Another review of the Palm

One of the things people in other countries often ask one about Dubai is the Palm. Not all know that there is more than one, but the concept is certainly famous enough that people are curious. While parts of it are nice, there are less-appealing aspects, including the questionable environmental impact and less than fully reliable real estate arrangements. Add rumors of sinking sections causing damage, the fact that even palm Jumeirah is still a construction site (we rented a place out there a few months ago when some of my elephant polo team met up in town en route to a tournament, and our apartment door was labeled"occupied" to distinguish it from all the rest. I went swimming with the dear sister, and felt more than a little guilty swimming under the gaze of the near-by construction workers. The trunk road is also a pain; in order to minimize traffic, it is all one-way. If your place is on the left side of the trunk as you enter, you must drive down it to turn around to et to your building. This gets old. Even the larger, more expensive villas are pretty close to one another as well, making privacy difficult), my own concerns about traffic (the trunk connects to the road at one point, one future serious traffic choke point), rumors of sharks out near the end fronds (there are sharks in the Gulf, but far out. But the Palm is far out) and the general kitchiness question.

Now the mainstream press, often so positive (with the exception of some articles devoted to the plight of laborers and domestics) is starting to notice as well. The Guardian ran an article titled "Pitfalls in Paradise: Why Palm Jumeirah is Struggling to Live Up to the Hype," first brought to my attention by Grape Shisha.

To be fair, only roughly 4,000 people of the 65,000 who will eventually live there (plus the 40-odd hotels) have already moved in, so you can't say that the Jumeirah Palm is "done," so some of these issues may be fixed in the future. But some may also be exacerbated.

Among the issues detailed by the Guardian:

- Multimillion-pound villas squeezed together "like Coronation Street" (a British soap opera including a street of that name, full of tight houses). This is also apparently the result of deceptive construction practices ala the metro line. The article quotes Rachael Wilds, 42, an exhibition organiser from Surrey who moved in with her family to a palatial villa on one of the Palm's "fronds" a year ago, who complained that she found her £3m property squashed against a neighbour's and set in a barren, almost treeless, landscape. "It was absolutely nothing as it was depicted in the brochure," she says. "There was a massive gap between the villas and it was full of lush tropical gardens. We were totally shocked at the closeness of the villas." What is true elsewhere is doubly true in Dubai. Caveat Emptor.

- Air-conditioning bills of £800 a month (roughly 1600 USD). This is just poor engineering. Its not like the weather would be a surprise. Could they not make the houses more efficient? This is also the buyers' fault too though - they should have paid attention to such things.

- Overly-pushy PR. The villas were built by state-owned Nakheel Properties, and their is omnipresent on flags all over the island. For some residents, this is a little much. Again to be fair though, flags with logos and slogans are all over Dubai, especially along bridges and main roads. So complaining that the Palm is doing this may also fall under the "well, what did you expect" rubric.

- Intensive irrigation is necessary to maintain the landscaping, but uses tremendous amounts of water (note: most of the water will come from desalinization plants, which themselves use tremendous amounts of energy)

- Tallest trees actually mobile phone masts dressed up to look like palms (I didn't notice these, so they must be at least OK. There is one across from the entrance to Madinat though and it isn't bad for what it is)

- Guilt over the quality of life of the migrant construction workers. This is a real concern. But again, this is a pan-Dubai issue and one people should consider when purchasing anywhere here. Problems mentioned in the Guardian include low salaries of 200 USD per month, debts to agents in their home countries who paid for their passage with interest rates as high as 120% a year, increasing alcoholism and debts accumulated to pay for said drink, unpaid salaries, poor living conditions, rising suicide rates and separation from families at home.

Some numbers from the Guardian:

13m: The number of liters of desalinated drinking water the Palm Jumeirah uses when at capacity (they didn't say in what period. It may in one day).

28: Bottlenose dolphins have been flown in from the Solomon Islands to populate Dolphin Bay, an 11-acre lagoon

94m: The cubic meters of sand used to build the Palm Jumeirah

84: The site has doubled the natural 42-mile coastline of Dubai

4: The Palm is four times the size of Hyde Park in central London

Save the Honey Bee

I love bees. They are friendly, cooperative little dears that are quite willing to be tough when necessary and work in incredibly complex networks throughout their lives. I also like honey, flowers and agriculture (honeybees and their hives are actually trucked from field to field in many places to maximize their pollination services throughout the growing season of various crops).

Which is why Colony Collapse Disorder is so concerning. The term is used to describe a mysterious phenomenon whereby what entire colonies of bees just disappear and die, and it is spreading fast enough and wide enough to threaten the millions of farms that depend on them to pollinate their crops (as well as the bees themselves) on a massive scale.

And which is also why I'm glad someone is making a public effort to improve the situation. Yes, it's Haagen-Daaz ice cream, and yes, they have a commercial/PR angle, but the money raised goes directly to research at the University of California and Davis and Penn State universities looking into causes and cures for this disease.

So take a minute, learn more and help the honeybees if you are so inclined.

The Environmental Impact of All Those Islands

A gold star to the Economist for discussing something that has bothered me for a long time. While swimming at the (Jumeirah) Palm beach for the first and only time last November, I noticed a few troubling things. The first of course was the ongoing construction - we were swimming on the trunk's beach, while a few hundred meters down the trunk construction workers toiled away on a new building, which made me feel a bit guilty/unwilling to get out of the water to avoid being looked at (even if they were far away). The other was the amount of shells on the beach. Being still mostly a construction site, the Palm didn't have that many people on it, and we were one of a few to have used the beach. It was covered in shells, some really good ones (large, colorful, etc), but almost all broken. At first I was thrilled, as I like shells and marine life in general, but then I realized what was going on; these were all of the shells dug up and crushed as part of the process of building the island. The water was crystal clear, and we saw a few fish (the emptiness of the beach meant that they were quite willing to come up to the waters edge, darting away only when my shadow fell on them), so clearly someone is enjoying the new islands, but I was quite worried by the sheer numbers implied by so many broken shells.

I also wonder about the sustainability of the islands' marine life. If the islands' fronds and coves are to stay clear, dredging and cleaning operations will likely be necessary. If this is the case, then they will be forever disturbing the "new life" these formations are to support. Not to mention the role played by the many boats, jetskis, swimmers etc that are sure to come.

PS The World, Universe, Palms, etc aren't the only islands. Apparently the wife of Sheikh Mohammed has one (although I'm not sure which wife - Hind, the first wife, has her own, Princess Haya, his more public junior wife, or the rumored Moroccan middle wife, who may or may not exist, may or may not really be his wife and/or may or may not be the mother of some of his children), and someone else has been making a reverse-island, i.e. custom waterways.

ECONOMIST

How green is The World?
Evaluating Dubai's island-reclamation project

ITS DEVELOPERS call the three hundred islands laid out in the shape of the world map just off Dubai’s coast the “most innovative real-estate development on Earth”. These new artificial islands, known as “The World”, are just part of a plan to create hundreds of kilometres of new waterfront for Dubai, attracting visitors and wealthy home-owners from around the (real) world.

The World’s developer, Nakheel, built its first artificial-island chain in Dubai in 2001 in the shape of a palm. By 2007, Palm Jumeirah, as it was called, claimed to be the world’s largest man-made island. Construction of two more giant islands, as well as other projects along the coast, are well underway. In January of this year, the last rock was put into The World's breakwater, which stretches for 27km and uses 34m tonnes of rock. Buyers have already started to move in.

AP

ds are built the same way. Masses of sand are gathered from the seafloor of the Arabian Gulf. The sand is then brought to Dubai and sprayed in a giant arc onto the shallow (10.5 meter) seabed off the coast. The sand piles up until it breaks through the surface of the water and forms an island about 4.5m high. Then a massive breakwater is built around the islands to protect them from the stiff local sea currents. It is expensive work: each development typically costs billions of dollars.

The short-term environmental consequences of this reclamation are clear: the intensive construction of Palm Jumeirah created vast plumes of sediment that turned blue seawater milky and temporarily damaged marine life. It also destroyed turtle nesting sites and the only known coral reef along Dubai’s coast.

But Nakheel contends that the new rocky breakwaters of all these projects are creating vast artificial reefs, habitats for reef fish and meadows of sea grass in between the “fronds” of the Palm Jumeirah. They promise to build new turtle nesting sites. Furthermore, they say that the sandy, seafloor habitat held little marine life—and this habitat is common in the region. On balance, they contend that the environmental impact of the project is positive.

Already, the older reef around the Palm Jumeirah is starting to thrive, it says. Nakheel's website says of Palm Jumeirah's breakwater: “As the island was reclaimed, the fine sediments that were created by the reclamation eventually paved the way for a biologically and organically fertile soil on the sea bed, on which turtles and a variety of fish are living. This will lead to a highly oxygenated water, with excellent visibility for divers and snorkelers.”

But Milton Love, an expert on artificial reefs at the Marine Science Institute at the University of California, poses an interesting question: “Clearly, if you were a worm living in the soft sediment and someone dug your home up and replaced it with rock to form an island, you would be out of luck. On the other hand, if you were a butterfly fish and only lived around reefs, and someone changed the sand bottom to a reef, you might like that. But which view is the ‘right’ one? Strictly speaking, neither one is; it just depends on what a person’s philosophy is”.

If one's philosophy, for example is that the ocean should be largely left alone, then whether reclamation provides homes for more fish will not matter. Others, though, may take a more pragmatic view, thinking that the development has essentially created something from nothing. Indeed, many artificial reefs—scuttled ships and aircraft, sunken tyres and shopping trolleys—house marine life in otherwise empty waters.

That conclusion, however, risks oversimplification. While there may be more substrate for coral to grow, the question of whether there is actually more marine life is complicated. Do artificial structures in the ocean actually promote more life, or do they simply attract it? Dr Love reckons some reefs do one, some do the other and some do both. So while the artificial reefs have certainly created new habitats, it isn’t clear whether this is as a net benefit for the region.

That doesn’t give The World and the other islands a clean green bill of health. And focusing on what goes on under the water risks ignores a bigger question: where is all the fresh water for this paradise coming from? Dubai is famous for a number of things; not among them is a plentiful supply of water. So where do they get water for the swimming pools, spas, gardens, dishwashers and hotel laundries? Most of it comes from desalination plants, which expend a lot of energy and release plenty of carbon dioxide.

Anyone in the market for one of the Dubai islands might want to consider the contradictions inherent in their investment. As our climate continues to change, thanks at least in part to the addition of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, sea levels will probably keep rising, turning low-lying islands into something less than a paradise.

Environment Not a Priority for Airlines

Surviving is. If the EU passes stricter regulations, this may change, but for now it's still all about the benajmins.