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Environmental peacemaking
More than ever, hostile countries that share borders are working together to save their common environments.
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Similarly, a push by the Friends of the Earth Middle East (FOEME) to get Jordan, Israel, and the Palestinian Authority to cooperate in piping Red Sea water into the dying Dead Sea has been at an impasse since renewed hostilities.
Diversion of rivers flowing into the world's saltiest body of water has caused it to fall from 1,280 feet below sea level to more than 1,360 feet below sea level in the past 50 years - evaporating to just a third of its former size. An $800 million pipeline from the Red Sea to the Dead Sea would help restore the sea, eliminate sink holes, and encourage tourism.
"The project is presently stuck," Gidon Bromberg, an FOEME activist, comments in an e-mail. "I think the project, though, is far from dead and that the parties will find the language to move forward."
Despite severe obstacles, some working examples of environmental peacemaking are popping up in unexpected corners of the world. Today the highway corridor connecting China and Vietnam, bitter enemies for centuries, is still the largest conduit for smuggled wildlife in the world. Trucks filled with sacks of snakes, turtles, pangolin, mongoose, and civet cats flowed across the border into China, recalls Tom Dillon of the World Wildlife Fund, who worked on halting such smuggling.
For years China had seemed relatively unconcerned, while Vietnam was furious over losing its wildlife. But in the past year, the two nations have begun working much more closely on enforcement measures to stem the tide of Vietnamese and Laotian wildlife smuggling, Mr. Dillon says.
He predicts more progress this fall when talks under the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora, in Bangkok, ratchet up the pressure on China and others nations.
"As the SARS epidemic has revealed the link between the consumption of wildlife and public health, they've become much more serious about stemming use of wildlife in medicine and stopping the trade in these species," he says.
In the long run these efforts will succeed more often than not, Dr. Matthews predicts. "There's not much in the way of political stakes, so if all fails there's not nearly the embarrassment there would be on a cooperative deal on the economy or military," she says. "The environment is just a nice soft-political backdoor way for countries to get along."
Maybe that's why the US and Cuba, along with Mexico, have embarked on a new research program into the Gulf of Mexico ecosystem. It is thought that Gulf currents carry fish, lobster, and larvae of other species from Cuba and Mexico into US waters, and that sea turtles that nest on US beaches feed in Cuban waters.
"Despite a chillier and chillier political climate between the US and Cuba, this set of research activities has been licensed by the US Treasury Department," says David Guggenheim, head of the newly formed Harte Research Institute for Gulf of Mexico Studies at Texas A&M University, in an e-mail. "We have gained support from the highest levels of government in Cuba."
