#the environmental refining on the borders of the maps look so good

[ar0rin]

Ive been playing a lot more stardew valley recently. Here's my first proper farmer oc

[fatehbaz]

Hi, your blog is great, a very good resource and useful. I was wondering if I could ask, have you ever read a book/article about the life cycle of product, I mean an examination of the resource extraction/labor/factory/transport process and how each stage is damaging to people/environment? I've been looking and nothing is useful. Sorry if my English is not great. Thank you for your blog!

Hello. Thank you for such a supportive and kind message. You are always welcome to send me messages. I know that I’m often annoying, so I’m happy if anything I’ve shared/posted has provided an interesting resource.

Thank you for trusting me enough to send me this message, but I don’t think I’m qualified to answer it too well. I think that some of my friends on this site would be better able to provide some recommendations for you. For example, I don’t know anything about the transportation stage of products, or how providers/corporations eventually come to move, say, edible produce from the agricultural source, across borders, and into a grocery store (though I’m mostly-sure that colonial/imperial/corporate powers have obscured these mechanisms of food production, in many/most cases purposely, in order to absolve metropolitan consumers of any potential realization of guilt or complicity in violence). But I don’t know anything about product life cycles generally. So I don’t think I’m a great person to ask, y’know? For example, in the case of, say, lithium production, I’ve not found or read any, like, comprehensive book or singular text that, like, follows the entire process from extraction, through refinement, to use, and then eventual disposal. But I’m sure there are books/articles/texts out there which do describe this process. And that’s why I’d invite someone else, one of my friends or whomstever, to offer recommendations, since I can’t.

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That said, I’ve got a couple of recommendations. I’m relatively more interested in plantations; the life cycle of some few very specific products (rubber; palm oil; uranium; lithium); more broad discussion of the damage wrought from industrial-scale resource extraction and development (Anthropocene and Plantationocene concepts; planetary urbanization); or the violence of the first/initial stages of the product life cycle (wastelanding; colonial/imperial institutions dispossessing people of land; poisoning/contamination from mining). So I’ve got some resources here related to these concepts.

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The concept of “planetary urbanization” or “planetary urban fabric” basically refers to how, at least in the past two or three centuries, there is no corner of the planet that has been spared ecological damage by or escaped the resource extraction cycles of industrial development and major urban areas. This is the idea that every corner of Earth, no matter how apparently “remote” or “wild”, is altered by and implicated in industrial resource extraction. (For example, even “remote” Siberia hosts pipelines and giant mines that service major urban areas. Ice-loss in Greenland and algae blooms in the open ocean are related to anthropogenic climate alteration. Isolated forests of the Great Bear Rainforerst are still penetrated by logging roads. Industrial cropland disrupts the soil of the West African Sahel, and then Saharan dust storms sweep into the Caribbean; etc.)

Some introductions to the concept: Roi Salgueiro Barrio. “What World? Reframing the World as One City.” December 2016. ////////// Lindsay Bremner. “The Urban Hyperobject.” Geoarchitecture. 24 August 2015. ////////// Maria Kaika and Erik Swyngedouw. “Radical urban political-ecological imaginaries.” Derive. May 2014. ////////// And here’s a compilation post I put together, with short excerpts from several articles about planetary urbanization.

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Anyway, seems like this might be more closely related to what you’re looking for. These are some recent things I’ve read that seem related to the violence of the product life cycle.

-- I wrote a post about the violence of the life cycle of uranium (including initial extraction and mining; refinement; and disposal, imposing violence at every stage of production) in Navajo Country and the Colorado Plateau (includes maps of uranium mines; radioactive fallout zones; and radioactive waste disposal sites).

-- Andrea Knutsen. “Scarcity and the Suburban Backyard.” Edge Effects. 1 September 2020. [This article is about food and grocery store supply chains in North America during crises and how British imperialism in the Caribbean in recent centuries relied on the imposition of artificial scarcity and the maintinence of a racialized economic hierarchy which still influences contemporary food supply chains.]

-- Gaston Gordillo. “The Metropolis: The Infrastructure of the Anthropocene.” In: Infrastructures, Environment, and Life in the Anthropocene. Edited by Kregg Hetherington. 2019. [This article is about the stages of dispossession, policy, and marketing that support massive soy agriculture/extraction in Latin America, and how soy is an example of how contemporary products involve dispossession at multiple scales in multiple regions driven by forces that transcend national boundaries. This article also describes planetary urbanization.]

-- Martin Arboleda. “Financialization, totality, and planetary urbanization in the Chilean Andes.” December 2015. [This article is about lithium in Latin America, how lithium extraction relates to the mass “financialization of life” in the neoliberal era, and how local dispossession in Chile is driven by investors and companies from North America.]

-- Yanis Iqbal. “The Ravages of Lithium Extraction in Chile.” 15 July 2020. [This article is about “lithium imperialism” and how so-called “sustainable” electric cars in European and North American markets rely on dispossession and ecological/human violence in Latin America.]

-- Gregg Mitman. “Forgotten Paths of Empire: Ecology, Disease, and Commerce in the Making of Liberia’s Plantation Economy.” Environmental History. December 2016. [Article about the early-20th-century extraction and production of rubber via corporate plantations in West Africa and how US medical institutions and Harvard doctors relied on plantations for access to research; also discusses coffee and fruit plantations in Latin America.]

-- Post I wrote about the difference between a forest and a tree plantation, focused on resource extraction on Mapuche land in the Valdivian temperate rainforest region of “Chile.”

-- Mongabay has done consistent work covering palm oil plantations which service European and North American food markets, especially focused on plantations in Indonesia, which appear to be dependent on Indigenous dispossession in Borneo and Papua. One example of the initial stages of violence: Sophie Chao. “In the plantations there is hunger and loneliness: The cultural dimensions of food insecurity in Papua.” Mongabay 14 July 2020.

-- On a related note, here’s a long and comprehensive look at palm oil: Human Rights Watch. “When We Lost the Forest, We Lost Everything”: Oil Palm Plantations and Rights Violations in Indonesia. September 2019.

-- Melanie K. Yazzie. “Decolonizing Development in Dine Bikeyah: Resource Extraction, Anti-Capitalism, and Relational Futures.” Environment and Society. September 2018. [This article is about the connections between Navajo Country and US border policies; connections between coal mining, uranium, and land dispossession; and ecological/human damage of wastelanding in the region.]

-- Post I wrote about fossil fuel refineries; environmental racism; high c0vid death rates; cancer rates; toxic air; state violence; and local zoning policy in Louisiana’s Cancer Alley (with a bunch of maps, photos, and graphics).

-- Inspired by a good article Mongabay did about the history of one particular major land-owning company, here’s a post I wrote about how a Gilded Age company founded by friends of King Leopold in the infamous rubber plantations of the Congo eventually came, today, to establish and own the major rubber plantations of Southeast Asia which service Euro-American markets, while the same company still maintains many “neo-colonial” land holdings in Africa.

-- Nicholas Jahr. “Workers Organize at Firestone, Liberia’s ‘State Within a State’.” The Nation. 8 July 2010. [Article about contemporary rubber plantations in West Africa and how Firestone -- “official tire of Major League Baseball” -- functions and rules as a de facto colonial/imperial state.]

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Let me know if anyone wants links to read these articles for free.

Thank you for reaching out. Thanks again for being so kind.

[biofunmy]

The Global Demand For Gold Is Destroying The Amazon Rainforest

Cris Bouroncle / AFP / Getty Images

An aerial view over a chemically deforested area of the Amazon jungle caused by illegal mining activities in the river basin of the Madre de Dios region in southeast Peru, on May 17, 2019, during the ‘Mercury’ joint operation by Peruvian military and police ongoing since February 2019.

The wildfires ripping through the Amazon have drawn the world’s attention to the destruction of the “lungs of the planet.” Many scientists believe cattle ranchers clearing land caused the flames, spurring groups around the world — including the government of Finland — to call for a boycott of Brazilian beef. But to boycott all of the products damaging the Amazon, you’d have to do much more than give up steak. You’d have to toss out your phone, laptop, wedding band, and anything else with gold in it.

“There’s no way to get the gold out without destroying the forest. The more acres you cut down, the more gold you get. It’s directly proportional,” Miles Silman, the cofounder of Wake Forest University’s Center for Amazonian Scientific Innovation (CINCIA), told BuzzFeed News.

“There’s no way to get the gold out without destroying the forest.”

Fueling that demand is not just the world’s appetite for gold bars and jewelry — the largest categories for which gold is used — but also high tech. Tiny electrical currents are constantly running through your iPhone, Alexa speaker, and laptop — and carrying those currents is gold, a fantastic conductor of electricity that’s also resistant to corrosion. While there isn’t much gold inside a single device — an iPhone 6, for example, contains 0.014 grams, or around 50 cents’ worth — in the aggregate, the amount is staggering. According to market researcher Gartner, over 1.5 billion smartphones were sold last year, with 1.3 billion of them being Android devices. It was followed by 215 million iOS devices.

So the tech industry, which consumes nearly 335 tons of gold yearly, will only need more and more of the metal. “There’s a gold rush in the Amazon right now that’s just like the gold rush that happened in California in the 1850s,” said Silman.

According to a 2018 CINCIA study, artisanal mining, or small-scale mining conducted by independent miners, have uprooted nearly 250,000 acres of rainforest in the Madre de Dios region of Peru, where Silman focuses his work. Another study, by researchers at the University of Puerto Rico in 2015, found that approximately 415,000 acres of tropical forest across South America has been lost to gold mining. A map compiled by environmental group Amazon Geo-Referenced Socio-Environmental Information Network shows 2,312 illegal mining sites in 245 areas across six countries, which the group called an “epidemic.”

And just as the California gold rush gave rise to a lawlessness that took generations to tame, the tech industry’s suppliers can’t always meet demand and sometimes turn to the Amazon’s illegal mining economy.

Afp / AFP / Getty Images

An artisan miner shows a piece of gold after extraction and processing on May 6, 2008 in El Ingenio, Peru, 420 kms south of Lima. Artisan mining accounts for the livelihood of more than 40 thousand Peruvian families, though almost 15% of the nation’s gold production comes from this activity. Since the 1980s many extracting camps have been converted into small mining towns lacking basic services and containing high levels of pollution.

A Miami Herald investigation in 2018 detailed how a handful of traders from Southern Florida–based precious metals company NTR Metals bought $3.6 billion of gold from outlaw mines across South America. NTR Metals has since been shut down and the traders arrested. The company was a subsidiary of Elemetal, a major US gold refinery that supplied Tiffany & Co. and other consumer brands, like Apple, which said it stopped working with the supplier, in a February 2019 corporate disclosure.

Apple is far from the only tech giant that sources gold from the Amazon region. A review of corporate disclosures by BuzzFeed News found that Amazon (the company), Apple, Samsung, Sony, and Google list refiners Asahi and Metalor as suppliers. In turn, these firms, based respectively in Switzerland and Japan, buy some of their gold from South American mines. According to the Herald, those companies buy from brokers, who source their gold from a range of legal and illegal mines in the region.

Companies like Alphabet, the parent company of Google, are aware of the impacts of gold mining in the Amazon, and have taken steps to address it. A Google company spokesperson pointed to its conflict minerals policy, and says it relies on third party audits to ensure that smelters are in compliance. Samsung, Sony, and Amazon did not return a request for comment. Apple told BuzzFeed News all its gold refiners participate in third party audits. “If a refiner is unable or unwilling to meet our standards, they will be removed from our supply chain,” an Apple spokesperson said it a statement. “Since 2015, we’ve stopped working with 60 refiners of gold for this reason.”

Dirty gold doesn’t just end up in electronics. A 2015 report by Ojo Publico reported that companies with ties to the London Bullion Market Association — an organization that determines the international price of gold — acquired precious metal from illegal mining camps in Peru, Bolivia, and Brazil.

An estimated 15% to 20% of gold in jewelry and electronics inadvertently comes from small-scale gold mines, according to Fairtrade Gold, an organization advocating the use of responsibly sourced precious metals.

“A part of the problem with gold is that it all goes into one melting pot. So you can have a bar of gold where some of it comes from responsible sources, some of it comes from illegal sources, but it looks like one bar of gold,” said Sarah duPont, president of the Amazon Aid Foundation.

That illegal and dirty gold extraction takes a toll on the environment and the humans who mine it. Compared to soybean farming or cattle ranching, the mining industry clears fewer acres of forest from the Amazon.

However, according to Silman, the carbon emissions of mining can make the industry’s environmental footprint between three to eight times as big as the surface acres lost to mining might suggest. In addition to uprooting trees and other plants, miners dig two to four meters deep into the ground, where soil is rich in carbon. That soil can be thousands of years old, and gold mining liberates that carbon back into the atmosphere, killing nutrients in the dirt that are vital to plants in the rainforest.

“If you think about an Amazonian forest, there’s nothing you do that’s worse to it than alluvial mining.”

“The growth rates around the mines are so slow because you’ve washed everything that’s good out of the soil,” Silman explained.

Gold mining also transforms the landscape in another way: “1 out of every 5 acres converted by mining can’t be reforested because it’s converted into a body of water. So it ends up looking like Minnesota, with thousands of lakes all across the landscape,” said Silman. “If you think about an Amazonian forest, there’s nothing you do that’s worse to it than alluvial mining. You could drop a nuclear bomb on the forest, and it would be better than mining it.”

On top of the environmental devastation, mercury, used as an amalgam to retrieve gold from the dirt, contaminates the region’s water and food supply. According to the US National Institute of Health, artisanal and small-scale gold mining is the leading source of mercury released into the environment. Researchers have found high levels of mercury, which has serious health effects on the nervous, digestive, and immune systems, in people living along the Brazil–Venezuela border, the Madre de Dios area of Peru, and in Suriname.

Joao Laet / AFP / Getty Images

Aerial view of the Esperanca IV informal gold mining camp, near the Menkragnoti indigenous territory, in Altamira, Para state, Brazil, in the Amazon basin, on August 28, 2019.

Despite the dangers, gold mining in the Amazon region is unlikely to slow down. Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro has loosened the country’s environmental laws and is working to open up more of the Amazon to mining. Bolsonaro fired the head of the country’s agency that tracks deforestation, after a report that some 1,330 square miles of Amazonian forest in Brazil had been lost since the president took office in January — a 39% increase over last year.

What can be done? According to Kevin Telmer, executive director of the Artisanal Gold Council, an organization working to professionalize and train the sector, the environmental problem is linked to that of extreme poverty.

Banning small-scale mining would not be effective, according to Telmer: “People have asked the miners to leave for 40 years and they haven’t. What [bans] do is drive the economy into the black market.”

“What’s needed really is sustainable economic pathways for those individuals who are currently pursuing illegal mining,” said Payal Sampat, the mining program director at Earthworks, a nonprofit that started a campaign called No Dirty Gold in 2008. Sampat added that buying vintage jewelry and holding on to electronics for longer is a good way for consumers to cut down on their gold consumption.

Silman, the CINCIA researcher, agrees. Legally placed mines, he said, are at least confined to a small area, instead of thousands of mines sprawled across a landscape. Taxing mining operations could also help money flow back into job placement and other programs: “There was $3 billion made out of Madre de Dios, and a lot of it flowed through mafias. There’s a little over 100,000 people living in that land, and they would have had $300 million of tax revenue,” he said.

The Artisanal Gold Council, Telmer said, is working to provide training and education to miners, reforest mined areas, as well as introduce processes that are more effective than the use of mercury.

The formalization and professionalization of the sector can help miners be more productive, and be less impactful on the environment, too, Silman said: “Once you do all these things, at least you can get some good from mining, and you still don’t destroy all the opportunities for the future that rely on biodiversity.”

UPDATE

Aug. 31, 2019, at 16:00 PM

This story has been updated to include comment from Apple.

Sahred From Source link Technology

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[newsnigeria]

Check out New Post published on Ọmọ Oòduà

New Post has been published on http://ooduarere.com/news-from-nigeria/world-news/news-conference-following/

News conference following talks between the presidents of Russia and the United States

President of Russia Vladimir Putin: Mr President, ladies and��gentlemen,

The talks with President of the United States Donald Trump were held in a candid and business-like atmosphere. I think they were quite successful and beneficial.

We reviewed the current state and prospects of Russia-US relations and key international issues. It is obvious to everyone that our bilateral relations are undergoing a complicated period but there is no objective reason for these difficulties and the current tense atmosphere.

The Cold War ended long ago, the era of acute ideological confrontation belongs to the distant past, and the situation in the world has fundamentally changed.

Today both Russia and the United States are facing completely different challenges – the mechanisms of international security and stability are dangerously out of balance, there are regional crises, the spread of the threat of terrorism and cross border crime, crime in general, growing world economic problems, environmental and other risks. It is possible to cope with all this only by working together. I hope we will come to this same understanding with our American partners.

Today’s talks reflected the shared desire of President Trump and myself to correct the negative situation in bilateral relations and map out initial steps to improve them, restore an acceptable level of trust and return to the former level of cooperation on all issues of mutual interest.

As a major nuclear power, we have special responsibility when it comes to international security. I consider it important, as we discussed, to get the dialogue on strategic stability and the non-proliferation of weapons of mass destruction on track. We made a note with a number of concrete proposals on this matter available to our American colleagues.

We believe that continued joint efforts to fully work through the military-political and disarmament dossier is necessary. That includes the renewal of the Strategic Offensive Reductions Treaty, the dangerous situation surrounding the development of elements of the US global missile defence system, the implementation of the Treaty on the Elimination of Intermediate-Range and Shorter-Range Missiles, and the topic of deploying weapons in space.

We are in favour of continued cooperation in the sphere of combating terrorism and ensuring cybersecurity. Notably, our special services are working together quite successfully. The most recent example of that is the close operational interaction with a group of US security experts as part of the World Cup in Russia that ended yesterday. Contacts between the special services should be made systematic. I reminded the President of the United States about the proposal to reconstitute the anti-terror working group.

We covered regional crises extensively. Our positions do not coincide on all matters, but nonetheless there are many overlapping interests. We should be looking for common ground and working more closely, including at international forums.

Of course, we talked about regional crises, including Syria. With regard to Syria, restoring peace and harmony in that country could serve as an example of successful joint work.

Of course, Russia and the United States can take the lead in this matter and organise cooperation to overcome the humanitarian crisis and help refugees return to their hearths.

We have all the requisite elements for effective cooperation on Syria. Notably, Russian and American military have gained useful experience of interaction and coordination in the air and on land.

I would also like to note that after the terrorists are routed in southwest Syria, in the so-called “southern zone”, the situation in the Golan Heights should be brought into full conformity with the 1974 agreement on the disengagement of Israeli and Syrian forces.

This will make it possible to bring tranquillity to the Golan Heights and restore the ceasefire between the Syrian Arab Republic and the State of Israel. The President devoted special attention to this issue today.

I would like to emphasise that Russia has a stake in this course of events and will adhere to exactly this position. This will constitute a step towards establishing a just and durable peace on the basis of UN Security Council Resolution 338.

It is good that efforts to gradually solve the problem of the Korean Peninsula have begun. This became possible largely because President Trump got personally involved and pursued dialogue in the spirit of cooperation rather than confrontation.

During the talks we openly discussed Russia’s concern over the US withdrawal from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action on the Iranian nuclear issue. The US knows our position. It remains unchanged. To underscore, due to the nuclear deal Iran has become the country most heavily inspected by the IAEA. This guarantees the exclusively peaceful nature of the Iranian nuclear programme and facilitates the consolidation of the non-proliferation regime.

Returning to our discussion of the Ukrainian crisis, the importance of observing the Minsk agreements in good faith was noted. The United States could be more resolute in insisting on this and could motivate Ukraine’s leaders to engage in this work.

We paid special attention to the economy. Obviously, there is interest in cooperation in the business circles of both countries. The US delegation was one of the biggest at the St Petersburg International Economic Forum in May. It consisted of over 500 US entrepreneurs.

To develop trade and investment, President Trump and I agreed to establish a high-level group that would unite captains of Russian and American business. Business people better understand how to go about mutually beneficial cooperation. Let them consider what can be done and make recommendations.

Once again President Trump touched on the so-called Russian interference in the electoral process in the United States. I had to repeat what I said many times before, including during my personal meeting with the President: Russia has never and will never interfere in US domestic affairs, including the electoral process. We are ready to examine all concrete materials that may be presented, for example, in the framework of the cybersecurity working group, the establishment of which we discussed during our meeting in Hamburg.

And, of course, it is time to unfreeze Russian-US ties between civic organisations and in the cultural and humanitarian sphere. As you know, recently we received a delegation from the US Congress, which was considered almost a historic event, when it should be a regular occurrence.

On this note, we have proposed that the US President think not only on practical issues but also on the philosophy underlying long-term bilateral relations. It would be useful to involve experts on the history and nuances of Russian-US cooperation in this process.

Our idea is to establish an expert council composed of influential Russian and US political analysts, academics, prominent former diplomats and military officers, which would work on finding points of convergence and ways to put bilateral cooperation on a sustainable positive trajectory.

In general, we are satisfied with our first full-scale meeting. Let me say once again that before this, we had only met briefly at international forums. President Trump and I had a good conversation. I hope now we understand each other better, and I thank Donald for this.

Of course, numerous problems remain. We have not managed to clear all the blockages, which would be impossible in one meeting. But I believe we have taken an important first step in this direction.

In conclusion I would like to note that our Finnish hosts helped to create the working atmosphere during the talks. I thank to the leadership of Finland, the Finnish people and residents of Helsinki for what they have done. We know that we have caused a lot of inconvenience for people in Helsinki and we apologise for this.

Thank you for your attention.

<…>

Question: I have a question for the President of the United States.

During your recent European tour, you said that the Nord Stream 2 pipeline project and other projects make Europe hostage to Russia. You suggested saving Europe from this dependence by supplying US liquefied gas.

This past cold winter proved the viability of the current energy supply system in Europe, at a time where the United States was forced to buy additional liquefied gas, including from Russia, to cover the heating needs of Boston.

So, my question: is your idea more of a political nature? Might it lead to a situation where a gap could develop in Europe’s energy supply system which would impact primarily the consumer countries?

And a second question, if I may. Before the meeting with Mr Putin, you called him a rival, but left hope that, perhaps, you would be able to take these relations to a friendly plane. Did you succeed?

Donald Trump: (English transcript)

Vladimir Putin: I would like to add a couple of words to that.

I spoke with the President, including on this topic. We are aware of the President’s position. But I believe that we, as a major oil and gas country – and the United States is also such a country – could work constructively to regulate international markets, because we are not interested in a sharp drop in prices below the lower limit. Our producers, including the United States with its shale oil and gas, will be affected by this.

The profit margin of production comes to naught below certain levels. We are not interested in excessively high prices either, because they can kill refining, engineering and other branches of the economy. We have things to discuss and there is room for cooperation. This is my first point.

Second, with regard to Nord Stream 2, the President expressed concerns about the possible end of transit across Ukraine. I assured him that Russia is willing to keep this transit in place. Moreover, we are willing to renew the transit contract, which expires next year, if the dispute between economic agents is settled in the Stockholm Arbitration Court.

To be continued.