ELAW Fellow Rockson Akugre

Last weekend, ELAW joined fellow Eugene non-profit NextStep — a consumer electronics reuse and recycling organization — at the 7th Annual Good Earth Home, Garden, and Living Show.

NextStep had volunteers and staff on-hand to answer questions about the vast range of consumer electronics they accept for reuse or responsible recycling as well as the amazing array of refurbished computers, televisions, CD and DVD players, and other items they sell at their Eugene and Springfield ReUse stores.

ELAW works with NextStep’s Executive Director, Lorraine Kerwood, to teach vising ELAW Fellows about the recycling and reuse of “e-waste.” After visiting Next Step in March 2011, ELAW Fellow Rockson Akugre said: “In Ghana, we would throw broken computers away…this is very new to me and good to be exposed to.”

NextStep is part of a growing international awareness of the problem of e-waste.  Many coalitions have formed to combat the e-waste problem, including the Electronics Takeback Coalition (ETC) and Basel Action Network (BAN).  In 2010, proposed Federal legislation focused on prohibiting the export of “restricted electronic waste” from the U.S.  to developing nations.  ELAW’s staff and international partners are thrilled to collaborate with NextStep to further our impact on the global problem of e-waste!

Glenn Gillis
Information Technology Manager

The dictionary entry notes that fracking is “the forcing open of fissures in subterranean rocks by introducing liquid at high pressure, especially to extract oil or gas. [Shortened < hydraulic fracturing.]”  However, some may prefer the explanation provided in the popular video “My Water’s on Fire Tonight (The Fracking Song),” which was produced by NYU journalism students in collaboration with ProPublica.

On a more serious note, fracking poses a substantial risk to drinking water supplies.  The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) issued a draft report in early December that linked hydraulic fracturing to water contamination in the drinking wells of families living in the small town of Pavilion, Wyoming.  Samples from the EPA’s own monitoring wells detected synthetic chemicals that are used during the fracking process in the underground water aquifer.

Hydraulic fracturing is not confined to the U.S.  ELAW partners in countries like Ukraine, South Africa, and Australia are monitoring new proposals that involve fracking to extract natural gas from underground rock formations.  Sharing information from the U.S. will help leaders in other regions take appropriate measures to protect precious drinking water supplies.  Good news emerged from Bulgaria just this week, where lawmakers overwhelmingly voted to ban fracking, effectively halting a plan by Chevron to use the process to drill for natural gas in that country.

Liz Mitchell
Staff Attorney

ELAW colleagues at the Environmental Law Workshop

I was fortunate to travel last month to Puerto Barrios, Guatemala, for the first annual Festival of the Sea, held in conjunction with a Trinational Fisheries Forum and Workshops on Environmental Law and the Human Right to Water.  The Fisheries Forum was poignant, with roughly 20 fishers from Belize, Guatemala, and Honduras doing the difficult work of discussing limits on their fishing grounds, in order to restore the fishery.  Our Guatemalan partners are working with Guatemalan fishing communities in the Gulf and the Ministry of Natural Resources to help create  “recuperation zones” that would be managed jointly by the agency and the fishers in Guatemala’s waters.

The Gulf of Honduras is a complicated web of Guatemalan, Belizean, Honduran, Garifuna, and Maya culture.  Negotiations among fishers WITHIN countries is complex, and when we are trying to reach across the many layers of jurisdictions and ethnic culture present in the Gulf, the complexities are far greater.

Alongside the work, we celebrated the food, culture, and livelihood of fishing communities in the region at the Festival of the Sea on the waterfront.   Fisheries are vital to sustaining coastal communities worldwide, and the roughly 500km of coastline in the Gulf of Honduras is home to nearly one million people.  This relatively small area holds tremendous biodiversity, but both species and local economies are in decline.

Lori Maddox
Associate Director

Making the NGT functional required a hard-fought struggle. Established by the National Green Tribunal Act of 2010, the NGT was designed as a replacement for the National Environmental Appellate Authority (NEAA), an environmental tribunal that, with a single judicial member, had ruled favorably on a number of environmental petitions. However, for months, the Government of India failed to appoint judicial and expert members to the NGT and provide it with necessary components, such as courtrooms and staff.  To make matters worse, the NGT Act abolished the NEAA at the same time it created the NGT, leaving dozens of environmental petitions languishing with no court to rule on urgent matters.  It required a sustained legal effort early this year, lead by ELAW partner Ritwick Dutta, who went to the Supreme Court of India, to force the Government of India to comply with the NGT Act and breathe life into the new tribunal.

Ritwick Dutta

With everything finally in place, the NGT began hearing cases and issuing judgments in late summer of 2011.  Several judgments have been exceptional, including one that requires the Government of India to enact national standards for exposure to radiation hazards.

For me, the most exciting part is that ELAW partners will be leading the way in making sure the NGT fulfills its promise of taking quick action to remedy environmental problems in India.  Already, ELAW partners Ritwick Dutta and Rahul Choudhary are lead counsel on more than 30 petitions before the NGT, with dozens more being readied for filing.  The petitions deal with environmental problems across a wide area of India, including the States of Orissa, Tamil Nadu, Uttarakhand, Andhra Pradesh, Arunachal Pradesh and Chhattisgarh, and seek to stop environmentally destructive projects such as new coal-fired power plants, and large hydroelectric dams in remote forested areas.  Providing scientific support to many of these cases will likely make 2012 a busy and rewarding year.

Mark Chernaik
Staff Scientist

You may listen to the interview here.

Michele Kuhnle
Donor Liaison

Adrian on the ferry to Puerto Barrios

We were flying from Placencia to Punta Gorda in Southern Belize.  Domestic flights in Belize are an incredible treat – and over the years I have enjoyed learning to recognize certain estuaries, towns and other features of the coastal landscape as if they are old friends.  Local advocates use the opportunities of the flights to identify developments that may compromise coastal ecosystems.  But on this day, what we saw was cause for celebration.  As we passed over the Placencia Lagoon, Adrian Vernon of the Peninsula Citizens for Sustainable Development (PCSD)  beamed as he grabbed for his cell phone to tell folks on the ground that PCSD’s work had paid off, once again.

“The manatees are back!  I see FIVE resting behind Drunken Caye!”

Adrian’s roots are deep in Placencia – his great great grandfather — an Irish Admiral in the Royal Navy and a commissioned pirate, was one of the first to settle the peninsula in the 1770s.  Adrian’s family spread across Belize, but some stayed put in Placencia – and became anchors in the community there.  Adrian grew up playing among the mangroves in the Placencia Lagoon, which he says are like “botanical amphibians, with one foot on land and the other in the sea.” Manatees and other wildlife were abundant.

In the last few decades, the world has discovered Placencia.  Although the village of Placencia itself still feels like a sleepy place, resort developers recognize the potential profits of developing this sparsely populated Caribbean paradise for tourism.  Developments currently proposed would nearly double the population of the peninsula.  This scale of development threatens not only the lifestyle and culture of the local people, but also seriously jeopardizes fragile ecosystems.  Sedimentation from dredging and filling to “make land” in the Placencia Lagoon has literally choked out some species.  Excess nutrient discharge from shrimp farms also suffocates plants, and changes critical habitat.

Shrimp farms in Belize

Adrian and colleague Tim Smith persuaded four large shrimp farms to stop discharging directly to the lagoon, and instead to plant mangrove buffers between their ponds and the lagoon.  Mangroves naturally filter the nutrient waste from the shrimp farms  out of the water.  As a result, native seagrass has re-colonized the lagoon, and the manatees, dependent on seagrass for their survival, are back!

Well done!

Oil development has been controversial in Belize and several years ago, the government opened virtually the entire country, including offshore areas and protected areas, to oil exploration.  Long-term exploration and development contracts were forged with oil companies behind closed doors.  The Belize Coalition to Save Our Natural Heritage, which formed in 2010, has been very effective in educating the public about the petroleum industry and advocating for a ban on oil development in offshore and protected areas, such as national parks.  Earlier this year, the Coalition gathered enough signatures to allow the public to vote on a referendum about the future of oil development in Belize.

While I was in Belize City, fresh controversy erupted over oil exploration activities in Sarstoon-Temash National Park in the southern part of the country.  Word emerged that USCapital Energy was conducting seismic testing activities in the park.  Seismic testing is a process used to map underground rock formations to predict where oil may be found.  To create the map, explosive charges are set off along transect lines to create underground seismic waves that are recorded and analyzed.  The transect lines are cut into the forest, creating a scar many miles long – in this case stretching all the way across the park.  Seismic testing fragments habitat and is very disruptive to nearby Maya and Garifuna communities.  Poachers and illegal loggers use abandoned transect lines to enter remote areas to kill wildlife and remove valuable tree species.  SATIIM, the local indigenous environmental organization, sent a team out to monitor the exploration activities and posted a report describing the environmental damage and evidence of illegal logging that the team found.  

I was working one afternoon when ELAW partner Candy Gonzalez called and said, “Quick, turn on the television to Channel 51!”   It was Love TV’s rebroadcast of that morning’s talk show and the guests were Chief Forest Officer, Wilber Sabido, and Geology and Petroleum Department Director, Andre Cho.  They were there to answer questions about why they had granted permission for the seismic testing to occur in a national park and without prior evaluation of the potential environmental impacts.  The talk show hosts asked many pointed questions and frequently referred to calls that they had received from the public expressing concern about the exploration activities.  Sabido and Cho defended their decision and the hosts were rather gentle in their follow-up questioning, but it was nevertheless engaging and interesting to watch the interview.  I gained a new appreciation for this form of “talk show democracy” and will be sure to tune in the next time I visit Belize.

Liz Mitchell
ELAW Staff Attorney

Gustavo Alanis Ortega

In CEMDA’s most recent biennial report, director Gustavo Alanis Ortega credits CEMDA’s recent success to the implementation of recommendations from a 2009 strategic planning exercise and the performance of the organization’s Quintana Roo and La Paz offices under the new leadership of Alejandra Serrano Pavón and Agustín Bravo respectively.

These offices, as well as the  CEMDA-DF office in Mexico City, have been strengthening their work related to the care, protection and conservation of protected natural areas and also endemic, threatened or endangered flora and fauna.

In the last few years, CEMDA has shifted its focus toward human rights and fostering transparency, public participation and, access to information within environmental decision making processes. CEMDA also participated in the 2010 COP 16 climate change meetings held in Cancun.

ELAW has collaborated with CEMDA for more than 15 years.

Congratulations CEMDA!

Glenn Gillis
Information Technology Manager

Thank you for your support and commitment to protecting communities and the environment around the world!

Judge Aiken spoke with Judge Chirinos about training programs for U.S. federal judges and the importance of continuing education.  She pointed him to a wealth of resources available at the D.C.-based Federal Judicial Center and invited him to sit in on programs at Oregon’s U.S. District Court.

Judge Chirinos is putting together a training program for judges in Honduras that focuses on environmental law, and particularly laws that pertain to marine areas.  He says, “Increased understanding of the region’s ecological importance will lead to better management of natural resources, and ultimately the conservation of the Mesoamerican Reef.”

The temperature is dropping in the Northwest.  If Judge Chirinos has it his way, he will see snow, for the first time, before he heads home in early December.

Maggie Keenan
Communications Director