Stuart Franklin is turning air miles into trees. Franklin — the founder of a grassroots carbon offsetting project in Ecuador — calculates how many seedlings he has to put in the ground in order to generate a carbon bank big enough to capture the carbon dioxide emitted by tourists jetting to the popular Galapagos Islands each year.
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The city of Curitiba, in southern Brazil, is famous among urban planners for its innovation and rational development, with a reputation for being highly livable and very sustainable. It was one of the first cities to market itself as “green” in a 1980s advertising campaign. And it is.
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Israeli activist Jeff Halper came to Winnipeg at the end of January to speak about the current situation in Palestine-Israel, and about the work of the Israel Committee Against House Demolitions. Temperatures outside plunged to almost minus forty. Inside the atmosphere was congenial — but Jeff had disturbing news to share.
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They’re scrubby, fierce with mosquitoes and impossible to walk through, but salt water mangroves are the guardians of Earth’s tropical coastlines and nurseries for her fish. Coastal mangroves are endangered by unsustainable fishing and cutting practices. The mangroves of southern Cambodia, on the Gulf of Thailand, are a case in point.
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Farmers and their cash crops … earning a living on the margins of global agriculture. Palestinian farmers face an entirely unique challenge. Israel’s so-called “Security Barrier” has actually walled them off from their olive and vegetable groves. The Annexation Wall – as Palestinians call it – prevents them from farming completely.
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Rwanda … Land of a Thousand Hills, in east-central Africa. Fourteen years after the awful 100-day genocide, Rwandans grow rice, bananas, tea and coffee as they have for generations. On one mountainside, villagers are earning extra money processing their own coffee beans — thanks to a fellow Rwandan educated in Canada.
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The next time you buy roses for your honey, consider this: The cut flowers in your Valentine’s bouquet were fumigated for insects and mildew, then drenched with preservatives for the long flight north. They may only make your lover sneeze – or perhaps break out in a rash – but the farmers who grow the flowers may suffer chronic poisoning. GPM producer Jen Moore sends us this report from Ecuador, a major exporter of cut flowers.
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Thirty years have come and gone since the end of the American War – as the Vietnamese call it – and its toxic aftermath lingers on. Between 1961 and the early 1970s, the U.S. drenched Vietnam with almost a hundred million liters of Agent Orange and other herbicides. It wasn’t just rainforests and mangroves that suffered … and the poison continues its dirty work.
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Once upon a time, the US was the world’s top emitter of carbon dioxide, the major man-made, heat-trapping gas. The average American still emits more than the rest of us, but – sometime last year – fueled by a rising demand for coal and cement – China’s annual emissions surpassed the US’s, at about six billion tonnes. As the Chinese choke on fume-filled air, their leaders are turning to the wind.
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Think about threatened waters and their wildlife … what comes to mind? Whales … declining codfish stocks … bleached coral reefs. In the U.S. Territory of Puerto Rico, tiny, luminescent creatures are taking it on the chin. Chemical and light pollution threaten to quench their bioluminescence.
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