Marine plastic pollution is a problem with a far reaching consequences. We are likely familiar with the heart-wrenching image of a marine turtle having a plastic straw removed from its nose, but recent research reveals that plastic pollution in our ocean has sunk to a new low. The current record for how deep plastic debris is found in the ocean? A plastic bag found 10,898m deep in the Mariana Trench.

This was just one of the findings from a recent study published on April 2018 in the journal Marine Policy, which investigated the nature of deep-sea debris. Researchers at The Global Oceanographic Data Center (GODAC) of the Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology (JAMSTEC) carefully analyzed archived photographs and videos of deep sea debris that were collected by deep-sea submersibles and remotely operated vehicles. By looking at data from over 5000 dives since 1983, the researchers found that plastic formed the majority (33%, to be exact) of all the deep sea debris items recorded. The type of plastic they found is also notable – 89% of deep sea plastic debris they observed was from single-use products.

Plastic debris detected on the sea bottom at the Mariana Trench published in the study, from the JAMSTEC Deep-sea Debris Database (http://www.godac.jamstec.go.jp/dsdebris/e/).

These study findings run contrary to our perceptions of single-use plastics being lightweight and buoyant. Evidence of plastic debris was found for the first time in the hadal zone – the deepest region of the ocean. This zone is the part of the ocean that is beyond 6000m deep, and usually lies within oceanic trenches. In fact, the study found that plastic debris dominates relative to other waste types in the hadal zone.

Plastic debris was also found entangled with deep-sea ecological communities. 17% of images analyzed showed debris intertwined with at least one other organism. The presence of plastic debris amongst some of the most inaccessible ecosystems in the world should raise alarm bells. These wonders of the deep are teeming with life such as shrimp, tubeworms and anemones, and scientists are only just beginning to uncover its mysteries and sheer diversity. But the study found deep-sea organisms such as anemones attached to plastic bags on the muddy sea floor – we might not always like what we unearth.

Plastic debris alters deep-sea marine habitats for the long term. Given that there is little UV light and turbulence in the deep parts of the ocean, deep-sea plastic debris is estimated to remain for hundreds of years before being broken down. Beyond the potential chemical pollution from plastic disintegration, plastic can also act as a hard surface on which organisms might latch on to. This can potentially and permanently disrupt sensitive deep-sea ecosystems, as these deep sea critters might now make their home wherever plastic is available.

These findings shed new light on the relationship between land-based human activity and the deepest parts of the ocean. This only adds urgency to calls for stronger regulatory action against single-use plastics. It is estimated that more than 250,000 tons of plastic are currently in the world’s oceans, and that coastal countries generate around 275 million metric tons of plastic waste annually. With plastics being found in areas more than 1000 km off the coast of the mainland, it is clear that an international effort is needed to monitor and regulate both the production and disposal of plastics.

The government of Peru needed funds to offer its people new roads. Finding its coffers nearly empty, Peru gladly accepted China’s offer to give some money toward the road project. To ensure that China continued giving them money, Peru granted mining concessions like Las Bambas to Minmetals, a Chinese mining company, to mine in the Apurímac region. Peruvians got their roads, Minmetals got their golden reward, and everyone was happy.

This didn’t last long. From 2013 to 2015, state authorities approved six modifications to the environmental impact assessment, the document detailing the potential environmentally harmful aspects of development projects. Among the things approved by the new assessments was the relocation of a mineral-processing plant that caused 250 trucks a day to pass along villages’ unpaved roads. Local community protests sprung up against these environmental and social impacts, and the Peruvian police moved in quickly to squash the protests. Three civilians were killed, and national troops were sent in to enforce a state of emergency in the region.

That a Chinese firm’s investments could have such devastating effects is hardly surprising. New research from Shapiro, Vecino and Li (2018) presents a damning study of mining conflicts in Latin America. While the foreign mining companies might profit, the local people are usually not happy about the situation. In fact, violent conflicts between local Latin American communities and Chinese mining companies occur almost twice as frequently compared to firms of other national origin.

China has become a major lender to the Latin America and Caribbean region. In 2005, China loaned US$4 billion to the Latin America region but by 2015, this number had reached US$24 billion. Meanwhile, China has also increased its foreign direct investments to 8.65% of the world’s total. China is investing heavily in the Latin American region, and this new article unveils who is getting what from these lucrative deals.

The study finds that China’s generosity goes hand in hand with more market access for Chinese firms in Latin America. While other governments do this through development aid or international investment agreements, the study found that there was a high positive correlation between Chinese foreign direct investment and loan announcements. Right around the time of the Las Bambas concession, Chinese loans to the Latin American region reached the highest amount yet, at US$37 billion. China is funneling money to Latin American governments to pry open Latin America’s wealth of natural resources.

But how effective is this strategy?

By looking at the use of a mechanism called state investor dispute settlement, which allows corporations to sue governments for lost profits due to host government actions, the researchers found that Chinese firms use these mechanisms at a significantly lower rate than other firms. In other words, Chinese firms have fewer problems with Latin American governments than other firms.

This played out all too clearly in Peru. While protests sprung up over the Las Bambas mine, Chinese premier Li Keqiang held talks with the Peruvian president Ollanta Humala to sign new deals on infrastructure and manufacturing development, perhaps in hopes that with new agreements, the Peruvian government would squash the protests.

In the analysis so far, the Latin American governments and the Chinese firms are both getting what they want from each other. But those living in mining communities have different opinions.

The researchers used data from mining conflicts registered by more than 40 social welfare organizations throughout Latin America. What they found was startling: Chinese firms’ conflict-to-project ratio is about 26.92%, more than double the average conflict-to-project ratio among all firms of 12.18%. This means that Chinese firms were more than twice as likely to be involved in some sort of conflict with civil society about their mining operations.

The protests in Las Bambas aren’t an exception to normal operations for Chinese firms. They’re the rule. Across the region, scenes like the Las Bambas military takeover and the death of local community members because of Chinese mining projects play out again and again. Loans from the Chinese government help Chinese firms gain politically favorable conditions, but the Latin American people stand up to bad conditions resulting from the investments.

The study offers some explanations for these higher than average social conflict rates. In China, nongovernmental action is not nearly as important for being awarded contracts and successfully carrying out operations. Chinese firms are relatively new to the international scene, so they are not as used to operating in countries in which civil society has a lot to say about what they do. The Chinese firms may also not invest as much in corporate social responsibility actions, such as community outreach and resource building.

With the help of loans, the Chinese government effectively helps its firms to enter into Latin American markets and to gain political favor there. What it hasn’t been able to do is prevent social conflicts arising from its firms’ investments.

If Chinese direct investment continues to increase without any change in how firms relate to the environment or Latin American communities, the deaths and mass protests that occurred in Peru around the mine in Las Bambas will multiply. Foreign direct investment is an increasingly important tool for development, but if used with little thought to communities, the effects of the projects devastate the people they were intended to help.

Medicine is critiqued for focusing too much on an individual’s responsibility for their ailments. Patients often are blamed for their medical conditions and are held responsible for arranging their own care. Navigating our health care system is daunting, especially in our country’s mostly privatized health care system that fosters inequities. An emerging field, Environmental health literacy (EHL), empowers people to push back against these inequities by advocating for public knowledge and a structure emphasizing community engagement.

A recent article discusses the promising developments and findings in Environmental Health Literacy (EHL). Its authors, Symma Finn and Liam O’Fallon, work for the National Institute of Health Science (NIEHS), which promotes and funds community-engagement initiatives that help people to lessen environmental exposures that lead to illness. The mission of NIEHS includes a three-step strategic plan related to promoting healthier lives among people exposed to environmental hazards. Its website presents an outstanding body of research that is accessible for all people. I recommend you take a look.

Environmental factors are contributors to disease in humans. According to the World Health Organization, environmental factors contribute to 24 percent of diseases and 23 percent of deaths. EHL emphasizes disease prevention, by providing access to information to people who lack such resources so that they can actively promote health. By spotlighting the root environmental causes of certain medical issues, EHL sets in motion behavioral changes that help people stay healthy.

Communicating environmental risks resides at the core of EHL’s mission. Yet, it wasn’t until the mid-20^thcentury that the idea that environmental exposures pose risks to human health was widely recognized. Beginning in the 1960s, the fields of environmental science mitigation and remediation, health literacy, risk health communications, and environmental justice emerged.

Susceptibility to environmental risk varies greatly among communities based on socioeconomic, biological and psychological factors. Unhealthy exposures disproportionately affect low-income, minority, and indigenous peoples, so it is in these communities that EHL devotes its resources. Its community-based approach focuses on disease prevention; EHL targets health information to answer specific needs, making it accessible to those who are most affected by an environmental danger.

When sick, people often turn to the internet to seek information about their symptoms, and possible diagnosis and treatment. But with so much information available, one challenge is misinformation. When people set out to learn about breast cancer, for example, researchers have observed that the language is complex and lacks cultural specificity. Multiple environmental risk factors are linked to breast cancer, including exposures to chemicals in commonly used products.It can be challenging for someone without a medical background to understand the research.Just having access to information doesn’t mean that people have the capacity to understand it or use it to improve their health. EHL prevents misinformation by turning scientific findings into words – and often images – that are accessible to the public.

EHL was successfully put to use in the Green Housing Study in the Boston area. In this initiative, scientists tested chemical exposures and allergens inside of homes and then brought their findings- in plainspoken ways- back to parents in community meetings. The community-level approach created a human connection and developed trust between the researchers and families. Together, they collectively learned what the researchers discovered and were able to ask questions about the conditions of their homes. As a result, the Green Housing Study helped parents learn about how to prevent asthma triggers in their homes to protect their children from respiratory attacks. This initiative realized positive behavioral changes as families used the instruction they’d been given.

The researchers’ conceptual framework for measuring and understanding EHL works for a variety ofhealth issues. Step one is recognizing an environmental exposure, and then applying, analyzing, and evaluating its effects- putting knowledge to work to find solutions in people’s lives. This process doesn’t always follow a linear path; with each risk factor and community, the mode of response can differ. Whether breast cancer or asthma, their EHL model recognizes that literacy levels of people who are affected vary across issues.

Moving forward, more research is needed. Such studies should focus on the relationship between EHL initiatives, health outcomes and resilience, the effectiveness of resources and frameworks for various settings, and the long-term effects of EHL on creating positive behavioral change.  EHL continues to evolve as a community-based approach to environmental public health research. As it does, conceptual models will develop too. EHL fills a vital need that our conventional health care system overlooks as a way of communicating with the public to prevent illnesses.

EHL changes the ability of people to act in their own best interest instead of feeling as though “There’s nothing Ican do,” EHL gives hope that “There’s something we can do”.

Citation:

Finn S, O’Fallon L. 2017. The emergence of environmental health literacy— from its roots to its future potential. Environ Health Perspect 125:495–501; http://dx.doi. org/10.1289/ehp.1409337

Do you worry about going to jail when you get rid of the pesticides from your garden? Probably not. Neither do many large corporations that are polluting on a much larger scale.

Actions committed by individuals or corporations that reduce ecosystem quality can be prosecuted as crimes if they violate federal environmental law and regulation.  It falls under the jurisdiction of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to investigate environmental crimes, which are then referred to the Department of Justice (DOJ) for prosecution. New research by Michael Lynch, Paul Stretesky, and Michael Long focuses on how situational crime prevention can be used to increase compliance with environmental regulations.

What exactly is situational crime prevention? In the larger field of criminology, situational crime prevention (SCP) theory looks at the potential for non-criminal-justice policies to control crime. Proponents of SCP look at the entire social picture to determine what caused a person to commit a crime. SCP theorists believe in looking at this larger picture of criminality because prosecution and punishment of crimes can have negative effects on perpetrators, causing them to become repeat offenders rather than helping them reenter society.

“Conservation criminology” focuses more narrowly on the effectiveness of environmental regulations and the factors that lead to environmental crimes. Environmental crimes have been seen as “nontraditional” crimes that are normally ignored by criminologists in their research on SCP. The authors of this research found that situational factors matter in identifying the causes of environmental harms or crimes. There cannot be a one-size-fits all SCP intervention that works for every environmental crime. Instead, the policies must be flexible enough to be used in a variety of situations. Governments at the local level are closest to the behaviors that cause environmental damage. They are in the best position to adapt an SCP policy to best fit the needs of their community.

Studies have found that the enforcement of environmental laws rarely leads to a significant decrease in violations. Green criminologists suggest that environmental laws can improve compliance in individual cases, however, they don’t have much effect on overall levels of ecological damage. Enforcement does not significantly enhance compliance with environmental laws. A recent study revealed that less than 1% of environmental cases from 1983 to 2013 resulted in criminal conviction- across all laws enforced by the EPA.

SCP policies can also look at the bigger picture of systematic causes of environmental crimes. One of these system-level factors is the constant expansion of capitalism. This requires using up more and more natural resources, causing extreme environmental harms. There could be a need for SCP economic policies that constrain the ever-continuing expansion of production. One big-picture suggestion from the research is a global conversion to steady-state economic policies. Steady-state economics is based around ideas that economic production is not limitless. It has physical limits that are imposed by the quantity of ecosystem resources. SCP policies can promote steady-state economics on a local level and can be built upon from there.

Let’s look at a specific example of an SCP policy related to environmentalism. In this case, the policy is payments for environmental services. These policies are a market-based way to promote land conservation. Land holders are paid when they preserve land that is ecologically sensitive. This sounds like a good idea in theory, but when a specific case in Costa Rica was studied, these policies did not actually prevent deforestation. This could be because land holders were still given more money to cut down the trees than they were to preserve them. Payments like this also require a large investment to get started, which can make them less appealing to governments.

A different case study shows another approach to an SCP intervention. In this case, rhino poaching is the environmental crime being focused on. Rhino species are critically endangered worldwide because there is a strong market for their horns. A creative SCP solution to the problem is dyeing rhino horns with a bright pink solution that is dangerous to humans but not to the rhinos. This is a specific example of an SCP intervention because it is a nontraditional way of combatting crime. Law enforcement officials targeting the poachers has not slowed down the rates of rhino death. This technique lowers the value of the horns on the market, which makes the rhinos less likely to be poached. Unfortunately, this treatment requires all rhino horns to be dyed, which can be difficult to manage in the wild.

There have not been many studies on the effectiveness of SCP policies for preventing environmental crimes. The lack of success with traditional enforcement and punishment policies shows that a better model is needed to reduce environmental crime. This research suggests that situational crime prevention shows promise for slowing the rates of environmental crime by focusing on local intervention and solutions, while a new economic model is worked toward on a more global scale.

The boat rocks lightly. A fisherman stares down at his net in the water patiently. When he pulls it up, the catch could be described as meager, at best. One would expect overfishing to be the culprit of lower fish catches these days. Or maybe climate change. But, there is one threat lurking beneath the water’s surface that could be causing some serious issues for fish and fishermen—microplastics.

A recent study conducted by Oona M. Lonnstedt and Peter Eklov at Uppsala University in Sweden shows just how much of a threat microplastics can be. Lonnstedt and Eklov studied Eurasian perch larvae, a freshwater perch native to Europe and northern Asia, which is fished for food and game.

Example of Eurasian perch larvae used in study.

The researchers found that microplastics are making fish stupider and lazier. Microplastics inhibited the fish larvae’s abilities to avoid and detect predators. They also reduced their activity levels, how many hatched from their eggs, and their body size.

Microplastics are pieces of plastic less than 5mm in length, which is a little less than the width of a wooden pencil. Plastic is not biodegradable, so over time it breaks down into smaller and smaller pieces called microplastics.

Scientists suspect these pieces of plastic will last hundreds to thousands of years or more in the environment. That potato chip bag that blew out of my hand on a whale watching boat ten years ago? It’s still in the water, but not so visible to us anymore.

Lonnstedt and Eklov’s research comes at a time when microplastics are raising international concern for their potential health effects in marine organisms and humans. In February, another study revealed that microplastics impair oyster reproduction. Other studies are finding that microplastics are showing up in much of our seafood and even sea salts. There is concern among scientists that if we ingest enough microplastics we may experience health effects similar to those shown happening in marine creatures, like infertility.

Almost half of the human population depends on fish for protein or on fishing for their livelihoods. In 2013, 3.1 billion people depended on fish as a primary source of animal protein. 12% of the world’s population depends on fisheries for their income. More than 90% of these people are small scale fishers.

According to Lonstedt and Eklov’s research, the fish populations people depend on could be in serious jeopardy if microplastic concentrations continue to increase.

For their study, Lonnstedt and Eklov reared Eurasian perch larvae in aquariums with three different microplastic concentrations: no microplastic particles, a current environmentally realistic concentration of microplastics, or a high concentration of microplastics. The larvae placed in high microplastic concentrations were less healthy and more likely to be killed by predators.

Eurasian fish larvae from study that has filled its belly with microplastics, the small clear dots.

When placed in a simulated natural environment with juvenile pike fish, a natural predator to young perch, all of the perch fish larvae that grew in high concentrations of microplastics were killed after 24 hours, compared to two-thirds of perch reared in an average microplastic concentration. Those reared in water with no microplastics did the best: only one half of the fish died.

Most surprisingly, Perch reared in the highest level of microplastics seemed to actually prefer eating plastic particles rather than their natural food. Plastic is not nutritional so, not surprisingly, these young fish were significantly smaller and weighed significantly less.

Though more research needs to be completed, this study indicates that microplastics could have wide-ranging effects on fish populations and, consequently, entire food webs if other fish larvae react similarly to microplastics.

This is bad news for fish and people. Many communities depend on fish as a means to survive and for their livelihood. If fish actually prefer eating plastic over their natural food sources, that means when we eat seafood, we will be consuming more microplastics too.

We create and throw away more plastic everyday. This study highlights the need for better management of plastic waste and the importance of further research on microplastics, an unseen, but all too real threat for fish, fisheries, and ourselves.