Putin's Private Siberian Project Excludes Alexei Navalny

Two-dimensional maps often show Russia on the far right side and the United States all the way over on the left. This separation provides the false impression the countries are far apart. But as John McCain's vice presidential running mate, Sarah Palin, famously observed, she could see Russia from her kitchen window. Presumably, Russia's President Vladimir Putin can see the United Staes from a Siberian window. And lately, US military planes have intercepted Russian planes snooping from the skies over Alaska. Climate change turned Siberia, once identified with Russian prison camps in an inhospitable frozen wasteland, into what President Putin calls the East Sibrian Sea's Northern Sea Route "a matter of national pride." With increased seasonal passage through Arctic waters comes faster market access for oil and gas from Russia's Yamal Penninsula and a new military option. Beginning on September, 11, 2018, Russia, China and Mongolia participated in Vostok-2018, a massive military exercise in Siberia. By the middle of 2020, Vladimir Putin, who considered the collapse of the USSR the 20th century's geopolitical disaster, felt confident. Russia tamed the Chechnya separatists in 2000 and annexed Crimea in 2014. Possible domination of Georgia and Belarus was still in play. The US was about to walk away from an Open Skies Treaty, resisted by the Kremlin ever since one was designed to prevent surprise attacks after World War II. Refusing to authorize treaty-permtted flights over Russia's military exercises and staging areas for nuclear weapons aimed at Europe provoked the US to designate a final November, 2020 participation date. Russia already interfered with US elections in 2016 and was prepared to do so again in 2020. On July 1, 2020, voters approved a referendum allowing a Russian president to serve two consecutive 6-year terms after the next election, when the current term of President Putin, age 67, ends in 2024. At this propitious moment, Putin's political nemesis, Alexei Navalny, arrived in Siberia. Mr. Navalny's anti-corruption message had gained traction in Russia's urban areas, where his slick YouTube delivery system skirted state-owned media and inspired massive protests when Putin decided to return to the presidency in 2012. By 2020, Navalny was far outside Russia's major cities schooling opposition city council candidates who won two seats and ousted the majority held by Putin's United Russian party in the student town of Tomsk in Siberia's elections on Sunday, September 13, 2020. By winning one seat in Novosibirsk and uniting with three other independent candidates, the United Russian party also seemed likely to lose its majority there. Timing favored Mr. Navalny's opposition party, since the coronavirus exposed the effect of falling oil prices on a falling standard of living, while Putin's wealthy oligarchy buddies remained untouched. On the plane back to Moscow from Siberia, Mr. Navalny became seriously ill. The plane made an emergency landing in Omsk, Siberia, where Alexei spent two days in a coma before the Kremlin allowed a plane to fly him to Germany on August 22, 2020. There, and also later in laboratories in France and Sweden, doctors determined he was exposed to the nerve gas chemical weapon, Novichok, the same poison that nearly killed the former Russian spy, Sergei Skripal, in England. On Tuesday, September 8, 2020, a masked man threw a foul-smelling liquid into the offices of Navalny's Anti-Corruption Foundation in Novosibirsk, Siberia. By Wednesday, September 9, German officials announced the attack on Navalny forced them to reconsider Gazprom's Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline between Germany and Russia, which already is a source of controversy in Germany and Poland. Although Mr. Navalny came out of his coma on Monday, September 7, 2020, and could walk a short distance by September 14, German physicians remain uncertain about the extent of his long-term recovery. German doctors released Mr. Navalny from the hospital on September, 22, 2020. He will remain in Germany for rehabilitation but has expressed his intention to return to Russia, where court orders have frozen his bank accounts and, on August 27, 2020, seized his apartment to prevent it from being "sold, donated, or mortgaged." Knowing Mr. Navalny will be greeted with a rousing rally when he returns to Moscow, Putin certainly is planning to counter his reception. It is interesting to note how enthusiastic Vladimir Putin was about Siberia, when Secretary of State Hillary Clinton visited him in 2010. He took her to a map in his dacha's private office to show her the areas where he was involved in saving Siberian tigers and polar bears from extinction. An earlier post, "North Pole Flag," also details Russia's continuing interest in the Arctic.

You Don't Have to Be Catholic to be Helped by Nuns

On the passing of John Lewis, the young 1963 Civil Rights leader who went on to represent Georgia in Congress for 33 years, one tribute mentioned nuns who administered a Selma, Alabama, hospital took care of him when he was beaten by police in 1965. A female Muslim student wrote a prize-winning story about a nun, the principal of a college in Bangladesh, who saw she was absent, visited her family and arranged to help her continue her education after her unemployed father could no longer afford tuition. Shamima Sakendar's story is now a film, "The Soul," which can be viewed on Facebook and YouTube. Taken together, these mentions of the unheralded contributions religious orders of women reminded me of the legally-trained nuns who represent immigrants in courts at the US border and the recently deceased Sister Carolyn Farrell, who had helped plan, at the invitation of Iowa's governor, the State's long-term goals. She also was elected to the City Council in Dubuque, Iowa, in 1977 and became mayor in 1980, since Council members held that office on a rotating basis. The work nuns do in Africa is extremely important. To prevent young women from being lured into the human trafficking trade, nuns in Bukoba, Tanzania, help students become self-sufficient in a 3-year sewing program. At graduation, they receive their own sewing machines. Since 1989, nuns in Kampala Uganda, have provided a home for as many as 30 abandoned babies and children under five at a time. When mothers die in childbirth after traveling long distances to deliver their newborns, relatives often cannot be found to care for the babies. In other cases, women flee from abusive husbands who are left with children they don't want, husbands leave to seek work in cities or abroad and never return and friends and relatives shun women and children who are HIV positive. With help from volunteers, the nuns carry the babies, sleep with them and maintain a cow and chickens to provide milk and eggs to feed them. The nuns try to find caring relatives by posting children's photos in local newspaper ads. If no relatives are found and the children have not been adopted by age 6, they are transferred to a children's home and then a group home until they can support themselves. As carbon dioxide's greenhouse gases continue to raise the Earth's temperatures, the organic farming practices of nuns in drought-ridden Chilanga, Zambia, provide a valuable example of how to produce a variety of indigenous fruits, cabbage, kale, maize, tomatoes, onions and beans as well as how to raise cows, goats and chickens. By drilling a borehole, the nuns were able to install an irrigation system to spray water over crops. They also use manure as organic fertilizer and crop rotation to keep from depleting soil nutrients. Mixing crops grown on the farm helps control insect damage. Without becoming Catholic, people around the world benefit from the care nuns provide.

Threats to Olympic Sites

Insurance companies feared financial losses if the coronavirus caused the cancellation of this summer's 2020 Olympic Games in Toyota. As it turned out, the games were rescheduled for July, 2021. Violence, including World War II, that marred the noble purpose of the games in the past, could again be a factor next year, if North Korea continues to launch missiles toward Japan.

     Environmental threats from pollution and climate change also have had an impact on the Olympics. Debris in the waters off Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, before the 2016 summer Olympics worried open-water swimmers and skippers in boating events. High winds delayed skiing events and kept spectators off the slopes at the 2018 winter games in Pyeongchang, South Korea.

     Despite efforts to switch away from fossil fuels and plant trees to control the sand and dirt blown south from the Gobi Desert, athletes at the 2022 winter Olympics in China could face a breathing, as well as a competitive, challenge at events in Yanqing and Chongli, north of Beijing. During winter, heating homes and factories increases pollution in an area that suffers year round. Smog is likely to obscure views from the 4-story tower built in Yanqing to give visitors to the Olympics a glimpse of the Great Wall of China.

     Since the fur from four goats is needed to respond to the fashion industry's demand for one cashmere sweater, grazing goats turned the Mongolian steppes north of China into a desert no longer capable of protecting Beijing from wind-blown sand. To stabilize top soil, the government removed up to 700,000 villagers in northern China from land designated for planting trees. However, at the same time climate change reduced rainfall in arid areas, many non-native trees planted in China required more water and worsened water shortages. An attempt to plant shrubs needing less water is underway. In any case, it is hard to know if China's new trees and shrubs will be ready to shield 2022's Olympic athletes from the Gobi Desert's blowing sand. According to Congbin Fu, the director of the Institute for Climate and Global Change Research at Nanjing University, growing forests is a long-term process that "can take several decades or even 100 years."

Children of the Year

Not only Greta Thunberg but you also are TIME magazine's 2019 "Person of the Year."  Children have the means of communication to meet the challenges of reducing and eliminating global threats of climate change, migration, and gun and nuclear weapon destruction by terrorists and nation states at home and abroad.

     Inaction no longer satisfies indigenous peoples confronting destruction of the Amazon forest in Brazil, democracy activists in Hong Kong, or religious orders of nuns offering proposals at the Vatican and stockholder meetings in New York.

     Just as Greta Thunberg did, children can paint a slogan for change on a sign and hold it up in front of the adults in the media, legislatures, banks, and corporations that have the power to act now. And young people have the numbers and time to keep the pressure on from now into the future.

     For other thoughts on the impact children have, see the earlier post, "Youth and Social Media Fuel Democracy."

Foreign Policy Need Not Be "Foreign":

Every year the Foreign Policy Association identifies the areas of the world that need our attention and prepares information to help us understand and discuss these issues. The association has prepared materials on the following for 2020:

• Climate change
• India and Pakistan conflict
• Red Sea security
• Modern slavery and human trafficking 
• U.S. relations with the Northern Triangle of Central America (Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador)
• China's Road to Latin America
• U.S. relations with the Philippines
• Artificial Intelligence (AI) and data

To find out how to obtain these materials and how to start a foreign policy discussion group, go to fpa.org/great_decisions.

Advice for Political Candidates

While a name may indicate a person's individualistic inheritance, it fails to disclose everything people want to know about each other. In the case of political candidates, voters want to know that the politicians they elect will correct the problems that matter most to them.

     In his new book, How Behavior Spreads: The Science of Complex Contagions, Damon Centola, a sociologist at the University of Pennsylvania, explains how changing complex behavior, such as changing a medical system or reducing the effects of climate change, requires multiple contacts reinforcing the same message over and over.

     Individual social media comments on Facebook, for example, can spread a bit of information, such as a job opening, easily and quickly. But it takes more than a march or rally to facilitate complex changes. It takes supporting messages, how-to instructions, and, maybe, competitive motivation from trusted friends, commentators, organizations, and symbols, like a donkey or elephant. Complex changes require effort; they involve physical risk, social ridicule, prayer, an investment of time and money.

     Believing social media has the power to make complex changes is a mistake. Convincing and mobilizing a multitude to take the actions needed to overcome inertia takes hard work. The American Revolution, forming labor unions, cleaning up the Great Lakes, and discovering and distributing a polio cure took more than a one-off Tweet. 

Winter Is Not Only Coming; The Polar Vortex Arrived

A wall of ice and "winter is coming" are not just fictions from Game of Thrones. According to a climate scientist from the University of Wisconsin, polar bears are not the only ones who suffer from the global warming that reduces the size of ice bergs. Collapsing glaciers should raise concern, not just entertain, tourists to Alaska.

Once a glacier's ice wall cracks, it enables a swoosh of Arctic air to rush south. The polar vortex that crippled the midwestern United States last week can result. Frigid temperatures also cause frost quakes like the one experienced near Lake Michigan in Chicago.  When sections of underground water freeze, they can crash together with a loud bang and cause slight tremors similar to an earthquake. 

If you've ever tried to function when it is minus 20 degrees with a wind chill that makes it feel like minus 40 or 50 degrees, you will see how serious a glacier break can be. People freeze to death. Systems equipped to heat homes in Wisconsin only handle minus 16 degrees, and last week they did not heat homes well enough to prevent the need to wear gloves inside. Water mains break; fighting fires becomes even more hazardous; buses cannot run because diesel fuel turns to gel; car batteries don't start.

If we add the effect of frigid weather to that of burning heat caused by global warming, or if you want to call it climate change, the future of life on planet Earth looks bleaker and bleaker.   

   

In Praise of Print

Marc Benioff, co-founder of Salesforce.com, made his billions creating a software company in the cloud's digital age.  Why did he and his wife, Lynne, just plunk down $190 million to purchase Time, a print magazine founded in 1923? They say they want to find solutions to some of the most complex problems in today's society.

     Do complex problems in today's society lend themselves to hashtag solutions, slogans on posters in marches, presidential "debates," and election campaign ads on TV? Consider: racism, gun violence, immigration, cancer, gene editing, an income gap between the Benioffs and nearly everyone else in the world, corruption, censorship by the government in China and Facebook in the US, robots replacing human workers, marriage, privacy versus national security, climate change, lopsided trade balances.

     TV headlines and 3-minute interviews, apps, and a limited number of Twitter characters have not solved today's problems, and they never will. The Federalist Papers argued before the U.S. Constitution was ratified. An extra Bill of Rights was needed. The print media backed further Amendments needed to clean up initial mistakes about the election of the President and Vice President, slavery, women's suffrage, and alcohol.

     Print carries revolutionary ideas everywhere in the world. Why do authoritarian governments always shut down the press? Writing at Iowa's Storm Lake Times, with a circulation of only 3,000, Art Cullen won a Pulitzer Prize in journalism for showing transparency's importance as a guard against bribes affecting government decisions. He wondered who was enabling the local Board of Supervisors in Buena Vista County, population 10,000, to help fund a million dollar defense against the Des Moines Water Works. His editorial disclosed the corn and soybean agribusiness farms that were contaminating drinking water with nitrates from their fertilizer.

     Open a discussion about tariffs at the dinner table or on social media. You'll see a difference of opinion on the purpose of tariffs, if they can accomplish these purposes, even if these purposes need to be achieved. Does anyone mention what they have read about what government representatives, experts on economics, seniors, Walmart shoppers, or farmers have said about tariffs?

     Informed judgments require the extended, detailed information print provides. Read the"Letters to the Editor," too. I'm often inspired by the readers who take time to compose the thoughtful opinions published. A grandmother's letter told why she insisted her two teen-aged grandchildren, she called them "screen zombies," put down their "tiny rectangles" to take in the spectacular sight of crossing the four-and-a-half-mile bridge over Chesapeake Bay.

     A digital marketer like Marc Benioff deserves gratitude for funding the printed link between society's complex problems and those who depend on the extensive body of information needed to solve them.

     

       

Lyme Aid

Summertime and the living is not easy where Lyme disease is on the rise. Black-legged ticks that carry the disease are now in 30 countries and half of all U.S. counties, mainly from the Northeast to the Midwest. Some blame the increase on warming from climate change.

     You might see a bull's-eye rash swelling around the bacteria left by a tick bite, but symptoms listed at LymeDisease.org vary and complicate diagnosis. Patients may have severe migraines, muscle spasms, and even seem to have ALS. Blood tests are worthless. The bacteria head for body tissues where they can spread to muscles, nerves, the brain, and heart before the needed early treatment with antibiotics is begun. New antibody tests are being developed.

     Since ticks pick up Lyme disease by feeding on white-footed mice, there are efforts to combat the disease by developing ways to kill ticks in the yards and nesting materials mice inhabit and to prevent mice from carrying the disease. Gene editing might be able to make mice less tasty to ticks or to immunize mice from tick-carrying bacteria.

     In summer, it's far more fun to catch and release fireflies than to be caught by ticks...mosquitoes and wasps.

China Stakes New Claim to Arctic

When warming from climate change uncovered portions of the ice sheet on Greenland, Chinese tourists arrived as did Chinese mining companies interested in the country's newly accessible deposits of rare earth minerals, said to be the world's tenth largest known deposit. In September, 2019, London's Rainbow mining company announced it was ready to expand rare earth production in Burundi to twenty times its current output in order to compete with China, already the world's major extractor of  the hazardous-to-mine rare earth elements. Rare earth elements have a wide variety of uses in hybrid cars, catalytic converters, wind turbines, aircraft engines, cell phones, film making, oil refining, x-rays, powerful magnets for MRI machines, control rods in nuclear reactors, and for TV and computer screens.

To date, Greenland's 56,000 citizens rely on fishing exports and an annual grant from Denmark. An independence movement lobbies to free Greenland from Denmark, and Greenland's Prime Minister Kim Kielsen sees potential ties with China as a way to eliminate the need for Denmark's help. (The earlier post, "Iceland Gives China the Cold Shoulder," describes China's earlier attempt to stake a claim in the Arctic.)

Denmark is not opposed to granting Greenland's independence. But it now does use Greenland as a way to claim Arctic land and the U.S. military base on Greenland to claim an exemption from paying its share of NATO funding. (In 2019, Norway's leader termed President Trump's attempt to purchase Greenland "ridiculous.")

After A Disaster, Give Me A Break

Climate change doesn't let up. Four blizzards hit the East Coast of the United States one after another this winter, and, on the West Coast, mudslides followed the fires that burnt away the trees anchoring soil. People on Caribbean islands, like Haiti, recovered from one hurricane only to be struck by drought and then the wind and torrential rain of another hurricane.

     Knowing a hurricane's devastation, or that of a war, and the effort and money needed to repair damage provides motivation for preventive measures. Immense benefit can be gained, if, for example, planting trees goes hand in hand with development, such as China has planned in its One Belt One road Initiative. Consider the benefits of tree projects in Haiti.

     A farmer in Haiti, who already had fields planted in potatoes and beans, was working to increase his income by diversifying, when a hurricane hit. His four goats, unable to bear the wind and rain, died of heart attacks. All his potatoes were lost along with at least 80% of his bean crop and what was left of the trees that had been cut down for fuel.

     Restoration of trees became a high priority, since they were needed to improve air quality, to stabilize hillsides from washing down over farms, and to provide avocado, mango, and papaya trees for food and income. Fast growing native oaks were needed to provide charcoal for cooking, and cedars and pines were a source of raw material for construction. Reforestation by the Plant With Purpose group's "Cash for Work" program gave immediate income to 2,000 employees.

     Long term, a variety of religious groups, the Arbor Day Foundation, and agronomy teams in Haiti have set up nurseries that now plant as many as 60,000 trees per year. Agronomy teams "get down and dirty" with local farmers to start income-producing fruit and other tree nurseries shaded by palm fronds propped up by sticks, to start tree plants in discarded broken buckets, and to employ procedures, such as drip irrigation, composting, and grafting citrus trees. As a result of student hikes to the forests on once barren mountains, from an early age, young people gain an appreciation for their country and learn to value and help plant trees.

   

China Tries to Build a Tree Wall

Rather than keeping immigrants out, China's new tree wall is designed to keep out the smog-producing sand and dirt that blows south into Beijing from the Gobi Desert.

     To combat pollution's health hazard and fossil-fuel causing climate change, China is employing a 3-pronged plan: 1) manufacturing electric cars and banning gas-fueled vehicles, 2) constructing towers to filter dirty air, and 3) planting a wall of pine and poplar trees.

Trees are the focus here, because electric cars powered by lithium batteries and air-filtering towers were the subjects of the earlier post, "How to Meet the Clean Air Challenge."

     Like the Sahara in Africa that even blows sand into Europe, the Gobi Desert expands into China, covering as much as 1,000 more square miles annually. Besides causing pollution, sand eliminates farming and livestock grazing land and closes roads and rail lines. By adding to the demand on groundwater and the loss of trees for firewood, population growth in Inner Mongolia, directly south of the Gobi Desert, also strips Beijing of any protection from wind blown sand. In both Africa and China, before close analysis, planting trees seems like a good solution to stabilize topsoil, absorb greenhouse gases, and even increase rainfall.

     According to an article in Mother Jones (August, 2017), Beijing's forestation efforts began in 1978 and accelerated as a government priority after 2000. Since then, up to 700,000 villagers have been forced off their family plats to make way for trees. By 2018, the government set ambitious planting targets: 32,400 new square miles worth of trees by the end of the year and an increase in the forested area of China's landmass from 21% to 23% by 2020 and to 26% by 2035. Villagers are paid to plant seedlings, and in 2018 armed police and 60,000 soldiers from the People's Liberation Army were reassigned from duty on the northern border in order to plant trees in Hebei Province around Beijing and the area where China will host the Winter Olympics in 2022.

     In response to the government's commitment to battle sand, the State Forestry Administration gained an incentive to claim the frequency of sandstorms decreased 20% between 2009 and 2014, rainfall increased almost six fold in 29 years, and a high percentage (60% to 75%) of new trees survived three years. By planting trees, running solar power fields, and attracting ecotourists, contractors, such as Wang Wenbiao, who heads the $6 billion Elion Resources Group, are making fortunes implementing these government programs. Wang also owns the Seven Star Lakes Desert Hotel and golf course which has a fountain at the entrance and a green lawn and grove of poplars.

Trees in the fast growing poplar genus include aspen trees that require an extensive root system to acquire the large amount of water desert conditions do not provide. Pictures of what are said to be poplars do not look as though they are growing the 3' to 5' annually that is expected.
     The smog reduction potential of China's electric cars, and maybe air filtering towers, seems to offer more promise than forestation.

Priority: Eliminate generating electricity from fossil fuels

Not only Disneyland and China design model cities for the future, schoolgirls and young boys also use cereal boxes, LEGOs, and every other sort of building toy to create their own visions of home. What the Visions and Pathways 2040 project at the University of Melbourne did, that was a bit different, was design a greener, cleaner city AND a path to get there from here.

A group of 250 experts from various disciplines collaborated to determine how to reach the year 2040 with cities that cut their greenhouse gas emissions by 80%. They realized they could work with many technologies, such as bladeless wind turbines, solar panels on skyscrapers, and roof and vertical gardens, that already exist. But future suburbs might look very different with less privacy because of clustered townhouses with solar roofs. At the same time, indiscriminate land clearing outside cities and for housing developments would be replaced by forest preservation and regeneration of shade trees used to capture and store carbon dioxide. Urban dwellers would get around through local forests by electric transport, bike trails, and walkways. A CSIRO-developed Australian Stocks and Flows Framework helped model these new cities and the path to them.

The Melbourne project also identified the direct and indirect emissions cities would need to reduce or eliminate. Transport, landfill waste, and buildings caused about 16% of direct carbon dioxide emissions in cities. While the energy used by the heavy industry and agricultural production needed to supply cities also caused indirect emissions, the need for electricity generated almost half of a city's indirect carbon footprint. That meant replacing the fossil fuel burned by power stations with clean technologies was a priority.

Experts saw the transition to ecocities initiated by: 1) city governments that used sanctions to discourage businesses and organizations from carbon-producing activities or 2) citizen movements that foster cooperatives and engage in cultural, political, and economic decisions. By visiting visionsandpathways.com/, you can get the entire Visions and Pathways 2040 report. The challenges it presents are something to think and talk about during the holidays and before making a New Year's Resolution to help your community create a positive climate change.

The Palm Oil Dilemma for Consumers

Before consumers buy products they are going to eat or drink, they are beginning to turn them around to check for the added sugars, genetically engineered ingredients, and high fructose corm syrup they want to avoid. The palm oil they find listed in snack foods, as well as in ice cream and other products, also is an ingredient in detergents and beauty products. Africans cook with palm oil, and a woman from Nigeria told me it could control high blood pressure. This widespread use results in a constant pressure to expand palm oil plantations and the following unintended consequences.

• Deforestation of rain forests means fewer carbon emissions can be absorbed to limit climate change.
• Deforestation destroys the tropical forest habitats of endangered species, such as orangutans, rhinos, tigers, and elephants in Sumatra, Indonesia. Plus, roads built into forests enable illegal logging and exporters to reach the rare birds that become part of the underground trade in exotic creatures. 
• Deforestation in parts of Indonesia helped cause floods, according to the World Bank.
• Fires used to clear Indonesian oil palm plantations in 2015 caused the smoke that resulted in respiratory problems in Indonesia, Malaysia, and Singapore.
• Although corporations make commitments not to use palm oil from suppliers accused of illegal deforestation and from uncertified mills, they often only honor these commitments when an NGO or other groups uncovers a violation or local law enforcement acts.
• Labor is exploited; living and working conditions on plantations are bad. Migrant laborers from Bangladesh, for example, who work on the palm oil plantations in Malaysia often owe third party company recruiters debts they cannot pay. They find they are like prisoners working seven days a week after being forced to surrender their passports.
• Needed food production decreases when farmers switch to growing oil palm. Their debts rise as they purchase seed and fertilizer from the palm oil companies they supply.
• Expansion of palm oil plantations which encroach on village farm land and grazing pastures leads to conflict. 

Ravenous demand for palm oil from Indonesia and Malaysia, the countries that produce 80% of the world's supply, has not gone unnoticed in Brazil, where research shows almost half of the country's land area is suitable for growing oil palm. At the moment, most of Brazil's palm oil comes from the Amazon state of Para, where plantations employ about 20,000. As in Indonesia and Malaysia, an increase in palm oil production raises fears of illegal deforestation and endangering the biodiverse ecosystem. Rising land prices already have led to land ownership conflicts and even murder.

Relying on Indonesia's environmental laws, eco-warriors now identify illegal palm oil plantations on protected National Park land listed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Spotters tell owners of illegal plantations to return the land to authorities or face prosecution. They then cut down each oil palm. In about five years, replanted seedlings begin to help forests recover unless sun burns out young plants or elephants trample them. Altogether, it can take 20 to 200 years for forests to reach their original growth.

Other palm oil players also are determined to combat the effect of deforestation on climate change and to protect endangered animals, birds, and plants. Besides groups, such as the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO) that uses an oil palm symbol to identify "Certified Sustainable Palm Oil," the Environmental Investigation Agency (EIA), Greenpeace, the Rainforest Action Network, and Friends of the Earth, banks that finance palm oil plantation owners and investors in palm oil companies have begun to show greater concern about backing firms engaged in deforestation. When the Noble Group, owner of palm oil's Noble Plantations, prepared to issue a bond to finance clearing pristine rain forest in Papua, Indonesia, the HSBC bank involved in the bond issue asked RSPO to investigate charges that development on Noble's concession was about to violate RSPO standards. As a result, Noble's spokesperson announced work on Papua's plantations was on hold while sustainable analysis was pending. Other banks also have begun to require independent verification that palm oil borrowers comply with no deforestation, no peat, and no exploitation policies.

In the United States, the Ceres sustainability organization issued an "Engage the Chain" report to alert investors to the environmental and social threats posed by companies that rely on palm oil and other commodity suppliers.

Negatives associated with palm oil create a search for alternatives. But when the Ecover cleaning company produced a new laundry liquid using oil from genetically modified algae, customers refused to buy it. In the UAE, experiments show a species of alga that grows in fresh and salt water naturally produces the fatty palmitic acid found in palm oil. The University of Bath is experimenting with a yeast that has properties similar to palm oil that can grow in municipal, supermarket, or agricultural waste rather than on land. To date, however, substitutes, including rapeseed and coconut oil, cannot compete with less expensive palm oil that sells from $500 to $1,200 a ton, unless customers begin to recognize the non-price benefits of avoiding palm oil.

When consumers turn around a product and spot palm oil as an ingredient, what might they do?

(Also see the earlier post, "Long Supply Lines Foster Abuses").

Fishing Makes Climate Change Real

Are you an ecotourist sport angler trying to catch a strong, speedy golden manseer in one of Bhutan's large free flowing rivers? Or are you an angler testing your tenkara skill with iwana (trout) lying in wait for an insect in a stream near Kamidaki in the Japanese Alps?

     Fishing brings anglers face-to-face with the effects of climate change in a real life way that looking at collapsing glaciers and reading about oil drilling in the Arctic cannot. If, for example,  fishermen see no mayflies, stoneflies, or caddisflies, they know the water is not healthy for fish.

     To protect fishing in Himalayan rivers (and tigers in the forests around them), Bhutan's Royal Manas National Park provides a safe haven free of pollution for migratory fish. Anglers have a vested interest in organizations, such as the World Wildlife Fund, that work with governments, manufacturers, and farmers to study and implement ways to maintain water quality in rivers and streams by keeping them silt-free, clear, and the right temperatures for different fish species.

Boil or Preserve the Planet?

Attention to rising temperatures and sea levels is generating positive and negative reactions, depending on which side of the climate change citizens, organizations, and governments are on.

     An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power, the new film on climate change from former U.S. Vice President and presidential candidate, Al Gore, opened at movie theaters  August 4, 2017.

     In her current book, No Is Not Enough, Naomi Klein reports current U.S. Secretary of State and former head of ExxonMobil, Rex Tillerson, expects humans to adapt to an overheated planet by moving crop production around as they have in the past, when weather patterns changed. Yet, ExxonMobil's oil and gas drilling equipment has arrived in the Arctic before the world's farmers, who can't work long outdoors even if their crops and livestock could survive in blistering heat.

     Although James Hansen, who formerly headed NASA's climate research team, expects melting polar ice caps to keep temperatures cooler than some suggest, he believes the melting cannot help but cause a rise in sea levels. He further notes a mass inland migration of people from flooded coastal cities could cause ungovernable chaos.

     Klein's book reveals Exxon's scientists knew as far back as 1978 there was general scientific agreement that humans burning fossil fuels released the carbon dioxide that influenced climate changes, and only five to 10 years remained before a serious decision to transition from fossil fuels to clean energy sources was needed. A report by the Climate Accountability Institute found 25 investor-owned corporate and state-owned fossil fuel producers, including ExxonMobil, Shell, BP, and Chevron, are responsible for half of all global greenhouse gas emissions since the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was established in 1988.

     In California, three communities already have filed law suits for compensation from oil, gas, and coal companies for current and future costs of property damage from and adapting to rising sea levels. San Mateo, Marin, and San Diego counties claim that instead of working to reduce the impact of  fossil fuel emissions that they had known about for up to 50 years, they launched a campaign to discredit scientific findings about climate change.

     Members in the U.S. House of Representatives, according to insideclimatenews.org, have been voting to prevent regulatory agencies from evaluating future damage from greenhouse gas pollution, to streamline environmental reviews of pipelines and electric transmission projects that cross state borders, and to sponsor legislation supporting federal coal leasing. In contrast, a bipartisan House caucus of 6 Democrats and 7 Republicans introduced the Climate Solutions Commission Act of 2017 (H.R.2320) to establish a National Climate Solutions Commission. By appointing Commission members, the President and Congressional leaders from both parties would acknowledge climate change is "real, human caused, and requires solutions." Based on the latest scientific findings, Commission members would recommend to the President, Congress, and the States policies and actions to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

     Environmental organizations, such as the Sierra Club and Greenpeace, are warning investors in publicly traded fossil fuel producers that they are jeopardizing the value of their stock holdings, since auto makers are moving toward electric and hybrid models and companies, such as Apple, Facebook, Google, and Ikea, are leading the way to a corporate culture committed to the use of 100% renewable power.

     Finally, the Arbor Day Foundation (arborday.org) has a program to help homeowners absorb air pollution and reduce the need for fossil fuel-generated energy. To find out if there is a nearby active U.S. program to select trees and determine the best location to plant them to provide shade around homes, go to arborday.org/est.

World's Food Supply Needs Bees & Bees Need Help

One study found 40% of bee and butterfly pollinators are in decline around the world. As if bees didn't have enough problems with the neonicotinoid type of insecticide that has been causing their colonies to collapse since 2006, now they have to deal with the effects of climate change. When spring-like warming occurs too early, flowers can bloom before bees are ready to make their rounds. Crops of at least 140 nuts, fruits, and vegetables can suffer from a lack of pollination.

     In the US, clocks are about to be moved an hour ahead this weekend to signal the beginning of daylight saving time and the time to get seeds for planting flowers and food crops on commercial farms and in backyards, rain gardens at the curb, and community plots. The Sierra Club has been sending members packets of what the organization calls a "Bee Feed Flower Mix." These packets contain seeds for bee-tasty nectar and pollen from forget-me-nots, poppies, asters, blue flax, white sweet alyssum, lavender, fleabane daisies, and purple coneflowers. What is important is the seeds in these packets are Untreated.

     Untreated seeds are important because treated seeds, such as corn and soybean seeds, are coated with neonicotinoid insecticide to kill pests as soon as the seeds sprout. Frequent exposure to neuro-toxic pesticides that spread through a plant's leaves, pollen, and even nectar damage a bee's nervous and immune systems. While insects destroy plants, so too are strawberries, avocados, peaches, almonds, and other crops lost due to a lack of pollination by bees.

     Presented with a decade of evidence about simultaneous bee colony collapse and neonicotinoid use, the European Union suspended the use of neonicotinoid in 2013. In the US, the Department of Agriculture continues to study the problem, and the Saving America's Pollinators Act of 2015 failed to get out of a House of Representatives subcommittee.

     US consumers and farmers began to take matters into their own hands. There have been consumer campaigns against stores that sell neonicotinoid-treated plants. Gardeners started to grow bee-friendly flowers and to leave woody debris, leaf litter, and bare soil where bees can breed. You can find more on this subject in the earlier post, "Be Kind to Bees."

     Some farms also began to meet the bee health challenge. Besides planting vegetables, an organic farm couple in Minnesota planted flowering dogwood and elderberry hedgerows to attract bees, butterflies, and other insects that pollinate their crops. General Mills, a company that uses honey, fruit, and vegetable ingredients requiring pollination, is working with the Xerces Society and the Department of Agriculture to preserve pollinator habitat on 100,000 acres of US farmland. A plan to grow flowers and shrubs in narrow strips around crop fields is designed to restore seven million acres of land for pollinators in the next five years. But for farmers who usually grow single crops, a shift to diversify with flowers that attract pollinators is not easy. It requires analysis of farm land, how wet and dry it is, for example, and which plants will not attract the insects that could destroy their farm's crops.

     The battle to save bees, and the world's food supply, continues.
   

I Love Coffee; I Love Tea

South African tea farmers, who formed the Heiveld co-operative in the Suid Bokkeveld, are among the Africans who have learned to play the game. Not satisfied with the low prices middlemen brokers paid, and the subsequent low wages they received for the long hours (up to 10-12 hour days) they worked on tea plantations, they formed a co-operative to sell directly to Fairtrade importers who pay fair prices. Their incomes tripled by dealing with companies, such as Lemonaid & Chari Tea.

     Fairtrade certified co-operatives are a good fit with companies formed to satisfy health conscious consumers who are willing: 1) to pay a slightly higher price for products that use natural ingredients and 2) to treat all farmers fairly and with dignity. In the case of Lemonaid & Chari Tea, the company also set up a foundation which uses per bottle contributions from its specialty drinks to finance solar energy and education projects for co-operative members.

     For coffee bean farmers, current conditions are not this favorable. Rising temperatures and, in some areas, unusual drenching high altitude rain associated with climate change have caused a decline in harvests and an increase in pests and widespread roya, a leaf rust fungus, in Central America and Africa. While several big coffee companies are helping farmers move to higher ground, move away from the equator, develop more resilient coffee plants, and diversify crops, most coffee growers are poor small scale farmers unable to mill and market their own coffee beans.

     Since worldwide coffee demand is growing and coffee yields are shrinking, criminal gangs in Kenya and elsewhere have an incentive to overpower private security guards, pay off police guards, steal entire harvests from storage facilities, and sell stolen bags of beans to unscrupulous or unsuspecting middlemen.

     Coffee plantations also have an incentive to scam coffee certification systems that are designed to recognize farms for good environmental, social, and economic practices. Inspectors for the Rainforest Alliance, the Netherlands' UTZ seal, and the Fairtrade International seal have failed to spot problems in Brazil, the world's largest coffee producer. When confronted, farm owners have been known to claim violations were corrected before a deadline, labor issues were resolved, and information about code non-conformities and improved conditions is confidential. Noted certification violations include: false pay deductions for absences, for pay advances and for days off and a failure to register seasonal workers and provide their required medical exams.

     In some counties, government regulations requiring coffee marketers to provide sizable bank guarantees and to obtain export licenses have hampered the formation of coffee co-operatives that can sell directly to companies, such as Starbucks.

(An earlier post, "Coffee Prices Going Up; Allowances Going Down?" also addresses the coffee shortage.)
   

Turn Off, Power Down, and Act Up

The conservation-minded World Wildlife Fund included the following list of planet-helping reminders in its current catalog (wwfcatalog.org).

• Take a 5-minute shower that uses 10 to 25 gallons of the world's precious clean water resources compared to about 70 gallons for a bath.
• Turn off faucets while brushing teeth, soaping up hands, and putting shampoo in hair. Running a water faucet not only uses up clean water but running it for 5 minutes uses as much energy as lighting a 60-watt bulb for 14 hours. 
• Turn off computers or use "sleep mode" to save energy when they're not in use. Unplug electronic devices when not in use over a long period of time (overnight), because many still use energy when switched off.
• Buy local at farmers' markets and grocery stores, and eat local at restaurants whenever possible. That reduces the need for the climate warming gas used to transport fruits and vegetables up to 1,500 miles.
• Reduce the gas used for your own trips by walking, biking, or taking a bus or train.
• Replace regular light bulbs with energy-saving compact fluorescent lights. 
• Investigate using solar panels to save energy and cost in your home. Make sure to replace failing refrigerators and freezers that can account for 1/6 of a home's energy bill with appliances that are certified energy efficient.

Read more information about energy and environmental concerns at the earlier blog post, "A Healthy Environment."

1 Invention + 1 Invention = 1 New Invention

Combining two inventions to make a new one has solved a world of problems. Kids need outdoor exercise and water so a South African entrepreneur combined a merry-go-round and pump (See the earlier post, "Hope for the Future.").

     There are many reasons to invent a machine to solve the back-breaking problem of planting trees in the hot African sun. Drought-plagued countries, such as Ethiopia and Kenya, need to plant trees along river banks to prevent agricultural soil erosion. New trees also are needed to replace those harvested for firewood and charcoal and eaten by goats. And by sucking carbon dioxide out of the air, trees reduce the greenhouse gases associated with climate change.

     The Equinox Community Farm in Wisconsin, USA, has come up with a "water wheel transplanter" it uses to save time and the back breaking work of planting onion seedlings in straight rows. A tractor drags a sort of flatbed trailer that has three large wheels lined with hollow spikes that dig and water holes to ready them for two men who ride on the flatbed and plant pre-grown seedlings. by two men seated on the flatbed. Two 80-gallon tanks leak water out of the spiked wheels that make Could this system be modified to simplify the process of planting trees? After the trees are planted, another pass over the field might put the plastic cones that conserve water over each new tree.

     Obviously this is just one idea for creating an invention that can plant the trees Africa needs. There are a wide variety of organizations, government agencies, and companies already looking for solutions: the African Forest Landscape Restoration Initiative (AFR100); World Resources Institute (WRI); government Ministries of Agriculture, Environment, Forest, and Climate Change; Farmers Managed Natural Regeneration; Kenya-based Komaza; the Unique Forestry and Land Use consulting firm; Moringa Partnership.

(Incidentally, by purchasing cards at arborday.org/giveatree, you can plant trees in America's National Forests in honor of family and friends.)