Nature Ramble

When we find something marvelous and beautiful, why do we have to exploit it to destruction?

World’s largest cave in Vietnam threatened by cable car

Vietnamese are protesting plans to build a cable car through remote Phong Nha-Ke Bang national park that could carry 1,000 visitors an hour to Son Doong cave

A planned 10.6km cable car route would connect Son Doong Cave with other caves in the area as part of a planned “tourism, service and resort complex”. Photograph: Carsten Peter/NG/Getty Images

Plans for a cable car in Vietnam’s Unesco-listed Phong Nha-Ke Bang national park would open up the world’s largest cave to mass tourism. But Vietnamese are protesting the project, and experts warn the environmental impact could be devastating.

Quang Binh province announced in October that resort developer Sun Group would build a $212m (£135m) cable car system through the national park, which occupies a remote, mountainous swathe of central Vietnam. The 10.6km route would connect Son Doong Cave, so large it could house an entire 40-story building, with other caves in the area as part of a planned “tourism, service and resort complex”.

According to local official Nguyen Huu Hoai, the cable car would carry 1,000 visitors per hour.

After the announcement drew an unprecedented flood of opposition, the national tourism ministry made clear that it had not yet approved the project. Experts from overseas slammed the plan in local newspaper and TV reports, while Vietnamese activist Bao Nguyen launched an online petition that drew thousands of signatures. However, the tourism ministry then gave the go-ahead for a preliminary survey – a tentative nod of consent.

Sun Group claims the cable car would be the most environmentally friendly means of opening the area to tourism. Company spokesperson Quach Bao Tran also said the project would “develop Quang Binh as a tourism center” and bring “thousands of jobs for the poor local people”. But experts refute these claims.

“The environmental impact would be devastating,” said Andy McKenzie, one of the first explorers to visit the cave.

Source: TheGuardian Read more

A Country with a Conscience

Chile rejects huge hydro-electric project in Patagonia

Environmentalists say the hydro-electric project would have devastated the region’s ecosystem

The Chilean government has rejected what would have been the biggest energy project in the country’s history.

The HidroAysen project would have seen five huge dams built on two rivers in a beautiful part of Patagonia.

“This project has many aspects that were poorly thought out,” said Energy Minister Maximo Pacheco.

Environmentalists celebrated the decision, saying the project would have had a devastating impact on the area’s ecosystem.

“These giant dams would have put at risk the wilderness, traditional culture, and local tourism economy of this remarkable region,” said Amanda Maxwell, Latin America project director at the Natural Resources’ Defence Council.

Thousands of people had protested against the HidroAysen project.

Environment Minister Pablo Badenier said HidroAysen had made insufficient provision for those who would have been displaced, and the quantification of damage to the environment and wildlife were inadequate.

The companies behind the proposal, Spain’s Endesa and Chile’s Colbun, can appeal against the decision before an environmental court.

“Without HidroAysen, the country is starting to turn its back on hydroelectricity – the only real remedy to the continuing dependence on fossil fuels,” said Daniel Fernandez, the CEO of HidroAysen.

He described the move as a lost opportunity for Aysen, one of the most remote and under-developed areas of the country.

Source: BBC News

Nature Ramble

Nature Ramble isn’t always about animals and birds, discoveries or threatened with extinction. It can also be about habitats, often these habitats are generally unknown by the majority, or are themselves under threat. Such is the case today.

One thinks of Spain, great wines, Basques and Catalonians vying for independence, failing economics and great beaches. But you rarely hear about the nature in Spain like you do about Africa or the Amazon.

Spain’s wetlands wonder is under threat for a second time in 16 years

Doñana national park, a haven filled with rare birds and wildlife, survived a toxic flood. Now tourism, an oil pipeline, demand for water and the return of mining have left it on a knife edge

Evening in Donana national park. Huelva province, Andalucia. Photograph: Alamy

The view from the visitors’ centre at the southern edge of Doñana national park is striking, to say the least. From its plate-glass windows, you gaze – over a small lake ringed with bulrushes – at a group of tamarisk bushes covered with squawking, screeching birdlife. Cattle egrets, night herons, purple herons and glossy ibis have made their homes here, while in the foreground flamingos and spoonbills wade gracefully through the shallow, reed-filled water.

This an ornithologist’s dream: 200,000 hectares of salt marsh of unrivalled importance to the birdlife of western Europe. Dozens of Britain’s most loved migratory birds, including house martins, swallows, cuckoos and warblers, find precious rest here on their annual migrations from Africa.For good measure, Doñana, a UN World Heritage Site, is home to some of Europe’s rarest birds, including the Spanish imperial eagle, while its mammalian inhabitants include the highly endangered Iberian lynx.

It is a glorious, vibrant landscape. Yet it exists on a knife-edge, a point brought home dramatically 16 years ago last week when almost two billion gallons of contaminated, highly acidic water, mixed with arsenic, cadmium and other waste metals, surged into the park from a dam that had burst its bank at Los Frailes mine 45km to the north, near the little town of Aznalcóllar. A toxic tsunami of mine tailings poured down the Guadiamar river and over its banks, leaving a thick crust of metallic crud over a vast stretch of parkland.

More than 25,000 kilos of dead fish were collected in the aftermath and nearly 2,000 adult birds, chicks, eggs and nests killed or destroyed. Even worse, the contamination persisted and many birds gave birth to deformed or dead chicks for several years.

It was Spain’s worst environmental disaster and the clean-up cost €90m (£74m). Suddenly aware of Doñana’s status as the nation’s most important natural site, Spain decided to spend a further €360m, some of it EU money, on restoring the landscape which, in the 1950s and 60s, had been drained in places to create rice and cotton fields. Some of this farmland is now being returned to its original wetland state.

It has been a costly but encouraging process. Yet the fate of Doñana still hangs in the balance thanks to the increasing pressures of modern life. An example is provided by local farms which, in a bid to provide western Europe with out-of-season fruit, have laid out endless ribbons of plastic arches in which they grow strawberries all year round. Strawberries drink a lot, however, and that has led farmers to pump up ground water – in many cases, illegally – and so lower the park’s critically important water table.

In addition, plans have been outlined to build an oil pipeline through Doñana, while other developers have announced proposals to expand local tourist resorts whose new hotels and golf courses would demand water supplies that would further erode the local table. Silt washed from nearby farms is also choking the channels that crisscross Doñana. The wetlands of Doñana are under threat of a death by drought.

However, the real body blow for conservationists has been the recent decision of the Andalucían government to reopen the Frailes mine which so very nearly destroyed Doñana in 1998. “This is Europe’s most precious bird sanctuary, both in terms of indigenous species and also as a resting place for birds that migrate between Africa and Britain and other parts of north-west Europe,” says Laurence Rose, of the RSPB. “Doñana already faces a great number of threats, but now they want to bring back the very cause of its near-undoing 16 years ago. It is extremely worrying.”

Having spent so much restoring Doñana to its past glories, it might seem strange that the local government should choose to announce that it wants mining companies to tender bids to rework Los Frailes. However, a brief examination of the state of the local economy provides an explanation. The crash of Spain’s banks five years ago hit the region catastrophically and unemployment in some parts of Andalucía is now more then 30%. Reopening the mine would provide more than 1,000 precious jobs.

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Palau’s plans to ban commercial fishing

…could set precedent for tuna industry

The Pacific nation wants to conserve fish for its economy and marine reserves. How will this impact the fishing industry?

Click to expand this infograph showing key data on Palau and how the nation plans to create one of the world’s largest marine sanctuaries. Photograph: Food and Environment Reporting Network and Switchyard Media

The Pacific island-nation of Palau is close to kicking all commercial fishing vessels out of its tropical waters. The move will single-handedly section off more than 230,000 sq miles of ocean, an area slightly smaller than France, to create one of the world’s largest marine reserves. The sanctuary, which Palauan President Thomas Remengesau Jr announced at the United Nations last month, would also sit inside the world’s last healthy stand of lucrative, tasty tuna.

Giving fishing vessels the boot is bold for any nation, but perhaps more so for Palau, a smattering of 300 islands east of the Philippines. Tuna, America’s favorite finned fish, is a regional boon worth an estimated $5.5bn. Commercial fishing, largely by boats from Japan and Taiwan, represents $5m annually – or 3.3% of GDP – to Palau. But still, the island state says it will allow existing fishing licenses to expire.

The move, hailed by ocean conservationists, sets a worrying precedent for the tuna industry. While the commercial catch inside Palau is minimal, captains covet the freedom to chase warm-blooded, migratory tuna across jurisdictions. If Palau goes through with the plan, it will mark the first time a nation has completely banned fishing vessels from its entire Exclusive Economic Zone.

“Our concern is not so much a practical one as it is a concern with the precedent of closing areas with no scientific basis for it,” says Brian Hallman, executive director of the American Tunaboat Association.

“The migratory range of tunas is vast, covering the waters of many countries and the high seas. So the only way to conserve stocks is by international treaty arrangements and this is already being done.”

Palau’s decision to act alone could be seen as a warning to the fishing industry to take the sustainability concerns of smaller, fish-rich nations more seriously and to work with these countries on more nimble and responsive solutions.

A domino effect?

Palau currently works with seven of its island neighbors to co-operatively manage a large swath of ocean. Jointly, these eight nations set fishing quotas and sustainability standards to manage nearly a third of the world’s tuna stock. Balancing both conservation and business, the alliance became the first group of countries certified by the Marine Stewardship Council for managing its tuna grounds sustainably.

But this arrangement hinges on allowing more-sustainable fishing inside member waters. If Palau bans commercial fishing, it’s unclear how this will impact the broader regional effort.

“There’s nothing in these agreements that require we allow fishing in our waters,” Remengesau says in a telephone interview. “It’s all about the regional area. Our conservation efforts would ensure that the stocks are healthy and that they gain in economic value as they move out of our territorial waters into other waters.”

When it comes down to it though, banning commercial boats simply appears to be in Palau’s interests.

Even though the bulk of commercial fishing in the region focuses on tuna, sharks are frequently hauled in as bycatch. Yanking sharks out of the sea directly hits Palau’s biggest moneymaker: the $85m dive tourism industry.

More valuable alive than dead. Photograph: Brian J Skerry/Getty Images/National Geographic

“We feel that a live tuna or shark is worth a thousand times more than a dead fish,” Remengesau says.

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Nature Ramble

One of the lesser known animals of the world is the lemur, it’s a primate and it lives only in Madagascar.

Tourism best hope for critically endangered lemurs

Madagascar’s lemurs – the world’s most threatened primate – could be saved from extinction by eco-tourism, conservationists say.

The big-eyed fluffy creatures are unique to the island but their numbers have declined dramatically in recent years.

Now researchers have unveiled a survival plan that combines tourism with increased conservation efforts.

There are over 100 species of lemur known to science, the majority of which are at dangerously low levels, largely due to habitat loss from illegal logging.

Madagascar is the only known home of these species as its unique location, split off from the African mainland, has allowed the primates to evolve in near isolation.

Political turmoil has enveloped Madagascar following a coup in 2009. As a result of the instability, illegal logging has increased on the island, a source of valuable rosewood and ebony trees.

Due to a lack of environmental policing, the habitat of the lemurs has been under constant threat and the primates are now one of the most endangered groups of vertebrates on the planet.

Over 90% of these species are at risk and are on the International Union for the Conservation of Nature’s (IUCN)’s red list of threatened species.

This includes over 20 species regarded as critically endangered, which is the highest level of threat.

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Monday Moaning

Man is the only beast that kills for sport!

‘Canned hunting’: the lions bred for slaughter

Canned hunting is a fast-growing business in South Africa, where thousands of lions are being bred on farms to be shot by wealthy foreign trophy-hunters

Lions bred to be shot in South Africa’s ‘canned hunting’ industry – image The Guardian

They are adorably cute, with grubby brown fur so soft it seems to slip through my fingers like flour. It is only when one of the nine-week-old cubs playfully grabs my arm with its teeth and squeezes with an agonising grip that I remember – this is a lion, a wild animal. These four cubs are not wild, however. They are kept in a small pen behind the Lion’s Den, a pub on a ranch in desolate countryside 75 miles south of Johannesburg. Tourists stop to pet them but most visitors do not venture over the hill, where the ranch has pens holding nearly 50 juvenile and fully-grown lions, and two tigers.

Moreson ranch is one of more than 160 such farms legally breeding big cats in South Africa. There are now more lions held in captivity (upwards of 5,000) in the country than live wild (about 2,000). While the owners of this ranch insist they do not hunt and kill their lions, animal welfare groups say most breeders sell their stock to be shot dead by wealthy trophy-hunters from Europe and North America, or for traditional medicine in Asia. The easy slaughter of animals in fenced areas is called “canned hunting”, perhaps because it’s rather like shooting fish in a barrel. A fully-grown, captive-bred lion is taken from its pen to an enclosed area where it wanders listlessly for some hours before being shot dead by a man with a shotgun, hand-gun or even a crossbow, standing safely on the back of a truck. forHe pays anything from £5,000 to £25,000, and it is all completely legal.

Like other tourists and daytrippers from Jo’burg, I pay a more modest £3.50 to hug the lions at Moreson, a game ranch which on its website invites tourists to come and enjoy the canned hunting of everything from pretty blesbok and springbok – South Africa’s national symbol – to lions and crocodiles. After a cuddle with the cubs, I go on a “game drive” through the 2,000 hectare estate. Herds of blue wildebeest, red hartebeest and eland run from the truck, then stop and watch us, warily: according to the guides, the animals seem to know when visitors are not carrying guns. At the far end of the property is an abandoned farm, surrounded by pens of lethargic-looking big cats. One pair mate in front of us. Two healthy looking tigers tear at chicken carcasses rapidly rotting in the African sun.

The animals look well cared for. But Cathleen Benade, a ranch assistant who is studying wildlife photography and is devoted to the cubs, reveals that they were taken away from their mothers just an hour after birth and bottle-fed by humans for the first eight weeks of their life. After dark, as the lions roar in the cages below the pub veranda, Maryke Van Der Merwe, the manager of Lion’s Den and daughter of the ranch owner, explains that if the cubs weren’t separated from their mother – by blowing a horn to scare the adult lion away – the young lions would starve to death, because their mother had no milk. She says the mother is not distressed: “She’s looking for the cubs for a few hours but it’s not like she’s sad. After a day or two I don’t think she remembered that she had cubs.”

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Opinion:

Nothing sickens me like this!

 

Nature Ramble

Not so much a ramble today, more like a ‘float.’

And we’re doing it under Los Angeles.

This is an interesting story, in that it shows how we have callously built over nature and then rediscovered it, even to the extent of it becoming a tourist attraction.

The Los Angeles river lives again

LA’s concrete storm drains conceal a living, breathing waterway that has rarely been explored – until now

Concrete jungle: the LA river flows under Burbank Boulevard. Photograph: Michael Owen Baker/Los Angeles Daily News/Zumapress.com/Alamy

A scorching morning in the San Fernando valley and I am driving up and down Balboa Boulevard, parks and fields either side of the motorway, lost. The talking GPS on my dashboard has lapsed into silence, defeated by an arcane destination with no zip code. I spy a park attendant emptying a bin and pull over to ask directions. He eyes me, baffled. I wonder if he is deaf and repeat the question. He still looks confused. “Did you say river?” Yes, I reply. Where is the river? He shakes his head. “What river?”

I find an elderly woman with a straw hat walking her terrier and ask the same question. She looks puzzled. “What river, honey?” The river I am supposed to kayak, I reply. She looks at me compassionately, as if I have sunstroke. “I don’t think you’re in the right place.”

But I am. Swishing below, all but invisible from the park and motorway above, is the Los Angeles river. A river with water, fish, tadpoles, birds, reeds, banks, a river that flows for 52 miles skirting Burbank, north Hollywood, Silver Lake, downtown and Compton and empties into the Pacific Ocean at Long Beach. A regular river, except that to most Angelenos it’s a secret. I ask three other people and receive the same blank looks until finally a park ranger confirms that, yes, there is a river at the bottom of a ravine all of 150ft away.

There, amid the reeds, bob a dozen little green and red kayaks, and people wearing helmets and lifejackets are clambering inside them. It is the inaugural season of LA River Expeditions, a pioneering effort to reclaim a waterway that vanished from the city’s consciousness almost a century ago. “Welcome,” says George Wolfe, the group’s founder. “I hope you’re ready for adventure.” We push off into the current.

Until recently this excursion would have been considered not just mad but illegal. City authorities encased the river bed in concrete in the 1930s, turning it into a flood-control channel that was a byword for contamination and forbidden to boaters. For decades it languished all but forgotten, save for Hollywood using its storm drains in films such as Grease and Terminator 2. Now, however, it has formally opened to boating tours, specifically kayaks and canoes. Activists hope it is the first step towards transformation. “It’s a milestone, and hopefully there are more to come,” says Charles Eddy, a board member of Friends of the LA River, and part of this expedition, as he navigates his kayak through brambles. “If you think of the river as a blank palette, people will create all sorts of wonderful things.”

Kayakers paddle under the Woodley Avenue bridge in Los Angeles. Photograph: ZUMA Wire Service / Alamy/Alamy

The kayak excursions are the latest twist in California’s water wars, a saga immortalised in Roman Polanski’s 1974 film Chinatown, a neo-noir exploration of intrigue and treachery with Jack Nicholson and Faye Dunaway set during the state’s 1930s battles over land and water rights. The river, fed by streams from the Simi hills in Canoga park, originally provided food, water and transport for Gabrielino Indians and Spanish settlers. After the US seized control from Mexico the city’s water needs outgrew the river. An aqueduct completed in 1913 directed water from the Owens river in the Sierra Nevada mountains to LA, ending dependence on the LA river. Disastrous flooding prompted its conversion – desecration, some critics would say – into a glorified drainage ditch. And so it remained for decades, a butt of jokes, a rubbish dump, out of sight and mind except when used as a backdrop for Hollywood car races and chases….

….

After passing a concrete bridge with graffiti-daubed arches and a shopping trolley half-buried in mud, we enter a wilderness that seems a world removed from the freeways and urban sprawl above. “We call this the Grand Canyon,” says Wolfe, showing his flair for advertising, as we paddle through a mini-gorge 15ft tall. Nature slowly asserts itself. To our left are wild fig trees, descendants of those planted by the Indians, to our right potentially deadly ricin-producing plants. Further on, hallucinogenic jimson weed. “Around the next bend is the Apocalypse Now bit,” says Wolfe. We encounter “fish sticks”: improvised traps made by unknown hands to trap carp, tilapia and other species. A discourse on how to make the traps is drowned out by a passenger jet roaring low overhead, briefly breaking the spell.

The sense that this is something special returns as we moor our boats and slosh ashore, inspecting plants, a turtle shell, a cascade, before resuming the journey. It is difficult to believe that the 405 freeway, the gridlocked bane of LA motorists, is just a mile away. Three hours later we return to where we started, a swampy bank, and moor the kayaks amid some ducks. The tour is over. We saw nothing that would excite David Attenborough. But we glimpsed another LA, one not consumed by automobiles, or turned into a strip mall, where nature and human optimism thrive in a watery realm, an ever so slightly mystic river.

Read the rest

 

Monday Moaning

When I read of the arrest of the Israeli tourist responsible for the enormous blaze destroying major parts of Torres del Paine National Park in Southern Chile, I was not surprised.

Despite that he has admitted his role, his family are bleating that he is innocent:

Israeli tourist family defends Chile fire suspect

High winds spread the flames rapidly through the Torres del Paine national park

The family of an Israeli tourist accused of starting a massive forest fire in a Chilean national park say the authorities are making him a scapegoat.

Twenty-three-year-old Rotem Singer’s relatives in Israel say he could not have caused the blaze.

A 110 sq km (27,000 acre) expanse of pristine forest has already burned in the Torres del Paine national park in southern Chile.

Hundreds of firefighters are still tackling the blaze.

Mr Singer was arrested on Saturday on suspicion of causing the fire through negligence, by failing to properly extinguish a toilet roll he had been burning.

Chilean prosecutor Juan Melendez said the Israeli had acknowledged his role in allowing the fire to start.

However, Mr Singer’s family say he is innocent.

Source: BBC News Read more

Opinion:

In the 1990s I worked in many locations as a tour guide and camp administrator, including the Pantanal; during which time I met many Israeli tourists, along with many other nationalities.

Of all the nationalities, were I to have my time over, I would never again work with Israelis, closely followed by 5 Star Americans, they are the pits. Don’t bother with your views that I am anti-semitic and therefore a racist, I am not. My disrespect was earned.

Background

Following Israeli compulsory military training every year many parts of the world are flooded with thousands of Israelis freed from their military commitment with a pocket full of money. They swarm across South America in droves from December to end up in La Paz, Bolivia for the Passover Festival there.

During their trek, they reek havoc like no other group or nationality. They ignore camp rules, they do as they please. I have had to close a camp in the Pantanal after it was made uninhabitable by the Israelis shitting everywhere, refusing to use the toilet area, strewing the surrounding countryside with toilet paper, refusing to bury their own shit and designated rubbish containers. They lit fires where they wanted, ignoring special areas set aside for fires, they destroyed camp equipment, hammocks, tents, chairs, tables and used the water casks for seating which in turn broke them. They used drinking water (which has to be trucked in) for washing, even to the point of not closing spigots to preserve water so it was lost, it was organised sabotage because we dared to point out that their behaviour was unacceptable. In this particular camp intake there were only Israelis, 32 of them.

As a national group, their irresponsibility and arrogance makes all angry. In South America, there are hotels, lodgings and tour operators that have signs, “No Israelis.” So I am not alone in venting my thoughts. The Inca Trail to Machu Picchu in Peru has seen many problems with them as well, while not from personal experience, I knew many Peruvian trail guides that refused the four day treks with Israelis in the group. The scenario above was one instance, and the worst, but not by much. I had photos that I had taken at the time, unfortunately they have yet to be recovered from my old HDs, if in fact I had scanned those negatives now lost.

They have no respect for nature or eco-anything.

Now I am not saying that all Israelis are like this, but many of the ones traveling in South America are. Of the hundreds I had contact with, one ex-army doctor was a great guy, even apologising for his comrades behaviour which he recognised was way beyond the limits.

Sorry, no sympathy here. His family are in Israel, they don’t know what happened on the other side of the world in Chile.

I apologise to my readers if this sounds racist, it is not intended to be. I am 100% miffed by the attitude and the claim by his parents and hope that upon his admission he is subjected to the full weight of the law as I would be with any nationality. This type of carelessness in today’s day and age is not excusable from travelers from first world countries when you consider the education we have.

‘Rubbish Island’

Maldives ‘Rubbish Island’ is ‘overwhelmed’ by garbage

Boatmen bringing rubbish to Thilafushi are impatient at having to wait up to seven hours to unload

The government of the Maldives has temporarily banned the depositing of rubbish from its hotels onto an island used almost entirely as a garbage dump.

Thilafushi, an artificial island 7km (four miles) from the capital, is nicknamed Rubbish Island.

The accumulation of garbage there has become so acute that it has begun spilling into its lagoon.

An emergency clearing operation has begun to remove “hills of rubbish” mostly collected from luxury hotels.

Rubbish Island is a far cry from the Maldives’ famous turquoise waters and white sands.

Those who have been there describe vast piles of rubbish and perpetual smog and smoke.

The routine is for mainly Bangladeshi workers to sift through the trash to look for materials their employers can sell.

Waste from the whole country is taken there to the island be buried, burnt or – for some plastic and metal – recycled.

Much of the rubbish comes from the luxury resorts which, reportedly, do not follow the rules on crushing their waste.

The boats that bring rubbish to Thilafushi have recently started dumping it into the lagoon, many boatmen impatient at having to wait up to seven hours to unload it.

Source: BBC News Read more

Maldives

Most of you have no idea where the Maldives are, I would wager. They are a small chain of 1,190 small coral islands in the Indian Ocean, to the southwest of India.

With a population of 238,500, only 199 islands are inhabited and 75 are exclusively for tourist resorts.

The Maldives are one of the most coral-rich regions of the world and the reefs support 75% of the world’s reef fish.

Pristine, like pristine has never been seen before

But as you can see from the story above, it is not all Blue Lagoon country.

Some of the clearest and pristine waters in the world surround this small island enclave and while the natural fauna above is nothing to write home about the underwater world is and makes for some of the best diving on the planet.

Sheraton Maldives Full Moon Resort & Spa

 

The Maldives have become a playground for the rich, resorts are the mainstay of Maldive income with many of the world’s most famous hotel chains being represented; and they all participate in the destruction of an island.