The World is Talking About…

Gridskipper: Under Tokyo

Oh, this one I know:

Under Tokyo

I'm sure the last thing you'll want to see during your travels is a city's sewer system -- in fact, the less we know about what happens in the dark and wet, the better. But browsing through the this gallery of shots from Tokyo's underground, I think you'll agree there's something pretty interesting going on down there. Looking like a cross between Japanese anime and one of Ken Adam's classic set pieces for the James Bond films, I'm surprised they don't offer tours. Then again, since photos don't transmit smell, maybe there is a reason.

UPDATE: Actually, they do offer tours.

The correspondent gets a big part of it wrong: it's NOT a sewer, it's a flood-control project, with the unlikely English-language monicker of "G-Cans Project". As such, the only smell on offer, I'm sure, is possibly that of cold damp concrete.

It's even been featured in a Land Rover TV commercial (requires Flash: click on "Range Rover Sport" when the page loads to see the Tokyo section) and print ad. And despite what's shown in the commercial, it's actually way up in the northern outskirts of Tokyo (actually, in Saitama prefecture), and nowhere near Shinjuku (where the commercial begins) or Yokohama (where it ends).

Tours are possible, it appears, but since they're conducted only in Japanese, they require you to bring someone to act as a translator (my guess is that they're worried about foreign visitors not understanding the safety rules). If you speak Japanese or know someone who does, call them at 048-747-0281 to make arrangements, which is something I ought to be doing myself someday.

Access from Tokyo:

The nearest train station seems to be Minami-Sakurai station on the Tobu Noda line, and there are a variety of ways to get there:

Method 1: From Tokyo Station, go to platform 3 and catch the Keihin-Tohoku line north to Omiya (25 minutes away). Transfer to the Tobu Noda line eastbound towards Kasukabe, Kashiwa, or Funabashi, and get off at Minami-Sakurai station (11 stations, 28 minutes away). Don't know what the bus lines are, so it's probably simplest to take a taxi from the station rather than walk for 2 kilometers.

Method 2: From Tokyo Station, go to platform 3 or 4 and catch either the Keihin-Tohoku or Yamanote line north to Akihabara (2 stops, 3 minutes). Exit and transfer to the Hibiya subway line going towards Kita-Senju station (6 stations, 12 minutes). Depending on the train you're on, either transfer at Kita-Senju station (if the train terminates there) or simply stay on it (if it continues) to the Tōbu Isesaki Line to Kasukabe (6-19 stations, depending on whether it's a local or express, about 28 minutes). Transfer at Kasukabe to the Tobu Noda line eastbound towards Kashiwa or Funabashi, and get off at Minami-Sakurai station (2 stops, 7 minutes away). Take a taxi.

Method 3: Use this website to figure whichever route works for you to reach Minami-Sakurai station. There, take a taxi.

Map Legend:

南桜井 = Minami-Sakurai station
春日部市= Kasukabe, the name of the city
首都圏外郭放水路 = Official Japanese name for the project

Kazakhstan is Talking About...the Return of the Sea

Aral Sea's Return Revives Withered Villages

Dam Begins to Diminish Ecological Disaster of Soviet-Era Irrigation

By Peter Finn, Washington Post Foreign Service

Tastupek, Kazakhstan - In the cool of one recent evening, after tending to his herd of 19 camels, Puzblay Seytpembetov and four companions pushed his small single-engine boat out onto the placid waters of the Aral Sea to lay fishnets. In the morning, he predicted, he would haul in flapping carp and pikeperch.

It is a daily task that until recently had seemed forever lost to the folly of humankind.

The Aral Sea, its sustaining rivers diverted to the irrigation of cotton fields, was for decades on an irrevocable course to death and desert. One of the 20th century's worst ecological disasters consumed more than half the sea's surface area and three-quarters of its volume, creating 13,000 square miles of dried-up wasteland. The shriveling sea bequeathed poisonous sandstorms, chronic health problems, dead fishing grounds and unemployment to this part of southern Kazakhstan.

But now the sea, or at least a rump part of it, is coming back, retracing its destructive retreat and offering villagers such as Seytpembetov nothing less than renewed life.

"It's good to be back on the water. I'm happy for that," said the weather-beaten fisherman, who turned to camel herding when the shoreline withdrew. "I'm happy for that. But it's not the sea it used to be. That's the truth."

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Alberta is Talking About...Oil

Black Gold's Tarnish Seen in Canada

Cash and jobs flow bountifully from Alberta's oil sands, but they come at a cost to the environment and native peoples.

By Tim Reiterman, Los Angeles Times

Fort McMurray, Alberta, Canada - The Aurora Mine exudes the odor of petroleum and the look of untapped riches.

The open pit mine plunges 250 feet deep and ranges over a couple of square miles, carved out of pine and spruce forest by gigantic machines that operate 24/7, even in the dark of winter at 40 below zero

This is the heart of Alberta's oil sands, a remote Florida-sized region where moose, bears and beavers inhabit watery woodlands atop the world's largest proven petroleum reserves outside Saudi Arabia.

Almost half of Canada's oil production comes from the oil sands — and the energy industry estimates that enough oil can be economically extracted to fill the country's needs for three centuries.

The benefits may be great, but the toll on other natural resources is also enormous.

With development expected to triple, or even quintuple, in the next few decades, producers and government officials puzzle over how to harness the oil sands' potential with less cost to the climate, land, water and the well-being of native peoples who fear that cancer cases in a downstream community may be a sign of lethal industrial pollution.

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Uganda is Talking About...Trash

Why Uganda Hates The Plastic Bag

Uganda joins the growing number of East African countries which have banned the plastic bag in an attempt to clean up cities and prevent environmental damage including blocked drains.

By Mark Whitaker, BBC News

Kampala, Uganda - efore your eyes become accustomed to the sight and the stench, the Chitezi municipal dump - which serves the Ugandan capital, Kampala - is like a scene from a painting by Bosch, a premonition of the Apocalypse, or a vision of Hell.

High in the sky, great birds wheel around on the thermals. At first glance, they look like giant vultures, casting ominous shadows on the ragged human scavengers strewn around below.

But as they touch down on the grey, stinking moonscape, they seem to take on a ghastly sub-human form themselves. Like cowled priests bent over the rotting piles.

With their moth-eaten plumage, grotesque "alopecia-ed" heads, and sinister reptilian eyes, these are Africa's nightmare birds - marabou storks - fencing with their murderous bills over the carcass of a plastic sack they have ripped apart.

Flocking here in their hundreds, the ravenous birds are making a feast of Kampala's refuse, squabbling with their human competitors over the richest pickings.

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Isle of Lewis is Talking About...Windmills

Sheltered In Every Way But One

Massive wind project divides a British isle; "This is the land of our ancestors. If we lose it, we've lost the thing that makes us who we are," says schoolteacher Catriona Campbell.

By Tom Hundley, Chicago Tribune

Isle of Lewis, Scotland - Those who inhabit this faraway island of windswept moors and rocky crofts seem to possess a sense of place that does not leave them at a loss for words.

Listen to Finlay MacLeod, a local broadcaster and writer who enjoys long ambles on the desolate moors, a jelly-like terrain that is more liquid than solid: "I know this place through the soles of my feet. I revel in it. I serenade it. I never go on holiday. When I do go away, I'm desperate to get back," he told a visitor.

"And now we are facing this terrible thing that threatens the very essence of what Lewis is. It's a small island. It's unique. And this will tear it asunder," he said.

The "terrible thing" to which he refers is a plan to construct what some promote as an environmental and economic blessing--a vast wind farm. Two British energy conglomerates have applied for permission to build 234 giant wind turbines that would generate 702 megawatts of power, one of the largest such projects in Europe.

The turbines would be 460 feet high; their rotors would have a diameter of 330 feet. A Boeing 747 jumbo jet could fly through the circumference with room to spare.

"There'd be no escaping them," said Catriona Campbell, whose kitchen window view would be compromised by dozens of the turbines about a mile away. She calls them a "physical and cultural desecration."

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Kathmandu is Talking About...Closing the Mountain

Comment: More about the effects of mass tourism. Weirdest fact in the article: 188 dead bodies are still up there.

Should Everest be closed?

Tourism is turning the world's highest peak into its biggest rubbish dump, claim conservationists, who are pressing for controls on climbing. But will this cost sherpas their livelihood?

By Dan McDougall, The Observer

Kathmandu, Nepal - It has been described as the highest junkyard in the world. Covered in discarded mountaineering detritus and suffering under thousands of tourists' boots every year, environmental groups are to launch a push for a radical solution - the temporary closure of Mount Everest, the world's highest mountain.

Warnings that an ecological disaster is imminent in the area around the mountain have largely been ignored amid years of turmoil in Nepal. But conservationists think that growing political stability in the Himalayan kingdom means that the time has come and that the damage caused every year by thousands of climbers and tourists can no longer be ignored.

Maoist rebels declared a ceasefire with Nepal's government in April after a decade-long insurgency and are negotiating to join an interim government with the country's mainstream political parties. The Kathmandu Environmental Education Project (Keep) said that the relative calm has removed an obstacle in its efforts to persuade the authorities that a temporary closure of the mountain is the only solution to help it repair itself.

Campaigners warn that the price of tourism is discarded rubbish and medical waste and the colonisation of the area by restaurants and internet cafes. Sherpa spelled out the strain being placed on the indigenous population. "Providing enough electricity and water for the small communities surrounding Everest and the other Himalayan mountains becomes very challenging when there are tens of thousands of additional tourists and climbers in the region competing for these same resources," he said. "Nepal is ravaged by water and air pollution caused by industrialisation and increased tourism. Water supplies for local villages, delivered through irrigation systems in the mountains, are being critically depleted and urgent action needs to be taken."

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Argentina is Talking About...Land Ownership

Argentine Land Fight Divides Environmentalists, Rights Advocates

Not just South American nationalism against foreign investors, but also environmentalists versus social justice advocates -- two activist movements often grouped together under the "progressive" label.

By Monte Reel, Washington Post

Concepción, Corrientes_Province, Argentina - From a flat patch of tree-studded savannah, the gaze stretches for miles: across a small pond where a marsh deer stops to drink, and over swampy wetlands where herons gingerly high-step.

Above it all, a small airplane drones. At the controls is Douglas Tompkins, an American who owns everything underneath him, paid for from the millions he earned as the founder of the North Face and Esprit clothing lines.

"It's an amazing piece of land," Tompkins said shortly after landing. "Extremely rich with biological diversity."

Now, many Argentine officials and social activists want to confiscate the property he says he bought to create an ecological preserve. They think that he and other wealthy foreigners who have bought enormous swaths of the Argentine and Chilean countryside are trying to wrest control of a continent under the guise of environmental preservation.

"We believe this is a new way of trying to dominate the South American countries," said Araceli Mendez, a congresswoman who represents this region and sponsored legislation last month that would expropriate Tompkins's land. "It is dangerous for the defense of our national security to have the concentration of so much land in the hands of foreigners..."

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Beirut is Talking About...Environmental Damage

Beirut's Anger Over Lasting Damage

Major environmental damage caused by Israeli bombing

By Chris Morris, BBC World Service's From Our Own Correspondent

Beirut, Lebanon - The port of Beirut has welcomed its first big cargo ships since Israel lifted its eight-week blockade of Lebanese territorial waters and air space on Friday imposed after the capture of two Israeli soldiers by Hezbollah militants.

While the lifting of the embargo is clearly a significant step for Lebanon, Chris Morris has been finding out that the repercussions of the conflict are still keenly felt, even outside those areas most badly damaged in Israel's military offensive.

Abu Ali is 49-years-old. In a small open boat, he has been fishing off the coast of Beirut for a quarter of a century. It is a familiar routine - make money in the summer when the fish are plentiful and the seas are calm. It helps tide you through the winter.

But there has been nothing familiar about the summer of 2006.

The small port of Dalieh is a tiny inlet, little more than a stone's throw from the posh sea-front apartment blocks of West Beirut. About 100 fishermen usually set out from here, Abu Ali among them, to ply their trade in the Mediterranean.

But Dalieh has died, it has been smothered.

Everything is covered in a thick slick of heavy fuel oil. The smell sticks in the throat, the oil sloshes against blackened boats and rocks, polluting everything it touches. It is filthy, it is toxic, and it is right in the heart of the city...

Read more..., or listen to the story at the BBC's From Our Own Correspondent.

Myanmar (Burma) is Talking About...Temple Preservation

From Ruins to Ruined

Bagan in danger of becoming temple theme park

By Richard C. Paddock, Los Angeles Times

Bagan, Myanmar  (formerly Burma) - The bricklayers are paid $1.35 a day to rebuild the ancient ruin: a small, 13th century temple reduced by time to little more than its foundation.

But they have no training in repairing aged monuments, and their work has nothing to do with actually restoring one of the world's most important Buddhist sites. Instead, using modern red bricks and mortar, they are building a new temple on top of the old.

They work from a single page of drawings supplied by the government. Three simple sketches provide the design for a generic brick structure and a fanciful archway. No one knows, or seems to care, what the original temple looked like. Nearby are two piles of 700-year-old bricks that were pulled from the ruin. The bricklayers use them to fill holes in the temple.

Known as Monument No. 751, the structure is one of hundreds of new temples that have popped up all over the ancient city of Bagan, which ranks with Cambodia's Angkor temple complex as one of Asia's most remarkable religious sites. Once the scene of an international rescue effort, Bagan is now in danger of becoming a temple theme park.

The late Myanmar historian Than Tun called the restoration "blitzkrieg archeology."

"They are carrying out reconstruction based on complete fantasy," said an American archeologist who asked not to be identified for fear of being banned from the country. "It completely obliterates any historical record of what was there."

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Kyrgyzstan is Talking About…Mining Garbage

There’s Money in Dirt, for Those Who Find Bits of Silicon

In a Kyrgyz dump, girls dig up silicon for China

By Ilan Greenberg, New York Times

Orlovka , Kyrgyzstan - Sifting black earth inside her hole, 14-year-old Nurzada Meerim admits to breathing problems. “But here is money,” she said, holding up a crinkled silver flake.

Across a vast landfill just outside this tiny farming town in eastern Kyrgyzstan, the heads of girls continually pop up from narrowly constructed 10-foot shafts. Mothers and other female relatives wait on the rim, hands outstretched to take the flakes and gnarled pebbles of silicon that the girls have retrieved from the soil. There are some men, too, and they bark threats to outsiders who walk past their holes.

The landfill covers the garbage cast off from a shuttered factory that produced mostly trinkets and souvenirs from silicon-bearing rock, as well as waste sent from a nearby Soviet-era uranium mine. Flattened plastic bottles carpet the area.

Local environmentalists and doctors who have visited the landfill have warned the Kyrgyz government of the site’s health risks, especially from high levels of radiation. But few salvagers of silicon in Orlovka can afford to let health issues stop their unsanctioned digging….

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