Next month will mark the 200th anniversary of Charles Dickens’ birth. Given the last two centuries’ stratospheric advances in technology and the past century’s progress in human rights policy, one would think that child labor, dangerous and unhealthy working conditions, and the export of hazardous industrial refuse to poor countries and communities would be a thing of the past. But as several reports released last month show, Dickensian working and living conditions are still very much with us. Children continue to be engaged in hazardous manual labor instead of attending school. They continue to be exposed to levels of toxics that hamper their ability to learn. Particularly troubling is the fact that these problems have long been documented and persist despite policies – in national regulations, international agreements, and in voluntary business codes of conduct – aimed at their prevention.

Gold mining in Mali
A Human Rights Watch report released in December details the work of children in gold mines in Mali – children as young as six digging and climbing mine shafts, working underground, carrying heavy loads of rock, crushing ore, and using the potent neurotoxicant mercury to separate gold from surrounding rock. Even younger children are also being exposed to mercury as they accompany their mothers who are engaged in this work. According to the report, an estimated 20,000 to 40,000 children work in Mali’s small-scale artisanal gold mining operations – despite the fact that Mali has now outlawed hazardous child labor in gold mines. Many of these children work alongside their parents, but some are victims of labor trafficking. Some of the gold from these artisanal mines in Mali has been traced to Switzerland and Dubai.

The Human Rights Watch report points out that labor conditions of these small-scale operations are far more difficult to police than those of big companies, and that funding to enforce international child labor prevention programs is far from sufficient. It notes that among the challenges of eradicating this child labor is the fact that in situations like the one in Mali, boycotts can be counterproductive if they result in a local economic downturn that may prompt families to put more children to work in the mines as they pursue additional income. Recommendations from Human Rights Watch include increasing access to free education (with free school meals) in mining areas, reducing use of mercury in artisanal mines, improving overall mining practices, and renewing the International Labor Organization’s “Minors Out of Mining” campaign.

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The charge that airlines will have to pay for flying in and out of the EU is not a “tax” at all, but the cost of airlines having to hold tradable emissions permits under the EU Emissions Trading System. Starting January 1, 2012, airlines will have to hold permits for the carbon dioxide their airplanes emit during the entire length of a flight that originates or terminates in the EU zone [see EU reg]. Since it has to pay for a permit that is traded on an open market, the price is not known. It is not a tax.

In my recent interview on Seattle Public Radio KUOW, I received a question from a caller who claimed to have had to pay a “carbon tax” of something like $600. That sounded high to me, as it did to host Steve Scher, but I should have done the back-of-the-envelope calculation and concluded she was nuts. Here is the simple arithmetic of the cost to an airline of flying in or out of the EU. Boeing reports that a 747-400 consumes about 5 gallons per mile, assuming a flight of about 3500 miles, about the distance from JFK airport to Heathrow. A direct flight from Seattle to Heathrow is longer, 4780 miles, but we’ll assume that the fuel burn rate is about the same, even though it could well be longer because the plane would have to carry more fuel to fly the longer distance. The carbon content of jet fuel is 9.57 kg of CO2 per gallon, or 0.052746 tons per mile (5 x 9.57 x conversion factor for kg to short tons). Thus, a 4780-mile flight from Seattle to Heathrow would emit about 250 tons of CO2 for the flight. The 747-400 seats about 416 passengers in a 3-class configuration, so assuming that there are 350 passengers on board (a generous assumption given the fullness of flights these days), each passenger would account for about 0.72 tons of CO2. EUETS allowances have been trading at about 8 or 9 Euros lately, or about 11 US dollars. So the “tax” for this Seattle passenger going to visit family in the UK should really have been about eight or nine U.S. dollars. Of course, British Airways may mark up the cost a bit, but that is still two orders of magnitude off from her estimate of $600. And I suppose that the price of the EUETS permits are relatively low right now, and the Euro is taking it in the shorts, so maybe it is not a fair calculation to make right now. Perhaps, an estimate of fifteen or twenty U.S. dollars is more realistic over the long run. But on the other hand, even this estimate might be high; the EUETS might not cost passengers anything in 2012, because for the first year of the airlines’ participation in EUETS, allowances equal to 97% of historical emissions will be allocated free, and 95% in 2013. There may not be any costs to pass on to passengers in 2012 and 2013!

So there you have it. For most passengers flying in and out of the EU, the cost of their airline having to comply with the EUETS will likely be close to zero for the first two years, and rising up to something on the order of fifteen or twenty dollars. Makes the threatened lawsuit by Chinese air carriers and the threatened US Congressional attempt to fine American carriers for complying with the EUETS mandate seem more than a little hot-headed.

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Shi-Ling Hsu is Associate Professor at the University of British Columbia Faculty of Law. Previously, he was Associate Professor at the George Washington University Law School, Senior Attorney and Economist for the Environmental Law Institute in Washington, DC and Deputy City Attorney for the City and County of San Francisco.

As Congress nears recess, legislative approval of the Keystone XL pipeline is still a possibility. Congressional Republicans and the American Petroleum Institute have said the Keystone XL pipeline could create 20,000 new jobs, as has the Teamsters union. House Speaker John Boehner has said “tens of thousands” of jobs would be created. The State Department estimate comes in at between 5,000 and 6,000, and a report from Cornell University’s Global Labor Institute concludes that the pipeline could ultimately “kill more jobs than it creates,” since most of the pipeline construction jobs would be temporary and costs of responding to related environmental health effects would lead to job cuts. Whatever the actual number, something I haven’t seen discussed is the safety of the jobs that would be associated with such a pipeline.

Pipeline-related jobs would involve not only oil and gas extraction, but also pipeline construction and installation, work that would involve welding, trench-digging, drilling, and much heavy equipment operation. The top 10 workplace safety standards violated in 2010 are all common to this work. At a time of tight budgets, when construction and production jobs are also often under time constraints, and when funding for the agencies that oversee workplace safety is also limited, this is a particularly important consideration, especially given this work’s inherent hazards. . . . Read more »

To the untrained eye, New Zealand forests have a tropical feel somewhat out-of-character in a temperate world. Like Australia, these rainforests owe their existence to the ancient ark of Gondwana that broke away from Pangea at a time when dinosaurs were still flourishing.  Some of the species like giant Kauri trees have lineages dating back 100 million years.

And when it comes to temperate rainforests, New Zealand has a lot to boast about. Isolation from mainland areas and long lineages have provided the backdrop for a maternity ward of unique species. Nearly 80% of the flowering plants, conifers, and ferns are endemic (found nowhere else). Reptiles give birth to live young and frogs completely skip the tadpole stage. Many birds are flightless and threatened because of introduced predators (mostly rats and opossums). And many of the conifers are unique – known as podocarps because seeds are not concealed in scaly cones like northern hemisphere conifers.

New Zealand’s temperate rainforests can be grouped into two classes: conifer-broadleaf and southern or Antarctic beech. In this blog, I will focus on the conifer-broadleaf forests (a later blog will describe beech forests) and the giant Kauri trees.

Father of the Forest - Giant kauri estimated at over 2000 years old. Photo credit Dominick DellaSala.

About 3 hours north of New Zealand’s largest city – Auckland –pockets of Kauri trees punctuate the forest canopy in the Waipoua Forest. As I walked along a trail into the dense forest, I was overcome by the enormity of the largest tree that the Maori call Te Matua Ngahere  – or “Father of the Forest.” And what a granddaddy it is. Its trunk measures more than 16 meters across (>50 feet) and it stands as tall as a five-story building. While not as tall as a redwood, it was wider than any tree I had seen. Kauri trees branch repeatedly at the top and tend to grow disproportionately in width. Most of these giants were cut down by two centuries of logging both by the Maori before European settlement and then by Europeans that nearly finished the job.

In spite of the majestic nature of these trees, on my journey back to Auckland I was struck by the audacity of New Zealand forestry practices outside this protected area.

Most New Zealand conservationists will tell you that the battle over logging was won years ago when New Zealanders agreed to end logging of what remains of its native forests (nearly two-thirds were already logged) and instead focused its wood production on existing plantation management. However, I was struck by the similarities in sign-propaganda that I also reported on in my visit to the Olympic rainforest, where misleading signs boasted about stewardship practices that were non-existent.

New Zealand's industrial forestry practices outside reserves. Photo credit Dominick DellaSala.

Along one of the main highways where extensive plantation and clearcut logging had occurred (see photo) a timber industry sign resembled something out of a George Orwell novel – “Please take care of our forest, it’s busy saving the world.”

Ironically, New Zealand forests are indeed busy saving the world but the sign was in the wrong place and should have advertised the importance of saving remaining native, uncut forests in the Waipoua and others like it.

While plantations supply important wood products, New Zealand forestry practices leave much room for improvement. Massive clearcuts, use of exotic pines, and an explosion of invasives like scotch broom resemble tree-cutting practices on the Olympic Peninsula – Orwellian propaganda sign and all!

New Zealanders have a lot to celebrate as they have made prudent choices for protecting remaining and globally significant native forests. As climate change impacts New Zealand, what needs to happen next is for management of protected areas to increasingly deal with numerous invasive plants and animals outcompeting native species and to focus on making improvements in forestry practices outside reserves. Until then, regarding those forestry signs on the Olympics or in New Zealand, George Orwell would be rolling in his grave!

Dominick A. DellaSala is chief scientist and president of the Geos Institute in Ashland, Oregon, and president of the North American section of the Society for Conservation Biology. He is the author of Temperate and Boreal Rainforests of the World: Ecology and Conservation.

Some 38-45 million years ago, Australia broke off from its parent super-continent, Gondwana, and began drifting northward.  In its long and arduous journey, the ark rafted ancient species forced to cope with a cooling and drying climate. Some, like Antarctic beech (Nothofagus spp.), were forced into climatic refugia along the eastern edge of Australia where it remained moist enough to cradle the evolution of rainforest communities in changing times.

Ancient Antarctic beech from Lamington NP, Queensland. Photo credit Dominick DellaSala.

This December, I had the pleasure of walking in the shadow of ancient beeches in Queensland, Australia, where I witnessed first-hand these and other magnificent rainforests. Here’s what I saw:

Antarctic beech forests are relicts of a bygone era restricted to windward slopes that squeeze moisture out of rising air masses coming from the South Pacific. The tapestry of life is a delicate balance of plants jockying for position based, in part, on changes in moisture determined by slope, elevation, and distance from the prevailing winds. As winds blow downslope on the north side of mountainous areas, rainfall and humidity levels drop while temperature rises. Plants are shuffled about from temperate to subtropical wet, subtropical dry, and wet or dry Eucalypt communities.

While beech forests have lower levels of overall species richness, their connection to this ancient ark is unmistakable and globally significant with genera shared by trees and other plants in southern temperate rainforests of Valdivia (Chile), South Africa (Kynsna-Tsitsikamma), and New Zealand. The Antarctic beech that I observed arose from a process known as coppicing – repeat dying and growing of tree stems from a single seed that may have sprung some 2,000 years ago.  Ancient trees continuing what their ancestors started millions of years ago in a delicate dance with climate.

Wet Eucalypt forest in the Bunya Mountains of Queensland, Australia, remain unprotected because they are not considered rainforest. Photo credit Dominick DellaSala.

Equally fascinating was the shift from temperate to subtropical to wet Eucalypt. Along this gradient, was a noticeable explosion in the chorus of bird songs (sometimes pleasantly deafening), all kinds of ferns, numerous epiphytes, and long-dangling lianas that conjured up images of the mythical Tarzan. In my walks – both on the ground and along canopy bridges constructed along some walkways – I was greeted by lyre-birds, parrots, colorful pigeons, bush-turkeys, whip birds, bell birds, fantails, gray goshawks and much more.

I was especially interested in the mixing of subtropical and wet Eucalypt elements and how fire dictates whether Eucalypt – a fire tolerant species – wins in this battle for supremacy – or rainforests eventually overtake giant gum trees (some were over 50 meters tall) when fire is absent for long periods.

And none of my blogs would be complete without a call for conservation action. Australians – like so many other nations in Oceania – have nearly erased this pre-historic heritage. Most of the forests were cut down over a century ago but fortunately over two-thirds of the remaining native rainforests are now protected. The remaining battles persist over logging of Eucalypt (giant gum trees) – considered rainforest in my book and by other authors – but not by government protections. The hot spot of logging is in Tasmania; however, the government recently reached an agreement between conservation groups and industry to transition out of native forest logging. Last September, I was joined by 12 other co-authors of the temperate-boreal rainforest book in congratulating the Australian and Tasmania governments on this conservation milestone urging them to get on with the business of designating and then protecting remaining native forests including wet Eucalypt in Tasmania.

In the current era of human-caused climate change, there are few opportunities for rainfall-dependent species to find refuge as the climate moderates and rainfall patterns change. The best hope is to reduce stressors on rainforest communities from human activities so that rainforest species have the best chance of adapting to human-caused climate chaos. This includes implementing the terms of the native forest agreements in Tasmania with new protected areas and facilitating connectivity along gradients to allow species to migrate. It is my hope that the Tasmania forest agreements are a signal to the rest of Australia, if not the world, that we can work together to protect the best of our natural heritage while restoring the rest. To do otherwise, would sink this ancient ark.

Dominick A. DellaSala is chief scientist and president of the Geos Institute in Ashland, Oregon, and president of the North American section of the Society for Conservation Biology. He is the author of Temperate and Boreal Rainforests of the World: Ecology and Conservation.

Taking America by storm with actions reminiscent of the 60s, “Occupy Wall Street” has gone viral in an attempt to raise awareness about corporate interests being placed above public needs. But the movement has yet to sound alarm bells on the Tongass rainforest, where a native corporation is seeking to develop and log over 100-square miles of public lands through a legislative lands transfer proposed in Congress.

With 290,000 acres of corporate holdings and 560,000 acres of subsurface rights, the for-profit Sealaska Corporation is the largest private landholder in Southeast Alaska and largest of 13 regional native corporations established under the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act (ANCSA). Decades of Sealaska clearcuts run scatter shot across the region, holes punched in a verdant rainforest web-of-life. Here’s what’s at stake if the proposed land transfer takes hold.

The Tongass Rainforest (photo credit: John Hyde for Sierra Club)

The Tongass is the  “crown-jewel” of the national forest system. It contains one-quarter of coastal temperate rainforests that once stretched nearly unbroken from Alaska’s Prince William Sound to California’s magnificent coastal redwoods. Throughout the world, forests are vanishing at an alarming rate of 60 acres every minute of every day, but the Tongass stands tall as one of the largest remaining tracts of relatively undeveloped rainforests in the world (see Temperate and Boreal Rainforests of the World: Ecology and Conservation).

A visit to the region makes you appreciate just how special the Tongass is as it remains a timeless wonder where traffic-jams are replaced by “salmon-jams,” fish lined up head to tail, fin-to-fin, to spawn and die while hungry bears, wolves, and eagles wait patiently on river banks for their catch-of-the day. Its highly productive coastal areas, fisheries, and forested lands are irreplaceable public treasures ­- a key reason why President Theodore Roosevelt established the Tongass as the nation’s premiere national forest in 1907.

The Tongass is also part of a global network of rainforests that purify drinking water supplies, cleanse the air we breathe, and lessen climate change impacts. Southeast Alaska, in general, contains over 2,500 wild salmon runs, the densest salmon-jam on the planet. Tongass roadless areas and old-growth rainforests are strongholds for the region’s salmon fishery. And the Tongass rainforest is a vital part of the planet’s air purification system, soaking up immense amounts of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and storing it in long-lived trees, soils, and dense foliage. When rainforests are cut down, much of this stored carbon is released as a greenhouse gas pollutant from decaying logging slash left on the ground and the manufacture and transportation of wood products over long distances. Around the world, logging of forests contributes more global warming pollution annually than the total emissions from fossil-fuel powered vehicles in the same time period.

The so-called Lands Transfer bills (S.730/H.R. 1408) sponsored by Alaska Congressman Don Young and Senator Lisa Murkowski would allow Sealaska Corporation to select over 65,000 acres of some of the most important conservation and culturally valued lands within the Tongass to log and develop.  Rainforest champions like spruce and cedar—that grow as tall as twenty-story buildings—would be cherry picked from the Tongass and then sent overseas to timber starved China and Japan. According to a recent analysis by Audubon Alaska, only two percent of the largest trees remain on the Tongass.

Many of the public lands parcels that Sealaska Corporation wants to develop also are from public lands sited at the heads of bays, mouths of salmon streams, and large-tree rainforest areas. These lands contribute an inestimable value to commercial and sport fishing, recreation, subsistence fishing and hunting and tourism. Developing them would harm these industries that are considered the backbone of the regional economy.

No new legislation is needed to finalize Sealaska Corporation’s land entitlement claims as the corporation already filed remaining claims under ANCSA but has delayed these land selections so it can pursue controversial legislation. ANCSA established areas available to native corporations for economic opportunities while designating additional lands for the Tongass National Forest.

Occupy Wall Street has placed single corporate interests in a national spotlight. Sealaska Corporation’s preoccupation with the lands transfer bills is indicative of corporate interests being placed above those of the public.

For more information on this bill click on: http://seacc.org/issues/land_transfers/sealaska

Dominick A. DellaSala is chief scientist and president of the Geos Institute in Ashland, Oregon, and president of the North American section of the Society for Conservation Biology. He is the author of Temperate and Boreal Rainforests of the World: Ecology and Conservation.

Inspired by the recent popular discontent expressed so colorfully on Wall Street, I offer this proposal: Occupy Sprawl!

People are not happy with the economy, with politics, with the government. Consider the physical surrounding of the protesters: the streets and squares in lower Manhattan where there are plenty of places to gather. Good urbanism provides good spaces for assembling and protesting. Our sprawling suburbs are devoid of such places. Where can people get together to show frustration (or to celebrate)? Are people happy with their physical environment in sprawl? Why not revolt against the system of sprawl, which is responsible for some of the most serious environmental, economic, social and health problems in recent history? Sprawl has been central to our economic troubles: the mortgage meltdown, dependence on cars and oil, pollution and waste of resources to mention just a few. Sprawl has even been blamed for the death of the American dream itself.

How about taking on sprawl in the passionate way the protesters are taking on Wall Street? The metaphor of occupation can serve us well in the quest to reform sprawl because we will need a dramatic overhaul – of the physical pattern, of the law, of the financing mechanism that created, supported and encouraged sprawl for decades. The whole system must be shaken from its foundations, in the same way the occupiers demand systemic changes on Wall Street.

Read entire post here.

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Galina Tachieva is a partner and director of town planning at the central office of Duany Plater-Zyberk & Company, in Miami, Florida. She is originally from Bulgaria, and received a master’s degree in architecture from the University of Architecture and Civil Engineering in Sofia and a master’s in urban design from the University of Miami, Florida. Galina submitted a “Sprawl Repair Kit,” which contains some of the ideas and drawings from her book, to the 2009 Re-Burbia competition sponsored by the blog Inhabitat and DWELL magazine, where it won the People’s Choice Award. She is the author of The Sprawl Repair Manual.

They’re arguing that a new study shows canned foods to be safe, even when lined with BPA. The problem? That’s not what the study says.

The latest skirmish in the battle over bisphenol A (BPA) — the synthetic chemical used to make polycarbonate plastics, to make the epoxy resins that line food and beverage cans, and as developers in thermal receipt papers — came last week when the Breast Cancer Fund, an Oakland-based non-profit, released the results of its testing for BPA in canned food marketed to children (PDF). The report found BPA in Campbell’s Disney Princess Cool Shapes, Toy Story Fun Shapes Pasta in chicken broth, Spaghettios With Meatballs, Earth’s Best Organic Elmo Noodlemania Soup, Chef Boyardee Whole Grain Pasta Mini ABCs &123s With Meatballs, and Annie’s Homegrown Organic Cheesy Ravioli at levels that ranged between 13 and 114 parts per billion, levels that have been shown to be biologically active, meaning they’re high enough to interact with and affect our cells.

In response, the North American Metal Packaging Alliance (NAMPA), a trade association representing the food-and-beverage metal-packaging industry, fired off a press release citing a study ostensibly showing that there’s no health risk from BPA exposure through canned food.

“This comprehensive, first-of-its-kind clinical exposure study, funded entirely by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), offers definitive evidence that even the highest exposure levels of BPA from canned foods and beverages did not lead to detectable amounts in the human blood stream,” said NAMPA. “The EPA-funded study emphatically showed there is not a health risk from BPA exposure in canned foods because of how the body processes and eliminates the compound from the body, in children as well as adults,” said NAMPA chairman Dr. John M. Rost in the press release.

Read more on The Atlantic.

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Elizabeth Grossman is the author of Chasing Molecules: Poisonous Products, Human Health, and the Promise of Green Chemistry, High Tech Trash: Digital Devices, Hidden Toxics, and Human Health, Watershed: The Undamming of America, and Adventuring Along the Lewis and Clark Trail. Her writing has appeared in Mother Jones, The Nation, Salon, The Washington Post, and other publications. She lives in Portland, Oregon.

Scale is fundamental to urban design. If you get it right, and achieve a well-proportioned space between buildings, you have a sound basis to build upon. Even if the architecture is far from perfect, the public realm you create can be decent and comfortable. If you get the scale wrong and your master plan is built, even the most lustrous architecture won’t remediate the failure of space-making; people might still use it for utilitarian reasons (think the parking lot of a Wal-Mart), but will not enjoy it.

Getting the urban scale right has been the mantra of planners and architects for ages. But have we been practicing what we have been preaching? In reality, we have been putting up for too long with the worst offender to human scale, sprawl. This pathological growth pattern has created environments of magnified dimensions that overwhelm the physical size of the human body. Massive thoroughfares, perfect for fast-moving cars but not for pedestrians, have destroyed our neighborhoods; mind-boggling multi-level interchanges have eroded our urban cores; single-use mega structures of enormous size and their even more enormous parking lots, have obliterated the walkable scale of traditional towns. This type of planning has resulted not only in the largest waste of real estate, infrastructure and natural resources in human history, but has seriously impeded some elemental human necessities – the need to walk based on the physiology of our two-legged bodies, and the need for spatial enclosure based on the physiology of our human eyes as well as our psychology. It is simple: we enjoy walking and we enjoy well-defined spaces, while sprawl has deprived us of both.

Read more at Galina Tachieva’s blog.

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Galina Tachieva is a partner and director of town planning at the central office of Duany Plater-Zyberk & Company, in Miami, Florida. She is originally from Bulgaria, and received a master’s degree in architecture from the University of Architecture and Civil Engineering in Sofia and a master’s in urban design from the University of Miami, Florida. Galina submitted a “Sprawl Repair Kit,” which contains some of the ideas and drawings from her book, to the 2009 Re-Burbia competition sponsored by the blog Inhabitat and DWELL magazine, where it won the People’s Choice Award. She is the author of The Sprawl Repair Manual.

As of late, the mortgage interest deduction (MID), a tax break many Americans have become accustomed to, has become the focus of much debate and controversy. It first became the subject of heated discussion when President Obama’s debt commission suggested its reduction. They argued that in addition to reducing deficits, such reform could also help slow the growth of sprawl. The claim was that the deduction encourages people to buy larger homes on larger, exurban lots, and that reducing this subsidy would slow the growth of sprawl.

In a previous post, I argued that the MID is only one of many incentives that have made sprawl the predominant form of growth. What’s more, slowing growth does nothing with the huge surplus of sprawl that already exists. If the goal is to effectively deal with sprawl, we will be better served by encouraging its repair through regulatory and financial incentives.

Now the MID debate has started anew as President Obama suggested funding portions of the Jobs Act through certain reductions of the MID. And yet again the result has been uproar from all directions. It is obvious that any proposal to reform this all-American “privilege” will be an uphill battle.
Read more of Galina Tachieva’s blog here.
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Galina Tachieva is a partner and director of town planning at the central office of Duany Plater-Zyberk & Company, in Miami, Florida. She is originally from Bulgaria, and received a master’s degree in architecture from the University of Architecture and Civil Engineering in Sofia and a master’s in urban design from the University of Miami, Florida. Galina submitted a “Sprawl Repair Kit,” which contains some of the ideas and drawings from her book, to the 2009 Re-Burbia competition sponsored by the blog Inhabitat and DWELL magazine, where it won the People’s Choice Award. She is the author of The Sprawl Repair Manual.