envir nmentTHE VANCOUVER SUN

Behind the baffling bee die-off

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Feature: the world’s ten worst ‘ecocides’

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FRIDAY, MAY 21, 2010A DIVISION OF CANWEST PUBLISHING INC.

W W W . V A N C O U V E R S U N . C O M

The oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico threatens the Breton National Wildlife Refuge, created by Theodore Roosevelt to halt a grave threat to birds in his era — the lucrative trade in plumage. Now, oil is starting to wash up on beaches where he once

At the heart of the region now threatened by the massive oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico is a chain of islands containing tens of thousands of seabirds. Thin ribbons of sand rising no higher than 19 feet out of the gulf, these islands — part of the Breton National Wildlife Refuge — currently hold at least 2,000 nesting pairs of brown pelicans, 5,000 pairs of royal terns, 5,000 pairs of Caspian terns, and 5,000 pairs of various seagulls and shorebirds. Earlier this week, strong winds and barrier-like booms kept the oil slick from washing ashore on Breton Island, the Chandeleur Islands, and other links in the refuge. But the National Audubon Society reported May 5 that oil had reached the beaches of the Chandeleurs, putting the abun-dant birdlife there in peril.More than a century ago, these islands held an even richer assemblage of bird species. Breton Island alone was home to 33 species of wintering waterfowl, wading birds, secretive marsh birds,

and various shorebirds. When the birds were in full plumage, Breton Island was quite a sight.Oil-boom barriers now line the shores of the Breton National Wild-life Refuge, home to tens of thousands of breeding seabirds.Because nobody lived on the barrier islands at the turn of the last century — they were isolated miles from Venice, Louisiana, with treacherous gulf waters in between — most Ameri-cans had never heard of the sandy breed-ing ground where pelicans and herons in the thousands populated the beach. But plume hunters in Mississippi and Louisi-ana had. Regularly gangs made “hits” on the islands’ nesting wading birds and seabirds. The birds’ feathers were worth a fortune

for milliners because the delicate plumage was needed to adorn ladies hats — the fashion rage of

the Gilded Age and beyond.To Roosevelt, the despoilers and plume-hunters of the Gulf South

were pirates, and he wanted the feather

mafias arrested. “Wreck-ers are no longer

respectable and plume-hunters and eggers are sinking to the same

level,” Roo-sevelt wrote

about Breton Island. “The illegal business of killing breeding birds, of leaving nestlings

to starve wholesale, and of general ruthless extermination, more and more tends to attract men of the same moral

category as those who sell whiskey to Indians and combine the running of ‘blind pigs’ with highway robbery and murder for hire.”To stop the carnage, Roosevelt issued an executive order on October 4, 1904 creating the Breton Island Federal Bird Reservation off the southeast coast of Louisiana. The reservation was the second unit — after Pelican Island, Florida — of what would eventually become the U.S. National Wildlife Refuge System, whose stated mission was to “work with others to conserve, protect and enhance fish wildlife, plants and their habitats for the continuing benefit of the American people.” Today, the refuge system numbers 551 protected areas. The history of Theodore Roosevelt and the creation of the U.S.’s first wildlife refuges in is one of the seminal stories in American conservation. For most of his adult life, Roosevelt was a staunch Auduboner. As U.S. President from 1901 to 1909, he kept a White House bird list. He regularly met with his ornithologist friends Frank M.

Gulf oil spill threatens wildlife refuge

By Douglas BrinkleySpecial to the Vancouver Sun

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A dead shark on a beach in Ship Island, Mississippi. Photograph by Joe Raedle/Getty Images

Scientists condemn ‘political assaults’

A group of 255 of the world’s top scientists today written an open let-ter aimed at restoring public faith in the integrity of climate science.In a strongly worded reproof of the recent escalation of political assaults on climatologists, the letter, published in the US Journal Science and signed by 11 Nobel laureates, attacks crit-ics driven by “special interests or dogma” and “McCarthy-like” threats against researchers. It also attempts to set the record straight on the proc-ess of rigorous scientific research.The letter is a response to negative pub-licity following the release of thousands of hacked emails from climate scientists at the University of East Anglia (UEA)

By Celia Cole

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Secret Copenhagen recording revelations

A leaked recording of behind-the-scenes negotiations between world leaders at the Copenhagen climate summit in December has revealed bad-tempered exchanges and clear frus-trations from Europeans at what they saw as intransigence by the Chinese.The recording – published on the web-site of German magazine Der Spiegel – offers an extraordinary glimpse of the battle taking place between lead-ers including Barack Obama, Gor-don Brown, Angela Merkel and Nikolas Sarkozy, and Chinese and Indian negotiators who were deter-mined to resist a treaty that includes binding emissions reduction targets.The failure of the Copenhagen summit

By David Adam and James Randerson

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27%of all food produced inNorth America is wasted.

FACT OFTHEDAY

SUNDAY MAY 23

DO

N’T

FO

RGET

There are no passengers on Spaceship Earth. We are all crew.

- Marshall McLuhan, 1964

The Gulf of Mexico, By the Numbers

UN chief critical of Ca-nadian climate change

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THE VANCOUVER SUN ENVIRONMENT7 8FRIDAY, MAY 21, 2010 FRIDAY, MAY 21, 2010 THE VANCOUVER SUN ENVIRONMENT

A campaign to declare the mass destruction of ecosystems an international crime against peace - alongside genocide and crimes against humanity - is being launched in the UK.The proposal for the United Nations to accept “ecocide” as a fifth “crime against peace”, which could be tried at the International Criminal Court (ICC), is the brainchild of British lawyer-turned-campaigner Polly Higgins.The radical idea would have a profound effect on industries blamed for widespread damage to the environment like fossil fuels, mining, agriculture, chemicals and forestry.Supporters of a new ecocide law also believe it could be used to prosecute “climate deniers” who distort science and facts to discourage voters and politicians from taking action to tackle global warming and climate change.“Ecocide is in essence the very antithesis of life,” says Hig-gins. “It leads to resource depletion, and where there is escalation of resource depletion, war comes chasing behind. Where such destruc-tion arises out of the actions of mankind, ecocide can be regarded as a crime against peace.”Higgins, formerly a barrister in Lon-don specialising in employment, has already had success at the UN with a Uni-versal Declaration for Planetary Rights, mod-elled on the human rights declaration. “My starting point was ‘how do we create a duty of care to the planet, a pre-emptive obligation to not harm the planet?’”After a successful launch at the UN in 2008, the idea has been adopted by the Bolivian government, who will propose a full members’ vote, and Higgins has taken up her cam-paign for ecocide.Ecocide is already recognised by dictionaries, but Higgins’ more legal definition would be: “The extensive destruction, damage to or loss of ecosystem(s) of a given territory, whether by human agency or by other causes, to such an extent that peaceful enjoyment by the inhabitants of that territory has been severely diminished.”The ICC was set up in 2002 to hear cases for four crimes against peace: genocide, war crimes, crimes of aggression (such as unprovoked war), and crimes against humanity.Higgins makes her case for ecocide to join that list with a simple equation: extraction leads to ecocide, which leads to resource depletion, and resource depletion leads to con-flict. “The link is if you keep over-extracting from your capital asset we’ll have very little

left and we will go to war over our capital asset, the last of it,” adds Higgins, who has support in the UN and European commission, and among climate scientists, environ-mental lawyers and international campaign groups.Although there is debate over how frequently people go to war over resources such as water, a growing number of important voices are arguing this case. Most recently Sir David King, the UK’s former chief scientist, predicted a century of “resource wars”, and in response to a report on resource conflicts by campaign group Global Witness, Les-sons Unlearned, the UN appeared to accept many of the arguments.

Controversially, Higgins is suggesting ecocide would include damage done to any species - not just humans. This, she says, would

stop prosecutions being tied up in legal wrangling over whether humans were harmed, as many environ-

mental cases currently are.: “If you put in a crime that’s absolute you can’t spend years

arguing: you take a soil sample and if it tests as positive it’s bang to rights.”

Under an ecocide law, which would be more potent be-

cause prosecutions would be against individuals such as

directors rather than the companies, traditional energy companies could have to become largely clean energy companies, much extractive min-ing would have to be scaled back or stopped, chemicals which contaminate soil and water and kill wildlife would have to be abandoned

and large-scale de-forestation would not

be possible. “I’m only just beginning to get to

terms with how enormous that change will be,” admits

Higgins.Higgins will launch her cam-

paign through a website – thisise-cocide.com – asking for global sup-

port to pressure national governments to vote for the proposed law if it is accepted

by the UN Law commission. The deadline for the text is January, and a vote has been scheduled on other

amendments in 2012. It would need a two-thirds majority of the 197 member countries to pass.

Higgins hopes the UN’s “one member, one vote” system will help over-ride likely oppo-sition of some nations and vested business interests. She also believes many businesses favour clear regulation because they fear a future public backlash. And she cites how, when the US entered world war two, its car manufacturers - despite initial opposition - made 10 times the number of aircraft originally asked for. “It shows you how industry can turn around very fast.”

1.Alberta tar sands:

Referred to as the most dam-aging project on the planet. According to Greenpeace, emissions from tar sands ex-traction could grow to between

127 and 140m tonnes by 2020, ex-ceeding the current emissions of Aus-tria, Portugal, Ireland and Denmark. If proposed expansion proceeds,it will result in the loss of vast tracts of bo-real forest and peat bogs of a territory the size of England.

The North Pacific gyre:

A swirling island of 100m tonnes of plas-tic bits and bottle tops, spins clockwise from Hawaii to Japan. Also

known as the Pacific trash vor-tex, it is estimated to be the size of Texas. This picture shows a laysan albatross (Diomedea im-mutabilis) giving a bottle cap to its chick.

Deep-sea mining: The emerging underwa-ter mineral extraction in-dustry is sounding alarm bells among marine biolo-gists, environmental scien-

tists and campaigners such as Polly Higgins, who predict that mining for gold, silver and copper on the sea-bed will be the next great ecological disaster. The fragile marine ecosys-tem of the sea floor is a frontier that we know very little about.

The Dongria Kondh: Members of the Dongria Kondh tribe gather on top of the Niyamgiri mountain, which they worship as their living god, to protest against plans by Vedanta

Resources to mine bauxite from that mountain. The mine will destroy the for-ests on which the Dongria Kondh depend and threaten the livelihoods of thousands of other Kondh tribal people living in the area. Vedanta denies allegations that the planned mine would violate the rights of thousands of people.

The Amazon: The razing of the Amazonian rainfor-est, a key stabi-liser of the global climate system, by logging, min-

ing, crop planting and beef production. Almost 60% of the region’s forests could be wiped out or severely damaged by 2030.

Mountaintop removal:

Aerial of mountaintop removal coal mining site in West Virginia. Mountaintop mining in-volves a highly destruc-tive practice of blast-

ing through hundreds of feet of mountaintop to get at thin but valuable seams of coal.

Linfen, China: The most polluted city on earth.

Located at the heart of a 12-mile industrial belt of iron foundries, smelting plants and cement factories, fed by the 50m tonnes of

coal mined every year, unregu-lated because of rapid develop-ment.

Toxic dumping by Chev-ron Texaco in Ecuador:

Chevron, formerly Texaco, is alleged to have dumped billions of gallons of crude oil and toxic waste waters into the Ama-zonian jungle over two decades. This oily

pond is at the oil production site of Guanta, near the city of Lago Agrio. Ecuador’s recent bill of rights for nature has changed the legal status of nature from being simply property to being a right-bearing entity. Campaigners hope this will stop similar ecological disasters from happening again.

Space junk: From spent rockets to defunct sat-ellites, the millions of pieces of orbital debris have reached a critical level. A computer-generated image re-leased by the European Space Agency shows an ap-proximation of 12,000 fragments in orbit around the Earth.

2.

3.

4.

5.

The Niger delta: Fifty years of oil extraction in the Niger delta has scarred the Niger delta. Oil compa-nies operated here for decades with very little environmental supervision and the delta, notoriously beset by conflict and poverty, has been steadily pushed towards ecological disas-ter. Villagers struggle to live off land and water poisoned by years of oil spills, and crops fail under the acid rain caused by gas flares.

7.

6.

8.

9.

10.

10worst ecocides‘ ’From floating plastic islands to orbiting space junk, the

worldwide destruction of ecosystems is worse now than at any other time...and environmental lawyer,

Polly Higgins, is advocating a new law at the UN that would recognise ‘ecocide’ as the

fifth ‘crime against peace’.

Dr. Vesselin Popovski, Senior Academic Officer at United Nations University Institute for Sustainability and Peace (UNU-ISP) shares the spirit of an-ger and condemnation against those he terms

“eco-destroyers” and the need to ensure that perpetrators are held accountable. He has experience working in the former Soviet Union helping victims of ecological disas-ters, including Chernobyl, in their struggle for compensations.However, Popovski differentiates between advocacy and campaigning on the one hand — where using terminology such as ‘ecocide’ can attract attention and sup-port — and introducing international legal norms, such as a fifth crime against peace, on the other.Genocide, he argues, is a result of criminal intent, planning and execution, whereas

ecocide is a result of greed and negligence that can also be criminalized, but in differ-ent legal processes, not in the international humanitarian law that applies in armed conflict.“Let’s not diminish genocide with ecocide.

Genocide is a horrific anti-human policy deliberately orchestrated by individual lead-ers to annihilate a large group of people. If we play around with words and push for equalizing genocide with ecocide, we may de-facto dishonour the victims of the Holo-caust or the Rwandan genocide,” Popovski

says. “The over-exploitation of resources and ecological degradation may push some people to change homes and jobs, but this is incomparable to the deliberate planned and executed extermination of millions in genocide situations.”Popovski doubts that the ICC is the appro-priate mechanism through which to pros-ecute large numbers of greedy or negligible company directors. “The ICC is charged with identifying individual perpetrators with criminal intent,” he explains, going on to illustrate how this would be difficult or impossible in the case of ecocide:“Nobody in the Soviet Union deliberately planned the Chernobyl disaster in the same way as Stalin planned the deportation of Chechens in 1944 — which was a crime against humanity. Nobody in Dow Chemi-cals deliberately planned to kill thousands of people in Bhopal in the same way as Saddam Hussein did in Northern Iraq using chemical gases.”“Secondly, it would be very difficult to identify crimes and prosecute individuals.”

In many countries, pollution and eco-degradation are

already criminalized and one does not need to complicate it with the abstract terminology of ecocide.

F o r m o r e i n f o r m a t i o n v i s i t : thisisecocide.com

Is “genocide” a better term?

- By Juliette Jowit

“”

Dr. Vesselin Popovski

Environmentally destructive and even criminal behaviour commit- ted by powerful multinational corporations and national governments has often had lethal effects on local communities and ecosystems. Today, with ever more desperate grabs at resources taking place, crimes of this sort are on the increase. According to an unpub-lished report by the United Nations, 3,000 of the world’s biggest companies have caused US $2.2 trillion worth of environmental dam-age.Therefore indeed — in light of poor regula-tion, neglect and complicity by national governments in dealing with environmental injustices — there is a clear need for in-ternational mechanisms through which perpe-trators can be held responsible and victims can claim compensation.The logic behind the campaign’s proposal is that ecosystem loss leads to resource deple-tion and ultimately war.

What is ‘ecocide’?

Does air travel really have a big environmental footprint?There’s no way around the fact that flights are bad news for the environment. It’s not just that planes are worse than most other forms of transport in terms of the impact of greenhouse gases per passenger mile. Just as important is the simple fact that flying allows us to travel a far greater number of miles than we otherwise could. Thanks to these two factors, individual trips by air can have a remarkably large carbon footprint – which helps explain why aviation has become such a heated issue in the climate change debate.

What is the total impact of flying on the climate?As the aviation industry is usually keen to point out, planes account for only around 1.5%–2%

of global CO2 emissions. However, this figure is somewhat misleading.First, the total global warming impact of each flight is thought to be around twice as high as the CO2 emissions alone (see ‘What’s an aviation multiplier?’, be-low). Second, the figures are skewed in favour of British travellers. The standard way to ac-count for the emis-sions for an inter-national flight is to allocate half to the country of depar-ture and half to the country of arrival. Third, the avia-tion industry causes emissions over and above those of the planes themselves. The processing and transportation of the aviation fuel, and the manufacture and maintenance of planes, air-ports and support vehicles all create extra car-bon dioxide.

What about greener planes?A number of technologies designed to reduce the environmental impact of flying have been researched, tested and implemented. However, compared with greener cars, where the tec nol-

ogies are proved and the carbon saving huge, the potential for eco-friendly flying looks rather limited. There will be some further gains in en-gine efficiency over the coming decades, and larger planes with more seats will allow slight-ly lower emissions per passenger. But there is nothing in the pipeline with the transformative potential of the electric car.

What can individuals do?For anyone concerned about their contribution to global warming, cutting back on air travel is an obvious goal. It’s true that short flights tend to be more harmful to the climate per mile trav-elled than long-haul flights are (because they have more empty seats, and because taking off and landing burns more fuel than cruising) but this doesn’t change the fact that the further you travel, the greater the emissions that will result. People often assume that budget flights are somehow more eco-unfriendly than expen-sive ones. In fact, the opposite tends to be true. Budget airlines pack more passengers on each flight and typically have younger, more fuel-efficient fleets than longer-established airlines. Indeed, the least eco-friendly tickets of all aren’t the cheapest but the most expensive.

FRIDAY, MAY 21, 2010THE VANCOUVER SUN ENVIRONMENT13

CO2

Could CO2 be the green fuel powering tomorrow’s cars?Imagine a green fuel that could power our cars, keep the wheels of industry turning, and wean us off our addiction to oil - a fuel called CO2 By Duncan Graham-Rowe

Imagine a green fuel that could power our cars, keep the wheels of industry turning, and wean us off our addiction to oil. A fuel that could stop climate change in its tracks, and send carbon

levels plunging to pre-industrial levels. A fuel that allows business as usual to carry on as before – emissions and all. Because that fuel is… CO2.It’s actually not that far-fetched a scenario. Trees and algae have been turning CO2 into fuel since the dawn of time, unlocking the chemical energy within this molecule to power metabolic processes. With a little ingenuity, it is already possible to transform CO2 into anything from petrol to natural gas. And thanks to centuries of industrialisation, we appear to have a plentiful supply of the stuff floating around us in the atmosphere. So if we can just find an efficient means of extracting CO2 from

air and converting it into a useful fuel, it should be possible both to power our future and scrub our atmosphere clean.But there is, of course, a catch. Carbon dioxide is a very stable molecule. So any conversion processes will take a lot of energy. But getting from CO2 to CO requires either a lot of energy, or billions of years worth of evolutionary chemical nous. The US Government’s Sandia National Laboratories, in Albuquerque, New Mexico, have opted for the former approach, developing a system that takes its energy source from concentrated solar power. As Green Futures goes to press, researchers from Bristol and Bath Universities in the UK have also announced plans for solar-powered CO2-to-fuel conversion.Unlike many large-scale initiatives to tackle global warming, converting CO2 into fuel for domestic use can appeal to the most self-interested government – even a ‘climate sceptic’ one.At the University of Calgary, David Keith believed he’d found a solution in the form of a process which extracts carbon dioxide from air via ‘spray towers’. As air is drawn into the towers, it is sprayed with a fine mist of an alkali solution. The technology was promising enough to launch a spin-off company, Carbon Engineering Ltd.Given the heroic scale of the engineering require-ments, and the fact that as a concept air capture is still relatively unheard of, it’s hardly surprising if its proponents are facing what Keith calls a credibility gap. Then there’s the fear that if we do eventually manage to start actively removing CO2 from the atmosphere, it will create a culture of compla-cency, effectively giving industry a licence to pollute. It could make today’s debates over the morality of carbon offsets look mild-mannered by comparison.

The impact of flying on

Aviation Q&A :

environment By Duncan Clark

study

North

Pole

to

determine

region’s ecological health

Polar trekkers

An “unbelievably tough” 60-day British expedition from Canada’s High Arctic to the North Pole has collected hun-dreds of “unique” samples of polar ice and sea water, part of an international scientific project aimed at shedding new light on carbon dioxide concentrations in one of the world’s most forbidding and controversial environments.Back in Ottawa, just days after reaching the North Pole last week, members of the 2010 Catlin Arctic Survey re-counted their “gruelling” trek by sleds across the Arctic ice and highlighted the collection of what they described as an unprecedented research resource, one that should im-prove polar climate predictions and help Canada and other northern nations assess the state of the region’s ecological health.The goal of the project was to measure sea ice thick-ness and test CO2 levels in both ice and water around a base camp off Canada’s Ellef Ringnes Island and along a 500-kilometre route leading from a departure point on the sea ice at about 85 degrees north, across the frozen central Arctic Ocean to the North Pole.British explorers Ann Daniels, Martin Hartley and Char-lie Paton battled extreme cold and unstable ice conditions while gathering samples to be analyzed in the coming months by scientists from Europe, the U.S. and Canada, including researchers with the federal Department of Fisheries and Oceans and University of Laval.When they reached the North Pole on May 12, they took carefully preserved samples of ice and water that the mis-sion’s communications director, Rod Macrae, said repre-sent a scientific first.“This is getting science done the hard way,” Daniels said in a statement. “At times it was unbelievably tough going with large areas of very thin ice and open water to negoti-ate. But we got the survey work done and, best of all, kept our water samples in a liquid state despite the bitter cold.”Tim Cullingford, the survey’s scientific director, told Can-west News Service that the sample collection across such a wide swath of the Arctic Ocean during the spring period marks a “fantastic achievement” that will fill a serious gap

in the global record of CO2 concentrations for the world’s oceans.“What we now have is a unique baseline that will enable a better understanding of what is going on at a crucial time of year,” he said in an expedition overview released Mon-day.Tim Cullingford, the survey’s scientific director, told Can-west News Service that the sample collection across such a wide swath of the Arctic Ocean during the spring period marks a “fantastic achievement” that will fill a serious gap

in the global record of CO2 concentra-tions for the world’s oceans.Back in Ottawa, just days after reaching the North Pole last week, members of the 2010 Catlin Arc-tic Survey recounted their “gruelling” trek by sleds across the Arctic ice and highlighted the col-lection of what they described as an un- precedented research resource, one that

should improve polar climate predictions and help Canada and other northern nations assess the state of the region’s ecological health.The goal of the project was to measure sea ice thick-ness and test CO2 levels in both ice and water around a base camp off Canada’s Ellef Ringnes Island and along a 500-kilometre route leading from a departure point on the sea ice at about 85 degrees north, across the frozen central Arctic Ocean to the North Pole.“This is getting science done the hard way,” Daniels said in a statement.

By Randy Boswell

[ ]

British polar adventurers test their equipment before starting their Catlin Arctic Survey polar expedition at Canada’s Resolute Bay in this 2009 file photos. Photograph by: Martin Hartley-www.martinhartley.com/Handout, Reuters

Man proposes; nature dis-poses. We are seldom more vulnerable than when we feel insulated.The miracle of modern flight protected us from gravity, at-mosphere, culture, geography. It made everywhere feel local, interchangeable. Nature inter-jects, and we encounter - tragi-cally for many - the reality of thousands of miles of separa-tion. We discover that we have not escaped from the physical world after all. Complex, connected societies are more resilient than simple ones - up to a point. During the east African droughts of the early 1990s, I saw at first hand what anthropologists and economists have long pre-dicted: those people who had the fewest trading partners were hit hardest. Connectivity provided people with insur-ance: the wider the geographi-cal area they could draw food from, the less they were hurt by a regional famine. But beyond a certain level, connectivity becomes a haz-ard. The longer and more com-plex the lines of communica-tion and the more dependent we become on production and business elsewhere, the great-er the potential for disruption. This is one of the lessons of the banking crisis. Impover-ished mortagage defaulters in the United States - the butter-fly’s wing over the Atlantic - almost broke the global econ-omy. If the Eyjafjallajoekull volcano - by no means a mon-ster - keeps retching it could, in these fragile times, produce the same effect. We have several such vulner-abilities. The most catastroph-ic would be an unexpected coronal mass ejection - a solar storm - which causes a surge of direct current down our electricity grids, taking out the transformers. It could happen in seconds; the damage and collapse would take years to reverse, if we ever recovered. We would soon become aware of our dependence on electric-ity: an asset which, like oxy-gen, we notice only when it fails. As New Scientist magazine points out, an event like this would knacker most of the systems which keep us alive. It would take out water treat-ment plants and pumping sta-

tions.

Environmental columnist George Monbiot contemplates the possibility

Has our society become too complex to sustain?

The team’s base camp off Canada’s Ellef Ringnes Island (circled).

Converting CO2 to fuel is only half the problem. We also have to suck the stuff out of the air in the first place.‘ Japan Agency for Marine-Earth

Science and Technology

Fumio Inagaki