Editor’s note: CNN’s award-winning Planet in Peril returns this year to examine the conflict between growing populations and natural resources. Anderson Cooper, Dr. Sanjay Gupta, and Lisa Ling travel to the front lines of this worldwide battle. Ling has been a co-host of The View, correspondent for The Oprah Winfrey Show, National Geographic and Channel One. She filed this blog from Nigeria.
Lisa Ling
AC360° Special Correspondent
I’m so upset by what I experienced here today that I can barely think straight.
I’m in the Niger Delta in southern Nigeria, a place essential to the U.S. economy.
The communities along the delta literally live atop a virtual goldmine—black gold that literally make’s the world’s engines run. Oil. Underneath the surface of the ground here, lies one of the richest sources of crude oil on the planet.
Nigeria is the 5th largest supplier of oil to the United States and is the 12th biggest oil producer in the world. It was discovered here in the 1950’s, and big oil companies have been pumping hundreds of billions of dollars worth of oil out of the ground here ever since. Over the years, it’s made some people colossally rich. Colossally.
Logic would suggest that the people living above this tremendously lucrative resource would benefit from its riches. But the situation here defies logic. The millions of people who live along the delta are considered some of the world’s poorest. There is no electricity and clean water and basic services like medicine and quality education are severely lacking.
How can this be?
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Check out the amazing photographs from the Planet in Peril team’s trip to Chad. Special Correspondent Lisa Ling is in Zakouma National Park in southeastern Chad, to report on the disappearance of the Central African Elephant from the region.
Editor’s note: CNN’s award-winning Planet in Peril returns this year to examine the conflict between growing populations and natural resources. Anderson Cooper, Dr. Sanjay Gupta, and Lisa Ling travel to the front lines of this worldwide battle. Ling has been a co-host of The View, correspondent for The Oprah Winfrey Show, National Geographic and Channel One. She filed this blog from Chad.
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Lisa Ling
AC360° Special Correspondent
Today was a day filled with both extreme jubilation and utter horror.
I’m using the last bit of my computer battery whilst sitting under a mosquito net at the Tinga Camp in the Zakoma National Park in southeastern Chad. We are here to report on the astronomical reduction of Central African Elephants in the region. We’re with biologist Mike Fay, who has conducted comprehensive surveys of the region’s elephants over the years. He says over the last four decades, the number of Central African elephants has dwindled from nearly two hundred thousand to several thousand: the pace of the loss has been hugely shocking and disturbing. The global demand for ivory combined with war in neighboring Sudan has nearly killed off the Central African elephant. These elephants are the largest land animals on earth and have roamed the region for thousands of years. They have proven, however, to be no match for man and his gun.
Our day started early. After fueling, we boarded a Cessna airplane in search of elephant herds. Fay says that having an airplane greatly impacts the ability to survey the elephant population but also to defend against poachers. People are not allowed to live in the park, but from the air, we saw camps of nomads living just beyond the borders.
We flew for about an hour and a half without seeing any elephants. I was starting to get sleepy-eyed when Fay surprised us by saying, “I’m seeing a lot of elephant activity.”
Chris Gajilan
CNN Medical Senior Producer
It’s been one of the toughest and most complex stories I’ve ever worked on: Smokestacks belching dark clouds of lead, arsenic, cadmium into the air; children live with more than four times the safe limit of lead pumping through their blood; people who believe they have lost loved ones to the toxic conditions of where they live.
Dr. Sanjay Gupta and I have been traveling for the upcoming documentary “Planet in Peril: Battle Lines.” We visited the small town of La Oroya, Peru a couple of times during the past year. This town nestled in the Andes mountains is home to the Doe Run Peru smelting complex, where metal-laden rock is brought for processing into raw materials such as lead, copper and zinc. It is a place where the air irritates the eyes, befouls the mouth, stings the nostrils and heavies the chest. In this town of 35,000 people, 99 percent of children living in and around La Oroya have blood lead levels that exceed acceptable limits, according to studies carried out by the director general of environmental health in Peru in 1999.
Consider this: People shouldn’t naturally have lead in their bodies. The upper safe limit set by the World Health Organization is 10 mg/dL. But even more recent findings from La Oroya show that the situation is still very grim. We were joined there by Fernando Serrano, a St. Louis University researcher, whose 2005 study found that children had an average blood lead level of 36.1 mg/dL to 32.4 mg/dL. That’s more than three times the safe limit!
Lead poisoning is insidious. Children who have high levels of lead in their bodies can appear healthy but may suffer long-term consequences such as developmental disorders, mood disorders and in some cases, retardation. The young are most at risk because their tissue is more susceptible to the toxicities of lead.
Editor’s note: CNN’s award-winning Planet in Peril returns this year to examine the conflict between growing populations and natural resources. Anderson Cooper, Dr. Sanjay Gupta, and Lisa Ling travel to the front lines of this worldwide battle. Ling has been a co-host of The View, correspondent for The Oprah Winfrey Show, National Geographic and Channel One. She filed this blog from Alaska
Lisa Ling
AC360° Special Correspondent
Arrived in Anchorage, Alaska yesterday. The burning question I had for everyone I encountered was what people really thought of Governor Palin. But since that question is not germane to the reason why I’m here, I shall refrain from writing about what those conversations entailed.
Almost immediately upon arrival, we set off to interview the General Manager of Shell operations in Alaska. He stressed the vital importance of drilling off shore in the Alaskan Arctic, as it is potentially a source that could reduce our reliance upon foreign oil. When I asked him if the result would be a temporary one, he said, “ we can’t know until we’re actually allowed to drill.”
Al Goodman
Madrid Bureau Chief
Nearly a fourth of the world’s mammals are threatened with extinction, a leading international conservation group said Monday as it unveiled its latest global study of the problem.
Harp seals are among the mammals under threat, according to the latest IUCN Red List.
At least 1,141 of the 5,487 mammals on Earth, or 21 percent, are endangered species, the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) said at the start of its World Conservation Congress in Barcelona.
The problem appears to be getting worse since the IUCN’s last comprehensive survey of mammals 12 years ago, the IUCN’s Jan Schipper told CNN. But he added that more study will be needed in the coming months.
Dr. Sanjay Gupta
CNN Chief Medical Correspondent
Dr. Sanjay Gupta takes us into a small village near Lima, Peru hospital where tuberculosis is running rampant, in part due to the impoverished living conditions. He looks at the work Partners in Health and the Peruvian government are doing to prevent and contain outbreaks of infectious diseases.
Dr. Sanjay Gupta
CNN Chief Medical Correspondent
While on assignment in the mountains of Peru, Dr. Sanjay Gupta experienced the dangers of altitude sickness firsthand. After ten minutes of pure oxygen treatments, he felt much better and returned to work reporting on a dangerous public health threat in a nearby village.
Dr. Sanjay Gupta
CNN Chief Medical Correspondent
Dr. Sanjay Gupta shows how people in La Oroya, Peru, try to reduce exposure to arsenic, lead and other heavy metals thrown off by an American-owned smelter. Health and environmental groups have filed a petition urging the Peruvian government take urgent action to protect people from illnesses and death.
A melting Greenland is the front line in the fight against global warming as scientists try to predict the future. TIME’s Bryan Walsh visited this ‘unfrozen tundra’ to learn how drilling deep into Greenland’s past can help predict its fate in the future.
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