Recently in Plenty Category

Last Christmas, I spent a few days on the Venezuelan archipelago of Los Roques. It's a gorgeous place - but it's got some serious environmental problems, ranging from overfishing to waste disposal. I've written about the trip for Plenty:

The island was flawless: a sliver of bone-white sand blazing in the Caribbean sun. The sky was clear and cloudless, the water a startlingly vivid blue. Apart from a pair of brown pelicans bobbing lazily nearby, we were entirely alone: sole tenants of a picture-perfect slice of paradise.

The lure of this kind of desert-island fantasy is the unique selling point of Los Roques, a cluster of tiny islands about 80 miles off the Venezuelan coast. For us, the park delivered on its promise: we snorkeled and basked in the sun until finally, with the shadows lengthening, a fishing boat arrived to take us back to Gran Roque, the archipelago’s only inhabited island.

As the boat skipped over the water, our guide pointed out silver clouds of jumping fish and dark, hazy disks - "Tortugas!" - gliding beneath the crystal-clear water. Approaching Gran Roque, though, we noticed a bitter, acrid smell. Tucked behind a headland, out of sight of most tourists, a thick cloud of filthy black smog was rising: Islanders had piled a week's worth of garbage into a huge heap and, with no other way to dispose of the trash, had simply set it ablaze.

Read the rest over here.

Deep-sea mining could be the next big thing - but is it worth the potential environmental consequences? I've got a feature on the Plenty website eying the fledgling industry:

Leading the charge is Nautilus Minerals, a Canadian company currently prospecting in the waters off Papua New Guinea. The company’s CEO, David Heydon, has proved a capable evangelist for the industry, raising hundreds of millions of dollars in venture capital; spurred on by spiraling metals prices, Nautilus has already begun drilling and is in negotiations to build a huge mining vessel. Using cutting-edge technology adapted from the oil industry ― and from operations off the southern coast of Africa, where shallow-water diamond mining is already big business ― the company hopes to begin full-scale operations by 2010.

“And it won’t just be in Papua New Guinea,” Heydon promises. “We’re going to start a whole new industry.”

It’s a plausible claim. The density of mineral deposits in black smokers is an order of magnitude greater than anything found on land; analysts say a single claim could meet more than one percent of the global demand for copper and produce significant quantities of zinc, silver, and gold. And while Nautilus is ahead of the pack, other companies are looking to jump on the bandwagon: Neptune Minerals, a UK-registered company, is already prospecting off the coast of New Zealand, and both companies have drawn significant investment from terrestrial mining giants.

But the prospect of a maritime mining boom makes many scientists queasy. They say too little is known about the potential impact on delicate marine ecosystems.

“We simply don’t know what we’re doing,” says Rodney Fujita, a senior marine scientist at US-based advocacy group Environmental Defense and a leading voice in the burgeoning campaign against deep-sea mining. “These ecosystems were only discovered in the 1970s, and they’re completely different from anything else on the planet.”

Read more here.