female factor
Small changes, big impact: How to reduce waste in your daily life.
Fed up with how government and business are responding to a waste crisis that pollutes the planet and stokes climate change, concerned individuals are increasingly taking the matter into their own hands.
LONDON (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - Each person on the planet produces more than 1 kg (2.2 lb) of waste every day, and that number is expected to increase in the next 15 years, according to the World Bank.
Fed up with how government and business are responding to a waste crisis that pollutes the planet and stokes climate change, concerned individuals are increasingly taking the matter into their own hands.
During Zero Waste Week, here are ways you can reduce your impact on the environment:
* Ditch plastic straws: In the United States alone, 500 million plastic straws are used each day, according to campaigners.
Straws are often too small to be recycled and are among the worst polluters of beaches and can end up trapped in turtles’ stomachs.
But single-use, plastic straws can easily be replaced with stainless steel or glass reusable models.
* Carry a reusable water bottle and coffee cup: Every minute, one million plastic bottles are bought around the world, according to data obtained by the Guardian.
Recycling rates are low, and campaigners say at the current pace, there will be more plastic than fish in the ocean by 2050.
A reusable water bottle and coffee cup can save money - many coffee chains such as Starbucks offer discounts for customers who come in with their own cup.
* Use a reusable shopping bag: Last week, Kenya joined more than 40 other countries that have banned, partly banned or taxed single use plastic bags, including China, France, Rwanda, and Italy.
Many bags drift into the ocean, strangling turtles, suffocating seabirds and filling the stomachs of dolphins and whales with waste until they die of starvation.
Many supermarkets now offer alternatives such as reusable plastic bags, canvas or cotton bags.
* Start composting: When sent to landfills, food scraps release methane, a gas more potent than carbon dioxide which contributes to global warming.
With composting, which requires a small countertop bin and can be done in apartments, food waste is turned into nutrient-rich soil that can be used to grow flowers, trees or food.
* Switch to reusable sanitary products: A woman who menstruates will use thousands of sanitary products in her lifetime - with a majority using sanitary pads, which are mostly made of plastic, or tampons.
Researchers estimate that 20 billion pads, tampons and applicators are sent to landfills every year in North America.
But the number of alternatives is growing, and includes silicon menstrual cups and reusable pads.
* Quit smoking: cigarette butts are the most commonly discarded item worldwide, and they are considered toxic waste, damaging water supplies and making their way into the food chain. Cigarette butts are not biodegradable and are made of small pieces of plastic.
Reporting by Anna Pujol-Mazzini
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People in Oman asked not to drink from plastic bottles kept in sun.
Residents in Oman have been warned not to leave plastic water bottles out in the sun by the Muscat Municipality, which is running a campaign on the adverse health effects of chemicals from plastic bottles leaching into the water stored inside them.
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People in Oman asked not to drink from plastic bottles kept in sun
August 7, 2017 | 11:07 PM By Gautam Viswanathan / gautam@timesofoman.com
Photo -Muscat MunicipalityPeople in Oman asked not to drink from plastic bottles kept in sun
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Residents in Oman have been warned not to leave plastic water bottles out ...
People asked #nottodrink from #plasticbottles kept in sun
Muscat: Residents in Oman have been warned not to leave plastic water bottles out in the sun, as this could cause cancer.
“For your health, avoid keeping and storing drinking water under the sun,” tweeted the Muscat Municipality, which is running a campaign on the adverse health effects of chemicals from plastic bottles leaching into the water stored inside them. Dr. Sajeev Bhaskar, a general practitioner at the Al Lamki Polyclinic, highlighted the effects this could have on people.
“These bottles may have the ISO mark of approval, but just because they have that, doesn’t mean it is always safe to drink because sometimes, they are not stored properly,” he explained. “Plastics contain a highly carcinogenic compound called Bisphenol A, which is commonly used for bottled water and leaches into it water at a certain temperature.”
“Bisphenol A stimulates prostate cancer cells and causes tissue changes that resemble the early stages of breast cancer in both mice and humans,” he added. “Higher levels of Bisphenol A in humans have also been associated with ovarian dysfunction. If at all you do need to keep bottles of water in your car, please store them in glass bottles.”
Dr. Basheer, an internist and diabetologist at the Badr Al Sama’a Hospital, also agreed with the need to exercise caution when it came to storing water in the sun.
“In the long-term, plastics in water can cause cancer,” he revealed. “While long-term exposure is definitely dangerous, it is also very common to suffer from lung diseases in the short-term. It is very dangerous to keep plastic bottles in your cars and in places that have direct exposure to sunlight.”
Always cover
“It is common for those who are involved in field work to keep their bottles in the sun, but this is dangerous,” added Basheer. “If they are working outdoors, it is better to cover these bottles with a cloth, so that sunlight does not directly penetrate them. These provisions must be made by the company that is sending workers into the field, and ideally, they should be provided with a cooler to store their drinks.”
Oman’s Public Authority for Consumer Protection (PACP) also weighed in on the matter. “The World Health Organisation (WHO) suggests 1,000 ppm (parts-per-million) or less,” they tweeted, in response to queries about safe toxin levels in drinking water, adding, “In bottled drinking water, this should be between 100 and 600ppm.”
Raids carried out by PACP have led to caches of improperly stored water in the past. This July, according to the authority, “the Department of Consumer Protection in Al Dakhiliyah Governorate recently destroyed, in cooperation with the Municipality of Izki, a quantity of bottled mineral water containers, because they did not comply with the standard specifications.”
“Drinking water bottle boxes were found packed and stored in unhealthy storage conditions, and samples were taken for examination,” added the PACP spokesperson. “The results of the examination by the Food Control Laboratory of the Directorate General of Regional Municipalities and Water Resources in Al Dhakhiliyah showed that the product does not conform to the reference standard, and there was a change in taste and smell due to storage conditions.”
“The Public Authority for Consumer Protection calls upon all merchants and suppliers to abide by the provisions of the Consumer Protection Law and its executive regulations to avoid legal accountability,” he added.
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How Trump signed a global death warrant for women.
With one devastating flourish of the presidential pen, worldwide progress on family planning, population growth and reproductive rights was swept away. Now some of the world’s poorest women must count the cost.
Six months ago, one powerful white man in the White House, watched by seven more, signed a piece of paper that will prevent millions of women around the world from deciding what they can and can’t do with their own bodies.
In that moment, on his very first Monday morning in office, Donald Trump effectively signed the death warrants of thousands of women. He reversed global progress on contraception, family planning, unsustainable population growth and reproductive rights. His executive order even has implications for the battle against HIV, tuberculosis and malaria.
Rarely can the presidential pen have been flourished to such devastating effect. The policy it reintroduced will shut health clinics in Uganda and HIV programmes in Mozambique; it will compel women from Nepal to Namibia to seek out deadly back-street abortions.
“It is an unprecedented attack on women’s rights – it goes much deeper than abortion,” said Ulla Müller, president and CEO of EngenderHealth, a leading advocacy organisation.
“Girls are kicked out of school if they get pregnant. They are very often forced to marry the fathers. Very often they have to live in their in-laws’ house, where they have to do unpaid labour. It is a violation of women’s rights. We need to see this as a gender issue and very much as a power issue.”
Tewodros Melesse, director general of the the International Planned Parenthood Federation (IPPF), which stands to lose as much as $100m, said the US move “seeks to restrict the rights of millions of women. It asks us as a health provider, to stop providing services which are entirely legal in countries through our members – where some of the most poorest women, depend on them.
“The human cost of the gag rule will have a long and fatal legacy.”
Like so many far-reaching American policies, Trump’s executive order is enshrouded in complexity to the point where it seems almost designed to confuse.
The order reinstated the Mexico City policy (so called because it was first signed at the International Conference of Population in Mexico City, in 1984). Under this policy, any NGO outside the US seeking American funding for family planning has to pledge it will not carry out abortions anywhere in the world, even with its own money. Such organisations must agree not to talk to women about a termination, nor lobby governments to liberalise their policy on abortion.
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What is the ‘global gag rule’, and why does Trump support it?
US aid has never been used to fund abortion services (it is forbidden, by law). This is a ban on speaking about abortion – a restriction on free speech which the First Amendment does not permit within the US. For this reason, the rule became known as the global gag.
Trump’s version of the policy has massively expanded its reach. It is no longer just international family planning organisations that must agree not to “perform or actively promote abortion”. Every global health organisation that accepts US funding now has to sign the same clause. Anyone working to fight HIV, get vaccines or vitamins to children, or prevent Zika or malaria is facing a stark and unprecedented choice: sign, or lose all funding from the biggest aid donor in the world.
I believe that President Trump doesn’t give a hoot about any of these issues
Jon O'Brien, president, Catholics for Choice
As much as $10bn (£7.7bn) of global health funding hangs in the balance. Among those who will lose money if they refuse to sign up to the anti-abortion orthodoxy are the two big international family planning organisations, Marie Stopes International (MSI) and the IPPF. But for the first time, global NGOs such as Save the Children, WaterAid and the International HIV/Aids Alliance are also targeted.
The effects will be felt most keenly in the tiny, frontline clinics run by small NGOs struggling to help women and children in crowded townships, refugee camps and remote rural villages. There are no abortion doctors in such places (in most African countries, abortion is banned unless the woman’s life is in danger). These clinics instead offer contraceptive injections and condoms for those who would struggle to feed numerous children. But they also treat children for malaria and malnutrition and their mothers for HIV. This integrated care is now under threat.
But that’s not all. Trump has also decided to stop funding the UN Population Fund, which does hard and heroic work, reaching some of the most oppressed women in the world in refugee camps and war zones, as well as getting contraception to the remotest parts of the planet. In 2016, the US gave the organisation $69m in core funds and for its humanitarian response work.
And deep budget cuts to foreign aid under Trump include a proposal to axe every cent for overseas family planning, currently $600m a year.
The triple blow is already being felt by some of the world’s poorest women.
Take Nigeria, a country with one of the world’s fastest growing populations. The average woman there has more than five children. MSI predicts that because of Trump’s “global gag rule”, there will be an additional 660,000 abortions in Nigeria over the next four years, with 10,000 women dying as a result.
“This is going to be really huge,” said MSI country head Effiom Effiom of the US decision to pull funding. “They’ve been key in strengthening healthcare. It’s their funding that allowed us to reach 500,000 women in the past three years. Who will bridge that gap?” he asks.
It’s a question that bothers Sakina Sani as well. She has two children already and knows she cannot afford many more. She is grateful to a family planning clinic in northern Nigeria for furnishing her with a contraceptive implant that will enable her to plan out her family for the next four years. But after that, she’ll be on her own.
Sakina Sani, a mother of two, receives a contraceptive implant
Sakina Sani, a mother of two, has a contraceptive implant – known informally among young Nigerians as a ‘tattoo’ – placed in her arm. Photograph: Ruth Maclean for the Guardian
“I’d have to have more children,” she admits. “All I could do is pray harder for God to help feed them.”
Across the continent, in Uganda, her experience is replicated by Dausi Mukwana, 26, who had the first of her four children at the age of 14. An injectable contraceptive called Sayana Press and a tireless healthworker called Aisha Mugoya have belatedly given her control over family planning. But this is now in jeopardy: funding will dry up in the coming weeks.
“The number of maternal deaths will increase as the number of pregnancies increases, and the number of abortions is going to increase,” said Dr Moses Okilipa of Reproductive Health Uganda, a branch of the IPPF, which refuses to sign up to the Mexico City policy.
Dausi Mukwana, 26, a rural Ugandan, receives a contraceptive called Sayana Press
Dausi Mukwana, 26, a rural Ugandan, receives a contraceptive called Sayana Press. Photograph: Juozas Cernius/for The Guardian
The glaring paradox is that the global gag policy doesn’t even work. “The gag rule contributes to the very thing it purportedly seeks to reduce: the frequency of abortion,” said a report in June from the Guttmacher Institute, a US research organisation focused on sexual and reproductive health and rights. Evidence shows that when the gag is imposed, unwanted pregnancies and abortions go up.
Banning abortions and forcing NGOs not to offer any counselling or advice about them drives desperate women to the back-street abortionists and witch doctors.
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Hardline opponents of abortion don’t understand this; they don’t believe it or don’t care. At Trump’s right elbow when he signed the order was Mike Pence, a born again Christian. Trump is not religious, but some of his most influential advisers are – and the choice of Pence as his running mate brought on board the religious right. The new, improved global gag is their reward.
“I believe that President Trump doesn’t give a hoot about any of these issues one way or the other,” said Jon O’Brien, president of Catholics for Choice. He pointed out that Trump’s closest advisers include a significant number of ultraconservative Catholics. Kellyanne Conway has been a prominent anti-choice campaigner for decades, he said, claiming in interviews that “unborn babies can feel pain at 20 weeks” (a view that the evidence does not support). Steve Bannon, chief strategist and Sean Spicer, White House press secretary, are both conservative Catholics. Katy Talento, a health policy aide on the Domestic Policy Council, recently published an article alleging that “chemical birth control causes abortions and often has terrible side effects, including deliberate miscarriage”, a claim about the pill that is not supported by scientists.
And then there is Pence. At the Republican National Convention in Ohio last July, he called himself “a Christian, a conservative and a Republican, in that order”. Born into an Irish Catholic Democrat-voting family in Indiana, he found God at a Christian music festival in Kentucky in 1978. He was still a Democrat in 1980, when he voted for Jimmy Carter, but his views started to shift to the right at college and he became a big admirer of Ronald Reagan’s “common sense conservatism”. By 1988 he was running for Congress as a Republican. He lost but won a seat in the House of Representatives for Indiana in 2000.
In his 2000 Congressional campaign, he urged that the Ryan White Act, which provides funds for HIV treatment for the poor, should only be renewed if the money was “directed toward those institutions which provide assistance to those seeking to change their sexual behaviour”.
As governor of Indiana in 2015 he made national headlines when he signed into law a bill that was interpreted as permitting discrimination against LGBT people in the state. Under the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, restaurants, hotels or shops would be able to cite a religious objection to serving gay customers. Pence was photographed signing the bill into law in March 2015 surrounded by monks and nuns in habits. A number of large businesses spoke out against the law, including Apple CEO Tim Cook and in the face of an outcry, Pence made revisions.
Opponents of the anti-abortion law signed by Mike Pence protest outside the Indiana State House in July 2016
Opponents of the anti-abortion law signed by Mike Pence protest outside the Indiana State House last July. Photograph: Mykal McEldowney/AP
His opposition to abortion has been solid. In October 2015, he awarded $3.5m of Indiana state funds to a charity called Real Alternatives, which promotes sexual abstinence and counsels pregnant women wanting an abortion to have the baby. Then, in March 2016, Pence brought in one of the toughest state abortion laws in the US. Abortion on the grounds of foetal abnormality, including Down’s syndrome, would be banned. All women wanting an abortion would be required to have an ultrasound examination, where they would see the foetus on the monitor, at least 18 hours before the termination. The harsher aspects of this law were stayed by the courts, but the US by now understood Pence was willing to fight the most controversial battles on behalf of the religious right. As Rolling Stone put it in January: “When Trump needed a VP nominee with a career-long reputation for being virulently pro-life to balance his own abortion flip-flops, Mike Pence was the answer to all his political prayers.”
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The day after the inauguration, 500,000 people attended the Women’s March on Washington on 21 January, to voice disgust at Trump’s past sexual behaviour and fear for the future of women’s reproductive rights. Days later, Pence became the first vice-president in history to attend the annual anti-abortion March for Life, held for the past 44 years on or near the anniversary of the historic judgement of Roe v Wade. Thousands of anti-abortion activists were bussed to the National Mall in Washington DC, some holding pictures of the foetus in the womb, others waving banners. “Trump loves the bump” was one. “We voted to make America pro-life again”, said another. A third read: “We hear your silent cries”.
“It is no coincidence that the first right cited in the US Declaration of Independence is the right to life,” Conway told the crowd, to cheers. But it was Pence who made the real impact. Trump had sent him to address this gathering, he said. Life, Pence said, “is winning again in America”.
Fighting back
The most devastating impact of the policy is on the big providers of family planning, IPPF and MSI, whose clinics all over the world will be stripped of US funds because they offer abortions in countries where it is legal to do so (in the UK, Marie Stopes provides terminations on behalf of the NHS). In developing countries, they partner with local NGOs, funding clinics where women may go for a contraceptive implant or injection but often for other healthcare too, such as an HIV test or cervical cancer smear. All of this is at risk.
MSI received $30m from USAid last year, which was 17% of its total funding. It is working to raise funds from other sources, but the gap will be hard to fill. Hardest hit will be services in Madagascar, Zimbabwe, Uganda, Ethiopia, Nigeria and the Sahel. These are places where MSI has been running substantial programmes with USAid funding. In Madagascar, 40% of women get their contraception from MSI.
IPPF has about $100m annually in US funds but, after the last global gag, it deliberately invested nearly half the money in HIV services, decreasing its exposure in case another Republican president came in. Trump’s extension of the Mexico City policy to all forms of healthcare means they stand to lose the lot. Among programmes under threat unless alternative sources of funding can be found are HIV treatment in the Caribbean, clinics testing for Zika across Latin America, and help for displaced people in Colombia.
“We have become much more of an integrated service provider. We’re trying to be a one-stop shop that takes you from the start of life to the end of life,” said Matthew Lindley of IPPF, who support fragile health systems in impoverished and war-torn countries.
“If we had USAid funding, we would have expected to avert 6m unintended pregnancies,” said Megan Elliott, vice-president for strategy and development at MSI. “Because we can’t avert them, we believe there will be an additional 2m abortions. Because they are in restricted environments, the majority of those women will be getting a backstreet abortion where they won’t be properly cared for and certainly won’t get proper contraception to prevent a further unwanted pregnancy.”
Isabella Lövin
In a picture widely seen as a parody of Trump signing the global gag order, Isabella Lövin, Sweden’s deputy prime minister, is flanked by female colleagues as she signs a bill. Photograph: Johan Schiff/EPA
Last time the gag rule was in force, between 2001 and 2008, USAid stopped supplying contraceptives to NGOs in 16 developing countries in Africa, Asia and the Middle East, many of which had very high rates of HIV. Guttmacher cites Lesotho, where one in four women were HIV-positive, and which got no US support at all for family planning or contraceptive supplies under George W Bush. In 13 other countries, USAid cut off support to the leading family planning organisation. The Planned Parenthood Association of Zambia suffered a 24% budget cut and had to reduce its services.
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The fightback began in March. She Decides was the idea of the Dutch trade and development minister Lilianne Ploumen, who was backed by the Belgian, Swedish and Danish governments. A fundraising conference attracted representatives from 50 governments and raised €181m.
That’s a drop in the ocean, they acknowledge, but the campaign to persuade more governments, philanthropists and the private sector to step up with cash continues. Earlier this month, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (which also funds work at the Guardian) announced it would increase its funding for family planning by 60%, with an extra $375m over the next four years.
Chris Hohn, a hedge fund manager, started the Children’s Investment Fund Foundation, which makes grants for projects to improve children’s health in poor countries. Concerned about the harmful effects of pregnancy on so many adolescent girls, which can result in a baby suffering from stunting and malnutrition, his Fund is giving MSI $10m.
Millions of women have been given control over their bodies and their futures. Millions of girls have been able to stay in school and have hopes of a career. But the edicts of the Trump administration, rooted in an ideology that says the lives of women count for less than the life of a foetus, have set the world back years.
The gag meanwhile extends far beyond the world of NGOs. Western officials who don’t want to fall out with the Trump White House are silent. Those who work at the Department for International Development do not want to criticise their colleagues at USAid, who themselves are privately wringing their hands over a policy that will undo much of their good work on behalf of women and girls.
Further afield, the 30-year-old woman with 10 children she can’t feed or send to school, and the 14-year-old made pregnant by her uncle, can’t be gagged.
They have no voice at all.
Ruth Maclean in Maiduguri, Nigeria, and Liz Ford in Mbale, Uganda, contributed to this report
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Green China: In pursuit of rebuilding as 'an ecological civilization.'
Capitalizing on failures of U.S. leadership, China is emerging as a potential ‘great green power’ of the 21st century.
Cribb, Julian | June 13, 2017 | Leave a Comment Download as PDF
ADB Investment Brings Cleaner Energy to the People's Republic of China | Image by the Asian Development Bank | Flickr | CC BY-NC-ND 2.0
Capitalising on failures of U.S. leadership, China is emerging as a potential ‘great green power’ of the 21st century.
With an estimated 4000 people choking to death daily in the pall of fossil fuels that overhangs China’s industrial cities, the demand for clean-up action is imperative. [i]
It isn’t just the air. Nearly two thirds of the country’s groundwater and a third of its surface water are rated by China’s Environment Ministry as too polluted for human contact [ii] – and water scarcity menaces many of China’s largest cities, as well as the food supply. [iii]
Then there’s climate change, imperilling the giant nation’s food systems and flood-prone regions. There’s the still-booming trade in endangered animals and plants for Chinese medicine [iv], the relentless creep of the deserts in the north and west [v], the notorious ‘cancer villages’ [vi] coupled with soaring rates of ‘lifestyle’ diseases – stroke, cancer, diabetes, heart disease – stemming from an increasingly industrial diet and unhealthy cities. And those recurrent food poisoning scandals.
However, there is also growing evidence that the PRC Government is meeting the challenge of too-rapid development head-on. This began with the re-ignition by Premier Xi Jinping in 2013 of a 2007 plan to rebuild China as ‘an ecological civilization’. [vii] Dismissed at the time by some observers as sloganeering, the idea of a Green China has been steadily gathering force, propelled by mounting concern among its newly-affluent citizens who don’t want a prosperity that is going to cost them their lives – and also by the huge economic returns to be reaped.
Like most industrial giants before it, China is attempting massive clean-up and reform of the dirty industrial systems that built its present economic success. In so doing it is simultaneously erecting the launch pad for its next phase of economic expansion, restoring its cultural pride and seeking to relieve the anxiety of its rising middle classes over their health and wellbeing. It’s a work in progress, but progress is the operative word.
On the opposite side of the Pacific, by shocking contrast, an American President is throwing open his country’s revered National Parks to oil drillers, shredding the environmental laws that shield Americans’ health and safety, giving industry unbridled licence to pollute and befoul, sabotaging world and national climate progress, creating unhealthier school lunches for America’s children, making abysmal national healthcare worse and gagging government websites that warn citizens about these things.
While China suffers the pangs of over-development, grapples with endemic corruption and attempts to rein in the buccaneer industrialists who poison and pollute in the name of profit, the dream of a Green China is very much alive. Consider the following:
In the tussle for pole position in the booming market for electric cars China has already elbowed America into second place. In 2016 it reported putting 352,000 new electric vehicles on the roads, compared with 159,000 in the US, with plans for 3 million units a year by 2020. [viii] It is planning to flood the market with tiny, $5000, low-speed electric vehicles (LSEVs) and is the world leader in electric buses. For the rev-heads, China recently unveiled the world’s fastest electric car, the NIO EP9, capable of speeds up to 312km/h.
In renewable energy China occupies a comfortable position as world market leader. At home, its 400 manufacturers have turned out 77 gigawatts of photovoltaic capacity, with plans for a further 100 GW in the coming three years. By 2030 the sun may provide 20% of its energy needs. [ix] But China isn’t just cleaning up its own power sector: through soaring exports it has driven world solar prices down by 80 per cent, thrusting American exporters into second place and materially helping the planet to clean up its act and combat climate change.[x]
Last year China added 23 GW of the total of 55 GW of windpower installed worldwide. [xi] Its target is for 26% of its national energy needs to come from the wind by 2030. At the same time, it has cancelled more than 100 coal-fired power plants that were planned or under construction, and announced plans to close over 1000 coal mines.
By such measures China has claimed leadership in the tussle for a share of what the New York Times estimates will be a $6 trillion global market for clean technologies by 2030.[xii]
With the Trump Administration’s decision to abdicate its climate responsibilities, China has scented a once-in-a-generation opportunity to assert world policy leadership also, as National Geographic recently noted. [xiii] “The Paris Agreement is a hard-won achievement,” President Xi Jinping told the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, in January. “All signatories should stick to it instead of walking away from it, as this is a responsibility we must assume for future generations.” Following Trump’s exit notice, China has reaffirmed its intention of being a committed climate actor and its willingness to forge agreements with individual U.S. states.[xiv]
At the consumer health end of the spectrum China is responding to a global cancer pandemic which is being exacerbated by pollution and industrial toxins in food. New Scientist reports the PRC has taken a world lead in gene therapy using the new CRISPR technology to treat lung, cervical, breast, prostate, colon, kidney and throat cancers. [xv]
The smoggy concrete vista of the modern Chinese city may soon be shrouded in green, as cities like Nanjing adopt the Italian-inspired ‘vertical forest’, tree-clad skyscrapers which suck pollution out of the air and replace it with oxygen.[xvi] In Shanghai a 100-hectare urban farming development seeks to solve the compound challenges of food insecurity, employment and a fresh, healthier diet for urban Chinese.[xvii]
And in a bid to overcome the disastrous state of its fresh water, the PRC is halfway through an $11 billion plan to ‘massively reduce’ pollution, restore water quality and aquatic life and, hopefully, make its seven great river systems run clear again. [xviii]
China still has a long way to travel before it becomes the ecological civilization of Xi Jinping’s vision – but all the indicators are there of serious intent. Driving it forward, says British scholar David Tyfield, is a deep-seated yearning to restore Chinese eminence among human civilizations, lost to the West more than two centuries ago. “China’s grand project of ‘ecological civilization’ is so important in contemporary domestic politics that the environment will likely be seen as (its) trump card for some time yet,” he says. [xviv]
Holding it back is the fragility of central control expressed in the ‘fragmented authoritarianism’ of Chinese political structures, and the PRC’s own evident internal vacillation over which path to take: conventional military gorilla – or a green economic ‘soft power’.
Either way, the fate of China will influence the fate of humanity at large in the 21st Century. And that fate will be so much better for all if this vast civilization opts for “Green China”.
Sources:
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Floating hospitals treat those impacted by rising seas.
In parts of Bangladesh, flooding makes it impossible to build permanent hospitals. But that doesn’t mean people can’t get healthcare.
It may sound like science fiction, but for many Bangladeshis, their only hope for treatment is on a floating hospital. And by day they may send their kids to floating schools. These are just a few of the ways they are adapting to the effects of climate change.
"Bangladesh is actually learning to adapt to climate change faster than any other country in the world because the impacts are happening here and we’re having to deal with them out of necessity," says Saleemul Huq, director of the International Center for Climate Change and Development in Bangladesh.
Bangladesh is low lying and the most densely populated country in the world—putting a strain on its limited resources. The Bay of Bengal that lies to the south of the country has long been a generator of cyclones. But as the temperature of the seas rises, these storms have gotten more frequent and more intense.
Three major rivers and a vast number of rivulets drain the plains of the country. All this water carries more silt and sediment than any other river system on Earth. Some of this sediment accumulated to form floating islands, particularly in the Brahmaputra River—which at certain points is over 18 miles wide. Called chars in Bangla, these floating islands are extremely fertile. So they are inhabited by a number of farming families, most of them poor.
These chars form and disintegrate every few years.
"Bangladesh does not have many rocks. So the river banks and islands, they’re always moving," says Runa Khan, the founder and CEO of the nonprofit group Friendship, which works to improve the lives of the char people.
The fleeting nature of the chars makes it impossible for the government to build any permanent structures on them, like a school or a hospital. And officials are hesitant to build on other land in the area because the climate is changing, the seas are rising, and nothing feels permanent. So Friendship built a hospital on a boat, to at least bring primary and secondary healthcare to the islands.
After receiving a grant worth more than $750,000 from the Emirates Airline Foundation, Friendship named the twin-hulled vessel the Emirates Friendship Hospital (EFH). The Rangdhonu Friendship hospital serves the coastal belt in the south.
The foundation covers the salaries of the staff that work in the Emirates floating hospital, so they can offer treatment for free.
Saiffudin Akhtar, a resident medical officer on the EFH, says they anchor the ship in a location that is best accessible to the char people, who live in more than 400 islands. The staff then meet with local leaders to let them know of the services being offered. On the days I visited the ship, there was a two-day cataract surgery camp.
A record with patients' names and mobile numbers is kept on board the EFH. The hospital staff do their best to follow up with patients from time to time. They also offer them boat rides from their chars to the hospital. The ship covers a few hundred miles and can treat abouta 60,000 patients a year. On board are two operating suites, two eight-bed wards, a pathological lab, an x-ray machine, pediatric and gynecological units, and dental and ophthalmological rooms.
The voyages have led the medical staff to encounter high rates of cervical cancer in the chars. According to the World Health Organization, roughly 12,000 new cervical cancer cases are diagnosed each year in Bangladesh. Nearly half of these result in death.
Masuma, a paramedic on the EFH, says the reasons for the high rates on the chars, in particular, are varied and include child marriage and improper use of contraceptives.
Musammad Noor Begum, a twenty-two-year-old mother—who tested positive in a preliminary cervical cancer screening test—says one of the primary reasons for child marriage is poverty. "The parents cannot afford to send their child to school. And so when a proposal comes from a good house they think it is best to give [their daughter's] hand in marriage," says Noor Begum.
The lack of access to healthcare and education drives women to give birth at home, often at the hands of an unqualified neighbor who neither knows the right timing or the position to deliver babies. Masuma also says that tugging on the child while the mother is birthing leads to the loosening of the uterine muscles, resulting in uterine prolapses.
"Whenever we go to the char area we usually see malnourished women with one or two babies on their laps. They have thin, emaciated bodies and you can just see—these are the people [who need help]," says Akhtar.
With rising seas, the lives of these already vulnerable populations have only gotten harder.
"What has happened with the changing climate is [storms and flooding] that used to happen once a year are now coming five times a year," says Runa Khan. “And they cannot adapt to that.”
This story was reported with a grant provided by the Pulitzer Center for Crisis Reporting.
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This Price is not right.
President-Elect Donald Trump would have been hard-pressed to pick someone more frightening than Rep. Tom Price, the Republican from Georgia, to direct the Department of Health and Human Services.
This Price Is Not Right
Donald Trump has tapped U.S. Rep. Tom Price to lead the Department of Health and Human Services. Women, the LGBT community, and the poor will suffer.
12.02.2016 / BY Judy Stone
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PRESIDENT-ELECT Donald Trump would have been hard-pressed to pick someone more frightening than Rep. Tom Price, the Republican from Georgia, to direct the Department of Health and Human Services. After all, Trump and Vice President-elect Mike Pence, the outgoing governor of Indiana, have vowed to repeal the Affordable Care Act and its protections for women, the LGBT community, and poor people. Price will undoubtedly work to fulfill those goals.
Both Price and Pence have long-standing histories of extremist views about women’s health needs. They are rabidly anti-abortion, even in the case of serious fetal abnormality or risk to the mother’s health. Price currently enjoys a 0 percent rating from Planned Parenthood and a 100 percent rating by the National Right to Life Committee.
In Indiana, two women of color were imprisoned for fetal losses under Governor Pence’s fetal homicide law. Price and Pence both believe that life begins at the moment of conception. Pence even wants miscarried fetuses to be buried or cremated, although spontaneous miscarriages commonly occur early in pregnancies. Both Indiana and Texas have passed such laws.
In 2012 Price told ThinkProgress that there’s “not one” woman who doesn’t have access to birth control. In fact, a Hart research survey commissioned by Planned Parenthood found that 55 percent of women aged 18 to 34 reported trouble affording this necessity. If his claims were true, why would more and more U.S. women — 20.2 million as of 2014 — need publicly funded family planning services?
Many women rely on Planned Parenthood for family planning and screening for breast and cervical cancer, HIV, and sexually transmitted diseases. The triumvirate has repeatedly called to defund the group, which serves almost 3 million people, although they provide essential services not covered elsewhere. This vindictive stance is driven by ideology, not science — and certainly not sound policy. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office projects that defunding Planned Parenthood would cost taxpayers $130 million over 10 years due to costs of unintended pregnancies. Further, if curbing abortion rates is the goal, why cut contraceptive benefits and promote inaccurate, ineffective, abstinence based “education?”
Laws criminalizing abortion don’t work. Instead, they drive patients to seek dangerous alternatives to safe abortion. I’ve seen sepsis from abortion; I hope never to again. A recent study showed that the abortion rate per 1,000 women fell from 46 in 1990 to 27 in 2014, largely due to the increasing availability of effective contraceptives.
Yet access to contraceptives is likely to be one of Price’s first targets, as he described a requirement for making contraceptives available as “a trampling of religious freedom and religious liberty in this country.” Other “essential services” (now provided by Planned Parenthood) include screening and counseling for domestic violence, screening for diabetes during pregnancy, breastfeeding counseling and equipment, screening for HPV and HIV, and one preventive care visit annually. These benefits weren’t made on a whim — instead, the National Academies of Science’s Institute of Medicine recommended that these preventive services should be covered without cost sharing, and the Health Resources and Services Administration adopted the recommendations. There is concern that the new administration may be able to rewrite the regulations according to the dictates of their fundamentalist ideology, against sound public health and scientific advice. This could be done by administrative fiat without Congressional approval or through attempts to repeal the ACA.
Currently, maternity care is mandated under the ACA. But Price’s cynically named alternative, the “Empowering Patients First Act,” eliminates all the current essential health benefits guaranteed by that legislation. Insurers could choose to not cover maternity benefits, and could again deny women coverage because of pre-existing conditions, which in the past have included yeast infections and even domestic violence. Insurers could resume the inequality of “gender rating,” or charging women much higher rates than men.
Women of color are at special risk of suffering from funding cuts, as they already face greater health disparities. For example, African-American women have a four-fold higher death rate during childbirth than white women, and higher deaths from breast cancer as well. Latinas and Vietnamese women have higher rates of cervical cancer. Native American women are 2.4 times as likely to develop diabetes than white women. The ACA is critical to addressing the health disparities in these groups and among low-income communities.
Price and Pence demand constitutional protections for unborn persons from the moment of conception on. But this flies in the face of a woman’s autonomy, relegating her to being viewed only as an incubator for embryos and fetuses. Women could again be forced to have medication or surgeries against their will, or be imprisoned for doing anything that might harm the fetus. The woman’s own survival would be valued less than even a nonviable fetus.
WHILE PRICE AND PENCE claim a religious belief in the sanctity of an unborn child’s life, their concern seems to evaporate once that child is born. Both voted repeatedly against public health funding, including the Children’s Health Insurance Program, or CHIP. Price has advocated for state, rather than federal control of some Head Start programs, and he wants to cut assistance for families or people struggling with disabilities.
Price opposed the re-authorization of the Violence Against Women Act and both he and Pence oppose nondiscrimination protections for the LGBT community. Refusal clauses they support basically would allow discrimination against a wide array of people, trumping civil rights in the name of religious beliefs.
If they attempt to repeal the Affordable Care Act without any viable alternative, the wealthy white troika risks rebellion as their base awakens to the reality of a future of insurmountable medical bills and no safety net. Trump lost the popular vote by at least 2.5 million votes. Add the nearly 5.5 million white people who Paul Krugman estimates just voted themselves out of health care and the 55 million women who risk losing their preventive care, and Trump will surely face growing opposition to his draconian plans.
While it’s only a fantasy on my part at this time, maybe if our fears about the destruction of healthcare in this country come to pass, women will take a lesson from the Greek playwright Aristophanes, whose heroine Lysistrata persuaded the women of Greece to withhold sexual privileges until their husbands and lovers negotiated an end to the Peloponnesian War. In this war — which is over women’s health, dignity, and rights — the stakes are clear.
The head of the Department of Health and Human Services has a moral responsibility to care for all people. Based on his track record, Price — an orthopedic surgeon himself, as well as a Christian — seems poised to make basic health care more difficult for millions of women and children. That would make a mockery not just of a doctor’s obligation to do no harm, but also the tenets of his own faith, which call for care and compassion for those in need.
Dr. Judy Stone is a Maryland-based physician specializing in infectious disease, and she is a frequent contributor to Forbes.
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Few women fight wildfires. That’s not because they’re afraid of flames.
They signed up to battle blazes for the federal government, but their biggest struggles have been with discrimination, harassment and abuse.
By Darryl Fears November 20 at 7:46 PM
WHISKEYTOWN, Calif. — The burn boss scanned the snaking trail of the Swasey Recreation Area through thick black sunglasses.
She saw firefighters scurrying on a hill above in a smoky blue haze. They were setting dozens of fires to burn away piles of sticks and shrubs that a lightning strike or cigarette butt could use to grow into a wildfire. Their work was part of a key prescribed burn training that could help them move up in rank.
But there was a much deeper meaning for burn boss Erin Banwell and the firefighters in the haze. All but a few were women, and they were taking part in the first majority-female training exchange, called WTREX, in a profession that is known for shunning women.
“We need to create a space for women to develop,” said Amanda Stamper, one of the training’s organizers, who darted up and down the trail to offer help. “They get held back on purpose because of bias. It makes it really hard for women to function well.”
During the first briefing meeting for the three-day prescribed burning in October, Kelly Martin, the fire chief at Yosemite National Park, was floored when she entered a dining hall and saw 35 women staring back at her. “It was just, like, . . . stunning,” Martin said. “I needed a moment.” In more than three decades as a wildfire fighter, she had never seen so many female colleagues in one room at one time.
A fire crackles as trainees attend to a prescribed pile blaze in the Swasey Recreation Area in Redding, Calif., on Oct. 26. (Tauhid Chappell/The Washington Post)
Women who fight wildfires for the federal government describe their work as isolating and lonely — and scary in a way that has nothing to do with fire. In a male-dominated, hypermasculine discipline that operates like the military, they face discrimination, sexual harassment and verbal abuse.
Nearly 45 years ago, women sued for better access to firefighting jobs. Under court order, the Forest Service’s operation increased female recruitment in a region that includes California, where bias against women is some of the worst in the nation, civil rights advocates say.
[California’s flames fueled by historic drought]
But when the order expired 10 years ago, the number of women sharply fell because, critics say, the service failed to adequately address a chauvinist culture.
Women hold about 12 percent of the government’s permanent wildfire suppression jobs at the Forest Service, Bureau of Land Management and National Park Service, and retaining them is a challenge.
A sample of recent Equal Employment Opportunity complaints show why many choose to leave.
Heidi Turpen holds a map of the Sequoia National Forest, where she worked as a wildfire fighter for the Forest Service in 2015. (Darryl Fears/The Washington Post)
Heidi Turpen, a former firefighter for the Forest Service, said male colleagues routinely propositioned her for sex and told her women didn’t belong at her station in the Sequoia National Forest.
Alisha Dabney, a former Forest Service wildfire crew member, said she was ordered by a supervisor to report when her menstrual cycle started and was placed in a headlock during an attempted rape. She said she was fired after reporting the harassment.
Anda Janik, a former firefighter who settled a claim against the Navy in 2013, was not provided with facilities to shower at a fire station outside San Diego. Janik said in an interview that she was forced to knock on a battalion commander’s door each morning to ask to use his office shower.
Other women said they were propositioned for sex, inappropriately touched, stalked, photographed without their knowledge, spied on while bathing and screamed at because of their sex.
Many women said they are speaking out about abuse because of Fairfax County firefighter Nicole Mittendorff’s suicide in April. After her body was discovered in Shenandoah National Park, county fire officials discovered sexually suggestive messages about Mittendorff on a website, messages which appeared to have been posted by her colleagues.
The Forest Service, which employs more than 10,000 federal firefighters, far more than any other agency, acknowledges past problems but said it now has zero tolerance for sexual harassment.
[A giant reservoir that supplies a California county’s drinking water is nearly empty]
The agency said it requires civil rights training for every employee, conducts surveys and has bulked up its contingent of investigators and case workers for a rapid response to complaints.
“We do have positive trends,” said Lenise Lago, deputy chief for the agency’s business operations. “Data shows that our cases of harassment based on gender are half of what they were five years ago.”
Critics say many women don’t report bad conduct because they’re afraid of repercussions.
Before Martin defied the odds to become one of the highest-ranking officers in federal wildfire suppression, she was one such woman.
In testimony before a House oversight committee in September, Martin said she was stalked during a training early in her career and spied on as she took a shower but kept quiet, as many women say they do, for fear that reporting it would hurt her career.
Martin told lawmakers she finally came forward at “great risk to my career,” because recent cases have shown that the kind of harassment she experienced in 1984 is still happening.
“As women, many of us feel shame and fear of coming forward to report misconduct and cannot bring ourselves to be the ones who have the difficult and painful task of speaking up about this type of serious allegation,” she said.
Jon Schwedler, associate director at the Nature Conservancy, and two wildfire trainees talk during the Women-in-Fire Training Exchange, or WTREX, on Oct. 26. (Tauhid Chappell/The Washington Post)
‘I’m never going back’
At a small apartment in suburban Los Angeles, Heidi Turpen held her head back to stop tears from streaming down her face.
Turpen was recalling her six-month stint as a seasonal worker last year for the Forest Service, a division of the Agriculture Department, in Sequoia National Forest. She was excited to have a job doing what she loved with good pay and government benefits. But just three months into the season that started in June, according to her civil rights claim against the agency, the harassment started.
[New sexual-misconduct claims hit Yosemite, Yellowstone in widening Park Service scandal]
Turpen and another woman on her female crew were exercising with a male firefighter in a gym when another man approached: “When you’re done rubbing that [female genitalia] all over yourself,” he said, addressing the male firefighter, “you can come have a beer with us.”
The women, stunned, debated whether they should report it. Turpen said yes; her friend declined. “She wanted to wait to see if things would get better. She didn’t want to ruffle feathers. I said, ‘What about my feathers? They’re ruffled.’ ”
Turpen’s report to a supervisor triggered a talk with both men. When she returned to the gym, she was told she was banned. She fought that decision and won. Later, she said, when women were moved to a male barrack from an all-female barrack because of a hole in the roof, she and a friend were verbally attacked by a man within days.
“He lays into us about the cleanliness of the kitchen, saying we’re attracting bugs and we’re dirty and we should be washing dishes,” Turpen said.
“Finally he got so close to my face, I said you’re coming off a bit hostile right now,” Turpen recalled. “He said I was being hostile. Females shouldn’t be here. He was so close to my face that I was backed up to the refrigerator.”
The Forest Service declined to discuss individual claims, but Lesa Donnelly, vice president of the Agriculture Department’s Coalition of Minority Employees, confirmed that Turpen is one of several women who brought charges against the agency. California is an especially bad place for women firefighters, Donnelly and other women said.
Several women filed a lawsuit against the service in 1972 for failure to hire and recruit women, which resulted in a push to bring more women into firefighting after the lawsuit was settled nine years later.
Donnelly, who lives in Redding near Whiskeytown, filed a second lawsuit in 1995 over reprisals against women after the first lawsuit. The experience turned Donnelly into an advocate.
“I get calls every day from women who are getting harassed,” Donnelly said. “Obviously, there are a lot of male firefighters in the agency who are pro-diversity, who want women on their crews and want women to get ahead. But there are enough misogynists who want to keep women out of the field and out of managerial positions.”
Over the remaining three months of Turpen’s stint, she claimed that a police officer with a drug-sniffing dog illegally searched her room because of false rumors that she sold narcotics.
“I was also approached by male employees asking for sexual favors. A guy started stalking me.” Her anxiety was creeping into paranoia. “My day-to-day life turned into this fear of what was going to happen next,” Turpen said.
After the season, Turpen switched careers. “I’m never going back,” she said.
[Climate scientists predict more blazing heat, drought, fires and scores of dead trees in the West]
‘Uniquely discriminatory’
Diversity training at the Forest Service tries to cover all the bases — bias in hiring and promotion, sexual harassment such as propositions and inappropriate touching, as well as dirty words about women that fly constantly on the crews.
A 2008 National Report Card on Women in Firefighting showed that 85 percent of women said they thought they were treated differently from men. Women reported being exposed to pornography, requests for sex and hostile language 15 times more often than men.
“There’s something about firefighting that seems to make it a uniquely discriminatory environment,” said Debra D’Agostino, an attorney at the Federal Practice Group who represents Janik and other federal employees. “I deal with female law enforcement officers all the time, and I don’t hear this sort of thing.”
It drives women away.
“Women say, I really want to do firefighting but I don’t want to hang out with these guys who objectify women and act crass and . . . be a part of an environment that’s not welcoming to them,” said Stamper, a former member of the Forest Service who’s now a fire-management officer for the Nature Conservancy in Oregon.
But Stamper and others say the troublemakers are a minority. Some men are trying to help change the culture of firefighting.
One is Travis Dotson, a firefighter who addressed discrimination against women in an essay he wrote in the summer for Two More Chains, a publication devoted to the profession.
“You see crew after crew after crew with no women on them. That’s not a reflection of who’s applying for these jobs,” Dotson said in an interview, explaining why he spoke out.
Two participants in WTREX work together during a training exercise. (Tauhid Chappell/The Washington Post)
“There are the things you hear, the egregious, things that are way out there: ‘I don’t hire women.’ There are . . . things we don’t even realize we’re doing,” he said. “When a woman is leading a crew, and an authority comes looking for the boss, they always go to the tallest guy in the group. He may be the rookie on the team but always get addressed.”
Reaction to the essay was generally positive, he said. “There’s real minor instance of men being offended. They felt like I used too broad of a brush. My response is I understand. The intent of the piece was you don’t get to hide. Yeah, they see me as a traitor. That’s okay, it’s worth it to me.”
[National Park Service turns 100, and some sites are showing their age]
‘This is a safe space’
Leaning on the handle of her hatchet on the trail at the Swasey Recreational Area, Katie Sauerbrey — 5-foot-3, 118 pounds and wearing a no-nonsense expression — said she has heard it all from men: Women won’t last. They belong in the home raising families.
She dismisses it. “I’ve been at fires with a 35-pound bag on my back, a 35-pound chainsaw and a 10-pound kit. If you have the mental grit to get through that, you belong,” she said.
Sauerbrey, a firefighter for the Nature Conservancy who embeds with the Forest Service and National Park Service when needed, said she traveled from her station in South Carolina to the women’s training exercise to work with intelligent and strong women.
“I know a lot of women who have left fire because they did not feel supported or felt there was no room for them to grow,” Sauerbrey said. “It’s sad for me to see women who have that desire who don’t continue because of the culture. It’s hard to describe the passion people have for this job. There’s no other job I’d rather be in.”
WTREX, or Women-in-Fire Training Exchange, electrified female firefighters when it was announced. Ninety people from the United States and abroad applied for the 10-day training, and fewer than half were accepted for lack of space.
As a fire rages behind them, Sonya Kaufman, right, and Emily Troisi explain how two Washington-area natives ended up in jobs fighting wildfires in the deep woods. (Darryl Fears/The Washington Post)
In firefighting, every bit of training is essential. It’s the path to the certifications needed to move up in rank and pay. In fire crews throughout the country, where two women are often the maximum, they are often overlooked by the men who lead them. Many are so intimidated, they don’t ask questions because guys sometimes mock them, so they don’t advance.
“This is a safe space,” said Lenya Quinn-Davidson, a University of California Cooperative Extension adviser who planned the event. “There are no wrong questions. Women feel more comfortable in this environment.”
And they had swagger. They barked orders. They paid little attention to the dangerous poison oak they walked over to get to assignments. They wanted to demonstrate something too many of their male colleagues doubt — that women can do the work.
Monique “Mo” Hein was one of several women who came up with the idea for WTREX. They were at a regular training event in North Carolina last year where they were assigned to a barracks for women only.
At night, after hard training days, they sat in a room talking about fire with more comfort than they did around men.
“It was like, ‘How do you run a chainsaw?’ Maybe there were other ways to do it that men don’t talk about because they’re used to doing it their way,” she recalled. The talk got bold. “We wanted to see more women in leadership roles. We wanted to help get them there. All of a sudden, we had this thought about a TREX with all women.”
WTREX might have been a safe space deep in the forest, but these women would have to return to their crews.
At the prescribed burn and in the dining hall where firefighters gathered for dinner, they spoke openly, sharing specific instances of discrimination and sexual harassment.
But afterward, nearly all of about 15 women interviewed for this article quietly asked that their comments not be included.
And each one said the same thing: It would hurt their career.
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