A scale model of the city – notice the unusual amount of green space

Few things can be certain about the future, as philosophers wiser than I have pointed out, but one trend that’s likely to continue is urbanisation. The Anthropocene will be peopled by city dwellers, in contrast to the rural demography of the past millennia. Nowhere will this be felt more keenly than in China, home to more than 1.3 billion people, more than half of whom now live in cities (as of the end of 2011) – an urban population that at 690 million is double the entire US population. By 2030, 75% of Chinese will live in cities; fifty years earlier, in 1980, less than 20% did.

While the government is encouraging urbanisation, most people are moving to improve their prospects – salaries are at least double in cities, and there are far more employment opportunities, especially for those whose rural situation has been made intolerable by pollution, drought, industrial encroachment or compulsory purchase for urban development. Urbanisation has been one of the most important factors in China’s phenomenal economic growth and rapid industrialisation over the past decade, providing essential labour and new consumers.

The international high school is almost complete

It also comes saddled with tremendous challenges. Over the next 20 years, the urban population will balloon by more than 300 million people, all of whom need housing, infrastructure, water, food, jobs – and the rising issues of pollution and social inequality must also be tempered. In a typically top-down style, the government is tackling all of these at once: the biggest polluters have been moved out of the biggest cities (inland into rural areas or other cities), slum populations (here, called ‘urban villages’) have dropped from 37% to 28% since 2000, and China is in the midst of a building frenzy.

Visit any city in the country – there are over 650 of them – and you’ll soon be negotiating a route around a noisy, dusty construction site, beneath towering cranes. Much of this is taking place in existing cities, converting low-rise to high-rise, to pack more people into the unlimited vertical space. But in a few places, planners have started from scratch.

A ground-source heat pump in the school’s basement heats the swimming pool and building

Tianjin Eco-city is a collaborative project between the Chinese and Singaporean government that will house 350,000 people in a low-carbon, green and pleasant environment by 2020. As I approach the city under an ever-present pall of filthy air, across a wasteland of contaminated soil and water, I have my reservations about the Eco-city’s success.

The site chosen for the project was an industrial dumping ground for toxic waste, barren salt flats abutting one of the world’s most polluted seas. This was deliberate, says Ho Tong Yen, head of the Sino-Singapore Tianjin Eco-city Development and Investment, charged with building the city. “In the past, so-called eco-cities have been built in ecologically important areas or on useful arable land. We wanted to show that it’s possible to clean up a polluted area and make it useful and liveable.”

The energy centre has PV wall panels

The clean-up took the best part of three years, and included the development of a newly patented technology to remove the heavy metals from a central reservoir – soon to be a boating lake. The hard graft’s paid off. I enter the part-complete city down an avenue lined with fragrant trees and solar-energy panels. Among the newly planted saplings I spot five wind turbines and solar-powered street lighting. One-fifth of the energy used here will be emission-free, from solar, wind and, as I discover on a visit to the almost finished international school, from ground-source heat pumps, which use the temperature difference in the ground for energy.

Phillips has designed a sound and movement activated light switch

Clomping upstairs in the school, I surprise another innovation into action: Dutch-owned Phillips is trying out its new sound- and motion-sensitive lights, which default to off unless the switch hears or feels someone approach.

Other innovations include a planned pneumatic municipal waste collection system, produced by Swedish Envac, which will eliminate the need for refuse trucks, and potentially driverless cars being trialled by General Motors. Buildings will have smart controls, automatically raising and lowering window blinds to regulate light and temperature, for example.

Solar panels line the streets and carpark roofs

In March, the first 60 families moved into the city’s residential buildings, all of which are designed to a minimum green buildings standard, including water-saving sanitary fittings, insulated walls and double-glazed windows, as well as a south-facing orientation to optimise passive heat. Such techniques may be standard in some countries, but in China they are rare.

Also rare here is the emphasis on liveability. Parks and green spaces are planned around the city, and reed beds have been created to attract birdlife and help clean the water. Lanes and alleyways have been strung through the usual grid layout of big blocks, meaning communities can develop, everywhere is walkable or cycle-able and people don’t feel socially excluded from areas. Free recreation facilities will be provided within 500 metres walk of anywhere.

With Tianjin Eco-city’s development director Ho Tong Yen

A green spine, called the ‘eco valley’ runs through the heart of the city with cycle routes and a tram. Residents will be encouraged to use regular low-carbon transport or walk, rather than driving. Cars won’t be banned, Ho says. “We don’t want to create obstacles for people, but rather make it conducive to use alternatives.” Niche designs that have focused blindly on eco-technologies haven’t worked, he says. “This eco-city will be practical – it will work.”

To that end, the site has been chosen wisely in one of the nation’s new growth areas, and the city is setting itself up as a hub for green tech enterprise and creative industries – 600 companies have already set up shop, including an animation studio that is powered by its own energy station, incorporating solar PV walls as well as roof panels.

The site before (2007): The ‘rainbow bridge’ with the polluted salt-flats beyond

Water provision is one of the bigger challenges in this naturally arid area. Tap water will be drinkable and piped in, although the city is planning a possible desalination plant too. A lot of effort is being put into conserving water and recycling it for irrigation and toilet flushing. “The lakes and water pipes have been lined in clay or concrete to prevent salt water incursion, and all waste water is being sent to plant for anaerobic biodigestion,” says Ary de Koning of the EU-China River Basin Management Programme, who is advising the city on water issues. “The methane emitted in the digestion process is then used to produce energy,” he says.

The site was a dumping zone for toxic industrial waste and had to be completely cleaned up before building work could commence

It certainly feels like a more pleasant place to live than the traffic choked, polluted cities further inland, even at this incomplete stage. And unlike the majority of planned eco cities, this one will actually be finished and already has residents. But whether it lives up to its green credentials will depend in part on the type of society it nurtures.

Aerial view in mid-2011

Perhaps its most novel, yet important mission is social inclusivity. One fifth of the housing will be subsidised for low-wage workers and their families. “We want to avoid the idea that this is a haven for rich people or second-homers from Beijing,” says Ho. “Being green isn’t a luxury, it’s an affordable necessity. This city should be a practical, replicable, scalable model for elsewhere in China and the world.”

A version of this post first appeared here.

And a for those of you interested in the Anthropocene and related enviro/geographical issues, I’ll be speaking in fine company in north London on 21 May at SameAs, so do come along, it would be lovely to meet you!

The 16th century old Shanghai

Glittering 21st century Shanghai

Wall of flowers lines the Bund

The city is an interesting mix of wooden 16th-century Chinese buildings and gardens, European 19th- and early 20th-century grand statements and residential terraces, and the glass-clad sky-piercing architecture that has come to characterise the 21st-century.

Art deco doors of the Peace Hotel

At deco lion. The medieval Ming dynasty arts and crafts used a lot of simple geometric motifs that were popular again in the 1920s.

European buildings on the Bund

The gardens and parks here, while as regimented and stylised as a silk screen print, include a welcome variety of trees and flowers – elsewhere, the monotony of lines of poplars are relieved only by those Lego conifers or a rare silver birch.

Oops

Chrysanthemum tea

Dinner

People here are better educated, more people speak some English, they are wealthier and healthier, with men and women living to 80 and 84 yrs, although with the current trend for chain-smoking, I suspect those impressive ages will drop.

Tourists take photos using iPads now

Where there's water, there's koi

Dragons have featured in Chinese decoration for millennia

I’m staying in a great Victorian institution, in good company: Charlie Chaplin, Einstein and Bertrand Russell have all stayed here. From my window I can see big fancy cars gliding past the Russian embassy, an old man pulling a handcart piled high with wooden sheets, pedal and electric bicycles, weaving with mopeds among vegetable sellers and suited businessmen. Above it all are the bright lights of a big city whose per capita energy consumption is higher than New York or London’s.

Medieval bronze yak pot in the excellent Shanghai Museum

Bronze water dish

I’ve come to China, in part, to look at one of the most pressing questions of our time: how will China provide its people the benefits of development that Shanghai residents enjoy without sacrificing further the environment on which it (and we all) depends?

3000BC jade funeral urn

12th century vase

Art deco vase from 1920s. Plus ca change...

I’ve learned of all sorts of impressive attempts by the government to clean up its coal stations, capture the carbon dioxide emitted – including one facility here in Shanghai that can apparently capture a whopping 100,000 tonnes of CO2 – of attempts to store the greenhouse gas in saline aquifers in Inner Mongolia, or oil fields in the Bohai Sea. There are wind farms carpeting the Gobi desert, and solar PV farms scattered across the country, geothermal projects in Tibet, including plans to use a screw-expander technique to generate power from warm, subterranean water or to recover energy lost in heat from factories…

Majhong players, Ming dynasty

Deer, Ming again

This symbol means happiness and longevity

But as the Western car industry vies for the lucrative Chinese market, a country with very little oil, China is experimenting with filthy coal-to-oil technology, while scaling back its electric vehicle ambitions.

Birds

A pot for paintbrushes

Flowers

Building a green economy was never going to be easy. As Changhua Wu, director of the Climate Group, says: “China might be able to leapfrog over some industrial or technological stages, but it can’t leapfrog over the costs involved in deploying the latest clean options.”

7th century birdfeeder

Pipe smoker

Piper and friends

China doesn’t have any choice but to take environmental issues seriously, however as a poor country rapidly developing, it hasn’t been given – or asked for – handouts from richer nations.

7th century child-sized ceramic statue

Dismounting camel rider (7th century)

As the Guardian‘s Asia correspondant Jon Watts says: “China is trying to do something without precedent in world history: it is trying to decarbonise its economy even before it has finished industrialising.”

Let’s hope it succeeds.

A pot from 6000BC

In the morning, I’m heading firmly into the future, taking the Shanghai Maglev train. At 431 km per hour, it’s the world’s fastest commercial train and faster than an Formula 1 car!

Old meets new in Beijing

The capital city, unremittingly ugly, shoots up in blasts of loud, dirty construction under a tobacco-stained fug of sky. Flat, with grey upon grey of concrete and those peculiarly ugly shades of glass that architects choose for hi-rises, interrupted only by the brightness of advertising billboards and the colourful luxury items they display, it’s perhaps not surprising that China is becoming a nation of aspirational shoppers. Materialism has replaced idealism as in so many other places, but here in a supposedly communist state, the resulting blatant social inequality makes for a particularly uncomfortable political setting.

Mahjong players

Mahjong in action

Not that it seems to be impacting the popularity of China’s one-party state, according to the Chinese I ask. So long as economic development continues apace, most of the people I speak to say they are happy with the status quo.

Tiananmen Square

Mao and one of his guards

Giant screens in Tiananmen Sq show tourists far more attractive parts of China

Woven into the city’s fabric, among the vast anonymous skyscrapers, are the remnants of community: small alleyways and courtyards with human-scale houses, low-slung roofs with decorative details, leaning bicycles, outside cooking stalls and flavours of Asia. These rare examples of a far more inefficient, economically poor way of life are nevertheless for me the only real evidence of a city with soul that has, after all, existed for at least 3000 years.

Goldfish courier

Chinatown in China

As in so many places, it’s the people that save this city. Beijingers are diverse, curious and friendly – and they serve up great food. Few speak English, which is awkward, especially as when I do manage Mandarin, my tonal pronunciation is wrong. Conversation is mainly via gesture and translators.

Tru dat

Scorpions before...

...and after

The streets are a bobbing sea of black heads, thick straight hair, busy bodies, and between the hoards, the lanes and lanes of cars – I counted 16 lanes for the street a block from my hostel. Most of the cars have a single occupant, they drive erratically and fast with no heed for pedestrians or the cyclists that not so long ago filled every thoroughfare.

Insects, incl silkworm larvae

Oh no, not seahorses!

This is something James Hu is trying to change. James is one of a growing number of new social entrepreneurs, often educated overseas, who are trying to build a better China. After graduating from the University of Washington and stints working for Microsoft and Groupon, he banded together with a couple of other like-minded American graduate Chinese and moved to Beijing to found Wodache, the country’s first car-pooling scheme.

Marble and wood from the 14th century

Grand and detailed

Royal dragon motif on a roof

“We wanted to use technology to help improve society,” he explains. The team has created an iPhone app that allows people to get real-time information on where car journeys are taking place and request passage, and for drivers to alert potential passengers to journeys they are making. “We wanted to cut down on pollution, congestion and also help bring people together and build trust between people,” James says.

James Hu, social entrepreneur

In the Forbidden City

Ceramic wall frieze in the Forbidden City

Trust is a problem in China, he says – it’s certainly something I’ve experienced during my short stay here – and their entire business model relies on trust. It’s free to use at the moment, while they build up from their 500-odd users, but eventually they hope to generate advertising to support an expansion.

Sightseeing is tiring

When the maze was filled with water, the emperor and his mates used to float their wine glasses along it

One of the many fantastic clocks in the Forbidden City collection, which include one with a character that can write in Chinese on the hour!

Like other internet-based initiatives out here, though, Wodache faces Chinese censorship hurdles: Facebook, Twitter and other social networking sites are blocked, and perhaps most frustratingly, the Google Maps application they use also often “disappears”.

Roof detail

A rare Christian church is used for a photoshoot

Vegetarian street food

James is not alone in being concerned about the city’s pollution problems. Environmental awareness generally is growing here and climate change is discussed more frequently in the media than in Britain. China aims to generate one-third of its electricity from low-carbon sources (renewables and nuclear) by 2050 – the same proportion as from coal, which currently provides some 80% of electricity.

A "green shop" stall in a bling new mall

The 700-yr old great wall

It's also known as the longest cemetery because 1 million workers are thought to be buried inside

There's a slide down from the wall

The government is taking typically giant steps to improve conditions. The worst polluting factories have been moved out of the city, emissions standards have been tightened and enforced, Beijing, along with some other cities and provinces, begins carbon trading next year, and new technologies such as carbon capture are already underway. The filthy air that I’ve been breathing, which almost completely obscures the sun, is I’m told far cleaner than it was just a few years ago.

The only 'nature' I've seen

Many of these changes have been brought about through civil activism, points out Changhua Wu, director of The Climate Group organisation. “People demanded better air quality, and the government responded,” she says. ”Kids are learning about environmental issues in school and are coming home and confronting their parents about lifestyle habits and choices. The next generation of adults will be very interesting to watch.”

Organic mushrooms

Environmental issues that have a direct impact on health receive the most public focus. No one wants to eat contaminated food or drink unsafe water, and trust, as James pointed out, is low. Pesticide use is several times higher than is safe for consumers or farmers – it’s relatively new to China, so farmers spray liberally hoping for improved yields. Toxic waste from factories often spills into irrigation water or over crops and arable land. It is often covered up and villagers seldom report it for fear of reprisals and because they seldom receive any compensation.

Tasting different organic rice wines. The colours are according to the rices used

Scandals, such as one involving milk contamination in 2008, which had 300,000 victims and killed 6 babies, have pushed consumers here to seek alternatives. I visit one success story: an organic farmers’ market, curiously hidden away at the top of a Beijing department store, because they can’t get a permit.

A woman from Greenpeace demonstrates the pesticides in a shop-bought tea

The one on the left is of water, the one on the right is tea and reveals pesticide contamination

I arrive to a bustling scene of exciting looking mushroom varieties, certified (properly) milk and yoghurts, the first cheese I’ve seen since I got here (French), and a variety of eggs, veggies and fruit. Organic farming isn’t the solution to feeding China’s vast population, but there is definitely a market for safer, less polluted food. A survey last year for Deloitte found that more than half of 2000 Beijingers would buy organic if it was available and even if it cost more.

The trouble is, it isn’t easily available, and it costs a lot more. The pressures to keep food prices at base levels rewards farmers who cut corners. And with memories of mass starvation seared into the minds of the older generation, price may well take priority for some time yet.

One hundred years later, another huge building transformation was underway. I take the Docklands Light Railway, a once-futuristic fully automated driverless train, remembering the excitement of my first journey on it 25 years ago. The boxy 80s designed cars take us into another utterly transformed landscape – within my lifetime – whose former use is also knowable only through the signs: West India Quay, Custom House…

Planet Under Pressure panel of scientists

The Planet Under Pressure conference this week in London’s glass and steel towered Docklands recognises that Earth has undergone a dramatic and recent change, and that humans are now the dominant biophysical force across the planet. We’re now in the Anthropocene rather than the Holocene. Humans are pushing global temperatures, land and water use beyond what we’ve experienced before. We’re polluting the biosphere, acidifying the oceans, and reducing biodiversity. At the same time, we are a global population of 7 billion – going on 9 billion – all of whom need food water, clean air and who lead increasingly complex lives requiring more things to be comfortable.

Nearly 3,000 experts in earth systems science and sustainability issues have gathered here to try and find a way through the mess and plan some sort of solution for future earth.

In 2009, Johan Rockström of the Stockholm Resilience Centre, and colleagues, identified nine “planetary boundaries” – biophysical thresholds – that must be observed if humanity was to remain in the “safe operating space” of Holocene-like conditions. Many scientists (and non scientists) agree with these thresholds – many unquestioningly – and indeed an entire book has been written based on these thresholds.

However, others argue that these nine are rather arbitrary choices. I would question whether, for example, we can be said to have a “climate change” boundary – surely it should be temperature or forcing? – or a “change in land use” or “biodiversity loss” boundary. Others contest that there are either no biophysical thresholds for these, or that we are far from reaching them.  I would disagree with this – there is a clear threshold for dangerous loss of stratospheric ozone, for example, and I would also say for global temperature – caused by too many greenhouse gas molecules and too few sinks – although whether that’s a 2, 3, 4 degree threshold, I’m not sure. I wouldn’t like to go above 2.5, but we are already heading beyond that, so what does that mean – are we all doomed? Possibly.

Erle Ellis and Ruth Defries talk "opportunities"

Now, Ruth Defries, Erle Ellis and some of the authors of the Planetary Boundaries paper, including Diana Liverman, are publishing another paper, describing Planetary Opportunities. “Scientists’ most useful role is not to set doomsday limits and set thresholds, but to provide a more optimistic opportunity for society,” Ellis told me. “There is no hard-line carrying capacity for the planet. Humans are very adaptive.”

Urbanisation is a good example of the human system responding to a planetary opportunity, Ellis says, by living more efficiently in larger populations, while freeing up rural land for ecosystem services or agriculture. We need to apply human ingenuity on a multi-scale approach – from individuals to the global, both in governance and the scale of scientific analyses – in order to find solutions, he says, citing examples of societies successfully adapting to environmental threats in the past. “Planetary boundaries are not a useful concept for society,” Erle says.

Wow, sounds like a big schism from the 2009 paper. But according to Defries, the new paper “does not represent a dispute among factions within the global change science community. It’s more an attempt to move forward with the discussion”.

Solutions at the conference include this water pump made by Imperial College students

I took the paper over to Rockström, and asked what he thought. “We should not frame this crisis as an opportunity. This is not an opportunity. If we destroy the water supply, the air, the climate, humanity will not be safe,” he says, adding that he finds the whole ‘technology-will-solve-all-our-problems camp tiresome. “But, the journey towards something good represents an opportunity. The safe operating space is an opportunity,” he concedes.

We are already in the Anthropocene – in that humans are the largest driver of planetary change – but we have not yet changed state from stable Holocene to another stable state yet, he says. Breaching tipping points could send us into another state of which we have no experience, and which is likely to be dangerous. Exceeding the planetary boundaries, as we already have for three of the nine, he warns, is a very dangerous game.

Perhaps the truth is that thresholds do exist, even if we can only recognise them with hindsight, but that our poorly adapted human brains cannot act on this message. The promise and language of opportunities may spur us to action – thus realising the truest opportunity.

Now, it’s impossible to find an angle of sight that doesn’t include a manmade structure. The ground is drained, paved or asphalted; brick and newer concrete buildings rise from the edges of car-bordered streets. The once mill-lined Quaggy stream is lined and sided with concrete (a flood defence) on its prescribed route to the Thames. Nature has either been planted and encouraged by humans – my magnolia, clematis and cats, for example – or found for themselves new urban way to flourish – the foxes, pigeons and herons.

Frog spawn in the plastic tray

A frog has chosen to have its family in my tiny dinner table-sized back yard. My garden is a stone terrace with a narrow flowerbed running around it. There is no pond, but nevertheless, the frog has found a shallow plastic tray under a chair, (meant for putting beneath a flowerpot), and filled it with her spawn. In the Anthropocene, life finds a way.

The start of something bouncy

While I’m delighted to be hosting this amphibian family – they’re globally endangered – this is about as far from a natural habitat as I can imagine. That wouldn’t necessarily be a bad thing. I will, for example, keep their tray topped up with water (now I’ve seen them in there) during the drought, which is likely to dry up many natural ponds.

The frog is in the water, bottom left of the green pot

But this tray is too small for so many frogs, so I’m looking for a better situation – most likely, another artificial, purpose-built pond. Maybe when the tadpoles grow up, I can teach them to climb trees like their Amazonian cousins.

The article, ‘Navigating the Anthropocene: Improving earth system governance‘, says we need these urgent changes to cope with food and water security problems before tipping points are reached on planetary boundaries, such as climate change. The authors suggest upgrading the UN Environment Programme and creating a UN Sustainable Development Council, as well as allowing qualified majority voting on important UN decisions to stop countries from blocking progressive action on, say, emissions reductions as happened at Copenhagen in 2009.

It’s not the first time, scientists have called for change to how humanity manages environmental stewardship – there have been calls for an International Court for the Environment, for example – but in the run-up to the Rio+20 conference this June, perhaps more people are listening and thinking about how we might better manage our globalised economies, land, water and air.

Global efforts are perhaps coming of age: polio has been almost wiped out, the Millennium Development Goals on poverty reduction and access to clean water have been met ahead of schedule, and we have had successes in action on stratospheric ozone depletion and nuclear testing in the past. Now we need more joined up governance on the complicated interconnected issues that threaten us all. The question is: will Rio+20 governments deliver with the same post-WWII commitment?

I use sustainability to mean lastingness – how well something endures. In terms of the planet’s resources, sustainability means using resources at a rate at which they can be replenished. In the past, and still in many places around the world today, people have generally lived sustainably, using materials that are replenished by the natural world within months or a few years. Where resources were not replenished in short time periods, such as timber or peat, they were used in small amounts, in part because populations were smaller – in part regulated by resource limitations. This was not always the case, and there are many examples of great civilisations that collapsed because of unsustainable resource use, from the Mesopotamians to the Maya.

The ‘great acceleration’ from the mid-20th century, which was born of the technological advances of the Industrial Revolution, population expansion, globalisation and urbanisation, has dramatically changed our relationship with the planet. Earth is no longer in its relatively stable Holocene epoch, this is the new Human Age – the Anthropocene – and we’re going to have to adjust the way we live, eat and make stuff to accommodate to the planetary changes we’ve made.

We’re exceeding the sustainable resource replenishment rate with everything from fossil fuels to bluefin tuna, which means we’re running out of stuff. So we’re going to have to learn to live without these things, find alternatives to replace them, figure out ways to replenish resource stocks, or slow our use-rate through efficiency and re-use.

Most of this makes perfect sense to most people, not least because one resource we’re short of as individuals is money, and our sustainable use of cash should drive our sustainable use of other resources. The problem comes when resources are financially cheaper than their availability would suggest – we’ve given a lot of stuff an artificial value. Tin and indium are both cheaper than gold, even though they are rarer and likely to run out faster.

So what happens when the stuff we depend on runs out? How will we – the rich and the billions of poor people sharing this planet – live happy, healthy, fulfilling lives in the Anthropocene?

I’ll be looking at these questions in a series of Smart Planet columns for a new BBC website (although it can only be read by those of you living outside the UK, because of BBC licensing restrictions – try plugging the url into Google Translate if you’re in Britain. The first column is here). My first column is about the soil crisis – we’re running out of mud.

I interviewed a farmer in Kent, who is using a soil conservation method called no-tillage agriculture, which involves planting into undisturbed soil rather than ploughing. The technique reduces soil erosion, because the roots and other plant matter are retained, holding the soil. Here’s a video of our meeting:

_____________________

Update 8/2/12: The latest reports from Male here and (below) a video of deposed President Nasheed being taken away by armed police. His brother says Nasheed is injured but in a safe house now. Police were “aiming batons at the head” and attacking people in hospital.

______________________

Update 7/2/12: I’ve just been sent this video of supporters of deposed President Nasheed protesting against the military coup on the streets of Male.

______________________

Shocking news today that ‘Ani’ Nasheed, the first democratically elected president of the Maldives has resigned during what he describes as “a military coup” led by the former dictator Abdul Gayoom – here’s a statement.

Nasheed was in power for 2 years

Nasheed, who deeply impressed me with his intelligent, humane and courageous outlook when I met him in Male, has been forced to step down after weeks of what appear to be orchestrated protests engineered by the country’s former dictator, Abdul Gayoom. Nasheed’s attempts to lead the country and, in particular, to rule out the corruption that stem’s from the previous administration’s 30-years in power, was continually opposed by Gayoom’s band of paid ‘special officers’, who attacked Nasheed’s party headquarters and the media, as the Guardian reports:

There were also reports that a group of officers had taken over the state-run television channel’s studios and had forced staff to broadcast messages of support for Gayoom.

Nasheed has been at the forefront of state-led democratic and environmental efforts, including banning shark hunting, setting up marine reserves and leading an international fight for climate change mitigation as part of a bloc of small island nations. The Maldives, which is just a metre above sea level, is particularly vulnerable to the impacts of sea level rise through thermal expansion of the oceans and melting glaciers driven by global warming.

Maria Ahmed Didi MP (MDP) arrested by police in Male' on Wednesday 8 February for taking part in pro-Nasheed demonstration

It’s dangerous on the streets of Male at the moment with people being attacked, our thoughts are with our friends there.

Moosa Manik MP, (Acting Chairperson of the MDP), beaten unconscious by police on 8 February and in intensive care.

]]> http://wanderinggaia.com/2012/02/07/maldives-president-nasheed-resigns/feed/ 0 Gaia ani Maryia protester http://wanderinggaia.com/2012/02/01/wild-britain/ http://wanderinggaia.com/2012/02/01/wild-britain/#comments Wed, 01 Feb 2012 18:28:12 +0000 Gaia http://wanderinggaia.com/?p=4821 ]]> Sevenoaks:There was a time when hippos lounged in the swamps around London. A time when going for a stroll risked an encounter with mammoths or sabre-toothed tigers. But what the Ice Age didn’t kill, we humans did. Now, the biggest native animals in Britain are deer.

Oh deer

Sizing me up

My brother and I armed ourselves with a bag of carrots and went deep into the wilderness of Knole Park, a medieval hunting ground that is, essentially a landscaped recreation ground for the rather grand 15th-century Archbishop’s Palace located there. That’s as wild as it gets in 21st-century Britain.

Tempted by carrots

Yummy

Employing the same intrepid skills learned while tracking tigers in Nepal, we braved the ferns and grasses to find a few herds of shy deer.

White hart

We tempted them over with sweet carrots.

Not too proud

Still a wonderful encounter.

Many ecologists now claim that there is nowhere left on Earth that is truly wild, truly untouched by man – certainly nowhere humans haven’t visited. That may be true. Certainly by altering the composition of our atmosphere, oceans and the circulatory climate systems, we have spread our influence: everything that breathes air, now breathes a different number of carbon dioxide molecules; and plants and corals uptake a different ratio of carbon isotopes, for example.

So is this the end of exploration? Have we been everywhere, seen everything? No, we’re only just beginning. A century ago, Rutherford explored our planet’s smallest region: the atom. Now, we’re discovering that he didn’t really understand the geography at all. Explorers at CERN are looking for a key landmark, the Higgs boson, to help re-chart the territory with much greater precision.

The same mapping is happening for the stuff of life, our cells and genetic code, and we’re exploring the ecology of our bodies to find out the mix of microorganisms that live within us and start to understand the myriad of ways that they influence us.

We’re exploring our planet in new, more inclusive ways. We can visit remote places by satellite, by plane imagery and through the readily available journeys of others. We can look at the microscopic all around us and remotely, probe the most furthest depths of our oceans. And in many ways, these explorations provide us with more context than a single journey made by a few brave adventurers. The more humans explore, the more we realise how complex is our planet, its geology and biology.

Travel around our much-trampled world now is still, to me, the most exciting adventure. It remains true exploration, because even if it’s thoroughly charted and mapped and visited by everyone, until I’ve smelt the air, eaten the food, chatted to the people and animals, it’s hardly more real to me than Wonderland or Lilliput. This year promises plenty of exploring for me, although some of it will be virtual, because it’ll have to fit around writing projects. But I do have plans to visit some new places – and to take you with me.

Wishing you a great year of explorations in 2012.