On Monday Pakistan’s President Pervez Musharraf, a longtime ally of U. S. President Bush, resigned in the face of growing calls for his impeachment. Musharraf was a problematic ally to the United States. Although he agreed to rein in the Islamic extremists and help root out al Queda, both groups have grown and prospered under his command. In spite of the twelve billion dollars that the United States has given Pakistan since 9/11, 90% of which has gone to the military, the Taliban and al Queda are now healthier than ever and using the northern territories of Pakistan as a base for incursions into Afghanistan.
At 169 million, Pakistan has the 5th largest population in the world. Born in the Indian Partition of 1947, it has been ruled by the military for most of its existence. While it has a nuclear arsenal and a modern army it is a “failed state” lacking in basic public infrastructure. It is in fact a feudal system, without a sufficient middle class population to ensure economic and political stability. With the majority illiterate and uneducated, Pakistan is mired in corruption and a breeding ground for Islamic extremism.
The roots of Pakistan’s malaise centers on the military’s longstanding rivalry with India, which started during the 1947 partition of India when the two states fought over who should control Kashmir, with it’s largely Muslim population. Early on, India won control, and the Pakistani military has remained obsessed with getting back at India, fighting a series of costly wars and bringing the world to the brink of a nuclear war twice, in 1999 and 2002. Meanwhile the rulers of Pakistan have consistently neglected economic development to the detriment of the Pakistani people.
Pakistan’s problems have been compounded by their “friendship” with the United States. During the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan the CIA funneled billions into arms and training of Mujehadin insurgents in Pakistan through Pakistan’s military intelligence service, the Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate (ISI). When the Soviets withdrew from Afghanistan, the Americans, under George Bush senior, lost interest in the region. But the Pakistani military and the ISI continued to support Islamic extremists as part of their greater game plan to foment insurgencies in Kashmir and install a weakened regime hostile to India in Afghanistan.
According to Ahmed Rashid, Pakistani author of Descent Into Chaos, one of the best books ever written about the region, the Pakistani army backed the Taliban in the ensuing civil war in Afghanistan “encouraging thousands of Pakistani youngsters to fight and die for the Taliban just as it mobilized thousands of Pakistanis to fight in the Kashmiri insurgency against India.”
“Pakistani militants were providing manpower for both the Taliban and al Queda and running a vast logistics, communication, and transit network in Pakistan on behalf of al Queda… This support base in Pakistan was to prove critical to al Queda’s survival after 9/11”. Meanwhile, George W. Bush was supporting the very Pakistani military and political system that helped fund and arm the Taliban that sheltered al Queda when it attacked the U. S. in 2001.
Let’s stop for a second and consider the following: Suppose that instead of giving military support to Pakistan’s army, the U. S. had given money to build schools in Pakistan. Think what would have happened to Pakistan’s economy and democratic institutions if aid money had gone into building and operating public schools for the last twenty years. . People who remain ignorant are more likely to offer themselves up as suicide bombers for al Queda and the Taliban. When society becomes literate the mullahs become disempowered
That’s what one American mountain climber decided to do after receiving life-saving help from the remote village of Korphe in northern Pakistan in 1993. Greg Mortenson vowed to build a school to pay the villagers back. Mortenson, did go back and help the villagers to build a school in Korphe. And he went on to build 60 schools in remote areas of Pakistan and Afghanistan. Those 60 schools have educated over 27 thousand children, more than half of them girls.
Mortenson argues that fighting terrorism only perpetuates the cycle of violence. “You can drop bombs, hand out condoms, build roads, or put in electricity, but unless girls are educated a society won’t change.” When you educate girls infant mortality decreases, population growth slows down, and the general health improves. .
The CIA and the ISI both contain the word “intelligence” and yet that is the very quality that is missing from their actions in the “War on Terror”. You can donate to Mortenson’s organization - the Central Asia Institute (www.ikat.org) and see your money increase intelligence in the world rather than diminish it. That’s what I’m going to do and I invite others to join me.
Tuesday, August 19, 2008
Monday, August 11, 2008
Trees Are the Answer
My dad, Clive Justice, has a bumper sticker on his car that says: “Trees are the Answer”. No, he's not a member of a religious tree cult. He just thinks that planting trees can answer a lot of problems: climate change, the food crisis, pollution, urban blight, and many others.
As a landscape architect, he has spent his entire adult life working around trees. When I was a child he designed the grounds of the Vancouver Unitarian Church at 49th and Oak and had trees planted along the main sidewalks and took some of the trees from the original site to complement the church building. Some of the new trees were scraggly looking things then but fifty years later they've grown larger and given the church and it's grounds more maturity and substance.
Many trees live long lives. Trees grow very fast initially and then their growth tapers off and they slowly decline over hundreds of years. The twisty knarled yellow cedar that grows all along the BC coast, can live for thousands of years.
The first thing I noticed when I saw Prince Rupert, was how many trees there were surrounding the town. We are surrounded by mountainous coastline, with forests as far as the eye can see. You'd think that with so many trees in the distance, we wouldn't need so many here in town. But the fact is that trees are important in town as well.
Consider our golf course, the Hays creek ravine, the wooded areas around summit, the beautiful vertical park on Fulton that features maples at the bottom, rhododendrons in the middle and a majestic stand of sitka spruce at the top of the cliff - trees are essential to the identity of these places.
Even individual trees have importance. There are four big oak trees in town I've noticed that include a pair of tall and stately oaks on the grounds of the Masonic Temple. There are two beautiful big linden or lime trees, with their spicy fragrance, one on E 7th and one a couple of blocks away on E 6th. There's a huge Cottonwood down in the “holler” between E7th and 8th. There's a mysterious MonkeyPuzzle Tree on Borden Street across from the little park.
Trees that are commonplace elsewhere can seem exotic in town. Drive up the Skeena valley past Smithers , and quaking aspen are ubiquitous. When the wind blows their circular leaves shake. But, it's hard to find them in Prince Rupert. That's probably why I'm very fond of the aspen that towers over my back yard. Here and there the odd chestnut tree, with it's big palmate leaves gives deep and satisfying shade in the summer.
Trees can keep a house cool in the summer, and protect a house against wind in the winter. They are pleasing to the eye. Their roots help to hold the soil together absorbing excess water and preventing erosion. Trees provide vital nesting habitat for birds. Trees help to moderate dry climates by pulling water up from the ground and allowing it to evaporate into the atmosphere from the leaves. Large forests, like the amazon, actually make their own climate by creating rain clouds. Without trees the Amazon would not get any rain.
Trees give off oxygen and take in carbon dioxide. They are an answer to global warming. Planting trees store carbon in a form that doesn't cause climate change. Trees also absorb pollution, taking mercury up from the soil and up to one and a half pounds of air pollution a day per tree. A recent study from Columbia University showed that children who lived on tree lined streets were 25% less likely to have asthma than children who lived on streets without trees.
We stand to lose many pine trees in the BC interior because global warming has made BC more hospitable to the pine bark beetle. The pine beetle crisis is leading to economic devastation in Northern BC, as a gap in time of more than a generation lies between harvesting the dead and damaged pine and the growth of more mature trees to replace them.
When you plant a tree, you have to plan ahead, because the benefits of trees are often not fulfilled for a generation. It takes decades to build up an orchard. But after twenty-five years you have a renewable harvest of apples, pears, cherries, or what-have-you.
The red and yellow cedar, the sitka spruce, could be used here, on the BC North Coast for timber, for local construction, for furniture making, for boat building. It takes time to grow a tree, and you don't realize the benefits right away. If we develop resources that we have here we can support each other when times get harder. If we let big corporations extract our resources without our say, they won't look out for our future. We need to grow businesses and contractors here that use local wood and get involved, as stakeholders in the sustainable harvesting of our forests. If trees are the answer then we need to take the long view while we still have time.
As a landscape architect, he has spent his entire adult life working around trees. When I was a child he designed the grounds of the Vancouver Unitarian Church at 49th and Oak and had trees planted along the main sidewalks and took some of the trees from the original site to complement the church building. Some of the new trees were scraggly looking things then but fifty years later they've grown larger and given the church and it's grounds more maturity and substance.
Many trees live long lives. Trees grow very fast initially and then their growth tapers off and they slowly decline over hundreds of years. The twisty knarled yellow cedar that grows all along the BC coast, can live for thousands of years.
The first thing I noticed when I saw Prince Rupert, was how many trees there were surrounding the town. We are surrounded by mountainous coastline, with forests as far as the eye can see. You'd think that with so many trees in the distance, we wouldn't need so many here in town. But the fact is that trees are important in town as well.
Consider our golf course, the Hays creek ravine, the wooded areas around summit, the beautiful vertical park on Fulton that features maples at the bottom, rhododendrons in the middle and a majestic stand of sitka spruce at the top of the cliff - trees are essential to the identity of these places.
Even individual trees have importance. There are four big oak trees in town I've noticed that include a pair of tall and stately oaks on the grounds of the Masonic Temple. There are two beautiful big linden or lime trees, with their spicy fragrance, one on E 7th and one a couple of blocks away on E 6th. There's a huge Cottonwood down in the “holler” between E7th and 8th. There's a mysterious MonkeyPuzzle Tree on Borden Street across from the little park.
Trees that are commonplace elsewhere can seem exotic in town. Drive up the Skeena valley past Smithers , and quaking aspen are ubiquitous. When the wind blows their circular leaves shake. But, it's hard to find them in Prince Rupert. That's probably why I'm very fond of the aspen that towers over my back yard. Here and there the odd chestnut tree, with it's big palmate leaves gives deep and satisfying shade in the summer.
Trees can keep a house cool in the summer, and protect a house against wind in the winter. They are pleasing to the eye. Their roots help to hold the soil together absorbing excess water and preventing erosion. Trees provide vital nesting habitat for birds. Trees help to moderate dry climates by pulling water up from the ground and allowing it to evaporate into the atmosphere from the leaves. Large forests, like the amazon, actually make their own climate by creating rain clouds. Without trees the Amazon would not get any rain.
Trees give off oxygen and take in carbon dioxide. They are an answer to global warming. Planting trees store carbon in a form that doesn't cause climate change. Trees also absorb pollution, taking mercury up from the soil and up to one and a half pounds of air pollution a day per tree. A recent study from Columbia University showed that children who lived on tree lined streets were 25% less likely to have asthma than children who lived on streets without trees.
We stand to lose many pine trees in the BC interior because global warming has made BC more hospitable to the pine bark beetle. The pine beetle crisis is leading to economic devastation in Northern BC, as a gap in time of more than a generation lies between harvesting the dead and damaged pine and the growth of more mature trees to replace them.
When you plant a tree, you have to plan ahead, because the benefits of trees are often not fulfilled for a generation. It takes decades to build up an orchard. But after twenty-five years you have a renewable harvest of apples, pears, cherries, or what-have-you.
The red and yellow cedar, the sitka spruce, could be used here, on the BC North Coast for timber, for local construction, for furniture making, for boat building. It takes time to grow a tree, and you don't realize the benefits right away. If we develop resources that we have here we can support each other when times get harder. If we let big corporations extract our resources without our say, they won't look out for our future. We need to grow businesses and contractors here that use local wood and get involved, as stakeholders in the sustainable harvesting of our forests. If trees are the answer then we need to take the long view while we still have time.
Tuesday, August 5, 2008
Sheep and Softwood Lumber
What have sheep farming and softwood lumber got to do with each other? Dennis Loxton is a Canadian Sheep farmer. Born in Australia, he learned the sheep business there, from the ground up. At its peak, Australia had 180 million sheep. Because of a sustained drought the number has declined considerably, to 120 million. In comparison, Canada has one million sheep.
But part of that one million sheep was a once thriving business in BC called sheep vegetation management. For seventeen years Loxton hired tree planters in his silviculture business, then he saw the advantages of sheep vegetation management and for the next seventeen years he hired tree planters and shepherds to plant trees and feed sheep in Northern BC clearcuts. Here's the beauty of it – sheep don't like conifers. Sheep won't eat pine or spruce, or fir, but they'll eat the fireweed that grows in the clearcut and competes for sunlight with the conifers. It turns out that fireweed is 23 % protein, the perfect well balanced diet for fattening up sheep. Not only that, they leave behind a valuable manure that provides much needed nutrients to the depleted soil, accelerating the growth of the confer seedlings.
You might think that predators – wolves and grizzlies – would be a real problem with sheep herds in clear cuts. But the solution, according to Loxton, is livestock guardian dogs. In seventeen years of sheep herding and tree planting, averaging about six thousand sheep per year, Loxton says he lost only eight sheep to predators, thanks to the dogs.
Started in Oregon in the seventies, the sheep vegetation management business spread north to BC where it grew to 50 thousand sheep by the mid nineties. But the softwood lumber dispute and the corresponding fall-out of mill closings and mass layoffs hurt both silviculture and vegetation management. When it came to the bottom line, forestry companies could save money by using herbicides to kill competing broad leaf vegetation. Herbicides are really much more expensive then they seem. The risk that introducing such toxins to our environment does to our health and to the health of other creatures is not included in their price. But it's up to governments to solve that market failure by encouraging healthy alternatives like sheep farming.
Loxton tells me that BC's Sheep vegetation system is down to less than five thousand sheep now. There have been job losses and business closings all over the BC interior as a result of the mill bankruptcies. . He used to hire two hundred tree planters and twelve shepherds every summer and he had a herd that totalled an average of six thousand sheep per year. In the recent economic downturn his 1000 acre sheep farm in Prince George was repossessed. "I lost me shirt. I lost me farm, in spite of thirty-four years of perfect silviculture production", he said.
Dennis Loxton is an articulate man. When I met him in Kispiox, it took less than a minute for him to get me fascinated in the idea of sheep farming and silviculture. For me he exemplifies the saying: “Think globally, act locally”, because he is describing the kind of sustainable local economy that we should be aiming for. When he looks at the pine beetle disaster he sees both an opportunity for silviculture - 20 billion seedlings to be planted - and ten million hectares of potential sheep pasture. It's an inspiring vision of sustainability.
By combining sheep herding with tree planting forest companies can avoid using carcinogenic herbicides; Sheep aren't in the farmer's fields in the summer eating hay that would otherwise go to feeding them in the winter; and wool, mutton, and sheep dairy are the byproducts. This kind of local enterprise adds value and diversity to our economy.
A key factor in giving a place it's distinctiveness is what the people there produce. Extracting resources and shipping them overseas to be finished, without producing some form of finished goods locally just impoverishes and depletes an area and drives employment overseas.
Value-added enterprises create jobs, build human capital, by increasing the level of know-how and help to diversify the local economy, multiplying the income that circulates through local communities.
Resource extraction by itself, can permanently degrade the environment. The classic example is mountaintop removal – strip-mining mountains for coal and filling up valleys with tailings. Tailings smother and poison watersheds, killing wildlife and contaminating the water supply.
Unfortunately Premier Campbell and his liberal government have been fast-tracking resource extraction without any thought to developing and diversifying local economies. More and more jobs have been lost while we've watched raw unprocessed logs shipped to China and the United States.
Signing trade deals like NAFTA and TILMA have taken away our rights to environmental protection and made us more vulnerable to economic downturns. For most of us, our standard of living is falling or is just barely being maintained. With the prospect of higher fuel prices and global warming, the Provincial and the Federal governments should be making it their policy to encourage local value-added enterprises like sheep vegetation management and locally milled lumber. The path to a sustainable future is through developing and diversifying local resource economies.
But part of that one million sheep was a once thriving business in BC called sheep vegetation management. For seventeen years Loxton hired tree planters in his silviculture business, then he saw the advantages of sheep vegetation management and for the next seventeen years he hired tree planters and shepherds to plant trees and feed sheep in Northern BC clearcuts. Here's the beauty of it – sheep don't like conifers. Sheep won't eat pine or spruce, or fir, but they'll eat the fireweed that grows in the clearcut and competes for sunlight with the conifers. It turns out that fireweed is 23 % protein, the perfect well balanced diet for fattening up sheep. Not only that, they leave behind a valuable manure that provides much needed nutrients to the depleted soil, accelerating the growth of the confer seedlings.
You might think that predators – wolves and grizzlies – would be a real problem with sheep herds in clear cuts. But the solution, according to Loxton, is livestock guardian dogs. In seventeen years of sheep herding and tree planting, averaging about six thousand sheep per year, Loxton says he lost only eight sheep to predators, thanks to the dogs.
Started in Oregon in the seventies, the sheep vegetation management business spread north to BC where it grew to 50 thousand sheep by the mid nineties. But the softwood lumber dispute and the corresponding fall-out of mill closings and mass layoffs hurt both silviculture and vegetation management. When it came to the bottom line, forestry companies could save money by using herbicides to kill competing broad leaf vegetation. Herbicides are really much more expensive then they seem. The risk that introducing such toxins to our environment does to our health and to the health of other creatures is not included in their price. But it's up to governments to solve that market failure by encouraging healthy alternatives like sheep farming.
Loxton tells me that BC's Sheep vegetation system is down to less than five thousand sheep now. There have been job losses and business closings all over the BC interior as a result of the mill bankruptcies. . He used to hire two hundred tree planters and twelve shepherds every summer and he had a herd that totalled an average of six thousand sheep per year. In the recent economic downturn his 1000 acre sheep farm in Prince George was repossessed. "I lost me shirt. I lost me farm, in spite of thirty-four years of perfect silviculture production", he said.
Dennis Loxton is an articulate man. When I met him in Kispiox, it took less than a minute for him to get me fascinated in the idea of sheep farming and silviculture. For me he exemplifies the saying: “Think globally, act locally”, because he is describing the kind of sustainable local economy that we should be aiming for. When he looks at the pine beetle disaster he sees both an opportunity for silviculture - 20 billion seedlings to be planted - and ten million hectares of potential sheep pasture. It's an inspiring vision of sustainability.
By combining sheep herding with tree planting forest companies can avoid using carcinogenic herbicides; Sheep aren't in the farmer's fields in the summer eating hay that would otherwise go to feeding them in the winter; and wool, mutton, and sheep dairy are the byproducts. This kind of local enterprise adds value and diversity to our economy.
A key factor in giving a place it's distinctiveness is what the people there produce. Extracting resources and shipping them overseas to be finished, without producing some form of finished goods locally just impoverishes and depletes an area and drives employment overseas.
Value-added enterprises create jobs, build human capital, by increasing the level of know-how and help to diversify the local economy, multiplying the income that circulates through local communities.
Resource extraction by itself, can permanently degrade the environment. The classic example is mountaintop removal – strip-mining mountains for coal and filling up valleys with tailings. Tailings smother and poison watersheds, killing wildlife and contaminating the water supply.
Unfortunately Premier Campbell and his liberal government have been fast-tracking resource extraction without any thought to developing and diversifying local economies. More and more jobs have been lost while we've watched raw unprocessed logs shipped to China and the United States.
Signing trade deals like NAFTA and TILMA have taken away our rights to environmental protection and made us more vulnerable to economic downturns. For most of us, our standard of living is falling or is just barely being maintained. With the prospect of higher fuel prices and global warming, the Provincial and the Federal governments should be making it their policy to encourage local value-added enterprises like sheep vegetation management and locally milled lumber. The path to a sustainable future is through developing and diversifying local resource economies.
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