This article is brief, but I think that it is interesting. It shows action by the UN to try to determine what the environmental impacts of of the Gulf war were by awarding several countries, including Saudi Arabia, $243 million. It looks as though during the 90-91' occupation of Kuwait incurred $46 billion in environmental claims. That is a staggering number that raises some interesting questions. How do you assign a dollar amount to environmental damage caused by war? $46 billion is no small figure. How was this number calculated? I think that it is not only important to look at these impacts of war in resources such as number of birds and trees dying, but also in economic terms.
The following is a link to a report that I found released by the U.S. Department of Energy on the environmental impacts of oil production in Saudi Arabia: http://www.earthscape.org/r1/ES15071/doe_saudi.html As is evident in “Blood and Oil” readings for this week, the production of oil in Saudi Arabia is strongly linked to not only fuel use for the military, but also, to U.S. relations that help fund the Saudi Arabian military. As a result, the effects that oil processing has on the nation’s environment can be constructed as an issue of the environmental degradation of war. The report describes, for example, how as demand for oil exports increases, shipping traffic from Saudi Arabia has become more congested, and as a result the amount of accidents and oil spills have gone up as well. Furthermore, Saudi Arabia’s practices of offshore drilling have several negative environmental implications. For instance, coral reefs located on the Saudi coast as well as the Mangrove populations have been depleted from oil contamination. Another problem is that the waste-water left over from the oil production is very high in salt content, upsetting the balance of salt in these waters. These are only a few of the effects seen in Saudi Arabia from the production of oil. The air has also been degraded from pollution as well as the expected hazards of increased carbon emissions. The report concludes by saying the Saudi government is intensifying efforts to increase awareness about environmental issues. I think it is important to not only recognize the environmental effects cause by oil production and military expansion, but also examine the forces that are encouraging or enabling this degradation. The United States is a major source of the demand for oil as well as a financer of their military in return. We must question who has the responsibility to address these environmental issues? Is it only the Saudi government that must tend to the state of the environment in their nation or do other powers need to assist in the development? More importantly, perhaps, who is most capable and would most realistically offer constructive reform?
I found it relatively difficult to find anything concrete on this topic, so I decided to look at the Persian Gulf for inspiration. I decided to look at the Persian Gulf, since Saudi Arabia has a share in the coast and waters of the Gulf, but has not itself experienced a war in some time now and the topic is war related due to Kuwait, Iraq and Iran.
I found this article on an Iranian news and culture journal, at http://www.iranian.ws/cgi-bin/iran_news/exec/view.cgi/2/2181, which talked about the pollution in the Persian Gulf. It said that there was “The world largest oil spill, estimated 8 million barrels” (approx 336 million gallons), which made the want to look into that. According to Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulf_War_oil_spill) the spill was estimated to be somewhere between 42 to 462 million gallons, which is a lot of oil. Then again, it’s not that much, if one takes into consideration hat, according to the CIA factbook, in 2007 the world produced 85,5 millionbarrels of oil PER DAY. That makes it around 310 billion barrels per year, if I am not wrong in my calculations!
Anyway, such a major spillage has had never happened in the world – the closest one to this one was in 1979/80 in the Gulf of Mexico and it hadsomewhere between 454,000 to 480,000 tons of crude oil, while the “Gulf War oil spill” had 780,000-1,500,000 tons of crude oil.
Coming back to the original article, this is what it said about the oil spill:
“Saudi Arabia had the worst damage. Because the animals and plants of the seafloor are the basis of the food chain, damage to the shoreline consequences for the whole shallow- water ecosystem.
The impact of the damage affected the multimillion-dollar Saudi fisheries industry and surrounding area including Medina al Jubayl. The spill threatened industrial facilities in Al Jubayl . The greatest pollution was experienced in Abu Ali Island. The large number of marine birds, such as grebes, cormorants, and auks were killed.
Beaches along the entire Al Jubayl coastline were covered with tar balls and oil. The exploding and burning of 700 miles oil wells in Kuwait created staggering levels of atmospheric pollution.”
Obviously, the oil spill had rather direct impact on Saudi Arabia’s environment (and all of the nations of the Persian Gulf) and was definitely related to the war in Iraq and Kuwait at that point.
The article above discusses a new study being launched into the Saudi Arabian coral reef system in the Red sea. The study is a collaboration between organizations in the United States, Saudi Arabia and the international community. While the coral reefs being studied have not suffered from the impacts of war, in the sense that they have not be subjected to oil spills, but only the stresses put on them by fishermen. So it isn't really the environmental impacts of war, more the environmental impacts of daily, normal, life.
What I found so interesting though, is that collaboration on scientific research like this. So often I tend to think of the Middle East as a region so riddled by war, conflict and political divides that they never encounter or productively deal with other issues. Articles like this show that Arab nations are concerned with domestic issues as well, and are actively working to find solutions to environmental problems within their own borders.
After the readings, it became clear to me that Saudi Arabia has been spared the costly wars prevalent throughout the rest of the Middle East because of American protection. This is not to say that American protection necessarily benefitted Saudi Arabia, but the U.S. military proved no match for the Iraqi army. However, had the United States not been involved, it is very likely that Saudi Arabia would have been attacked by Iraq as well. The close proximity of Saudi Arabian oil fields to Kuwait meant that the damage from the fire that Saddam set in Kuwait oil fields did travel to Saudi Arabia. Since the environmental effects of this have already been discussed in the previous posts, such as the effect on the birds, I thought that I would post some visual representations of the fires themselves. Here is a video I found that shows the fires and briefly explains how they began:
This video is a broadcast from CNN on the first day of the Iraqi invasion into Kuwait. The amount of tanks and helicopters is pretty astonishing, and it doesn’t take a lot of imagination to think about how much pollution they are probably causing. Plus, this is only the Iraqi troops; I’m sure U.S. troops considerably polluted the area as well.
Also, although this doesn’t have anything to do with our topic, I watched the Documentary Web of Deceit on YouTube. It does a really good job explaining what our readings went over this week, but the addition of images make it so much more real (at least for me). If your search “Web of Deceit” on youtube, you can find it installed in parts.
Here is a link to a CNN piece on the efforts of a Saudi prince to protect the deserts. I wasn't able to get the embed codes to work, but the link should get you there.
Inside The Middle East in Egypt Part 03 7:00 updated Tue, April 10, 2007 Prince Khalid Faisal Turki al Saud, a Saudi government advisor tells us about the danger to the deserts of Saudi Arabia
So after numerous searches for "Saudi Arabia" environmental impacts I was unable to find something that exactly fit this criteria, although I did find this article which I find pretty interesting.
The article is about how Saudi Arabia and Egypt were planning on creating a 15 mile long bridge across the Strait of Tiran directly linking Egypt and Saudi Arabia. Not only would there be significant environmental impacts on the sea, there would also be problems with Israel. Currently there is no direct land route between Saudi Arabia and Egypt, Israel is in the way. This bridge would have allowed for automobile access between the two countries (and continents). Israel had considerable problems with this bridge as it would have possibly impeded their access to the Gulf of Aqaba and beyond. If it had been constructed, it could have drastically changed the Middle East for those who lived there. Egypt recognizes Israel as a state while Saudi Arabia does not, so having an increasing amount of interactions between people of these two states could result in some changes occurring.
ok it's Iraq but it's interesting
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Here is a link to a blog put up by Morgan on a different Blog. There are a
number of entries that tie more to your topic than theirs. Enjoy.
A sexual revolution -- women moving up in Iran
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To continue the focus on women from the reading, I found this article
posted on a non-profit news-source called Iran Focus**'s website. The
article itself...
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