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The fight against climate change is already as hard as it is but it doesn't just mean fighting natural elements. Turns out, it doesn't even mean just fighting big conglomerates, trying to change government policies or trying to convince people that what we're doing to our planet is destroying it. For some people, being a climate activist means putting your own and your loved ones' lives in danger. Latin America is one of the most dangerous places for climate activists, especially women. Read this excellent piece from Open Democracy on the challenges women activists in Latin America face in their fight against climate change.

Berta Cáceres solidarity rally, Honduras 2016. Photo: Flickr/Daniel Cima/CIDH. CC BY 2.0.

If we want to stop humanity from destroying the living planet we need to start thinking beyond the current time and beyond borders. SpaceBuzz is an organisation that is aiming to do both. It's based on the idea of the 'overview effect', something that astronauts who see the earth from outer space experience, that allows them to see it as a "fragile ball of life". SpaceBuzz's mission is to give this experience to as many children so that they will grow up not taking the earth for granted. We talked with Spacebuzz's founder Hidde Hoogcarspel to see where Spacebuzz is headed (other than to infinity and beyond).

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Meet ‘Mr. Toilet’, the eccentric entrepreneur fighting the sanitation crisis

Solutions

Written by
Davide Banis

on
22 November 2019

The lack of access to clean and safe toilets is a serious global problem. According to UN data, 4.3 billion people, more than half of the world’s population, still live without safely managed sanitation and 673 million practice open defecation.

Untreated human waste spreads diseases in water and food leading to 432.000 diarrhoeal deaths every year. Young people and women are particularly affected by the problem. 297,000 children under the age of five die from diarrhoea each year because of sanitation-related issues. Girls miss school during their menstrual period as they don’t have access to adequate toilets. Women can be more vulnerable to abuse and sexual assault because they have to go outside to defecate, often when it’s dark. And the list goes on.

But if the problem is serious, it doesn’t mean that the solution can’t be sprinkled with some humor. Enter Jack Sim aka “Mr. Toilet.”

Mr. Sim is a 62-year-old Singaporean businessman who gave up a successful career in real estate to fight the global sanitation crisis weaponizing toilet humor. “My goal is to transform poo culture into pop culture,” he quips in the documentary Mr. Toilet: The World’s #2 Man, a new film dedicated to his life and mission.

What clearly emerges from the documentary is that Jack Sim does “give a s**t” about the problem he’s tackling, possesses an innate ability to attract media attention and has a distinct knack for scatological puns.

In 2001, he set up the “World Toilet Organization,” a nonprofit to help him spread his message. He also declared the 19th of November—the day in which he founded the charity—“World Toilet Day,” an occasion to celebrate sanitation and its essential role in human life. In his own words, it was a way to “put a crown on the toilet throne.”

Twelve years later, the UN added the celebration to its list of official International Days (in the documentary, Jack Sim gleefully recalls when he convinced the Russian ambassador who wanted to euphemistically call it “World Hygiene Day”) and, in 2015, the end of open defecation became one of the Sustainable Development Goals’ targets.

But the fight to solve the global sanitation crisis is far from over and that’s why World Toilet Day is still a fundamental occasion to break the silence surrounding this topic, promote latrine use and raise funds to build new facilities for those who need it the most.

A few years ago, The Economist touted the toilet as “one of the world’s most useful inventions”. Yet, billions of people don’t have access to it or aren’t aware of its importance.

Shedding a light on this basic human right—breaking stigma and taboos along the way—is Jack Sim’s happy crusade, a crucial campaign powered by a wardrobe of costumes ranging from Game of Thrones to Super Mario and loads of poop-themed gags.

“When I switched to social work, my business colleagues said that I was making a joke of myself,” he says in Mr.Toilet, “but then I realized that if you’re able to laugh at yourself and to make people laugh, then they will pay attention to you.”

Credit header image: MR TOILET: THE WORLD’S #2 MAN

This story features:

philanthropy / Global sanitation / Mr. Toilet / World Toilet Day

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How salmon became the symbol of our broken food system

Obstacles

Written by
Davide Banis

on
18 November 2019

In 1973, pioneering undersea explorer Jacques Cousteau—the David Attenborough of the oceans—wrote: “With earth’s burgeoning human population to feed, we must turn to the sea with understanding and new technology. We must farm it as we have farmed the land.”

Norway was a particularly fertile ground for this imperative since the first floating sea pens to rear salmon had been developed in the country of the fjords already in the late 1960s. Until then, the aquaculture of salmonids had been virtually nonexistent and the global catch of all salmon species amounted to 400.000 tonnes per year. Fish farming changed everything.

In 2018, the total supply of salmon was more than 3 million tonnes, of which 2.36 million were farmed. The relative abundance of this ray-finned fish brought remarkable nutritional benefits to our tables as their pink flesh is rich in Omega-3 fatty acids, high quality proteins and B vitamins.

Nutritional benefits aside, salmon aquaculture—which according to the WWF is the fastest-growing food production system in the world—has found itself in increasingly hot water, accused of polluting the waters and endangering wild salmon.

Recurring sea lice infestations is probably the biggest problem for salmon farms, costing the sector nearly $1 billion a year in losses. Sea lice has always existed in nature but, in floating sea pens, fish are kept at unnaturally high densities, favoring unprecedented epidemics of the parasite.

Wild salmon that swim by fish farms while migrating between saltwater and freshwater get contaminated with the disease. Moreover, farmed salmon sometimes escape and breed with wild fish, transmitting the sea lice and causing a genetic weakening of the species.

However, wild salmon are menaced by an array of other problems beyond aquaculture. Rising sea temperatures, dams impeding their migration, overfishing and hatcheries set up to enhance the harvest in fisheries (yes, using hatcheries to put more salmon in the rivers often results in fewer fish to catch) are all factors that contribute to dwindling numbers of wild salmon worldwide. Global populations of wild Atlantic salmon, for example, have fallen from between eight to ten million in the 1970s to between three to four million today.

Outdoor clothing giant Patagonia, a self-styled “activist company,” recently released the documentary Artifishal on YouTube. Directed by Josh Murphy, the film explores “wild salmon’s slide towards extinction” with a particular focus on the threats posed by hatcheries and fish farms.

“Technology is great in so many realms of human experience but when you try to apply manipulation and control of ecosystems through technology, you’re often successful early on but then problems creep in,” says conservation biologist Gary Meffe in the film.

Salmon are a “keystone species” in both the North Pacific and North Atlantic meaning that they play a unique role in the ecosystem. Connecting salt and freshwater, they bring the nutrients of the oceans far inland and are an irreplaceable source of food for animals like orcas and grizzly bears.

“They are a natural barometer for the health of the planet,” writes journalist Mark Kurlansky in his upcoming book Salmon and the Earth: the History of a Common Fate (published by Patagonia). That’s why the survival of wild salmon is such an important environmental challenge: it’s our relationship with nature that is at stake.

In Artifishal, ecologist and writer Carl Safina recounts the Greek myth of Icarus, the overambitious man who died because he flew too close to the sun with wings made of wax and feathers. “Humans believe they can do anything and everything all the time and this can-do attitude has gotten us very far [...] but there are limits and we don’t understand anything about those limits,” comments Safina. In other words, aquaculture risks of becoming today’s myth of Icarus.

“Humans have often thought of themselves as superior to nature but it has got us into a lot of trouble,” echoes Patagonia’s founder Yvon Chouinard.

In nature, salmon eggs hatch in freshwater streams. After a period ranging from a few months to a couple of years, the fish, which at this stage is called “smolt,” migrate to the sea where they grow to sexual maturity. When it’s spawning time, salmon return to their natal rivers, often swimming upstream against strong currents. Most of them die shortly after they have spawned (many species of salmon are semelparous meaning they experience just one reproductive episode before death).

Recreating artificially this heroic life cycle represented without any doubt a grandiose technological success but tinkering with salmon’s ecosystems to increase food production came with hefty environmental costs.

At the same time, Jacques Costeau’s admonishment is more relevant than ever. The current world population is 7.7 billion, almost double that of 1973, when the French explorer stressed the importance of developing new technologies to produce food.

There are people who argue that to feed the ever-burgeoning human population, we need to dramatically accelerate the speed of technological improvements, rather than slowing it down. Wild Type, for example, is a San Francisco-based startup that has recently raised $12.5 million to develop “lab-grown” salmon, that is fish produced by in vitro cultivation of animal cells, without the need of wild fisheries or setting up hatcheries and farms.

In June, the company hosted a test dinner in Portland, Oregon where they served samples of their product prepared according to a variety of culinary traditions, including a bowl of bisque (a French soup) and a platter of Latin American ceviche (raw fish cured in lemon and spiced with peppers). Wild Type estimated that a single spicy salmon roll served that night cost a whopping $ 200 to produce but they hope to bring the price down to just $7 to $8 per pound in a few years. “The dream vision is the cleanest, purest, freshest salmon, without contaminants or antibiotics, for a price lower than farmed Atlantic Salmon,” commented the company’s cofounder Justin Kolbeck.

Patagonia’s Yvon Chouinard is right: humans have often thought of themselves as superior to nature and that has gotten us into a lot of trouble. But this arrogance—the desire of becoming the “homo deus” described by Yuval Noah Harari in his famed book—has enabled us to bulldoze through herculean challenges like famines and diseases. It may then well be that also cultivating salmon—creating its pink flesh in the lab with an unabashed can-do attitude—will be part of the solution to restore our relationship with this mighty fish. And with the planet at large.

Credit header image: Pixabay

This story features:

Future of Food / Salmon / Lab-grown seafood

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All aboard the sleeper - The unexpected renaissance of European night trains

Solutions

Written by
Davide Banis

on
11 November 2019

In his 2017 book Night Trains, British writer Andrew Martin nostalgically celebrates the bygone era of sleeper trains and overnight rail travels. Attempting to recreate the journeys immortalized by novels like Murder on the Orient Express, Martin embarks on a series of nocturnal train adventures across Europe, just to realize that today’s sleeping carriages are nothing but a pale shadow of the opulent “hotels on wheels” that whisked wealthy passengers from Paris to Istanbul in the first half of the Twentieth Century.

In 1934, when Agatha Christie published Murder on the Orient Express, the eponymous train was the pinnacle of luxury travel. In the dining car, waiters wearing immaculate white jackets laid nine-course spreads on starched linen while the interiors were a triumph of art deco glamour. Even in economy class, the steel ladders of the berths, introduced in the late 30s, had carpeted rungs.

In comparison, the rolling stock of today’s night trains leaves Andrew Martin unimpressed, to say the least. His couchette on an Intercités de Nuit, an overnight service run by France’s national railway company, is “a pretty good simulacrum of a prison cell.” As for refreshments served on board, the average breakfast consists of "a plastic cup of instant coffee and a jam-filled croissant in a sealed wrapper uninspiringly labelled ‘7 Days’."

Despite the spartan hospitality, night trains aren't particularly profitable either. "They do not make money," wrote Martin, "so their future looks uncertain in Western Europe."

In 2017, when Martin published his eulogy, overnight rail routes were being axed across Europe and sleeping carriages seemed ready to be parked at the transport museum, killed by budget airlines and high-speed trains. However, just a couple of years later, night trains may be about to undergo an unexpected renaissance.

In October, the Austrian Federal Railways (ÖBB)—one of the very few European rail operators that never gave up on overnight routes—announced plans to introduce a new Vienna-Brussels Nightjet service from January 2020.

A connection between Amsterdam and Vienna might follow in 2021. It would be the first international night train running in the Netherlands since December 2016.

A recent study by the Institute of Mobility Policy, part of the Dutch Ministry of Infrastructure, concluded that there’s good potential for sleeper trains from Amsterdam to several European destinations, including Vienna, Zurich and Milan.

Support for night trains is gaining momentum in Switzerland, too. The Swiss Federal Railways (SBB) is discussing the reintroduction of wagon-lits, withdrawn from Swiss rails in 2009 (current overnight services from Zurich are operated by ÖBB).

A survey commissioned by the Swiss Association for Transport and Environment found that the majority of polled Swiss are in favor of trans-European night trains. “We see the demand and are therefore looking into whether we can rebuild the night-train network. We’re now examining the routes and connections,” Armin Weber, SBB’s head of international passenger transport, told Swiss public television SRF.

The Swedish government is also interested in exploring the possibility of revamping its nighttime rail offer, as part of the country's ambitious plans to be carbon neutral by 2045.

The relatively low environmental impact of rail travel is one of the main reasons driving the comeback of romantic sleepers and couchettes. Night trains were killed by faster and cheaper airplanes but now they’re taking their revenge.

A report published in October by the UK Committee on Climate Change stated that “flying is the quickest and cheapest way for a consumer to increase their carbon footprint.” (Overnight) rail travel, which is virtually always less carbon-intensive than aviation, might then become the go-to choice for eco-minded travellers. Moreover, passengers save up an expensive hotel night and wake up well-rested right in the city centre, ready for their visit or meetings.

So, are night trains the silver bullet for climate-conscious, efficient and even glamorous travels? No, or at least not yet. Hefty track access fees, infrastructure capacity constraints and high maintenance costs put the brakes on railway companies' investments in their overnight services.

And even when they do invest, things don't always turn out as hoped.

The case of the new Caledonian Sleeper is exemplary in this regard. Connecting London to Scotland, the Caledonian Sleeper is one of the two remaining overnight routes in the United Kingdom (the other, the Night Riviera, connects London to West Cornwall).

The Scottish government and Serco, the company which operates the train on behalf of Transport Scotland, spent £150 million ($193 million) to renovate the rolling stock and the overall experience.

Harking back to the golden age of wagon-lits, the refitted Caledonian Sleeper was vaunted as a "luxury hotel on wheels," equipped with en-suite double rooms and a new technology to help ensure travellers sleep undisturbed during the journey. The restaurant car was freshened up too and Highland classics like smoked venison, haggis and a wide range of whiskies were added to the menu.

Unfortunately, since their introduction in April 2019, the new fleet of trains has been plagued by a variety of glitches and faults, from severe delays to water problems. The Office of Rail and Road (ORR), the U.K.'s railways regulator, reported that, between April and June, the Caledonian Sleeper has attracted the highest complaint rate of any train operator in the country.

Part of the charm of wagon-lits is that moving them across countries amounts to an epic operation. It requires solid infrastructure, a faultless rolling stock, specialized personnel able to maintain hotel standards in difficult conditions and (often) international cooperation. It may sound utopian but, in Europe, night trains can also be vessels of continental integration, cutting across national borders like a knife through butter (however, EU rules have paradoxically stymied overnight rail services in the past).

The challenge now is to make this romantic and climate-friendly travel option more economically viable, both for operators and passengers. And to ensure it remains a reasonably pleasant experience.

It’s an uphill struggle and there’s a lot of work to do but this also means that for night trains the end of the line is still far, far away.

Header image: SBB Intercity train
Credit: Pixabay

This story features:

Sustainable travel / Night trains

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More Stories

Meet ‘Mr. Toilet’, the eccentric entrepreneur fighting the sanitation crisis

How salmon became the symbol of our broken food system

All aboard the sleeper - The unexpected renaissance of European night trains