While much of the attention paid to the Gulf Coast in recent years has focused on BP’s destruction of the Gulf of Mexico and the coastline, it is important to remember that the fossil fuel industry has been polluting the South for decades.

In fact, the problem is so bad that the Southeast Louisiana Flood Protection Authority-East (SLFPA-E) filed a lawsuit against 97 fossil fuel companies two years ago to force them to pay for the destruction that they have caused to the Louisiana coast.

The lawsuit seemed almost doomed from the start: Republican Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal signed legislation in 2014 that forbade the lawsuit from moving forward, but this legislation was later ruled unconstitutional and thrown out.

As Climate Progress points out, the growing concern among Louisiana citizens is that their coastline is disappearing: More than 1,900 square miles of coast line has vanished in the last 85 years, and the fossil fuel industry has been responsible for polluting what’s left.

Oil wells are to blame, industry admits – but still wins

The industry has even admitted it is responsible for at least 36% of the total wetland loss in the state of Louisiana. The State Department estimates that the wells drilled by the dirty energy industry are destroying as much as 59% of the coast.

An admission of liability, hard facts, and the protection of the public’s well being should have been enough to make this case a slam-dunk for any seasoned attorney. Unfortunately, the dirty energy industry has powerful connections all over the South – from politicians to judges – and those connections have resulted in the dismissal of the lawsuit.

The industry successfully lobbied to have the case moved from a state judge to a federal judge. This action, known as venue-shopping, allows a defendant to search for a more friendly judge before the case is heard, and US District Judge Nanette Jolivette Brown is about as friendly with the industry as a judge ever could be.

In mid-February, she tossed the suit, ruling that SLFPA-E had failed to make a valid claim under the law. Her 49-page judgment went into the fine detail of the permits under which the companies worked, and arcane points of law and legal precedents concerning drainage and landowners’ rights and obligations.

An loyal friend and servant of the oil industry

Before her appointment to a federal judgeship by President Obama (confirmed unanimously by the US Senate), Judge Brown spent decades as a corporate attorney, working for firms that regularly represented the dirty energy industry in matters of environmental litigation.

During her time in practice, she worked at the law firms of Adams & Reese, the Onebane Law Firm, Milling, Benson, & Woodward, and the Chaffe McCall law firm. The McCall firm’s website says the following about its oil and gas representation:

“Seventy-five years before the first commercial production of Oil and Gas in Louisiana, Chaffe McCall made its mark in the Louisiana legal field. Since early in the twentieth century, the firm has been sought out by clients in all aspects of the Oil and Gas industry. Our attorneys are thoroughly conversant with state and federal regulations of natural resources and the environment.”

Meanwhile, Adams & Reese boast the following about its oil and gas litigation department:

“Whether advising an oil and gas operator, marine transportation company, offshore supply company, drilling contractor or a barge line, the Adams and Reese Oil and Gas Practice Team is strategically located along the Gulf South to provide legal services for exploration and production, as well as marine transportation, in the Gulf of Mexico and adjoining inland waterways.”

And it wasn’t that she just happened to be at a firm that represented the industry. After all, not every attorney at a law firm handles every case and represents all clients.

But Judge Brown’s credentials specifically say that she “specialized” in environmental litigation, meaning that she sat in a courtroom and defended the very people that she just handed a massive legal victory. If she had even a shred of dignity, she would have recused herself from the case due to the massive conflict of interest.

The industry is getting out of a potential $50 billion penalty because it successfully pulled the case out of the state courts, and into the hands of an old friend.

Farron Cousins is the executive editor of ‘The Trial Lawyer’ magazine, and his writings have appeared in numerous publications including DeSmogBlog, California’s Information Press and Pensacola’s Independent Weekly. Follow him on Twitter @farronbalanced.

Russian President Vladimir Putin will “launch a campaign of undercover attacks to destabilise the Baltic states on Nato’s eastern flank”, the Telegraph reports today – along with all other mainstream news media.

How do we know this? Because the UK’s Defence Secretary Michael Fallon has said so. Lithuania, Estonia and Latvia watch out – the Russian peril is fast coming your way.

“There are lots of worries”, Fallon told the newspaper. “I’m worried about Putin. There’s no effective control of the border, I’m worried about his pressure on the Baltics, the way he is testing NATO, the submarines and aircraft … They are modernising their conventional forces, they are modernising their nuclear forces and they are testing NATO, so we need to respond.”

Covert attack by Russia on the Baltic states is “a very real and present danger”, Fallon insisted. Now where did we hear that before? Ah yes. On 16th December 1998 President Bill Clinton said that that Iraqi President Saddam Hussein presented “a clear and present danger” to the stability of the Persian Gulf and the safety of people everywhere.

We all know where that led: the Iraq war followed a few years later. We also know that the claim was a monstrous untruth: Saddam had no chemical, biological or nuclear weapons. So why should we believe Fallon now? Where is his evidence? He has none. When you already know the truth, who needs evidence?

Fallon – and NATO – should keep their eyes on the ball

But while Fallon’s attention is focused on the imaginary threat to the Baltic states, there is another country that really could be ‘at risk’ – and not because of cyber-attack, invasion by ‘green men’ or a campaign of destabilisation emanating from the Kremlin.

No, the EU, the European Central Bank, the IMF and European finance ministers have already been doing all the destabilisation that’s needed – forcing Greece into a deep programme of austerity that has seen the economy shrink by 25% over five years, the closure of vital public services, mass unemployment and the forced sell-off of public assets.

And now the Greeks – and their newly elected Syriza government – have had enough. This week the Greek prime minister Alexis Tsipras flatly refused to renew the €240 billion ‘bailout’ package, which comes with all the austerity strings, and he today advanced proposals for a ‘six-month assistance package’ free of harsh conditions to give Greece time to renegotiate its debt.

The standoff continues, and will be decided tomorrow by EU finance ministers. It’s not looking good: Germany has already stated that the Greek proposal “does not meet the conditions”. But if the finance minsters don’t agree, then what?

You guessed it: Tsipras will turn to Russia. Earlier this month Tsipras and Putin agreed on a range of bilateral ties, including the construction of a pipeline that would carry Russian natural gas from the Turkish border across Greece to the other countries of southern Europe.

This follows the re-routing of the ‘South Stream’ pipeline, which had been due to cross Bulgaria but was effectively blocked by the EU’s retrospective application of energy market rules, under heavy pressure from the USA. Last November and December Putin negotiated the pipeline’s realignment across Turkey with Turkish President Erdogan – right up to the Greek border.

Following the agreement between Putin and Tsipras, which came complete with an invitation to Moscow on Victory over the Nazis day, 9th May, the pipeline link to the major countries of southern Europe is now complete, at least on paper. And once it’s built, Greece will effectively control – and profit from – that gas supply, and take a strategic position in Europe’s energy landscape.

But Greece is a NATO member!

Greece’s increasingly warm relationship with Russia is already causing concern among other EU and NATO countries. German Defense Minister Ursula von Der Leyen has said that Greece was “putting at risk its position in the NATO alliance with its approach to Russia.”

This provoked a fierce retort from Greek Defense Minister Panos Kammenos who branded the attack as “unacceptable and extortionate” – noting that “Greece was always on the side of the Allies when they pushed back German occupation troops.”

“Statements that replace the EU and NATO’s institutional bodies are unacceptable as blackmailing”, he added. “They undermine the European institutions except if Germany’s aim is to dissolve the European Union and the NATO.”

So if Tsipras’s refinancing proposal is refused tomorrow will Greece quit NATO and the EU, to join the Eurasian Union? Not if Mr Putin gets his way: Greece is worth much more to Russia as an ally within the EU and NATO than outside – where it can veto more trade sanctions against Russia, block the TTIP and CETA trade deals with the USA and Canada, and oppose NATO’s increasing belligerence from within.

But we could see Greece simply renouncing its manifestly unpayable and unjust €320 billion national debt, and quitting the Eurozone straitjacket – while receiving an emergency liquidity package from Russia to support the launch of the New Drachma.

In fact, we could see a re-run of important elements of the Ukraine play of December 2013, when Russia offered a support package under which it would buy $15 billion in bonds from Ukraine, supporting its collapsing currency, and supply it with deeply discounted gas – £268 per cubic metre rather than the maarket price of $400.

A $15 billion purchase of New Drachma denominated Greek bonds would be a superb launch for Greece’s new currency, and would firmly cement Greece’s long term alliance with Russia, providing it with a valuable long term bridgehead into both the EU and NATO.

This move would also give inspiration and confidence to progressive political movements across Europe that take inspiration from Syriza’s fight for economic justice – in Spain, Portugal, Ireland, Italy, the UK and beyond – and bear the powerful message: there is an alternative.

And while NATO, the EU, the USA and their loyal servants, among them the UK’s Michael Fallon, deliberately whip up a fictitious threat in the Baltic, ignoring the real danger they face to the south, the masterly Mr Putin would once again make fools of them all.

Oliver Tickell edits The Ecologist, but this article is written in a personal capacity.

On September 29, 2014, Samantha Ho was wading through the Wraysbury River, a shallow stream that runs just a few miles south of the busy tarmac at London’s Heathrow Airport. She was collecting a ‘kick’ sample, a routine at a designated point that is visited once or twice a year, for the Environment Agency.

But this time was different: among the mud and grass Ho found a small mussel, no bigger than a thumbnail, which looked vaguely familiar.

“I separated it out and carried on”, she says. “The fact that it was an unusual environment – fast-flowing, not a canal – and that I had sampled there before and not found it, were all things that roused my suspicion.” She brought it back to the lab and a quick check online confirmed it: she had found a quagga mussel.

Although it was a long way from home, the mussel’s arrival had been anticipated by ecologists for a while. It’s one of a number of non-native species that are increasingly making their way to Britain and posing a considerable threat to native plants and animals.

The larvae of the quagga are microscopic and a single mussel can produce millions of eggs, up to 200,000 in a single season (which lasts from April to November). Their size is one of the reasons they’re so problematic, according to Belinda Gallardo, an aquatic ecologist who studied the ecological impact of invasive species as a researcher at the University of Cambridge.

“It’s really, really difficult to contain, unless it is located in a very isolated water body that you can basically drain to eradicate everything in it”, she says. “There are techniques in place and we are testing different options, but as far as I know it can not be controlled in open water.”

A major ‘biofouling’ hazard: pipes, valves, hulls, propellers …

Originating in the Ponto-Caspian region around the Black Sea, the quagga mussel is joining its larger cousin, the zebra mussel, which has been established in Britain for roughly 200 years and is thought to cost the UK at least £5 million a year.

At a recent workshop on the quagga mussel at the Zoological Society of London, Jason Eccles, Thames Water’s Regional Production Manager for West London, briefed an assembly of scientists, activists and representatives of organisations that are interested in the quagga.

He demonstrated the impact of the mussel through images like that of a large boat propeller, completely covered by several layers of quagga mussels, which had been pulled out of Lake Mead in Nevada (see photo, above).

Whether in the US or the UK, both the zebra and quagga are troublemakers. The mussels’ ‘beard’, a small thread of hairs that looks like brown seaweed, allows them to attach to surfaces and to each other, meaning that large numbers of them block pipes and valves wherever they occur. This so-called biofouling comes with considerable costs to the water and power industry.

Eccles says that Thames Water, the UK’s largest water provider, already spends millions of pounds clearing underground tunnels. With the arrival of the quagga, he says, this will have to be done even more frequently in the future.

Tackling the problems caused by invasive species quickly becomes even more costly when viewed as a whole. The Environment Agency estimates the costs associated with non-native species (there are over 3,000 in the UK) to figure around £1.7 billion per year.

The roughly 12,000 species that have invaded new habitats around Europe, with their combined impact on native biodiversity, agriculture, health and the economy, create costs upwards of €12 billion (£9.4 billion) a year.

Native ecosystems at risk

On top of that, invasive species are the second biggest threat to biodiversity after habitat loss. The zebra and quagga mussels are no exception – the latter smothers and chokes other mussels to death.

And because it filters nutrients out of the water (a single quagga can go through up to two litres every day), it changes the nature of entire ecosystems, which in turn can facilitate life for predators or even kill off entire populations.

“It’s the species we thought was most threatening”, says Gallardo. “These Ponto-Caspian species, as a group, are probably the most threatening of aquatic invasive species. Ten years ago, there were only two or three of these species in Britain, and right now there are ten or 15 already. And there are another 100 species currently travelling along Europe, and they will end up here as well, sooner or later.”

Gallardo points out that one of the Ponto-Caspian species’ most dangerous characteristics is their ability to thrive in new habitats. Because they are generalist feeders, they can modify their environment to fit their needs: “They come from a region where they experience very high changes in climate and environmental conditions, and that makes them very able to adapt.”

It gets worse. Because they are used to living together, the zebra and quagga mussel even facilitate each other: the zebra lays down an ideal substrate for the quagga in riverbeds and on the bottom of reservoirs.

“They already have close interactions and that’s why they are so worrying. They easily establish together and build up communities that resemble more of their native range than the actual English range”, Gallardo says.

And this applies to the rest of the Ponto-Caspian invaders too. The killer shrimp, which was first recorded in Britain in 2010, feeds off the waste of the zebra and even imitates the mussel’s striped pattern.

This is why Gallardo and her fellow researchers speak of an “invasional meltdown” when it comes to the increasing rate of invasions. Their theory is that, as more and more species arrive and support each other, the problem will become exponentially worse.

Eradication? No chance. Maybe an ice age …

At the workshop in London, the most eagerly awaited speaker was David Aldridge, a lecturer in aquatic ecology at Cambridge and the foremost expert on quagga mussels in the UK. His bottom line is sobering. “We’re really just waiting for these pests to arrive. And you can’t do much once they’re here”, he says.

And with no chance of eradicating species once they reach the UK, it all comes down to prevention: “From a broader, national policy, we’re interested in really trying to identify what the future invaders are and perhaps use things like quagga mussels as a model for patterns and pathways for invasion so that we can try and do our best to stop things coming here.”

The Victorians first started importing ornamental plants in the 19th century – it is them we have to thank for pests like Himalayan balsam or giant hogweed, plants that usually dominate media coverage when it comes to invasive species.

The number of intentionally introduced animals and plants is declining nowadays, but with the building of new canals and waterways, aquatic species have increasingly been making their way across Europe on their own.

The aquatic invaders spread through a number of different ways: ballast water in ships, the movement of soil or water and the contamination of fishing gear, sports equipment or boats. A single pool of water in a fishing boat returning from Europe can introduce a new species.

“We already knew this species was coming and I know there’s been a lot of work to develop an early-warning system”, says Gallardo.

Despite new laws, the quagga will be soon be everywhere

She also thinks the UK is more advanced in dealing with the problem than the rest of Europe, thanks in large part to the Great Britain Non-Native Species Secretariat. The secretariat, which was formed in 2006, is an attempt to bring some coordination to a naturally messy problem.

Its current campaign is accordingly basic. ‘Check, Clean, Dry’ aims to get the word out to angling societies, boat clubs and the like, so that their members keep their equipment in check and thereby avoid spreading the mussels between different ecosystems.

What is missing so far is comprehensive legislation. “We’ve got nests in various different pieces of legislation but we don’t have one itself”, says Karen Harper, who manages the London Invasive Species Initiative and organized the event at the Zoological Society.

Last January 1st new EU legislation has come into effect, the first specifically geared towards alien species. Member states are now required to notify others if certain species are detected, which could result in bans of trade, for example.

Helen Roy, an ecological entomologist at the Centre for Ecology and Hydrology in Oxfordshire, chairs a European-wide information exchange program on invasive species and thinks the legislation will consolidate existing links between countries.

“It’s very exciting to think that we will have a regulation that will apply across all member states”, she says. “I think we already have some great collaborations with our near neighbors. And that’s extremely important when thinking about prevention of the arrival of alien species.”

Harper is hopeful too. “I think it’s a step in the right direction – to everyone realizing that it is a real problem and needs to be managed.”

The Wraysbury River flows into the Thames only a few miles downriver from where Ho found the quagga in late September. Aldridge says it is only a matter of time before its spread becomes uncontrollable.

In fact, barely a month after the workshop took place, quagga mussels had already been found in the Thames and six nearby reservoirs. “I expect that in the next four years or so it will be widespread across the UK”, Aldridge says. “I mean it won’t be everywhere it can get, but I think it will be in lots of the major waterways.”

Yannic Rack is a journalist at City University London who has written for local newspapers in the UK and the US, and the editor of a hyperlocal news website in London.

On September 29, 2014, Samantha Ho was wading through the Wraysbury River, a shallow stream that runs just a few miles south of the busy tarmac at London’s Heathrow Airport. She was collecting a ‘kick’ sample, a routine at a designated point that is visited once or twice a year, for the Environment Agency.

But this time was different: among the mud and grass Ho found a small mussel, no bigger than a thumbnail, which looked vaguely familiar.

“I separated it out and carried on”, she says. “The fact that it was an unusual environment – fast-flowing, not a canal – and that I had sampled there before and not found it, were all things that roused my suspicion.” She brought it back to the lab and a quick check online confirmed it: she had found a quagga mussel.

Although it was a long way from home, the mussel’s arrival had been anticipated by ecologists for a while. It’s one of a number of non-native species that are increasingly making their way to Britain and posing a considerable threat to native plants and animals.

The larvae of the quagga are microscopic and a single mussel can produce millions of eggs, up to 200,000 in a single season (which lasts from April to November). Their size is one of the reasons they’re so problematic, according to Belinda Gallardo, an aquatic ecologist who studied the ecological impact of invasive species as a researcher at the University of Cambridge.

“It’s really, really difficult to contain, unless it is located in a very isolated water body that you can basically drain to eradicate everything in it”, she says. “There are techniques in place and we are testing different options, but as far as I know it can not be controlled in open water.”

A major ‘biofouling’ hazard: pipes, valves, hulls, propellers …

Originating in the Ponto-Caspian region around the Black Sea, the quagga mussel is joining its larger cousin, the zebra mussel, which has been established in Britain for roughly 200 years and is thought to cost the UK at least £5 million a year.

At a recent workshop on the quagga mussel at the Zoological Society of London, Jason Eccles, Thames Water’s Regional Production Manager for West London, briefed an assembly of scientists, activists and representatives of organisations that are interested in the quagga.

He demonstrated the impact of the mussel through images like that of a large boat propeller, completely covered by several layers of quagga mussels, which had been pulled out of Lake Mead in Nevada (see photo, above).

Whether in the US or the UK, both the zebra and quagga are troublemakers. The mussels’ ‘beard’, a small thread of hairs that looks like brown seaweed, allows them to attach to surfaces and to each other, meaning that large numbers of them block pipes and valves wherever they occur. This so-called biofouling comes with considerable costs to the water and power industry.

Eccles says that Thames Water, the UK’s largest water provider, already spends millions of pounds clearing underground tunnels. With the arrival of the quagga, he says, this will have to be done even more frequently in the future.

Tackling the problems caused by invasive species quickly becomes even more costly when viewed as a whole. The Environment Agency estimates the costs associated with non-native species (there are over 3,000 in the UK) to figure around £1.7 billion per year.

The roughly 12,000 species that have invaded new habitats around Europe, with their combined impact on native biodiversity, agriculture, health and the economy, create costs upwards of €12 billion (£9.4 billion) a year.

Native ecosystems at risk

On top of that, invasive species are the second biggest threat to biodiversity after habitat loss. The zebra and quagga mussels are no exception – the latter smothers and chokes other mussels to death.

And because it filters nutrients out of the water (a single quagga can go through up to two litres every day), it changes the nature of entire ecosystems, which in turn can facilitate life for predators or even kill off entire populations.

“It’s the species we thought was most threatening”, says Gallardo. “These Ponto-Caspian species, as a group, are probably the most threatening of aquatic invasive species. Ten years ago, there were only two or three of these species in Britain, and right now there are ten or 15 already. And there are another 100 species currently travelling along Europe, and they will end up here as well, sooner or later.”

Gallardo points out that one of the Ponto-Caspian species’ most dangerous characteristics is their ability to thrive in new habitats. Because they are generalist feeders, they can modify their environment to fit their needs: “They come from a region where they experience very high changes in climate and environmental conditions, and that makes them very able to adapt.”

It gets worse. Because they are used to living together, the zebra and quagga mussel even facilitate each other: the zebra lays down an ideal substrate for the quagga in riverbeds and on the bottom of reservoirs.

“They already have close interactions and that’s why they are so worrying. They easily establish together and build up communities that resemble more of their native range than the actual English range”, Gallardo says.

And this applies to the rest of the Ponto-Caspian invaders too. The killer shrimp, which was first recorded in Britain in 2010, feeds off the waste of the zebra and even imitates the mussel’s striped pattern.

This is why Gallardo and her fellow researchers speak of an “invasional meltdown” when it comes to the increasing rate of invasions. Their theory is that, as more and more species arrive and support each other, the problem will become exponentially worse.

Eradication? No chance. Maybe an ice age …

At the workshop in London, the most eagerly awaited speaker was David Aldridge, a lecturer in aquatic ecology at Cambridge and the foremost expert on quagga mussels in the UK. His bottom line is sobering. “We’re really just waiting for these pests to arrive. And you can’t do much once they’re here”, he says.

And with no chance of eradicating species once they reach the UK, it all comes down to prevention: “From a broader, national policy, we’re interested in really trying to identify what the future invaders are and perhaps use things like quagga mussels as a model for patterns and pathways for invasion so that we can try and do our best to stop things coming here.”

The Victorians first started importing ornamental plants in the 19th century – it is them we have to thank for pests like Himalayan balsam or giant hogweed, plants that usually dominate media coverage when it comes to invasive species.

The number of intentionally introduced animals and plants is declining nowadays, but with the building of new canals and waterways, aquatic species have increasingly been making their way across Europe on their own.

The aquatic invaders spread through a number of different ways: ballast water in ships, the movement of soil or water and the contamination of fishing gear, sports equipment or boats. A single pool of water in a fishing boat returning from Europe can introduce a new species.

“We already knew this species was coming and I know there’s been a lot of work to develop an early-warning system”, says Gallardo.

Despite new laws, the quagga will be soon be everywhere

She also thinks the UK is more advanced in dealing with the problem than the rest of Europe, thanks in large part to the Great Britain Non-Native Species Secretariat. The secretariat, which was formed in 2006, is an attempt to bring some coordination to a naturally messy problem.

Its current campaign is accordingly basic. ‘Check, Clean, Dry’ aims to get the word out to angling societies, boat clubs and the like, so that their members keep their equipment in check and thereby avoid spreading the mussels between different ecosystems.

What is missing so far is comprehensive legislation. “We’ve got nests in various different pieces of legislation but we don’t have one itself”, says Karen Harper, who manages the London Invasive Species Initiative and organized the event at the Zoological Society.

Last January 1st new EU legislation has come into effect, the first specifically geared towards alien species. Member states are now required to notify others if certain species are detected, which could result in bans of trade, for example.

Helen Roy, an ecological entomologist at the Centre for Ecology and Hydrology in Oxfordshire, chairs a European-wide information exchange program on invasive species and thinks the legislation will consolidate existing links between countries.

“It’s very exciting to think that we will have a regulation that will apply across all member states”, she says. “I think we already have some great collaborations with our near neighbors. And that’s extremely important when thinking about prevention of the arrival of alien species.”

Harper is hopeful too. “I think it’s a step in the right direction – to everyone realizing that it is a real problem and needs to be managed.”

The Wraysbury River flows into the Thames only a few miles downriver from where Ho found the quagga in late September. Aldridge says it is only a matter of time before its spread becomes uncontrollable.

In fact, barely a month after the workshop took place, quagga mussels had already been found in the Thames and six nearby reservoirs. “I expect that in the next four years or so it will be widespread across the UK”, Aldridge says. “I mean it won’t be everywhere it can get, but I think it will be in lots of the major waterways.”

Yannic Rack is a journalist at City University London who has written for local newspapers in the UK and the US, and the editor of a hyperlocal news website in London.

On September 29, 2014, Samantha Ho was wading through the Wraysbury River, a shallow stream that runs just a few miles south of the busy tarmac at London’s Heathrow Airport. She was collecting a ‘kick’ sample, a routine at a designated point that is visited once or twice a year, for the Environment Agency.

But this time was different: among the mud and grass Ho found a small mussel, no bigger than a thumbnail, which looked vaguely familiar.

“I separated it out and carried on”, she says. “The fact that it was an unusual environment – fast-flowing, not a canal – and that I had sampled there before and not found it, were all things that roused my suspicion.” She brought it back to the lab and a quick check online confirmed it: she had found a quagga mussel.

Although it was a long way from home, the mussel’s arrival had been anticipated by ecologists for a while. It’s one of a number of non-native species that are increasingly making their way to Britain and posing a considerable threat to native plants and animals.

The larvae of the quagga are microscopic and a single mussel can produce millions of eggs, up to 200,000 in a single season (which lasts from April to November). Their size is one of the reasons they’re so problematic, according to Belinda Gallardo, an aquatic ecologist who studied the ecological impact of invasive species as a researcher at the University of Cambridge.

“It’s really, really difficult to contain, unless it is located in a very isolated water body that you can basically drain to eradicate everything in it”, she says. “There are techniques in place and we are testing different options, but as far as I know it can not be controlled in open water.”

A major ‘biofouling’ hazard: pipes, valves, hulls, propellers …

Originating in the Ponto-Caspian region around the Black Sea, the quagga mussel is joining its larger cousin, the zebra mussel, which has been established in Britain for roughly 200 years and is thought to cost the UK at least £5 million a year.

At a recent workshop on the quagga mussel at the Zoological Society of London, Jason Eccles, Thames Water’s Regional Production Manager for West London, briefed an assembly of scientists, activists and representatives of organisations that are interested in the quagga.

He demonstrated the impact of the mussel through images like that of a large boat propeller, completely covered by several layers of quagga mussels, which had been pulled out of Lake Mead in Nevada (see photo, above).

Whether in the US or the UK, both the zebra and quagga are troublemakers. The mussels’ ‘beard’, a small thread of hairs that looks like brown seaweed, allows them to attach to surfaces and to each other, meaning that large numbers of them block pipes and valves wherever they occur. This so-called biofouling comes with considerable costs to the water and power industry.

Eccles says that Thames Water, the UK’s largest water provider, already spends millions of pounds clearing underground tunnels. With the arrival of the quagga, he says, this will have to be done even more frequently in the future.

Tackling the problems caused by invasive species quickly becomes even more costly when viewed as a whole. The Environment Agency estimates the costs associated with non-native species (there are over 3,000 in the UK) to figure around £1.7 billion per year.

The roughly 12,000 species that have invaded new habitats around Europe, with their combined impact on native biodiversity, agriculture, health and the economy, create costs upwards of €12 billion (£9.4 billion) a year.

Native ecosystems at risk

On top of that, invasive species are the second biggest threat to biodiversity after habitat loss. The zebra and quagga mussels are no exception – the latter smothers and chokes other mussels to death.

And because it filters nutrients out of the water (a single quagga can go through up to two litres every day), it changes the nature of entire ecosystems, which in turn can facilitate life for predators or even kill off entire populations.

“It’s the species we thought was most threatening”, says Gallardo. “These Ponto-Caspian species, as a group, are probably the most threatening of aquatic invasive species. Ten years ago, there were only two or three of these species in Britain, and right now there are ten or 15 already. And there are another 100 species currently travelling along Europe, and they will end up here as well, sooner or later.”

Gallardo points out that one of the Ponto-Caspian species’ most dangerous characteristics is their ability to thrive in new habitats. Because they are generalist feeders, they can modify their environment to fit their needs: “They come from a region where they experience very high changes in climate and environmental conditions, and that makes them very able to adapt.”

It gets worse. Because they are used to living together, the zebra and quagga mussel even facilitate each other: the zebra lays down an ideal substrate for the quagga in riverbeds and on the bottom of reservoirs.

“They already have close interactions and that’s why they are so worrying. They easily establish together and build up communities that resemble more of their native range than the actual English range”, Gallardo says.

And this applies to the rest of the Ponto-Caspian invaders too. The killer shrimp, which was first recorded in Britain in 2010, feeds off the waste of the zebra and even imitates the mussel’s striped pattern.

This is why Gallardo and her fellow researchers speak of an “invasional meltdown” when it comes to the increasing rate of invasions. Their theory is that, as more and more species arrive and support each other, the problem will become exponentially worse.

Eradication? No chance. Maybe an ice age …

At the workshop in London, the most eagerly awaited speaker was David Aldridge, a lecturer in aquatic ecology at Cambridge and the foremost expert on quagga mussels in the UK. His bottom line is sobering. “We’re really just waiting for these pests to arrive. And you can’t do much once they’re here”, he says.

And with no chance of eradicating species once they reach the UK, it all comes down to prevention: “From a broader, national policy, we’re interested in really trying to identify what the future invaders are and perhaps use things like quagga mussels as a model for patterns and pathways for invasion so that we can try and do our best to stop things coming here.”

The Victorians first started importing ornamental plants in the 19th century – it is them we have to thank for pests like Himalayan balsam or giant hogweed, plants that usually dominate media coverage when it comes to invasive species.

The number of intentionally introduced animals and plants is declining nowadays, but with the building of new canals and waterways, aquatic species have increasingly been making their way across Europe on their own.

The aquatic invaders spread through a number of different ways: ballast water in ships, the movement of soil or water and the contamination of fishing gear, sports equipment or boats. A single pool of water in a fishing boat returning from Europe can introduce a new species.

“We already knew this species was coming and I know there’s been a lot of work to develop an early-warning system”, says Gallardo.

Despite new laws, the quagga will be soon be everywhere

She also thinks the UK is more advanced in dealing with the problem than the rest of Europe, thanks in large part to the Great Britain Non-Native Species Secretariat. The secretariat, which was formed in 2006, is an attempt to bring some coordination to a naturally messy problem.

Its current campaign is accordingly basic. ‘Check, Clean, Dry’ aims to get the word out to angling societies, boat clubs and the like, so that their members keep their equipment in check and thereby avoid spreading the mussels between different ecosystems.

What is missing so far is comprehensive legislation. “We’ve got nests in various different pieces of legislation but we don’t have one itself”, says Karen Harper, who manages the London Invasive Species Initiative and organized the event at the Zoological Society.

Last January 1st new EU legislation has come into effect, the first specifically geared towards alien species. Member states are now required to notify others if certain species are detected, which could result in bans of trade, for example.

Helen Roy, an ecological entomologist at the Centre for Ecology and Hydrology in Oxfordshire, chairs a European-wide information exchange program on invasive species and thinks the legislation will consolidate existing links between countries.

“It’s very exciting to think that we will have a regulation that will apply across all member states”, she says. “I think we already have some great collaborations with our near neighbors. And that’s extremely important when thinking about prevention of the arrival of alien species.”

Harper is hopeful too. “I think it’s a step in the right direction – to everyone realizing that it is a real problem and needs to be managed.”

The Wraysbury River flows into the Thames only a few miles downriver from where Ho found the quagga in late September. Aldridge says it is only a matter of time before its spread becomes uncontrollable.

In fact, barely a month after the workshop took place, quagga mussels had already been found in the Thames and six nearby reservoirs. “I expect that in the next four years or so it will be widespread across the UK”, Aldridge says. “I mean it won’t be everywhere it can get, but I think it will be in lots of the major waterways.”

Yannic Rack is a journalist at City University London who has written for local newspapers in the UK and the US, and the editor of a hyperlocal news website in London.

On September 29, 2014, Samantha Ho was wading through the Wraysbury River, a shallow stream that runs just a few miles south of the busy tarmac at London’s Heathrow Airport. She was collecting a ‘kick’ sample, a routine at a designated point that is visited once or twice a year, for the Environment Agency.

But this time was different: among the mud and grass Ho found a small mussel, no bigger than a thumbnail, which looked vaguely familiar.

“I separated it out and carried on”, she says. “The fact that it was an unusual environment – fast-flowing, not a canal – and that I had sampled there before and not found it, were all things that roused my suspicion.” She brought it back to the lab and a quick check online confirmed it: she had found a quagga mussel.

Although it was a long way from home, the mussel’s arrival had been anticipated by ecologists for a while. It’s one of a number of non-native species that are increasingly making their way to Britain and posing a considerable threat to native plants and animals.

The larvae of the quagga are microscopic and a single mussel can produce millions of eggs, up to 200,000 in a single season (which lasts from April to November). Their size is one of the reasons they’re so problematic, according to Belinda Gallardo, an aquatic ecologist who studied the ecological impact of invasive species as a researcher at the University of Cambridge.

“It’s really, really difficult to contain, unless it is located in a very isolated water body that you can basically drain to eradicate everything in it”, she says. “There are techniques in place and we are testing different options, but as far as I know it can not be controlled in open water.”

A major ‘biofouling’ hazard: pipes, valves, hulls, propellers …

Originating in the Ponto-Caspian region around the Black Sea, the quagga mussel is joining its larger cousin, the zebra mussel, which has been established in Britain for roughly 200 years and is thought to cost the UK at least £5 million a year.

At a recent workshop on the quagga mussel at the Zoological Society of London, Jason Eccles, Thames Water’s Regional Production Manager for West London, briefed an assembly of scientists, activists and representatives of organisations that are interested in the quagga.

He demonstrated the impact of the mussel through images like that of a large boat propeller, completely covered by several layers of quagga mussels, which had been pulled out of Lake Mead in Nevada (see photo, above).

Whether in the US or the UK, both the zebra and quagga are troublemakers. The mussels’ ‘beard’, a small thread of hairs that looks like brown seaweed, allows them to attach to surfaces and to each other, meaning that large numbers of them block pipes and valves wherever they occur. This so-called biofouling comes with considerable costs to the water and power industry.

Eccles says that Thames Water, the UK’s largest water provider, already spends millions of pounds clearing underground tunnels. With the arrival of the quagga, he says, this will have to be done even more frequently in the future.

Tackling the problems caused by invasive species quickly becomes even more costly when viewed as a whole. The Environment Agency estimates the costs associated with non-native species (there are over 3,000 in the UK) to figure around £1.7 billion per year.

The roughly 12,000 species that have invaded new habitats around Europe, with their combined impact on native biodiversity, agriculture, health and the economy, create costs upwards of €12 billion (£9.4 billion) a year.

Native ecosystems at risk

On top of that, invasive species are the second biggest threat to biodiversity after habitat loss. The zebra and quagga mussels are no exception – the latter smothers and chokes other mussels to death.

And because it filters nutrients out of the water (a single quagga can go through up to two litres every day), it changes the nature of entire ecosystems, which in turn can facilitate life for predators or even kill off entire populations.

“It’s the species we thought was most threatening”, says Gallardo. “These Ponto-Caspian species, as a group, are probably the most threatening of aquatic invasive species. Ten years ago, there were only two or three of these species in Britain, and right now there are ten or 15 already. And there are another 100 species currently travelling along Europe, and they will end up here as well, sooner or later.”

Gallardo points out that one of the Ponto-Caspian species’ most dangerous characteristics is their ability to thrive in new habitats. Because they are generalist feeders, they can modify their environment to fit their needs: “They come from a region where they experience very high changes in climate and environmental conditions, and that makes them very able to adapt.”

It gets worse. Because they are used to living together, the zebra and quagga mussel even facilitate each other: the zebra lays down an ideal substrate for the quagga in riverbeds and on the bottom of reservoirs.

“They already have close interactions and that’s why they are so worrying. They easily establish together and build up communities that resemble more of their native range than the actual English range”, Gallardo says.

And this applies to the rest of the Ponto-Caspian invaders too. The killer shrimp, which was first recorded in Britain in 2010, feeds off the waste of the zebra and even imitates the mussel’s striped pattern.

This is why Gallardo and her fellow researchers speak of an “invasional meltdown” when it comes to the increasing rate of invasions. Their theory is that, as more and more species arrive and support each other, the problem will become exponentially worse.

Eradication? No chance. Maybe an ice age …

At the workshop in London, the most eagerly awaited speaker was David Aldridge, a lecturer in aquatic ecology at Cambridge and the foremost expert on quagga mussels in the UK. His bottom line is sobering. “We’re really just waiting for these pests to arrive. And you can’t do much once they’re here”, he says.

And with no chance of eradicating species once they reach the UK, it all comes down to prevention: “From a broader, national policy, we’re interested in really trying to identify what the future invaders are and perhaps use things like quagga mussels as a model for patterns and pathways for invasion so that we can try and do our best to stop things coming here.”

The Victorians first started importing ornamental plants in the 19th century – it is them we have to thank for pests like Himalayan balsam or giant hogweed, plants that usually dominate media coverage when it comes to invasive species.

The number of intentionally introduced animals and plants is declining nowadays, but with the building of new canals and waterways, aquatic species have increasingly been making their way across Europe on their own.

The aquatic invaders spread through a number of different ways: ballast water in ships, the movement of soil or water and the contamination of fishing gear, sports equipment or boats. A single pool of water in a fishing boat returning from Europe can introduce a new species.

“We already knew this species was coming and I know there’s been a lot of work to develop an early-warning system”, says Gallardo.

Despite new laws, the quagga will be soon be everywhere

She also thinks the UK is more advanced in dealing with the problem than the rest of Europe, thanks in large part to the Great Britain Non-Native Species Secretariat. The secretariat, which was formed in 2006, is an attempt to bring some coordination to a naturally messy problem.

Its current campaign is accordingly basic. ‘Check, Clean, Dry’ aims to get the word out to angling societies, boat clubs and the like, so that their members keep their equipment in check and thereby avoid spreading the mussels between different ecosystems.

What is missing so far is comprehensive legislation. “We’ve got nests in various different pieces of legislation but we don’t have one itself”, says Karen Harper, who manages the London Invasive Species Initiative and organized the event at the Zoological Society.

Last January 1st new EU legislation has come into effect, the first specifically geared towards alien species. Member states are now required to notify others if certain species are detected, which could result in bans of trade, for example.

Helen Roy, an ecological entomologist at the Centre for Ecology and Hydrology in Oxfordshire, chairs a European-wide information exchange program on invasive species and thinks the legislation will consolidate existing links between countries.

“It’s very exciting to think that we will have a regulation that will apply across all member states”, she says. “I think we already have some great collaborations with our near neighbors. And that’s extremely important when thinking about prevention of the arrival of alien species.”

Harper is hopeful too. “I think it’s a step in the right direction – to everyone realizing that it is a real problem and needs to be managed.”

The Wraysbury River flows into the Thames only a few miles downriver from where Ho found the quagga in late September. Aldridge says it is only a matter of time before its spread becomes uncontrollable.

In fact, barely a month after the workshop took place, quagga mussels had already been found in the Thames and six nearby reservoirs. “I expect that in the next four years or so it will be widespread across the UK”, Aldridge says. “I mean it won’t be everywhere it can get, but I think it will be in lots of the major waterways.”

Yannic Rack is a journalist at City University London who has written for local newspapers in the UK and the US, and the editor of a hyperlocal news website in London.

On September 29, 2014, Samantha Ho was wading through the Wraysbury River, a shallow stream that runs just a few miles south of the busy tarmac at London’s Heathrow Airport. She was collecting a ‘kick’ sample, a routine at a designated point that is visited once or twice a year, for the Environment Agency.

But this time was different: among the mud and grass Ho found a small mussel, no bigger than a thumbnail, which looked vaguely familiar.

“I separated it out and carried on”, she says. “The fact that it was an unusual environment – fast-flowing, not a canal – and that I had sampled there before and not found it, were all things that roused my suspicion.” She brought it back to the lab and a quick check online confirmed it: she had found a quagga mussel.

Although it was a long way from home, the mussel’s arrival had been anticipated by ecologists for a while. It’s one of a number of non-native species that are increasingly making their way to Britain and posing a considerable threat to native plants and animals.

The larvae of the quagga are microscopic and a single mussel can produce millions of eggs, up to 200,000 in a single season (which lasts from April to November). Their size is one of the reasons they’re so problematic, according to Belinda Gallardo, an aquatic ecologist who studied the ecological impact of invasive species as a researcher at the University of Cambridge.

“It’s really, really difficult to contain, unless it is located in a very isolated water body that you can basically drain to eradicate everything in it”, she says. “There are techniques in place and we are testing different options, but as far as I know it can not be controlled in open water.”

A major ‘biofouling’ hazard: pipes, valves, hulls, propellers …

Originating in the Ponto-Caspian region around the Black Sea, the quagga mussel is joining its larger cousin, the zebra mussel, which has been established in Britain for roughly 200 years and is thought to cost the UK at least £5 million a year.

At a recent workshop on the quagga mussel at the Zoological Society of London, Jason Eccles, Thames Water’s Regional Production Manager for West London, briefed an assembly of scientists, activists and representatives of organisations that are interested in the quagga.

He demonstrated the impact of the mussel through images like that of a large boat propeller, completely covered by several layers of quagga mussels, which had been pulled out of Lake Mead in Nevada (see photo, above).

Whether in the US or the UK, both the zebra and quagga are troublemakers. The mussels’ ‘beard’, a small thread of hairs that looks like brown seaweed, allows them to attach to surfaces and to each other, meaning that large numbers of them block pipes and valves wherever they occur. This so-called biofouling comes with considerable costs to the water and power industry.

Eccles says that Thames Water, the UK’s largest water provider, already spends millions of pounds clearing underground tunnels. With the arrival of the quagga, he says, this will have to be done even more frequently in the future.

Tackling the problems caused by invasive species quickly becomes even more costly when viewed as a whole. The Environment Agency estimates the costs associated with non-native species (there are over 3,000 in the UK) to figure around £1.7 billion per year.

The roughly 12,000 species that have invaded new habitats around Europe, with their combined impact on native biodiversity, agriculture, health and the economy, create costs upwards of €12 billion (£9.4 billion) a year.

Native ecosystems at risk

On top of that, invasive species are the second biggest threat to biodiversity after habitat loss. The zebra and quagga mussels are no exception – the latter smothers and chokes other mussels to death.

And because it filters nutrients out of the water (a single quagga can go through up to two litres every day), it changes the nature of entire ecosystems, which in turn can facilitate life for predators or even kill off entire populations.

“It’s the species we thought was most threatening”, says Gallardo. “These Ponto-Caspian species, as a group, are probably the most threatening of aquatic invasive species. Ten years ago, there were only two or three of these species in Britain, and right now there are ten or 15 already. And there are another 100 species currently travelling along Europe, and they will end up here as well, sooner or later.”

Gallardo points out that one of the Ponto-Caspian species’ most dangerous characteristics is their ability to thrive in new habitats. Because they are generalist feeders, they can modify their environment to fit their needs: “They come from a region where they experience very high changes in climate and environmental conditions, and that makes them very able to adapt.”

It gets worse. Because they are used to living together, the zebra and quagga mussel even facilitate each other: the zebra lays down an ideal substrate for the quagga in riverbeds and on the bottom of reservoirs.

“They already have close interactions and that’s why they are so worrying. They easily establish together and build up communities that resemble more of their native range than the actual English range”, Gallardo says.

And this applies to the rest of the Ponto-Caspian invaders too. The killer shrimp, which was first recorded in Britain in 2010, feeds off the waste of the zebra and even imitates the mussel’s striped pattern.

This is why Gallardo and her fellow researchers speak of an “invasional meltdown” when it comes to the increasing rate of invasions. Their theory is that, as more and more species arrive and support each other, the problem will become exponentially worse.

Eradication? No chance. Maybe an ice age …

At the workshop in London, the most eagerly awaited speaker was David Aldridge, a lecturer in aquatic ecology at Cambridge and the foremost expert on quagga mussels in the UK. His bottom line is sobering. “We’re really just waiting for these pests to arrive. And you can’t do much once they’re here”, he says.

And with no chance of eradicating species once they reach the UK, it all comes down to prevention: “From a broader, national policy, we’re interested in really trying to identify what the future invaders are and perhaps use things like quagga mussels as a model for patterns and pathways for invasion so that we can try and do our best to stop things coming here.”

The Victorians first started importing ornamental plants in the 19th century – it is them we have to thank for pests like Himalayan balsam or giant hogweed, plants that usually dominate media coverage when it comes to invasive species.

The number of intentionally introduced animals and plants is declining nowadays, but with the building of new canals and waterways, aquatic species have increasingly been making their way across Europe on their own.

The aquatic invaders spread through a number of different ways: ballast water in ships, the movement of soil or water and the contamination of fishing gear, sports equipment or boats. A single pool of water in a fishing boat returning from Europe can introduce a new species.

“We already knew this species was coming and I know there’s been a lot of work to develop an early-warning system”, says Gallardo.

Despite new laws, the quagga will be soon be everywhere

She also thinks the UK is more advanced in dealing with the problem than the rest of Europe, thanks in large part to the Great Britain Non-Native Species Secretariat. The secretariat, which was formed in 2006, is an attempt to bring some coordination to a naturally messy problem.

Its current campaign is accordingly basic. ‘Check, Clean, Dry’ aims to get the word out to angling societies, boat clubs and the like, so that their members keep their equipment in check and thereby avoid spreading the mussels between different ecosystems.

What is missing so far is comprehensive legislation. “We’ve got nests in various different pieces of legislation but we don’t have one itself”, says Karen Harper, who manages the London Invasive Species Initiative and organized the event at the Zoological Society.

Last January 1st new EU legislation has come into effect, the first specifically geared towards alien species. Member states are now required to notify others if certain species are detected, which could result in bans of trade, for example.

Helen Roy, an ecological entomologist at the Centre for Ecology and Hydrology in Oxfordshire, chairs a European-wide information exchange program on invasive species and thinks the legislation will consolidate existing links between countries.

“It’s very exciting to think that we will have a regulation that will apply across all member states”, she says. “I think we already have some great collaborations with our near neighbors. And that’s extremely important when thinking about prevention of the arrival of alien species.”

Harper is hopeful too. “I think it’s a step in the right direction – to everyone realizing that it is a real problem and needs to be managed.”

The Wraysbury River flows into the Thames only a few miles downriver from where Ho found the quagga in late September. Aldridge says it is only a matter of time before its spread becomes uncontrollable.

In fact, barely a month after the workshop took place, quagga mussels had already been found in the Thames and six nearby reservoirs. “I expect that in the next four years or so it will be widespread across the UK”, Aldridge says. “I mean it won’t be everywhere it can get, but I think it will be in lots of the major waterways.”

Yannic Rack is a journalist at City University London who has written for local newspapers in the UK and the US, and the editor of a hyperlocal news website in London.

Whether man-made sources of mercury are contributing to the mercury levels in open-ocean fish has been the subject of hot debate for many years.

My colleagues Carl Lamborg, Marty Horgan and I analyzed data from over the past 50 years and found that mercury levels in Pacific yellowfin tuna, often marketed as ahi tuna, is increasing at 3.8% per year. The results were reported earlier this month in the journal Environmental Toxicology and Chemistry.

This finding, when considered with other recent studies, suggests that mercury levels in open-ocean fish are keeping pace with current increases in human-related, or anthropogenic, inputs of mercury to the ocean.

These levels of mercury – a neurotoxin – are now approaching what the EPA considers unsafe for human consumption, underscoring the importance of accurate data. With this article, I’ll explain the evolution of the science to this point and our findings. I expect our analysis will either quiet the debate or add more fuel to the fire.

Busting the dilution myth

Motivated by the seminal environmental book Silent Spring, environmental chemists have long found widespread mercury pollution in wastewater from industrial activities.

Surprisingly, mercury also appeared far from point sources – in ‘pristine’ lakes of Scandinavia and northeastern North America. It took many years and careers to understand why mercury wound up in these ‘pristine’ lakes.

Once emitted from natural or man-made sources, such as coal-burning power plants, mercury can travel as a gas many times around the globe before falling with rain, snow, or dust. Once out of the air and in the water, it can then be taken up by fish.

There has been a false perception, however, that the open ocean – far removed from point sources of pollution – is too voluminous to be polluted with mercury from atmospheric fallout.

The shorthand for saying oceans can’t be significant sinks for air-borne pollutants is ‘dilution is the solution to pollution.’ The argument is that lakes are concentrated environments because they are in direct contact with their watersheds that collect rain and snow, but the deep open ocean is an extremely dilute environment.

Two manuscripts published in Science in the early 1970s supported this argument. The first stated that mercury pollution could only result in a negligible increase in mercury levels in open ocean water.

But my colleagues and I found these conclusions were based on faulty data. Before the advent of clean sampling techniques that prevent contamination before, during, or after collection, it was accepted that natural mercury levels of open ocean waters ranged in the low parts per billion.

But we now know that a typical mercury level is about 200 parts per quadrillion. That means the natural mercury level of open ocean water is about 5,000 times lower than previously thought – and that it takes a lot less mercury from other sources to pollute the open ocean.

The second manuscript reported no difference in mercury levels in tuna between museum specimens dating from 1878-1909 and samples caught during 1970-1971. This finding may be true, but also has a critical error in that mercury levels in the museum specimens were not ‘corrected’ for lipid (fat) loss.

Mercury is primarily in fish muscle and preservation with ethanol causes significant loss of fats. The net effect is that this preservation technique ‘inflates’ the mercury concentration in the tissue that remains.

As a result, we question how valid these findings are. In other words, this second study doesn’t conclusively demonstrate whether mercury levels in fish have gone up, down, or stayed steady.

But where’s the mercury coming from?

More recently, the focus of debate has been on the source of mercury in open-ocean fish. The mercury absorbed by fish is a compound called methylmercury, a form readily taken up by plant and animal cells but not easily eliminated.

Because of this, mercury is concentrated with each step of the food chain. As a result, methylmercury levels in predatory fish are about a million times greater than in the water in which they swim.

In lakes, there is overwhelming evidence that methylmercury is formed in sediments and bottom waters that are devoid of oxygen. But where is methylmercury in oceans formed?

In 2003, Princeton scientists published a hypothesis to answer the question of where methylmercury comes from in open ocean fish. The hypothesis was based on the observation, mentioned above, that there was no increase in mercury levels in yellowfin tuna near Hawaii between 1971 and 1998.

With no increase in mercury levels in tuna during a period of greatly increasing anthropogenic mercury emissions, the scientists presented the idea that methylmercury in the open ocean forms from mercury naturally present in deep waters, sediments, or hydrothermal vents.

Subsequently, however, independent studies have shown that there is not enough methylmercury in deep waters of the ocean to account for mercury in open ocean fish.

One of these studies also found that methylmercury is formed on sinking particles in the water that provide a micro-environment devoid of oxygen. That research showed that the methylmercury is formed from mercury coming from above – that is, the atmosphere – which we know is polluted from human activities.

Finally and most importantly, we know mercury levels in ocean water are increasing globally.

What the numbers say

Given the ongoing debate, our study set out to test a simple question: have mercury levels in fish stayed the same over time?

We assembled data from published sources for mercury in yellowfin tuna from Hawaii to compare three different time periods: 1971, 1998, and 2008. The comparison had to factor in the size of each tuna for each time period, because mercury level increases with size.

The statistical comparison indicated mercury levels were higher in 2008 than in either 1971 or 1998. As a result, we concluded that mercury levels are increasing in yellowfin tuna near Hawaii. The rate of increase between 1998 and 2008 of 3.8% per year is equivalent to a modeled increase in mercury in ocean waters in the same location.

What’s the source of the mercury? The overwhelming scientific evidence points to anthropogenic sources of mercury polluting open ocean waters and methylmercury being produced in the water column and then accumulating in fish. The average mercury level in a Pacific yellowfin tuna is approaching a level the US EPA considers unsafe for human consumption (0.3 parts-per-million).

Fish are an important source of food for billions of people worldwide and a solution to the problem is not to eat less fish, but to choose fish lower in mercury, as the EPA and FDA jointly recommend.

The ultimate solution to the problem is to control mercury emissions to the atmosphere at their source, which is the aim of the new United Nations Environment Programme’s Minamata Convention on Mercury.

Paul Drevnick is Assistant Research Scientist at the University of Michigan.

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

A crowd gathered in the cold near Wall Street on Friday to call for New York’s divestment from fossil fuels. (Flickr / 350)

If you’ve been to a major protest in the last 10 years, chances are you’ve heard the iconic chorus of “Which Side Are You On?“ floating out from the crowd.

While it’s been covered many times, the song’s potent message originally emerged from Appalachia’s brutal Coal Wars, labor struggles between miners and coal companies that stretched roughly from the 1890s through the 1930s.

At the time, union members would regularly find themselves blacklisted and evicted from their homes in the company owned-and-operated towns that dotted the Appalachian Mountains through much of the 19th and early 20th centuries.

Those found to be affiliated with the union – often the United Mineworkers, or UMW – were pushed out of city limits by armed thugs, usually paid by some combination of the coal companies themselves and business-friendly sheriff’s departments.

There are no neutrals here!

One of the most memorable sites of conflict in the Coal Wars was Harlan County, Kentucky. On Feb. 16, 1931, in the throes of the Great Depression, the Black Mountain Coal Company announced a 10% wage cut, sparking a walkout among miners and a majority vote to unionize under the UMW. The striking workers soon found themselves embroiled in a pitched battle with both the coal operators and the county sheriff, J.H. Blair.

“Which Side Are You On?” was written just hours after a mob hired by Blair entered the home of its author, Harlan County resident Florence Reece, looking to assassinate her husband. A noted UMW activist, Sam Reece had heard about the attack hours earlier and fled Harlan, leaving Florence and their seven children terrorized as Blair’s men ransacked the house.

Reeling from the assault, Florence “tore a sheet from a calendar on the wall” and penned one of the song’s lesser known lines: “They say in Harlan County there are no neutrals there. You’ll either be a union man or a thug for J.H. Blair.”

Now, as a new generation of organizers picks its own fight with the fossil fuel industry, Reece’s words have never been more relevant. In the last few days, oil, coal and natural gas executives have gone on the defensive, attempting to discredit campus and community divestment campaigners.

The American Energy Alliance took to Twitter earlier this month to disseminate the hashtag #DivestmentTruth and encourage people to “take a stand against divestment!”

The ‘campaign’ Big Green Radicals, a project of right-wing public relations mastermind Richard Berman, has surfaced to criticize environmental organizations’ ties to everything from “dark money” to the Kremlin. They even made a surreal cartoon about Americans’ tortured love affair with oil drums.

The Independent Petroleum Association of America, a national trade association of oil and natural gas producers, released a report and Wall Street Journal op-ed outlining the “costs of divestment”, which they say amount to $3.2 billion each year among university endowments.

But as Rolling Stone journalist Tim Dickinson reported, there is no such evidence. In fact, he cites financial professionals whose models show no penalty for dumping fossil fuel stock.

The fossil fuel industry knows its situation is desperate

There are a few things that might explain the industry’s newfound anxiety: the largest US refinery strike in more than three decades, plummeting oil prices, and not-so-sunny prospects about what climate change means for unhinged economic growth.

The industry, as told through the American Energy Alliance, also knows exactly why divestment is so threatening to their business model: “By ridiculing natural gas, coal and oil companies as ‘Public Enemy Number One’ – destructive of the planet itself – divestment activists try to force companies into defensive positions for which there is no defense (no one is arguing that we should destroy the planet).”

Still, it’s not as if industry executives are somehow pulling the strings behind all of this backlash. Conservatives and liberals alike have voiced opposition to the movement, albeit for different reasons.

The nature of polarization is that it forces everyone – not just opponents and movement-affiliated organizations – to choose a side. As the debate permeates mainstream news sources, increasingly large sections of society are made to take a firm stance, one way or another. Cameron Fenton, 350.org’s Canadian Tar Sands organizer, made the same point earlier this week in a Huffington Post article:

“The people in charge have avoided the critical decision on whether or not their institution should continue to prop up a climate-wrecking industry … but these attacks on divestment have taken away this coveted ‘neutral’ ground.”

No more sitting on the fence!

Thus far, college administrators have tried to have it both ways: denounce the problem and the proposed solutions alike.

Faced with a groundswell of support for divestment, administrations have eagerly heralded institutional recycling initiatives, LEED-certified sustainable building projects and ‘green’ lifestyle choices as more effective tactics for dialing down the crisis – anything, that is, but divestment.

Last week, Gregory Brown, Swarthmore College’s Vice President for Finance and Administration, rejected the majority of students’ call to divest, emphasizing “the need to focus not on divestment from the producers of fossil fuels but on the consumers of such fuels.”

On this issue, colleges have found their interests more aligned with the fossil fuel industry than with their students, faculty, staff and alumni, a majority of whom, on many campuses, have signed on in support of divestment.

It may not be too long before well-meaning, otherwise progressive college presidents quote industry-backed reports from the likes of the Independent Petroleum Association of America as a buffer against divestment advocates, maybe even inviting representatives of fossil fuel companies to their campuses to discuss the true value of their investments and consult with them on counter-strategies.

These dynamics are nothing new. In fact, this sort of polarization is a bittersweet marker of victory for the movement. At the very least, it’s a sign that divesters are doing something right.

‘Sometimes it is necessary to dramatize an issue’

In the spring of 1960, students in Nashville, Tennesee, had just kicked off a wave of lunch counter sit-ins that would spread throughout the South. The students have faced regular attacks from white mobs, who pulled them violently from their seats and beat them to the ground.

On April 17, two months into the Nashville campaign, Martin Luther King Jr. was in Washington DC as a guest on ‘Meet the Press‘. To give a sense for the show’s tenor, the first question asked was if “the sit-in strikes are doing the race, the Negro race, more harm than good?”

The rest of the segment proceeded along similar lines, prompting King to defend the campaign’s use of nonviolent direct action, if not its very right to exist. The Nashville students, including Selma campaign architect Diane Nash and now-Congressmen John Lewis, had recently extended their campaign to include a boycott of segregated downtown businesses.

Midway through the segment, Lawrence Spivak – the show’s producer and a regular panelist – turned to King. Referring to the boycott, he asked, “Wouldn’t you be on stronger grounds … if you refused to buy at those stores and if you called upon white people of the country to follow you?” In other words, why not just boycott?

As he had to similar questions throughout the program, King responded resolutely, saying, “sometimes it is necessary to dramatize an issue because many people are not aware of what’s happening … If you didn’t have the sit-ins, you wouldn’t have this dramatic – and not only this dramatic, but this mass demonstration of – the dissatisfaction of the Negro with the whole system of segregation.”

The point, here, is not to draw shaky comparisons between the civil rights movement and the fossil fuel divestment movement. The ‘Meet the Press’ panelists, in all likelihood, were not leading White Citizens Councils or Klan chapters. Many likely considered themselves liberals.

The actions of the civil rights movement dramatized, as King said, the issue of race in America, illustrating its ugly, virulent nature by bringing the crisis of structural discrimination to white audiences – however progressive they were – for whom it had been easy to avoid.

Being a moderate on desegregation became virtually impossible: you either stood with the nonviolent demonstrators being beaten in the streets, or with the police and mobs that were attacking them. Civil rights campaigners would come to win the battle for public opinion, in part, by making that choice clear.

And even if the movement’s most ambitious aims were not achieved, it created a new normal in which obviously denying African Americans the right to vote or use public facilities was no longer politically, socially or economically viable.

The challenge is to polarize – and win!

Polarization is inherently risky. There’s no sure way of telling how the public will react. Rather than convincing administrators, or even the fossil fuel industry, of their wrongs, divestment campaigners should be convincing everyone that the movement is right.

As one crucial part of a broader movement for climate justice, divestment is looking to effect nothing short of a fundamental shift in our society’s relationship to the planet and the economy: to bring about a new normal. Ironically, the industry and its supporters understand this more deeply than many of their opponents.

Shifting paradigms and cultural landscapes means shifting popular consciousness, not that of the worst actors. In short, the opponent may be the fossil fuel industry, but the target is the public.

It’s a testament to the divestment movement’s strength that it has managed to produce such a dramatic response from the industry. Hopefully, it won’t be the last. With 450 events having taken place in 60 countries last Friday and Saturday for Global Divestment Day, the movement is already proving itself as full of skilled organizers.

At the University of Mary Washington in Fredricksberg, VA., students followed a hundreds-strong statewide march for divestment with a weekend-long conference, Virginia Power Shift. Divestment organizers in Toronto held an action in the country’s stock exchange, just as 62% of faculty at the University of British Columbia voted to divest.

With more than 30 students sitting in at Harvard, Global Divestment Day was not simply two days of action, but a statement of intent: divest now, or suffer the consequences of standing on the wrong side of history and public opinion.

The challenge now for campaigners is to “polarize, polarize, polarize” – and come out on top.

Kate Aronoff is an organizer and freelance journalist based in Philadelphia, PA. While in school, she worked extensively with the fossil fuel divestment movement on the local and national level, co-founding Swarthmore Mountain Justice and the Fossil Fuel Divestment Student Network (DSN). She is currently working to build a student power network across Pennsylvania. Follow her on Twitter @katearonoff

This article was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.