Many environmentalists confuse material consumption with environmental stewardship. The desire for beauty and performance is so ingrained in the human psyche, it is hard to imagine we will ever not want beautiful things. Archeologists have found jewellery dating back over 40 000 years – long before civilization.

If we can marry beauty and technology to produce sustainability, we may still yet have some hope to stave off environmental disaster.

Not only do fish die, but there are numerous reports of hazardous waste leading to civil strife. There are numerous reports (and another) that nuclear waste was dumped off the coast of Somalia, leading to a die off of fish. The fisherman, having little other choice, turned to piracy.

From Al Jazeera News,

Nick Nuttall, a UNEP spokesman, told Al Jazeera that when the barrels were smashed open by the force of the waves, the containers exposed a “frightening activity” that has been going on for more than decade.

“Somalia has been used as a dumping ground for hazardous waste starting in the early 1990s, and continuing through the civil war there,” he said.

“European companies found it to be very cheap to get rid of the waste, costing as little as $2.50 a tonne, where waste disposal costs in Europe are something like $1000 a tonne.

Not only does hazardous waste kill marine life and ecosystems, it can destroy human societies as well.

Carl Zimmer reports on a new study on sea acidification and worries that we may be headed inexorably towards a massive wave of marine extinctions:

The acidification of the ocean today is bigger and faster than anything geologists can find in the fossil record over the past 65 million years. Indeed, its speed and strength — Ridgwell estimate that current ocean acidification is taking place at ten times the rate that preceded the mass extinction 55 million years ago — may spell doom for many marine species, particularly ones that live in the deep ocean.

Here is a rundown of the presentation by design gurus at Duarte. But just look at some of these slides, gorgeous.

UPDATE (16/02/2010 10:30AM): The site is back up and running normally, we apologize for any inconvenience this might have caused.

Recently I visited many Canadian companies websites to see who is ISO 14001, but one interesting thing struck me – at least 80% of companies now have a page dedicated to their environmental work or policies on their site. This is rather new and quite promising, companies seem to understand that strong environmental stewardship is becoming part of daily business activities.

Another major source of pressure is investor groups – notably ethical and pension funds. A good outline of various “green” investors was done at the Davis blog here. As we all know, money talks; if major funds are requesting greater environmental transparency then companies will have to take this seriously.

Things are really unraveling at the IPCC, with officials finally admitting that the UN panel has to improve its procedures when reviewing reports.

The worst part about any scandal is the cover-up and Climategate is no exception. Had climate scientists come down hard, early on, on the practices at East Anglia and the methods of the IPCC, this series of blunders could be more easily corrected and forgotten.

Here’s what the Observer has to say about the series of blunders committed by the IPCC lately:

“[Deniers] deal not in the balance of risk but the exposure of uncertainty. Tiny doubts on the periphery of the case, they say, undermine the whole story, banishing the threat.

That isn’t true, but it is bad science and bad politics to counter scepticism with righteous indignation. In the long run, public confidence will be inspired more by frankness about what science cannot explain.”

Even a top British government scientist is on the record for saying that the panel is losing all credibility.

It will take years before this community of scientists will be able to repair their damaged reputation.

In 2005, I lived in Beijing and worked for a steel equipment manufacturer. I travelled to many industrial towns and saw the tremendous pollution caused by China’s growth. What I saw in China made me reconsider my career as a metallurgical engineer and turn my focus to environmental consulting.

In 2009, I returned to Beijing and China, though only there for three weeks, the difference was quite remarkable. Beijing is not the best example as it was largely cleaned up for the Olympics, between 2005 and 2009, they built 5 metro lines, removed millions of cars from the streets and now bicycle paths are starting to reemerge. A steel factory I worked at, which was accessible by metro was completely disassembled and transferred to another city 300 km away. They have made progress.

However the shear size of China makes the clean-up task daunting. Canada, 34 million inhabitants, is smaller than Beijing. China has 30 Canadas in it and less space. China has a great mountain to climb and the damage done to their rivers and soil may take many generations to repair. There are no easy answers, but it is good to see China more openly acknowledge the damage done and the task ahead to repair it.