From this week's lesson in one of my classes.
A few years ago, I had a day off in London. My estimable travel people had put me in a modest but comfortable hotel in the business district near the Tower Bridge, not very lively from a residential perspective, but a great location for someone who likes to hike in urban ecosystems. No more than 50 meters from my hotel was the public path along the Thames, which now runs along both shores for the entire length of the City of London and more. On Saturday morning I headed for the bridge to get across to the Tate Modern to see Kandinsky on one of its last days in town.
And got distracted for most of the day. There was an exceptionally low tide that morning, and most of the Thames bottom along the flood walls on both banks was exposed. Being a mudflat ecologist by training and beachcomber by preference, I was very soon up to my knees in sticky, mayonnaisy mud and finding, to my surprise, animal bones—horse and cow teeth, skull fragments, limb bones, ribs—as deep into the mud as I could easily dig. Inquiring of the nearest gentleman working the same flat with a metal detector suggested that a slaughterhouse and meat purveyor operated at that location for a long time—he thought many decades, medieval to post-medieval times. And that the facility was permitted to dump as much of anything they could into the river for precisely one hour per day. My bed of bones, which by my measure with a length of one-by-two was at least a couple meters deep and maybe much more, was the modern outcome of that bit of regulation (possibly it wasn’t even “regulation” in a formal sense, being simply polite custom), no doubt intended at the time to reduce the nuisance of smell and noxious material in the marketplace.
Lesson one for me: effects of regulations can last a long, long time, well beyond the span of their intended purpose.
In the 1980s, I worked with a team under contract to the U.S. Agency for International Development and the Government of Egypt to develop a manual for environmentally sound…now we would say “green”…development of tourist villages along the desert coasts of the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aqaba. These were gorgeous tropical waterways, vacation magnets for northern Europeans enduring the raw gloom of German, Danish, or Dutch winter-to-early-spring weather. But the remote nature of the landscape and haphazard history of occupation yielded some uncomfortable—and some downright unhealthy—outcomes. Solid waste management was ineffective, and trash littered the resort areas. In some cases withdrawal ports for desalination for potable water supplies adjoined the discharge ports for untreated sanitary sewage. Our integrated group of engineers and ecologists compiled a user-friendly manual of specifications for sustainable and attractive, and most especially, healthy, development of financially profitable tourist villages in this fragile environment. It was a very nice piece of work, I am proud of my small part in it to this day.
However. Just as the manual was to have its published unveiling, accompanied by a suite of visits to developers and development facilities to discuss its importance, the violence of the 1990 Gulf Conflict began to grow from the shards of the long-running Iran-Iraq war. Subsequent events simply plowed our plans and specifications under the soils of the desert battlefields of Kuwait and the effects that spread across the region like ripples on a storm-struck pond.
Our well-funded, carefully-written, thoroughly reviewed specifications for sustainable development disappeared under a heap of higher priorities. Lesson two: environmental issues, however important and well-intended, are easily lost in the fog of war.
Later in the 1990s, I was engaged as an expert in natural resource damages and ecosystem service losses associated with impacts of the Gulf Conflict on several nations affected by the outcomes of that war. At issue were such effects as damage to pastureland by refugees and their herds, intense use of water, food, and medical supplies, physical impacts to coastlines and waterways, pre-emption of agricultural lands, habitat injuries and loss of endangered species, and others. For this effort, the United Nations established a Compensation Commission program by which a fractional contribution was taken from legal petroleum sales and channeled to funds for reparation of war damages in social, economic, and environmental arenas.
This process seems to have worked rather well for at least a while. Many of the claims were documented, verified, and paid. Some of the environmental claims lagged, and these may end up being victims of subsequent events again overriding the original priorities. Still, at least some, and possibly much, of the intent of the UNCC program was accomplished successfully.
Lesson three: environmental regulations, developed rationally and implemented conscientiously, can work, even under difficult circumstances.
Notes
I have been unable to date to verify the medieval slaughterhouse theory that my friend on the Thames mudflat gave me. It does not appear to be mentioned in Peter Ackroyd’s excellent Thames: The Biography. But I’ll keep looking.
Nor have I found an available source of our 1990s sustainable development manual. More up-to-date and useful sources of similar materials are, however, widely available. For example, see
http://www.google.com/search?client=safari&rls=en&q=manual+for+environmentally+sound+tourist+village&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8#q=manual+for+environmentally+sound+tourist+village&hl=en&client=safari&rls=en&prmd=ivns&ei=-XJ9TdrvCMnB0QHlwO3fAw&start=20&sa=N&bav=on.2,or.r_gc.r_pw.&fp=cb68b71298b37dc8
regarding fresh water, and
http://150.214.182.12:8080/turismo/turismonet1/economia%20del%20turismo/turismo%20sostenible/globalisation%20versus%20sustanaible%20tourism%20in%20coastal%20areas.pdf
more generally and theoretically.
Many documents and some of the regulatory history of the United Nations Compensation Commission program are included in this week’s lesson upload package. A general overview is available here:
http://www.uncc.ch/
PS--if you have the time, I got the material. Surf on over to
http://endoftheworldpartdeux.blogspot.com/
http://theresaturtleinmysoup.blogspot.com/
http://docviper.livejournal.com/
Thanks for stoppin' by!
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