WiLD Blog

There are many reasons to be concerned about global warming, and now the Stern report on climate change has added the economic dimension to the worries we face with this mounting catastrophe. Written for the UK government by former chief economist of the World Bank Sir Nicholas Stern, the report concludes that global warming could lead to the biggest recession since the Wall Street Crash and the Great Depression.

Until Stern's 700-page tome was released late last October, economists were generally of the view that taking action on global warming would be too costly to be warranted. Overnight, the widely-reported Stern report rewrote the economic argument. Stern added up the costs and benefits, and made it clear that failing to curb greenhouse gases would result in an economic disaster.

It's telling of the limitations of neoclassical economics that to assess the economic implications of climate change, Stern compared the costs in reduced GDP of preventing climate change against how much climate change will reduce future growth in GDP. That's like comparing the cost of repairing the brakes of your bicycle to the costs you will face when the brakes fail and you crash into incoming traffic.

The detailed economic consequences of global warming tallied up in Stern's report are far more alarming than the projected drop in world GDP he emphasized to the press. Stern warns of melting glaciers reducing dry season flows to one-sixth of the world's population, declining crop yields leaving millions of people in Africa hungry and impoverished, acidifying oceans leading to less fish to catch, rising sea levels displacing up to 200 million people, more deaths from malnutrition and heat stress.

And yet, all these vast tragedies, all these livelihoods rendered more difficult, get simplified by most economists into one measure, a hiccup in their dreams of an ever-increasing GDP. But Stern didn't just change the economic argument on global warming. Himself a highly respected member of the economic profession, soon to return to the London School of Economics, Stern found that using mainstream economics to analyze climate change stretched the discipline to its limits. For Stern, climate change "presents a unique challenge for economics: it is the greatest and widest-ranging market failure ever seen."

(From Adbusters Copyright 2007)

Saul

The ice floes where harp seal pups are born have broken up and many animals have drowned.

Each year, the Canadian government allows the massive slaughter of hundreds of thousands of harp seals. Last year, approximately 325,000 harp seals were killed, about 6% of the total population. This massive killing only brings a revenue of $14.5 million dollars. That is, Canada only gets $40 per seal. Furthermore, after costs and indirect subsidies are taken into account (patrolling the hunt, upgrading plants, promoting the hunt, developing new markets for seal products and supporting research to find new products), Canadians would likely find that the hunt actually costs the Canadian taxpayer money. The hunt has become a cull, designed more to achieve short-term political objectives than those of a biologically sustainable hunt.

Last year, The Humane Society of the United States (HSUS) released a study by conservation biologist Professor Stephen Harris of Bristol University, which shows that the quota levels in the seal hunts of Canada and Greenland "pose a threat to the very survival of the harp seal population." When the seals that are struck and lost, that is wounded animals who escape and are not recovered, more than half of all the seal pups born each year are slaughtered, Harris said. "When such hunting pressure last occurred, the harp seal population declined rapidly by over 50 percent," said Harris. "Given seals only reach breeding age at about five to six years old, it could be too late to intervene by the time the impacts of current hunting levels are understood." The Harris report criticizes the Canadian Department of Fisheries and Oceans (DFO) for failing to include environmental variables such as climate change in their Atlantic Seal Management Plan.

In 2007, the threat of climate change to harp seals is not a possibility anymore. The first stage of Canada's controversial annual harp seal hunt is likely to be scrapped because the ice floes where pups are born have broken up and many animals have drowned. Canada's federal fisheries ministry, which oversees the hunt, said the pups had been born as usual this year but the ice floes had then been blown far out to sea and started to break up before the seals learned how to swim properly.

The first part of the hunt, which had been due to start on March 28, occurs in the Gulf of St Lawrence to the south of the Magdalen Islands on Canada's East Coast. Hunters move across the ice floes, shooting and clubbing to death young seals.

"This is the first time I've ever seen this in 25 years ... for sure there is increased mortality," fisheries spokesman Roger Simon said from the Magdalen Islands. There is ice (south of the islands) but there are no seals on that ice," he added, saying the animals were now well out of the range of most of the hunters' vessels.

In Cabot Strait, there is wide open water and almost no seals," Internationl Fund for Animal Welfare researcher Sheryl Fink said. "I only saw a handful of adult harp seals and even fewer pups, where normally we should be seeing thousands and thousands of seals."

The ignominious policy of the Canadian government and climate change may be a lethal combination, the road to the extinction of harp seals. The irony of harp seal hunting is that the Canadian government and isolated fishing communities insist they need the supplemental income from the hunt, since cod stocks have dwindled due to overfishing. I wonder what will be the supplemental income when harp seals dissapear due to overhunting and climate change.

What can you do? Boycott Canadian seafood

Seal hunting is an off-season activity conducted by fishers from Canada's East Coast. They earn a small fraction of their incomes from sealing—primarily from the sale of seal pelts to European fashion markets. But the vast majority of the sealers' incomes are from commercial fisheries. Canadian seafood exports to the United States contribute $3 billion annually to the Canadian economy—dwarfing the few million dollars provided by the seal hunt. The connection between the commercial fishing industry and the seal hunt in Canada gives consumers all over the world the power to end this cruel and brutal slaughter. Don't consume Canadian seafood or eat in restaurants that buy Canadian seafood. You have the power to stop the harp seal slaughter.

Saul

Voice of San Diego

by Serge Dedina 

The conflicts and controversies over the presidency in Mexico over the past few months rivaled our own Bush v. Gore. Unlike his predecessor, Vicente Fox, who only had to sit still for six years to prove that Mexico could be governed without the Soviet-like PRI, Mexico's newly installed President Felipe Calderon, needed to demonstrate that he can actually do something.

Having just completed his first 100 days in office, Calderon has carried out three measures recently that prove that at least in terms of coastal and marine conservation, he is wiling to abandon the pro-development and destruction legacy of Fox. A recent mangrove conservation law protected these fragile coastal ecosystems against the predations of developers who are cutting a wide swath along the wetlands and estuaries of Mexico's coastline.

Last week, Calderon formally protected 1.1 million acres of the Sea of Cortez area around Bahia de los Angeles, one of the world's richest marine and island areas. And last Thursday, his National Park Service Director, Ernesto Enkerlin announced on national television in Mexico, that President Calderon protected 110,000-acres of Laguna San Ignacio that had once been under concession to the Mexican Salt Exporting Company that is 49 percent owned by the Mitsubishi Corporation.

These are major steps for Mexico and Calderon after the six years in which former President Fox encouraged the world's biggest corporations to literally buy and destroy Mexico's amazing biodiversity hotspots. Having worked to protect both Bahia de los Angeles and Laguna San Ignacio, I cannot even begin to explain how elated I was to hear such amazing news.

Calderon's measure only reinforces a program managed by the Laguna San Ignacio Conservation Alliance (WiLDCOAST, NRDC, ICF, Pronatura Noroeste, Pronatura, FUNDEA, Laguna Baja Aric and Fundacion Azteca) in which local landowners have signed more than 140,000-acres of conservation easements around the lagoon's shoreline, in return for establishing an investment trust fund and payments that provide green capital for their whale watching and private enterprises.

This is fitting news to share since today I am in Laguna San Ignacio in the company of El Santo surrounded by 45-foot friendly gray whales, to celebrate the fact that conservation becomes a reality when it involves environmental protection, sustainable development and helping the poor help themselves.

By

Serge Dedina

(originally published in the Voice of San Diego) 

When I was a kid, Cartolandia (Cardboardland), a squatter slum of more than 25,000 people dominated the first view of Tijuana as you crossed the border at San Ysidro. Cardboard, plywood, and garbage houses occupied the Tijuana River only adding to the hardened image of Tijuana as Sin City.

My father, a novelist turned filmmaker, made one of his first documentaries while in the graduate film program at SDSU, on the conditions at Cartolandia. I'll never erase the memory of my three-year old little brother Nicky being carted around the colonia while my dad made his film.

President Luis Echeverria, Mexico's successor to crazed strongman Gustavo Diaz Ordaz, paved the way for the razing of Cartolandia in the 1970s during the development of the Zona Rio and the construction of the Tijuana River concrete channel. After being evicted, the residents picked up their belongings and moved east in the river valley to a new Cartolandia. During the winter of 1980, more than 100 of the residents of the new cardboard colonia died when the Mexican government opened the gates of Rodriguez Dam one night after severe rains. Over 25 bodies washed up in Coronado and Imperial Beach.

Today, the Cartolandias of Tijuana are harder to find than they were back in the 70s. But they still exist and blot the fantasy of Tijuana's industrial progress and modernity. These shantytowns link our neighbor to the south with their counterparts in Nairobi, Rio de Janiero, Manila, Lima and Lagos whose concentrated wealth in the hands of corrupt elites cannot hide the stain of human misery.

Mexico's fastest growing city can't begin to provide adequate housing for the middle class let alone its poorest residents. So they build shantytowns in the canyons that ring the city and in the flood-prone watershed of the Alomar River.

One of these colonias is located at the southern edge of Colonia Chilpancingo in eastern Tijuana, below the maquiladora zone, east of the Otay Mesa border crossing. In the middle of the river that cuts through the neighborhood, are the pipes and gullies that spew out toxic sewage and waste from the maquiladoras above into the cardboard, blue-tarp, plywood and garbage shanties that house Tijuana's poorest people.

I toured the colonia on an overcast morning recently. Even after years spent among the rural and urban poor of Mexico, Peru, Morocco and El Salvador, the poverty of this suburb of Chilpancingo still shocked me. What did not surprise me however, was how thousands of residents have made normal lives out of unimaginable conditions in order to make life as bearable as possible. Mothers and their children navigated through the toxic mud with huge bags of laundry on their way to the streets of Chilpancingo to do the wash. A family carrying their belongings in travel bags carefully picked their way across the sewage gully by hopping along a shaky stone pathway. A makeshift plywood footbridge offered a dry route across the waste-filled river. Children were everywhere playing in yards filled with ornamental plants, chickens and ducks. Packs of dogs wandered the streets. A large hawk sat on an electrical post on a hillside above the colonia.

The entire colonia sits on an old landfill. Water trucks drove through the mud streets. A couple of cowboys on horseback crossed the way across the river (there are farms nearby). One of the horses became nervous around a passing truck, rearing its front legs, almost knocking me into the sewage gully. Electricity is hijacked from utility poles by dozens of colorful wires that are strung along to each house. A new subdivision of town homes advertising security and tranquility abuts the north side of the colonia. New gated communities are pushing informal settlements further east to even more danger-prone canyons south of Tijuana.

As I surveyed the colonia, a young mother dragged her stroller through the mud across the river. She did not pay attention as the stroller tipped over and her newborn dangled upside down held in place by a safety strap. I ran over and up righted the stroller and the baby. The mother managed to quickly unhook her child from the stroller and clutched him to her breast. She then tramped through the mud clutching her baby, while I lifted the stroller above the mud and carried it to safety. A colleague grabbed her giant sack of laundry back to the dirt entry road into the colonia from Chilpancingo.

Just another day in Tijuana.

With the Associated Press headline last week, "Sewage Deal Along the Border Hits the Rocks" about Bajagua's ongoing implosion spanning the globe in over 150 media outlets in the U.S., Canada, Mexico, France, Germany and the U.K., and the beaches of Imperial Beach closed for weeks, the fact remains that no centralized sewage treatment plant will ever solve the problem of cross border beach closures caused by colonias like the one in the Alomar. Because no $700 million sewage plant, no matter how hard its Rancho Santa Fe owners and North County lobbyists argue it will, can ever address the human suffering and the environmental tragedy of the garbage colonia set in the Alomar River that connects the residents of Imperial Beach and Coronado to the poorest people in Tijuana.

Our political failure to treat the symptoms of the environmental crisis along the U.S.-Mexico border is a moral and social failure as well. It exposes how far we have directed our political system to only respond to the needs of the wealthy and powerful. For those of us in the nonprofit community, our job as environmental stewards and guardians of the public trust is not to help the powerful make a profit at the expense of the poor, but to advocate for and organize those who have no power. Those who fail to speak up and address the human suffering that the privatization of public services along the U.S.-Mexico border will only exacerbate, are as complicit in this miscarriage of justice as those who profit from it.

-- SERGE DEDINA

If you saw the coverage of Al Gore's press conference on the Live Earth global concert series planned for July 7, 2007 to raise awareness about the global climate crisis, you might have noticed that two of the participants Fher Olvera and Alex Gonzalez of the Mexican supergroup Maná. The band is Latin America's answer to U2. For the past 20 years Maná has inspired its fans with some of the best environmental songs ever performed.

Maná's fans are arguably the most receptive group of rock fans on the planet for coastal protection campaigns. Last year, the band was awarded the "Environmental Hero" award from the Monterey Bay Aquarium for its pioneering work in Mexico and among Latinos in the U.S. promoting environmental protection.

The environmental movement in the U.S. and around the world is really at a dead-end. The new task of environmentalists is to reach out to new constituencies to build a broad-based movement that is not about exclusion. Promoting campaigns that espouse high-end organic lifestyles and carbon credits to offset McMansions and ski vacations in Switzerland is a ticket to nowhere.

That is why working with groups like Maná and reaching out to Latinos and broad audiences in Latin America is so critical to saving the planet. Just as the way that Bono and U2 created a new audience for helping Africa, Maná and Latino stars such as Los Tigres del Norte and El Hijo del Santo are demonstrating that you don't have to be Albert Markovski to be an environmentalist.

I joined Maná in Mexico City last month to celebrate the 10th Anniversary of Selva Negra and on their recent swing through Southern California during which they received a Grammy for best Latin Rock Album. At the San Diego Sports Arena 16,000 fans stood up for over two hours singing every word of every song as the band played their hearts out. At the Gibson Amphitheater in L.A., Maná played out four sold out shows. Even Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa and his family attended (can you imagine Jerry Sanders ever showing up at a Latino rock event? That is why Villaraigosa is such a good politician and Sanders is so lame).

During the concerts, over 1,000 people signed up for the current WiLDCOAST "Amar es Conservar" campaign to support statewide ocean protection measures.

Last year, when I joined the band at the Monterey Bay Aquarium, I watched the band members, Fher, Sergio, Alex and Juan, show genuine enthusiasm as we toured the exhibits with Julie Packard. Maná are true believers. Now only if our elected officials in the United States were as serious about the environment as Mexico's most inspiring rockers.
 Serge (originally published by the Voice of San Diego)