A gentle reminder.
All of the reviews should be your own work.
Thank you.
Sunday, March 28, 2010
THE ECOLOGY OF DESTRUCTION
I would like to begin my analysis of what I am calling here “the ecology of destruction” by referring to Gillo Pontecorvo’s 1969 film Burn!.1 Pontecorvo’s epic film can be seen as a political and ecological allegory intended for our time. It is set in the early nineteenth century on an imaginary Caribbean island called “Burn.” Burn is a Portuguese slave colony with a sugar production monoculture dependent on the export of sugar as a cash crop to the world economy. In the opening scene we are informed that the island got its name from the fact that the only way that the original Portuguese colonizers were able to vanquish the indigenous population was by setting fire to the entire island and killing everyone on it, after which slaves were imported from Africa to cut the newly planted sugar cane.
Sir William Walker (played by Marlon Brando) is a nineteenth-century British agent sent to overthrow the Portuguese rulers of the island. He instigates a revolt amongst the numerous black slaves, and at the same time arranges an uprising by the small white colonial planter class seeking independence from the Portuguese crown. The goal is to use the slave revolt to defeat Portugal, but to turn actual rule of the island over to the white planter class, which will then serve as a comprador class subservient to British imperialists.
Walker succeeds brilliantly at his task, convincing the victorious army of former slaves and their leader José Dolores to lay down their arms after the Portuguese have been defeated. The result is a neocolony dominated by the white planters—but one in which the de facto rulers, in accordance with the laws of international free trade, are the British sugar companies. Walker then departs to carry out other intelligence tasks for the British admiralty—this time in a place called Indochina.
When the film resumes in 1848 ten years have passed. A revolution has again broken out on Burn led by José Dolores. Sir William Walker is brought back from England as a military advisor, but this time as an employee of the Antilles Royal Sugar Company, authorized by Her Majesty’s government. His task is to defeat this new rebellion of the former slaves. He is told by the oligarchy ruling the island that this should not be difficult since only ten years have passed and the situation is the same. He replies that the situation may be the same but the problem is different. In words that seem to echo Karl Marx he declares: “Very often between one historical period and another, ten years suddenly might be enough to reveal the contradictions of a whole century.”
British troops are brought in to fight the insurgents, who are waging a relentless guerrilla war. To defeat them Walker orders the burning down of all the plantations on the island. When the local representative of the British sugar interests objects, Walker explains: “That is the logic of profit....One builds to make money and to go on making it or to make more sometimes it is necessary to destroy.” This, he reminds his interlocutor, is how the island Burn got its name. Nature on the island has to be destroyed so that labor can be exploited on it for hundreds of additional years.
My intention here is not of course to recount Pontecorvo’s entire extraordinary film, but to draw out some important principles from this allegory that will help us to understand capitalism’s relation to nature. Joseph Schumpeter once famously praised capitalism for its “creative destruction.”2 But this might be better seen as the system’s destructive creativity. Capital’s endless pursuit of new outlets for class-based accumulation requires for its continuation the destruction of both pre-existing natural conditions and previous social relations. Class exploitation, imperialism, war, and ecological devastation are not mere unrelated accidents of history but interrelated, intrinsic features of capitalist development. There has always been the danger, moreover, that this destructive creativity would turn into what István Mészáros has called the “destructive uncontrollability” that is capital’s ultimate destiny. The destruction built into the logic of profit would then take over and predominate, undermining not only the conditions of production but also those of life itself. Today it is clear that such destructive uncontrollability has come to characterize the entire capitalist world economy, encompassing the planet as a whole.3
The Earth Summits: 1992 and 2002
It is a characteristic of our age that global ecological devastation seems to overwhelm all other problems, threatening the survivability of life on earth as we know it. How this is related to social causes and what social solutions might be offered in response have thus become the most pressing questions facing humanity. The world has so far convened two major earth summits: in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil in 1992 and Johannesburg, South Africa in 2002. These summits took place a mere ten years apart. Yet, they can be seen as lying in the dividing line separating one historical period from another, revealing the contradictions of an entire century—the twenty-first.
The 1992 Earth Summit in Rio, organized by the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development, represented the boundless hope that humanity could come together to solve its mounting global ecological problems. The late 1980s and early 1990s were a period in which the global ecological crisis penetrated the public consciousness. Suddenly there were grave concerns about the destruction of the ozone layer, global warming, and the rising rate of species extinctions resulting from planetary destruction of ecosystems. In June 1988 James Hansen, Director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, testified before the U.S. Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, presenting evidence of global warming due to the emission of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. That same year the United Nations set up a new international organization, the Inter-Governmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), to address global warming.
A new ideology of world unity pervaded the Rio summit. The Gulf War of 1991 and the demise of the Soviet Union later in the same year had given rise to the then dominant rhetoric of a “new world order” and of “the end of history.” The world, it was said, was now one. The recent passage of the Montreal Protocol, placing restrictions on the production of ozone-depleting chemicals, seemed to confirm that the world’s economically dominant countries could act in unison in response to global environmental threats. The site chosen for the Earth Summit, Brazil, home to the Amazon, was meant to symbolize the planetary goal of saving the world’s biodiversity. The summit’s principal document, known as Agenda 21, was intended to launch a new age of sustainable development for the twenty-first century.
The mood of the second earth summit, the World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg, could not have been more different than the first. Rio’s hope had given way to Johannesburg’s dismay. Rather than improving over the decade that had elapsed, the world environment had experienced accelerated decline. The planet was approaching catastrophic conditions, not just with respect to global warming, but in a host of other areas. Sustainable development had turned out to be about sustaining capital accumulation at virtually any ecological cost. All the rhetoric ten years earlier of a “new world order” and the “end of history”—it was now clear to many of the environmentalists attending the Johannesburg summit—had simply disguised the fact that the real nemesis of the global environment was the capitalist world economy.
The site of the Johannesburg summit had been chosen partly to symbolize the end of apartheid, and hence the advent of significant world social progress. Yet, critics at the second earth summit raised the issue of global ecological apartheid, emphasizing the destruction wrought on the environment by the rich nations of the North in ways that disproportionately affected the global South. The ecological imperialism of the center of the capitalist world economy was symbolized by Washington’s refusal to ratify the Kyoto Protocol on limiting greenhouse gas emissions generating global warming. Significantly, U.S. President George W. Bush declined to attend the earth summit. Instead, at the very moment that debates were taking place in Johannesburg on the future of the world ecology, the Bush administration seized the world’s stage by threatening a war on Iraq, ostensibly over weapons of mass destruction—though to the world’s environmentalists assembled in Johannesburg it was clear even then that the real issue was oil.4
In fact, a new historical period had emerged in the ten years since the Rio summit. Economically, the world had witnessed what Paul Sweezy in 1994 called “the triumph of financial capitalism” with the transformation of monopoly capital into what might be called global monopoly-finance capital.5 By the end of the twentieth century capitalism had evolved into a system that was if anything more geared to rapacious accumulation than ever before, relatively independent from its local and national roots. Global financial expansion was occurring on top of a world economy that was stagnating at the level of production, creating a more unstable and more viciously inegalitarian order, dominated by neoliberal economics and financial bubbles. Declining U.S. hegemony in the world system, coupled with the demise of the Soviet Union, induced repeated and increasingly naked U.S. attempts to restore its economic and political power by military means.
Meanwhile, global warming and other crucial environmental problems had crossed critical thresholds. The question was no longer whether ecological and social catastrophes awaited but how great these would be. For those (including myself) in Johannesburg in 2002, watching the U.S. president prepare for war in the petroleum-rich Persian Gulf while the planet was heating up from the burning of fossil fuels, the whole world seemed on fire.
The Destruction of the Planet
In the almost five years that have elapsed since the second earth summit it has become increasingly difficult to separate the class and imperial war inherent to capitalism from war on the planet itself. At a time when the United States is battling for imperial control of the richest oil region on earth, the ecology of the planet is experiencing rapid deterioration, marked most dramatically by global warming. Meanwhile, neoliberal economic restructuring emanating from the new regime of monopoly-finance capital is not only undermining the economic welfare of much of humanity, but in some regions is removing such basic ecological conditions of human existence as access to clean air, drinkable water, and adequate food. Ecologists who once warned of the possibility of future apocalypse now insist that global disaster is on our doorstep.
Bill McKibben, author of The End of Nature, declared in his article “The Debate is Over” in the November 17, 2005, issue of Rolling Stone magazine that we are now entering the “Oh Shit” era of global warming. At first, he wrote, there was the “I wonder what will happen?” era. Then there was the “Can this really be true?” era. Now we are in the Oh Shit era. We now know that it is too late to avert global disaster entirely. All we can do is limit its scope and intensity. Much of the uncertainty has to do with the fact that “the world...has some trapdoors—mechanisms that don’t work in straightforward fashion, but instead trigger a nasty chain reaction.”6
In his book, The Revenge of Gaia, influential scientist James Lovelock, best known as the originator of the Gaia hypothesis, has issued a grim assessment of the earth’s prospects based on such sudden chain reactions.7 Voicing the concerns of numerous scientists, Lovelock highlights a number of positive feedback mechanisms that could—and in his view almost certainly will—amplify the earth warming tendency. The destructive effect of increasing global temperatures on ocean algae and tropical forests (on top of the direct removal of these forests) will, it is feared, reduce the capacity of the oceans and forests to absorb carbon dioxide, raising the global temperature still further. The freeing up and release into the atmosphere of enormous quantities of methane (a greenhouse gas twenty-four times as potent as carbon dioxide) as the permafrost of the arctic tundra thaws due to global warming, constitutes another such vicious spiral. Just as ominous, the reduction of the earth’s reflectivity as melting white ice at the poles is replaced with blue seawater is threatening to ratchet-up global temperatures.8
In Lovelock’s cataclysmic view, the earth has probably already passed the point of no return and temperatures are destined to rise eventually as much as 8° C (14° F) in temperate regions. The human species will survive in some form, he assures us. Nevertheless he points to “an imminent shift in our climate towards one that could easily be described as Hell: so hot, so deadly that only a handful of the teeming billions now alive will survive.”9 He offers as the sole means of partial salvation a massive technical fix: a global program to expand nuclear power facilities throughout the earth as a limited substitute to the carbon-dioxide emitting fossil fuel economy. The thought that such a Faustian bargain would pave its own path to hell seems scarcely to have crossed his mind.
Lovelock’s fears are not easily dismissed. James Hansen, who did so much to bring the issue of global warming to world attention, has recently issued his own warning. In an article entitled “The Threat to the Planet” (New York Review of Books, July 13, 2006), Hansen points out that animal and plant species are migrating throughout the earth in response to global warming—though not fast enough in relation to changes in their environments—and that alpine species are being “pushed off the planet.” We are facing, he contends, the possibility of mass extinctions associated with increasing global temperature comparable to earlier periods in the earth’s history in which 50 to 90 percent of living species were lost.
The greatest immediate threat to humanity from climate change, Hansen argues, is associated with the destabilization of the ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica. A little more than 1° C (1.8° F) separates the climate of today from the warmest interglacial periods in the last half million years when the sea level was as much as sixteen feet higher. Further, increases in temperature this century by around 2.8° C (5° F) under business as usual could lead to a long term rise in sea level by as much as eighty feet, judging by what happened the last time the earth’s temperature rose this high—three million years ago. “We have,” Hansen says, “at most ten years—not ten years to decide upon action but ten years to alter fundamentally the trajectory of greenhouse gas emissions”—if we are to prevent such disastrous outcomes from becoming inevitable. One crucial decade, in other words, separates us from irreversible changes that could produce a very different world. The contradictions of the entire Holocene—the geological epoch in which human civilization has developed—are suddenly being revealed in our time.10
In the Oh shit era, the debate, McKibben says, is over. There is no longer any doubt that global warming represents a crisis of earth-shaking proportions. Yet, it is absolutely essential to understand that this is only one part of what we call the environmental crisis. The global ecological threat as a whole is made up of a large number of interrelated crises and problems that are confronting us simultaneously. In my 1994 book, The Vulnerable Planet, I started out with a brief litany of some of these, to which others might now be added:
Overpopulation, destruction of the ozone layer, global warming, extinction of species, loss of genetic diversity, acid rain, nuclear contamination, tropical deforestation, the elimination of climax forests, wetland destruction, soil erosion, desertification, floods, famine, the despoliation of lakes, streams, and rivers, the drawing down and contamination of ground water, the pollution of coastal waters and estuaries, the destruction of coral reefs, oil spills, overfishing, expanding landfills, toxic wastes, the poisonous effects of insecticides and herbicides, exposure to hazards on the job, urban congestion, and the depletion of nonrenewable resources.11
The point is that not just global warming but many of these other problems as well can each be seen as constituting a global ecological crisis. Today every major ecosystem on the earth is in decline. Issues of environmental justice are becoming more prominent and pressing everywhere we turn. Underlying this is the fact that the class/imperial war that defines capitalism as a world system, and that governs its system of accumulation, is a juggernaut that knows no limits. In this deadly conflict the natural world is seen as a mere instrument of world social domination. Hence, capital by its very logic imposes what is in effect a scorched earth strategy. The planetary ecological crisis is increasingly all-encompassing, a product of the destructive uncontrollability of a rapidly globalizing capitalist economy, which knows no law other than its own drive to exponential expansion.
Transcending Business as Usual
Most climate scientists, including Lovelock and Hansen, follow the IPCC in basing their main projections of global warming on a socioecnomic scenario described as “business as usual.” The dire trends indicated are predicated on our fundamental economic and technological developments and our basic relation to nature remaining the same. The question we need to ask then is what actually is business as usual? What can be changed and how fast? With time running out the implication is that it is necessary to alter business as usual in radical ways in order to stave off or lessen catastrophe.
Yet, the dominant solutions—those associated with the dominant ideology, i.e., the ideology of the dominant class—emphasize minimal changes in business as usual that will somehow get us off the hook. After being directed to the growing planetary threats of global warming and species extinction we are told that the answer is better gas mileage and better emissions standards, the introduction of hydrogen-powered cars, the capture and sequestration of carbon dioxide emitted in the atmosphere, improved conservation, and voluntary cutbacks in consumption. Environmental political scientists specialize in the construction of new environmental policy regimes, embodying state and market regulations. Environmental economists talk of tradable pollution permits and the incorporation of all environmental factors into the market to ensure their efficient use. Some environmental sociologists (my own field) speak of ecological modernization: a whole panoply of green taxes, green regulations, and new green technologies, even the greening of capitalism itself. Futurists describe a new technological world in which the weight of nations on the earth is miraculously lifted as a result of digital “dematerialization” of the economy. In all of these views, however, there is one constant: the fundamental character of business as usual is hardly changed at all.
Indeed, what all such analyses intentionally avoid is the fact that business as usual in our society in any fundamental sense means the capitalist economy—an economy run on the logic of profit and accumulation. Moreover, there is little acknowledgement or even appreciation of the fact that the Hobbesian war of all against all that characterizes capitalism requires for its fulfillment a universal war on nature. In this sense new technology cannot solve the problem since it is inevitably used to further the class war and to increase the scale of the economy, and thus the degradation of the environment. Whenever production dies down or social resistance imposes barriers on the expansion of capital the answer is always to find new ways to exploit/degrade nature more intensively. To quote Pontecorvo’s Burn!, “that is the logic of profit....One builds to make money and to go on making it or to make more sometimes it is necessary to destroy.”
Ironically, this destructive relation of capitalism to the environment was probably understood better in the nineteenth century—at a time when social analysts were acutely aware of the issue of revolutionary changes taking place in the mode of production and how this was transforming the human relation to nature. As a result, environmental sociologists of the more radical stamp in the United States, where the contradiction between economy and ecology nowadays is especially acute, draw heavily on three interrelated ideas derived from Marx and the critique of capitalist political economy dating back to the nineteenth century: (1) the treadmill of production, (2) the second contradiction of capitalism, and (3) the metabolic rift.
The first of these, the treadmill of production, describes capitalism as an unstoppable, accelerating treadmill that constantly increases the scale of the throughput of energy and raw materials as part of its quest for profit and accumulation, thereby pressing on the earth’s absorptive capacity. “Accumulate, Accumulate!” Marx wrote, “that is Moses and the prophets!” for capital.12
The second of these notions, the second contradiction of capitalism, is the idea that capitalism, in addition to its primary economic contradiction stemming from class inequalities in production and distribution, also undermines the human and natural conditions (i.e, environmental conditions) of production on which its economic advancement ultimately rests. For example, by systematically removing forests we lay the grounds for increasing scarcities in this area—the more so to the extent that globalization makes this contradiction universal. This heightens the overall cost of economic development and creates an economic crisis for capitalism based on supply-side constraints on production.13
The third notion, the metabolic rift, suggests that the logic of capital accumulation inexorably creates a rift in the metabolism between society and nature, severing basic processes of natural reproduction. This raises the issue of the ecological sustainability—not simply in relation to the scale of the economy, but also even more importantly in the form and intensity of the interaction between nature and society under capitalism.14
I shall concentrate on the third of these notions, the metabolic rift, since this is the most complex of these three socio-ecological concepts, and the one that has been the focus of my own research in this area, particularly in my book Marx’s Ecology. Marx was greatly influenced by the work of the leading agricultural chemist of his time, Justus von Liebig. Liebig had developed an analysis of the ecological contradictions of industrialized capitalist agriculture. He argued that such industrialized agriculture, as present in its most developed form in England in the nineteenth century, was a robbery system, depleting the soil. Food and fiber were transported hundreds—even in some cases thousands—of miles from the country to the city. This meant that essential soil nutrients, such as nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium, were transported as well. Rather than being returned to the soil these essential nutrients ended up polluting the cities, for example, in the degradation of the Thames in London. The natural conditions for the reproduction of the soil were thus destroyed.
To compensate for the resulting decline in soil fertility the British raided the Napoleonic battlefields and the catacombs of Europe for bones with which to fertilize the soil of the English countryside. They also resorted to the importation of guano on a vast scale from the islands off the coast of Peru, followed by the importation of Chilean nitrates (after the War of the Pacific in which Chile seized parts of Peru and Bolivia rich in guano and nitrates). The United States sent out ships throughout the oceans searching for guano, and ended up seizing ninety-four islands, rocks, and keys between the passage of the 1856 Guano Islands Act and 1903, sixty-six of which were officially recognized as U.S. appurtenances and nine of which remain U.S. possessions today.15 This reflected a great crisis of capitalist agriculture in the nineteenth century that was only solved in part with the development of synthetic fertilizer nitrogen early in the twentieth century—and which led eventually to the overuse of fertilizer nitrogen, itself a major environmental problem.
In reflecting on this crisis of capitalist agriculture, Marx adopted the concept of metabolism, which had been introduced by nineteenth-century biologists and chemists, including Liebig, and applied it to socio-ecological relations. All life is based on metabolic processes between organisms and their environment. Organisms carry out an exchange of energy and matter with their environment, which are integrated with their own internal life processes. It is not a stretch to think of the nest of a bird as part of the bird’s metabolic process. Marx explicitly defined the labor process as the “metabolic interaction between man and nature.” In terms of the ecological problem he spoke of “an irreparable rift in the interdependent process of social metabolism,” whereby the conditions for the necessary reproduction of the soil were continually severed, breaking the metabolic cycle. “Capitalist production,” he wrote, “therefore only develops the techniques and the degree of combination of the social process of production by simultaneously undermining the original sources of all wealth—the soil and the worker.”
Marx saw this rift not simply in national terms but as related to imperialism as well. “England,” he wrote, “has indirectly exported the soil of Ireland, without even allowing its cultivators the means for replacing the constituents of the exhausted soil.”
This principle of metabolic rift obviously has a very wide application and has in fact been applied by environmental sociologists in recent years to problems such as global warming and the ecological degradation of the world’s oceans.16 What is seldom recognized, however, is that Marx went immediately from a conception of the metabolic rift to the necessity of metabolic restoration, arguing that “by destroying the circumstances surrounding that metabolism, which originated in a merely natural and spontaneous fashion, it [capitalist production] compels its systematic restoration as a regulative law of social reproduction.” The reality of the metabolic rift pointed to the necessity of the restoration of nature, through sustainable production.
It is this dialectical understanding of the socio-ecological problem that led Marx to what is perhaps the most radical conception of socio-ecological sustainability ever developed. Thus he wrote in Capital:
From the standpoint of a higher socio-economic formation, the private property of individuals in the earth will appear just as absurd as the private property of one man in other men. Even an entire society, a nation, or all simultaneously existing societies taken together, are not owners of the earth. They are simply its possessors, its beneficiaries, and have to bequeath it in an improved state to succeeding generations, as boni patres familias [good heads of the household].
For Marx, in other words, the present relation of human beings to the earth under private accumulation could be compared to slavery. Just as “private property of one man in other men” is no longer deemed acceptable, so private ownership of the earth/nature by human beings (even whole countries) must be transcended. The human relation to nature must be regulated so to guarantee its existence “in an improved state to succeeding generations.” His reference to the notion of “good heads of the household” hearkened back to the ancient Greek notion of household or oikos from which we get both “economy” (from oikonomia, or household management) and “ecology “(from oikologia or household study). Marx pointed to the necessity of a more radical, sustainable relation of human beings to production in accord with what we would now view as ecological rather than merely economic notions. “Freedom, in this sphere,” the realm of natural necessity, he insisted, “can consist only in this, that socialized man, the associated producers, govern the human metabolism with nature in a rational way, bringing it under their collective control...accomplishing it with the least expenditure of energy.”17
The destructive uncontrollability of capitalism, emanating from its dual character as a system of class/imperial exploitation and of enslaver/destroyer of the earth itself, was thus well understood by Marx. With regard to the film, Burn!, we saw how the exploitation of human beings was tied to the destruction of the earth. Relations of domination changed but the answer remained the same: to burn the island as a means of winning the class/imperial war. Today a few hundred people taken together own more wealth than the income of billions of the world’s population. To maintain this system of global inequality a global system of repression has been developed and is constantly put in motion. And along with it vast new systems of destructive exploitation of the earth, such as modern agribusiness, have evolved.
Social Revolution and Metabolic Restoration
Pontecorvo’s film Burn! about revolution in the Caribbean reaches its climax in the year 1848, a revolutionary year in real-world history. In 1848 Marx famously observed in his speech on free trade: “You believe perhaps, gentlemen, that the production of coffee and sugar is the natural destiny of the West Indies. Two centuries ago, nature, which does not trouble herself about commerce, had planted neither sugar cane nor coffee trees there.”18 Much of what we take as natural is the product of capitalism. Indeed, we are brought up believing that capitalist market relations are more natural, more incontrovertible, than anything within nature. It is this way of thinking that we have to break with if we are to restore our relation to the earth: if we are to invert the metabolic rift. The only answer to the ecology of destruction of capitalism is to revolutionize our productive relations in ways that allow for a metabolic restoration. But this will require a break with capitalism’s own system of “socio-metabolic reproduction,” i.e. the logic of profit.19
What such a revolutionary break with today’s business as usual offers is of course no guarantee but the mere possibility of social and ecological transformation through the creation of a sustainable, egalitarian (and socialist) society. Lovelock’s “revenge of Gaia”—what Frederick Engels, in the nineteenth century called the “revenge” of nature, now writ large on a planetary scale—will not be automatically overcome simply through a rupture with the logic of the existing system.20 Yet, such a rupture remains the necessary first step in any rational attempt to save and advance human civilization. Burn is no longer an island; it stands for the entire world, which is heating up before our eyes.
At the end of Pontecorvo’s film José Dolores is killed, but his revolutionary spirit lives on. The strategy of destroying nature to enslave humanity, we are led to believe, will not work forever. Today Latin America is reawakening to the revolutionary spirit of Bolivar and Che—a spirit that has never perished. But we now know—what was seldom understood before—that a revolutionary transformation of society must also be a revolutionary restoration of our metabolic relation to nature: equality and sustainability must coevolve if either is to emerge triumphant. And if we are to survive
Sir William Walker (played by Marlon Brando) is a nineteenth-century British agent sent to overthrow the Portuguese rulers of the island. He instigates a revolt amongst the numerous black slaves, and at the same time arranges an uprising by the small white colonial planter class seeking independence from the Portuguese crown. The goal is to use the slave revolt to defeat Portugal, but to turn actual rule of the island over to the white planter class, which will then serve as a comprador class subservient to British imperialists.
Walker succeeds brilliantly at his task, convincing the victorious army of former slaves and their leader José Dolores to lay down their arms after the Portuguese have been defeated. The result is a neocolony dominated by the white planters—but one in which the de facto rulers, in accordance with the laws of international free trade, are the British sugar companies. Walker then departs to carry out other intelligence tasks for the British admiralty—this time in a place called Indochina.
When the film resumes in 1848 ten years have passed. A revolution has again broken out on Burn led by José Dolores. Sir William Walker is brought back from England as a military advisor, but this time as an employee of the Antilles Royal Sugar Company, authorized by Her Majesty’s government. His task is to defeat this new rebellion of the former slaves. He is told by the oligarchy ruling the island that this should not be difficult since only ten years have passed and the situation is the same. He replies that the situation may be the same but the problem is different. In words that seem to echo Karl Marx he declares: “Very often between one historical period and another, ten years suddenly might be enough to reveal the contradictions of a whole century.”
British troops are brought in to fight the insurgents, who are waging a relentless guerrilla war. To defeat them Walker orders the burning down of all the plantations on the island. When the local representative of the British sugar interests objects, Walker explains: “That is the logic of profit....One builds to make money and to go on making it or to make more sometimes it is necessary to destroy.” This, he reminds his interlocutor, is how the island Burn got its name. Nature on the island has to be destroyed so that labor can be exploited on it for hundreds of additional years.
My intention here is not of course to recount Pontecorvo’s entire extraordinary film, but to draw out some important principles from this allegory that will help us to understand capitalism’s relation to nature. Joseph Schumpeter once famously praised capitalism for its “creative destruction.”2 But this might be better seen as the system’s destructive creativity. Capital’s endless pursuit of new outlets for class-based accumulation requires for its continuation the destruction of both pre-existing natural conditions and previous social relations. Class exploitation, imperialism, war, and ecological devastation are not mere unrelated accidents of history but interrelated, intrinsic features of capitalist development. There has always been the danger, moreover, that this destructive creativity would turn into what István Mészáros has called the “destructive uncontrollability” that is capital’s ultimate destiny. The destruction built into the logic of profit would then take over and predominate, undermining not only the conditions of production but also those of life itself. Today it is clear that such destructive uncontrollability has come to characterize the entire capitalist world economy, encompassing the planet as a whole.3
The Earth Summits: 1992 and 2002
It is a characteristic of our age that global ecological devastation seems to overwhelm all other problems, threatening the survivability of life on earth as we know it. How this is related to social causes and what social solutions might be offered in response have thus become the most pressing questions facing humanity. The world has so far convened two major earth summits: in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil in 1992 and Johannesburg, South Africa in 2002. These summits took place a mere ten years apart. Yet, they can be seen as lying in the dividing line separating one historical period from another, revealing the contradictions of an entire century—the twenty-first.
The 1992 Earth Summit in Rio, organized by the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development, represented the boundless hope that humanity could come together to solve its mounting global ecological problems. The late 1980s and early 1990s were a period in which the global ecological crisis penetrated the public consciousness. Suddenly there were grave concerns about the destruction of the ozone layer, global warming, and the rising rate of species extinctions resulting from planetary destruction of ecosystems. In June 1988 James Hansen, Director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, testified before the U.S. Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, presenting evidence of global warming due to the emission of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. That same year the United Nations set up a new international organization, the Inter-Governmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), to address global warming.
A new ideology of world unity pervaded the Rio summit. The Gulf War of 1991 and the demise of the Soviet Union later in the same year had given rise to the then dominant rhetoric of a “new world order” and of “the end of history.” The world, it was said, was now one. The recent passage of the Montreal Protocol, placing restrictions on the production of ozone-depleting chemicals, seemed to confirm that the world’s economically dominant countries could act in unison in response to global environmental threats. The site chosen for the Earth Summit, Brazil, home to the Amazon, was meant to symbolize the planetary goal of saving the world’s biodiversity. The summit’s principal document, known as Agenda 21, was intended to launch a new age of sustainable development for the twenty-first century.
The mood of the second earth summit, the World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg, could not have been more different than the first. Rio’s hope had given way to Johannesburg’s dismay. Rather than improving over the decade that had elapsed, the world environment had experienced accelerated decline. The planet was approaching catastrophic conditions, not just with respect to global warming, but in a host of other areas. Sustainable development had turned out to be about sustaining capital accumulation at virtually any ecological cost. All the rhetoric ten years earlier of a “new world order” and the “end of history”—it was now clear to many of the environmentalists attending the Johannesburg summit—had simply disguised the fact that the real nemesis of the global environment was the capitalist world economy.
The site of the Johannesburg summit had been chosen partly to symbolize the end of apartheid, and hence the advent of significant world social progress. Yet, critics at the second earth summit raised the issue of global ecological apartheid, emphasizing the destruction wrought on the environment by the rich nations of the North in ways that disproportionately affected the global South. The ecological imperialism of the center of the capitalist world economy was symbolized by Washington’s refusal to ratify the Kyoto Protocol on limiting greenhouse gas emissions generating global warming. Significantly, U.S. President George W. Bush declined to attend the earth summit. Instead, at the very moment that debates were taking place in Johannesburg on the future of the world ecology, the Bush administration seized the world’s stage by threatening a war on Iraq, ostensibly over weapons of mass destruction—though to the world’s environmentalists assembled in Johannesburg it was clear even then that the real issue was oil.4
In fact, a new historical period had emerged in the ten years since the Rio summit. Economically, the world had witnessed what Paul Sweezy in 1994 called “the triumph of financial capitalism” with the transformation of monopoly capital into what might be called global monopoly-finance capital.5 By the end of the twentieth century capitalism had evolved into a system that was if anything more geared to rapacious accumulation than ever before, relatively independent from its local and national roots. Global financial expansion was occurring on top of a world economy that was stagnating at the level of production, creating a more unstable and more viciously inegalitarian order, dominated by neoliberal economics and financial bubbles. Declining U.S. hegemony in the world system, coupled with the demise of the Soviet Union, induced repeated and increasingly naked U.S. attempts to restore its economic and political power by military means.
Meanwhile, global warming and other crucial environmental problems had crossed critical thresholds. The question was no longer whether ecological and social catastrophes awaited but how great these would be. For those (including myself) in Johannesburg in 2002, watching the U.S. president prepare for war in the petroleum-rich Persian Gulf while the planet was heating up from the burning of fossil fuels, the whole world seemed on fire.
The Destruction of the Planet
In the almost five years that have elapsed since the second earth summit it has become increasingly difficult to separate the class and imperial war inherent to capitalism from war on the planet itself. At a time when the United States is battling for imperial control of the richest oil region on earth, the ecology of the planet is experiencing rapid deterioration, marked most dramatically by global warming. Meanwhile, neoliberal economic restructuring emanating from the new regime of monopoly-finance capital is not only undermining the economic welfare of much of humanity, but in some regions is removing such basic ecological conditions of human existence as access to clean air, drinkable water, and adequate food. Ecologists who once warned of the possibility of future apocalypse now insist that global disaster is on our doorstep.
Bill McKibben, author of The End of Nature, declared in his article “The Debate is Over” in the November 17, 2005, issue of Rolling Stone magazine that we are now entering the “Oh Shit” era of global warming. At first, he wrote, there was the “I wonder what will happen?” era. Then there was the “Can this really be true?” era. Now we are in the Oh Shit era. We now know that it is too late to avert global disaster entirely. All we can do is limit its scope and intensity. Much of the uncertainty has to do with the fact that “the world...has some trapdoors—mechanisms that don’t work in straightforward fashion, but instead trigger a nasty chain reaction.”6
In his book, The Revenge of Gaia, influential scientist James Lovelock, best known as the originator of the Gaia hypothesis, has issued a grim assessment of the earth’s prospects based on such sudden chain reactions.7 Voicing the concerns of numerous scientists, Lovelock highlights a number of positive feedback mechanisms that could—and in his view almost certainly will—amplify the earth warming tendency. The destructive effect of increasing global temperatures on ocean algae and tropical forests (on top of the direct removal of these forests) will, it is feared, reduce the capacity of the oceans and forests to absorb carbon dioxide, raising the global temperature still further. The freeing up and release into the atmosphere of enormous quantities of methane (a greenhouse gas twenty-four times as potent as carbon dioxide) as the permafrost of the arctic tundra thaws due to global warming, constitutes another such vicious spiral. Just as ominous, the reduction of the earth’s reflectivity as melting white ice at the poles is replaced with blue seawater is threatening to ratchet-up global temperatures.8
In Lovelock’s cataclysmic view, the earth has probably already passed the point of no return and temperatures are destined to rise eventually as much as 8° C (14° F) in temperate regions. The human species will survive in some form, he assures us. Nevertheless he points to “an imminent shift in our climate towards one that could easily be described as Hell: so hot, so deadly that only a handful of the teeming billions now alive will survive.”9 He offers as the sole means of partial salvation a massive technical fix: a global program to expand nuclear power facilities throughout the earth as a limited substitute to the carbon-dioxide emitting fossil fuel economy. The thought that such a Faustian bargain would pave its own path to hell seems scarcely to have crossed his mind.
Lovelock’s fears are not easily dismissed. James Hansen, who did so much to bring the issue of global warming to world attention, has recently issued his own warning. In an article entitled “The Threat to the Planet” (New York Review of Books, July 13, 2006), Hansen points out that animal and plant species are migrating throughout the earth in response to global warming—though not fast enough in relation to changes in their environments—and that alpine species are being “pushed off the planet.” We are facing, he contends, the possibility of mass extinctions associated with increasing global temperature comparable to earlier periods in the earth’s history in which 50 to 90 percent of living species were lost.
The greatest immediate threat to humanity from climate change, Hansen argues, is associated with the destabilization of the ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica. A little more than 1° C (1.8° F) separates the climate of today from the warmest interglacial periods in the last half million years when the sea level was as much as sixteen feet higher. Further, increases in temperature this century by around 2.8° C (5° F) under business as usual could lead to a long term rise in sea level by as much as eighty feet, judging by what happened the last time the earth’s temperature rose this high—three million years ago. “We have,” Hansen says, “at most ten years—not ten years to decide upon action but ten years to alter fundamentally the trajectory of greenhouse gas emissions”—if we are to prevent such disastrous outcomes from becoming inevitable. One crucial decade, in other words, separates us from irreversible changes that could produce a very different world. The contradictions of the entire Holocene—the geological epoch in which human civilization has developed—are suddenly being revealed in our time.10
In the Oh shit era, the debate, McKibben says, is over. There is no longer any doubt that global warming represents a crisis of earth-shaking proportions. Yet, it is absolutely essential to understand that this is only one part of what we call the environmental crisis. The global ecological threat as a whole is made up of a large number of interrelated crises and problems that are confronting us simultaneously. In my 1994 book, The Vulnerable Planet, I started out with a brief litany of some of these, to which others might now be added:
Overpopulation, destruction of the ozone layer, global warming, extinction of species, loss of genetic diversity, acid rain, nuclear contamination, tropical deforestation, the elimination of climax forests, wetland destruction, soil erosion, desertification, floods, famine, the despoliation of lakes, streams, and rivers, the drawing down and contamination of ground water, the pollution of coastal waters and estuaries, the destruction of coral reefs, oil spills, overfishing, expanding landfills, toxic wastes, the poisonous effects of insecticides and herbicides, exposure to hazards on the job, urban congestion, and the depletion of nonrenewable resources.11
The point is that not just global warming but many of these other problems as well can each be seen as constituting a global ecological crisis. Today every major ecosystem on the earth is in decline. Issues of environmental justice are becoming more prominent and pressing everywhere we turn. Underlying this is the fact that the class/imperial war that defines capitalism as a world system, and that governs its system of accumulation, is a juggernaut that knows no limits. In this deadly conflict the natural world is seen as a mere instrument of world social domination. Hence, capital by its very logic imposes what is in effect a scorched earth strategy. The planetary ecological crisis is increasingly all-encompassing, a product of the destructive uncontrollability of a rapidly globalizing capitalist economy, which knows no law other than its own drive to exponential expansion.
Transcending Business as Usual
Most climate scientists, including Lovelock and Hansen, follow the IPCC in basing their main projections of global warming on a socioecnomic scenario described as “business as usual.” The dire trends indicated are predicated on our fundamental economic and technological developments and our basic relation to nature remaining the same. The question we need to ask then is what actually is business as usual? What can be changed and how fast? With time running out the implication is that it is necessary to alter business as usual in radical ways in order to stave off or lessen catastrophe.
Yet, the dominant solutions—those associated with the dominant ideology, i.e., the ideology of the dominant class—emphasize minimal changes in business as usual that will somehow get us off the hook. After being directed to the growing planetary threats of global warming and species extinction we are told that the answer is better gas mileage and better emissions standards, the introduction of hydrogen-powered cars, the capture and sequestration of carbon dioxide emitted in the atmosphere, improved conservation, and voluntary cutbacks in consumption. Environmental political scientists specialize in the construction of new environmental policy regimes, embodying state and market regulations. Environmental economists talk of tradable pollution permits and the incorporation of all environmental factors into the market to ensure their efficient use. Some environmental sociologists (my own field) speak of ecological modernization: a whole panoply of green taxes, green regulations, and new green technologies, even the greening of capitalism itself. Futurists describe a new technological world in which the weight of nations on the earth is miraculously lifted as a result of digital “dematerialization” of the economy. In all of these views, however, there is one constant: the fundamental character of business as usual is hardly changed at all.
Indeed, what all such analyses intentionally avoid is the fact that business as usual in our society in any fundamental sense means the capitalist economy—an economy run on the logic of profit and accumulation. Moreover, there is little acknowledgement or even appreciation of the fact that the Hobbesian war of all against all that characterizes capitalism requires for its fulfillment a universal war on nature. In this sense new technology cannot solve the problem since it is inevitably used to further the class war and to increase the scale of the economy, and thus the degradation of the environment. Whenever production dies down or social resistance imposes barriers on the expansion of capital the answer is always to find new ways to exploit/degrade nature more intensively. To quote Pontecorvo’s Burn!, “that is the logic of profit....One builds to make money and to go on making it or to make more sometimes it is necessary to destroy.”
Ironically, this destructive relation of capitalism to the environment was probably understood better in the nineteenth century—at a time when social analysts were acutely aware of the issue of revolutionary changes taking place in the mode of production and how this was transforming the human relation to nature. As a result, environmental sociologists of the more radical stamp in the United States, where the contradiction between economy and ecology nowadays is especially acute, draw heavily on three interrelated ideas derived from Marx and the critique of capitalist political economy dating back to the nineteenth century: (1) the treadmill of production, (2) the second contradiction of capitalism, and (3) the metabolic rift.
The first of these, the treadmill of production, describes capitalism as an unstoppable, accelerating treadmill that constantly increases the scale of the throughput of energy and raw materials as part of its quest for profit and accumulation, thereby pressing on the earth’s absorptive capacity. “Accumulate, Accumulate!” Marx wrote, “that is Moses and the prophets!” for capital.12
The second of these notions, the second contradiction of capitalism, is the idea that capitalism, in addition to its primary economic contradiction stemming from class inequalities in production and distribution, also undermines the human and natural conditions (i.e, environmental conditions) of production on which its economic advancement ultimately rests. For example, by systematically removing forests we lay the grounds for increasing scarcities in this area—the more so to the extent that globalization makes this contradiction universal. This heightens the overall cost of economic development and creates an economic crisis for capitalism based on supply-side constraints on production.13
The third notion, the metabolic rift, suggests that the logic of capital accumulation inexorably creates a rift in the metabolism between society and nature, severing basic processes of natural reproduction. This raises the issue of the ecological sustainability—not simply in relation to the scale of the economy, but also even more importantly in the form and intensity of the interaction between nature and society under capitalism.14
I shall concentrate on the third of these notions, the metabolic rift, since this is the most complex of these three socio-ecological concepts, and the one that has been the focus of my own research in this area, particularly in my book Marx’s Ecology. Marx was greatly influenced by the work of the leading agricultural chemist of his time, Justus von Liebig. Liebig had developed an analysis of the ecological contradictions of industrialized capitalist agriculture. He argued that such industrialized agriculture, as present in its most developed form in England in the nineteenth century, was a robbery system, depleting the soil. Food and fiber were transported hundreds—even in some cases thousands—of miles from the country to the city. This meant that essential soil nutrients, such as nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium, were transported as well. Rather than being returned to the soil these essential nutrients ended up polluting the cities, for example, in the degradation of the Thames in London. The natural conditions for the reproduction of the soil were thus destroyed.
To compensate for the resulting decline in soil fertility the British raided the Napoleonic battlefields and the catacombs of Europe for bones with which to fertilize the soil of the English countryside. They also resorted to the importation of guano on a vast scale from the islands off the coast of Peru, followed by the importation of Chilean nitrates (after the War of the Pacific in which Chile seized parts of Peru and Bolivia rich in guano and nitrates). The United States sent out ships throughout the oceans searching for guano, and ended up seizing ninety-four islands, rocks, and keys between the passage of the 1856 Guano Islands Act and 1903, sixty-six of which were officially recognized as U.S. appurtenances and nine of which remain U.S. possessions today.15 This reflected a great crisis of capitalist agriculture in the nineteenth century that was only solved in part with the development of synthetic fertilizer nitrogen early in the twentieth century—and which led eventually to the overuse of fertilizer nitrogen, itself a major environmental problem.
In reflecting on this crisis of capitalist agriculture, Marx adopted the concept of metabolism, which had been introduced by nineteenth-century biologists and chemists, including Liebig, and applied it to socio-ecological relations. All life is based on metabolic processes between organisms and their environment. Organisms carry out an exchange of energy and matter with their environment, which are integrated with their own internal life processes. It is not a stretch to think of the nest of a bird as part of the bird’s metabolic process. Marx explicitly defined the labor process as the “metabolic interaction between man and nature.” In terms of the ecological problem he spoke of “an irreparable rift in the interdependent process of social metabolism,” whereby the conditions for the necessary reproduction of the soil were continually severed, breaking the metabolic cycle. “Capitalist production,” he wrote, “therefore only develops the techniques and the degree of combination of the social process of production by simultaneously undermining the original sources of all wealth—the soil and the worker.”
Marx saw this rift not simply in national terms but as related to imperialism as well. “England,” he wrote, “has indirectly exported the soil of Ireland, without even allowing its cultivators the means for replacing the constituents of the exhausted soil.”
This principle of metabolic rift obviously has a very wide application and has in fact been applied by environmental sociologists in recent years to problems such as global warming and the ecological degradation of the world’s oceans.16 What is seldom recognized, however, is that Marx went immediately from a conception of the metabolic rift to the necessity of metabolic restoration, arguing that “by destroying the circumstances surrounding that metabolism, which originated in a merely natural and spontaneous fashion, it [capitalist production] compels its systematic restoration as a regulative law of social reproduction.” The reality of the metabolic rift pointed to the necessity of the restoration of nature, through sustainable production.
It is this dialectical understanding of the socio-ecological problem that led Marx to what is perhaps the most radical conception of socio-ecological sustainability ever developed. Thus he wrote in Capital:
From the standpoint of a higher socio-economic formation, the private property of individuals in the earth will appear just as absurd as the private property of one man in other men. Even an entire society, a nation, or all simultaneously existing societies taken together, are not owners of the earth. They are simply its possessors, its beneficiaries, and have to bequeath it in an improved state to succeeding generations, as boni patres familias [good heads of the household].
For Marx, in other words, the present relation of human beings to the earth under private accumulation could be compared to slavery. Just as “private property of one man in other men” is no longer deemed acceptable, so private ownership of the earth/nature by human beings (even whole countries) must be transcended. The human relation to nature must be regulated so to guarantee its existence “in an improved state to succeeding generations.” His reference to the notion of “good heads of the household” hearkened back to the ancient Greek notion of household or oikos from which we get both “economy” (from oikonomia, or household management) and “ecology “(from oikologia or household study). Marx pointed to the necessity of a more radical, sustainable relation of human beings to production in accord with what we would now view as ecological rather than merely economic notions. “Freedom, in this sphere,” the realm of natural necessity, he insisted, “can consist only in this, that socialized man, the associated producers, govern the human metabolism with nature in a rational way, bringing it under their collective control...accomplishing it with the least expenditure of energy.”17
The destructive uncontrollability of capitalism, emanating from its dual character as a system of class/imperial exploitation and of enslaver/destroyer of the earth itself, was thus well understood by Marx. With regard to the film, Burn!, we saw how the exploitation of human beings was tied to the destruction of the earth. Relations of domination changed but the answer remained the same: to burn the island as a means of winning the class/imperial war. Today a few hundred people taken together own more wealth than the income of billions of the world’s population. To maintain this system of global inequality a global system of repression has been developed and is constantly put in motion. And along with it vast new systems of destructive exploitation of the earth, such as modern agribusiness, have evolved.
Social Revolution and Metabolic Restoration
Pontecorvo’s film Burn! about revolution in the Caribbean reaches its climax in the year 1848, a revolutionary year in real-world history. In 1848 Marx famously observed in his speech on free trade: “You believe perhaps, gentlemen, that the production of coffee and sugar is the natural destiny of the West Indies. Two centuries ago, nature, which does not trouble herself about commerce, had planted neither sugar cane nor coffee trees there.”18 Much of what we take as natural is the product of capitalism. Indeed, we are brought up believing that capitalist market relations are more natural, more incontrovertible, than anything within nature. It is this way of thinking that we have to break with if we are to restore our relation to the earth: if we are to invert the metabolic rift. The only answer to the ecology of destruction of capitalism is to revolutionize our productive relations in ways that allow for a metabolic restoration. But this will require a break with capitalism’s own system of “socio-metabolic reproduction,” i.e. the logic of profit.19
What such a revolutionary break with today’s business as usual offers is of course no guarantee but the mere possibility of social and ecological transformation through the creation of a sustainable, egalitarian (and socialist) society. Lovelock’s “revenge of Gaia”—what Frederick Engels, in the nineteenth century called the “revenge” of nature, now writ large on a planetary scale—will not be automatically overcome simply through a rupture with the logic of the existing system.20 Yet, such a rupture remains the necessary first step in any rational attempt to save and advance human civilization. Burn is no longer an island; it stands for the entire world, which is heating up before our eyes.
At the end of Pontecorvo’s film José Dolores is killed, but his revolutionary spirit lives on. The strategy of destroying nature to enslave humanity, we are led to believe, will not work forever. Today Latin America is reawakening to the revolutionary spirit of Bolivar and Che—a spirit that has never perished. But we now know—what was seldom understood before—that a revolutionary transformation of society must also be a revolutionary restoration of our metabolic relation to nature: equality and sustainability must coevolve if either is to emerge triumphant. And if we are to survive
Earth's Fresh WaterUnder Pressure
"National Geographic" Article Review.....Earth's Fresh WaterUnder Pressure…… ESI Environmental ENV-TSXV
"National Geographic", in it's Sept. 16th edition, gives a great overview of freshwater issues and they say "among the environmental spectres confronting humanity in the 21st century - global warming, the destruction of the rainforests, over-fishing the oceans - a shortage of fresh water is at the top of the list, particularly in the developing world." A World Bank expert calls it the "grim arithmetic of water". Recently, the US stated that 2.7 billion people would face severe water shortages by 2025 if consumption continues at current rates.
The article's author went on a two - month trip to Africa, India and Spain, and met with individual organizations and businesses that are trying to solve water's dismal arithmetic. Some of the examples in the article were reviving ancient techniques such as rainwater harvesting and some were twenty-first century solutions. All solutions emphasized the need to "obtain maximum efficiency from every drop of water." Conservation is a necessity as a fraction of one percent of the earth's water is available for drinking, irrigation and industrial use. All over the globe, municipalities and farmers are pumping water out of the aquifers faster than it can be replenished.
In the article's main example of water, how it is used and how it is wasted, two facts come out; specifically that 10% of water use is for household use and 70% for agricultural use. Of the 70%, one half of that water is wasted due to evaporation or runoff. The article states: "Drip irrigation, uses 30 to 70 percent less water than traditional methods and increases crop yield to boot." This technology was first developed in the 1960's but, even now, it is used on only one percent of irrigated land.
ESI Environmental Sensors of Victoria, British Columbia, designs and manufactures world-class sensors and wireless systems for water management. The first products, Moisture.Point and Gro.Point, have already been sold to clients in over 40 countries. Gail Gabel is the President and CEO of ESI; she was past Chair of the BC Premier's Advisory Council on Science and Technology and was previously Vice-Chair of the Science Council of B.C.
During the past year, ESI signed an exclusive distribution agreement with Netafim USA. Netafim is the world leader in drip irrigation products. Internationally Netafim has sales of US $220 million, with it's fastest growing market sector being in North America where, in California alone, 25% of the world's mechanized (spray) irrigation is located, and is a target for several ESI products. Netafim has 40 sales staff and a network of approximately 400 dealers located throughout the USA alone. In addition, Netafim has a comprehensive programme well underway to train its sales team throughout North America, in marketing ESI's Gro.Point TM and Intelligent Irrigation TM systems.
ESI's Gro.Point Sensors and Intelligent Irrigation software, will provide Netafim with a major edge over any competition, and take Netafim into high tech control and wireless communication for water management. Savings for users are in water and electricity and at the same time provide growers with a greater yield and significantly enhanced harvest quality. ESI has also begun working with several US utility companies who are offering a cash rebate for agricultural clients who use management systems to save water and power.
A fully integrated Gro.Point-based Intelligent Irrigation System pays for itself in a year or less, depending on the crop. Systems are modular. Average system sales are already reaching $30,000 to $50,000 each. Systems have already been sold for water management and irrigation management applications in vineyards, vegetables, tree fruits such as avocados and citrus, for high value nut crops such as pecans, hops and for tree farms.
The "National Geographic" article describes the success of the Kallie Schoeman farm in South Africa. The Schoeman farm has 500,000 citrus trees that produce 175 million oranges and lemons for export to 32 countries. This family have been innovators in irrigation as water becomes scarcer and more expensive. In the eighties, the family used more efficient sprinklers but they have been "readily replacing these with "super-efficient" drip irrigation which give the trees exactly what they need every day" Mr. Schoeman said, by parcelling small amounts of water to each tree. As Schoeman has used ever-more efficient irrigation systems, the farm has quadrupled the production of fruit per acre while actually using one third of the water.
ESI's various moisture probes are able to relay soil moisture data, via solar-powered wireless communication, to a farm or vineyard's computers. Based on the information sent to the farm's computers, and the time of year, an irrigation manager can adjust the flow rate of water, mixed with fertilizer. Fruit and other crops need varying amounts of water during different stages of growth. Farm operators are now recognizing that they will have to continue to make technological leaps as water becomes more costly.
ESI and partners have invested in excess of $10 million in R & D and their clients have included: US Dept of Agriculture, Federal and Provincial Government Departments of Agriculture, Forestry and Environment, Leading Universities, e.g. University of Georgia, McGill, California, Guelph, Toronto, Vancouver, top vineyards in New Zealand, Australia and the US.
Other applications for the products are in landfill monitoring, site remediation and monitoring leachates from mining tailings. Municipal and city clients in North America already total 28, and include cities of Los Angeles, Las Vegas, Tucson, Glendale, as have several California Counties. Newmont Mines and the US Army Corps of Engineers have also bought systems to track contaminated water seepage. The Norwegian Government bought a system to monitor polluted runoff infiltrating under their new airport runway, which is situated over the City of Oslo's underground water supply. The State of Minnesota and Florida clients have bought several systems to monitor water seepage under roadways. The data gathered from these projects is used to predict road surface breakdown, or when to restrict traffic in certain areas.
The newest ESI product, Flo.Point, uses the same technology and is packaged for the Oil & Gas sector. Flo.Point measures the volume of water in producing oil wells and in nine other related industry applications. Sales have begun through established dealers and OEM's (original equipment manufacturers who integrate Flo.Point into their own systems). This product sells for $9500.00. An independent market study has determined that there are over 40,000 applications in one market sector in Western Canada, alone.
With the new Netafim relationship, and sales of Flo.Point coming online, revenues in the fiscal year (April 02-March 03) are expected to grow significantly over this year's $2.75 million in sales.
Robert A. Young and Associates telephone number is 1-877-626- 2121 or local 604-682-5123. The email address is raya@digital-rain.com. ESI's website is www.esica.com.
Robert A. Young has a position in the company and is responsible for investor relations. The above is for informational purposes only. Nothing in this communication is, nor should be construed to be an offer or solicitation for the purchase or sale of securities. The TSXV has not reviewed and does not accept responsibility for the accuracy of the above. Counsel from a registered securities representative is recommended. The above information may contain forward-looking statements considered genuine by the author and are based on the author's experience and knowledge. However, the outcome will ultimately be determined by forces of which the author may have little or no ability to affect. Any forward-looking statements should not be considered guarantees of results
"National Geographic", in it's Sept. 16th edition, gives a great overview of freshwater issues and they say "among the environmental spectres confronting humanity in the 21st century - global warming, the destruction of the rainforests, over-fishing the oceans - a shortage of fresh water is at the top of the list, particularly in the developing world." A World Bank expert calls it the "grim arithmetic of water". Recently, the US stated that 2.7 billion people would face severe water shortages by 2025 if consumption continues at current rates.
The article's author went on a two - month trip to Africa, India and Spain, and met with individual organizations and businesses that are trying to solve water's dismal arithmetic. Some of the examples in the article were reviving ancient techniques such as rainwater harvesting and some were twenty-first century solutions. All solutions emphasized the need to "obtain maximum efficiency from every drop of water." Conservation is a necessity as a fraction of one percent of the earth's water is available for drinking, irrigation and industrial use. All over the globe, municipalities and farmers are pumping water out of the aquifers faster than it can be replenished.
In the article's main example of water, how it is used and how it is wasted, two facts come out; specifically that 10% of water use is for household use and 70% for agricultural use. Of the 70%, one half of that water is wasted due to evaporation or runoff. The article states: "Drip irrigation, uses 30 to 70 percent less water than traditional methods and increases crop yield to boot." This technology was first developed in the 1960's but, even now, it is used on only one percent of irrigated land.
ESI Environmental Sensors of Victoria, British Columbia, designs and manufactures world-class sensors and wireless systems for water management. The first products, Moisture.Point and Gro.Point, have already been sold to clients in over 40 countries. Gail Gabel is the President and CEO of ESI; she was past Chair of the BC Premier's Advisory Council on Science and Technology and was previously Vice-Chair of the Science Council of B.C.
During the past year, ESI signed an exclusive distribution agreement with Netafim USA. Netafim is the world leader in drip irrigation products. Internationally Netafim has sales of US $220 million, with it's fastest growing market sector being in North America where, in California alone, 25% of the world's mechanized (spray) irrigation is located, and is a target for several ESI products. Netafim has 40 sales staff and a network of approximately 400 dealers located throughout the USA alone. In addition, Netafim has a comprehensive programme well underway to train its sales team throughout North America, in marketing ESI's Gro.Point TM and Intelligent Irrigation TM systems.
ESI's Gro.Point Sensors and Intelligent Irrigation software, will provide Netafim with a major edge over any competition, and take Netafim into high tech control and wireless communication for water management. Savings for users are in water and electricity and at the same time provide growers with a greater yield and significantly enhanced harvest quality. ESI has also begun working with several US utility companies who are offering a cash rebate for agricultural clients who use management systems to save water and power.
A fully integrated Gro.Point-based Intelligent Irrigation System pays for itself in a year or less, depending on the crop. Systems are modular. Average system sales are already reaching $30,000 to $50,000 each. Systems have already been sold for water management and irrigation management applications in vineyards, vegetables, tree fruits such as avocados and citrus, for high value nut crops such as pecans, hops and for tree farms.
The "National Geographic" article describes the success of the Kallie Schoeman farm in South Africa. The Schoeman farm has 500,000 citrus trees that produce 175 million oranges and lemons for export to 32 countries. This family have been innovators in irrigation as water becomes scarcer and more expensive. In the eighties, the family used more efficient sprinklers but they have been "readily replacing these with "super-efficient" drip irrigation which give the trees exactly what they need every day" Mr. Schoeman said, by parcelling small amounts of water to each tree. As Schoeman has used ever-more efficient irrigation systems, the farm has quadrupled the production of fruit per acre while actually using one third of the water.
ESI's various moisture probes are able to relay soil moisture data, via solar-powered wireless communication, to a farm or vineyard's computers. Based on the information sent to the farm's computers, and the time of year, an irrigation manager can adjust the flow rate of water, mixed with fertilizer. Fruit and other crops need varying amounts of water during different stages of growth. Farm operators are now recognizing that they will have to continue to make technological leaps as water becomes more costly.
ESI and partners have invested in excess of $10 million in R & D and their clients have included: US Dept of Agriculture, Federal and Provincial Government Departments of Agriculture, Forestry and Environment, Leading Universities, e.g. University of Georgia, McGill, California, Guelph, Toronto, Vancouver, top vineyards in New Zealand, Australia and the US.
Other applications for the products are in landfill monitoring, site remediation and monitoring leachates from mining tailings. Municipal and city clients in North America already total 28, and include cities of Los Angeles, Las Vegas, Tucson, Glendale, as have several California Counties. Newmont Mines and the US Army Corps of Engineers have also bought systems to track contaminated water seepage. The Norwegian Government bought a system to monitor polluted runoff infiltrating under their new airport runway, which is situated over the City of Oslo's underground water supply. The State of Minnesota and Florida clients have bought several systems to monitor water seepage under roadways. The data gathered from these projects is used to predict road surface breakdown, or when to restrict traffic in certain areas.
The newest ESI product, Flo.Point, uses the same technology and is packaged for the Oil & Gas sector. Flo.Point measures the volume of water in producing oil wells and in nine other related industry applications. Sales have begun through established dealers and OEM's (original equipment manufacturers who integrate Flo.Point into their own systems). This product sells for $9500.00. An independent market study has determined that there are over 40,000 applications in one market sector in Western Canada, alone.
With the new Netafim relationship, and sales of Flo.Point coming online, revenues in the fiscal year (April 02-March 03) are expected to grow significantly over this year's $2.75 million in sales.
Robert A. Young and Associates telephone number is 1-877-626- 2121 or local 604-682-5123. The email address is raya@digital-rain.com. ESI's website is www.esica.com.
Robert A. Young has a position in the company and is responsible for investor relations. The above is for informational purposes only. Nothing in this communication is, nor should be construed to be an offer or solicitation for the purchase or sale of securities. The TSXV has not reviewed and does not accept responsibility for the accuracy of the above. Counsel from a registered securities representative is recommended. The above information may contain forward-looking statements considered genuine by the author and are based on the author's experience and knowledge. However, the outcome will ultimately be determined by forces of which the author may have little or no ability to affect. Any forward-looking statements should not be considered guarantees of results
Saturday, March 27, 2010
Good article review
Hi guys,
Maybe this is A+ type of article review. Please have a look.
http://www.newsweek.com/id/235366
Maybe this is A+ type of article review. Please have a look.
http://www.newsweek.com/id/235366
Space Waste?
Hi guys,
Does anyone of you aware of the space waste?
I don’t even know/care about its existence until I read about them in the internet.
According to the articles, we are surrounded with waste not only here on earth but also in our space region. We can see some plastics or food packages on the beach, some waste were buried underground and not to mention also some were sink under the ocean. In addition, if you are lucky, you will see some burning objects dropping from the sky in near future. These are left over objects that orbit our planet.
Space junk is a growing problem. Among the main contribution to this are the unused satellites. Over 6000 satellites have been launched into space since 1958, but only around 800 are currently in operation. This means that we have a lot of unwanted objects orbiting our earth that could be dangerous for future space explorations. Some of the examples are discarded bolts and nuts, astronaut gloves, cameras.
Space junk even presents some threat to those of us with our feet firmly on the ground, albeit a small one. Most space junk that re-enters the Earth’s atmosphere burns up before it reaches the ground. One exception was Skylab, an early US space station that was launched in 1973 and fell to Earth six years later. Nobody was hurt, but dangerous debris rained over a large expanse of the Australian outback. In 1996, meanwhile, wreckage from a Russian spy satellite re-entering over the Pacific Ocean passed dangerously close to an airliner carrying 270 passengers.
To make those threats even worse, do you know that people even think of sending nuclear waste into space as an option? Why??? Well, they say for these three good reasons; first, it is safe, second, space disposal is better than the alternative, underground burial, and third, it may finally open the door to widespread utilization of space.
But, personally I don’t think that’s a good option to be adopted. The possibility of an accident during launch and the potential for radioactive waste to be scattered by such an accident does not sound good to me. In addition, space disposal is impractical because of the number of launches that would be required. Well, we have to pay for this right?
What do you guys think?
~Muharniza~
Articles:
http://environment.uk.msn.com/climate-change/article.aspx?cp-documentid=12617262
http://www.thespacereview.com/article/437/1
small steps to going GREEN :)
Dear All,
There has been loads of fantastic informative materials I have read on this blog. I have gained much from this blog and would like to contribute a post to simple steps that we can take to inch closer to the ideal green life.
As a University Student or an individual,
1.we can recycle everything; especially paper!
*all those notes after a semester, scrap paper, etc*
2.limiting our printing or by printing both sides of a paper.
*a note to put it into visualization: If every American recycled his newspaper once per week, 36 million trees would be saved each year. Imagine how many trees could be saved if students went electronic with their notes.*
3.making every purchase a green one.
This simply means trying to ensure our purchases are of recycable materials when it comes to paper products, plastic. Also environmentally safe products.
4.carrying our own water tumbler!
Think of how many bottles of water get consumed on a campus every day. Save waste and money by carrying a refillable bottle.
5.Use refillable binders instead of notebooks. This is a simple way to save waste. If you want to save your notes after the semester is over, take them out of the binder and staple them. Or you can go electronic and take all of your notes on a laptop.
Steps that we can take at home:
1.Turn off the water when you shave or brush your teeth.
According to Kiplinger.com, you can send up to two gallons of water down the drain in TWO minutes.
2.Take the junk out of your trunk.
The extra weight of unnecessary materials in your trunk decreases your gas mileage, so you have to fill up more often.
3. Unplug your electronic devices when they’re not in use.
Toasters, chargers and printers still draw electricity even when they are not on.
4.Have a veggie meal once a week.
Enjoy a veggie pizza or pasta meal without endangering any animals
There are many more tips we can take, but let us start with this possible few and take on bigger steps as we walk along.
We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.' ~ Aristotle
With a breath of inspiration from Aristotle, hopefully practising these small steps would ease the transition toward a greener lifestyle.
There has been loads of fantastic informative materials I have read on this blog. I have gained much from this blog and would like to contribute a post to simple steps that we can take to inch closer to the ideal green life.
As a University Student or an individual,
1.we can recycle everything; especially paper!
*all those notes after a semester, scrap paper, etc*
2.limiting our printing or by printing both sides of a paper.
*a note to put it into visualization: If every American recycled his newspaper once per week, 36 million trees would be saved each year. Imagine how many trees could be saved if students went electronic with their notes.*
3.making every purchase a green one.
This simply means trying to ensure our purchases are of recycable materials when it comes to paper products, plastic. Also environmentally safe products.
4.carrying our own water tumbler!
Think of how many bottles of water get consumed on a campus every day. Save waste and money by carrying a refillable bottle.
5.Use refillable binders instead of notebooks. This is a simple way to save waste. If you want to save your notes after the semester is over, take them out of the binder and staple them. Or you can go electronic and take all of your notes on a laptop.
Steps that we can take at home:
1.Turn off the water when you shave or brush your teeth.
According to Kiplinger.com, you can send up to two gallons of water down the drain in TWO minutes.
2.Take the junk out of your trunk.
The extra weight of unnecessary materials in your trunk decreases your gas mileage, so you have to fill up more often.
3. Unplug your electronic devices when they’re not in use.
Toasters, chargers and printers still draw electricity even when they are not on.
4.Have a veggie meal once a week.
Enjoy a veggie pizza or pasta meal without endangering any animals
There are many more tips we can take, but let us start with this possible few and take on bigger steps as we walk along.
With a breath of inspiration from Aristotle, hopefully practising these small steps would ease the transition toward a greener lifestyle.
'Great minds discuss ideas. Average minds discuss events. Small minds discuss people.'
~ Eleanor Roosevelt
Toxic Trade: E-Waste
The amount of old electronics that are discarded every year is rapidly increasing. With lower prices and rapidly changing technology, computers, phones and TVs now have very short life spans. In many countries, e-waste is the fastest growing type of trash. It is reported that as much as 4,000 tonnes of toxic e-waste are discarded every hour. Vast amounts are routinely and often illegally shipped as waste from Europe, USA and Japan.
Electronic waste, or e-waste, is electronics equipment that isn't properly recycled. Electronic items such as computers, cameras, cell phones, Plasma TV, and DVD players are filled with highly toxic materials, like lead, mercury, cadmium and brominated flame retardants. To make matters worse, much of our e-waste is recycled (often illegally) overseas using sub-standard methods that do more harm than good. The E-waste recycling and disposal operations found in China, India, and Pakistan are extremely polluting and likely to be very damaging to human health. Examples include open burning of plastic waste, exposure to toxic solders, river dumping of acids, and widespread general dumping.
For examples, the two pictures posted here speak for themselves. The first one shows two unprotected workers in Guangdong, China recover parts and materials from the e-waste. The second one shows a boy (in Ghana) burning electronic cables and other electrical components in order to melt off the plastic and reclaim the copper wiring. This burning in small fires releases toxic chemicals into the environment. Perhaps for them, who are most probably not aware of the hazard, they are just doing a good job to get some money to live on.
How about the e-waste awareness in Malaysia?
I think Malaysians, especially the urban people, know that they need to recycle e-waste and not dump it anywhere they like. However, the Government or non-governmental organisations need to create more awareness through the mass media on how and where people can recycle different materials. The DOE do have a list of offsite full recovery facilities for e-waste in Malaysia, as you can see in the following picture.
However, the authorities should provide recycling bins in more places, especially in universities, shopping centres, or any easy-to-reach drop-off points. Having a proper e-waste management programme should help also.
Besides that, most companies in Malaysia do not inform the public of any take back of e-waste, either. Maybe the Government should provide incentives to encourage them to take back e-waste. Functionally good products – not pieces of junk – can be donated to the underprivileged, too.
.
Thursday, March 25, 2010
Below is a report provided by citywire on rare earth. It is used in much equipment in relation to renewable energy. The issue been brought up is the depleting of its source. The usage had gone up to 200 000 MT in a year. China being the biggest producer was trying to monopolize the rare earth by taking over two mines in Australia and in the US but failed to do so. Manufacturer has no choice but to build plant in China to ensure the supply of the rare earth. This is an example competition toward energy. What are we suppose to do? We support the usage of rare earth because rare earth is used in the manufacturing of hand phone. Do we need hand phone? For long we can survive without hand phone. Just think about it.
5 March 2010
Rare earths investment could be the best opportunity out there
Source: Citywire
Rare earth may not sound a sexy investment, but with China controlling 97% of the world's production and threatening to tighten supply, billions is set to be channelled into finding new sources of these crucial chemical elements.
The names of the 17 rare earth components, which include yttrium, europium and dysprosium, may not be familiar but they are vital to many renewable and clean energy technologies, such as wind turbines and catalytic convertors, along with more conventional technologies such as fibre-optics and batteries.
The rapid growth in their usage as the world looks to move away from a reliance on oil has seen demand surge from 40,000 to 125,000 tonnes a year over the last 10 years and it is predicted to reach 200,000 tonnes per year by 2014.
In the 1980s, the US was self-sufficient, but the closure of its Californian Mountain Pass mine following environmental problems and China ramping up production meant that by 1999, some 90% of US industry's supply came from the Far East and this reliance has continued to creep up.
The significance of this near monopoly has not been lost on the Chinese with former leader Deng Xiaoping saying back in 1987: 'The Middle East has oil, but China has rare earth.'
Neither has the irony of trying to move away from a dependence on Opec for oil to an even heavier one on China for rare earth been lost on policymakers.
The situation looks set to get worse, however, after China's Ministry of Industry and Information Technology submitted a six year plan to the State Council to tighten exports and safe-guard its own supply.
The Institute for Energy Research has warned that by doing this: 'Chinese officials are forcing global manufacturers to move factories to China by limiting the availability of rare earths outside China.'
GE moved its battery research plant to China in 2006 and more companies would be expected to follow suit.
Not content with its existing near-monopoly on supply, its state-run Chinese National Offshore Oil Corporation has being trying to buy up mines around the globe to consolidate its position. It has twice failed to buy the Californian mine and has also been rebuffed in its attempts to snap up mines in Australia.
The IEA says that outside of China, only a handful of projects are expected to produce rare earth in the next few years with MolyCorp Minerals looking to develop the Californian Mountain Pass mine and Lynas Corporation developing the Mount Weld mine in Australia.
'As energy prices become more expensive, a lot more is going to be invested in developing rare earth mines,' says Richard Lockwood, manager of the City Natural Resources High Yield Trust. 'It is difficult to imagine any new technologies that will not rely on rare earth down the line and the US government is offering huge amounts to companies that can discover new sources.'
Rare earth is one of the strands of President Obama's green budget for the next fiscal year with huge incentives being offered.
Lockwood has been building up City Natural Resources' exposure to rare earth with Canadian firm Neo Material Tech among his top 10 holdings.
He says that the company is not cheap, but has the potential to deliver outstanding returns as the Chinese tightening of supply will squeeze up prices.
Where there's muck there's brass, as the saying goes and rare earth could up end being one of the top commodity themes over the next few years.
5 March 2010
Rare earths investment could be the best opportunity out there
Source: Citywire
Rare earth may not sound a sexy investment, but with China controlling 97% of the world's production and threatening to tighten supply, billions is set to be channelled into finding new sources of these crucial chemical elements.
The names of the 17 rare earth components, which include yttrium, europium and dysprosium, may not be familiar but they are vital to many renewable and clean energy technologies, such as wind turbines and catalytic convertors, along with more conventional technologies such as fibre-optics and batteries.
The rapid growth in their usage as the world looks to move away from a reliance on oil has seen demand surge from 40,000 to 125,000 tonnes a year over the last 10 years and it is predicted to reach 200,000 tonnes per year by 2014.
In the 1980s, the US was self-sufficient, but the closure of its Californian Mountain Pass mine following environmental problems and China ramping up production meant that by 1999, some 90% of US industry's supply came from the Far East and this reliance has continued to creep up.
The significance of this near monopoly has not been lost on the Chinese with former leader Deng Xiaoping saying back in 1987: 'The Middle East has oil, but China has rare earth.'
Neither has the irony of trying to move away from a dependence on Opec for oil to an even heavier one on China for rare earth been lost on policymakers.
The situation looks set to get worse, however, after China's Ministry of Industry and Information Technology submitted a six year plan to the State Council to tighten exports and safe-guard its own supply.
The Institute for Energy Research has warned that by doing this: 'Chinese officials are forcing global manufacturers to move factories to China by limiting the availability of rare earths outside China.'
GE moved its battery research plant to China in 2006 and more companies would be expected to follow suit.
Not content with its existing near-monopoly on supply, its state-run Chinese National Offshore Oil Corporation has being trying to buy up mines around the globe to consolidate its position. It has twice failed to buy the Californian mine and has also been rebuffed in its attempts to snap up mines in Australia.
The IEA says that outside of China, only a handful of projects are expected to produce rare earth in the next few years with MolyCorp Minerals looking to develop the Californian Mountain Pass mine and Lynas Corporation developing the Mount Weld mine in Australia.
'As energy prices become more expensive, a lot more is going to be invested in developing rare earth mines,' says Richard Lockwood, manager of the City Natural Resources High Yield Trust. 'It is difficult to imagine any new technologies that will not rely on rare earth down the line and the US government is offering huge amounts to companies that can discover new sources.'
Rare earth is one of the strands of President Obama's green budget for the next fiscal year with huge incentives being offered.
Lockwood has been building up City Natural Resources' exposure to rare earth with Canadian firm Neo Material Tech among his top 10 holdings.
He says that the company is not cheap, but has the potential to deliver outstanding returns as the Chinese tightening of supply will squeeze up prices.
Where there's muck there's brass, as the saying goes and rare earth could up end being one of the top commodity themes over the next few years.
03/24/2010: Five EPA Region 9 Metro Area Cities Rank Among Top 25 in Nation for Most Energy Efficient Buildings
03/24/2010: Five EPA Region 9 Metro Area Cities Rank Among Top 25 in Nation for Most Energy Efficient Buildings
As per our blog title “A small steps towards better environment”…..
I have read an article under USEPA on the how the US Government have encourage the public participation on the Energy saving and fight against the climate change.
USEPA have released a list of US metropolitan areas with the largest number energy efficient buildings that earned EPA’s Energy Star in 2009. The list is headed by Los Angeles, Washington, D.C., San Francisco, Denver, Chicago, Houston, Lakeland, Dallas-Fort Worth, Atlanta and New York. Five of the cities ranked on the list are located in EPA’s Pacific Southwest Region.
According to the Assistant Administrator for the Office of Air and Radiation said that these cities see the importance of taking action on climate change and are working with EPA to fight back. The buildings that have earned EPA’s ENERGY STAR are reducing the emission of greenhouse gases and cutting energy bills.
These ENERGY STAR programs have caused annual saving more than $900 million in utility bills and more than 4.7 million metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions. There was increase up to 40% in the year 2009 on the buildings that received Energy Star award since the year it started 1999. Overall annual utility savings have climbed to nearly $1.6 billion and greenhouse gas emissions equal to the emissions of more than 1 million homes a year have been prevented.
EPA awards the Energy Star to commercial buildings that perform in the top 25 percent of buildings nationwide compared to similar buildings. Thirteen types of buildings can earn the Energy Star, including schools, hospitals, office buildings, retail stores and supermarkets.
In the Bay Area the Hotel Nikko, One Embarcadero Center, Marin Montessori School and Parc 55 Hotel are just a few of the 173 commercial buildings have saved more the $69 million in energy costs and cut emissions equal to taking about 36,000 cars off the road for one year. Phoenix currently have 52 Energy Star buildings in Phoenix, which creates an $11.4 million dollar cost savings and an electricity savings equal to 9,900 homes’ energy use.
You may refer the article at http://yosemite.epa.gov/opa/admpress.nsf/0/B048C769E6294B71852576F000773644
Well this is al about US. How about our country Malaysia? What are the steps that we have taken to reduce the energy consumption..From my personal observation we are still not aware the real need of energy saving and its purposes.
I have seen so many decorations that made from light at most of the traffic light areas. That empty space near to traffic light initially was decorated with very nice landscape of flowers and trees with sufficient street light. Now, those areas filled with an artificial tree made from colourfull lights. It really nice to see but is it really needed???
Think…
As per our blog title “A small steps towards better environment”…..
I have read an article under USEPA on the how the US Government have encourage the public participation on the Energy saving and fight against the climate change.
USEPA have released a list of US metropolitan areas with the largest number energy efficient buildings that earned EPA’s Energy Star in 2009. The list is headed by Los Angeles, Washington, D.C., San Francisco, Denver, Chicago, Houston, Lakeland, Dallas-Fort Worth, Atlanta and New York. Five of the cities ranked on the list are located in EPA’s Pacific Southwest Region.
According to the Assistant Administrator for the Office of Air and Radiation said that these cities see the importance of taking action on climate change and are working with EPA to fight back. The buildings that have earned EPA’s ENERGY STAR are reducing the emission of greenhouse gases and cutting energy bills.
These ENERGY STAR programs have caused annual saving more than $900 million in utility bills and more than 4.7 million metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions. There was increase up to 40% in the year 2009 on the buildings that received Energy Star award since the year it started 1999. Overall annual utility savings have climbed to nearly $1.6 billion and greenhouse gas emissions equal to the emissions of more than 1 million homes a year have been prevented.
EPA awards the Energy Star to commercial buildings that perform in the top 25 percent of buildings nationwide compared to similar buildings. Thirteen types of buildings can earn the Energy Star, including schools, hospitals, office buildings, retail stores and supermarkets.
In the Bay Area the Hotel Nikko, One Embarcadero Center, Marin Montessori School and Parc 55 Hotel are just a few of the 173 commercial buildings have saved more the $69 million in energy costs and cut emissions equal to taking about 36,000 cars off the road for one year. Phoenix currently have 52 Energy Star buildings in Phoenix, which creates an $11.4 million dollar cost savings and an electricity savings equal to 9,900 homes’ energy use.
You may refer the article at http://yosemite.epa.gov/opa/admpress.nsf/0/B048C769E6294B71852576F000773644
Well this is al about US. How about our country Malaysia? What are the steps that we have taken to reduce the energy consumption..From my personal observation we are still not aware the real need of energy saving and its purposes.
I have seen so many decorations that made from light at most of the traffic light areas. That empty space near to traffic light initially was decorated with very nice landscape of flowers and trees with sufficient street light. Now, those areas filled with an artificial tree made from colourfull lights. It really nice to see but is it really needed???
Think…
Wednesday, March 24, 2010
Greenpeace plans more actions in oil sands
Hi everyone,
As we all understand oil is one of the major source of energy. I have read the above mentioned article in The Star news paper on 24th March, 2010. The news was mainly on the intention of Environmental Activist “Greenpeace” to disrupt the production of oil sands by the Canadian government. The effect oil sand was mentioned as damaging the environment and nearby community.
The article also highlighted that Greenpeace has a C$200,000 ($196,000) budget to campaign against the oil sands, Hudema said, a fraction of what multinational oil companies and the Alberta government itself spend on its oil sands messages, he said.
Actually what is Oil sand?? and how it can affect the environment?
Oil sands, also known as tar sands, or extra heavy oil, are a type of bitumen deposit. The sands are naturally occurring mixtures of sand or clay, water and an extremely dense and viscous form of petroleum called bitumen. They are found in large amounts in many countries throughout the world, but are found in extremely large quantities in Canada and Venezuela.
Canada is the largest supplier of crude oil and refined products to the United States, supplying about 20% of total U.S. imports, and exports more oil and products to the U.S. than it consumes itself. Most of the oil sands of Canada are located in three major deposits in northern Alberta (54,000 sq mi) and hold proven reserves of 1.75 trillion barrels (280×10^9 m3) of bitumen in place.
Like all mining and non-renewable resource development projects, oil sands operations have an effect on the environment. Oil sands projects affect: the land when the bitumen is initially mined and with large deposits of toxic chemicals; the water during the separation process and through the drainage of rivers; and the air due to the release of carbon dioxide and other emissions, as well as deforestation. Additional indirect environmental effects are that the petroleum products produced are mostly burned, releasing carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.
Cannadian goverment has taken few action to control this oil sand operation as such increase the tax, controlled release of liecence for the oil sand companies and enforcement of Law.
You may refer the articles at http://thestar.com.my/news/story.asp?file=/2010/3/24/worldupdates/2010-03-24T052833Z_01_NOOTR_RTRMDNC_0_-471672-1&sec=Worldupdates
As we all understand oil is one of the major source of energy. I have read the above mentioned article in The Star news paper on 24th March, 2010. The news was mainly on the intention of Environmental Activist “Greenpeace” to disrupt the production of oil sands by the Canadian government. The effect oil sand was mentioned as damaging the environment and nearby community.
The article also highlighted that Greenpeace has a C$200,000 ($196,000) budget to campaign against the oil sands, Hudema said, a fraction of what multinational oil companies and the Alberta government itself spend on its oil sands messages, he said.
Actually what is Oil sand?? and how it can affect the environment?
Oil sands, also known as tar sands, or extra heavy oil, are a type of bitumen deposit. The sands are naturally occurring mixtures of sand or clay, water and an extremely dense and viscous form of petroleum called bitumen. They are found in large amounts in many countries throughout the world, but are found in extremely large quantities in Canada and Venezuela.
Canada is the largest supplier of crude oil and refined products to the United States, supplying about 20% of total U.S. imports, and exports more oil and products to the U.S. than it consumes itself. Most of the oil sands of Canada are located in three major deposits in northern Alberta (54,000 sq mi) and hold proven reserves of 1.75 trillion barrels (280×10^9 m3) of bitumen in place.
Like all mining and non-renewable resource development projects, oil sands operations have an effect on the environment. Oil sands projects affect: the land when the bitumen is initially mined and with large deposits of toxic chemicals; the water during the separation process and through the drainage of rivers; and the air due to the release of carbon dioxide and other emissions, as well as deforestation. Additional indirect environmental effects are that the petroleum products produced are mostly burned, releasing carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.
Cannadian goverment has taken few action to control this oil sand operation as such increase the tax, controlled release of liecence for the oil sand companies and enforcement of Law.
You may refer the articles at http://thestar.com.my/news/story.asp?file=/2010/3/24/worldupdates/2010-03-24T052833Z_01_NOOTR_RTRMDNC_0_-471672-1&sec=Worldupdates
Tuesday, March 23, 2010
Consequences Faced Due To Climate Change
Hi everyone......
To date, there are many news and articles being heard on climate change and the ways to mitigate it by using renewable energy, carbon credit and many more.....
Browsing through The Star Newspaper today (23rd March 2010), i came across an article at the environment section highlighting on the effect of climate change towards the native villages located at the north pole. This article was written by a villager (Newtok tribal administrator) that has grown up watching the changes in his village due to climate change.
This village lies few metres beneath Alaska's tundra, a layer of frozen soil called permafrost. In years the icy soils has provided a foundation for buildings and sturdy buffer against the sea.
However the climate at Alaska is getting hotter, the permafrost is melting and the foundation under Newtok is crumbling, the community hall have buckled and started to sink into the muddy earth. The water is rising at a rate of up to 27m a year. Some villages have faced erosion as fast as 33m a year.
Newtok is not the only village facing this problem, there are more than 200 native Alaskan villages have problems with flooding and erosion and these villages have been erected to explore relocation. The article have stated that rising seas are affecting other parts of the world, including the Pankhali region in Bangladesh and the islands nations of Maldives and Tuvalu and respective governments are now considering wholesale migration as a matter of public safety.
The united nations have estimated 150 million people could become "environmental refugees" by 2050. The article had claimed every person who drives a car, used electricity are responsible for the warming climate, so does oil, gas and coal companies that profit from the release of heat trapping gasses. The article had also blamed the government who fail to act before these climate change hit their homes. Do you agree with the blame? i agree with it...'environmental refugees' are purely generated due our selfishness and greediness. we were not aware of our contribution to climate change and global warming until we hear a news on how innocent people are facing the consequences. How could this be fair.....I feel it is merely unfair for the villagers. it is not their mistake to be residents of the icy cold areas and at the same time they are not the contributors of global warming due to establishment of industries (oil, gas and coal) for them to face the consequences. The touching part of it are the children living in these locations.
These people deserve justice, however, the government is struggling to determine which are the agencies should pay for relocation because of high cost of moving communities. The government has not developed effective ways to protect communities at risk from climate change.
Newtok lies on the Ninglick River near Alaska's west coast, 640km from the nearest road.As the plane circles to land, it is plain to see the waters of Ninglick River encroaching on the village as result of increased temperatures and rising sea levels in the nearby Bering Sea, from which the river flows.
it has been decided that the entire village to be relocated to a grassy hillside on Nelson Island, 14.4 km upstream, but moving a village is very costly (between US$80mil and US$130 million). It is always an unanswered question on who should bear this cost. No doubt most public support is only available in the form of reconstruction or post disaster relief, however this public support and reconstruction is no use to communities living through slow ongoing disaster..... Will these affected people receive aid and a new living...or these innocent people going to be neglected and left to be victims of climate warming, an ongoing disaster.
Life need to be saved. These people deserve to live a happy life, free from disaster. If it is necessary for them to be relocated and it has to be carried out immediately. If the particular government can't afford, all the other countries of the world need to give a hand as climate change and global warming were contributed collectively. Money is being spent to establish new technologies to overcome climate change and global warming. Although new technologies are important, this issue also has to be given importance as living people have already started to face its consequences.This is my opinion, please state your opinions too......
Panimalar Baskaran
Sunday, March 21, 2010
Clean Water and the Climate
Water has been an important resources for most living being on this planet. However, it is also prone to abuse by human being. We do not appreciate clean water that comes our way. We especially Malaysian take clean water for granted.
In Malaysia, water tariff is still very low and affordable to all. However less we realized that lately there has been a few cases of water treatment plant shut down due to excessive amount of pollutant. Water catchment area nowadays are prone to pollution by human activities. Worst is when the destruction of catchment area by illegal logger uncontrollably.
When we talk about clearing of forest, less do we realized that those forest doesnt only act as a catchment area and carbon sink which can lead to global warming if it is being redeveloped. One of the example is where a rubber plantation project spanning across 443 hectares that required deforestation at two water intake and treatment plant.
This is the main evident that by planting fertilizer, generous amount of pesticide can easilly leach into soil and groundwater which eventually connected to the rivers or pond. This will then lead to human health risk if there is any uptake of groundwater.
“These chemicals cannot be present inside your water and the treatment cost for it is high. The moment you have ammonia pollution you have to shut down the water treatment plant, this had happened to water treatment plants at Sungai Nilai and Sungai Langat, which had to be shut down because of ammonia pollution.
The consequences are lack of water supply, increasing tariff and poor water supply quality so much so that consumers have to fix their own water filters.
This was an article adopted from The Star on water crisis and climate change in Malaysia.
In Malaysia, water tariff is still very low and affordable to all. However less we realized that lately there has been a few cases of water treatment plant shut down due to excessive amount of pollutant. Water catchment area nowadays are prone to pollution by human activities. Worst is when the destruction of catchment area by illegal logger uncontrollably.
When we talk about clearing of forest, less do we realized that those forest doesnt only act as a catchment area and carbon sink which can lead to global warming if it is being redeveloped. One of the example is where a rubber plantation project spanning across 443 hectares that required deforestation at two water intake and treatment plant.
This is the main evident that by planting fertilizer, generous amount of pesticide can easilly leach into soil and groundwater which eventually connected to the rivers or pond. This will then lead to human health risk if there is any uptake of groundwater.
“These chemicals cannot be present inside your water and the treatment cost for it is high. The moment you have ammonia pollution you have to shut down the water treatment plant, this had happened to water treatment plants at Sungai Nilai and Sungai Langat, which had to be shut down because of ammonia pollution.
DON'T BLAME CLIMATE CHANGE.....climate change does necessary lead to the crisis such as draught, flood and other effect. It is human activity that play a major role in addressing this issues.
“And the system is straight forward - if we disturb our forests, it impacts our water supply.”
In Malaysia, climate change affect us in a way where “We may have more rain or, we might not have rain at all. "When the fluctuation of rain is disturbed, the survival of a tropical country is disturbed. This is because the rainfall does not support ground water. “In a Glacier system (a country with four seasons), the recharge rate is higher because the snow melts slowly. "Here the forests are capturing most of the water, and helping us by releasing it slowly. For example, if it rains in KL, the Klang River level goes up. But when it's raining there, the level here is very low," As such, the river only floods after two hours because of the delay, which is a natural process. But when we destroy the forest, this delay time is reduced.The consequences are lack of water supply, increasing tariff and poor water supply quality so much so that consumers have to fix their own water filters.
This was an article adopted from The Star on water crisis and climate change in Malaysia.
Friday, March 19, 2010
FAREWELL PLASTIKI!
Hi everyone.
I’ve came across an article about a unique expedition that hope to raise awareness of plastic waste in the ocean, as well as to raise interest in using waste in new ways. Have you heard of The Plastiki Expedition?? The Expedition is a bold adventure that aims to capture the world's imagination and draw our attention to the state of our oceans.
The Plastiki concept was birthed nearly three years ago following the United Nation Environment Programme (UNEP) report 'Ecosystems and Biodiversity in Deep Waters and High Seas'. The report highlights the way fisheries, pollution and other stresses such as those arising from global climate change are impacting and affecting the marine world.
The Expedition is the brainchild of David de Rothschild, and the goal is audacious: to sail 12,000 nautical miles across the Pacific Ocean from San Francisco, California to Sydney, Australia in a boat made entirely out of plastic bottles and recycled waste products.
Now, the idea is not just a sweet dream anymore when the Plastiki, a 60-foot (18-meter) catamaran made of over 12,000 plastic bottles, as well as other recyclable plastic is already built and set for departure. The Plastiki was engineered by a number of experts in the field of sustainable design, boat building, architecture, materials and innovative design technology. The design aims to be completely self-contained in terms of its energy generation, fresh water creation and waste treatment.
The Plastiki expedition carries (among others) four scientists from the Scripps Research Institute who will study ocean acidification, marine debris, overfishing, and coral bleaching. The four month voyage will see The Plastiki pass through a number of environmentally sensitive regions. The most notable of which has been ominously named the 'Eastern Garbage Patch' (the world's largest landfill located in the middle of the Pacific Ocean), a region six times the size of the United Kingdom where vast quantities of plastic pollution have accumulated because of the currents.
"We hope that this expedition will not only bring light to the marine litter problem, but also inspire innovative solutions," said Elisabeth Guilbaud-Cox of UNEP's Regional Office for North America.
For more information, you can google ‘the Plastiki’ and lots of information is out there for you.
And guess what guys, the Plastiki is ready to begin her momentous voyage on Saturday 20th March 2010 at around 9:30am PST (TOMORROW!).
Farewell Plastiki… I would love to know about your discoveries later.
p/s: Anyone have ever heard of this ‘Great Pacific or Eastern Garbage Patch’?? This is the first time I heard about it and very eager to see its photos.
-Muharniza-
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Wednesday, March 17, 2010
Wind Energy
In recent years, the growth of capacity to generate electricity from wind energy has been rapid, growing from almost none in 1980 to 11,603 megawatts (MW) in 2006 in the
Generation of electricity by wind energy has the potential to reduce environmental impacts caused by use of fossil fuels to generate electricity because, unlike fossil fuels, wind energy does not generate atmospheric contaminants or thermal pollution, thus being attractive to many governments, organizations, and individuals.
Others have focused on adverse environmental impacts of wind-energy facilities, which include aesthetic and other impacts on humans and effects on ecosystems, including the killing of wildlife, especially birds and bats. Some environmental effects of wind-energy facilities, especially those from transportation (roads to and from the plant site) and transmission (roads or clearings for transmission lines), are common to all electricity-generating plants; other effects, such as their aesthetic impacts, are specific to wind-energy facilities.
Though wind power is non-polluting, however the turbines may create a lot of noise, which indirectly contributes to noise pollution. Wind energy is requiring knowledge of the weather and wind conditions on long term basis. Also, the wind energy will have the risk associated with the reliability of the wind power resource available at a particular site and the risk attached to the use of wind power equipment.
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