Sitka, a small town along the southeastern coast of the state, is seemingly well on its way to sending millions of gallons of water to India that will then be mostly distributed in the Middle East. Click on the following infographic to see data on both India and Alaska–water resources per capita, access to tap water, population, income per capita, and water pricing.

Graphic by Aubrey Ann Parker

Sitka, Alaska to sell bulk water exports to India. Click on image to see the complete infographic.

Some governments, responding to public concerns, have instituted bulk water bans. After several export attempts in the 1990s, Canada’s federal and provincial governments crafted laws to control the flow of water out of the country. But now Sitka, Alaska is seemingly well on its way to sending millions of gallons of water to India that will then be mostly distributed in the Middle East. Click on the following timeline to see information on North American bulk water sales, as well as bulk water blockages.

Sculptural installation FASTFORWARDFOSSIL: Part 2 uses discarded plastic bottles to comment on global resource and consumption issues.

Photo Courtesy See Ming Lee

American artist Ellen Driscoll explores resource consumption and material lineage in her latest multi-part, multi-year project, FASTFORWARDFOSSIL. Driscoll’s second installment of the project, which highlights the relationship between water and oil consumption, was on display last month at the Smack Mellon Gallery in Brooklyn.

“The piece looks back to eighteenth century American industry powered by water, and forward to the oil refineries of the Niger Delta, site of prolonged guerilla warfare against oil corporations and the source of over fifty percent of crude oil for the United States—the oil that produces the plastic within which our privatized water is currently bought and sold, “ Driscoll said.

Her exhibit devours almost the entire gallery floor and is fluttered with mini-mansions of plastic, somewhat Monopoly-esque, that rest on slick, ice-like sheets of plastic. The focal element of the exhibit was the 28-ft long sculptural landscape that depicted North America, the Middle East and Africa floating on a flood of plastic, honeycomb-shaped water molecules. The flood stemmed from the overflowing eighteenth-century water-powered mill. Along the periphery of the exhibit are color-drained drawings of industrial complexes with clusters of black scribbles that depict the “inner workings” of oil refineries.

Each landmass illustrated sites where oil is harvested and subsequently consumed -the same oil that is used in the production of the same easily-discarded plastic bottles used to construct the piece.

Driscoll collected and incorporated 2,600 recycled # 2 plastic bottles, which are made out of polyethylene, the most widely-used plastic. Roughly 80 million metric tons of polyethylene are produced each year with much of the non-biodegradable plastic ending up in landfills and oceans.

She’s been working with the medium since 2007, which spawned into two exhibits, “Phantom Limb” & “Hunter Gatherer,”.

On collecting, or “harvesting” days, Driscoll begins her work 5:30 a.m. in an effort to beat the recycling collection trucks to her discarded treasure. She spends an hour walking through Brooklyn, gathering # 2 plastic milk and water jugs from her neighbor’s recycling bags. She then transports the bottles to her studio where they are cleaned and cut into workable pieces. All told, only a very small waste stream is generated from the “harvesting” process. Driscoll is able to use about 85% of each bottle – the vacuform base of the bottle being the only component she has yet to utilize effectively.

Driscoll displays a strong theme of sustainability throughout all her art and sculpture. Instead of selling her completed sculptures, she dismantles them and incorporates them into her next project, and then recycles all that is left over. The first installment of FASTFORWARDFOSSIL was on display in April.

Using recycled or “poor” materials has been a common thread for almost 20 years. In 1992 she constructed Loophole of Retreat; a large camera obscura constructed of scrap wood and metal that was rescued from dumpsters and constructions sites. Her eyes and hands are instinctively drawn to everyday discarded material. Even as a young child, she was conscious of how even the most mundane and overlooked objects possess a story.

“Every little thing has a story, really nothing is garbage. Every scrap of it has some sort of a lineage that takes you somewhere else.” Driscoll said in an interview with CoB.

Driscoll is the head of the sculpture department at Rhode Island School of design and has been teaching there full-time since 1991. But Driscoll tries not to let her personal approach to sculpture impact the way she teaches her students.

“For better or for worse, I try not to impose my own aesthetic or moral and political passions on my students; I think learning is so much stronger when people come to their own conclusions.”

FASTFORWARDFOSSIL: Part 2 closed in early November, but Driscoll is hoping to find another venue to exhibit the sculpture. She plans to continue the FASTFORWARDFOSSIL project, but has not yet established a timeline. To keep up to date with the future progress of the project, visit the FASTFORWARDFOSSIL Web site.

Check out more on FASTFORWARDFOSSIL here or learn more about artist Ellen Driscoll here.

by Nadya Ivanova
Circle of Blue
Photographs by J. Carl Ganter

Next month British adventurer and ecologist David de Rothschild plans to hoist sail from San Francisco, Calif., and set out across the Pacific Ocean on a boat partly made of what he calls “the dumbest” product on the planet – the plastic bottle.

His destination, while just as dumb, is also considerably more dangerous: an expanse of floating plastic larger than France and Germany combined that has come to be called the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.

There is an ironic and distinctively 21st century dimension to de Rothschild’s almost 11,000-mile voyage. The scion of one of Europe’s oldest and most respected banking families, de Rothschild deployed the latest techniques in maritime design to build the Plastiki, a seaworthy 60-foot catamaran made from reclaimed plastic bottles. And he is using his considerable wealth to drum up global awareness of the needless, even reckless damage to the world’s oceans caused by the very same plastic throwaways that float.

“What I hope that the Plastiki does and what we stand for is not about vilifying people, pointing fingers or just articulating problems,” de Rothschild said. “We are about challenging that thinking.”

De Rothschild has made a career of exploring ecological challenges to popularize environmental issues. The brooding Brit trekked across Antarctica and explored the Greenland ice cap — two of the most fragile parts of the planet — to witness the consequences of climate change firsthand. In 2005 he launched Adventure Ecology, an organization and a Web site that tracks his travels to inspire people, especially children, to become agents of positive change for the planet. His Pacific plastic bottle mission is a way of reconnecting life style choices to nature — now de Rothschild’s main mantra but something he did not realize until journeying to Antarctica.

The youngest heir to his family’s banking fortune, he was a star show jumper as a teenager, and went on to attend the prestigious Oxford Brookes University in England. By the time he was 20 de Rothschild had started his own business. After selling the business and purchasing an organic farm in New Zealand, he was recruited by a friend to tag along on a Polar expedition. The trip sparked a love affair and a life’s mission for de Rothschild, who’s become internationally known as one of the era’s great adventurers and ecologists.

De Rothschild’s Plastiki voyage is inspired by a United Nations report on ocean borne plastic debris. He recruited architect Michael Pawlyn, renowned for his nature-inspired constructions, to design a boat that would be visually iconic and ensure that plastic was central to the boat’s architecture. Pawlyn’s design uses bio-mimicry to replicate the internal structure of a pomegranate as inspiration to integrate plastic bottles into the Plastiki’s pontoons.

Eventually, the bottles will be filled with dry ice and sealed to withstand the battering waves of the Pacific. The pontoons are made of self-reinforcing PET (srPET) plastic – a woven fabric made from PET fibers that are free of contaminants and 100 percent recyclable.

Three years and more than 12,000 two-liter soda bottles after production commenced, the team is equipping the ship with leading navigation technology and satellite communication. De Rothschild says the crew will collect water samples and send regular updates on the dangers of plastic pollution in the ocean during the journey.

Jo Royle, 30, was announced skipper of the Plastiki in June, while the rest of the crew is still undetermined. Photo © 2009 J.Carl Ganter for Circle of Blue.

After the trip, the entire vessel will be broken up, with some pieces upcycled into another product that further demonstrates the alternative uses of plastic.

“Right now it’s a boat, and then in the future it could be the legs of a chair, which is quite unglamorous,” said Jo Royle, the Plastiki skipper who’s been sailing for 10 years, “but it could become part of an airplane or bus, or a fleet or a computer.”

De Rothschild and his crew will take three months to sail from San Francisco to Sydney, Australia. The expedition’s highlight is the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, a gyre of plastic marine litter amid the Pacific Ocean. Bigger than the state of Texas, the patch, formally titled the North Pacific gyre, is the dumping ground for a vortex of currents that sweep plastic from the coasts of North America and Asia.

Stretching from the California coast to the eastern edge of Japan, the North Pacific is the most researched and best understood of the five gyres. In August the Scripps Institution of Oceanography launched Project Kaisei, to study the affects of plastic pollution on the gyre. Scientists are currently conducting tests to see if the samples collected contain toxins such as Polychlorinated Biphenyls (PCB) and DDT. PCB is known to negatively affect intellectual development in children and the immune system, while DDT is harmful to the nervous system and classified as a carcinogen by the EPA. Results from the trip will be released in the coming months.

But for de Rothschild the voyage is just as much about the problem as it is about the solution. By building the Plastiki entirely of recyclable materials and recycled plastic waste, he wants to demonstrate how the man-made material can be responsibly re-used.

“The first reaction that any environmentalist would go for is ‘plastic is the enemy –ban it,’ ” he said. “Let’s just think for a second and really evaluate — is it the material [that’s bad] or is it our inability to understand how we use it, how we manufacture it, what are we using it for, and most importantly, how we dispose of it.”

Plastiki also recycles a message. With the expedition, de Rothschild wants to introduce a new narrative approach to facing the dangers to the world’s environment.

“What we are seeing now is a momentum picking up around this innovation of materials used,” he said. “We are seeing that it’s not just about articulating problems, which is where a lot of the conversation has sat for the last five or six years. We now need to start looking at the solutions.”

Plastiki aims to showcase alternative solutions to environmental challenges. The boat is almost self-sustainable and will be reusable in the future.

In time, it will produce its own energy and drinking water, and compost its waste and not produce any climate changing emissions. Additionally, a network of solar panels and a pedal-powered turbine will provide energy and a hydroponic garden will provide a limited supply of fruit and vegetables.

The small ship’s water and waste water systems mimic the desert Namibian fog basking beetle, which gathers fresh water by radiating heat during the day and cooling down at night to condense in its shell. In the morning, once the shell has warmed, the beetle tips itself up and lets water trickle into its mouth.

“The whole idea is — we need to find a common thread among human beings to create a movement,” de Rothschild said. And for me the common thread is that we are all dreamers. And dreams are the breeding grounds of adventures.”

An adventure that de Rothschild hopes will revolutionize the use and misuse of plastic.

David de Rothschild is the founder of Adventure Ecology, an environmental organization that unites the power of dreams, adventures and stories to steer the minds and actions of people into a more ecological way of living.

Stretching from the southern border of Laos to just north of the Cambodian city of Stoeng Treng, Ramsar Site #999, along the Mekong River, is a thriving wetland of braiding sandbars and open river forests.

by C.T. Pope
Photographs by Paul Stewart/Mouth to Source

Paul Stewart’s Web site, Mouth to Source — a mixed community blogging, photography, and mapping project — invites local photographers and writers to report on their home rivers and when possible travel up a river and produce dynamic, navigable, 360-degree images.

Though he’s lived in Phnom Penh since 2002, it was only a few years ago during a trip to Laos that British-born travel photographer Paul Stewart discovered the magnificent flooded forests of northern Cambodia.

The 35,000-acre wetland along the northern reaches of the Mekong have largely remained hidden from view, isolated by a fortunate mix of water and impassable rain forest that have made the region, formally known as the Middle Stretches of the Mekong River north of Stoeng Treng, or more simply as Ramsar Site #999, one of the hardest to reach places on earth.

Smitten by the beauty and the role that the wetland plays in the northern Mekong ecosystem and its human culture, the 46-year-old Stewart built a Web site to enable photographers to report on similarly striking river systems.

MULTIMEDIA:

Click to interact with the Mekong river and Ramsar Site #999. Flash required. Travel along the river using the arrows in the panorama.

Officially made a protected site in 1999, the “Middle Stretches” are home to more than 100 species of fish, at least 50 of which are commercially important to local and downstream communities. In addition, the site also serves as a home to a critically endangered sub-population of Irrawaddy Dolphin and to various threatened and endangered bird species.

Quite naturally, Stewart’s Web site, features a brand new multi-media treatment of the Mekong River of Southeast Asia. But the site’s goal, Stewart says, is much larger.

“Mouth to Source is an attempt at trying to remap the way that we navigate around the world,” he says, “to have all the major rivers covered in a similar way, where you would travel down the river in a upstream and downstream manner.”

The Ramsar project, named for the 1971 global treaty to protect wetlands, documents the extraordinary ecosystem that Stewart found at the end of an upstream journey on the Mekong from his home in Cambodia’s capital.

The vast wetland is an expansive stretch of river, now threatened by two proposed dams, that relies on the natural flooding cycle of the Southeast Asian monsoons.

Still, the two dam projects — the Don Sahong, in Laos, and the Stung Treng, in Cambodia — could produce enormous damage to the wetland and to an important fishery. In addition, the lack of roads in the area makes the waterways vital for transport.

More than just a source for ecological and economical stability though, the wetland also is vital to the health of the Mekong River system as a whole. The floodplain is vital to downstream fisheries that are critical to Cambodia and Vietnam. Nutrients swept downstream each monsoon season also are crucial to maintaining downriver agricultural sites — such as the rice paddies of the lower Mekong.

MAP: Damming the Mekong

The Mekong river begins at the Tibetan Plateau in China and stretches through Myanmar (Burma), Thailand, Laos and Cambodia, before ending at the South China Sea in Vietnam. Stewart’s Mouth to Source includes stops along many stretches of the river. Map by Yiruo Zhao for Circle of Blue.

But the series of dams proposed near the river may change the face of Ramsar Site #999 forever. According to a report produced by the POLIS Project — a Canadian academic research center focused on ecological governance — the planned Don Sahong Dam, which lies upstream from the site, could severely affect the health of the river.

The report, published by Dr. Ian G. Baird in late August, highlights the human cost that a dam could have if it decimates fish populations in the region.

According to Baird, “Fisheries losses in the Mekong region from the Don Sahong Dam could negatively impact the nutritional status of hundreds of thousands or even millions of people dependent on these fisheries,” adding that the problem was especially significant “in parts of Laos, Cambodia and Thailand where nutritional standards are already low.”

Still, the energy from the dam, some 240 MW to 360 MW — or about half of the energy produced by a small nuclear power plant — could prove to be a financial boon to the Laotian government, who plans to sell the electricity to nearby Thailand.

As of now though, the dam is still only in the planning stages. The non-profit environmental advocacy group, International Rivers, has officially come out against the dam. In addition, the World Wildlife Fund urged the Laotian government to thoroughly review the project before going forward.

With or without the Don Sahong Dam, the Mekong and its “Middle Stretches” will remain vital to the countries of the Mekong River Basin. Stewart’s images document the natural beauty of this untamed and watery wilderness.

“The idea,” he says, “is that we, as a community, become so attached to promotion, preservation and publishing of our riverine environment that by default we actually become guardians of the environment.”

Visit the website here. Flash required.

Read the latest news about the intergovernmental Mekong River Commission here.

IMAGES: Ramsar – Site 999

Images by Paul Stewart/Mouth to Source

C. T. Pope is a Circle of Blue writer and researcher. Reach him at cody.pope@circleofblue.org