ppm, acidification of seawater would reduce calcification rates of three quarters of the world’s reefs to less than 20% of pre-industrial rates. Field studies suggest that at such low rates, coral growth would not be able to keep up with dissolution and other natural as well as manmade destructive processes attacking reefs.

Prospects for reefs are even gloomier when the effects of coral bleaching are included in the model. Coral bleaching refers to the loss of symbiotic algae that are essential for healthy growth of coral colonies. Bleaching is already a widespread problem, and high temperatures are among the factors known to promote bleaching. According to their model the researchers calculated that under present conditions 30% of reefs have already undergone bleaching and that at CO2 levels of 560 ppm (twice pre-industrial levels) the combined effects of acidification and bleaching will reduce the calcification rates of all the world’s reefs by 80% or more. This lowered calcification rate will render all reefs vulnerable to dissolution, without even considering other threats to reefs, such as pollution.

“Our fossil-fueled lifestyle is killing off coral reefs,” says Caldeira. “If we don’t change our ways soon, in the next few decades we will destroy what took millions of years to create.”

“Coral reefs may be the canary in the coal mine,” he adds. “Other major pieces of our planet may be similarly threatened because we are using the atmosphere and oceans as dumps for our CO2 pollution. We can save the reefs if we decide to treat our planet with the care it deserves. We need to power our economy with technologies that do not dump carbon dioxide into the atmosphere or oceans.”

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Link to House Subcommittee testimony: http://resourcescommittee.house.gov/index.php?option=com_jcalpro&Itemid=51&extmode=view&extid=224

The Carnegie Institution (http://www.ciw.edu/) has been a pioneering force in basic scientific research since 1902. It is a private, nonprofit organization with six research departments throughout the U.S. Carnegie scientists are leaders in plant biology, developmental biology, astronomy, materials science, global ecology, and Earth and planetary science. The Department of Global Ecology, located in Stanford, California, was established in 2002 to help build the scientific foundations for a sustainable future. Its scientists conduct basic research on a wide range of large-scale environmental issues, including climate change, ocean acidification, biological invasions, and changes in biodiversity.

Reprinted from Carnegie Institution.