Something for the Weekend? The Green Planet

Neece holding cockroach at Green Planet. This is the expensive way to do it. 

For the same experience at zero cost, pop the nearest drain head and scoop your hand in. 

No, no, please it's nothing. You're welcome...

Okay, let me be quite clear about this - this one's pricey, but it's worth it. To be fair, we're a bit spoiled on the general cost of a thing to do with the kids front - look at parks and attractions in the UK and you're straight into second mortgage territory right there. So if this sets you back Dhs 840 for a family of four, that's sort of fine, right?

The Green Planet by Meraas (they're a property developer or, if you prefer, lifestyle-shaping dream enabler) is a largish  but otherwise relatively unprepossessing building to the north of Satwa, near enough to the Coka Cola Arena. Inside is a tropical rainforest. And it's pretty cool as indoor rainforests go.

Now, before you get all sniffy about fake rainforests, let me just remind you that one of the most amazing tourist attractions in Cornwall, UK, is the Eden Project, a series of biomes contained in double-skinned, climate-controlled domes. And, like the Eden Project, Green Planet is a great platform for teaching kids about the world and some of its most brilliant nature.

There are 3,000 species of thing in Green Planet, from cockroaches you can handle (or, in my case, not handle the sight of, let alone touch) to sloths you can sloth at. There's a bat cave and a bit of outback and loads of little tactile experiences and things to do, see, handle, touch and generally gawp at. The whole journey starts at the top of the rainforest canopy (Green Planet is built around a massive 'tree') and then wends its way down past waterfalls and tree houses, rope bridges and walkways. There are monkeys and parrots, dazzling birds and slithery snakes, fish (including - cue dramatic sounds - piranhas) and insects everywhere.

We went with the neeces and a magnificent, royally entertaining time was had by all. Ellen wants to be a vet, so she was holding snakes and letting cockroaches run over her hand and doing all manner of other animally stuff that normal people would flip out over and that kids can, well, do.

If you want to make a real day out of it, maybe do lunch somewhere in City Walk and then nip over to the Dubai Frame for an afternoon treat...

How Green Is My Sharjah?

The unthinkable has happened. The old battered dumpsters that used to line our sandy street have disappeared, each one replaced by two shiny new plastic bins. One is marked 'General waste' and one 'Recyclable waste'.

I quite miss our old one. Some expat anarchist had sprayed 'Green Day' on it:

Well, 'green day' is finally upon us! Sharjah's upped its green act with waste management company Bee'ah, with a goal of 'zero to landfill' being the stated aim. The new bins aren't the only sign of change around here: for years an integrated waste management policy has been rolled out with thousands of staff litter-picking, bin emptying, street cleaning and waste segregating. It's taken its time, but that tremendous effort has finally reached our street.

It's the end of an era.

We used to go visiting friends and family in the UK, our hosts dancing after us and correcting our bin-using habits. This goes in the green bin, that goes in the orange bag, this goes in the black bag, that goes in the green tray: depending on where you were in the country, the recycling regimen would change, but generally people are in the habit of segregating waste into organics, recyclables, bottles and general waste. They always seem to fill the bottle baskets when we're with them, but that's probably just because they're pleased to see us.

Of course, we've always just had the dumpster. Our waste segregation regimen has generally been pretty much 'throw out stuff'. That includes broken office chairs, broken shower curtain poles. Anything. Just lay it by the dumpster and hey presto! it's gone. Actually, the bin men often don't get to the larger stuff, there's always some opportunist who's got an eye out and larger items generally don't stick around beside the dumpster for longer than an hour or so. The record was a broken office desk we chucked out a few years back: it was gone within ten minutes.

So now we've joined the ranks of the responsible: a second bag in the kitchen is devoted to plastic, cardboard and tins. We're actually becoming civilised. Wherever will it end?

Bill Gates, GM seeds, Monsanto and Africa. Hope for the future?

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I do find this all profoundly depressing.

There I am, minding my business looking at a news website, when my eye catches one of those annoying little 'On the web' link-bait thingies. 'Bill Gates' predictions for 2030' it says. Fair enough. I refuse to click on 'em as a matter of principle (my furious rebellion has come to this over the years) but a while later I made my own way over to the 2015 Gates Note, which is Bill and Melinda's version of the sort of photocopied note that goes with the Christmas card to let everyone know little Gypsophila is now taking ballet lessons and wee Roderick has stopped eating light bulbs.

Bill and Melinda make a number of predictions for the future, slavishly picked up and amplified by all manner of media. One of them is 'Africa will be able to feed itself'. Which is nice. I was reading all this worthy guff, all the time being keenly aware of a nagging sensation about Bill Gates that I've tended to have since the days when, as a journalist, I was in receipt of official letters of complaint from Microsoft about the things I had to say about them - and him.

I saw a little infographic thingy, the 'Four keys to agricultural productivity', sourced from AGRA - the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa. These sorts of acronym pop out at me nowadays, they usually mean 'Big Business/Agro Disguised As Something You'd Like More'. Alliances, Committees and Action Groups funded by Big PR to front some vested interest or another.

And such is AGRA. The weasel comes in their own FAQ:

Can resource-poor smallholder farmers afford to buy seed every year? 

Yes. In fact, we are finding that seed companies regularly sell out of their stocks every year, and still cannot keep up with demand. Selling seed in small packages and making it available at the village level has greatly increased farmer adoption of improved seed. Mobile money has likewise boosted sales of seed in remote villages. AGRA also works with farmer organizations that offer group buying opportunities, as well as access to credit. What we are increasingly seeing is that, by adopting improved seed, farmers are becoming more prosperous and more able to purchase additional seed, as well as other inputs.

Does AGRA support GMO in Africa?

AGRA invests in conventional, farmer-driven breeding as a way to give farmers access to high-quality seed at prices they can afford. The big problem for farmers in Africa is access to reliable seed. Currently, only about one quarter of Africa's smallholder farmers have access to good seeds, compared to, for instance, 80 percent of farmers in China. New varieties are needed because many of the seeds farmers use today are inherently low-yielding and vulnerable to crop diseases and pests.

Well, hold on a moment, folks. What was wrong with a straight 'no' to that last question? And why would farmers HAVE to afford to buy seed every year?

It's interesting that everyone here is talking about 'maize' when they mean 'corn' or 'sweet corn'. Is it just my nasty, suspicious mind that tars us all with avoiding an increasingly unpopular and maligned word? Did you know that Canola was a brand name, coined (at least in part) because North American consumers wouldn't like the sound of 'rape seed'? Or that over 90% of the North African rape crop is Genetically Modified (GM)? Or that over 95% of American sweetcorn is GM - designed to be resistant to chemicals such as Monsanto's poisonous Roundup herbicide and so allowing the crop to be drenched in such high levels of the awful stuff that it makes its way into the food chain - and the food that people eat?

AGRA was founded in 2006 through a partnership between the Rockefeller Foundation and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

So we take a look at this drought resistant 'maize' Bill's PR guy is waffling on about. It would seem 'Joyce Sandiya' in Tanzania was likely planting ZM 309 or ZM 523, two varieties of hybrid corn developed by CIMMYT (another acronym right there, this time for the 'International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center', whose research into drought resistant corn was backed by, wait for it, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the Howard G. Buffett Foundation). It was planted in Malawi in 2009 to great success.

Which is great, right? We're feeding Africa. Yay.

Except I can't help feeling unsettled by some of CIMMYT's bedfellows. They're working with Monsanto, the poster child for egregious GM and a company in which one Mr Gates' Foundation has a substantial, 500,000 share, investment (he's also invested in GM company Cargill but is tight-lipped about both investments). They're also linked to genomics company GeneMax, 'big six' GM company DuPont and agrochemical and genomics company Syngenta. Their 'advisory board' have strong links to Monsanto and Cargill.

They've got GM scrawled all over them.

It's interesting looking at all the coverage of their work, how they always partner with a local authority/research associate and ensure the local boys are upfront when it comes to the headlines and credit. Again, that's just me being suspicious and remembering the techniques used to publicise Microsoft 'win' stories back in the day.

You won't be surprised by now to learn that 25-year former Monsanto executive and GM research pioneer Robert Horsch is the deputy director for agriculture at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

So there's Africa's hope for the future, right there. Bound to buy their seeds every year (wait for the prices to go up), mired in debt and tied to restrictive contracts and drenched in glyphosate herbicides, producing poisoned food in thrall to big agribusiness that snuck in under the coverage of enlightened philanthropy.

You really couldn't make it up...

The Wild Wonders of Wadi Wurayah

Wot you lookin' at, fat 'ead?

Wadi Wurayah, or Wurrayah or however you want to spell it, has long been a hidden gem in the UAE's formerly glorious wadi systems. Uniquely, Wurayah's waters flowed all year round, a waterfall that sloshed around in a bowl at the top before cascading down to a big pool below. You could sit in the 'punchbowl' and look out to the wadi snaking away below you or just lie back and admire the flat, blue sky.

It used to be reached through some 18 Km of wadi tracks wending from the main Khor Fakkan-Dibba road. There was a wrecked light aeroplane you turned left at. Each year there was less and less wreck until it wasn't unusual - indeed this became true of many wadi routes - to bump into lost seekers of the wadi clutching copies of Dariush Zandi's 'Offroad in the Emirates'. Published by Motivate, the volume was kept on sale a tad longer than perhaps was wise, so as the wadis changed and so did landmarks, the book became more and more misleading. Zandi's direction to turn left at the wreck lost its charm when there was no longer a wreck, you see...

The 18 Km of heavy going along rocky wadi tracks deterred the vast majority of people, so Wurayah was a haven of peace, tranquility and unspoiled natural beauty. That all changed in a flash when they built a road to it. As I pointed out in this post noting 7Days' 'Save Wadi Wurayah' campaign back in 2011, the rocks turned into something from LA Ink overnight, the wadi became choked with blue plastic bags, cans and broken glass. And I found a bloke running a dirty, clattering generator to power the light bulb hung on a stick outside his tent. All this was back in the '90s, mind...

Last year, the government of Fujairah moved to cement the various conservation efforts being made around Wurayah and declared it off-limits to the public. The UAE's first National Park, Wadi Wurayah National Park, was declared and Wadi Wurayah is now recovering. It had a lot to recover from, I can tell you.

Now the Emirates Wildlife Society (EWS WWF is part of the global World Wildlife Fund) has announced the official launch of a water research and learning programme, designed to give volunteers a five-day insight into the unique ecosystem at Warayah. The scheme is funded by WWF, Earthwatch, the Government of Fujairah and HSBC. In return, their work contributes to a long term water monitoring program being implemented at Warayah.

It's a far cry from the remote spot we used to noodle out to for balmy winter camps and splashing around in cool pools - but if you'd seen the mess people made of it when it opened up, you'd agree no public access is preferable to devastating the place through thoughtlessness and criminal negligence.

And at least they didn't dump a hotel on it, like they did at Zighi Beach, another remote camping spot made ideal for intrepid wadi bashers by a precipitous mountain track that zig zagged up the mountainside. Great one for teachers that: the zig zag Zighi track is brought to you by the letter zee.

And if you really DO want to get into Warayah, you can just hit up the EWS WWF using this here handy link and make yourself useful. How cool is that?

Dumpster Divers Done

International Recycling Symbol  (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The United Arab Emirates sits smack bang on the socio-cultural tectonic plate that divides the east and west of humanity. With remarkable ethnic and nationalistic diversity, it's home to people of all faiths, shades, backgrounds and origins. We come from around the world to live here for one reason and one reason only.

We're all better off here.

That's as true of you and me as it is of labourers and housemaids. It's one reason why the crime rate here is so unbelievably low - we're all on the hog's back and wouldn't risk our privileged position just to pick a few pockets or steal money from someone's car. Other reasons include, it must be said, a draconian judicial system. I've seen the cells (from the oustide, thankfully) and stumbling lines of prisoners in leg gyves. You don't want to be there.

But better off is relative. My better off is a great deal more clover-lined than, for instance, an uneducated man from the Swat Valley or the Bangladeshi flood plains. For them, better off would be something simple like a decent billet, regular food, the absence of constant fear and a few dollars to send home every month. In fact, there are people here whose 'better off' is combing the rubbish bins in the streets for cardboard, tin cans and even plastic. They sell these to recycling companies. You'll often see chaps pedalling along with a great stack of cartons bungied to the back of their black-framed Chinese pushbikes.

Well, they're a thing of the past now. Sharjah Municipality has just herded them all up - 150 of them over the past six months according to Gulf News - to protect Sharjah's estimated 10,000 dumpsters from their unwelcome depradations. You'd have thought they weren't hurting anybody, wouldn't you? Even that this form of recycling, perhaps an uncomfortable sight for those who'd rather pretend this sort of thing didn't happen, is nevertheless actually efficient and a demonstration of free market economics at work. Cripes, you might even get carbon credits or something.

But no. Sharjah has not only nicked them all, but has issued them with fines ranging from Dhs 1,000 to Dhs 50,000. Where in blue blazes is somebody who's making his living rooting through bins going to find Dhs 1,000 to pay a fine?

"Raiding waste bins is considered a violation of Municipality property, as there is a special recycling plant for the various types of waste," a municipality spokesperson told Gulf News. And therein lies the answer. The dumpster divers' few pennies here and few pennies there tend to rather mount up with 10,000 bins at stake and there's Bee'ah, the national environmental company, at the end of the line, making revenue from recycling. Because where there's muck, there's brass...

You can only hope that these people are shown clemency in the traditional Ramadan amnesties.

Wadi Wurayah

Image by Peachland Joe via Flickr

It's been a while since Wadi Wurayah has been in the news. In fact, as far back as this totally pointless piece in the now (you can see why, too) defunct EmBiz24x7.

But now it's a 7Days front page splash! OUTRAGE AS VANDALS SPOIL BEAUTY SPOT trumpets the terrific tabloid. Actually, I hate to tell you this guys, but Wurayah has looked like it escaped from LA Ink since the early 1990s, when a road was built that turned the former 19km offroad drive required to get to Wurayah into a two minute saunter in the old Tiiida.

Wurayah is the only year-round waterfall in the UAE and a site of very real natural beauty. If you nip up to the top of the waterfall there's a little bowl you can sit in and let the cool water run over you as you lie back and reflect that yes, it is indeed Tough In The Gulf. You used to get to it by turning off the Khor Fakkan road by a wrecked aeroplane (well, until they removed the wreckage, which caused a lot of readers of Motivate's Offroad in the Emirates more than the odd problem. Mind you, we found more lost travellers in Hatta after the track cited in the book was washed away. Motivate continued, of course, to sell the book!) and trundling up wadi beds in your 4x4 to get to the waterfall.

We went up just after the new road was built and the wadi was already strewn with graffiti and the pools at the base of the waterfall contained rubbish - tin cans and broken glass. We found a man there, camping. He had a light bulb on a pole in front of his tent and a generator to light it, which was causing a terrible racket and stank. That was back in 1994 or so.

Today's outrage is a tad overdue...

Sharjah and Kyoto

The last few JCBs filling in the final watery holes are all that remain of Sharjah's Old Landfill. The enormous site has taken years to be remediated, the largest such project anywhere in the world. The project has run over by about two years, if the United Nations is to be believed, but has in many ways been a pioneering achievement - all carried out under the Kyoto Protocol.

Remediating Sharjah's landfill was carried out under the auspices of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. The project has meant scooping out something like 7.5 million cubic metres of old, festering rubbish and has resulted in turning something like two million square metres of land into 'brown field' real estate. Buildings are already going up on the remediated land.

The project has been truly a landmark affair - basically diggers have been scooping up buckets of waste which are then sorted and graded. Two sorting lines took out the bulky stuff, while organic waste was crushed and ground into material suitable to refill the site. Stuff that couldn't be used or recycled was taken up to the new landfill site (out in the desert on the Dhaid road).

This is the site - the Al Falah area of Sharjah. The Emirates Road runs along the base of the diagram - the purple stuff is the last area to be worked on (and pictured at the top of this post).

It's taken five years. Five years of digging through a pile of festering, stinking muck and sorting, then recycling it. The massive project has been financed partly by the sale of  real estate and partly by the sale of climate credits, or CERs (Certified Emission Reduction) - carbon credits to you, mate. From what I can gather, the carbon credits were bought up by Austria. The project qualifies for carbon credits because old landfills release huge volumes of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere - the original project plan outlines reductions of something like 438,000 tonnes of Carbon Dioxide or its equivalent over the original, rather ambitious, 2005-2008 timeline for the project.

The whole thing has been carried out to European standards, with the waste materials produced tested against German legal standards. Carried out by contractor Halcrow, the project was put together by EET - The Emirates Environmental Technology Co which is itself 49% owned by Austrian company IUT.

We drive past it every morning on the way to work and have watched, fascinated as the diggers have slowly reduced the enormous pile of fetid, black-looking rubbish until you can now look across an area of flat land - a little piece of Kyoto...

Sammy The Survivor

Image via Wikipedia

You've got to hand it to whale shark Sammy, the girl's a survivor. When we all thought she'd popped her clogs or was on death's door and being released clandestinely, she actually turns out to have been tagged by Mote Marine Laboratory and sent on her way swimming as free as only a happy whale shark could be.

The nocturnal release of the big fish with no video or photographic evidence made many cynical souls doubt - particularly as it came at the end of an extended period when Dubai's Atlantis Hotel was being pilloried for keeping the whale shark. There was more than the odd whiff of sulphur to the whole story, with undercurrents roiling regarding the actual nature of the whale shark's 'rescue' - whether it was caught to order or just wandered in for tea and decided to stay.

We get the news that Sammy is alive and well earlier than we normally would, because we should really have had to wait for three months to hear from the whale shark. Fortunately, the tag 'popped off' early and now Sammy's free to swim the waterways of the Gulf and beyond, free of tagular encumbrance.

Hooray! Thank goodness there are no links between Atlantis and Mote that would allow nasty cynics to question the tale of Sammy's good fortune.

Ch Ch Ch Changes

Image by Getty Images via @daylife

I have seen the climate changing here in the UAE and the effects of climate change since I first came here in the late '80s. I've watched the wadi tracks being turned into blacktop and wadis such as the East Coast's Warryah and the great Hatta Wadi turned into graffiti-splashed rubbish tips and I've watched as the many natural pools that dotted the Hajar mountains were drained by farmers using stinking pumps that leak oil and benzine into the waterways.

I've seen the desert becoming increasingly dotted with clumps of vegetation further and further out from the towns so that now you have to strike deep into the dunes before you see unbroken sand and I've watched the mountains being torn down to build megaprojects while villagers complain of disease, dust and unpredictable water flows. I've witnessed the water table plummet as natural underground waterways of the UAE have been depleted.

I've seen dead coral and coastal spills, turtle beaches in danger and helped to clear rich mangrove creeks clotted with reeking rubbish. I've stood on long strands as fishermen leave hundreds of sand sharks to gasp their last, dotting the long shore with their white-bellied bodies. I've watched in horror as huge, ecologically disruptive, building projects promote the proximity of migratory, and protected, flamingos.

I do recommend taking part in this survey, linked here. It's part of Richard Wagner's Doctoral Thesis, at the Vrije University in Amsterdam and is being supported by EDA, the Emirates Diving Association. It's a short, well-structured survey that should take no longer than ten minutes of your time.

Tree Hugger

Three things caught my eye yesterday and today and I thought I'd share them. Do bear in mind they come from someone that doesn't wear organic cotton, eat lentils or hug trees.

The evaporation of the Aral sea.
This image from NASA shows the evaporation of the Aral Sea. Not really a sea at all, but the fourth biggest lake in the world, the draining of the waters from the two rivers that lead to the Aral Sea in the 1960s has had a devastating and exponential effect on the surrounding environment, destroying the local fishing industry and rendering agriculture around the sea virtually impossible. Attempts to save the least polluted northern lake appear to have had some effect - this image appears to actually show a slight improvement on the situation a couple of years ago - but the damage has been done. Clouds of toxic dust from pesticides, biochemical research and industrial activity are swept throughout the barren area, the local population are being eaten away by poverty and sickness, including lung disease and cancers.

The declining polar cap
This time series of images from NASA shows the patterns of ice on the polar ice caps in September and March each year from 2000-2009. It will make you crap yourself.

The Story of Stuff
Someone (sorry, forgot who!) Tweeted a link to this impactful little video yesterday and I watched it. Getting the two links above from NASA the next morning did rather pull me up with a bump. I do highly recommend investing 20 minutes in taking a look at the video - you'll be the six million and somethingth to do so. It's entertaining, amusing and sobering. Not a bad mixture to manage!

It's been a tad controversial - one commentator called it 'Community college Marxism with a pony tail' - activist Annie Leonard certainly doesn't pull any punches. But you'll perhaps be pleased to know that Fox News, that famous left wing think tank and Voice of Reason, has quibbled with the facts presented in the video.

The list of quibbles with the film that Right Wing America trots out was the final, most scary thing of all. Because they don't question the substance of the presentation - just nitpick over facts such as whether the world's top 5 (Leonard) or 37 (Fox) economies are corporations. Wikipedia cites the sources for Leonard's figures, but I honestly don't care. 51 is a shocking number. 37 is a shocking number. And these are probably the least shocking numbers in the film.

Have a nice day!

Fishy

Gulf News is like a pit-bull on strychnine with this Sammy The Shark story: they've got their jaws clamped on its leg and they're not letting go. It's rapidly turning into a case study media nightmare.

Today's soaraway kilo of dead tree has got a story that is going to escalate the whole thing beyond reason: The Atlantis Hotel was apparently actively searching for a whale shark to put in its aquarium and Sammy was nabbed on purpose!

It's a pretty damning story, if it's true. Gulf News asserts that the 'rescue' story was a lie, that fishermen were sent out to collect specimens of Gulf aquatic fauna to populate the hotel's aquariums and that Sammy was one of a number of fish that were 'caught to order'.

Given the slightly dodgy sounding circumstances of the shark's 'rescue', Gulf News must have felt it was on pretty safe ground with this one.

It's almost good enough to forgive them for dubbing the brute 'Sammy'. The key will be whether Gulf News can keep this story going - and whether this latest revelation will be picked up by other news media.

Joke

Family out, couple of days off: a chance to visit Sharjah's Desert Museum and Arabian Wildlife Centre for the first time in a while. It's officially shut on Mondays, which explains why it was open on a Monday.

I can never visit the place without encountering the ghost of a rather remarkable woman called Marijke Jongbloed. I interviewed her for a magazine I was working on, just after the centre had opened many years ago back when the world was a sillier place. It was all a bit fairy tale: Jongbloed had originally moved out to Al Ain decades before and had carved a place as the UAE's most ardent amateur naturalist. Given the lack of professional ones, she quickly become the authority on the flora and fauna of the UAE.

Jongbloed had become concerned with the potential extinction of the 'dhub' or spiny-tailed lizard. The creature's tail was thought, by the bedouin, to be an aphrodisiac and its sole breeding ground, a large depressed area of desert to the left of the Sharjah/Dhaid road, was being decimated by love-lorn Lotharios looking for a lift.

So she wrote to the ruler of Sharjah, Dr. Sultan Al Qassimi. And he wrote back saying that he not only totally agreed with her, but would fund the creation of a nature reserve and wildlife centre.

When I interviewed her, she was weaning a hedgehog with a pipette. Marijke was a very large lady and it was a very small hedgehog. It was one of three species indigenous to the Emirates she told me, which did rather surprise me. I had always thought of hedgehogs as two-dimensional inhabitants of European roads.

She belly laughed, a deep, booming laugh, as she let me in on her favourite joke: she was building a major part of the centre so that the animals were outside and the humans confined. She thought that was only too appropriate. And so it is: today, as you walk around the centre, you're behind the glass and the baboons, cheetahs, wolves and Arabian Leopards are outside.

Marijke's great mission in life was the Arabian Leopard Trust. I'm not sure what happened: one day she was simply gone, leaving a whiff of sulphur behind her: something, somewhere, had gone wrong. And the Arabian Leopard Trust, founded to foster a breeding programme for these most attractive and almost extinct tarts of big cats (they lounge on rocky shelves at the Center, licking their paws and talking in languid, Terry Thomas lounge lizard tones, 'Helllooooo') appears to have disappeared too. If you ask one of the horde of under-employed local girls sat around behind the reception desk, you just get puzzled looks.

But I still see Marijke, in a red outfit, sitting in the garden with a hedgehog nestled in her big arms, every time I go to the Centre...