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

Monday Moaning

China has the biggest footprint in Asia, while this post targets China, it is aimed at the whole Asian region, from India to Japan.

Apart from China’s political policy and human rights abuses China faces massive problems.

I am quite comfortable in saying that I would never consider knowingly buying any foodstuff from China or any region in Asia.

The problem is how to identify.

Panga, a fish from Vietnam is no problem, the supermarkets are full of the shit.

But when you consider that 34% of mushrooms in America come from China, you may not buy them, but what about the restaurants that use them. Then there is 16% of frozen spinach, 27% of garlic, 49% of apple juice, the list goes on. It’s hard to identify.

When you read statistics like these:

:: A fifth of China’s land is polluted. The FAO/OECD report gingerly calls this problem the “declining trend in soil quality.” Fully 40 percent of China’s arable land has been degraded by some combination of erosion, salinization, or acidification — and nearly 20 percent is polluted, whether by industrial effluent, sewage, excessive farm chemicals, or mining runoff, the FAO/OECD report found.

:: China considers its soil problems “state secrets.” The Chinese government conducted a national survey of soil pollution in 2006, but it has refused to release the results. But evidence is building that soil toxicity is a major problem that’s creeping into the food supply. In May 2013, food safety officials in the southern city of Guangzhou found heightened levels of cadmium, a carcinogenic heavy metal, in 8 of 18 rice samples picked up at local restaurants, sparking a national furor. The rice came from Hunan province — where “expanding factories, smelters and mines jostle with paddy fields,” the New York Times reported. In 2011, Nanjing Agricultural University researchers came out with a report claiming they had found cadmium in 10 percent of rice samples nationwide and 60 percent of samples from southern China.

:: China’s food system is powered by coal. It’s not just industry that’s degrading the water and land China relies on for food. It’s also agriculture itself. China’s food production miracle has been driven by an ever-increasing annual cascade of synthetic nitrogen fertilizer (it now uses more than a third of global nitrogen output) — and its nitrogen industry relies on coal for 70 percent of its energy needs. To grow its food, in other words, China relies on an energy source that competes aggressively with farming for water.

:: Five of China’s largest lakes have substantial dead zones caused by fertilizer runoff. That’s what a paper by Chinese and University of California researchers found after they examined Chinese lakes in 2008. And heavy use of nitrogen fertilizer takes its toll on soil quality, too. It causes pH levels to drop, turning soil acidic and less productive — a problem rampant in China. Here’s a 2010 Nature article on a national survey of the nation’s farmland:

Go and read these statistics: Grist

Read about another side of this sad problem: Not even good enough for dog food: Imported food from China loaded with chemicals, dyes, pesticides and fake ingredients.

It gets worse:

Read more

Nearly 20 million people in China could be exposed to water contaminated with arsenic, a study suggests.

Scientists used information about the geology of the country to predict the areas most likely to be affected by the poison.

The report is published in the journal Science.

Arsenic occurs naturally in the Earth’s crust, but if it leaches into groundwater, long-term exposure can cause serious health risks.

These include skin problems and cancers of the skin, lungs, bladder and kidney.

Which means this is the water also used for agriculture, food products for export. Their arsenic is ending is ending up in our food chain.

Governments are bending over backwards to do business with Asia, particularly China.

Even Japan now has a major problem with radioactive contaminants.

They should be legislating to BAN Asian food products from the shelves of the western world.

Especially in China’s case, they are exporting mainly poison and cancers!

Why do we do this?

How indigenous people are turned off their lands

Hundreds of thousands in Cambodia, Vietnam and Thailand are said to have been displaced

A protester faces riot police in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, in a demonstration against the eviction of lakeside dwellers. Photograph: Tang Chhin Sothy/AFP/Getty Images

 

Cambodia

More than 400,000 people have been forcibly evicted from their lands since 2003, often without compensation, as the nation sells off its territory to sugar and rubber barons and property developers. Villagers who protest have been beaten, imprisoned and murdered – such as the environmental campaigner Chut Wutty, who was killed last year – as more than one-tenth of land has been transferred in the past few years from small-scale farmers to agribusiness, rights groups claim. A recent Global Witness report – and investigation by the Guardian – found that Deutsche Bank and the International Finance Corporation were bankrolling massive government-sponsored land grabs in both Cambodia and Laos through two Vietnamese companies, HAGL and VRG, which had been granted recent economic land concessions. Villagers claimed they had little food to eat and no chance of jobs, as hardly any positions were offered by the companies.

Vietnam

The state can take land away from citizens for economic development, national security or defence reasons, or in the public interest. But in recent years the government has grabbed land to make way for eco-parks, resorts and golf courses, much to the anger of the public. Last year, around 3,000 security forces were deployed in the northern Hung Yen province after villagers protested against a 70-hectare land grab to make way for an “eco-urban township”. Around the same time, a family of four fish farmers protested against a state eviction squad armed with homemade shotguns and land mines – a bold move in this one-party nation. While the prime minister declared the fish farmers’ eviction illegal, a court recently handed down a five-year jail sentence to those involved in the protest for making a “bad impact on the social order … [of] the country as a whole”.

Thailand

The sea gypsies in the southern resort island of Phuket are facing eviction after living on and around the beaches of Rawai for the past 200 years. Thai landowners claim they want the land back to build houses and a “sea gypsy village” in which tourists can buy fish and see how this once nomadic seafaring tribe now lives on land. The sea gypsy communities have so far refused to move, but could be forcibly evicted if no resolution is reached. Sea gypsies in neighbouring areas, such as Khao Lak, have also been forced off their land by resorts and hotels over past decades, while Burmese sea gypsies around the Mergui islands are reportedly being moved out by authorities keen to develop the area for tourism.

More cases of greedy corporations and governments.

You can’t make money from a native village, but build a resort or a golf course for the billionaires and you can make a lot of money!

It matters not that you are destroying lives.

 

Deception, once again

This is not so much an eco question, but it is another example of how profits are put before people, how shops, businesses and companies deceive their customers.

Mislabelled fish slip into Europe’s menus

Fish often take a circuitous route before reaching our plate

We are all eating much more fish than we used to – but are we eating the fish we think we are?

Official figures show that global consumption of fish and seafood per person is rising steeply – but research also reveals that much of what gets sold turns out to be not as described on the packet.

Earlier this year Europe’s horsemeat scandal revealed how processed meat can get mislabelled in a complicated supply chain. That appears to be an issue with fish, too.

On a large scale, cheap fish is being substituted for expensive fish without the consumer knowing. Moreover, new varieties, never before consumed, are being detected in fish dishes.

Take a British national dish, for example: fish and chips. It is often thought to be the epitome of Britishness – “as British as fish and chips”, the saying goes.

But scientific testing reveals that the traditional cod or haddock and chips is often something else entirely. Research reveals that 7% of cod and haddock – the deep-fried staples of British fish and chips – actually turn out to be cheaper fish substituted to cut costs.

In the Republic of Ireland, a similar study of samples bought in Dublin restaurants, shops and supermarkets revealed that a quarter of products labelled as cod or haddock were in fact completely different species.

In the United States, a study showed that 25% of the fish served in restaurants in New York were not what they were said to be on the menu.

And in Europe, about a quarter to a third of fish products tested turned out to be not what was described on the packet or menu.

New species

Fish and chips: much-loved, but do you know where the fish came from?

The global industry transports large amounts of frozen fish around the world in containers, with China producing much of it. This means, for example, that one of the biggest points of entry for fish into the European Union is not a port at all – no wharves or boats or even water. It is Frankfurt airport.

Samples here and elsewhere across Europe are tested at the big Eurofins laboratory in Hamburg. Its Director of Scientific Development, Dr Bert Popping, said that tests were turning up types of fish which had never been in the food chain before.

“The authorities at the airport in Frankfurt have found some new species – species which have not been caught previously; fish species which have not previously entered the food chain; which have not previously been commercialised,” he said.

So researchers believe that there is large-scale deception going on when it comes to fish – cheap is being substituted for expensive, so deceiving the consumer and bumping up the profits of the deceiver.

Read more

Opinion:

One of the fish mentioned is the Vietnamese Pangasius

Big fish, lots of flesh

Nice pinky flesh, looks good enough to eat

It’s raised in the Mekong River Delta

The Mekong River is arguably Asia’s biggest cesspool!

The Mekong River comes from China, passes Burma, Laos, Cambodia with the delta in Vietnam collecting sewerage and industrial waste along its entire length.

Has your fish ‘n chips, or your fancy New York restaurant food been raised on Asian faeces?

This fish called, among other things, Panga has taken the world by storm. It’s cheap, it looks good, but is it healthy?

One report labels it ‘the latest abberation of globalisation’, another ‘Government pressured into removing Vietnamese panga from school canteens‘, and another ‘Don’t Eat this fish: Pangas (Pangasius, Vietnamese River Cobbler, White Catfish, Gray Sole)‘, yet another ‘I don’t know how someone came up with this one out but they’ve discovered that if they inject female Pangas with hormones made from the dehydrated urine of pregnant women, the female Pangas grow much quicker and produce eggs faster (one Panga can lay approximately 500,000 eggs at one time).’

The bottom line is making profits!

Update

Through a comment by ECOCRED, I found she had a very pertinent post on the same subject; Seafood: Fraud, Mis-labelling and Laundering

Nature Ramble

Off today to have a look at an unusual creature.

The Pangolin

The physical appearance of a pangolin is marked by large, hardened, plate-like scales. The scales, which are soft on newborn pangolins but harden as the animal matures, are made of keratin, the same material of which human fingernails and tetrapod claws are made. The pangolin’s scaled body is comparable to a pine cone or globe artichoke. It can curl up into a ball when threatened, with its overlapping scales acting as armour and its face tucked under its tail. The scales are sharp, providing extra defense. The front claws are so long they are unsuited for walking, so the animal walks with its fore paws curled over to protect them. Pangolins can also emit a noxious-smelling acid from glands near the anus, similar to the spray of a skunk. Pangolins, though, are not able to spray this acid like skunks. They have short legs, with sharp claws which they use for burrowing into termite and ant mounds, as well as climbing. – Wikipedia

Indian pangolin (Manis crassicaudata) – image: Project Pangolin

 

Pangolins under threat as black market trade grows

The scaly anteater is less well-known compared with other illegally hunted species, but it is highly prized by traffickers

Endangered … the plight of the pangolin is not helped by its low profile compared with threatened species such as elephants, lions and tigers. Photograph: How Hwee Young/EPA

Last year tens of thousands of elephants and hundreds of rhinos were slaughtered to meet the growing demands of illegal trade in wild animals. Largely centred on eastern Asia, this black market is also devouring hundreds of tigers, sharks, tortoises, snakes and other rare beasts. It’s a flourishing trade, worth an estimated $19bn a year. But little attention is paid to the pangolin, or scaly anteater, one of the mammals that suffers most from such poaching.

Trade in the pangolin was banned worldwide in 2000, but the meat and supposed medicinal qualities of this unobtrusive animal – the only mammal to sport scales – have made it one of the most highly prized targets for traffickers in Asia. The meat is considered a great delicacy and many believe the scales can cure various diseases, including asthma and certain cancers, as well as boosting virility. Pangolins have become so rare that they may fetch as much as $1,000 a piece on the black market.

As a result, two out of four of the Asian species — the Sunda, or Malayan, pangolin, and its Chinese counterpart (respectively Manis javanica and Manis pentadactyla) — are endangered and the other two are near threatened, according to the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN). Two of the four African species are near threatened too. There are no figures for the number of specimens in existence worldwide, but the experts warn that their disappearance would alter the ecosystem of tropical forests, due to the rise in the number of ants and termites.

Despite the scaly anteater being protected, poaching is on the rise. In January four Chinese nationals were arrested in Jakarta with 189 pangolin skins in their luggage. In April, October and November of last year French customs officers at Roissy-CDG airport seized several tens of kilos of scales. In May 2011 a record haul of 7.5 tonnes of pangolin meat was discovered at Tanjung Priok port in north Jakarta, concealed under a layer of frozen fish in crates on their way to Vietnam. Other seizures have been reported in Thailand, Cambodia, India, Malaysia, Burma and Vietnam.

“Since 2000, tens of thousands of animals have been traded in each year internationally, from countries ranging from Pakistan to Indonesia in Asia and from Zimbabwe to Guinea in Africa,” says Dan Challender, co-Chair of the new IUCN Pangolin specialist group, quoted by the Mongabay website. In 2010 the wildlife trade monitoring network Traffic published a report alleging that a Malaysian crime syndicate had captured 22,000 pangolins aged over 18 months. In 2011 between 40,000 and 60,000 were netted in Vietnam alone.

Many are transported live to ensure meat is fresh, but a large number die of hunger or thirst during transport. In addition traffickers often inject them with water to increase their body weight.

Much as with elephants, rhinos and tigers, existing laws and penalties are too feeble to really discourage the traffic. The anteater’s low profile merely makes matters worse. “Unfortunately,” says Traffic’s Kanitha Krishnasamy, “pangolins do not attract as much attention from the public, and by extension from the authorities.”

Monday Moaning

Panga

What is a “panga”?

The truth about the panga will turn your stomach

It’s a fish. One that is exported from Vietnam, raised in one of the most polluted rivers in the world. The Mekong River has been called a poisonous soup and the toilet of Asia running from China through Thailand, Burma, Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam carrying all the industrial and social effluent from each country.

The polluted Mekong River, a major waterway and the home of the panga

Images: Folha da Manhã a Brazilian newspaper in Portuguese

Not only are the fish raised in highly polluted water, but they are injected with Chinese made hormones derived from the urine of pregnant women.

There is nothing good to say about this issue.

Don’t Eat this fish: Pterogymnus laniarius (Pangas, Pangasius, Vietnamese River Cobbler, White Catfish, Gray Sole, Pacific Dory, Pacific Roughy, Finny Scad, Hardtail Scad, Finletted Mackerel.) It’s almost an industry to invent new names to circumvent import restrictions and consumer awareness.

.

Man’s Finest Hour

Javan rhino ‘now extinct in Vietnam’

Genetic analysis of rhino dung samples revealed that there was only one individual left in Vietnam

A critically endangered species of rhino is now extinct in Vietnam, according to a report by conservation groups.

The WWF and the International Rhino Foundation said the country’s last Javan rhino was probably killed by poachers, as its horn had been cut off.

Experts said the news was not a surprise, as only one sighting had been recorded in Vietnam since 2008.

Fewer than 50 individuals are now estimated to remain in the wild.

“It is painful that despite significant investment in Vietnamese rhino conservation, efforts failed to save this unique animal, ” said WWF’s Vietnam director Tran Thi Minh Hien.

“Vietnam has lost part of its natural heritage.”

The authors of the report, Extinction of the Javan Rhino from Vietnam, said genetic analysis of dung samples collected between 2009-2010 in the Cat Tien National Park showed that they all belonged to just one individual.

Shortly after the survey was completed, conservationists found out that the rhino had been killed. They say it was likely to have been the work of poachers because it had been shot in a leg and its horn had been cut off.

Source: BBC News

Cát Tiên National Park , a diverse landscape

Possibly the rarest large mammal on earth

The Javan Rhinoceros (Sunda Rhinoceros to be more precise) or Lesser One-horned Rhinoceros (Rhinoceros sondaicus) with only one known population in the wild, and none in zoos. It is possibly the rarest large mammal on earth.

Cát Tiên National Park Bau Sau (Crocodile Lake)

 

This post has been posted simultaneously on Tomus Arcanum