Transcript

Fashion is such a personal thing. Everyone has their own style, influences and values. But the inescapable truth is that clothing has consequences. From the moment it is woven to the moment it is thrown away, every individual article has a massive global impact. From the water and energy used to produce the clothes to the human labor required, the clothing industry has a dark influence. However, within the last ten years, thrifting has become on trend again. In nearly every downtown, you can find a used clothing store giving life to clothes that may have otherwise been thrown out. Molly Schonert, assistant manager of Rumors Chapel Hill, said that the store avoids throwing clothes out, offering everyone a chance to sell or donate their clothes instead.

Molly Shonert: “We buy from the community. We also do have a section of the store where the items are new that we buy online via wholesale as a way to kind of help people who are hesitant to thrift for their clothes, as a way to kind of open that secondhand gate.”

Even then, Schonert says that managers research brands that the community will be interested in and that have ethical and sustainable practices.

Molly Shonert: “We never really get rid of an item. We do things like grab bags or dollar sales on special occasions, where we take items that haven’t been selling and we offer them for a discounted price. We always kind of use the item. We never just throw it away or anything like that. We’ll give it some worth of life somehow.”

However, not everyone is into buying and reselling. Most consumers still shop for new clothes from department store or outlets.

Candida Settle, manager of the Chico’s outlet store in Mebane, knows the formula for selling clothes and rotating them out depending on the seasons. Based on which items the store is selling well, Settle may be told to discount them or not. Similarly, whenever an item must be removed from inventory, it is sent to corporate and  may be donated for a company write-off.

Candida Settle: “In retail in general, they’re always gonna try to be one season ahead within the fashion aspect of it. So it depends on how quickly the product’s moving, how much product we have within the company, whether they go straight from a temp sale down to markdown. We don’t really resell our damaged products.”

The individual stores are largely left out of decision making. According to Chico’s FAS disclosure, the clothes are made and shipped from nations like China, Pakistan, India, and Bangladesh, and shipping clothes is a huge source of carbon emissions.

While a single consumer may not be able to change the whole industry overnight, they can start with shopping smarter. The same way one might research when buying a new car or shopping for produce, they should also check the practices and standards of the brands they shop from. Businesses should be held accountable for their decisions because no action is without consequences.

This is Em, Chapel Hill.

Since September 1, 2021, a draft to the Law on Climate Change and Ecological Transition in Navarra has been in process, awaiting approval by the regional parliament.

Despite the ambition of this legal text, it has been described both as insufficient and counterproductive by environmental interest groups such as Alianza por el Clima. They see some of the promises of the bill as problematic. For example, the law proposes that, by 2025, 50% of the electricity consumed by public institutions in the region must be from renewable sources. At first sight, this situation seems desirable from a human point of view. But what about biodiversity?

According to the environmental nonprofit Ecologistas en Acción, more than 8,000 vertebrates have been killed by the blades of wind turbines since the construction of the first wind farm in Navarra, in 1998. This data should draw attention to the fact that the location of farms is an important factor.

One of the main complaints of environmental groups is that wind farms are often located on land where dry cereal crops are grown or in mid-mountain areas. These are areas of less economic value than others, but also home to many birds and other flying animals. Bats, migratory birds and large gliders such as vultures collide with the rigid blades, imperceptible to their senses, and fall dead on the land that was once their home.

Since its  first wind farm in the late 1990s, Navarra has built 50 other wind installations,  becoming an industry pioneer and European leader. But at what price?

Inaccurate studies

The Navarra fund for the protection of the natural environment, Gurelur, accuses the regional government that, behind this attempt to move towards renewable energies lies the industrialization of the few areas of forest that had escaped the wind power plants. However, these studies are not always carried out properly.

According to a study by the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC), the reports that have been used so far in Spain to calculate the environmental impact of these parks have followed erroneous criteria. Since the study began in 2018, the true impact on birds of 20 Spanish wind farms has been analyzed and, comparing the data that were estimated before their construction and the actual number of dead birds, it has been concluded that there is no correlation between the two variables. According to the Spanish national center for scientific research (CSIC), one of the main flaws of the method used so far is that the impact of the wind farm is studied as a whole. This means that twenty turbines that are not located in the same place or at the same distance from each other are subjected to the same estimates. The impact of each wind turbine varies greatly depending on the mountain topography where it is located and the air currents around it, so the CSIC has proposed that the threat that each turbine can generate should be analyzed before it is installed.

Painting turbines black

A different question arises for the wind farms that already occupy Navarra’s territory and are in full operation. Even if companies in charge were obliged to repeat the environmental impact studies of their installations, it would be very difficult for the wind turbines to be moved if the results qualify them as “threatening.”

Four thousand birds of prey, including 94 red kites and 10 Egyptian vultures, are just some of the birds that have died in Navarra due to collisions with wind turbine blades in the last 23 years. It is the seventh leading cause of death for birds, according to Statista.

Perhaps the remedy lies in looking at what other countries have done before. In the last decade, the Norwegian Institute for Nature Conservation has been testing a method to reduce bird deaths from collisions with wind turbines: to paint one of its blades black, making the infrastructure much more noticeable to the birds.

The study showed that bird mortality in farms with painted wind turbines is 72% lower than in those without painted blades. Whether the solution is painting blades or another alternative, some action is necessary for wind and biodiversity to coexist in peace.

During the high Middle Ages in Europe, the bearded vulture (commonly known as quebrantahuesos or “bone breaker,” in Spanish) was known as the griffin or the legendary phoenix. Because of its curious red eyes and orange plumage, it was seen as a symbol of physical and spiritual regeneration, a harbinger of death and suffering.

Today, the population of this once mythical creature, has been declining due to hunting, deforestation and climate change. Now we are a danger to them and not the other way around.

The catalog of vertebrates in Navarra points at 16 species in danger of extinction. Among them, the most relevant birds are the great bustard, the ptarmigan, the bittern and the bearded vulture.

The bearded vulture is a beautiful and large bird of prey of the vulture family. It shares with its siblings the basic particularity of its diet: necrophagy. That is, it feeds on animal carcasses. In particular, bearded vultures are almost exclusively osteophagous, feeding on the bones of the animals they hunt. And if these are too large to ingest, it throws them from the heights to break them into smaller pieces. Hence its common name: quebrantahuesos (“bone breaker”).

Compared to other vultures, the Gypaetus Barbatus has an unmistakable figure: narrow wings, a long tail and a head full of brown or black feathers, depending on its age. It has a wingspan of between 275 and 300 centimeters, and usually weighs between 4.5 and 7 kilograms. Hatchlings and young specimens have a black feathered head that becomes lighter as they grow. In contrast to common vultures, which feature bare heads to be able to eat directly from animal carcasses and not infect their feathers with dirt, bearded vultures do have them since they never come close to dead meat.

These birds also live for a long time, being able to reach 10 or 12 years in perfect condition. Their bodies undergo remarkable changes such as the change from brown iris color to milky white, or its plumage mottled in shades of gray and brown to an orange belly and neck.

These birds have no sexual dimorphism, unlike most other bird species, which makes them difficult to distinguish. In addition, because they are so long-lived and copulate only once a year, they have a long reproductive cycle compared to other winged species and usually lay only one or two eggs. It takes about 120 days from the time the eggs are laid until the chicks leave the nest. Nests are usually composed of two or three adults, usually two males and one female; this is known as polyandrous breeding units.

By giving birth to so few young per family nucleus, it is not unusual that the species has lost density, especially in the Pyrenean area. But that is not the only reason why the bearded vulture is an endangered species in Europe. The main cause of mortality in this species is due to the illegal use of poisoned bait, which seriously compromises its growth and colonization of new areas. Other causes of unnatural death among the bearded vultures are accidents with power lines in mountainous areas or the construction of infrastructures that break with their natural habitat.

However, in the 2019-2020 season, the Autonomous Community of Navarra has broken a record of productivity in the breeding and protection of bearded vultures since at least 1980. Thanks to the Bearded Vulture Recovery Plan in Navarra, seven of the nine territories have been successfully occupied by this species, with the laying of four chicks where they were previously present. This is a great achievement, as the number of Bearded Vultures has increased by 64% since 1984, reaching approximately 1000 individuals. Of these, 34% are breeding individuals, but the number is still increasing every year.

The Yesa reservoir was built in the Pyrenees in 1959 and it is located in an area called Prepirineo. The dam is located in Navarra, but the reservoir extends through the community of Aragon, more specifically through the province of Zaragoza. It occupies a total of 2089 hectares and receives water from the dam of the Aragón river. As the Periódico de Aragón coined it in 2004, “the history of Yesa is a story of obstacles.”

The reservoir was created to supply water to different towns and for irrigation. The water accumulated in the reservoir is also used for electricity generation. These same waters have managed to create a total of 81107.64 hectares of irrigated land, most of which is in Aragon. The reservoir supplies the city of Zaragoza and more than 35 municipalities.

Far from its impressive volume, the reservoir is marked by continuous problems that have haunted it from its very first day. The decision alone to locate it where it is currently located caused the flooding of several villages and the eviction of many others, causing more than 1,500 people to leave their homes. Villages such as Ruesta, Tiermas and Escó were abandoned because they were totally flooded or became uninhabitable due to the proximity of the water. It also affected villages upstream, such as Acín de Gacipollera, but this time due to the need to plant a pine forest to prevent the massive dragging of sediments by the rains. Even 2048 hectares of farmland were flooded, a thousand of which were of very good agricultural quality.

The inconveniences continued, as the structure itself has not ceased to give headaches.

From the “Yesa no” web page, a group of neighbors and activists assure that the Yesa area is not capable of supporting this kind infrastructure. In fact, the dam has suffered landslides and has had cracks for many years. When all this was already happening, a plan to increase the height of the dam was approved, which ended up outraging those people who were suffering from the dam’s problems.

This project was intended to triple the volume of Yesa, but the works have not gone as expected. In June 2021 the following headline was published on the Diario de Noticias website: “The State assures that it will raise Yesa even though it does not even have the safety guarantee it demanded”. Just as a few years earlier they had published another headline related to the reservoir: “A study on Yesa shows that the force supporting the dam is equal to that of a potential collapse”. There was even a “Yesa Case”, where the court ruled in favor of the defendants.

Since the works began, there have been up to three displacements and the cracks have increased. Due to these situations, the towns located beyond the dam have been forced to take preventive measures in the event of a possible rupture of the dam. Sangüesa is one of these municipalities that would be affected by such a big problem as the outflow of water from the reservoir.

Testimonies

Alicia Aisa and Igor Martínez, two neighbors from Aesa, have agreed to answer some questions on this subject.

What was the cause of the problems with the Yesa reservoir? Firstly, these problems were already anounced when the dam was built and the engineer René Petit had wrote that the dam could not be raised. Secondly, the works involve slope movements, which are causing problems such as evictions of a housing development in Yesa due to cracks and landslides on roads and homes.

What problems are those affected by the reservoir dealing with? The eviction of their homes and the imminent danger due to movements of the slopes that would entail the breakdown of the current dam that would depopulate a few municipalities without time to evacuate.

What measures have been put in place by the local and regional institutions? The only measure has been to maintain these slopes that are costing the region four times over what was budgeted at the time to do this work, insisting on finishing something that will not be viable and endangering many people, such as Sangüesa, among many other municipalities.

Would you like to send a message to the institutions? We could stop this work, since it entails more risk than benefit. There is no need to increase the size of the dam.

What is the current problem with the dam? As of today, the works continue without providing any security, evacuation plan, or notification of movements that we can count on to know what situation we are in. Some alarms have been placed in Sangüesa, but the population is unaware of their sound. There is no information about the evacuation plan, and it is well known that there would not be enough time to evacuate. There have even been people who have moved to other towns of Navarra because of fear.

What are the alternatives or solutions to these problems? The solution is to stop the expansion of the dam and stop the ongoing work.

Neighbors are angry because this situation is a result of the bad actions of people in power. For this reason, different initiatives have been created against the reservoir and its enlargement and, in the face of the flight forward of the directors of a certain project with the works, demonstrations have taken place to make themselves heard.

The idea of creating a reservoir to supply water for drinking and irrigation in many municipalities and lands initially appealed to all those who were going to benefit from its creation, but it is the disadvantages already mentioned.