EcoHearth: Come Home to the Earth

One spring day a couple of years ago, I noticed an unusual gray haze screening Santa Fe’s typically unspoiled skies. It could not be attributed to wood fires that many residents use to heat their homes in colder months. I looked at the weather satellite maps; there was no system moving our way. I later learned that a dust cloud from Mongolia had parked itself over northern New Mexico.

Pollution knows no national boundaries. Contaminated water from the Tijuana River Valley watershed flows into the Pacific Ocean and onto Southern California beaches. The intense solar radiation at our planet’s girth churns ocean currents and drives winds inland, sweeping particulate matter with it. Everything we disturb on and under the Earth is moveable.

The frantic agitation and extraction of resources to keep up with human demand has resulted in more intensely concentrated natural and manmade hazards. And because climate change is fueled by greenhouse-gas emissions, we have entered a new era in environmental law.

Pacific Islanders have filed a petition with the Czech government to stop a coal-fired power plant some 4,000 miles away on the grounds it could harm the island’s environment. Prunerov II, a power station with thousand-foot-high chimneys, is run by the giant CEZ energy company. According to Greenpeace Czech Republic, which has waged a campaign to reduce damage from the power plant, it emits over 40 times as much carbon dioxide annually as the entire Federated States of Micronesia (FSM) combined. It is the 18th-biggest source of greenhouse gases in the European Union.

On the heels of a disappointing climate deal at the United Nations summit in Copenhagen, FSM’s action illustrates that issues raised between developing and developed nations have not quietly gone away. Though the accord was weak, it did in fact set a target of limiting global warming to a maximum of two degrees Celsius over preindustrial times. This provides developing countries with a new legal weapon.

Unfortunately, the FSM is not party to the UN’s Transboundary Environmental Impact Assessment (TEIA) that would afford them an easier legal mechanism to fight their case. However, their action might spur a signee to the treaty to take the fight to an international court on their behalf. If so, a precedent might be set to allow a country some measure of influence on the decisions made in another country that might affect the first country’s environment.

The FSM is a member of the Alliance of Small Island States (AOSIS), which includes the islands Tuvalu, Kiribati and the Maldives. Their leaders courageously made their presence known at Copenhagen’s climate negotiations in an effort to save their island homelands. Mohammed Nasheed, the first democratically elected president of the Maldives, gave a rousing speech to environmental activists in which he implored, “My message to you is to continue the protests. Continue after Copenhagen. Continue despite the odds.”

Unfortunately, strong environmental laws do not guarantee strong enforcement. But as the prominent scientist Jared Diamond summed up in a recent interview, “…the problems that we face are all problems that we are causing, and so if we decide to solve the problems, we can solve them.”

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