In a place where things couldn’t seem to get any worse, the remote island nation of Tuvalu has announced that parts of the country are just days away from running out of drinking water.
Photo by Jon Bowermaster
Long the poster child for the pessimistic future of low-lying islands, thanks to rising sea levels due to climate change, the Pacific Ocean archipelago of Tuvalu—four reef islands and five atolls halfway between Australia and Hawaii—declared a state of emergency last week. It hasn’t rained in Tuvalu in seven months, due to a combination of climate change, a three-year long el Nina and subsequent drought. One of its islands, Nukulaelae, claimed to have just 60 liters of drinking water for its 330 people.
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The tiny nation has been in the headlines for the past decade, ever since one of its prime ministers announced the country would one day be forced to move its entire population to New Zealand, Australia or Fiji before the expected sea level rise of 8 to 16 inches by the end of the century made the islands unlivable.
A very short-term fix to the water shortage arrived on Monday when Tuvalu’s closest neighbors in New Zealand sent desalination units and containers of fresh water to the country of 11,000 (the fourth smallest in the world). A Tuvaluan Navy ship distributed water and Red Cross volunteers earlier this week throughout the chain. Most needed were collapsible water containers, hand sanitizers and tarpaulins (to capture any rare rain that may fall). Rationing of water across the Pacific is now part of daily life. Families in Tuvalu, which can be up to 10 people, are living on 40 liters a day.
A lack of sanitation is also having an impact on human health. This week Tuvalu’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs announced a travel alert after suspected cases of cholera were discovered.
“One of its islands, Nukulaelae, claimed to have just 60 liters of drinking water for its 330 people.”
Unfortunately Tuvalu’s problem is not isolated and is spreading across the Pacific. Three-hundred miles east, the tiny New Zealand-administered island of Tokelau has also declared a state of emergency, claiming to have less than a week’s worth of drinking water. Even big islands like Samoa are in desperate need of fresh water; its riverbeds and farms are drying up.
As the region’s leaders wrestle with how to provide its populace with clean drinking water, other impacts of climate change continue apace: In March saline saltwater seeped inland on the atoll of Funafuti, the capital of Tuvalu, due to rising sea levels, poisoning wells and killing crops. Perhaps its population will have to emigrate sooner than expected.
(For the rest of my dispatches go to TakePart.com)
A little more than two decades ago I was among the first national journalists to question the social and economic impact of the fast spreading “Walmart-ization” of the U.S.
An Ocean Conservancy beach cleanup on South Padre Island, Texas. Walmart donated $3.7 million to the conservancy last year. (Photo: Ho New/Reuters)
The already huge, volume-buying, deep-discounting, low-wage-paying giant box stores were proliferating across rural America, many of them sucking business away from already bad small-town economies. For stories published in The New York Times Magazine and Mother Jones, I spent several weeks in the heart of Iowa—Independence, population 6,100—talking with Main Street shop owners, realtors, county politicians, and the town’s mayor about their fears and hopes as the economic landscape shifted around them. Given the inevitable loss of homegrown business they knew would accompany Walmart’s arrival, it was hard not to see it as bad for the town.
Back then, in 1989, there were 1,400 Walmart’s spread across the U.S., generating sales of $20.6 billion a year; Sam Walton was the richest man in the country, with an estimated worth of $6.7 billion.
Today the now-global enterprise has 9,600 retail units under 69 different banners in 28 countries, with sales in 2011 of $419 billion. While Bill Gates topped 2010’s Forbes list of wealthiest Americans ($54 billion), coming in at numbers 7, 8 and 9 were Sam Walton’s three kids (Jim, Alice and Rob, worth about $20 billion each). If papa were still alive and heading the company he started, he’d easily be the richest man in America.
Which is a circuitous way of attempting to weigh the pros and cons of what the Walton family chooses to spend its money on. In recent years the Walton Family Foundation has “tiptoed” into giving to environmental issues, particularly efforts to protect ocean and freshwater.
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While the bulk of the family foundation giving goes to education reform and much of it stays in their home state of Arkansas, it has generously given to environmental initiative. Last year alone they nearly donated $72 million, including more than $36 million to grantees working on ocean issues—the Ocean Conservancy ($3.7 million), Conservation International Foundation ($18.6 million), Nature Conservancy ($9.3 million) the Marine Stewardship Council ($4.5 million), the World Wildlife Fund and Environmental Defense Fund ($7 million)—and nearly $23 million earmarked for freshwater conservation.
“In recent years the Walton Family Foundation has ‘tiptoed’ into giving to environmental issues, particularly efforts to protect ocean and freshwater.”
“We focus our work in the United States’ primary river systems and in some of the world’s most ecologically significant marine areas,” says the foundation’s director of Environment Focus, Scott Burns. “It’s important to us to protect and conserve natural resources while also recognizing the roles these waters play in the livelihoods of those who live nearby.” The specific projects it funds are mostly aimed at encouraging sustainability and efforts to get fishermen working together with environmentalists.
The foundation’s effort has ironically been muddied by fishermen, who protest that one goal of the big environmental groups Walmart supports is to put more and more U.S. waters off-limits…to fishermen. New Jersey’s Recreational Fishing Alliance, for one, calls the gifts an effort to “fund the demise of both the recreational and commercial fishing industry.” The group’s biggest concern is the spreading of Marine Protected Areas, which it regards as taking away the inalienable right to fish wherever/whenever for whatever.
The RFA and others have organized boycotts of Walmart (Safeway, too, which has also supported the creation of MPAs). Protestors suggest the Waltons’ charitable giving may one day directly impact their stores cash registers; no sense buying all those fishing lures and tackle from Walmart if the fishing grounds are closed off.
The very real problem of “overfishing” clearly does not register with the protestors.
“Walmart apparently prefers customers buy farm-raised fish and seafood caught by foreign countries outside of U.S. waters, while denying individual anglers the ability to head down to the ocean to score a few fish for their own table,” says executive director of the RFA Jim Donofrio.
For their part, the recipients of Walmart’s charitable largesse have mostly kept quiet about the kerfuffle. EDF spokesman Tom Lalley represents the distancing the marine groups have tried to put between themselves and at least the reputation of the box stores: “It was the family, and specifically the family’s foundation, that made a contribution for sustainable fishing and ocean conservation, not the store.”
Regardless, Walmart the corporation has been invested in at least seeming environmentally responsible in more recent years. Wisely viewing it as both the right thing to do for the environment and simultaneously good for the bottom line, the company has been a leader among big corporations trying to green operations. Its environmental efforts include reducing waste, encouraging environmentally friendly packaging, using as much renewable energy as possible, promoting energy efficiency, improving its delivery trucks’ fuel efficiency and requiring factories around the world to comply with local environmental regulations. Specific examples on the shelves include being a top seller of concentrated laundry detergent, convincing CD, DVD and videogame makers to make lighter cases to reduce transport carbon emissions and encouraging light bulb makers to refine designs.
But Walmart is responsible for creating a variety of environmental messes that no amount of greenwashing can make go away, and some in the environmental community think that it’s all too little, too late. Walmart Watch, a nonprofit group run by the Center for Community and Corporate Ethics, says the company has paid numerous fines over the last decade for violating air and water pollution rules, and that its green initiatives will easily be erased by its sheer growth, which will mean more energy usage, more delivery truck trips and even more miles driven by consumers to get to Walmart stores that displaced smaller, more local ones.
In addition, many of its stores run 24 hours a day, using up much more energy than the majority of other retail stores. The large parking lots are major contributors to “no point source” water pollution (a leading cause of water pollution in the U.S.). In 2010 Walmart was forced to pay $27.6 million to the government of California for violating environmental laws, a suit initiated after a health inspector observed a Walmart employee dumping bleach down a drain.
And what transpired in Independence, Iowa, after Walmart came to town? Main Street continued to shutter and its population dropped. Five years ago Walmart opened a 99,000-square-foot Supercenter in the town, one of 35 in the state. Five hundred people lined up to apply for the 125 new “associates” jobs, paying $10.30 an hour.
(For the rest of my dispatches go to TakePart.com)
Floodwaters and winds wreak havoc on the narrow ravines and shallow-rooted forests of Vermont and New York; wildfires torch the desiccated Texas plains that have gone 300 straight days without rainfall; buckets pour down on the Gulf Coast once again, drowning ecosystems, hopes and dreams; and the great rivers of the American West are running dry. Sounds downright Biblical in its apocalyptic-ness, doesn’t it? Blame whomever you like, from heaven to hell to politicians to the Army Corps of Engineers to mall developers, but this is the reality of our environment in the first decade of the 21st century.
Photo by Pete McBride
Among all that doom and gloom, who would have predicted that those big American rivers—especially the granddaddy of them all, the Colorado River—would today be so imperiled. Yet tapped for the past 80 years for farms, drinking water, urban growth, suburban sprawl and recreation by a human population of more than 25 million, the Colorado currently no longer even reaches the sea. The 1,450-mile-long river, which not so long ago boasted a fertile, life-enriching delta covering 2 million acres, peters out about 90 miles from the Sea of Cortez.
Thanks to the work of two Colorado-based journalists, writer and adventurer Jon Waterman and photographer Pete McBride, the Colorado’s near-demise and its future were the subject of a seven-month-long descent and new accounts in a pair of books, photos and a short film.
In June 2008 Waterman—an experienced wilderness guide, park ranger and writer—set out to paddle the length of the Colorado, from its headwaters to south of the Mexican border; McBride joined him for parts of the descent and spent months capturing powerful photographs of its length from a small plane (often piloted by his father John), often from just a couple hundred feet above.
The river’s complex history of dams and diversions, the construction of massive canals to further drain it down, and its natural power and beauty all lend drama to their modern-day stories. But it is the anecdote about where the river runs dry that is the most powerful of all.
The conclusion of the descent in January 2009, in Waterman’s words, (from an essay for the Patagonia company’s fall catalog), paints the harsh reality: “Two miles into Mexico, my hopes of a complete 1,450-mile descent ended in a foamy pond of congealed fertilizers, distillate of countless American lawns and 3.4 million thirsty farm acres. I splashed out in bare feet, worried that our most iconic white water river would make me physically ill. (Pete) stayed clean by climbing out through the tamarisk trees. We tried to wipe the river shit off our pack rafts with tamarisk fronds, cursing the system that has diminished the Mighty Colorado to a stinking cesspool.”
“The 1,450-mile-long river, which not so long ago boasted a fertile, life-enriching delta covering 2 million acres, peters out about 90 miles from the Sea of Cortez.”
What happened? “Engineered to death” is Waterman’s conclusion, detailed in his book Running Dry: A Journey From Source to Sea Down the Colorado River: “…more than 100 dams and 1,000 miles of canals divert its water to most every farm, industry and city within a 250-mile radius of the river. Each year, seven western states and northern Mexico take 16.5 million acre-feet (enough water to supply 33 million American households) of river water. Amid the 12th year of drought in the Southwest, climate models show that conditions will continue to dry the snowmelt-fed river. Add explosive population growth, increasing the demand for water, and the river’s future becomes a ticking time bomb.”
McBride’s dramatic book of photos and film (Chasing Water) are bringing the river’s sickness to an ever-bigger audience across the West. An exhibit of words and pictures—“The Colorado River: Flowing Through Conflict”—is currently on display at Denver Museum of Nature and Science. Having grown up on a cattle ranch near Aspen, McBride admits to having taken the river’s abundance for granted; now he’s an advocate for its continued protection, “alarmed” by what he’s seen.
Like most of our environmental messes, parts of this one are reparable. The Tucson-based Sonoran Institute is leading an effort to save what remains of the Colorado River delta and has specific steps for how individuals can help. Cooperation between Mexico and the U.S. would be a big help and is being encouraged by the International Boundary & Water Commission. Patagonia’s yearlong “Our Common Waters” campaign points to a handful of organizations working on water-related clean-up projects.
For the full story, check out Waterman’s book-length account and the pair’s book of photo-and-text.
(For the rest of my dispatches go to TakePart.com)
Photo by Pete McBride
Photo by Pete McBride
Photo by Pete McBride
Photo by Pete McBride
Towing icebergs to places desperate for water is something of a non-urban myth. The idea sounds good on the surface. The planet is running short of freshwater, and gloomy forecasts predict a 30 percent rainfall decrease around the globe. Meanwhile, tens of thousands of big, purely freshwater icebergs crack off Greenland and Antarctica every year, only to drift into warmer waters and melt.
The notion of harnessing these massive, glassy natural resources is hardly new. In 1773 Captain James Cook brought small icebergs aboard The Resolution to replenish fresh water supplies. Towing bergs north or south has been seriously talked about in this century since the 1950s.
Unfortunately, every time a visionary entrepreneur floats a plan for navigating all that solid freshwater to parched markets, the H2O innovator is stymied by 1) the high cost of the towing and 2) the unacceptable amount of ice lost along the route.
Still, new iceberg theorists pop up every few years. The latest proposal comes from a University of Cambridge professor of ocean physics named Peter Wadhams. Wadhams claims to have partners in Canada and France who want to use tugboats to lug bergs from Newfoundland to the Canary Islands.
“It would be very nice to try it out and see if it works,” said Wadhams.
The group, which is of course looking for investors, bases its optimism on a hi-tech virtual map study illustrating the combination of ocean currents and winds, the anticipated melt rate and the tugboat’s fuel consumption. Coating the underside of the iceberg with an “insulating geotextile material” to reduce melt rate is a new twist on previous notions of wrapping them in sailcloth or Kevlar.
A team of 15 at Dassault Systems, a French software company, put the virtual imaging together. It estimated that a 7 million ton iceberg would take 141 days to reach the Canaries, and would lose 38 percent to melting. A test is estimated to cost upward of $10 million.
Five years ago, Britain’s biggest water supplier—Thames Water, which delivers to 13 million people—announced it was considering a plan to drag bergs from Greenland or northern Scandinavia across the North Sea. After factoring in costs, disruption of shipping lanes and that damn problem of ice melting as it reaches warmer climes, the plan was quietly dropped.
In 1977, scientists from 18 nations gathered at the International Conference on Iceberg Utilization at Iowa State University trotted out a similar idea. The event was organized and paid for by a nephew to the king of Saudi Arabia, a place desperate for new water sources, then and now.
The idea of Prince Mohammed al Faisal—and his Iceberg Transport International company—was to wrap a 100-million-ton iceberg off Antarctica in sailcloth and plastic and tow it with a fleet of tugboats back to the Arabian Peninsula. The trip was estimated to take eight months and cost $100 million.
At the time, the math suggested that the high costs would still be cheaper than desalinating water close to home, typically the Saudi’s primary access to fresh water. It was also thought that the American public—sucker that it is!—would pay for unique bottled iceberg water. To support his dream, Prince Faisal delivered a mini iceberg from Alaska to Iowa, by helicopter, plane and truck, where it was chipped and put into cocktails.
A Time magazine report of the day quoted a representative of the U.S. Army Cold Regions Research and Engineering Laboratory who was hardly optimistic: “Once you get north of the equator, you’ll have nothing but rope at the end of your tow.”
But maybe one day will be the ultimate cold day in …. and towing icebergs will finally make sense.
(For the rest of my dispatch, go to takepart.com)
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