RELATED e360 DIGEST ITEMS

19 Nov 2009: Kenya Evicts Squatters
From Beleaguered Mau Forest

The Kenyan government has begun evicting an estimated 30,000 families that have squatted illegally in the vital Mau forest and caused major environmental damage to the one-million-acre woodland. The Mau forest, located in the Rift valley, is Kenya’s largest water catchment area, the source of at least a dozen rivers that feed Lake Victoria, the Masai Mara nature reserve, and the tea fields of Kericho. Over the last 20 years, however, squatters and officials in the government of ex-President Daniel Arap Moi moved into the Mau and have destroyed roughly a quarter of the forest by clearing the land for timber production and agriculture. The forest destruction has created large-scale soil erosion and caused aquifer levels to fall, exacerbating a recent drought that caused many rivers to run dry. Prime Minister Raila Odinga has made clearing the Mau of squatters and restoring the forest the nation’s top environmental priority. Already, officials report, 3,500 squatters have moved out of the forest after being served with eviction notices.
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21 Oct 2009: Genetically Modified Crops
Needed to Avert Food Crisis, Panel Says

Further development of genetically modified (GM) crops will be needed to feed the estimated 9 billion people who will live on the planet by mid-century, according to a report from the U.K.’s Royal Society. The report said that rising populations, the impacts of climate change, and projected water shortages mean that new, drought-resistant and highly productive food plants must be developed to feed the world. The report said other economic and technological changes — such as improved irrigation and crop management — also will be necessary. The Royal Society scientists concluded that the development of new crops is an urgent priority if global agriculture and land-use problems are to be solved. The scientists’ conclusions drew fire from opponents of GM crops, who contend that the technique is unsustainable and could cause major environmental harm.
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01 Oct 2009: Drought in India
is Worst Since 1972, Government Says

With India’s four-month monsoon season now officially over, the nation’s meteorological department has announced that the country is experiencing the worst drought in 37 years, with rains 23 percent below normal. Especially hard-hit have been the region’s major rice- and cereal-growing regions in the northern and western states of Punjab, Haryana, and Rajasthan, where rains this year were 36 percent below normal. That region is also rapidly depleting its underground water supplies, as farmers with inexpensive diesel pumps extract irrigation water at an unsustainable rate, a trend that scientists warn could threaten Indian agriculture in the coming decades. The Indian government says the country has 52 million tons of wheat and rice in reserve, enough to last a year. But the drought and feeble monsoon rains have caused economic hardship for many of the 600 million Indians who still depend on agriculture for their livelihood.
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29 Sep 2009: Prolonged Drought and Salinity
Threaten Water Supplies in Australian City

Portions of Australia’s largest river are running so low and have become so salty because of a crippling drought and increased consumption that the nation’s fifth-largest city may soon have to deliver bottled water to its residents. Government officials warn that some stretches of the Murray River could be undrinkable by next week, particularly in 11 rural townships east of the city of Adelaide. Salinity levels in parts of the river already are higher than the World Health Organization’s recommended drinking water standard. Experts point to population growth, increased agriculture use, and a decade-long drought as contributing factors. Officials with the Murray-Darling Basin Authority, which oversees water resources for southeast Australia, say water reserves in the region are at about 25 percent of normal levels. “Another dry year will deplete our reservoirs and the water in the Murray will become too saline to drink,” said South Australian MP David Winderlich. “We are talking about 1.3 million people who are not far off becoming reliant on bottled water.”
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28 Sep 2009: Impact of Mountaintop Mining
To Be Subject of Major Study by U.S. EPA

The Obama administration is quietly launching a major scientific review of the environmental impact of mountaintop coal mining on streams and rivers in Appalachia, according to a news report. The Charleston Gazette says that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is forming a scientific panel to study how mountaintop removal has affected headwater streams and impacted downstream water quality. The study, announced without fanfare in the Federal Register, will also examine whether coal mining companies are meeting their obligations to restore Appalachian streams where millions of tons of mining debris have been dumped. Mountaintop coal removal is an environmentally destructive practice in which companies blast off the tops of mountains to get at coal seams below, then dump the debris in Appalachian valleys. Hundreds of miles of headwaters streams have been buried in mining debris, and the proposed EPA review marks the first time that the agency will undertake a major review of mountaintop mining. The Obama administration has promised to take “unprecedented steps” to reduce the impacts of mountaintop removal.
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24 Sep 2009: EPA Puts Pharmaceuticals on List of Possible Drinking Water Contaminants

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has listed 104 chemicals, including a number of pharmaceuticals, as potential drinking water contaminants to be considered for government regulation. While the agency must evaluate possible chemical contaminants every five years under the Safe Drinking Water Act, this is the longest list ever compiled by the agency and the first time it has included pharmaceuticals. They include estrogens such as equilenin, equilin, estradiol, and mestranol, which are used for hormone replacement therapy and birth control. Also on the list are 12 microbes, including the hepatitis A virus. The EPA evaluated about 7,500 contaminants and biological agents when compiling the list. Researchers will continue to evaluate data on the 104 chemicals and 12 microbes, and by 2013 will determine whether drinking water standards should exist for at least five of them. Click here to read the full list of the EPA’s “contaminant candidates.”
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27 Aug 2009: Drilling Chemicals Found
In Drinking Water Near Natural Gas Sites

For the first time, scientists have discovered chemicals used in a controversial natural gas drilling technique in water wells near the gas sites. Scientists for the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), testing wells near a major gas drilling area in Wyoming, have found traces of drilling chemicals in three wells, and other contaminants — including oil, gas, and heavy metals — in 11 of 39 wells recently tested, according to the Web site ProPublica. The chemicals are used in a process called hydraulic fracturing, in which drilling fluids and sand are injected under high pressure to break up rock and release gas. Using the fracturing technique, gas reserves are being developed in 31 states, although New York officials have imposed a moratorium on the process — which uses large amounts of water — until its environmental impact can be assessed. Congress is also considering a bill to regulate the process, but the gas industry has said regulation is unnecessary because it is impossible for fracturing fluids to contaminate underground water supplies. The recent tests, which may refute the industry’s claim, are continuing.
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24 Aug 2009: Small Hydropower Dams on Rise
As Concerns Grow About Big Power Projects

The number of small hydropower projects in the U.S. is increasing as utilities try to avoid concerns about the environmental impact of large dams, the Wall Street Journal reports. The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission now has applications for 14,000 megawatts of hydropower projects — enough to power 7 million to 14 million homes — and most are located on small rivers, streams, and creeks. That figure is a 20 percent increase from two years ago. As the number of projects grows in states such as Washington, Colorado, and Montana, environmentalists are beginning to raise objections to the small dams, which critics say can still block fish runs, interfere with whitewater rafting trips, and carve up wilderness habitat with roads, power lines, and other infrastructure. “One plant here, one plant there, maybe we would support that,” said an official at American Whitewater, a rafters’ group. “But with so many... this really gets to be an issue of cumulative impacts.” Utilities argue that the smaller dams often have minimal environmental impact and, most importantly, emit no greenhouse gases.
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17 Aug 2009: Chinese Air Pollution
Contributing to Drought, Study Says

Severe air pollution in China’s heavily industrialized east is impeding the formation of rain clouds and contributing to a drought in northern China, according to a new study. The study, which looked at rainfall and pollution patterns for the past 50 years, concluded that pollution has reduced the number of days of light rain in eastern China by 23 percent. Atmospheric scientist Yun Qian of the U.S. Department of Energy’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory said that the large number of aerosols in China’s polluted skies has led to the formation of rain droplets that are up to 50 percent smaller than rain droplets in clean skies. The smaller droplets do not as readily form rain clouds, which means that lighter rainfalls valuable to agriculture — ranging from a drizzle to accumulations of .4 inch per day — are occurring less frequently, according to the study, published in the Journal of Geophysical Research-Atmospheres. Qian said his research “suggests that reducing air pollution might help ease the drought in north China.” Meanwhile, a new U.N. study says major improvements in irrigation efficiency are needed to avoid large-scale food shortages that would effect 1.5 billion people in China, India, and Pakistan.
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14 Aug 2009: Salmon Return to Seine,
Disappear from Major Canadian River

For the first time in nearly a century, Atlantic salmon are returning to France’s Seine River to spawn, drawn back because the river has become appreciably cleaner in recent years, officials say. “There has been a turning point,” said Charles Perrier of the National Institute for Agronomic Research. “The improvement in water quality means that salmon have returned to the Seine.” The National Federation for French Fishing estimates that roughly 1,000 Atlantic salmon may be in the river this year. Salmon populations effectively disappeared from the Seine in the early 20th century because of high levels of industrial pollution, as well as the discharge of human sewage into the river. The salmon are returning to the river without the restoration programs used in recent years to reintroduce Atlantic salmon to the Thames and the Rhine. Meanwhile, millions of sockeye salmon — a Pacific species — have failed to return to Canada’s Fraser River, which empties into the Pacific Ocean in British Columbia. As many as 10.6 million sockeye were expected to return, but fewer than 1 million have, forcing the closure of the fishery. Scientists say that changing ocean conditions and fish farms at the mouth of the river — which spread sea lice to the wild salmon — could be responsible for the decline.
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12 Aug 2009: Obama Administration Okays
Major Mountaintop Removal Coal Project

After vowing to crack down on the controversial practice of leveling the tops of Appalachian mountains to get at the coal seams below, the Obama administration has quietly approved a major mountaintop removal project in West Virginia. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has approved the issuance of a Clean Water Act permit for CONSOL Energy’s Peg Fork Surface Mine, an 817-acre project that would permanently bury nearly three miles of Appalachian streams in mining debris. The Peg Fork mine was one of six mountaintop removal projects that Obama’s EPA initially said it opposed because “they all would result in significant adverse impacts to high-value streams.” Environmental groups criticized the administration for failing to carry through on its pledge to crack down on mountaintop removal, with a Sierra Club official expressing disappointment that the EPA failed to “adopt new regulations or policies that would end this destructive practice.” Mountaintop removal mines in Appalachia have destroyed more than 1,500 square miles of forests and buried more than 800 miles of streams in debris.
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11 Aug 2009: Satellite Data Confirm
Rapid Depletion of Indian Groundwater

A pair of satellites that measures changes in the earth’s gravity has shown that the intense irrigation of a 1,200-mile swath of northern India is depleting groundwater at a rate of 1.5 to 4 inches per year. The satellites, part of a joint U.S.-German mission known as GRACE (Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment), show that the region — inhabited by 600 million people heavily dependent on irrigated agriculture — is withdrawing 13 cubic miles of water per year from underground aquifers. Reporting in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, U.S. and Indian scientists analyzed satellite data from 2002 to 2008 and concluded that Indian farmers are pumping out groundwater 70 percent faster than estimated by the Central Ground Water Board of India in the 1990s. The GRACE satellites, orbiting in tandem and flying roughly 135 miles apart, use sophisticated instruments to detect changes in the earth’s gravitational pull, mainly due to water moving on or under the surface. The satellites, which have been used to measure the rapid thinning of ice sheets in the Arctic, “can help regional water managers by giving them a holistic view” of major aquifers, according to James Famiglietti, a University of California hydrologist who worked in the Indian project.
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10 Aug 2009: Hundreds of New Species
Discovered in Eastern Himalayan Region

More than 350 new species — including the world’s smallest deer, a flying frog, and an ultramarine blue flower that changes color in response to temperature — have been discovered in the past decade in the eastern Himalayas, according to the conservation group WWF. But in a report entitled “The Eastern Himalayas: Where Worlds Collide,” WWF said that many of the species are threatened by human development and by rising temperatures that are rapidly melting the region’s glaciers and endangering water supplies. The conservation group said that among the new species discovered between 1998 and 2008 are 244 plants, 16 amphibians, 16 reptiles, 14 fish, two birds, two mammals, and at least 60 new invertebrates. The eastern Himalayas — which include eastern India, Nepal, Bhutan, northern Myanmar, and parts of Tibet — are one of the most biologically diverse regions on earth, yet rapidly expanding human populations have left only 25 percent of the area’s original habitat intact, WWF said. Tariq Aziz, head of WWF’s Living Himalayas Initiative, also said that the region’s biodiversity risks being “lost forever unless the impacts of climate change are reversed.”
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14 Jul 2009: Euphrates River Dwindles
Due to Dams and Long Drought

The legendary Euphrates River has dwindled to perilously low levels in Iraq because of a severe two-year drought, the construction of dams in Turkey and Syria, and wasteful water management by the Iraqi government and farmers, the New York Times reports. The flow of the 1,730-mile river has been so sharply reduced that lakes and wetlands are drying up; rice, wheat, and barley farmers are unable to irrigate their fields; renowned Mesopotamia date crops are withering; and fishermen are losing their livelihoods. Unless the situation improves, the Euphrates’ flow could soon be only half that of several years ago, the Times reports. Particularly hard-hit are the marshes between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers, which had been drained by Saddam Hussein but were on their way to being restored several years ago. Once again, however, many sections of marshland are dry. A major reason for the Euphrates’ reduced flow is the network of seven dams in Turkey and Syria, which limit the water downstream. Turkey has recently released more water into the Iraqi section of the river.
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13 Jul 2009: Concern for Crop Safety
Leads to Damaging Farming Practices

Concerned about outbreaks of E. coli bacteria, farming groups and food buyers have instituted a series of environmentally damaging agricultural practices in California and could soon be replicating the program nationwide, the San Francisco Chronicle reports. The practices — spurred by a 2006 E. coli outbreak in spinach that killed four people and left 35 with acute kidney failure — include poisoning or draining irrigation ponds, creating 450-dirt buffers around fields, and killing amphibians and wildlife in and around cropland. The new practices are being implemented by the large growers and major corporate buyers of greens that are washed, bagged, and distributed nationwide. So far the new practices are mainly being carried out in California, but the prepackaged greens industry has submitted a proposal to have similar rules apply at farms nationwide. Critics contend the new agricultural practices not only cause environmental harm, but do little to improve food safety. “Sanitizing American agriculture, aside from being impossible, is foolhardy,” said author Michael Pollan who has written extensively on the food industry.
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02 Jul 2009: Turkey Resumes Dam Project

The Turkish government will revive a $1.6 billion dam project on the Tigris River despite concerns that it will displace tens of thousands of people, damage wildlife habitat, and destroy historic archaeological sites. Preparations for the Ilisu hydroelectric dam were suspended for six months after financial institutions in Germany, Switzerland, and Austria announced that they were withholding financial support because of environmental concerns. But Veysel Eroglu, Turkey’s environmental minister, said the financing would be made available for what the government considers an important part of a $32 billion plan to boost the economy in the nation’s southeastern corner, a region disrupted by armed conflict between the government and the outlawed Kurdistan Workers Party. Eroglu said improvements have been made to assure the project will meet international standards. Turkish officials say the dam, part of a larger proposed network of dams called the Southeastern Anatolia Project, would generate 1,200 MW of electricity after it is completed in 2013. But environmental advocates warn that the project would inundate as many as 80 towns, villages, and hamlets, and displace up to 80,000 people.
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01 Jul 2009: Oil Companies and Nigeria
Accused of Mass Pollution in Niger Delta

Amnesty International says Royal Dutch Shell, other oil companies, and the Nigerian government have violated the human rights of residents of the Niger Delta by polluting their land and harming their health with oil spills, natural gas flaring, and waste dumping. In a 141-page report, the human rights group said that at least 9 million barrels of oil may have been spilled in the past 50 years in the delta, home to an estimated 500,000 Ogoni people. “People living in the Niger Delta have to drink, cook with and wash in polluted water,” said the report. “They eat fish contaminated with oil and other toxins. The land they farm on is being destroyed... yet neither the government nor oil companies monitor the human impacts of oil pollution.” A Shell spokesman said that, despite its efforts to protect the environment, 85 percent of the pollution from its operations comes from attacks and sabotage carried out by criminal bands operating in the Niger Delta.
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26 Jun 2009: Spreading Desertification
Affecting Mediterranean, Group Says

Growing depletion of aquifers and climate change are turning parts of Italy, Spain, and France into desert, according to the Italian environmental group, Legambiente. The group said that 11 percent of arable land in Sicily, Sardinia, and sections of southern Italy already shows signs of drying up and could eventually affect the livelihoods of 6.5 million people. The main cause is the depletion of underground aquifers, which can result in seawater intruding into the groundwater, effectively poisoning water supplies, Legambiente said. The group reported that 74 million acres of land in Italy, Spain, and the French Riviera were gradually turning to desert because of overexploitation of water resources, with 20 percent of the Iberian Peninsula already experiencing desertification. Legambiente said that nearly half of Egypt’s farmland had been compromised by brackish groundwater caused by saltwater intrusion. U.N. officials confirmed the threat of desertification to large areas bordering the Mediterranean, and Legambiente said that unless water and land-use policies are changed “the risk will become concrete and irreversible.” Climate scientists say that rising temperatures also are contributing to spreading desertification in Spain and around the Mediterranean.
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18 Jun 2009: Pine Beetle Infestation
Threatens Water Source for U.S. Southwest

The destruction of 2.5 million acres of Rocky Mountain forest because of a pine beetle infestation could threaten the water supplies of 33 million people, according to the U.S. Forest Service. Rick Cables, chief forester for the Rocky Mountain region, told a congressional committee that the dead and dying forest at the headwaters of the Colorado River could burn extensively and reduce water supplies to residents in Los Angeles, San Diego, Phoenix, and Tucson, Ariz. Roughly 25 percent of the water piped to these cities originates in national forests in the Rockies that have suffered extensive damage from infestations of pine bark beetles, Cables said. He said that the loss of the trees and subsequent wildfires would “literally bake the soil” and lead to excessive runoff and rapid snowmelt, both of which reduce flow to the Colorado River. The fires also could destroy reservoirs, pipes, and other infrastructure, Cables said. Outbreaks of pine beetles — which scientists attribute to warmer winters that fail to kill beetle larvae — have destroyed 8 million acres of trees in the western U.S. and 22 million acres in Canada.
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20 May 2009: Disappearance of Aral Sea

In a dramatic series of satellite photos, NASA has documented one of the great environmental disasters of the last century: the disappearance — and near death — of the Aral Sea in Central Asia. Once the world’s fourth-largest lake, the Aral Sea became the victim of a grand Soviet public works project that diverted the water bound for the inland body of water and pumped it into the desert to grow cotton and other crops. By 2000, when the first photograph in this series was taken by NASA’s Terra satellite, the Aral Sea had already shrunk by more than half since the diversion projects began in 1960. The photographs show that by 2009, the sea has nearly disappeared altogether, with its once extensive southern portion little more than a swirling cloud of dust and salts heavily contaminated by agricultural chemicals. The Kazakhstan government completed a dam in 2005 that has restored some water to the northern lobe of the sea, but has led to the near-complete desiccation of the southern half.
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