Waiting for synthetic diamonds

There are few things as stupid as wasting a fortune on a diamond. If you are ever in a rock shop, you’ll realise that you can buy stones as beautiful as diamonds for the price of a cinema ticket. Rocks, like diamonds, are temporary because they can be easily destroyed with heat. Despite slogans, diamonds are not forever, and on top of that, they are overvalued. But this is just an opinion… it is just a question of taste:

- Oh, a precious stone!

- What? It is just a brick!

- But I like it...

Needless to say, you can spend your money as you wish, but you should also be aware that our actions as consumers are not neutral. Diamond trade is one of the most important factors to fuel wars and conflicts in many African countries. Buying conflict diamonds is like funding war. On 1 December 2000, the United Nations General Assembly admitted that diamond trade can fuel wars, as it is the case of Angola or Sierra Leone, and since then this issue has been discussed in many mass media, and even in a Hollywood movie: Blood Diamond. Fighting against it is quite difficult, although there are such commendable initiatives as requesting a certificate of origin for diamonds. The problem is that some companies like De Beers from South-Africa --which is the most important diamond trader in the world and the coiner of the famous advertising line “A diamond is forever”-- have so many interests in getting cheap diamonds that they do nothing to avoid conflicts. On the contrary, they can even promote conflicts.

But there is another way to end up with this blood conflict: science. In 1954 the first synthetic diamond was manufactured. It was a small, poor-quality diamond, but since then researchers have been working hard to manufacture top-quality diamonds. The most widely used method is HPHT (High Pressure High Temperature), which imitates the natural process of these crystals by crystallising carbon at a pressure of 50,000 or 60,000 bars and at a temperature ranging 1,300 to 1,600ºC. More or less, the same temperature and pressure found at 200 km deep in Earth. This method soon resulted in poor-quality, small diamonds, which are really useful for the industry as they are used as abrasive. However, in 1970, a large, beautiful diamond was eventually manufactured. It looked like a natural diamond of 1 carat (about 200 mg).

Besides HPHT, there are other systems to manufacture diamonds, like the chemical vapour deposition (CVD) method. This method used to be really slow, so it was not considered suitable for marketing purposes, but since 2005 there is a company manufacturing and trading diamonds with this technique at international level. Although we are still far from manufacturing utterly perfect diamonds, synthetic diamonds are sometimes hard to distinguish, only by really specialised laboratories. Those times where experts with magnifying lens used to examine diamonds to check flaws, impurities or fakes are over. In other words, in some years, “fake” diamonds will be so perfect that they will be no longer fake. There will be real diamonds created by nature and real diamonds created by men. And when this happens, maybe our passion for diamonds will be over and, consequently, this bloody trade will be over as well.

We cannot prevent people from being fascinated by such ridiculous things like diamonds, but at least we can prevent people from dying for it.

Sources:

1. Theodore GRAY. The elements: a visual examination of all known atoms in the universe: http://theodoregray.com/
2. UN report about conflicts caused by diamonds: http://www.un.org/peace/africa/Diamond.html
3. Blood diamond movie: http://blooddiamondmovie.warnerbros.com/
4. De Beers, world leader in diamond trading, with a long history of war and conflict promotion: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_Beers
5. Article in Wired about synthetic diamonds: http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/11.09/diamond.html
6. A carat: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carat_%28mass%29

     
      
      
     

The greenest cities in the world

Photo: Ángel Hernández Gómez

Generally speaking, we all love rankings. Despite being a superficial, simple way to map reality, rankings are useful to break the mould and fight against prejudices. Today, we will talk about a very interesting ranking drawn by the United Nations Humane Settlements Programme (UN-Habitat) in collaboration with the German multinational company Siemens: the Green City Index.

[Note for fussy readers: it is true that “German multinational” is an oxymoron, but having such companies as Siemens as sponsors of environmental studies is not very coherent either]

This survey measures eight variables for the assessment of the environmental performance of cities: CO2 emissions, sanitation, land use and types of buildings, transport, water and air quality, waste management and environmental governance. Thanks to these data, we get a list with the major leading cities in each continent, ranked from the greenest to the dirtiest. It is a shame that only in two continents (Europe and North America) the results are expressed in real numbers and figures --otherwise we could have compared cities from different continents. Moreover, the data of cities in Oceania are not available yet (the African Green City Index was published just one month ago), so we cannot check the results of Auckland and Wellington, the two largest cities of New Zealand, which usually are at the top of such rankings. Anyway, it is still interesting to enter this web site and take a look at the results published so far.

In Africa, the greenest cities are Accra (Ghana), Cape Town (South-Africa) and Casablanca (Morocco), each one located at the other end of the continent. The least green cities are Dar es Salaam (Tanzania) and Maputo (Mozambique).

However, in Europe most green cities are located in the same area, which is an easy guess: Copenhagen, Stockholm and Oslo. You can’t go wrong. And the least green cities are also as expected: Kiev, Sofia and Bucharest. Madrid ranks number 12, just after Paris and London and before Rome and Warsaw.   

In Asia, the greenest city is Singapore by far, followed by Hong Kong and Osaka. The dirtiest cities are Karachi (Pakistan), Bangalore (India) and Hanoi (Vietnam).

In Latin America, Brazil has four of the top five green cities: Curitiba, Belo Horizonte, Brasília and Rio de Janeiro. The other top five is Bogota, ranking number 3. The least green cities are Guadalajara, Lima and Buenos Aires –the latter has very poor air quality, no pun intended. 

Finally, the greenest city in the US and Canada is San Francisco and then Vancouver, one from each country. The dirtiest towns are Detroit, Saint Louis and Cleveland.

Sources:

1. UN-Habitat website with the data of African cities in relation to this index: http://www.unhabitat.org/content.asp?cid=9584&catid=26&typeid=11&AllContent=1
2. Green City Index: http://www.siemens.com/entry/cc/en/greencityindex.htm
3. An oxymoron: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxymoron

     
       
      
      

Organ harvesting market in Tondo

At the beginning of the 90s, a rumour circulated around the US. It was said that a person, usually a high-class adult man, woke up in an unknown hotel room with a large scar in his belly and found a note saying “you got one kidney removed; if you want to survive, you’d better go to hospital”. This rumour circulated so much that, some years later, the New Orleans Police Department was compelled to officially deny this fact. It was just an urban legend.

Organ theft events against donor’s will do happen, but in a lesser extend than reported by the gutter press or urban legends. However, there are real cases, like the disappearance of babies in Ukraine in 2005, denounced by the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe, or the case denounced by a Spanish nun in Mozambique.

Despite these relatively marginal cases, there is another widespread and somehow accepted organ harvesting market. It is the case of Manila’s slum district of Tondo, in the Philippines. Tondo is one of the poorest and most overpopulated areas in our planet and some residents have decided to sell one of their kidneys or corneas to survive. Sally Gutiérrez, a Spanish director of short documentary films, shot a 15-minute video in 2009 interviewing some of Tondo residents who sold an organ for 1,200 or 1,500 euros. This documentary film is called Organ Market and it shows only one side of this business, the donor’s side, but does not expose the recipients or the intermediaries. However, many interviewees reveal that organ-removal surgery was performed at Saint Luke's Hospital, the most well-known hospital of the Philippines. It is legal? Technically, it became illegal in 2008, when an act was passed banning human organ trafficking in the Philippines, but this documentary film was shot in 2009, so it seems that the situation has not changed. This documentary film was shot following some bioethic researchers of the University of the Philippines, who would pay one euro for each interview to donors. A dozen people appear in this video revealing that they sold a kidney or a cornea and now they suffer serious health problems. A donor’s wife reveals that the money paid for this donation does not even cover her husband’s current medical expenses for his kidney failure, which prevents him from walking. Most interviewees spent this money on a sidecar to work or on a new house of brass, and some of them even consider they are lucky and encourage other residents to sell their organs. Needless to say, you can defend this business by saying that donors are volunteer and nobody forces them to sell their organs, but then you admit that you don’t know what is extreme poverty and how difficult it is to escape from it: you should understand that need can drive people to the point of feeling lucky in such a horrible and inhumane situation.

Sources:

1. New Orleans Police Department press release to deny the urban legend about kidney theft (1997): http://www.mardigrasday.com/police1.html
2. About organ trafficking in Ukraine: https://wcd.coe.int/ViewDoc.jsp?id=902701&Site=COE
3. About organ trafficking in Mozambique: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/3483581.stm
4. Tondo, Manila’s slum district in the Philippines: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tondo,_Manila
5. About Sally Gutiérrez, the director of this documentary film: http://www.hamacaonline.net/autor.php?id=84
6. Organ Market, 15-minute documentary film about organ trafficking in Tondo: http://www.reelport.com/index.php?id=300&L=es&movie_id=22938
7. Saint Luke's Hospital, the most important hospital in the Philippines, where organ extraction is performed: http://www.stluke.com.ph/
8. Act banning organ trafficking in Philippines, passed in March 2008: http://archive.arabnews.com/?page=4&section=0&article=124049

    
    
    
    

European woods

2011 was the International Years of Forests and, thanks to this UN initiative, mass media have talked a little bit about our forests. We could read that European and North-American forests are not bad at all, especially if compared to the forests in other continents, where deforestation increases at an alarming rate and primary forests —those never exploited or influenced by human activities— are endangered. Here you have some facts and figures: Latin America and the Caribbean, with 57% of primary forests on Earth, have suffered the greatest deforestation, with tens of thousands hectares of forest land converted into agriculture; in Africa and Asia, although hectares of protected areas and natural parks do increase, ancient woodlands and native forests quickly disappear; in China, India and Vietnam new forests are planted to replace the primary forests, but biodiversity and the quality of young woods is far from the richness of old woods. However, in Europe, woodland increases. And according to FAO, Spain is the country with the highest growth of forest area, with 118,500 new hectares of forest land every year. Or at least this is what statistics reveal. But let’s go through it with a fine tooth comb to see what lies hidden.

To begin with, statistics include Russian large woodlands, which spread to the end of Asia, as European forests. These Russian forests have a surface area of 800 million hectares, standing for 80% of European woods. Therefore, most “European” woods are beyond European borders. Here we go! The rest of European countries exhibit smaller woodlands: the top three are Sweden with 28 million hectares, Finland with 22 million hectares and Spain with 18.5 million hectares, rather humble figures. The growth of European woodlands is partly due to the reforestation process from 1940 to 1960 and the natural expansion and recolonisation of forest, now occupying abandoned arable lands or meadows and pastures which are no longer grazed by livestock. In fact, this is a significant phenomenon in European rural areas, but the most significant growth is due to forest plantations. According to some observers, FAO is wrong when counting pine, poplar and eucalyptus tree plantations as forests, because despite being trees, these plantations are very different from a true forest. Plantations lack diversity (they consist of only one tree species, almost no vegetation and almost no animal life) and, due to tree felling process, soil retention and conservation is less effective. Moreover, plantations are made up of young trees which are chopped at an early stage to get low-quality timber and pulpwood (for paper production). Therefore, plantations should be counted as agricultural land, not as forest. And it should be clearly specified that the growth in European woodlands are based on plantations. 

The other reason why we should not consider that our management of woodland is better than others is hypocrisy. The two main consumers of tropical timber in the world are the US and Europe, precisely. And the same applies to products grown in single-crop farming after deforestation in South America, Africa and Asia: soybeans are grown to feed animals we eat, our clothes are made of cotton, linen and leather, and our vehicles use biofuel made of cereals, palm and beetroot. Therefore, the deforestation agents are us, the consumers of rich countries, not the inhabitants of the Amazon or the inhabitants of African tropical forest or the inhabitants of South-East Asian woods. With a least bit of common sense, we should not sermonize on wood management with the excuse that our woodlands are relatively healthier. 

According to this joint report by Greenpeace, Ecologistas en acción, SEO Birdlife and WWF about the problems of European forest, the solution lies in a better management of our own woods, so that we could take more timber and biomass from our own resources and import less from other continents. This way, we would prevent tropical wood deforestation and our own wildfires, because forests are destroyed by fire when they are poorly managed. For instance, in Spain every year an area of 150,000 hectares is destroyed by fire. And to be even more coherent, we could reduce the consumption of products causing deforestation in Third World countries, like meat.


Sources:

1. Primary forest: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old-growth_forest
2. FAO report "State of the World’s Forest" (2011): http://www.fao.org/docrep/013/i2000e/i2000e.pdf
3. WWF report about the Spanish woods "Bosques españoles: los bosques que nos quedan y propuestas de WWF para su restauración" (2009): http://assets.wwfspain.panda.org/downloads/gap.pdf
4. Report by Greenpeace, Ecologistas en acción, SEO Birdlife and WWF about European forest protection "La UE ante los problemas de los bosques europeos" (2010): http://awsassets.wwf.es/downloads/documento_conjunto_conf_bosques_valsain_6_7_abril_.pdf
5. Post at Delivering Data about the excessive consumption of meat: http://www.deliveringdata.com/2011/04/we-can-survive-thanks-to-vegetarians.html

The Anthropocene: when we humans create geological eras

The year 2011 is over and the year 2012 starts, but the new year could start the day after tomorrow or in three months because, although a year stands for a revolution of our planet around the Sun, the start of the year is taken at random. Or we could use the Islamic calendar and then it would be the year 1433, or the Nepalese calendar and then it would be the year 2068, or any other calendar currently in use. Or it could be the year 3517 if we were using the Roman calendar or the year 256 if we counted from Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s birth date –my personal choice. However, it is true that years, regardless of the starting date, are an interesting measurement tool in this endless ocean of time. In order to measure longer periods of time --for instance, the time since the invention of writing--, historians coined the terms Middle Age, Renaissance, Ancient times or Modern times. For times before the evolution of our species, we use such terms as Neolithic or Palaeolithic. But when applying to the history of our planet and our universe, these periods of time are too short and useless. When we want to talk about really long time lapses, we use eons, eras and periods. The Cambrian (from 542 to 488 million years ago) is a period that marked a profound change in life on Earth, the so-called Cambrian explosion: multicellular organisms first appeared. The Permian (251 million years ago) ended with the largest mass extinction in Earth’s history. During the Triassic, Jurassic and Cretaceous (from 250 to 65 million years ago) dinosaurs ruled our planet.
At present, and following these geologic terms, we are living in the Holocene, which started 11,000 years ago, following the last glacial period. During this epoch, humans discovered agriculture and many more things we have done ever since. But not everybody agrees: some years ago Paul Crutzen, awarded with the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, proposed a controversial idea, which is getting lots of supporters. Since the industrial revolution, the Holocene is over and we are living in the Anthropocene, the age of humans. And this has nothing to do with considering humans the centre of the universe. This term was coined to mark the evidence that human activities have had such a global impact on Earth as to affect the rest of living species and the ecosystems.
Figures speak for themselves: just take a look at these charts to understand why this recently-coined term has so many supporters. In just a few years, the impact of human activities on Earth rocketed: population, amount of domesticated land, atmospheric CO2, methane and N2O concentrations, fertilizer consumption, great floods, water use, deforestation, river and lake pollution, consumption of wood, minerals and fossil fuels, and the extinction of species… all these parameters shoot up. These changes are so profound that life on Earth will be affected for thousands of years, even if we are clever enough to stop it and avoid a catastrophe.
Either we do something about it or some intelligent species who will study our planet in the future will define the Anthropocene as the era of the sixth mass extinction, as if we were revisiting the Permian.

Sources

1. List of currently-used calendars: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_calendars
2. About the Nobel Prize-winning Paul Crutzen, known for his research on ozone depletion: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_J._Crutzen
3. Globaïa, a very interesting web site with data about the Anthropocene: http://www.globaia.org/en/anthropocene/
4. Charts showing the sudden impact of human activities on Earth: http://www.globaia.org/en/anthropocene/the_anthropocene_igbp_globaia.jpg
5. Mass extinctions: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extinction