Catchment – Catchments Area – and Clean Air Producing Catchments

It is now official that each one of us will have to pay dearly for the clean air you breathe.

Below is a drawing that illustrate three different communities each living in either the upper catchments, middle catchments or the lower catchments.

Upper catchments have the following characteristics (A):

1. A community with 15,000 people

2. The catchments have a forest reserve with trees for timber and there is illegal logging

3. The catchments have wild life

Middle catchments have the following characteristics (B):

1. A community with a population of 500,000 people

2. The population is mainly involved in agricultural activities with agricultural processing

3. The community has an industrial township

4. Water dams and hydro electricity generating plants

Lower catchments have the following characteristics (C):

1. A community with a population of 1,000,000 people

2. The population is mainly small scale farmers growing subsistence farming using irrigation

3. The community is involved in fishing activities

4. There is a town as well as an oil well and a port.

Now, where would you like to live: in upper catchments, middle catchments or lower catchments? Perhaps you may have a good answer as to where you would like to live but it is usually not as easy as one may think. For these three communities to live in peace and harmony is a very difficulty thing.

The community in upper catchments believes that since the forest reserve is next to where they live, then they have absolute right to do illegal logging and poaching. Trying to tell this community that cutting down of trees destroy the catchments that control and hold the flow of rain water to the lower and middle catchments does not seem to help. Telling them that the lower catchments are getting floods or the rivers have dried up because they have destroyed the forest is not a problem to them because the flooding or the dried up rivers are not in the upper catchments. Telling them that land uses such as clearing of forests will impose negative radiation forces leading to cooling and a fine climate for the communities in the lower and middle catchments will just make them want to cut more trees. Telling them that continued destruction of the forest will make the communities downstream become hungry and in turn want to migrate to the upper catchments will make them very aggressive and ready to go to war and cleanse those illegal economic migrants and aliens.

The community in the middle catchments believes that the ability to generate hydro-electricity is their God given right. Here the community will hold as much water in dams to facilitate the generation of electricity which is sold in the upper and lower catchments. The availability of electricity and crops makes it easy to set up profitable agricultural processing industries and as a result a township has developed. The sewerage from the township which is toxic with insecticides and industrial chemicals is finding an easy flow by gravity through the river. This community seems to be doing well economically. Trying to tell them that they can do water treatment to the sewerage water flowing into the lower catchments is like playing guitar to a goat. Trying to tell this middle catchments community that they can set a fund from industrial proceeds to fund growing of more trees in the upper catchments is met with a lot of resistance. Trying to tell this middle catchments community to try other sources of energy is expensive to them and a waste of time.

If you listen to this middle catchments community talk about how they make easy money selling clean piped water that flow by gravity to the lower catchments community you would think God loves some communities more than others. Trying to tell this middle catchments community that the industrial solvents they are using in their factories are releasing greenhouse gases of chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) and halons into the atmosphere which imposes positive radiation forces which lead to global warming is being met with a lot of resistance. Why do they resist? They resist because they already know that somebody is about to say that they set a portion of their industrial proceeds to go and fund community in upper catchments be able to grow more trees that will clean the atmosphere off the excessive greenhouse gases. It’s human’s nature, and even if it was me I would burry my head in the sand and assume there is nothing being said.

Having heard about all these problems these communities are going through, where would you like to live assuming you will not be cleansed or be labeled a late illegal immigrant or an illegal alien by the earlier legal migrants of the catchments: in upper catchments, middle catchments or lower catchments? I personally believe I would choose the upper catchments so that I go and start an organization of clean air producing catchments where we can be controlling the number of trees to be cut or planted when the international prices of clean air goes down or up.

The community in the lower catchments has always had a problem of flooding during the rainy season and drought during the dry season. This community earns their living by growing crops through irrigation. They sell the crops by exporting to foreign lands and they are making good money out of it. In as long as the river has sufficient water with rich soil erosion from upstream, then the crop is good. But the foreign markets are threatening them with a permanent export ban if the crops continue to contain toxic industrial contaminants. The same is being said of fish. Even the upper catchments and middle catchments communities are insisting on contaminant-free crops and fish which they buy from the lower catchments community. This lower catchments community is insisting that the upper catchments community should stop destroying the forests and that the middle catchments community should stop releasing toxic waste into the river and that the same community should stop blocking the flow of water into the lower catchments. But they are still doing well financially because they have an oil well and their oil has been selling well both in the other catchments as well as in foreign markets. They believe that if they can cut daily production of oil the price of oil will go up. They keep praying to God that if man can double his consumption of carbon rich oil, then the well being of the lower catchments community can improve. But in as much as they want the price of oil to go up they do not agree that the profit of oil and crops export can be split to fund the growing of more forest in the upper catchments.

Now, having heard about all these problems these communities are going through, where would you like to live assuming you will not be cleansed or be labeled a late illegal immigrant or an illegal alien by the earlier legal migrants of the catchments: in upper catchments, middle catchments or lower catchments? I personally believe I would choose the upper catchments so that I go (as undocumented worker or undocumented migrant according to president Obama) and start an organization of clean air producing catchments where we can be controlling the number of trees to be cut or planted when the international prices of clean air goes down or up.

In your country you have catchments where different communities live. For the communities to live in peace and in harmony, your country must have set up an authority which has the mandate of running the catchments so that people can co-exist in peace and harmony. For individual countries, the world has set up an authority called the United Nations. This authority has different agencies based on different disciplines. One such agency is called United Nations Environmental Program (UNEP). Through UNEP was the Kyoto Protocol which is an agreement between countries which provide mechanisms to reduce greenhouse effect emissions on an industrial scale by capping total emissions and letting the free market assign a monetary value to any shortfall through trading. This explains why I prefer to migrate to the upper catchments to set up an organization of clean air producing catchments where we can be controlling the number of trees to be cut or planted when the international prices of clean air goes down or up. I believe we should be able to do so because those with other natural resources like oil, water, and factories have since time immemorial been doing the same without anybody raising a finger. I believe people will now how to pay dearly for the clean air they breathe whether they like it or not. I figure it out that the trade in carbon credit will be the world’s biggest commodity market with futures and options and that the Wall Street will find it appropriate to allocate me a seat in New York. Once I join the upper catchments, it will just be a matter of time before I cross that poverty line and never again shall I ever look backward.

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