ENVIRONMENT - SEYCHELLES

Seychelles plant gallery -- a project for everyone

Did you watch the film about Seychelles plants on Wednesday evening May 16? - “Antigonn – Zakobe: Eski ou konn bann plant Sesel?” If you did, we hope that you came away knowing more about the many species and varieties of plants growing on our islands, and also why they are important in our lives.

But, if you see a plant in a garden or in the forest and you do not know what it is – can you identify it?

There are several books on sale about plants of Seychelles, but much of the current information about local plants is in scientific books and papers. Many of these are difficult to access and tricky for the non-specialist to read.

Another source of information is the National Herbarium, but the pressed plants which form this collection are stored in a small room inside the Natural History Museum, and you need help with using them for identification purposes.

The internet may be of help but usually you need to know something about the plant before being able to look it up! So is there another way?

In the film you could also learn about the Herbarium Project being carried out by the local NGO, Plant Conservation Action group (PCA) in collaboration with the Natural History Museum in Victoria. This project is being funded mainly by a grant from the GEF Small Grants Programme and the Environment Trust Fund. One of the aims of the herbarium project is to provide you with an easier way to identify and learn more about the plants of Seychelles, both native and introduced. And the herbarium will soon become much more than just a collection of dried pressed plant specimens!

We are creating a “Seychelles Plant Gallery” – photographs and information about all the plants in the country, which you will be able to access through the internet or in the Natural History Museum. But at the moment there are still many gaps! We know little about new ornamental species which have been brought into the country in the past 30 years; we do not have records for many of the agricultural species, particularly the older varieties; some invasive species are spreading fast and some useful plant species are becoming rare - we need to know where these plants are located now as this will be valuable information for the future.

If we tried to fill all these gaps on our own it would take us several years and the money would not be enough, so this is where we need your help. Many of you are very knowledgeable about the plants growing in your gardens and in your surroundings. So, if you help us, we can build up this information and a collection of photos together. Your contributions will be added to the Seychelles Plant Gallery, and we hope that it will become a useful tool for you also, a resource which you can use whenever you want. This project then becomes something special – it will be created by the people for the people.

Over the coming weeks we will provide more information about how you can contribute and which group of plants (or themes) to focus on each month. Also, watch out for the herbarium leaflet, a special printed edition of our newsletter “Kapisen” about the project, a plant photo competition and an exhibition about plants of Seychelles.

In the film, the Wildlife Club children shout “Yes Miss” when asked to take part. We hope that you will join us too. Even if you think that you don’t know very much, perhaps you have been curious about the strange plant on someone’s property or a new plant you hadn’t seen before. We want to know about that plant too – it might be something really interesting that we haven’t seen before either!

Contributed by the Plant Conservation Action group (PCA) and the Natural History Museum

ENVIRONMENT, NEW TREES - HALIFAX, CANADA

Plan for more trees takes root

City to plant in areas that lack leafy canopies

Tree are beautiful but they also shelter us from sun, wind and rain and divert snow and rain from wastewater systems. The municipality is developing an urban forestry strategy to promote and protect trees. (TIM KROCHAK / Staff)

There are about 160,000 trees lining the serviced streets of Halifax Regional Municipality. But there are 90,000 more spots where trees once were or could be.

And the city is losing trees to illness and old age faster than it’s planting new ones.

A group of HRM staff and Dalhousie researchers are imagining a Halifax with a lot more leafy cover than it has now, and their years of research have finally grown into a concrete plan that they are nearly ready to submit to regional council.

“If you start to add up all of the benefits you get from each tree you have in the city, you’d be astonished. You’d wonder why we wouldn’t have more trees,” said Peter Duinker, a Dalhousie forestry professor who’s leading the school’s work on HRM’s Urban Forest Master Plan.

“Every tree, as long as it’s not in a really bad location, like its roots are clogging up some pipes every tree is providing such an amazing array of benefits,” he said.

They shade cars, sidewalks and houses, lowering energy costs. Their canopies hold a considerable amount of water during rainstorms, allowing it to evaporate without hitting the ground and relieving pressure on the sewage treatment system.

Trees are a surefire hit on front lawns and raise property values — and tax revenues — just with their picturesque existence, said Duinker.

Knowing that, his team has documented certain parts of the municipality that are without their fair share of trees.

The area of the northern peninsula around Kempt Road has very few. That’s troubling because they would shield commercial buildings from sun and wind, saving energy costs, said Duinker, who has spent several years working on the project, the first of its kind in Halifax.

Certain newer developments, including parts of Cole Harbour, have lawns and wide streets, but lack any tree canopy, he said. He’d like to see “maybe a little less grass and way more trees.”

“There’s not a tree to be seen in large subdivisions, and that’s not a good scene,” said Duinker.

The Urban Forest Master Plan will give the municipality options of starting a tree giveaway or an education campaign to encourage homeowners to plant saplings.

At around $500 per planted tree, the cost is likely to be a little high for the city to fund its own at the volume that’s needed, said Duinker.

The tree population is dropping every year, with HRM planting 1,500 trees annually. If it planted 5,000 a year, the cost would be $2.5 million, though costs would drop somewhat if city staff provided all the labour.

The city will also consider whether to forbid homeowners from cutting trees without a permit, a system that several other Canadian cities use. The idea has been met with a mixed reaction at public meetings in Halifax, he said.

Duinker and his team think decades ahead. In 20 to 30 years, Halifax risks losing much of its older tree population, and hurricanes also create a risk of major tree loss that makes it important to keep up with planting, he said.

But planning for the future also has its benefits. While Halifax’s trees today are 80 or 90 per cent Norway maples, elm and linden trees, the urban forest team envisions different species everywhere, including many more native trees, like red oak and sugar maple.

ENVIRONMENT / FORESTS - WORLD

Healthy forests key for green growth, says UN report

By Mark Kinver Environment reporter, BBC News

 

The world's forests, if managed properly, can help deliver a strong and durable global green economy, a UN report has concluded.

But the report's authors said that nations needed to do more to ensure the right policies are in place if forests are to meet their maximum potential.

In another initiative, an international collaboration has pledged to restore 18 million hectares of wooded landscapes.

The findings were launched at the Rio+20 summit in Brazil.

"Forests and trees on farms are a direct source of food, energy and income for more than a billion of the world's poorest people," said Eduardo Rojas-Briales, assisant director-general for Forestry at the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO).

"At the same time, forests trap carbon and mitigate climate change, maintain water and soil health, and prevent desertification," he added.

"The sustainable management of forests offer multiple benefits - with the right programmes and policies, the sector can lead the way towards more sustainable, greener economies."

The report, The State of the World's Forests 2012, the 10th in the SOFO series, highlighted some of the main avenues in which money could figuratively grow on trees, including:

• Critical life support systems - can perform a range of "essential ecosystem funtions", such as regulating water supplies and buffering floods and droughts.
• "Engine of economic development" - SOFO highlights strong link between reforestation and growth, and deforestation and economic decline, hence the anti-poverty role of forests.
• "Key component of greening other sectors" - wood is still the primary energy source for one-third of the world's population, therefore - with the right policies - it can expanded to provide a global greener, cleaner energy source.

The report, launched at the R+20 summit in Rio De Jainero, concluded that forests and forest products "will not solve the challenges of moving towards greener economies, but they will provide excellent examples and a source of hope".



Rising to the challenge

Also being announced at the summit was a joint pledge between a number of nations and NGOs to restore more than 18 million hectares of forest landscape.

The US and Rwanda goverments teamed up with the Brazilian Mata Atlantica Forest Restoration Pact (made up from government agencies, NGOs, private sector bodies and indigenous groups).

The annoucement forms part of the "Bonn Challenge", which was agreed in September 2011 and commits nations to restore 150 million hectares of forested areas by 2020.

"The largest restoration initiative the world has ever seen is now underway," said Julia Marton-Lefcvre, director-general of the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN).

"[It] will provide huge global benefits in the form of income, food security and addressing climate change," she added.

"We urge other countries and landowners to follow suit."

The IUCN is involved in promoting Plant a Pledge, an online campaign to build public support for the Bonn Challenge.

Organisers hope people will sign a petition, which will be presented by campaign ambassador Bianca Jagger at the UN Climate Change talks in November.

ENVIRONMENT - INDIA

Stop picnics, start eco-tourism in Sundarbans: Bengal forest dept

The writer has posted comments on this articleSubhro NiyogiSubhro Niyogi, TNN | Jun 19, 2012, 01.05PM IST

Sundarbans

KOLKATA: Taking a leaf out of the mandatory in-flight instructions that stewards and stewardesses deliver prior to each flight, informing passengers how to fasten the seat belt and what to do in an exigency, the state forest department wants all tourist agencies in the Sunderbans, including boat owners, to spell out the dos and don'ts to tourists before they embark on the tour.

The proposal is part of the first serious initiative to transform the tourist scene in the Sunderbans that is currently nothing more than picnic tourism. A majority of the 3 lakh visitors who go to the Sunderbans do so to have fun without bothering about the ecology. During the day, they feast on board, litter the creeks and rivers with thermocol plates and plastic bottles and dancing to loud music at night while the boat is anchored mid-river.

""We want to end irresponsible tourism and promote eco-tourism in the Sunderbans. To do so, we need the cooperation of all stakeholders. This is a clarion call for all-NGOs; tour operators; boat and lodge owners-to partner with the forest department and create awareness on the need to preserve the region's ecology while conducting tourism activities,"" Sunderban Biosphere Reserve director Pradeep Vyas told a stakeholders' meeting in the city on Monday.

Though the draft of what guides and helpers on boats will tell tourists before the trip is yet to be worked out, it will broadly be along these lines: ""Dear guests, welcome on board. Fasten your seatbelts for a trip to the Sunderbans, a UNESCO World Heritage Site. During this journey through the Sunderbans' rich biodiversity that is home to the world's largest tiger reserve, one must not disturb the fragile ecosystem.

Plastic carry bags are strictly prohibited. Those who have plastic bags must deposit them and take jute bags in return. Do not throw plastic bottles, thermocol plates or any litter into the water. And please maintain silence, speaking only in whispers so that everyone can enjoy the sounds of the forest. Playing loud music is strictly prohibited. Here's wishing you a very pleasant experience.""

Suggesting a three-pronged effort to curb pollution in the Sunderbans, Vyas said the forest department would form strategic partnerships for education and awareness of tourists and then undertake enforcement of existing laws to wipe out the menace.

The department has also suggested a strict ban on plastic glasses, thermocol plates and polybags into the region. ""NGOs can distribute jute bags to boat and launch operators. If any tourist has a plastic bag, it can be confiscated and a jute bag handed out at a price or for free. Boat operators can also use melamine plates, glasses and spoons that can be washed and reused. Also, NGOs can network to check entry and exit of packaged water bottles,"" Vyas said.

Incidentally, the plastic ban has been in force for over a decade but has not had much effect till now due to lack of sustained movement. However, following complaints from tourists and a section of tour operators of indiscriminate littering, the forest department has woken up to the situation and is now seeking the help of stakeholders to reign in the problem.

""We don't want to start with fines. But if the situation does not improve soon, we will have to take punitive action. Responsibility will be fixed on tour and boat operators to ensure that they do not allow littering and use of loudspeakers. NGOs will be encouraged to carry out periodic clean up drives along the river banks. Unless we adopt these practices, the Sunderbans will be over-run by waste plastic and thermocol,"" Vyas added.

ENVIRONMENT / REFLECTION - UNITED KINGDOM

Rachel Carson: The green revolutionary

Fifty years ago, few people cared about pollution, deforestation or whaling. Then a remarkable book came along. In the first in a series charting the environment movement, Michael McCarthy looks back to its inspiration – Rachel Carson's Silent Spring

Michael McCarthy

Monday 11 June 2012

The book that changed the world is a cliché often used but rarely true, yet 50 years ago this week a book appeared which profoundly altered the way we view the Earth and our place on it: Rachel Carson's Silent Spring.

This impassioned and angry account of how America's wildlife was being devastated by a new generation of chemical pesticides began the modern environment movement: it awoke the general consciousness that we, as humans, are part of the natural world, not separate from it, yet we can destroy it by our actions.

A middle-aged marine biologist, Carson was not the first to perceive this, to see how intimately we are bound up with the fate of our planet; but her beautifully-written book, and the violent controversy it generated, brought this perception for the first time to millions, in the US, in Britain and around the world.
Down the centuries many people had expressed their love for nature, but Silent Spring and the furore it created gave birth to something more: the widespread, specific awareness that the planet was threatened and needed defending; and the past half-century of environmentalism, the age of Green, the age of Save The Whale and Stop Global Warming, has followed as a natural consequence.
When it began serialisation in The New Yorker on 16 June 1962 (it was published in full the following September) Silent Spring revealed to a horrified America – or at least, to those who did not know already – that its wildlife was being wiped out on a staggering scale by use of the new generation of synthetic pesticides, compounds made in the laboratory rather than from naturally occurring substances, which had followed on from the forerunner of them all, the chlorinated hydrocarbon DDT.
In particular, the songbirds of America's countryside and small towns were everywhere falling silent. They had been killed by colossal pesticide spraying programmes, usually from the air, sanctioned in the 1950s by the US Department of Agriculture, individual states and local authorities, and aimed at insect pest threats which turned out to be largely illusory.
There was no need for them; their real driver was the American chemical industry which had managed to convince US agriculture that its bright new range of deadly super-poisons, organochlorines such as aldrin and dieldrin, organophosphates such as parathion and malathion, were just the wonder drugs that farming needed – in huge doses.
Even now, it is hard to read Rachel Carson's account of these mass sprayings without incredulity, like the 131,000 acres in Sheldon, Illinois, sprayed with dieldrin to get rid of the Japanese beetle. "It was a rare farm in the Sheldon area that was blessed by the presence of a cat after the war on beetles was begun," she wrote.
Tens of millions of acres were covered in poison in campaigns against the spruce budworm, the gypsy moth and the fire ant, none of which succeeded in eradicating their targets, but all of which exterminated countless other wild creatures – the American robins on suburban lawns, the trout in forest streams – to the bewildered dismay of the local people watching it happen around them.
Carson's achievement was to bring the situation to national notice in a remarkable synthesis of dramatic reportage and deep scientific knowledge, explaining exactly what the new pesticides were, how their catastrophic side effects were occurring, and how senseless were the mass spraying campaigns (although she recognised that agricultural pesticides were necessary and did not advocate banning them all). To a reader today, her account is compelling and entirely convincing.
Yet it produced an explosion. The US chemical industry, and parts of the US scientific establishment, lashed out in frenzy against this presumptuous upstart holding them to account, with a long and bitter campaign of criticism and personal denigration; and it seemed as if what aroused their ire more than anything was the fact that their opponent was a woman – "An hysterical woman".
A professional biologist from Pennsylvania who had worked for the US Fish and Wildlife Service, she was 55 when Silent Spring appeared. Unmarried and childless after a life spent looking after her mother and her young nephew, she had found emotional solace in a deep friendship with a neighbour at her Maine holiday home, Dorothy Freeman, about which there has inevitably been speculation; certainly, they were very close. Yet Carson was more than a scientist, she was also an acclaimed author, having written a trilogy of highly-praised books on the marine environment, one of which,The Sea Around Us of 1951, had been a best-seller.
Thus when Silent Spring appeared, she already had a substantial audience, and the furore stirred up by the US chemical industry only served to boost it a thousandfold; by the end of 1962, three months after full publication, the book had sold half a million copies, and public opinion was solidly behind her. (It did nothing to hinder her cause that President John F Kennedy took her side and referred Silent Spring to his Science Advisory Committee, which the following year vindicated her stance.)
So the madness of the mass poison sprayings came to an end, and the robins and their song returned to America's spring; DDT was banned for agriculture in 1972 (although it remained in use for malaria prevention), and bans on dieldrin, aldrin and other substances followed.
Rachel Carson did not live to see it: she died of cancer in 1964. But her achievement was much more than to end a crazy and murderous assault upon nature, enormous though it was.
What she introduced to a mass audience for the first time, in explaining how the catastrophe was happening, was the idea of ecology, of the interconnectedness of all living things, of the connectedness between species and their habitats.
The pesticide falls on the leaf, and the leaf falls to the ground where it is consumed by worms, who also consume the pesticide; and robins consume the worms and consume the pesticide too, and so they die.
In showing how everything in the natural world was linked, she showed how humans were part of it too, and how human interference could wreck it, could wreck the balance of nature built up over billions of years.
That is a commonplace insight now, but in 1962 it was a new one. It was truly radical, because it implied – for the first time ever – that scientific advance and economic growth, closely linked as they were in America, might not be endlessly a good thing. There was the Earth itself to consider. And that perception has been at the heart of the movement that Silent Spring inspired, which is 50 years old on Saturday.

Spreading death: the new pesticides
Insecticides made from natural products, such as pyrethrum from chrysanthemum flowers and naturally occurring arsenic, had been known and used for centuries, before the more powerful effects of synthetic lab-produced pesticides became apparent during the Second World War.
The first was dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane – DDT – synthesised in the 19th century but whose insect-killing properties were only discovered in 1939. DDT was used with success in disease prevention during the war and was followed during the 1940s and 1950s by a family of similar organic chemicals.
However, the new organochlorines and organophosphates were not just more deadly, they built up in body fat and the accumulated dose could be passed on. "One of the most sinister features of DDT and related chemicals is the way they are passed on from one organism to another through all the links of the food chains," Rachel Carson wrote.
The deadliest of these chemicals have now largely been banned, but controversy over pesticide use and its effect on wildlife has not gone away. It now focuses on the neonicotinoids, one of which, thiamethoxam, was banned by the French government last week after research showed it affected the homing ability of bees

ENVIRONMENT - BRAZIL

Nearly two million people have signed a petition calling for a veto of the Forestry Code

 

A petition with nearly two million signatures will be delivered this Friday at the Palácio do Planalto in Brasília, to press the President of Brazil, Dilma Roussef, to protect the Amazon, announced the global organisation Avaaz.

The petition, which received support from former Brazilian Environment Minister Marina Silva and the Brazilian Director Fernando Meirelles, make Rousseff which allows Forestry Code vete deforestation by loggers and farmers.

The petition will be delivered to Gleisi Hoffmann, Minister-Chief of staff, Gilberto Carvalho, Minister of the General Secretariat of the Presidency, and Izabella Teixeira, Minister of the environment, the only 12:0 am deadline for the veto of the Bill.

Launched on 11 may in conjunction with the World Wide Fund for nature (WWF), Greenpeace and two major nature protection organizations, the petition has grown at a rate of 50 thousand signatures per day over the past two weeks, "said Avaaz.

This organization is dedicated to conducting campaigns through the Internet and has 14 million members, of whom 1.5 million in Brazil.

In addition to collecting signatures, the Avvaz encouraged people to call to the Brazilian embassies around the world to express concern over the issue, which has motivated manifestations of environmentalists in Brazil.

These links to external services to the News Journal, allow you to save, organize, share and recommend to other readers your favorite content from the JN (texts, photos and videos). Are free services but require user registration.