alien corn

You ought to drink more water, apparently

An advert in the London Lite or the London Paper (one of the two, it’s so hard to tell the difference) caught my evil  eye recently. It’s from the Natural Hydration Council and featuring an image of a man-crocodile hybrid clutching a bottle of water, it says that water is naturally kind to teeth. “Choosing water,” it says soothingly, “is a better choice for your teeth. Naturally sourced waters contain no sugar and no additives whatsoever. Drink it every day and you’ll be smiling for years to come.”

Wow, nature made us dependent on something that doesn’t rot our teeth. Who’d have thought? It’s no surprise that the Natural Hydration Council isn’t the objective, authoritative body its name implies but is yet another of those industry lobbying bodies set up to paper over the ethical and environmental cracks in their business practices. To be fair, they’re not hiding – the logos for Buxton (owned by Nestle), Evian (Danone), and Volvic (also Danone) amongst others appear at the bottom, and the council was launched last year with a big fanfare in the beverage industry.

John Vidal’s already noted that the conflict of interests between the NHC and another industry body, the British Soft Drinks Association, which pushes the sugary drinks these companies also produce, but the NHC is also charged with “to research and promote the environmental, health and other sustainable benefits of naturally sourced bottled water and help consumers to make an informed choice about natural bottled water and hydration in their diet.” It’s also helping to position your choice of water (that’s tap versus “naturally sourced”) as a lifestyle choice, encouraging you to develop a “sharp mind” (accompanied by an owl chimera) and “superior performance” (hello, cheetah man) by drinking bottled water.

And yet there doesn’t seem to be any real evidence to support these claims – studies have shown that there’s no benefit to drinking 1.5 litres a day (as Volvic is currently encouraging us to do by having a “cheeky Volvic” every now and then). Plus, the NHC’s claims that “naturally sourced water… is purified naturally rather than through a chemical process…” is a complete crock and rotten science. Are they seriously suggesting that water passing through various geological formations does not undergo chemical changes?

Paolo Sangiorgi, managing director of Nestlé Waters UK, spins further on the supposed benefits. “Not many people realise that natural bottled water comes from fully sustainable sources and in recyclable packaging,” he trills. “We need the council to undertake new research and communicate the facts to ensure fully informed consumer choices.” Putting aside the fact that any research commissioned by an industry body is going to be suspect at best, water is only sustainable if it’s not shipped halfway round the world to leave its point of origin all the more dessicated for it. Of course, climate change could, er, change all that. And yes, PET bottles can be recycled but most of them aren’t.

A great fount of wisdom and sagely advice once said that one of the greatest achievements of Western world was to provide universal clean drinking water (well, in the West at least), and that bottled water was a pointless waste of money, effort and resources. Good on you, Mum. And of course, you should never trust a crocodile.

Because I’m lazy and haven’t thought of anything worth writing of late, I’m reposting something I wrote for The Sietch:

In the environmental campaigning world, we talk a lot about the need to protect biodiversity: how it’s important to beat the ballooning extinction rate and preserve as many different species as we possible. Not only that, we need populations large enough to contain a deep genetic pool so they can breed successfully.

Anyone with the slightest interest in conservation accepts that we need to save trees, animals, slime molds, whatever from the great natural history museum in the sky, but the word ‘biodiversity’ itself causes me some problems. I don’t have any evidence to back this up (if anyone does, let me know) but I suspect it’s one of those jargon words used in policy documents and scientific abstracts which doesn’t really mean anything to those outside a relatively small circle who are in the know.

Some people have recently warned about the overuse of green geek speak and how it may be alienating the very people we’re trying to reach. Speaking as someone whose job it is to communicate environmental campaigns – many of which are based on rigorous research and reporting – to as wide an audience as possible, this really matters. Talking about the benefits of genetic diversity is guaranteed to turn a lot of people off and there have been times when I’ve deliberately avoided using ‘biodiversity’ in some stories I’ve written.

But then I just come up against the problem of which word to use instead. ‘Wildlife’ gets more Google hits but doesn’t really cut it; ‘plants and animals’ is lumpen and ignores whole kingdoms on the evolutionary tree… In fact, nothing I can come up with reflects the feverish complexity inherent in ‘biodiversity’.

As with anything, if you want people to understand the best way is to show them and as the interdependences of living organisms are slowly unpicked, there are more and more examples to draw on. Recently, I read Colin Tudge’s excellent book, The Secret Life of Trees, a fascinating insight into the mind-boggling wonder of our arboreal friends. (I making assumptions that trees have friends, because they never write, the never phone…) If you haven’t read it, do so (but save a tree and get a secondhand copy).

Amongst the many examples of trees relying on other living things (including a large section on the truly incredible fig-wasp interface), there’s the story of the almendro tree which grows in Panama. This tree produces a fruit, often in large quantities, which brings hordes of creatures to feast on them. The problem is, most of the diners aren’t very good at dispersing seeds (there are good reasons why tropical trees need to be so far away from other members of the same species – read the book to find out why). So the almendro relies on bats, who disperse the seeds but don’t bury them. The tree also relies on agoutis, a relative of the guinea pig, which finds seeds dropped by the bats, eats most of them but also buries some for later consumption, just like a squirrel. Given a chance, these planted seeds will germinate and grow.

But a further problem is that agoutis will also eat the young almendro shoots, so these rodents need to be kept in check. That’s where the ocelots come in – they keep the agouti numbers down and so the juvenile almendro have a better chance of surviving. Almendro trees haven’t been reproducing very well and the theory is that the low number of ocelots is having a direct impact on them – fewer ocelots means more agoutis which means fewer almendros. Kill off the bats and the agoutis, and it’s obvious that the trees are gonna suffer but where the ocelots fit in is less apparent, but take them out and the whole web would unravel anyway.

I know it’s not exactly revelatory, but reading that passage helped put a new angle on my understanding of biodiversity, a least the concept if not the detailed scientific analysis. It’s over-simplifying for sure and there are bound to be other species involved in the success story of almendros, but it’s a neat illustration of why biodiversity is important, not just for its own sake but for the continued survival of every species, including us. Now if I can just work that in every time I need to use the word ‘biodiversity’, I’m sorted.

So, after weeks in clear blue water and bracing sea air, returning to Jakarta was a bit of a shock. Waking up with brown smog on the horizon and junk in the water, not nice. A thick pall settled over the ship and clung to us for the next three days, and it didn’t help that the air-conditioning inside was getting increasingly worse. But after ten days at sea, returning to land was something of an adventure, not to mention the prospect of shore leave. I only managed to escape in the evenings, with one night spent D’Place in Sahrina shopping mall (where I played pool badly), and another night narrowly avoiding D’Place once more and going to Jalan Jaksa instead. We got drunk enough to stumble into a Nigerian hotspot where we were bought beers by a Huggy Bear look-alike and there was a shrine to Barack Obama.

The big political event the following morning was struggle, and with several new members of crew joining it was tough going doing all the introductions and small talk. John who works in my office was one of the newbies, and it was good to see a friendly face – seeing known people in bizarre locations (for instance, the VIP lounge of the Tanjung Priok port passenger terminal, the venue for the event) is getting increasingly commonplace. Also joining were four Chinese guys – one campaigner and three journalists – and I’ve been hesitantly experimenting with Mandarin again. I crammed some lessons from my iPod first to brush up on my vocab and managed to make myself understood about 20 per cent of the time.

Leaving Jakarta, the ship entered waters where there’s a higher incidence of piracy and security measures have been stepped up. Jokes about Johnny Depp jumping on board have grown old very quickly, but the sea last Sunday was preternaturally calm, flowing like liquid mercury around the ship. Somehow, Sunday night descended into drunken abandon for me and my cabin mate Ric, with a sound system set up in the heli-hanger. The frequent sightings of sea snakes I made weren’t believed (the waters round Java must be crawling with them) and I fell asleep in a hammock on the poop deck. But I was expecting more of a social life aboard ship – apart from a few isolated incidents (a barbeque here, a quiz night there), it’s been a quite trip.

But this week has been frustrating. Several activities that had been on the schedule suddenly disappeared: some were lost due to bad luck, but others appeared to slip through our fingers due to bad planning. I’d been treading water for two weeks (not literally) in the expectation of having some juicy stories to work on, but they’ve been a lot thinner on the ground than I’d hoped.

One exception was yesterday’s trip out to the plantations in Riau to hoist an unfeasbily large banner in a swampy, boggy bit of deforested land on the Kampar peninsula. Not only was it a trip off the ship, but it was a chance to see firsthand some of the stuff I’ve been writing about for nearly three years. The precariousness of the forest and the extent of the plantations (palm oil and acacia) is depressing, and given the mind-boggling scale of the areas we’re talking about, I’m inclined to think we’re all utterly screwed.

Still slowly getting images up on Flickr, and I shouldn’t really be gobbling up the bandwidth like this. I’m justifying it as a perk of the job. I can’t get FTP to work here so I can’t make modifications to the structure of the site like adding a Flickr badge. Oh well. And huge thanks to Jamie at my lovely host Ecological Hosting for doing the upgrade for me. If anyone’s looking for a hosting service with excellent service, go there.

I did a lot of reading over Christmas. After spending several months being way down on my usual reading levels, I chewed through several books in a few days, but then in a Cumbrian winter there’s not much else to do. One I read, even though I knew it would get me angry (which it did) was Not on the Label by Felicity Lawrence. I’ve been eyeing up the various supermarket exposes for a while but only just got round to reading one. It was the anger I wasn’t looking forward to and, as I said, it didn’t disappoint.

I already knew a lot of it – the exploitation of immigrant workers in this country and others, the outrageous demands supermarkets make of farmers and producers, not to mention the environmental cost – but there were still a few nuggets of new info to make my blood boil. One of which was an account of how Marks & Spencer sold green beans and baby corn grown in Kenya – I knew the stuff was air-freighted in but what I hadn’t realised was the packaging was air-frieghted out from the UK along with chives to tie bundles of veg together.

Which makes yesterday’s news that M&S will pull out all the stops to be greener than thou highly interesting. True, they’ve been doing some great stuff in various areas, especially fish, but they’ve still got a looooong way to go on things like packaging and food miles. Their new plan appear to address much of this and while they’ll still be flying food in, it will be clearly labelled, maybe with a ‘this product could be bad for the planet’ sticker. Or maybe not.

And there are lots of other boxes ticked – using waste food to as biomass for fuel, reducing energy consumption, offsetting as a last resort, eradicating plastic packaging in favour of corn starch materials… So, good on paper but I hope they follow through. To be fair, they do tend to put their money where their mouth is (£200m in this case) and with green policies now a key marketing tactic, hopefully their new policies will trickle down into the rest of the industry. Are you listening, Tesco?