In the early 1970s, "Save the Seals" became the anthem of the nascent environmental movement, and the harp seal pup, with its bottomless black eyes and snow white innocence, became the movement’s mascot. Environmentalists succeeded in virtually shutting down the commercial baby seal hunt in Canada, but now older harp seals have a new price on their heads–and possibly their penises–as the next target for the Asian aphrodisiac market.
From the air, Gibraltar Chemical Resources, Inc. resembles a ballfield clearing in the yellow pine forests of east Texas, scraped down to red dirt and crowded with steel sheds and smooth white cannister tanks. It lies in rural Winona, where many people raise cows or rose bushes for a living. Started in 1982, Gibraltar now handles 25 million gallons of hazardous waste a year from such sources as Fortune 500 electronics companies, small paint shops and U.S. military bases. It recycles solvents, mixe other chemicals as fuel for cement kilns, and pumps fluid wastes almost a mile down and injection well. Government agencies approve of Gibraltar’s work, but some townspeople accuse the company of chemical warfare.
Delfin Payaguajo of the Sekoya tribe in the Amazon rainforest in Ecuador says his family’s health and traditional way of life have been ruined by Texaco. The U.S. oild giant has pumped a billion barrels of crude oil out of the Ecuadoran rainforest–one of the world’s most biologicially diverse–and left behin and ecological horror show.
It sounds implausible: foreign-owned companies bruning hazardous waste in the United States, some of it imported, generating millions of dollars while poisoning citizens. And yet, at about 30 sites nationwide, cement is being made by burning hundreds of thousands of tons of liquid hazardous waste per year in unpermitted cement kilns. The waste, which originates, from the plastic petrochemical, pesticide and other industries, can contain arsenic, lead, cadmium, mercury and a host of other toxins which, when burned, send heavy metals and dioxins up into the air, down into unlined pits, and even out into bags of cement sold to unsuspecting consumers.
In the late fall of 1990, a woman named Claire Casey tried to stop a pair of hunters from shooting tame partridges on public land owned by the state Bureau of Land Management in Idaho. She waved her arms around to scare the partridges off, and lectrued the hunters on the errors of their ways. Casey didn’t just make the hunters mad–she sent them scurrying for their lawyers. Casey was convicted of "hunter harrassment" and fines $150.
In January 1993, Portland General Electric (PGE), Oregon’s largest electric utility, closed its nuclear power plant, Trojan, after cooling tubes has seriously corroded less than halfway through the plant’s anticipated 35-year lifespan. PGE had also found inexpensive replacement power from California. It would be cheaper to close Trojan, said the utility, than to fix it.
Burma, the western flank of the Indochina peninsula that also includes Vietnam and Thailand, has long been a black hole in the global village. For decades the military dictator was a numerologist and xenophobe. Foreign corporations, foreign journalists, foreign anything were not welcomed. (The country still supplies half of the world’s heroin and opium.) In 1988, the military junta crushed a student pro-democracy movement, killing over 2,000 demonstrators, and renamed the country Myanmar. The junta, now called the State Law and Order Restoration Council (SLORC), invited foreigners to tap its natural wealth for the first time in 30 years. Thai loggers rushed into the teak forests, adding the deforestation that plagues the country. One large rainforest remains, however, because it’s the home of ethnic villagers whoe have been fighting the government for 40 years. But SLORC may conquer the region with a natural gas pipeline for the benefit of international oil companies.
College campuses have some environmental craming to do: The average student produces 640 pounds of solid waste each year, including 500 disposable cups and 320 pounds of paper. Only five percent of it gets recycled. But not all students are hedonistic, beer-swilling waste creators. More than 450 people from 125 universities attended the Campus Earth Summit at Yale University in February to hear speakers like Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Carol Browner and her predecessor, William Reilly. Paul Hawken, the author of "The Ecology of Commerce" and head of cataloger Smith and Hawken, told them: "There are a lot of things that come between you and your Calvins." Among the chemicals used in making clothes: camium, molybdenum and lead. "This jacket I like to wear," he said, thumbing his tweed at the lapels, "Chromium, zinc, tin…"
Millions of lofty, straight American chestnut trees once forested the eastern United States with their dense canopy of saw-toothed leaves, making an umbrella for a host of native wildlife. During the late 1800s, a determined squirrel could have traveled from Atlanta, Georgia to Bar Harbor, Maine aboard the outstretched boughs of chestnut trees without ever touching the ground. Yet, according to Philip Rutter, president emeritus of the American Chestnut Foundation, it would have been a lean and mean rodent by journey’s end, for the chestnut’s spiny bur has been described as "the most effective anti-squirrel device nature has invented." Humans weren’t deterred, though, and many trees became fine Early American furniture. The wood, resistant to rot and weather, split with a straight grain and carved easily. Its bark–rich in tannic acid–was used to tan leather.
Greenpeace and the Basel Action Network have raised the alarm about the dangerous process of dismantling and recycling industrial ships, particularly by Norway, Japan and Greece (see "Ship Recycling," Currents, May/June 2003).
