The Brockovich Report

This is purely a philosophical question and it is not one that I can really answer for myself, much less anyone else. I was just thinking about Christmas trees.

There's something about having a real tree that is just Christmasy. There's just no other way to put it. The way the scent of pine fills the house, the colors, even sweeping up the needles that are left behind, particularly those elusive ones that you find long after the fact--all part of the ambiance of the season.

But.

We kill the tree to have that bit of festivity in the house just like you have to kill a bloom to have flowers in a vase. Because the big difference is, of course, that the bloom is only losing a matter of days of it's life anyway. When I was little, I always wondered if there could be some kind of giant glass of water to stick the Christmas tree in on December 26th, where it could root and we could stick it back in the ground to finish off it's life. Or perhaps some rooting powder where the tree could somehow be grafted back onto its roots. Unlike that short-lived rosebud, a tree--well, it can live for hundreds of years. How many years of life are we taking from that tree; or to be less sentimental and more scientific, how many years of CO2 consumption and oxygen production are we depriving the world of?

Okay, then, we can entirely avoid that issue with having a live tree--one that's in a pot, and after you decorate it, you can always plant it. Plant it in the back yard, plant it in someone else's tree deprived yard, plant it in a forest somewhere...

But what about the plastic tree? What about those aluminum trees that you have to screw together, and then you can take them apart and put them in a box until next year. There are thousands, maybe millions of these permanent trees that are already in existence; nevermind the "carbon footprint" of all the new ones being churned out of factories. Surely the green thing to do is to keep using them. After all, over the span of its usable existence, each of these fake trees saves how many tree-lives? What is the environmental cost of making that plastic or aluminum tree? Especially when, no matter how well made it is, it falls a far second behind the festive ambiance of a live green tree,

Which brings me back to the question of how green Christmas trees really are.

Evergreens are grown specifically to grace your house for the Christmas season. Evergreens--seasonal tree farms--are a sustainable industry, whether the trees are cut before you buy them, or sitting in a dirt ball ready to plant at the end of the day. Even if you have a cut tree, it will eventually end up as mulch somewhere, sustaining the next plant generation.

Is this a blog demanding that everyone use live trees? Not really. Maybe it's just because somewhere in the back of my mind, the Christmas tree reminds me of the Giving Tree.

IF you don't know The Giving Tree, it is a book worthy of exploration; it is a deceptively simple Shel Silverstein tale that many of us read to our children or in our own childhoods. It's a story about unconditional love, about the gifts of nature. It is a story about the relationship between a boy and his tree; and if you think it is a silly and sappy concept, then read it yourself–(don't be surprised when it makes you cry)–and look at the broader view. Here is a tree who gives and gives until she has no more to give; and the boy who takes and takes until there is no more to take. In the end, the boy is an old man, sitting on the stump of what remains of the tree who gave her life to him, and even then she is happy in her giving.

Is this what we are going to do to the earth? Is this earth our Giving Tree? Is it our destiny to dominate the earth to its destruction or to tend the garden to its fruition?

Could we not each choose to give a little back? Take a little less? Could we not honor our own Giving Trees and instead of using them up entirely, learn to cohabitate, to share our lives without using each other up?

Ultimately, the choice is not between a live green, or dead aluminum tree. It's all about the little choices we make every day.

But whatever choices you make, I'm wishing for you and yours, the Merriest, Greenest Christmas, ever.

Posted by Erin Brockovich | Permalink | Email This Post | Comments (2)

Posted In: Domestic

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The saying "No news is good news" is not always true.

Recently I started poring the headlines looking for fresh news from OINOFYTA, Greece.

Factories have been dumping waste in the Asopos River for decades, resulting in such severe pollution in Oinofyta that the residents have been held hostage by the damage. The water is undrinkable and untouchable; the tourist beaches have been declared unfit for swimming.

In the news, a few months ago, there was brief political acknowledgement and uproar. The pollution was recognized. Politicians promised to bring down the law on the factories and industries which had compromised the safety of the water by dumping industrial waste into the river.

There were a lot of promises made. Punishment, fines levied against the perpetrators. Developments in providing fresh and healthy drinking water for the residents. Monitoring and controls put in place to prevent more pollutions. Water cleaning facilities.

So of course, I open my newspapers and turn on my computer thinking I will see plenty of articles of all of these good things coming to life--all of these promises made by politicians to protect their constituency from poisoning by industrial pollutors.

But I see nothing.

No new news.

No positive developments.

The only news I find is more public outcry by the damaged parties.

On December 6. Reuters released an article detailing the hazards of chromium 6: "Used as an anti-corrosive in the production of stainless steel, paint, ink, plastics and dyes, the metal is on the European Union's list of restricted substances and listed as a carcinogen by the World Health Organization."

This isn't really news. The only recent news regarding chromium 6 is that it is more dangerous than they thought it was; instead of only causing lung cancer, it is now "believed in some medical circles to cause an array of blood and intestinal cancers when ingested in water."

I continued reading the Reuters article. I did find something new, but it was not news of all of the progress that has been done.

I found a new outcry from the public.

It is true that in August, inspectors dug up 20 illegal pipelines dumping untreated waste in violation of regulations.

It is true that in November, the government imposed two million dollars worth of fines against the twenty guilty companies.

It is also true that the companies are planning to protest--and that there are more polluters out there.

In fact, one of the comments on my blog included a letter from a local detailing how the factories were polluting the aquifer by piping their polluted waste into deep wells rather than pumping to the river and getting caught.

So we hear the public outcry.

We hear the voice of biochemical engineer Thanasis Panteloglou who has been trying to get this area cleaned up since 2000. And now he asks, Why are they killing us?" said Panteloglou. "I am shouting: stop committing this crime, stop killing the people. Someone has to hear me."

We hear you Thanasis.

We hear you and we ask, how can we help?

Posted by Erin Brockovich | Permalink | Email This Post | Comments (1)

Posted In: Saving the Environment

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Revisiting the Spill
Remember Exxon Valdez?

Who? Exxon Valdez, now called Sea River Mediterranean, oil tanker built by National Steel and Shipbuilding of San Diego, runs aground.

What? 11 million gallons of crude oil escapes into the Gulf of Alaska

Where? Prince William Sound, fouling 790 miles of shoreline within Prince William Sound oiled, 200 miles of which is classified as heavily oiled and in the Kenai Peninsula-Kodiak region, more than 2,400 miles of shoreline are found to be oiled. Block Island, Green Island, Sawmill Bay, Smith Island, *(EVOS Restoration Website)

When? March 24 1989

Why? 250,000 seabirds, 2,800 sea otters, 250 bald eagles, two dozen Orcas, billions of salmon, loons, three species of cormorants, harlequin ducks, harbor seals, herring and a partridge in a pear tree.

Exxon's scientists point to the recovery of "bald eagles, black oystercatchers, murres, pink and sockeye salmon, and river otters" and claim that the ecosystem has recovered.

The rest of the world (i.e. all of the scientists, environmentalists and study groups which are not paid by Exxon) feel the area has not yet recovered. Of course, there's no really optimal way to clean up the thin sheet of oil and the mousse (emulsified mixture of oil and sea water). Burning pollutes the air; using the boom to corral and contain is laborious. only marginally effective, and terribly inefficient; dispersants contaminate the water and food supply of indigenous species; and skimming is an equipment and manpower intensive process which is only successful under optimum conditions of calm seas, fresh, fluid oil and well-orchestrated teamwork. The NOAA's National Ocean Service study suggests "incomplete recovery (as of 1998) include species differences in infaunal populations, different grain size structures and lower population abundances at oiled sites..." (I had to look up infaunal. It means species that live on the ocean floor.)

Why am I bringing this up 18 years later?

It's the one month anniversary of the San Francisco Bay Oil spill. Call it a celebration of sorts, not that it's celebratory. Not with today's news of 66,043-110,000 barrels leaking from the Hong Kong-registered tanker in South Korean waters.

At least the cold weather froze the South Korean spill, making recovery and reclamation easier.

Some things are looking better. All those scientific minds pointed toward oil spill clean up have resulted in a improved technology--a mechanical skimmer whose surface is grooved to pick up more oil–and is scraped completely clean on each rotation. Activated carbon plays a part. It's a good thing technology is improving because the potential of the San Francisco Oil spill is just as bad as ever. Bad for the harbor seals. Bad for the sea lions. Bad for the herring, steelhead and Chinook salmon, and innumerable species. Bad for San Francisco. Bad for all of us.

58000 gallons were spilled from the Cosco Busan out of Port of Oakland. How much oil was recovered is not known. What is known is that it will take a long time for the ecosystem to recover, but optimists hope that the ecosystem can absorb the damage.

There's the rub.

Certainly the world has a balance. Certainly there have been instances of oil in the ecosystem in a natural situation, and the world wagged on. But the world is different now from any other time in history. Humans put an added stress on the ecosystem, and there's only so much natural absorption any ecosystem can sustain before homeostasis can no longer be maintained.

So come on scientists and nautical engineers It's time to put your thinking caps on and help us clean up. Find new ways, better ways. Boat designers, it's time to engineer ships which won't leak. If we can self-seal a tire, why not a ship's hold? Come on alternative fuel developers. Let's find a way to float our boats and run our cars which does not require massive oil transportation and consumption.

Come on purveyors of the new technologies. We believe in you. We have to. You're all we have.

Posted by Erin Brockovich | Permalink | Email This Post | Comments (1)

Posted In: Domestic , Saving the Environment

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