It was here 10 years ago that 1.3 million litres of oil leaked from an underwater pipeline smothering in oil birds, sandy beaches, and much of the mangrove swaps that surround Guanabara Bay.

It was a major environmental catastrophe.

“The spill in 2000 on Guanabara Bay was one of the most serious and severe accidents in the environmental history of Brazil,” Breno Herrera, the head of the federal governments environment office that oversees Guanabara Bay, told me recently during an interview.

Before I go any further, it’s important to understand the bay is huge. The perimeter is almost 150km long and there are dozens of little islands inside the bay.

Guanabara Bay is legendary in Rio de Janeiro for its pollution, unrelated to the oil spill 10 years ago.

But what interested me in the oil spill from 2000 are two things.

First, I wanted to see how the mangrove swamps that were covered in oil have recovered, because that ecosystem is not too dissimilar to the swamplands in Florida and elsewhere now under threat from the BP Gulf of Mexico spill.

And, second, in 2000 at the time of the Guanabara spill people estimated it would take 10 years for the ecosystem to recover.

That was a decade ago, and the obvious question is, Has it recovered?

I was recently led into a large patch of mangrove that was hardest hit by the oil, and let me be clear here: What I saw was evidence that there is no recovery after all these years.

The mud is thick, black and lifeless. And it stinks. Dead stumps – what used to be thick green mangrove swamps – protrude out from the mud as far as your eyes see.

It looks like a scene captured by a camera attached to an unmanned spacecraft that has just landed on a lifeless planet in another galaxy.

Nothing is growing here, and I can’t imagine anything growing here in a very long time.

It’s sad.

Effects

Evo da Silva, a local fisherman I met, said before the spill it was not uncommon to net 100 kilos of fish and crab a day. Today, on a good day, he is happy with five kilos; 10 kilos is a great day.

He said after the spill, the fish died off and have yet to come back to pre-spill levels.

“There are some types of fish that simply do not exist anymore here in our bay,” da Silva told me from Magé, a small town bordering the bay where he lives.

“I think they are extinct after the spill.”

The problem, I was told, is that once the mangrove were killed by oil, it also permanently disrupted the life cycle of the fish and crabs that needed the healthy swamplands to feed and multiply.

Put simply, it’s a vicious cycle: Oil kills mangrove, which in turn kills fish and crab, which in turn kills livelihoods of the local fishermen.

Until the mangrove can recuperate, the rest of the cycle can’t be fixed properly.

Problem is, once the mangrove is dead it is hard to bring back to life.

“The mangrove is one of the most fragile ecosystems in the world and unfortunately, when industrial accidents – particularly petroleum – enter the areas of mangrove, it’s a very slow process for the ecosystem to recuperate,” Herrera, the environmentalist, told me.

Herrera said once the oil was cleaned off the water surface area after the spill, it can reappear years later in ways not imaginable at the time.

“What is happening in many parts of the affected mangrove in the Guanabara Bay is that bubbles of oil were formed that are below the surface,” Herrera said.

“These bubbles are buried under sediment at the bottom of the bay, and then many years later – even decades after the accident – we can still verify those bubbles can re-appear on the surface.

“We still get reports from fishermen that report small spots of oil that keep appearing in the mangrove, and that is what that is.”

Economic Effects

The economic effects from the oil spill can still be felt on the fishermen in Guanabara Bay.

Alexandre Anderson runs a local association fighting for rights of fishermen on the bay and he told me buyers will only pay less than half the market value of the fish from Guanabara Bay because of the stigma of the fish “being contaminated.”

Da Silva confirmed this to me, and said he fears the fishermen on the Gulf Coast of the US will face the same problem.

“I do not want to be pessimistic but it’s going to be difficult if someone does not help (the fishermen in the Gulf Coast),” da Silva said.

“It is going to be impossible to support their families. Now they are going to have the problem of people saying, ‘we are not buying that fish because it is contaminated.’

“We went through that here. Nobody wanted our fish, they said, ‘your fish are contaminated because of the oil.’”

Of the 6,000 fishermen who used to fish Guanabara Bay, only about 2,000 are left, da Silva said. Most have been forced to find other lines of work.

Petrobras reaction

Petrobras, the Brazilian oil company responsible for the spill in 2000, has invested over $200m in the last decade in environmental and social projects in Guanabara Bay.

The company has dramatically improved its environmental record in the last ten years, and is considered Brazil’s most socially responsible company in an independent study released last year.

But recovering the environment after an oil spill is a long and difficult process, according to Petrobras CEO Jose Sergio Gabrielli.

“Recuperation is always a challenge,” Gabrielli said recently during a news conference at company headquarters in Rio de Janeiro.

“It’s like tsunami; it’s difficult after a tsunami to pretend that you resisted it.

“You have to avoid the tsunami in the first place. You have to move the population out of the area beforehand.

“But once the accident occurs, it’s a very grave phenomenon; there is no doubt about it.”

Gabrielli said the BP accident in the Gulf Coast is affirmation that the best treatment for an accident is to avoid it in the first place.

“The accident is teaching us in a clear way that prevention is the main instrument to avoid an accident,” Gabrielli said.

“…We believe that our procedures and our operational discipline in relation to our operations can prevent accidents.

“This is essentially our policy and we are reinforcing it. We have reviewed all our procedures, we have analyzed our equipment, we are reinforcing our mechanisms for accompanying our operational procedures and we have confidence that what we are doing in the safest we can do.”

Petrobras has not had an accident of the magnitude of what occurred on Guanabara Bay since.

The future

The lingering effects of the Guanabara Bay oil spill 10 years on are obvious after visiting some of the areas hardest hit.

But the effects in 2020 in the Gulf Coast could be much worse than anything seen here in Brazil.

The total amount of oil spilled in 2000 in Guanabara Bay was about 8,000 barrels and even by the most conservative estimates that is only about 25 per cent of the oil being leaked into the Gulf Coast everyday.

And as far as the full recovery of the mangroves in Guanabara Bay, that might not happen anytime soon.

“It is difficult to make a forecast concrete about these things, but without doubt it goes beyond 10 years,” Herrera told me in regards to the recuperation.

“It is counted in decades, not years.”

Herrera didn’t want to make any predictions about what will happen in the Gulf Coast down the road, but he did say he thinks the BP spill is the worst environmental disaster the planet has ever seen.

When I asked da Silva – the fisherman – if he has any advice for the people in the Gulf Coast of America coping with the BP spill, he says simply: “They are going to have to be patient, because they will have the same problems we still have here.

“But I think they are going to have it even worse than we do.”

Spoken from a man who has already lived it. And still is 10 years later.

This post originally appeared at Al Jazeera’s Americas Blog.

See the rest here:
Gabriel Elizondo: Effects of a Brazilian Oil Spill 10 Years On

The US Department of Agriculture (USDA) and the Department of Justice (DOJ) held another joint public hearing on anti-trust issues in farming on June 25 in Madison, Wisconsin. This hearing – the third of five scheduled for this year – focused on dairy farmers, who, it’s fair to say, are in a state of overwhelming crisis. As Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack noted at the hearing, the United States has lost more than 46,000 dairy farms in the last ten years – more than 40 percent of the total.

Just as with hog and poultry farming, consolidation in the dairy industry has done immeasurable damage to independent family farmers, consumers and the environment. The dairy market, though, is even more complicated than the market for chicken or pork, due to a 70 year old system of federal price setting for milk that adds another thick, murky layer of inscrutability.

This price setting scheme, the Federal Milk Marketing Order (FMMO) system, was enacted by Congress in 1937, in the wake of the Depression, to ensure that dairy farmers could earn a living and would thereby be encouraged to go on producing milk for the nation. Because milk is highly perishable, modern refrigerated transportation was still in its infancy, and there was often only one local milk dealer, before the FMMO system was established farmers were generally forced to accept whatever price was offered. Today, however, the FMMO system has become a weapon used by huge dairy companies to accomplish that same nefarious goal – paying farmers as little as possible.

Between 2007 and 2009 the price US dairy farmers received for their milk was cut roughly in half – from $21.70 per hundred pounds to just $11.30. During that same period, the farmers’ costs dramatically increased: feed and fuel prices rose by 35 percent and 30 percent, respectively; the logical result of paying a lot more to produce a product that you’re now getting 50 percent less for – well, you do the math.

Tens of thousands of farmers went out of business and tens of thousands more are saddled with insurmountable debt. Over the last two years alone, over 100 dairy farmers have found themselves so desperate that they have taken their own lives.

As Patty Lovera of Food and Water Watch, who attended the hearing, put it, “The dairy industry doesn’t work for consumers, who pay more than ever at the grocery store, or for small and mid sized farmers, who are paid less for milk than it costs to produce. It’s time for the Department of Justice to bust up the milk monopolies so more of the consumer dollar reaches dairy farmers.”

At the June 25 hearing in Madison, farmer after farmer recounted how these past two years of selling their milk below the cost of production have robbed them of perhaps 25 years of the equity they’d built up in their farms – which, of course, are also their homes.

As in the case of hogs and poultry, dairy farmers are subject to abuses arising from a lack of competition – that is, just a few huge companies own and control most of the product and the facilities to process and market it, giving them tremendous power to set prices. These are classic anti-competitive practices that anti-trust laws were designed to address and that are the subject of this year’s joint USDA-DOJ hearings.

Federal government concerns about monopolistic consolidation in the dairy industry go back more than 40 years; in 1965 the Federal Trade Commission stepped in to stop a merger between Dean Foods and Bowman Dairy which, the commission found, would give control of nearly a quarter of the milk sold in the area of Chicago to the newly-created business. Despite decades of concern, however, today these anti-competitive practices define the dairy industry – where just one company – Dean Foods – currently controls 40 percent of the nation’s fluid milk supply. In January of this year, the US Department of Justice filed a lawsuit against Dean Foods challenging its purchase of Foremost Farms’ Consumer Products Division that the government claims eliminates competition in the sale of milk in three states – Illinois, Michigan and Wisconsin.

While quite a few farmers want market order reform, with a long history of controversy over how the government gets the information they use to set prices, it’s essential that prices not be based on data or systems that can be easily manipulated. Huge dairy processers who buy and pool milk from tens of thousands of dairy farmers have an obvious interest in buying that milk at the lowest possible price.

Today the FMMO system – originally created to ensure dairy farmers a living wage through price protection – basically acts as a fig leaf for Dean and other dairy behemoths, providing cover for their anticompetitive practices. Meanwhile, federal investigations point to collusion to drive down milk prices paid to farmers by the dairy giants, including Dean Foods (which owns Horizon, Garelick, Tuscan, Purity, Friendship, Deans and numerous additional brands of milk, soymilk, and other foods) and the Dairy Farmers of America - which buys, bottles, processes and distributes dairy products from 18,000 farmers and owns Borden Cheese and other brands.

What’s the solution? In the short term, many of the farmers who attended the Madison hearing want the USDA to set a floor price for milk – perhaps $18 per hundred weight – just to stop the bleeding and protect them from the continuing free fall in prices they’ve endured in recent years. As a longer term fix, many believe that milk prices should reflect production costs, plus a reasonable profit. Of course, the devil’s in the details; how those production costs will be determined – and what a “reasonable profit” is – are sure to be the subject of intensive lobbying and debate – especially in the context of the 2012 federal Farm Bill, the subject of congressional committee work and industry lobbying already well underway.
Originally published on ecocentrism.org

Read the original here:
Regina Weiss: Dairy Farmers Ask Feds to Fix a Broken System

A family of four (and two cats) live comfortably in this 648-square-foot home in Maine. Photo Courtesy Ben and Sarina Speed.

Aaron and Meghan Powers relax in their Japanese-inspired sunken dining table made from cherry wood taken from Aaron’s grandfather’s farm in Vermont. Their home, an 836-square-foot passive solar, straw-bale structure, is made from salvaged materials. Photo By Betsy Morrison.

Denise Franklin’s house, Quietude, is built of local lodgepole pine. The ventilated, insulated double metal roof reflects heat away from the house during the hot Okanagan summers. Photo By Stuart Bish.

This tiny house’s salvaged windows date to the 1880s. The siding is made of salvaged old-growth cypress from circa 1910. The 19th-century doors have some of their original patina. Photo Courtesy Texas Tiny Houses.

With the housing market in a slump and more homeowners concerned about rising utility costs, this move toward smaller homes makes sense–but it’s not driven solely by economics. The AIA reports that homeowners are eschewing upscale amenities in favor of flexible, open and informal spaces that allow for easy movement and family living, and they’re finding those spaces in smaller houses.

We couldn’t be more thrilled. We’ve championed small homes because less square footage means less drain on our natural resources, but also because their savvy design and building methods are truly inspirational (no matter how low you go). In the past year, we’ve featured Tiny Texas Houses’ 300-square-foot salvaged homes, a 648-square-foot Maine home shared by a family of four, and Denise Franklin’s 280-square-foot home in the Okanagan Mountains–a reader favorite.

We believe tiny houses are the next big thing (and we’re pretty good at predictions).

The grief expiration date myth must come from people who have never experienced a close death — otherwise they would know the truth. Everyone fears facing such a loss. They are hopeful that should death touch their world, it will only take 6 to 12 months to recover. No one wants someone they love to die. So, until faced with the reality, it’s easier to think ‘this won’t happen to me, AND if it does it will only be bad for a finite, short amount of time and then there’s an expiration date and it is magically all gone.’ What a wonderful world that would be.

I’ve heard time and time again there is a societal expectation to “get over” grief in six months, and at the longest, a year. Those who aren’t grieving believe it, and often those who are also believe it — this sets grieving people up for false, and ultimately disappointing, expectations.
The one year mark looms like some golden carrot over the heads of those who are grieving. It is a symbol of hope that if they make it to the one year mark they will be in a much happier and pain free place.

The reality is they won’t be over it, nor should they be. If someone spent years loving another person, the pain of that person’s death simply will not be removed due to a date on the calendar.

The opposite actually might happen — people who are grieving may feel even more pain in year two because the initial numbness, which often serves as a protective barrier at the onset of loss, has worn off and they begin experiencing the full intensity of their feelings and grief. This is accompanied by the realization that life with loss is their “new normal.”

I lost my mother at 9 and father at 12. I remember feeling the expectation of a grief expiration date myself. I remember being 15, five years after my mother died and three years after my father died. If I had a tough day missing my parents, people looked shocked, or avoided the subject, or avoided me. Sometimes I would hear insensitive comments, like “aren’t you over that?” Or when someone experienced a more recent loss, I would get “Oh, poor [so and so]. What a tragic loss. Aren’t you glad you are over that now?”

I remember beating myself up and doubting how well I was coping. If you allow yourself to believe there is an expiration date for grief, you will start to think you aren’t doing well if you still miss your loved one 5, 10, 20, 40 years after the loss. In reality, it’s normal. And it’s okay.

This is what I know to be true:

Grief is a life-long journey. An emotional handicap you get up, and live with, everyday. It doesn’t mean you can’t lead a happy life, but it is a choice, and takes work.

The frequency and intensity of those grief pangs/knives should lessen over time, but the reality is every now and then for the rest of your life, you will feel those pangs. Everyone grieves at their own pace, and in their own way. There is no one way to grieve, and no certain order, and no timeline. There is definitely not an expiration date.

Grief will take on different forms in different people. Not everyone cries; others cry all the time. Some exercise a lot. Others talk about it a lot. Many seek counseling or join a support group, and enjoy the company of a good and understanding listener.

If years after your loss, thinking of your loved one missing a special day or milestone in your life, makes you sad, puts you in a funk or makes you cry, don’t beat yourself up. Allow yourself the ability to grieve the loss of memories not created. As long as the frequency and intensity of grief eases — even if it is slowly over time — you are coping in positive ways. Alternatively, if years after the loss, you can’t bear the mention of your loved ones name, you sleep all day, you aren’t participating in your normal everyday activities, you do things to “numb” or escape your grief, those are warning signs that you are not coping well, and should seek the assistance you need to begin healing.

Grieving in a healthy manner, taking steps to move forward and rebuild your life with a new normal doesn’t mean you won’t have those tough days or tough moments.

There is no expiration date. Grief never fully goes away. That doesn’t have to mean you can’t and won’t live a happy and productive life. What it does mean is the love you shared with loved ones lost, doesn’t have an expiration date either.

Okay, I admit that I am still sensitive today. But I have been through enough life experience (not to mention therapy) to attempt to view Facebook through a different lens–one that is not so black-and-white but that allows for shades of gray. For instance, if I notice that I am no longer friends with someone I once dated on Facebook, I do my best to not automatically assume the guy hates me. That’s black and white. I try to see the gray and recognize the many possibilities for the completely severed relationship. (I.e. Maybe he accidentally deleted his account. It happens!) Most of all, I try not to play the guessing game and just let go. (Note: I use the words “do my best” and “try” in this paragraph. You will see in Case No. 1 below that I am not always successful.)

My single friends and I agree that Facebook comes with unique dating challenges. Is it okay to defriend an ex or not? And in what time frame? What about an ex’s friends or relatives? Is changing viewing privileges an option? And the big question: when does Facebook investigating become Facebook stalking?

Let me share a couple of my Facebook experiences.

Case No. 1 (We’ll call him Bob.)

I dated Bob for a short time. After we broke up, he quickly (within 24 hours) changed his status to “in a relationship.” We hadn’t even been Facebook official, so I wondered if he really could have met someone in such a short time. I decided that his relationship status update was simply a strategic move to pique my curiosity. He succeeded. I spent a lot of mental energy thinking about all of the possible scenarios–was he dating “Woman A” or was it “Woman B”? (As I mentioned above, I try not to do this kind of guessing anymore.) I spent more time than I’d like to admit studying his profile to figure it all out. Then, out of nowhere, he defriended me. Investigation over. (Call it Facebook stalking if you must!)

Case No. 2 (Let’s call him Joe.)

Joe and I talked for several months before going our separate ways. Unlike Bob, Joe and I remained Facebook friends. Not long ago, he read this dating blog, which happened to mention him, and he sent me a direct message that actually cleared up a lot of misconceptions from our past. We both ended up telling each other things over Facebook that we should have said face-to-face months before. We agreed that we had learned an important lesson: open and honest communication is the key to a successful relationship. Cheers to Facebook for a lesson learned!

I think the whole point of this blog entry is simply to start an open dialogue with you. I shared a couple of my own stories and told you about my gray shades (that I try to keep on). I would love to hear your stories and online wisdom.

Single in Music City,

Jenni

UPDATE FROM PREVIOUS BLOG POST titled Gratitude in Dating (And in the Kitchen): You will be happy to know that I made lasagna (with Ben’s help)! You will be sad to know that we are no longer together.

This piece is in a series I am posting related to dating. You will also find this series on my Facebook Notes page. (There are already some great comments posted on Facebook from others!) If you have dated me and you are reading this, thanks for being a part of my experience. This is all in good fun! I am grateful.

Almost three months into this crisis, both BP and the White House appear paralyzed. But on StoptheGusher, people spend hours composing long, intricate plans and copying their Congresspeople, proposing concrete underwater containment barriers, and suggesting organic products such as Kenaf, an oil-soaking plant grown in North Carolina, Georgia and Texas that is ground down, refined and marketed as SupremeSorb.

What does this mean? It means people are ready to take matters in their own hands, and that they know social media makes this possible. Social media is a force for good, or potentially a force for trouble. It is more powerful than Republicans, Democrats, and Tea Parties, as we saw after the Iran elections. It has the power to call citizens into the streets.

The founder of Democrasoft,
the company that put up the site, believes the leak is not just some news item that has been through its peak cycle, but is an ongoing global catastrophe that is getting worse by the hour and needs every bit of public attention available. He thinks social networking has a purpose.

Most social media sites originated from the same purposeful desire to change the status quo for the better. Even Mark Zuckerberg, the oft-demonized Facebook founder, has been quoted in David Kirkpatrick’s “The Facebook Effect” as saying he would rather change the world than make money.

It’s apparent that even if the media moves on to other stories, the people will not forget about the oil spill, and that it makes them more unhappy by the day. Add that to the unhappiness about declining standards of living, massive unemployment, the ballooning of the debt, and the collapse of our education system, and you have a recipe for disaster if the government does not enlist those who want to help in more effective ways. It’s not enough to create government web sites like Healthcare.gov that give information. It’s time for the government to create sites that respect some of the intelligent and thoughtful suggestions being aggregated on StoptheGusher and put them to work.

How about creating jobs by stopping the gusher?

WATCH:

Loving on the other hand is the active expression of love-rooted qualities in a relationship. People love others and can be cruel, critical, or jealous – but when you are being loving, then there is no room for such actions or feelings. To be loving requires no psychotherapy nor workshops or CDs. Being loving is simple and we all know what it means. Children are loving, pets are loving, people falling in love are loving, a parent to a newborn is usually loving – the rest of us… well…

To be loving is to be kind, forgiving, non-judgmental, accepting, affirming, respecting, proactive, and open. You might make it your task once a week, or even for one week to keep the idea and practice of being loving top of mind. Write a reminder on recipe cards and place them everywhere: Are you being loving with your thoughts? Are you being loving with your attitudes? Are you being loving to those you care about, and what about strangers? Are your decisions and communications loving? Let “loving” be your meditation, your prayer, intent, goal and mantra for one week and see how it changes your perspectives.