Iran aiming to save Lake Oroumieh on the 38th Parallel

Iran's Lake Oroumieh, once one of the world's largest salt lakes (at 37.75 degrees North) has been rapidly declining due to watershed diversions and agricultural water use.  This week (late February 2014) experts gathered in northwestern Iran to develop plans for saving the lake, which now holds just 20 percent of the water it contained only a decade ago.  The nation's new president, Hassad Arani, made this effort an urgent priority.  As this article from ABC news reported, ""Rouhani stands by his campaign promise to revive the lake," [according to] Isa Kalantari, a popular scholar appointed by Rouhani to lead the rescue team."  Kalantari added: ""Don't blame nature and drought. Human beings, not climate change, are responsible for this situation. We dried up the lake because of our excessive demands and wrong methods. Now, we have to revive it ourselves. Five million people have to leave this region if the lake dies."
    As we traveled the 38th Parallel investigating such water issues, we had to skip over that section west of the Caspian Sea, because travel to Iran was not feasible.  Now the administration change and international effort to protect the lake have changed things, so perhaps we can visit that site someday and report back on this effort in this blog.

38th Parallel authors compared to famous travelers of the 1930s

After our 38th parallel book slide talk at the Alpine County library (Markleeville, CA), this notice ran in Tom Sweeney's local newsletter:
"The program... TRAVELING THE 38th PARALLEL, A WATER LINE AROUND THE WORLD, last Saturday was an enjoyable time for all the armchair adventurers in attendance; it was a full house. Modern day Martin and Osa Johnsons*, David and Janet Carle shared their travels and the book they wrote about them. If you missed it and ever get another chance be sure to take advantage of it."
**stars of the great 1950s "I Married Adventure" series

So we looked up the Johnsons, who traveled in the 1920s and '30s, wrote about, and filmed their adventures. Osa's book "I Married Adventure" is still available at online book stores.    

News from China about better environmental protection...maybe.

A Reuters article about new China policies on the environment sounds like good news regarding the tension between economic growth and environmental degradation. The government of China has announced reforms to beef up the Ministry of the Environment's oversight and reduce focus on uncontrolled economic growth.  During our travels across the nation on the 38th parallel, we saw some of the serious pollution problems generated by the nation's recent push to grow, grow, grow.
   The article also mentions the tendency we observed to build grandiose national park structures instead of addressing underlying issues with impacts of development (see our blog from April 28, 2011, "National Parks of Yinchuan, Playgrounds or Preserves?"

   We also interviewed an environmental NGO, "Green Camel Bell" in Lanzhou, where staff struggle to address such issues.  University professor, Zhang Songlin, at Northwest Normal University told us, "In old times, the belief was that if you harm the environment, you would be punished.  Now, increased GDP is the belief."  Professor Songlin was not very hopeful, at that time, but perhaps these 2013 reforms are going to help.
See our blog from May 1, 2011:  "Up the Yellow River to Lanzhou's Green Camel Bell."

 

CHOICE review of TRAVELING THE 38TH PARALLEL

"The stories are inspiring, sometimes heartbreaking, and should whet the appetite for more information about the history and environment of the areas.  Summing Up: Recommended. Lower- and upper-division undergraduates and general readers.   --R. C. Hedreen, Southern Connecticut State University"
October 2013
 CHOICE review of Traveling the 38th Parallel

Goodreads review by Debbie Boucher of Traveling the 38th Parallel

A Goodreads review of Traveling the 38th Parallel  on August 11, 2013, reads: “The perfect combination of arm-chair travelogue and environmental treatise. I learned as I joined them on their journey, and I saw things I will most likely never see. I came away with an important message: It is the power of place that moves us to do things we might never have considered doing, like standing up for the environment against incredible odds. It is the power of one that truly makes a difference. Thank you, David and Janet, for reminding me of this.” 
by Debbie Boucher, author of Oblivia, Back to Normal, and Millennial Fears

Iberian Lynx jeopardized by Climate Warming

An article was just published about the problems climate warming is bringing to Iberian Lynx, a very endangered cat in Spain and Portugal where there are captive breeding and release efforts underway that we explored as we traveled the 38th Parallel for our book (see our blogs from April 27 and 28, 2010).  This article summarizes the report just published in Nature Climate Change. See: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/07/22/iberian-lynx-climate-chan_n_3634918.html?1374506226&ncid=edlinkusaolp00000009

The authors of the report concluded that the species may face extinction unless efforts to reestablish them are shifted northward.  This link goes to the original report titled "Adapted conservation measures are required to save the Iberian lynx in a changing climate":   http://www.nature.com/nclimate/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nclimate1954.html

Lynx drawing by Javier Grijalbo, Madrid, Spain:

Amazing Yellow River Sand-Washing photos

Amazing photos at a Chinese webpage of the annual effort to flush silts from the Xiaolangdi Reservoir on the Yellow River. That river's silty story was a key one in our book, Traveling the 38th Parallel, a Water Line around the World.

 Read more about it here:Yellow river sand-washing photos
and even more photos here on a Chinese English-language site.
 

Color photos from our 38th Parallel book

As we have presented slide shows with color photos from our 38th Parallel travels, many readers have asked about color versions of the 30 images in the book.  We are re-posting all of those, in the order they appear in the text, plus the maps (in black and white) together in this single blog post.  Click on a thumbprint to advance through all of them in larger size:

                            

                             

Water Tensions and Middle East Peace

As we learned while traveling the 38th Parallel, tensions about water limits in the Tigris and Euphrates River watersheds are threatening peace in that troubled region.  The June issue of "Smithsonian" has an article,
Lack of Water to Blame for the Conflict in Syria?
which explores the current conflict in Syria and the broader regional tensions in Iraq and Turkey that are driven by too little water leading to refugees moving into cities, and ties to the recent uprising in Syria.

   Just last week an International Rivers conference in Turkey focused on the threats to displaced persons and flooded cultural sites in places like the Brazilian Amazon and at Hasankeyf, Turkey, on the Tigris River.  One of the most compelling stories in our book emerged from out visit to Hasankeyf.  Demonstrators from many nations attending the conference protested at the gates of the Ilisu Dam construction site:  See this report from May 21

As the Smithsonian article mentioned, NASA's GRACE satellite is providing documentation of the serious depletion of groundwater aquifers in the Middle East, and also in the Ogallala aquifer of the Great Plains in the U.S., and in California's San Joaquin Valley, all stories that we encountered along our travels.  You can read more about the scientific measurements from space that help explain so many on-going human and environmental challenges here.

Tales and Images from Traveling the 38th Parallel

Tickets available at:  http://hop612.eventbrite.com/#