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Posts Tagged ‘environment’
Tuesday, January 19th, 2010
January 17, 2010
Taktshang Goemba - also known as The Tiger’s Nest - is a magnificent monastery plastered on the face of a sheer cliff 900 meters above the Paro Valley, and moored to the mountain by the hairs of angels. There are only three ways to reach it. The best is to ride on the back of a flying tiger, which was the method used by the great saint Guru Rinpoche in the 8th century. He flew into a sacred cave on the cliff face, subdued the local demon, and meditated there for three months before continuing his mission to establish Buddhism in Bhutan.
If you can’t find a flying tiger, you can ride up to the Tiger’s Nest on a tough little mountain horse. (You can’t ride down, though; the path is too steep.) Alternatively, you can walk, which is the way I got there last month. The hike takes three or four hours.
It is a steep and brutal climb in the thin Himalayan air, not easy for sedentary folk of ripening years. I was grateful for Tashi, the nimble young guide who took my little backpack. We got a break at a wooden tea-house halfway up, lunching on Bhutanese specialties like ema datse, hot chillies with cheese. Nearby is a rock with the footprints of Guru Rinpoche burned into its surface.
Then the climb continued. In the end, I didn’t get into the monastery. I reached a viewpoint at the same height - but between the viewpoint and the Tiger’s Nest is a deep gorge, negotiated via a 700-step staircase cut into the rock face. My knees were weak and I was slightly giddy from the altitude. The steps are uneven, there is no hand-rail, and a misstep would mean immediate reincarnation. Nope.
The landscape of Bhutan is peppered with sacred places. Above the Tiger’s Nest are several shrines or “chortens,” as well as temples and meditation huts. The many temples on the valley floor include Kyichu Lhakhang, one of 108 temples built in a single day in 659 by a Tibetan king aiming to pin down an ogress and liberate the Himalayas for the advance of Buddhism.
There are chortens along the trails, chortens in the fields, chortens on the banks of streams, where water-wheels turn prayer-wheels that ring bells and send off prayers as they spin. Thickets of vertical white prayer flags stand high on the mountains, and brilliantly-coloured strings of square flags flutter on buildings, fences and bridges. The land virtually pulses with visual testimony to Buddhist reverence.
Underlying Bhutan’s Buddhism is a much older animist religion known as “Bon,” which populates the landscape with innumerable demons, sprites, local deities, gods and goddesses of lakes and rivers, lords of the earth and air. The most famous of the many lucky charms to ward off evil from these omnipresent spirits is the image of an erect penis.
Even this is evidence of devotion, which you see constantly in Bhutan. But you do not see mines, quarries, clear-cuts, industrial smog, huge landfill sites, plastic bags (which are illegal), chemically-nurtured golf courses, mills and factories blowing smog into the air and waste into the rivers. The Bhutanese use only what they need. Houses and farms are built of rammed earth, straw, slate and wood, and they occupy minimalist clearings in the woods. They enhance an already beautiful landscape.
All of which raises a huge question
.
Bhutan’s sacramental attitude towards the natural world - that the world is literally alive and sentient - is the normal human view. It’s shared by my Celtic ancestors, by virtually all ancient civilizations, by aboriginal peoples worldwide. Industrial society, by contrast, views the natural world as inert, dead, a mere source of materials and a blank slate for industrial manipulation. It exists for us to pillage. That arrogance has led us to a crisis unparallelled in the history of our species.
The Bhutanese evidently don’t think they’re lords of creation. Their land is sacred, and because they treat it with reverence, it sustains and enriches them. Superstition? Or wisdom, clothed in poetry? Bhutan takes us back to the future, reminding us that our species cannot persist on the earth without understanding, in our bones, the genuine sacredness of the world that is our only home.
– 30 –
You can see photos of the Tiger’s Nest (and other Bhutan pix) here: http://picasaweb.google.com/silverdonald/Paro#
Tags: animism, Bhutan, Buddhism, environment, Guru Rinpoche, Tiger's Nest
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Wednesday, September 23rd, 2009
September 20, 2009
Despair is a useless emotion. And there is no such thing as false hope.
I learned these things years ago, when someone I loved lay dying. A medical moron — a celebrated specialist, with an entourage of students — came to her bedside and told her she would be dead in a few weeks and she’d better get used to the idea. When he left, I went scuttling after him, demanding to know just how the hell he thought he was helping.
“She has Stage 4 cancer, and she still thinks she’s going to make it,” he snapped. “She’s not. There’s no point in encouraging false hope.”
“That’s an absolutely useless opinion,” I retorted. I was seething. “She’ll tell you that she’s not dying of cancer, she’s living with cancer. She’ll be doing that till her last breath. What do you want her to do? Spend her days in despair, waiting for death? Hope gives meaning to her life. How dare you try to take it away from her?”
By its nature, hope occurs in conditions of uncertainty. Sometimes it’s fulfilled, sometimes not. It may be faint. But it’s never false.
I remembered all this when I read Chris Turner’s article “The Age of Breathing Underwater” in The Walrus magazine. Turner is the author of an admirable book called The Geography of Hope: A Tour of the World We Need. His obsession is the need to maintain hope and optimism in a world that human beings have sent spinning towards environmental catastrophe. Action depends on hope. You can’t rouse people to strenuous effort and sweeping change if they believe that their efforts will be pointless.
But only fools ignore the science. The particular new horrors that have seized Turner’s attention are the changes in the ocean’s temperature and chemistry, which almost certainly doom the ocean’s most fecund ecosystems, the coral reefs of the tropics. Corals feed on the algae zooxanthelae — but warm water turns the algae poisonous. In addition, the increasing load of carbon dioxide in the oceans creates carbonic acid, which is also fatal to corals. We have made the oceans more acidic than they have been for tens of millions of years.
Raise the pistol to your temple, say the prophets of doom. Humans don’t deserve to live.
Not so fast, says Turner. Yes, we’ve entered the Anthropocene Era, an epoch in which human activity is overpowering the natural world. This is what Bill McKibben means by “the end of nature.” And let’s be clear, too, that there’s no going back. The world you grew up in is gone forever. We are already feeling the impact of climate change, which has such momentum that if we stopped greenhouse gas emissions tomorrow, the changes would continue for decades.
But, Turner says, that doesn’t justify surrender. The environmental battle needs to be intensified, possibly using startling new weapons like “geoengineering,” the deliberate alteration of the planet to counter-act the changes we’ve already set in motion. Or nanotechnology. Perhaps we need a philosophy of “social-ecological resilience,” accepting change as “the natural state of being on earth,” and targetting our conservation efforts on the life-forms with the best chance of survival. But this is a time for action, not for despair.
So I’ll participate in a “flash mob” at the Legislature tomorrow at noon, one of 1000-plus events in 88 countries organized by Avaaz.org to send a message on climate change to world leaders. Just in Halifax, other flash mobs will appear at the Chapter House on University Avenue, on the North Common, and at the Bedford United Church. Come and join us.
But tomorrow is also Zero Emissions Day (www.zeroemissionsday.org), when some of us are trying to eschew fossil fuels and minimize our use of electricity. Hmm… Will I spew emissions driving to a climate-change protest? I hear my MLA is going to walk. Maybe I’ll walk with her.
As Chris Turner declares, the arrival of the Anthropocene Era is not a license for despair. The world has forever been changing and evolving, and while the science-fiction environment we have created means loss and danger, it may also offer surprising prospects for beauty and adventure.
Remember this: despair is a useless emotion. And there is no such thing as false hope.
– 30 —
Tags: Add new tag, Anthropocene, Avaaz, Chris Turner, corals, despair, environment, global warming, hope, oceans
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Monday, January 28th, 2008
A hundred and sixty-five miles off the coast of Nova Scotia, Sable Island was once a graveyard of shipping. Today it is, among other things, a unique environmental monitoring platform, where universities and government agencies measure weather, the magnetic field of the earth, and the quality and composition of the air and water. Among the pollutants the researchers encounter are pesticides banned since the 1960s but still circulating in the air, contaminants used only in China – and thousands of plastic water bottles.
Plastic water bottles?
Yep. If you want to do something for the environment, and also prove you are not a gullible mutton-head, then stop drinking bottled water – now.
In 1976, the average American drank less than two gallons of bottled water a year. Today, that figure is 30 gallons, and sales are growing at more than 10% a year – faster than any other beverage. Bottled-water companies spend hundreds of millions a year on advertising – and Americans now spend $15 billion a year on bottled water. No doubt the figures would be comparable in Canada.
But bottled water is a scam, a triumph of brilliant marketing and knavish politics. The bottled-water industry routinely implies that the water from your taps, supplied by a municipal water authority, is not clean enough to drink. It further implies that bottled water is drawn from pristine natural sources, and is naturally cleaner and purer than tap water.
In fact, about 40% of bottled water actually is tap water. The biggest-selling brands are Aquafina, which is owned by Pepsi, and Dasani, which is owned by Coke. As Pepsi was forced to admit last summer, both brands are just filtered tap water — with an outrageous mark-up.
In Tucson, reports the Arizona Daily Star, Aquafina costs $1.39 per half-litre bottle. The contents come from the Tucson municipal water system, which provides 6.4 gallons for a penny. The Aquafina consumer is paying roughly 7000 times more for the same water.
Furthermore, many bottled-water companies are actually less rigorous in testing for purity and quality than are the municipal systems. One process used to enhance tap water is ozonation, which has a byproduct called bromate, a suspected carcinogen. In 2004, when Coca Cola launched Dasani in the United Kingdom, the company was embarrassed to discover that about half a million bottles were contaminated with excess bromate.
In other words, the quality of the water was better before it was “purified.” The company withdrew the tainted water – and also withdrew from the UK bottled-water market.
The environmental impact of the bottled-water rip-off is stunning. The US produces 29 billion water bottles every year, using the equivalent of 17 million barrels of oil. The bottles are designed for one-time use, and shouldn’t be re-used, because contaminants from the low-grade plastic may leach into the contents. Environmental groups estimate that only about 14% of the bottles are recycled. More than 80% of them end up in landfills, or in places like the beaches of Sable Island.
Once bottled, the product is shipped enormous distances to market, nearly 25% of it travelling far enough to cross a national border before being sold. The Pacific Institute estimates that the energy used for pumping, processing, transportation, and refrigeration represents another 50 million-plus barrels of oil equivalent—enough to run 3 million cars for a year.
The political implications are equally obnoxious. Private water promotion is a steady drumbeat of insinuation that public water supplies are inferior and dangerous, and that private supplies are safe and secure. Just like public schools versus private ones, or public transport versus private cars, or public health care versus private health care.
Happily, municipalities are taking offence. Last June, the U.S. Conference of Mayors noted that their 1100 cities spend $43 billion a year to provide clean drinking water to citizens – and yet city officials often purchased bottled water for city employees. Led by San Francisco, Salt Lake City and Minneapolis, the group called for an impartial investigation into the environmental effects of bottled water. San Francisco subsequently ordered a complete ban on bottled-water purchases from public funds, as did the state of Illinois. Los Angeles has had such a ban for a decade.
“There’s a sucker born every minute,” said circus magnate P. T. Barnum. And what the suckers are sucking on today are beautifully-labelled plastic bottles of water, adorned by blue mountain peaks with white glacier caps.
When gasoline prices rise much above a dollar a litre, consumers vigorously object – but they cheerfully pay three or four times that much for tap water in designer bottles. Barnum would have loved it.
– 30 –
Tags: Aquafina, bottled water, Coke, Dasani, environment, Pepsi, plastic, pollution
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Sunday, October 28th, 2007
“That looks like an apple tree,” I said to Marjorie. “But how come it doesn’t have any apples?”
Feral apple trees abound in Isle Madame – dotted through the woods, standing gnarled in deserted fields, adorning the edges of roads. They include several different varieties – probably heritage strains, since they apparently descend from orchards planted by French settlers in the 18th century. In October, they should be groaning with apples. But this one, growing beside a long-abandoned road, bore not a single fruit.
Later that day, I drove the five miles from the bridge at Lennox Passage to my house in D’Escousse. Apple trees grow along that road as closely as school children waiting to cheer a parade – so many, in fact, that I would like to see the dull name “Route 320” replaced by Route des Pommiers/Apple Tree Road.
But I saw no pommes on Route des Pommiers either.
By now I was curious, and rather alarmed. What about my own fruit trees, the ones that grow around my boat shed, and carpet the ground with little sour apples at this time of year? Local deer-hunters generally phone me in the fall to ask if they can have the apples to set out as deer-bait. But nobody had called this year.
No wonder. Five trees, and between them they had barely produced enough apples to make a pie.
My buddy Edwin DeWolf, who built the shed, drove up beside me.
“No apples this year,” I said.
“No apples anywhere,” said Edwin. “No bees, that’s why.”
Ye gods.
That evening I saw Farley and Claire Mowat, who last month donated 200 stunning seaside acres to the Nova Scotia Nature Trust. This splendid gift includes 35 years’ worth of the Mowats’ careful records and observations on the site and in the area.
“We saw almost no fruits of any kind this year,” said Farley. “No plums, no cherries, nothing. And it affected all kinds of things. It was a cold, wet, late spring, and we had so few insects this year that the insectivore species of birds didn’t reproduce. The tree swallows and the barn swallows live on flying insects. They made nests, but they didn’t lay eggs and they didn’t stay around. I’ve never seen them behave that way before.”
Was it truly just a cold, late spring – or something more alarming? Bees, I remembered, have been dying off in record numbers right across the United States and Europe, and nobody knew why.
Honey bees are not native to North America, and indigeous North American plants didn’t need them for pollination – but the species which do need them are the ones in the supermarket, the products of industrial agriculture: apples, almonds, cherries, tomatoes, zucchinis, cantaloupes. Theories about the cause of their decline ranged from new pesticides, mites and genetically modified crops to climate change, fungi and even radiation from cell phones.
Whatever the reason, the US problem was serious. Every third bite we eat, says one expert, “is dependent on a honeybee.” In the US, the crops pollinated by honey bees are valued at something like $15 billion. The California almond crop alone is worth $1.5 billion.
With money like that at stake, agribusiness doesn’t leave pollination to nature. Bees have been bred to work both earlier and later in the season – and they migrate to where they’re needed. Huge semi-trailers packed with hundreds of millions of bees rumble through US agricultural districts, renting the bees’ services to farmers.
These bees make money, not honey. (Believe it or not, American honey is being undercut by cheaper honey from China.) Industrial bees don’t eat nectar, either. Their food arrives in tanker trucks full of protein supplements, sucrose and corn syrup. It costs $12,000 per load.
“I don’t think the situation in the States is related,” said Farley. “We had extreme conditions this year, including the most rain we’ve seen in 35 years, nearly 40 inches. We also had a lot of fog, and flying insects can’t handle fog.” A biologist from the Nova Scotia Museum later confirmed a “patchy” die-off of bees in some districts of the province.
“It isn’t just the bees,” said Farley. “We had minimal populations of butterflies and moths too, and they came late. It may be several years until insect populations recover, since there aren’t many insects left to breed.”
And what about the swallows?
“They would have gone to where there was more food,” Farley said. “It might be just a few miles inland, out of the fog – but remember, these birds migrate 10,000 or 15,000 miles, so it would be nothing for them to fly a couple of thousand miles to find food.”
The apples of Isle Madame have survived 250 years so far, so I guess they’ll be back. But it’s a very strange autumn without them.
– 30 —
Tags: apples, bees, environment, Farley Mowat, Nova Scotia Nature Trust, pollination
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