Unreportable Warfare

This morning, about oil, I learned that if you burn the pools from an oil spill and seal off the hole in the earth, you have only made things worse. The burning releases fumes, vapors and toxins, and leaves a denser crude behind.

Still, this is a common method of clean up for many villages in Nigeria, according to a report from the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs.

“The land is devastated. The drinking water and streams are polluted. As it rains, we use the rain water but cannot drink it, because even that is full of crude oil,” youth leader Amstel Monday Ebarakpor told IRIN.

“At every groundwater intrusion, you see seepage. Sometimes you can see oil sheen on drinking water,” he told IRIN. “Crude will be there for the next 50 years.”

Just to repeat: Sometimes you can see an oil sheen on the drinking water.

On 25 January the chairman of the government’s National Oil Spill Detection and Response Agency, Bamidele Ajakaiye, told Nigeria’s Senate Committee on Environment and Ecology that there are 1,150 abandoned oil spill sites in the Niger Delta region. Many, communities say, are cleaned like the one in Kedere - if at all.

There seem to be a lot of factors at work.

The largest is the growing unrest in that region. I've written about Nigeria before... Local people steal oil from pipelines to sell on the black market or to heat their homes -- as one would imagine, this is not a very safe practice. Also sabotage against the oil companies is occurring frequently as communities protest the discrepancy between what is being taken from the land and what is being given back to the people of the land. Also -- pipelines are really old. Also -- in the realm of things that are never reported -- doesn't it stand to reason that if the huge oil companies are responding to guerrilla style warfare that by killing and crippling the surrounding lands and people they would be engaging in their own warfare...

Unreportable warfare.

I noticed in the news coverage last year the language of the stories reported made the issue sound very much like a band of thieves and hooligans were set on messing things up for everyone. It concerned me then -- and then the coverage fell off all together. The UN report was picked up be Reuters, but I didn't see it in the Times, and a Google search didn't show it as appearing in any major newspaper.

President Bush will be traveling to Africa this month.

Posted today, on what looks to be a newsish site -- though I can't really decipher, because it's all in Portuguese (I think) -- is a letter to our President.

"Mr President:
Greetings from the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta (MEND) of Nigeria. We trust this letter will reach you and your entourage touring some African countries well.

MEND needs little introduction to you since you must have been briefed after the actions we have taken to address the injustice in the Niger Delta region of Nigeria may have affected the oil dependent American economy.

Your trip to Africa comes at an opportune time and indicates the soft spot you have for the people of this great continent. Africa is facing several on going conflicts, almost all are avoidable. Nigeria is at the verge of entering its own mega-conflict even though everyone seems to be in denial. When Nigeria erupts, the lava will spread so fast, far and wide that the human and economic catastrophe will dwarf Darfur."

The letter goes on to outline a proposal for action. It doesn't sound like the kind of letter I would be reading if I was president of the United States.

I wonder if President Bush will read this letter.

I wonder if oil is being used deliberately as chemical warfare.
But really, isn't it hard to imagine a group of pissed off American or European oil workers, hot and sick of being messed with, not saying...



Photo: Dulue Mbachu IRIN photo
Environmental damage from an oil spill in Kegbara-Dere in the Ogoni district of the Niger Delta. Residents say the spill is more than 10 years old and has not been cleaned up.

Essential Human Elements

Robert Bateman, Canada
Antarctic Evening – Humpback Whales

I'm still needing art. And I think it's interesting -- at a time when there is so much money being generated by and for oil in this country alone -- that there is no money for the arts. Some of this is a philosophical issue of what we choose as our values and what is important -- other is just logistics. Artists can't afford to do their work and live in this culture. In talking about funding for the arts -- and I include poetry and performance in this term -- we have to look at the role and purpose in art. Politics? Entertainment? Meaning? If we starve the arts what conversations do we end...

Yesterday, Andrew C. Revkin of the New York Times bemoaned the lack of initiative in this country. Hard to imagine I could possible be more cynical than a New York Times reporter, but really -- we don't even back the UN...

Following the environmental tenants of that organization is this statement:

Internationally co-ordinated work on the environment has been led by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), since its inception in 1973. UNEP has provided leadership and encouraged partnerships to care for the environment, for example, through Multilateral Environmental Agreements (MEAs) which have addressed issues such as species loss and the need for conservation at a global and regional level. UNEP has created much of the international environmental law in use today.

The three environmental principles of the Global Compact are drawn from a Declaration of Principles and an International Action Plan (Agenda 21) that emerged from the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (the Earth Summit) held in Rio de Janerio in 1992. Chapter 30 of Agenda 21, identified that the policies and operations of business and industry can play a major role in reducing impacts on resource use and the environment. In particular, business can contribute through the promotion of cleaner production and responsible entrepreneurship.

The UN is a supporter of the arts in this endeavor.

"Science informs the mind, music and the heart but art connects with the human spirit," said Achim Steiner, Under Secretary-General of the United Nations and Executive Director of UNEP.

I love that. The human condition, right -- great art explores the human condition. Maybe that is part of what makes this particular topic so compelling, and so easy to integrate in terms of aesthetics and politics in a way that doesn't alienate one from the other -- demise is not foreign to the soul at all...

Steiner goes on to say: "We urgently need to empower all three of these essential human elements if we are to rise to the challenge and seize the opportunities for economic, environmental and social renewal glimpsed through the lens of climate change."

25% of the worlds oil reserves are believed to reside in the Arctic.
The icebergs are melting at a rate that far exceeds all expectations.

For UN World Environment Day 2007, the Natural World Museum in partnership with the United Nations Environment Programme produced an exhibition that addresses the theme of Climate Change from a global perspective - the melting and thawing of ice, snow and permafrost are environment-altering changes taking place around the world- from the Andes to the Himalayas to the melting ice caps of the Poles. "Change" the transition that occurs from same to different, the moment of transformation, a change of position or action. Change used in reference to our environment can describe the transformation of material substance -- from ice to water, liquid to gas - the changing conditions of our rivers, our rapidly melting glaciers,, and the overall changes in the earth's climate. Change requires organisms and organizations alike to adapt to new environmental conditions. Metaphorically, change can also refer to the transformation of society's mindset to act in a positive way individually and collectively to work toward a more sustainable future.
Press release from the Natural World Museum.

The Exhibit will be at the Field Museum in Chicago from April to October of this year.
I want to go.