Chevron is worse than BP.

Just came across these clips from the film Crude. The above was posted on 365 Days of Trash. I don't understand how I haven't seen this "Herculean work of investigative journalism" yet but plan to do so soon and suggest the same for our readers. I think we may have linked to an article about its release last year but then lost track. Anywho, the DVD is available for purchase here.



For those of you who may not be able to view videos in the office, the film by Joe Berlinger follows one of the largest and most controversial legal cases on the planet: the $27 billion Amazon Chernobyl lawsuit pitting 30,000 rain forest dwellers in Ecuador against the U.S. oil giant Chevron.

Which recreational drug is the greenest?

"Let's say I were the type of person who would go to a party where an assortment of recreational drugs were being used. Would it matter, so far as the environment goes, which one I took?"

Don't look at me! I didn't ask the question (this decade). One of Slate's Green Lantern readers did. And the answer, not surprisingly, is marijuana. The lantern determined each recreational drug's earthly impact based on where the raw materials come from, the ways in which they're harvested or synthesized, and the yield per square meter of land use. About half of the United States marijuana supply is grown domestically and while there are of course environmental downsides, like the fact that "at least half of the world's yearly crop of 50,000 metric tons is cultivated in subtropical Mexico, including protected areas in the mountains of the Sierra Madre Occidental," marijuana is far greener than ecstasy, crystal meth and cocaine. The US DEA estimates that 2.4 million hectares of South American rainforests have been cleared by coca growers in the Andes over the last 20 years. And speaking of rain forest destruction, ecstasy is made from sassafras oil - which is derived mostly from endangered rainforest trees in Southeat Asia and Brazil. From the article:

In 2008, the U.K.-based Flora and Fauna International helped law enforcement confiscate 33 tons of [sassafras] oil distilled by criminal gangs from more than 8,000 chopped-down trees at the Phnom Samkos Wildlife Sanctuary in Cambodia. (That's enough to make 245 million Ecstasy tablets.) Meanwhile, crystal meth in the U.S. market comes from the chemicals... which are either extracted from an Asian grass or brewed in a frothy vat of molasses. China and India account for half the world's supply, according to the U.S. State Department's 2010 Narcotics Control Strategy Report, and most of the stuff that lands on our shores was likely shipped from halfway around the globe. Big-time meth chefs in the United States and Mexico purchase the raw material from domestic pill makers or middlemen, while smaller players may purchase cold medicines from pharmacy shelves. The facilities that actually cook up the street drug are also running a dirty business: In California's Central Valley, law enforcement estimates between 4 million and 7 million pounds of lab waste were poured into canals and on properties between 2000 and 2004. The people who have to clean it up wear Haz-Mat suits.

JustSaying does not support any illegal drug use be them green, white, liquid, pill or however else they reach people these days. If you are interested in reading more about this topic find the full text on Slate. Having said that, I'm heading over to carbonfund.org to clear the footprint my extracurricular college activites.

World Wildlife Web

Stefano Allesina of the University of Chicago and Mercedes Pascual of the University of Michigan devised an algorithm, inspired by PageRank, for the relationships in a food web in hopes to determine which plant and animal species play paramount roles and would have the greatest impact if they were to become extinct. According to PLoS Computational Biology: "The algorithm uses the links between species in a food web, like the links between web pages, in order to determine the relative importance of species." I'm not particularly good at explaining or even completely understanding algorithms so here is what the NY Times' Henry Fountain reported:

One key to PageRank’s success is that its developers introduced a small probability that a Web user would jump from one page to any other. This in effect makes the Web circular, and makes the algorithm solvable. But in food webs, Dr. Allesina said, “you can’t go from the grass to the lion — the grass has to go through the gazelle first.

“We could not use the same trick to make food webs circular,” he went on.
So they used another trick, he said. Since all organisms die and decompose, they created a “detritus pool” that all species link to. The pool also links to primary producers in a food web, which make use of the decomposed matter.

Their algorithm differs also in that it determines the relative importance of species through reverse engineering — by seeing which species make the food web collapse fastest if they are removed. The researchers found that the algorithm produces results that were as accurate as much more complex (and computationally costly) software that builds webs from the ground up, simulating evolution.

The next step, Dr. Allesina said, is to refine the algorithm so that it will work with more complex webs. There are many other factors that affect extinctions, including pollution and habitat loss. The goal is to create an algorithm that can take these and other elements into account as well.

Reading the morning news...

Whenever I recommend Thomas L. Friedman's The Lexus and The Olive Tree, I struggle to articulate his take on globalization - perhaps because it takes reading the whole book to gain that greater understanding I so wish I could hand to people. Thankfully, my man wrote another typically insightful Op-Ed for today's NY Times. From Jao Flats, Botswana, Friedman connects the dots with 54 year old director of sustainability for Wilderness Safaris, Map Ives:

We’re trying to deal with a whole array of integrated problems — climate change, energy, biodiversity loss, poverty alleviation and the need to grow enough food to feed the planet — separately. The poverty fighters resent the climate-change folks; climate folks hold summits without reference to biodiversity; the food advocates resist the biodiversity protectors.

They all need to go on safari together.

“We need to stop thinking about these issues in isolation — each with its own champion, constituency and agenda — and deal with them in an integrated way, the way they actually occur on the ground,” argued Glenn Prickett, senior vice president with Conservation International. “We tend to think about climate change as just an energy issue, but it’s also about land use: one-third of greenhouse gas emissions come from tropical deforestation and agriculture. So we need to preserve forests and other ecosystems to solve climate change, not only to save species.”

But we also need to double food production to feed a growing population. “So we’ll need to do that without clearing more forests and draining more wetlands, which means farmers will need new technologies and practices to grow more food on the same land they use today — with less water,” he added. “Healthy forests, wetlands and grasslands not only preserve biodiversity and store carbon, they also help buffer the impacts of climate change. So our success in tackling climate change, poverty, food security and biodiversity loss will depend on finding integrated solutions from the land.”

This passage does not include Ives most fascinating - and so widely overlooked - observations on nature so find the entire op-ed here.