While my previous posts have been covering the environmental degradation and modernization in Tibet, this post will cover the waste management problems that is a direct result of modernization and project I plan on implementing in Tibet to address this issue. Currently there are no waste management infrastructure in Tibet; it is a very pressing issue that has immediate affects on the environment and communities environment of the Tibetan grasslands.

While rapid modernization is taking place in Tibet, flocks of tourists and consumeristic goods are coming in, too. Plastic snack cover wrappers and soda cans discarded by tourists and locals are now a very visible part of the Tibetan grasslands as my friend Yishin Khoo, who traveled to Tibet this past summer, mentioned.

(Source: Yishin Khoo)

Waste Management is a serious problem affecting the public and environmental health of Tibetan rural areas in China. It is a very pressing issue as Tibetan areas are facing rapid modernization and the locals are not exposed to the consequences of mismanagement of proper waste disposal. These areas do not have any facility for waste management; the current option is either burn or bury, which seriously degrades the land. It also raises a serious environmental concern. This causes many problems but the most serious with the heaviest repercussion one is contamination of drinking water sources because, as I mentioned in my last post, Tibet is the headwater of billions living downstream all over Asia.

Since Tibet is a very large land mass and the population is spread out, the government states that it is difficult for them to set up waste collection system to these remote areas. This fact strongly urged me to lead a service trip to Tibet to build resources such as waste receptacles and teach the community on proper management and composting. This is a very urgent need in the local Tibetan communities and they do not have much resources to create and raise awareness about the issue.

Working with Tibetan Village Project will help us accomplish our team goals because TVP is very well connected in the Tibetan areas since they are part of the local community and have been working together for the past decade. TVP’s goal in giving agency to the Tibetans is very similar to our vision and once the participants from the service trip set up the foundations for waste management, TVP will ensure the longevity of the project.

Team members will be expected to commit to weekly meetings and participate with the core commitment of Plateau Engage at Columbia University to the ideals of service and engagement. Plateau Engage works to develop new opportunities for education and training, as well as supporting initiatives that advance the challenges of community revitalization and sustainability on the Tibetan plateau. Participants will work on developing a shared understanding and engage directly with these challenges to strengthen communities on the Tibetan plateau. These efforts will enable us to create a portal for developing new partnerships and synergies in our community to address these issues.

The core ideal of the trip will be to promote the welfare of the public good by moving beyond the boundaries of separated communities through collective action to influence others while cultivating shared understandings, cultural awareness, using critical and integrative thinking. I want to address the immediate need within the community for long-term, sustainable solution to the challenge by working with the locals and fostering their agency.

The service trip will be directly publicized to the students in the East Asian, Environmental Science, and Sustainable Development departments, and will also be added as blurbs in a few mailing lists. Team members will first fill out an application and go through an interview in which Professor Barnett and the trip leaders will do the selection process. Participants will be assessed on their commitment to service, sustainable development, environmental/social justice, and East Asia; also on how they will incorporate the experience they will gain from the trip to their academic pursuits. Every participants will be mandated to commit to every meeting, which will prepare the participants to develop cultural competency and understand the local issue.

“The question many people have is that if the economy is growing so fast, when will the population start feeling the benefits?”- Aguinaldo Jaime, the nation’s deputy prime minister

In Angola a majority of children live in poverty

In Angola there is a façade that times have changed. After twenty-seven years of civil war, Angola appears as a place that is finally at peace. In comparison to other African nations, Angola has been considered to be exemplary. The International Monetary Fund projects a twenty-four percent economic growth in the country this year — one of the fastest rates in the world.

Angola is second largest oil exporter in Africa. Oil accounts for more than half of the country’s gross domestic product (GDP), eighty percent of the government’s revenues and ninety percent of export earnings. As reported by the New York Times, the government is taking in twice as much money as it did three years ago.

The other side of the story

Despite Angola immense growth in the past couple of years, it still has one of the highest rates of poverty in the world. In a December poll by a pro-democracy group and the United States Agency for International Development, six in ten Angolans said their economic situation was no better now than five years ago. Currently, seventy percent of Angolans live in poverty; eighty percent have no access to basic medical care. The average life expectancy is only forty years, and three in ten children will die before reaching their fifth birthday. In 2002 about US $210 million was spent on emergency aid to Angola.

Where is the oil money going?

The staggering rates of poverty can be correlated the ongoing corruption in of the Angolan government. On February 5, 2010, Angola adopted a new constitution. In a April of that same year, a law was passed  to curb Angola’s endemic corruption; this is part of President Jose Eduardo dos Santos new “zero-tolerance” anti-corruption discourse.

The government has made claims that it has implemented steps to build the country’s infrastructure. According to Aguinaldo Jaime, the nation’s deputy prime minister, Angola has invested between $8 billion and $9 billion in loans from China since 2004, exchanging guarantees of oil supply for reconstruction work. The lack of progress with regards to these development projects proves otherwise. The government seems to be more interested in filling it’s own pockets with billions of dollars of oil revenue that has illegally bypassed the central bank and disappeared without explanation.

Although the Angolian government has improved the publication of oil revenue figures, according to a Human Rights Watch Report, human indicators in Angola remain abysmal and do not commensurate with the rapid growth of Angola’s national wealth.

The government seems to be the single beneficiary of oil revenue. In 2003, the weekly newspaper of Angola published a list of the wealthiest people, in which twelve of the top twenty were government officials and five were former government officials. According to Arvind Ganesan, director of the Business and Human Rights Program, “Dr. Jaime’s activities underscore the need for accountability.” “If the Angolan government is serious about transparency and reform, it should rigorously investigate government officials, publish audits of its expenditures, and act on President dos Santos’ pledge of ‘zero tolerance’ for corruption.”

This  brings to light the fact that there has been  no agency for Angola’s corruption. China,  the nation’s  largest investors, trading partner, and consumer  of Angola’s oil, has completely disregarded Angolan corruption, of which they are aware. The China Investment Fund, a prominent private Chinese company  has extensive ties to Sonangol, the Angolan national oil company, where corruption is most prominent.

As China continues to buy oil, the rich in Angola continues to get richer , while the poor continues to suffer.

As ecosystems with immense levels of biodiversity and ecological interaction, medical researchers often look to coral reefs and organisms found on them as potential sources

Seahorse on Coral Reef. Photo Courtesy of WildSingapore/Flickr. Seahorses that live on coral reefs are used in traditional Chinese medicines. Unfortunately, these creatures are endagered due to over-exploitation.

for cures for disease. Reefs have already been the source of a number of medical breakthroughs, and scientists hypothesize that there are more medical treasures to be found on coral reefs if we continute to explore all of the life that lives on them.

Like other biologically diverse and productive ecosystems (for example rainforests) coral reefs have been the source of many medical discoveries.  Both modern scientists and ancient cultures have tapped into the potential of coral reefs to provide cures to some of the medical problems that ail humankind.  If we let coral reefs die out, we will lose with them, all of the biodiversity found on them, and in turn, all of the organisms that have the potential to provide cures to medical problems.

According to the paper “Life-Saving Products from Coral Reefs” by Andrew W. Bruckner, a coral reef ecologist in the National Marine Fisheries Service’s Office of Protected Resources, “The prospect of finding a new drug in the sea, especially among coral reef species, may be 300 to 400 times more likely than isolating one from a terrestrial ecosystem.”

Bruckner writes that this is becaue “marine organisms have greater phylogenetic diversity, including several phyla and thousands of species found nowhere else. Coral reefs are home to sessile plants and fungi similar to those found on land, but coral reefs also contain a diverse assemblage of invertebrates such as corals, tunicates, molluscs, bryozoans, sponges, and echinoderms that are absent from terrestrial ecosystems.”  The the sheer diversity in reef environments contributes to their potential as a source for cures to disease.

Further, as Bruckner notes, animals on reefs “spend most of their time firmly attached to the reef and cannot escape environmental perturbations, predators, or other stressors. Many engage in a form of chemical warfare, using bioactive compounds to deter predation, fight disease, and prevent overgrowth by fouling and competing organisms. In some animals, toxins are also used to catch their prey.”  Often times these natural defense can be channeled into medicines, and can potentially “yield life-saving medicines or other important industrial and agricultural products” for human use.

Coral Reef. Photo Courtesy of USFWS Pacific/Flickr.

Photo Courtesy of doug88888/Flickr.

Bruckner also points out that the eastern cultures have looked to reefs for cures for disease since the 14^th century.  Specifically, in places such as China, people used, and continue to use, reef-dwelling seahorses as medication for respiratory problmes, skin ailments, etc.

In the modern era, one of the most significant medical breakthroughs to come from coral reefs lead to the development of a drug called AZT.  AZT is a drug used to slow the progression of the HIV virus into AIDS.  According Bruckner, AZT was developed from extracts from a certain species of sponge that lives on coral reefs in the Carribbean.  He also states that another drug, an anti-cancer medicine called Ara-C, was developed from extracts from reef sponges.

The potential for the development of drugs from coral reefs does not stop here. The video below describes some of the links between coral reefs and anticancer medicines.

The use of extracts, compounds, and animals taken from coral reefs for medical purposes poses an interesting question: Is the potential for medical discoveries in coral reefs a strong enough force to influence policy and practice to preserve them?  From the video above, it seems like it should be, but often times, people are unaware that so many medical advances come from the natural world.

The use of coral reefs as a source of medical compounds also runs the risk of over-explotation of coral reefs.  Thus the question becomes: How do we study, explore, and extract materials needed from reefs to better human kind, without destroying or over-exploiting the coral reefs?

How can art be used by activists as a tool to work on environmental issues such as sustainable development? ArtCorps Art for Social Action is a small nonprofit organization based in Ipswich, MA which answers this question by pairing artists with local communities and development organizations. They work together using art as a tool to achieve cooperative and sustainable development projects.

ArtCorps grew out of  New England Biolabs Foundation (NEBF), a foundation that aims to foster “community-based conservation of landscapes and seascapes and the bio-cultural diversity found in these places,” supporting grassroots efforts to conserve and sustain biological as well as cultural diversity, ecosystem services, food security, and other projects. In 1999, Martine Kellett, then Executive Director of NEBF, noticed the difficulties her grantees were having when they tried to work with local residents in their projects. ArtCorps grew out of the question of how development organizations can engage local communities to achieve environmental and other development goals.

The answer, it seems, is through art. ArtCorps trains artists to work with development organizations to improve their capacity to educate, empower, and mobilize communities. They work on projects to address a number of issues that the communities face, including environmental issues.  Molly Barrett, Administrative and Financial Assistant, told me in an email:

“We believe art has the power to break social barriers, connect people, and be that mobilization to create change.  Communities don’t necessarily have the resources to understand their environment and the valuable gifts it has to offer, so we aim to assist other grassroots organizations, who are more knowledgeable about conservation, and help them communicate their messages.”

They have organized their process into this chart:

Here is how it works:

In 2010, Spanish artist Caterina Almirall lived in the Atlandita region of Honduras and worked with Bosques Pico Bonito (BPB), a local for profit company that seeks to achieve sustainable reforestation and agroforestry practices through carbon credit revenues from planting native trees and training local communities in how to produce higher yielding crops in an environmentally sustainable way. They worked together to create a communal celebration of Dia del Arbol, Arbor day. The goal was both environmental education through art and building a healthier community with more trees and more sustainable agroforestry practices. Also, if the business gets off the ground, carbon credits for trees could be a good source of income for this community. Watch some of the results here:

[vimeo]http://vimeo.com/13790412[/vimeo]

The Clean River Project:

In another project, this time in El Salvador, American artist Laura Smith worked with the local community and FUNDAHMER, an organization which works to improve living conditions. Together they brought eighteen young members of the community together to clean up a river bed one Sunday. They then came back the next week to paint murals so that the community would be aware of the project and motivated to keep the river clean. The river is significant to the community because it could be a tremendous resource of fresh water which they currently only obtain through rain water or, during the dry season, bottled water that they must purchase. Until this project, the riverbed was littered with plastic waste, detergents, wrappers, clothing, and other garbage, but nobody was cleaning it up until Smith and the kids did. The murals both give the community an incentive to keep the river clean and learn about the environmental messages in the art.

One of the murals. Photo from ArtCorps

As we have learned so far in this blog, art can be a powerful tool not just in advocacy for and raising awareness of environmental issues but also as a key in building solutions. The artists we saw last week talked about art being the activity that is done on the edge, where transitions and change happen. These artists are making those changes and pushing the boundaries socially and environmentally. The art is not separate from the community’s environmental goals or ornamentation on the side—the art and the environmental goals are intimately intertwined. Almirall’s project uses art to energize a community about sustainable and profitable methods of agroforestry.  Smith’s project uses art to keep a riverbed clean. Both of these projects use art to achieve environmental goals which will help the communities.