Year: 2015

Greenpeace’s Efforts Lead to Fishing Changes in Nauru

- Adam Clare

The tiny nation of Nauru (which has one of my favourite flags) has changed its laws thanks to the work of Greenpeace. The environmental organization found that fishing trawlers were catching fish at sea then offloading them to essentially a larger factory boat. This practice has been banned in many places because of the severe damage it causes to the fish populations.

The NFMRA, which credited Greenpeace’s exposure of an “illegal operation” for prompting the Nauru government ban, said it regularly observed “longliners in the high seas acting suspiciously and intruding on our borders”.

“These seas act like a safe haven for pirate boats, and transhipment allows them to stay at sea even longer, and launder fish out of the area,” it said.

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Nauru has become the third Pacific nation to issue a blanket ban on transhipments in its exclusive economic zone, after Marshall Islands and Tuvalu.

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Redistribute Neighbourhoods Instead of Wealth

- Adam Clare

People hate taxes despite the fact that basically every person who studies economics knows they are needed and a great way to spur economic success. Despite the fact taxes are needed and good at helping poorer people in society, taxes are hated.

As a result, some researchers in the USA have looked into alternative ways to help poor people escape poverty. One solution is to change the way we help neighbourhoods rather than looking at taxes.

More Americans live in high-poverty areas than ever in history, defined usually as places where more than 30% to 40% of residents are below the poverty line. The number of people who live these neighborhoods of “concentrated poverty” has doubled since 2000, especially in smaller cities. There are huge racial disparities in these neighborhoods, too. One in 4 African Americans and 1 in 6 Hispanics live in an area of concentrated poverty, compared with 1 in 14 whites. While explicitly racist policies such as “redlining” have subsided, their legacy remains in how neighborhoods are racially and economically segregated today.

THE LINK BETWEEN LOCATION AND LIVES

Montgomery County, Maryland—less than an hour’s drive from Baltimore—is a unique case that shows it doesn’t have to be this way. It is among the wealthiest counties in the nation, and its school system is among the best. It also serves its low-income families relatively well. Like some other cities, it requires some real estate developers to rent a portion of their homes at affordable, below market rates. More uniquely, the county itself also reserves the right to buy some of these homes to create public housing for the poor. The result? Poor families, earning an average of $22,500 a year, living right alongside the affluent.

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Using Art to get People to Care About the Environment

- Adam Clare

We’ve all seen sad, depressing, and otherwise disturbing photos of animals or people suffering after a human made disaster. You know, like the ducks dying in the tar sands or photos from the Bhopal disaster. Photographers have long thought that by showing these disturbing and truth-capturing photos people will start to care about the damage we are doing to the environment. Years of neglect and a lack of change has proven this point wrong.

So what do we do?

Artist Chris Jordan examined this very question and has found new ways to use art to get people to acknowledge the natural world and what we’re doing to it.

Slowly, the way Jordan thought about his work on Midway changed. His job wasn’t to soak up what he calls the darkness of the world; he could face it, he realized, without taking it in. “You acknowledge the presence of the darkness,” he says, “and you shine your light into it.” And his job wasn’t to be transformed by fire or to find a hidden door to hope: “We have this cultural obsession with hope. I’m not sure how useful hope really is.” When he gives a talk and someone stands up—someone always does—to ask, “But what do I do about this? What’s the solution?” he no longer wants to answer them. “That person,” he says, “may be feeling something uncomfortable that they don’t want to feel. They’re feeling the enormity and the complexity of the problems of our world, and that makes them feel anxious.” To give them an easy answer, he says, would be “like pulling the plug in a bathtub: the feeling all drains out. My job is to help people connect with what they feel, even if it’s uncomfortable.”

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Documentary: This Changes Everything

- Adam Clare

The Toronto International Film Festival starts today and one of the documentaries that will be screened is based on the book This Changes Everything by Naomi Klein. The film shares the same title and looks like it carries the same optimistic and clear message: we can change the world and we have to!

Filmed over 211 shoot days in nine countries and five continents over four years, This Changes Everything is an epic attempt to re-imagine the vast challenge of climate change.

Directed by Avi Lewis, and inspired by Naomi Klein’s international non-fiction bestseller This Changes Everything, the film presents seven powerful portraits of communities on the front lines, from Montana’s Powder River Basin to the Alberta Tar Sands, from the coast of South India to Beijing and beyond.

Interwoven with these stories of struggle is Klein’s narration, connecting the carbon in the air with the economic system that put it there. Throughout the film, Klein builds to her most controversial and exciting idea: that we can seize the existential crisis of climate change to transform our failed economic system into something radically better.

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The book:

A Farm in a Bomb Shelter

- Adam Clare

Zero Carbon Food is a new company that has started a farm in downtown London. If that doesn’t sound strange enough, the farm is a in a bomb shelter.

The company is using hydroponics and other modern technological approaches to food harvesting in order to make food even more local for Londoners. Has shipping costs and the time it takes to transport food increases there will be growing demand for urban farms.

Hopefully we’ll see even more hydroponic farms in dense urban centres soon!

The subterranean farm is optimized for growing crops like pea shoots, coriander, mustard leaf, rocket, radish and garlic chive: small, leafy greens with a short growth cycle – made even shorter through careful manipulation of the environment. Unlike outdoor fields at the mercy of variable weather, Zero Carbon Food can deliver a consistent product all year round. (A consistency that attracted at least one inquiry from an entrepreneurial druglord seeking a discreet cannabis farm).

The plants are picked and packed by hand in another part of the tunnel before distribution to restaurants, caterers and retailers under the brand Growing Underground. It’s already partnered with hyper-local food delivery company Farmdrop and is in discussions with supermarket Whole Foods.

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