Archives for May 2007

It says much about the state of African politics, and the credibility of the United Nations (UN), that Francis Nhema, Zimbabwe’s minister for environment and tourism, was elected last Saturday to head the UN Commission on Sustainable Development.

Evidently it doesn’t matter that Nhema belongs to a government that has effectively destroyed the agricultural base of a once proud farming nation.

When I visited in 1991, Zimbabwe also had huge and healthy elephant population and well managed national parks.

I don’t know how the elephant population is holding-up, but there is apparently an acute food shortage now, rationing of electricity, and official inflation is running at about 2,200 percent annually.

If the UN Commission needed to be headed by an African – I might have nominated someone from South Africa. What were the Africans thinking when they nominated Nhema from Zimbabwe?

I know the dams at the top of the Murray River are very low, but there is still water in the lower reaches of the system.

Today I visited the so-called Murray Mouth which is part of the Coorong National Park.

We then drove around the western perimeter of the huge estaurine lake system.

While the national consensus appears to be that some sort of catastrophe is about to befall this region — interestingly there are new housing developments and new olive orchards and more…

Crossed the ferry at Wellington – what I think is the real Murray mouth.

And there was also water in the river a bit upstream of Wellington.

I’ll be back in Brisbane tomorrow. And many thanks to Phil Sawyer for a great few days in South Australia.

I’ve spent the last couple of days with Phil Sawyer visiting Port Lincoln and other interesting places at the tip of the Eyre Peninsula in South Australia.

They have had a bit of rain.

We drove down to Sleaford Bay on Friday.

Its a rugged landscape.

Some of the first settlers were whalers.

Here’s a 300 kg bubber pot once used by Sleaford Bay whalers to extract oil.

More recently Port Lincoln residents have got rich fatten tuna for Japanese markets.

These pilchard will be fed to tuna that are held in cages in the sea to the south of Port Lincoln.

Prawn trawlers, abalone and crayfish fishermen still operate out of Port Lincoln. I watched a procession of about 20 prawn trawlers leave the harbour Friday night. They will be out for 11 days.

This is a photograph of some of the rigging on the boats in the afternoon, before they departed.

The Mayor suggested to me yesterday that Port Lincoln would be a good place for a wind-powered desalination plant.

There are already wind turbines in the area. This picture was taken yesterday from Coffin Bay National Park looking south.

“On 24 April 2007, the Manado court [in North Sulawesi, Indonesia] handed down a decisive, unambiguous verdict clearing my Dad [Richard Ness] of all charges and declared that Buyat Bay was never polluted, the fish are safe for human consumption and the people are fine.

Now let’s rewind almost two years back to 27 April 2005. This day the Overseas Press Club (OPC) awarded New York Times reporter Jane Perlez the prestigious Whitman Bassow Award, which recognizes “Best reporting in any medium on international environmental issues”.

The OPC panel of judges awarded Jane Perlez this honor because her reporting “detailed evidence in the village of Buyat Bay of skin tumors, rashes, breathing difficulties, and headaches.” But most noticeably, it is the claim that it wasn’t “until the Times series appeared [that] the Indonesian government and the mining company had turned a deaf ear to the problem” and that it was Jane Perlez’s series of articles that “forced the government to take legal action against Newmont”.

Read the rest of this blog post and watch the video of the presentation here: http://www.richardness.org/blog/revisitingtheoverseaspressclubaward.php