"Christmas Tree, Oh Christmas Tree, How Sustainable Are Thy Branches...?"

A Christmas tree with gifts carefully wrapped beneath says abundance, it says peace, it says yes indeed we killed this tree for all the right reasons this season.

Maybe you aren't Christian, maybe you are aren't religious at all, which is why a tree is a good way to celebrate the season. The ancient Europeans in Celtic and other pre-Christian traditions used pine bows to celebrate their connection with the Earth, and the folks at Tolerance.org suggest the tree may be a hold-over from that. Regardless, its a good place to assemble your Kwanza/Channuka/Christmas gifts and stop them from being trodden upon or carted off by carolers, thieves and other drunks.

But what is a healthy happy planet-friendly way of sorting out a tree for Christmas?

You could get a plastic tree, with all its packaging and petroleum-based PVCs and fuel-hungry transport that brings that tree from China to wherever you are. Though it is used every year for five or ten years or so and that helps mitigate some of it's carbon and manufacturing footprint. It doesn't smell like a tree, it lacks that Christmas ambiance, but if you are allergic to pitch and don't like pine needles all over your presents, it can work - but other than the color it is certainly not green.

You could also buy one of those farmed Christmas trees. Transported and shipped halfway across the continent, then wrapped in plastic netting or shrink wrap, this option is hardly much better that the plastic tree, and you have to buy one every year. The folks at North Carolina University have been doing health studies on farms. It does smell like a tree, look like a tree, and lets face it, if you are in a big city there may not be a lot of other options available. Or are there?

A quick search of the net brought many helpful hints on how to make your tree more sustainable. You could have a living tree. The folks at Earth Easy explain to how to pot, keep and maintain a rooted tree all year 'round. This is a great way to hold onto the brainwave of the season: you can be nice to people, give them gifts and be thankful for what you have ALL YEAR.

My folks here in Colorado decorate their living Christmas tree from a few years ago that they planted in the garden. Since our presents would get wet under that tree, and it gets a little cold in Colorado this time of year, it isn't practical to use that particular tree as our main Christmas centerpiece, but its still nice to see it thriving under its heavy blanket of snow and twinkly coalpower-driven lights.

If a planted pine tree is too tough to take care of in a small New York apartment, requiring at least as much attention as an old sofa or chair, then maybe a Christmas cactus could work for you. Another suggestion is to get an old slide projector and keep a projection of a tree up on your wall with the fireplace channel burning next to it on the TV or computer. Anything to get the old Christmas spirit to take possession of you.

Here in Colorado the white Christmases grow on trees, children are below average and around every corner there is a National Forest just waiting to be chopped down so that the gas industry can inject fracturing compounds into our water supply. To assist this very important economic process the folks at the Forest Service have issued us Christmas tree cutting permits.

All facetious remarks about gas drilling aside, usually the National Forest Service does have the forest's health somewhere near the bottom end of their top twenty priorities, and selective cutting done at a sustainable level can keep a forest healthy, wealthy and standing. So I trooped up into the White River National Forest the other day with a little yellow tag and chose an overshadowed little pine tree in a tight stand that needed thinning.

Yes, for the first time in my adult life, I chopped down a living wild tree in a wild forest, wrapped it up in a blue tarp that looked appropriately like a body bag, and skied that tree down into the valley to my parents living room here in Glenwood Springs.

So now it stands down there, a symbol of sustainable forestry that may or may not be a permanent blotch on my green Karma. At least the presents are protected from the sloppy boots of marauding carolers, and the house is filled with the fine smell of pine.

Merry Christmas everybody. I just shouldn't have counted the rings.


Sustainable harvesting of timber is one way to keep forests healthy and communities employed as guardians of this important resource.


Skiing-out with the body... I mean the tree.


A sustainably harvested Christmas tree is a great place to keep presents and the planet safe. Jeff and Jade Barbee.


White River National Forest in Colorado, much of which is being exploited by private companies for Gas Well Drilling.

The Malaria Handbook

Antonio Langa is the informaticist at the Manhica Institute, left, he is examining a blood slide, positive with Malaria, with journalist Jonathan Clayton, on assignment with the photographer from the Times newspaper in London.




Dr. Montse Reno, at her office in Manhica, Mozambique. The Malaria Vaccine Initiative in Manhica, Mozambique is organized by the University of Barcelona and supported by the Gates Foundation.






Mosquito Nets protect Karoline Ntchanga, in Kasongo, DRC, who has been in the local hospital for 2 weeks with her son who is suffering from Malaria.




Malaria is not the worst thing ever, if you have the right medication. Many in Africa do not have good access to anti-malarial medication, and this is the cause of eight hundred thousand deaths per year.

One of the most primal and powerful weapons in the battle for this disease is our own immunity. Many researchers have shown that people who are exposed to the malaria protozoa from a young age develop some sort of resistance to it. In Africa, the disease has been among the population for millions of years, so many people with African ancestry have some sort of immunity or resistance. What might kill a Swedish person may only make a healthy African sick with something akin to the common cold, -unless their immune system is compromised by hunger or HIV.

Malaria mutates quickly according to the latest news from the World Health Organization (WHO), and it seems to get deadlier and more able to cause havoc in the systems of those who were showing resistance. So the disease mutates and creates new strains, resistant to it's victims immune systems as well as the pantheon of drugs thrown at it.

The drugs themselves fall loosely into two categories, ones to stop you from getting it, and ones that cure it. Often there is crossover, where the same preventative drugs are given in shorter, higher doses to cure the illness. For anyone who visits Africa it is prudent to take some of these drugs in combination -according to a knowledgeable doctors advice. But for those of us who live here for years, it is not healthy to take any of the drugs for more than a year or two.

Some of the drugs can be dangerous. People have had heart problems, liver failure, and in some cases permanent dementia. This is probably enough to make most people change their Serengeti holiday plans to the sunny beaches of Florida, and indeed the presence of Malaria partly accounts for the tiny tourism numbers in Africa.

But these drugs are far less dangerous than the disease. Malaria can lead to liver failure, kidney failure, ruptured spleen, stroke and death. For visitors to Africa who are here for less than a year, there are excellent preventative drugs with minimal side effects.

For everyone in a "red zone", Malaria is a reality that we cannot avoid. Sometimes as journalists we choose stories to cover about Malaria as much for our own education as that of our readers. This puts us into contact with some of the most accomplished Malaria researchers in the world, like the Malaria Vaccine Initiative in Manhica, Mozambique who are close to developing a new trial vaccine that might be one more tool to fight this deadly disease.

So now you may have guessed it. I figure I got this case of Malaria about ten days ago in Mozambique. Because the camp I was staying in is far from villages and there is no history of Malaria there, I probably got it somewhere else.

There was one evening where I waited in the post-rain dreariness of mud in a small town for a grilled chicken and chips. It took about three hours, and since I had arrived there from the bush on my way back to camp around 4 pm, I was still in my shorts.

So there I sat, hang-dog hungry for hours while being food for the whining multitudes buzzing hungrily around me. The mosquitoes were thick under the table, and the place had all the Malaria sign posts: wet, populated, poor health care, and after dark.

Well I had my dinner, the mosquitoes had theirs, and now I am doing battle with the legions of parasites they sent to feast on me, breaking open my red blood cells to use for their own replication.

I am laying on my sofa in Johannesburg, watching a long epic from the Pacific in World War Two with the sound turned very low to stop my head from pounding. I can't help identifying those fresh faced young marines with my own white blood cells, valiantly defending island-like organs, getting drug-filled reinforcements from pill-like ships.

Delirious.

I think of visiting the Malaria Vaccine Initiative, where I asked Spanish Researcher Dr. Rontse Reno whether she had enjoyed the occasional brain busting bout of the disease. She laughed, "We all get it, all the time, this is a Malarial hotspot, so we take our cure quickly, we take a few days off... if you have the drugs, this is not a serious thing".

But there was that classic 100 yard stare in that pregnant pause and the unsmiling look behind the grin spoke volumes. It is the same one seen in soldiers and combat journalists, it is the "I have been to war, and I don't really want to talk about it" look. Anyone who has been there knows it's not cool to get shot at and its even less cool to have Malaria.

So here are a few life-prolonging tidbits to take on holiday:

Most Mosquitos that carry the disease only come out after sunset, so cover up with trousers and long sleeves.

If you are worried about the effects of DEET, that evil smelling stuff in mosquito spray, put it on your long clothes (especially your back), and the backs of your hands and neck.

No Malaria mosquito was born with it, they just get it from people they have dined off of. These Malarial mozzies aren't long-distance fliers, they have to have bitten someone else with Malaria, and then flown to you. So if you can help it, try to sleep and relax in the evenings at least 300 meters from the nearest possible Malaria victim. If they snore, that should be easy.

Travel in Africa with a fold-up mosquito net, its easy to put up, small to carry and oh-so-romantic.

If caught in the first few days, Malaria is not so serious. When it is allowed some time to establish itself it gets ugly. Watch these signs and assume its Malaria first.
1. headache behind the temples and eyes
2. sweaty and then chilled
3. aching joints

Many Africans and long-term expats will travel with the cure, and take it as soon as they think MIGHT have it (including yours truly). The up-side is, if you think you have it, you probably do, and the quicker you treat it the better. The down side is you may actually have the flu, but at least that won't kill you.

Only a few Malaria strains re-occur, and even then there are drugs to cure pretty much all of them completely.

Most doctors in the west don't understand Malaria, so do your own research on drugs and side effects, especially on these sites:
Roll Back Malaria (WHO)

The Center For Disease Control (CDC) Traveler page.

A negative Malaria test DOES NOT mean you don't have Malaria. Its a sneaky disease and can hide easily on a blood side.

If you are worried, speak to a doctor in the country you are visiting to get the best information.

Are You Part of the Solution?

A healthy Forest near Dondo, left is rapidly turned into wasteland, right, by corrupt logging and charcoal making, followed by intentionally-set fires to clear the land for two seasons of cultivation.

I am just back from the Mezimbite Forest Center in Mozambique. I am working on a long term project there, chronicling the work of the project and its founder, Allan Schwarz. Schwarz is trying to slow the destruction of Mozambique's woodlands. No one knows how much forest is being lost but Ashoka Fellow Schwarz says at the current rate of loss, within fifteen years most of the country's remaining forest will be logged and burned out of existence.

As I have mentioned many times in this blog, the forest is mostly being lost to power the energy needs of rural and suburban people of Southern Africa. Rural people earn rare money by making the forest into charcoal, and selling it to urban dwellers. They also move onto these cleared areas and farm for a few seasons before the land fails, and then they move on, leaving scrubland in their wake.

Even though I have been to the area many times, the actual frontlines of the forest destruction is far from the project, which has been focusing on replanting areas already lost. But last week I went looking for the "battle front" of the destruction and I ran into an unholy alliance. Loggers, working for a Chinese company, were clearing out the big hardwood trees, and the charcoal makers were felling the small ones, piling them up into big mud-covered roasters, making charcoal on a huge scale out of what was left of the forest.

It affected me deeply, and today I spent the day in a deep hole of unhappiness. There is really no one in the area other than Schwarz trying to stop this cycle of destruction, which is being played out on a massive scale throughout the region. Why aren't the logging companies forced to replant the forest? Why are they not working sustainably, cutting only what the forest can sustain? Why doesn't the money they give the government help support local communities so they are not forced to hammer their only resource, turning it into charcoal and unproductive farmland?

Schwarz is only one man with one project, and try as he might he can't make even a small dent into what is going on just in his province. The enemies (corruption, greed and mismanagement) are too strong and it is clear that without an international effort, they will prevail.

Americans and Europeans buy hardwood flooring from China all the time in big warehouse stores for as little as a dollar per square-foot. Where do clients think these woods come from? China? Not on your life. They come from Mozambique and other corrupt countries in Africa, and the cutting of these woods and the Chinese loggers presence here leads to other losses like poaching.

In South Africa 198 Rhino have been lost this year to poaching. Elephants and many many other animals are being wiped out in Mozambique, Malawi and Tanzania on a scale never seen before by members of these logging syndicates. Much of this destruction is funneled out of the countries by corrupt officials in cahoots with the logging workers.

But strangely, unlike the 1980s, there is no huge international outcry.

The silence of people in Europe, America, and other democracies is astounding. That lack of interest and outrage is as much a part of the poachers arsenal as high caliber bullets and corruption. And that means your inattention, your lack of interest. In our resounding silence and lack of outrage these nefarious killers of biodiversity are making a mockery of conservation on an international scale.

When you buy hardwood from China, you are paying for this death, it is your fault directly. There is a war against the last bastions of nature on our planet and if you are not part of the solution, you are the problem. The sides are clear. Recycling at home is not enough. You need to be informed about your decisions because you are responsible, your money is driving this destruction. And yet being a smart consumer is only part of the solution. Everyone must become an active participant in stopping this, because if you are not active you really are the problem.

So now you may be sitting there thinking, "but what can I do?" "I try to be thoughtful, and recycle, and walk to the store more and bring my own bags instead of using paper or plastic. Isn't this enough?" From someone at the battle zone, watching things you and your children will never see simply disappear, I can tell you that it is not.

But here is the good news. You don't have to do anything different, or tie yourself to a tree to stop the loggers or live in penury (yet). Right now all you have to do is your job. If you are an architect join Architects Without Borders and design appropriate low-cost solar housing for the 3rd world in your spare time. If you are an accountant, create a group of accountants that audits and follows the paper trail of multinational corporations who are paying for the widespread destruction. Name and shame offenders on blogs, Twitter and newspaper websites. As I said before, nefarious projects and poachers operate with our silent consent because we do not choose to practice oversight.

If you are a writer, take time out every month to write something about the environment, and research NGOs like the Mezimbite Forest Project that are important parts of a global solution, sharing them with the rest of the world. If you are a politician, teacher, librarian, used car salesman or concerned parent, do your job. Do it for our home, the Earth, on a regular basis.

Stock the library with consciousness raising books and articles and create an email newsletter that shares that list with your community. Troll the internet looking for news articles that are raising these issues, and share them through social networking sites and put pressure on companies bankrolling this chaos to stop. Everyone can be a part of the solution to this problem.

Sticking our collective heads in the sand will not make this problem go away. Our planet is really in peril. Our coastlines are under threat, our migrating species are dying, our oceans are being plundered on a scale that is hard for experts to measure, and our forests are being wiped out of existence for the profit of a few. Sticking our collective heads in the sand will not make this problem go away. Get active, get involved, get informed and stop being part of the problem.



Skeletal trees hang in the sun after loggers and charcoal makers have reduced this forest to ruin near Dondo, Mozambique.


Chinese logging companies remove hardwood trees and the charcoal makers move into the forests, creating a double-destruction cocktail that leaves the land bare and unproductive.



Forests are wiped out after charcoal makers and logging companies level forests. The charcoal makers like this one are aware the forest is in danger, but they say, "we are poor, what can we do?"


After logging and charcoal making few of the hardest trees are left standing, their skeletons seeming to reach imploringly to the sky.

Getting out there, making a difference

Villagers using a solar cooker for the first time, near Kanye in Botswana.

Crosby Menzies from Solar Cookers For Africa is traveling through Africa, visiting isolated communities, and trying to create a groundswell of public interest in Solar cooking. This former Wallstreet worker has created a project that takes him out from in front of his computer and into the wilds of Africa, and the reactions are overwhelmingly favourable. Armed with cookers, a simple flyer, and a huge smile, Menzies has made solar cookers his mission. I joined the Solar Caravan in Botswana, near the town of Kanye.

This country of 2 million people enjoys one of the highest solar indexes in the world, and last year the government made a commitment to develop solar energy over the next 20 years. At the moment, most of the people of this desert country use scarce firewood for their household energy needs, but Menzies sees a time when 80% of those needs will be met with solar, using today's technology.

Under the big Botswana sky Menzies trundles up in his white 4x4, bringing technology and new ideas to rural Africa.


Crosby Menzies is on a mission to distribute Solar Cookers all over Africa.


Earnest Batulo 11, learned how to use the Solar Cookers For Africa cooker in less than five minutes.

Good News....Great News!

Hells Gate National Park, the Home of Africa's Geothermal Future
Okaria 3 has about 100 Megawatts of Proven Geothermal reserves, with about 50 Megawatts developed by 2010. It sits in Hells Gate National park in Kenya. Ernest Mabwa is the Plant Manager, and he has about 30 full time employees. It is the only privately owned and operated geothermal plant in Africa.

When I was down in Cape Town last week visiting the sea and old friends, one of them mentioned to me that most of the reporting on the environment and in fact much of my blog is fairly negative. Now, it is my and other journalists role to bring up the problems in the world and hope we reach a critical mass of people that can actually change things, so people do need to know the problems around the issues. So don't expect this column to be a rosy greening over of the very serious environmental train-wreck we seem to be heading towards. However, sticky ego aside, its also true that there is much to be excited and proud about. See my column about standing on the shoulders of giants like John Muir for a positive synopsis of our past environmental heroes.

Anyone interested in seeing some great stories with some great news for humanity, look no further than Energy Entrepreneurs at Global Post. This fascinating 25 part series has upliftment aplenty for those of us looking for positive environmental news. Follow 25 entrepreneurs across the globe working to create a greener economy.

These are people with vision and drive working on their dream of a sustainable future. Overlook the fact that Shell Oil paid for the advertising, someone has to and with their oil money we have been able to make something truly unique and inspiring.

Too Many Of Us

Gliese 581c, By Graphic Artist John Kaufman


There is simply too many of us. Looking around the world, traveling as I do for my job, its obvious that there are simply too many humans. We are eating ourselves out of house and home. Tiara Walters, a South African journalist working for the Sunday Times here in Johannesburg wrote in her column today that "human demand on the biosphere more than doubled between 1961 and 2007, but the global population is only projected to stabilize at 9.22 Billion people in 2075".

Already, according to Lester Brown and other thinkers, we have passed the Earth's renewable carrying capacity and are living on ancient water deposits and borrowed time.

That we are running out of food, fuel and everything needed to make people happy and healthy members of society may not be apparent to people in developed nations. They have the financial resources to stand closer to the front of the growing queue. But in Developing countries such as Mozambique or Bangladesh the people are much further behind, lacking the cash resources to afford the rising costs that are becoming a measure of food scarcity. Bread riots last month in Mozambique are a perfect example of how even a modest cost rise can lead to civil unrest when people are living hand to mouth.

What is about humanity that we think that the right to reproduce is inalienable and permanent? This is clearly at odds with the carrying capacity of this particular piece of farmland that we call the Earth. So I have been thinking up solutions, some off the cuff and some simply impossible, but the status quo must change, of that there is no question. Population pressure will push out all of our wilderness into city parks and the margins of maize fields, with a massive extinction and an even higher risk of the sensitive food distribution system collapsing. (Systems become more susceptible to catastrophic failure the more highly organized they become, according to the law of entropy).

This is scary stuff. Not many voters, writers or thinkers are seriously even considering espousing many of these ideas, since they inevitably smack of the "one child" Chinese policy, with all its ghastly implications like infanticide. I have left out the more nightmarish "final solution" type ideas and focused on what may be the most equitable and random way of doing away with our excess folks.

1) Create a breeding ticket lottery. A yearly lottery is held that prospective people can enter and receive a breeding ticket, completely randomly.
Hitch:
This idea can only work in highly organized societies, the kind of societies where a rising birth rate is not a problem today, replete with good medical care and a draconian civil police force with informers and the idea of neighbors ratting out neighbors about that secret child in the basement.

2) Cyanide capsules on a rolling system that slightly increases the death rate in an equitable fashion.
Hitch:
This needs a less organized society and is a much more democratic process since everyone would be required to participate. However, the idea of popping a pill once a year in the chance that you will be that unlucky one in fifty that kicks it would probably turn off voters.

3) Focus the capital of the world in the pockets of a few countries that are insulated, with enough food to get them through bar environmental catastrophe, and let rest of the world's uneducated and poor people starve slowly to death.
Hitch:
The moral implications of this are perhaps the most ghastly, rivaled only by Hitler
-no wait, even he killed most people quickly.

With the discovery of Gliese 581c only twenty light years away, there could be a chance we could get off of this planet and take over another. Obviously twenty light years is still far away, too far even, but the implications of this discovery go beyond this odd little world that has all the goldilocks qualities we have been looking for. The reason we found it is because it is so close to its dim, cold star. But since there is a planet that could be habitable in such an unlikely planetary system, most astronomers feel that planets could be as common as pickled cabbage at a Korean wedding. Meaning that aside from euthanasia, breeding tickets and certain death for the poor, there may be a close-by neighbor we could invade and occupy in our time-honored human tradition.

All levity aside, what do we do? Its a conundrum, it is serious, it is the worst kind of political hot potato, and its only going to get worse. So rather than point fingers at people who may have taken the go forth and multiply idea a bit far, we should all be thinking about what we can do to sort it out, or nature will do it for us.

An Energy Revolution: Micro-Hydro Power

Watch The Video:




Pat Downey lives in the tiny little town of Hofmeyer, South Africa. This little town on the edge of the great Karoo Desert seems like an unlikely place for one of Africa's most innovative water engineers to live. There is a small general store, a gas station where you have to wake up the attendant, and surprisingly, a lot of rushing water in the Fish River, used to irrigate the dry farmland scattered around the desert hills.

Downey is a gentle, unassuming man, with the language of an inventor and a slightly stooped gate. Since the 1970s he has been pioneering technology that generates electrical power from small water-driven turbines. These turbines do not need a dam to build up water pressure, but rather they divert a small part of a river and harvest electricity from the kinetic energy generated by a small drop in height.

Water is a storehouse of kinetic energy. The hydrological cycle that lifts water out of the oceans and off the land through evaporation is run on solar energy. The sun heats the water and the air, evaporation occurs and the kinetic energy from this process is stored in the water. Then the water, full of energy, falls on distant mountains high up, and runs down rivers to the sea, all the while giving up that energy as splashing waterfalls and crashing rapids. Every gorgeous waterfall is a massive release of stored kinetic energy.

For a large-scale hydro-electric dam, those gorgeous waterfalls are flooded by a big lake, the stored water is backed up into a stunning gorge that will forever be lost to admiring eyes. Not so with micro-hydro systems like the ones Downey makes.

These smalls systems divert a small amount of water around the waterfall. Generally less than 1% of the total flow. The water falls through a pipe, spins a small turbine, and is dropped into the little pool at the base of the waterfall. For an average sized river like the Fish, a little fifteen foot (4m) drop can generate enough electrical power for fifty low-cost houses.

Small hydro systems like this can survive floods, they have a very small impact on the environment, they never silt up, and they can operate for as long as they are maintained, unlike massive dams which fill up with sediment and become useless over the years.

So why are they not more widespread?
Electricity in South Africa has been kept at an artificially low price for decades. The country sought to spur investment and growth with electricity subsidies to farmers and towns. Downey tried to sell these systems, but their initial cost was just too high. That has changed now. The national electrical grid has had to become profitable, and to do that they have had to raise prices by a whopping 140% in the last three years.

Correspondingly the demand for his systems has gone through the roof. At today's prices, the systems pay for themselves in three to four years. Today he cannot keep up with all the orders, "the emails just come flooding in, we can't keep up!" He explains in his wavering excited voice.

For a man who struggled and worked for years in obscurity, waiting for just this moment, he is clearly enjoying every moment of it.