The European Union has set a target of 20% of its energy needs coming from renewable sources by 2020. To make this happen, they will have to harness the power of wind sun and the sea…. In the first of a series of films I’m making for EARTHRISE, I travelled to the coast of Northern Ireland to explore the potential of tidal power

TURNING TIDAL explores the potential of tidal power as a renewable energy resource and visits the world’s first and largest commercial tidal turbine that’s been built in Northern Ireland. The waters of Strangford Lough, near Belfast run cold, fast and deep, and are some of the fastest tidal areas in the world. Under the surface lies a submerged turbine that looks like a cross between an airplane propeller and a windmill converting the energy of tidal flows into electricity. Green, clean and unlikely to harm marine life, the 300 tonne turbine is generating enough electricity to power 1000 houses.

Tidal generators can harvest the energy of these moving streams, with the added advantage that the resource is predictable unlike wind, is not dependent on annual rainfall like freshwater hydropower plants, and does not shut down at night like solar plants.

With 50% of Europe’s tidal resource around the UK, there lays an immense, potential, largely untapped resource of clean energy. It is estimated that harnessing the power of the seas, using wave and tidal generation methods, could meet the electricity demand of 15 million UK homes every year. Maximizing the full potential of marine energy could save up to 70m tones of Co2 by 2050, with the marine energy sector also providing up to 16,000 jobs.

EARTHRISE:
Earthrise broadcasts on Al Jazeera English and explores solutions to today’s environmental challenges, taking an upbeat look at ecological, scientific, technological and design projects the world over. Our reporters will meet inspiring individuals and communities leading the way in a field no one can afford to ignore.

Watch at the following times GMT: Friday: 1930; Saturday: 1430; Sunday: 0430; Monday: 0830, join our live web chats, submit your ideas and feedback and nominate your own environmental ‘local hero’.

Visit their website

I’ve recently been in Central Australia investigating the impact of Aboriginal people losing their identity and it’s got me thinking about the value of identity to our health and what happens if we lose it…The basis of our identity is what many tribal people called ‘Land’. ‘Land’ is more than just a physical concept like a field or a house but embodies history, language, beliefs and food. And the loss of land is the departure gate for the destruction of identity.

In Alice Springs I found thousands of Aboriginal people forced from their land, and now living in town camps, separate from the rest of the white majority town.

In one town camp called Hidden Valley I met 21-year-old Clint. His arms were heavily scared, a sign of an Aboriginal tradition of ‘Sorry Business’, cutting yourself when you lose a loved one. He told me how he’d lost a lot of friends and family from grog (alcohol), aged from 20 to 50. Alice Springs, a town of 30,000 now has the largest specialist dialysis unit in the whole of the Southern hemisphere, just one of countless indicators of a people facing destruction.

Grog rots the camps. It causes death and breaks down the social fabric of families and the communities. Disconnected from their land and language, law and lore, food and belief, traditional social and cultural behaviour is no longer being transferred from one generation to the next.

The Town Camps are some of the most socially dysfunctional places I have ever witnessed – alcoholism, disease, domestic violence, drink driving, fights and robbery are rife.

Australia may be second in the United Nation’s Development Index, but Aboriginal people now have one of the lowest life expectancies of any tribal people on the planet. Those still living on the land, live an average of 10years longer than those living in town camps.
I asked Clint who he was. He said he didn’t know.

Spending time with Clint and others, it’s painfully easy to see what happens when you lose your identity. It’s a platitude to say we take our identity for granted, but do you really know who you are?

Our identities are part nature, part nurture.

Throughout our cultural evolution our collective identity has been crucial for our physical survival and our development. As individuals we wouldn’t have survived predator attacks, combat situations or threats to the lives of our children. We have evolved both the abilities not to feel fear and pain and a willingness to sacrifice ourselves for more important goals. Have you ever wondered why you feel happy when you help someone? Hard-wired altruism.

We are group animals and we share a collective identity. Human culture is collective expression of our identity. How can you strengthen your identity? I’m not talking about becoming a nationalist nutcase, subscribing to the English Defence League, but ask yourself, ‘Who Am I?’ and see what you come up with.

Cultural identity is important to our sense of self and how we relate to others. It can help give us a sense of security, access to social networks that provide support, shared values that foster aspirations, and can help break down barriers and built up trust. Applied in the wrong direction – we can too easily end up a paranoid psychopath, possibly with paid-up membership to a fundamentalist nationalist cause.

Do you have a cultural identity? I’m not talking about being ‘British’ or ‘French’. In our increasingly interconnected and globalised world, we often identify with more than one culture. We contain more multitudes than ever before, and the DNA of our identity is ridden with more complexities and contradictions than our forefathers. From cradle to grave, we are constantly developing our identities. They are built on an endless array of inputs from relationships to relatives, from belief to humour, from geography to language, from failure to success, and from the truth of experience to misunderstanding of perception. The output of our identity is our culture, our expression of who we are.

But we forget the wisdom and evolved hardwiring of our ancestors at our peril. Lose the basis of our identity and we lose ourselves. The suffering of Aboriginal people and other tribal peoples around the world painfully reveal that identity is the basis of our wellbeing. Look after it.

(Australia’s Hidden Valley: Unreported World, Channel 4, 19:30, Fri 9th Dec)

Since the emergency legislation, which required the suspension of Australia’s race discrimination act, welfare payments are ring-fenced to prevent the purchase of alcohol, although with little positive impact. Aboriginal people are far more more likely to die of alcohol related causes than other Australians. Alcohol, welfare dependency and limited opportunities are often pushing adults to a life at the margins and sometimes into crime. There are some signs of hope in desert communities like Santa Teresa, where alcohol has been banned since 1975. With a school, health clinic, women’s centre and a strict no alcohol policy that everyone follows, Santa Teresa appears to be far safer and functioning better than many of Alice’s town camps.

WATCH ON 4oD

OLIVER’S BLOG:
Read Oliver’s Blog about the impact of losing identity: Who Are You? (coming soon)

MORE INFORMATION
Australia’s Hidden Valley Online:
Unreported World Website:
Unreported World on Facebook
Unreported World on Twitter
Photos from Hidden Valley
PODCAST: iTUNES or download mp3 via RSS Feed

PRESS REVIEWS:
Pick of the Day, Critics Choice, Highlights etc in: Times, Sunday Times, Telegraph, Sunday Telegraph, Guardian, Observer, Independent, Independent on Sunday, & Mail on Sunday, Radio Times

FROM TELEGRAPH: Pick of the Day: Critics Choice:
“The current run of Channel 4’s short, sharp documentary series comes to a close tonight with a trip to Australia, where reporter Oliver Steeds investigates the problems affecting the Aboriginal population around Alice Springs. Nearly a third of the residents in the area are Aboriginal. Most of them live segregated in camps across the city. Steeds visits these beleaguered settlements, targeted four years ago by legislation aimed at stamping out violence and child abuse. Alcohol, seen as the source of the struggle, has been made illegal. But the laws have had mixed success. At Hidden Valley camp, it is clear alcohol is still rife from the cans littering the ground, to the stories of residents living in its shadow. Unemployment is widespread. Most survive on government handouts, known by Aborigines as ‘sit down money’. In the city centre, racial tensions are rising. Steeds meets victims of a recent crime wave linked to Aborginal youths who visit Alice Springs to beat the ban on booze. Hope lies in those settlements with stronger links to ancestral history. In Santa Teresa, Steeds finds a peaceful, alcohol-free community whose members still hunt the bush and tell stories under the stars. Toby Dantzic.

Sharing word on a Dispatches I’ve just made with director Richard Sanders and Blakeway investigating the conservation movement…We reveal that far from stemming the tide of extinction that’s engulfing the planet, some conservationists have got their priorities wrong. Unquestionable, conservation is crucial – we’re in an extinction crisis right now, set to lose 2.5million species by 2050…. and we need to get it right. Sadly we unearth questionable business connections, human rights violations and far more… Far too often alienating the very people they would need to stem the loss of species from earth… including the incredible Dominican Mountain Chicken, that’s a frog, that tastes like chicken… Please tune in… and spread the word.. and get the debate going.
On twitter: @Dispatches #conservation
Full Details: on Dispatches Website

Unlike Ai Weiwei, China’s best-known dissident and artist who was arrested boarding a plane to Hong Kong, on April 3rd, He Wen’s disappearance has gone largely unreported by the world’s media and there are no high profile calls for his release. But his story holds the key to understanding China’s most repressive crackdown since Tiananmen 1989.

China’s inflationary squeeze is starting to hit ordinary people. The cost of living is up and many of the poorest are struggling to fill their rice bowls. Last year there were more than 100,000 protests across the country often sparked by individuals or communities rising up against local or provincial cases of corruption, land-development, employment or human rights violations. Most of those protesting have faced official disinterest, intransigence and violence.

In January this year an unknown group, inspired by events in North Africa and the Middle East, launched their own Jasmine Revolution with calls on twitter and other bulletin boards for a united protest against the repressive, single-party rule of the Communist Party.

The Party fears a generalised, national protest could provide the focus and glue to the millions of increasingly marginalised and disaffected. It is these “faceless millions” who could pose the real threat to the government’s long term strategy and the cohesion of the Chinese state itself.

He Zhimin is one of them. He’s a farmer in Sanyuan Town, a few miles outside Shaanxi’s provincial capital of Xian.

Last June, a woman approached his son at the local market, offered him a job and money and then abducted him. Mr He says the woman was part of a trafficking gang and that his son was abducted and forced in to a life of slavery – like thousands of other mentally impaired young men.

“My son is a kind-hearted child,” Mr He says. “He is as tall and strong as I am. He’s able to work but he has the mental age of a child. Our whole family searched the town for him but he never came back. I have to remain positive because one way or another I’ve got to keep looking for him. Whether I find him alive or his corpse, either way I must find my son.”

Mr He immediately reported the disappearance to the police, but he claims they refuse to take on the case. They refused to take witness statements and he wasn’t even allowed to register He Wen as a missing person.

Mr He is left to search for his son on his own, printing off thousands of ‘Missing Person’ posters and distributing them around the county. Within a few weeks, he began getting calls from eyewitnesses, many claiming they had seen him working in local brick factories.

“As my son is mentally impaired, they made him work in the kiln,” Mr He says. “It’s easy to control him. The bricks were still hot when they made my son move them. They told me he was beaten all over his body with bricks [ if he didn’t work hard enough?”]
With hundreds of brick kilns across the county, Mr He has an almost impossible task. In the last nine months he has visited 40 kilns and come across many other cases of mentally impaired people who have been abducted into slavery. As a result of his investigations, he’s been threatened and at times even violently attacked.

A couple of months ago Mr. He got a call about a man fitting his son’s description in a village 50 miles north of Sanyuan.

It turned out not to be his son, but 32 year old Liu Xiaoping. He too was mentally impaired and had been abducted and enslaved in brick factories for 10 months. At times he worked with Mr. He’s son.

Xiaoping’s father says during the day his son had to work in a brick factory and by night he was chained to a bed. “If he wasn’t working as they wanted, the factory owners would get a hot metal rod and burn it across his face. Sometimes, they purposefully put hot bricks on the back of Xiaoping’s legs as punishment.”

Xiaoping’s injuries got so bad that he couldn’t do any more physical labour and he was thrown out onto the streets and that was when Mr. He found him. “If Mr He hadn’t found him then, he would have been dead within two days,” Mr Liu says

When Mr He found him he had been tortured so badly the toes on his left foot had to be amputated. He spent the next 41days in a specialist burns unit at the local hospital until funds ran out. His family are now bankrupt and the State is doing nothing to support them.

Xiaoping’s parents and Mr He both talk in desperation of the state’s failure to help them. And they are not alone. The Beijing based NGO “Enable Disability Studies Institute” estimate that at least 10,000 people with mental impairments have already been abducted and 1.5million are at risk. At best the authorities are impassive, at worst they are actively trying to cover it up.

Yang Bin, from the charity says it’s incredibly difficult to prosecute the traffickers and the owners of the brick factories: “China’s legal system is weak. Modern day China is like a lawless jungle which enables the traffickers to prey on the weak and vulnerable and with impunity.”

In December last year, a local journalist broke the story that 137 mentally impaired people had been abducted from a government run welfare centre in Sichuan Province. Reports were horrific. A dozen people were found barely alive in a brick factory in Xinjiang Province, others were found dotted around the country, most often in brick factories. Survivors spoke of being tortured with electric cattle prods, some were beaten with bricks, some died, others simply disappeared when their slave masters took them away when their bodies were too beaten and exhausted to work.

Within days, the story went nationwide. People were horrified and wanted answers. As a local journalist started to dig around, the trafficking ring behind the abductions came into focus. A man had set up a front-company and claimed to be providing jobs and training for patients.

At the time he was even lauded in the local press and given an Entrepreneurial Award by a local politician. Chinese journalists were quick to jump on the State’s failure to protect the mentally impaired – one of many cases where the country’s social safety net is creaking under the pressures of growth and change. A Communist Party Official was implicated and arrested.

Then, like so many other occasions when public anger rises and protests escalate the State police went in and silenced anyone reporting on the case. When we tried to investigate as part of n ‘Unreported World documentary for Channel 4, we too were arrested. In the eyes of Beijing, reporting on state failure cannot be tolerated.

Stories like these and the abduction of He Wen strike at the heart of China’s problems. Cracks are opening up as China feels the growing pains of massive social upheaval and economic development.

In name this is the People’s Republic where the state is supposed to protect all. But in reality, as China powers ahead the most vulnerable are being left behind and all too often exploited. This is the lack of ‘social harmony’ the Party fears most.

WATCH CHINA’S LOST SONS:

• On Channel 4 on Demand:
• On Youtube

READ REVIEW:

• China’s Lost Sons in the Guardian

Thousands of mentally impaired people in China are being abducted into slavery. China’s Lost Sons is a documentary I’ve just made with Director Matt Haan for Channel 4’s critically acclaimed foreign affairs strand, ‘Unreported World’ to expose one of the untold stories behind China’s economic boom. This is a very dark film that focuses on one man’s inspirational search for his son. We shot this film in the midst of the most repressive crackdown since Tiananmen ’89 and I hope stories like can add some sort of context to the cracks opening up as China feels the growing pains of massive social upheaval and economic development. Click here for a clip from the film.

More Information : (and Vlogs and Blogs to come)

• Video Clip from the Film:
• China’s Lost Sons Online:
• Unreported World Website
• Unreported World on Facebook
• Unreported World on Twitter

PRESS REVIEWS: Pick of the Day, Critics Choice, Choice of the Week etc in:
Sunday Times, Telegraph, Sunday Telegraph, Guardian, Observer, Independent, Independent on Sunday, & Radio Times.

FROM SUNDAY TIMES: Pick of the Day: Critics Choice:
“Over more than 15years, Channel 4’s dispatches from China have uncovered evils recalling the Victorian scandals exposed in Charles Dickens’s novels or the writings of social reformers. After the Dying Rooms, about deadly state orphanages, came China’s Stolen Children revealing how babies were being trafficked; and now Oliver Steeds’s poignant investigation shows a similar pattern with adults with learning difficulties.

The reporter follows a market trader in his quest to find a missing son who is strong but has the mental age of the child. What emerges is that men like him are targeted by traffickers to make bricks for construction sites. Whether officials collude in this is unclear, they certainly want it kept secret – the Channel 4 team was first trailed by spooks then expelled from the province where they were filming.”

FILM SUMMARY from C4’s Unreported Website
Reporter Oliver Steeds and producer Matt Haan travel to China to follow one father’s inspirational search for his son, who was abducted and sold into slavery. They expose one of the untold stories behind China’s economic boom, discovering how thousands of young men with mental impairments have been kidnapped and forced to work in brick factories.

The team meet 62-year-old farmer He Zhimin in Sanyuan town in central China. He Wen – his son who has the mental age of a child and used to live at home – went missing last June.

Mr He says a woman approached his son at the local market, offered him a job and money and then abducted him. Mr He believes the woman was part of a trafficking gang and that his son has been abducted and forced into a life of slavery.

The disappearance was reported to the police, but Mr He claims they have done very little and he’s been left to search for his son on his own. He tells Steeds that a few months ago, He Wen was spotted in a nearby town. Eyewitnesses told him his son was being forced to work in local brick factories, which have a reputation for using forced labour supplied by trafficking gangs.

With hundreds of brick kilns across the county, Mr He has an almost impossible task. He has visited 40 kilns and come across many other cases of mentally impaired people who have been abducted into slavery. As a result of his investigations, he’s been threatened and at times violently attacked.

The team travels with Mr He to a brick factory where he believes his son might be held. Labourers claim He Wen was forced to carry hot bricks from the oven and was beaten all over his body if he didn’t work hard enough. But the factory was recently abandoned.

Just over a month beforehand, Mr He had received a call in response to one of his posters. A mentally impaired man fitting his son’s description had been found wandering the streets.

Mr He introduces the Unreported World team to the man he found – Liu Xiaoping – along with his family. Xiaoping is 30, but he has the mental age of a child. He reveals to Mr He that he worked alongside his son in a brick factory.

Xiaoping’s father says his son was also groomed like He Wen and enslaved in brick factories for 10 months. He says his son was chained up at night. If he wasn’t working hard enough in the day a hot metal rod was burnt across his face. Xiaoping’s injuries got so bad that he couldn’t work and he was thrown out onto the streets where Mr He found him.

Mr He also introduces the team to another father, Mr Li, who says his son disappeared from the street outside his house. He believes he was abducted and is now being forced to work in a brick factory. He’s printed off over 10,000 cards with details of his son on the back but has heard nothing.

Yang Bin works for the only organisation helping families track down mentally impaired relatives who’ve been abducted. He estimates there could be at least 10,000 currently enslaved. He says it is difficult to prosecute the traffickers and brick factory owners because often the testimonies of people with mental impairment are not accepted in Chinese courts even when there is substantial evidence.

Yang Bin agrees to help Mr He, who says no witness statements have been taken by the police and he hasn’t even been allowed to register He Wen as a missing person. Yang fears local police officers could be colluding with some of the brick factory owners.

Mr He receives more potential sightings of his son from several eyewitnesses at a nearby brick factory: the same one where Xiaoping claims he was held. The team investigates, filming secretly, but unfortunately there’s no sign of He Wen. The manager denies all allegations. Despite another dead-end Mr He vows never to give up searching.

VIDEO EXTRAS:
Daily Life for those abducted into slavery in brick factories

A Family’s Fear of speaking out

Visit to a charity for Mental health

Unreported World – the critically acclaimed foreign affairs series is back for our 21st Series – on UK Channel 4, online on 4oD, and un-geoblocked for first time for the world to witness. We bring an insight into the lives of people in some of the most neglected parts of the planet – lives largely overlooked by the global news machine. The new series kicks off in India with a powerful film from reporter Seyi Rhodes and director Richard Cookson: ‘Leprosy Heroes’ premieres this Friday @ 7:30pm. Our investigations have no place without our audiences, awareness & impact – so please spread the word and tune in…

MORE INFORMATION:
Some links for more information about the new series and what’s available online:

My previous films on Unreported World – more details & watch online:

PRESS REVIEWS: Pick of the Day, Critics Choice, Choice of the Week etc in:
The Times, Sunday Times, Telegraph, Sunday Telegraph, Guardian, Observer, Independent, Independent on Sunday, & Radio Times.

FILM SUMMARY from C4′s Unreported Website

Unreported World visits the ‘malaria capital of the world’ in northern Uganda to investigate why this preventable and treatable disease is still such a problem.

Reporter Oliver Steeds and director William West reveal that corruption is behind the theft of malaria treatment, and how organic products sold on Britain’s high streets also play a role in the continuing the pandemic.

When singer Cheryl Cole collapsed from malaria and was rushed to intensive care in July after a trip to Africa, it highlighted how dangerous the disease still is. Cole was lucky to survive: she received proper, timely treatment. Unlike her, almost a million Africans die every year from malaria.

Steeds and West begin their journey in the town of Apac. Surrounded by a vast mosquito-infested swamp, it’s the malaria capital of the world. People here are bitten on average six times a night, the highest rate anywhere. The local hospital is overrun, with more than 5,000 malaria patients turning up each week.

Twenty-four-year-old Harriet is one of them, violently convulsing as her desperate relatives try to pin her down. She has cerebral malaria, the most deadly strain. Her mother says her family has been ripped apart as Harriet has already lost three children to malaria.

Many of the patients admitted with the disease are under five and the pediatric ward is overflowing with youngsters. The team meets a mother cradling the body of her six-week-old daughter. Her father, Jasper, tells Steeds the hospital has run out of medicine to treat malaria patients.

In the pharmacy the dire shortage is clear: there’s only one box of anti-malarial drugs left. Those wanting treatment have to go outside and buy whatever vital medicine they need. The pharmacist tells Steeds: ‘if you can’t pay for the drugs, you die.’

Over the course of a year, Uganda has been given more than £20 million of anti-malarial drugs by the international community, but the reality is that not all the aid is reaching the people who need it.

The team follows a special government unit set up to investigate where the missing drugs have gone. During raids on several private clinics they find aid from various countries on sale to the public; everything from US mosquito nets to Chinese anti-malarial pills. The detective in charge says huge quantities of drugs are being stolen from hospitals and sold on the black market.

The World Health Organization says that indoor insecticide spraying is the best way to rapidly reduce the mosquito threat. However Unreported World reveals that this preventative measure isn’t welcomed by all.

The team meets a group of organic farmers who say they make their living by growing crops for sale to retailers in Britain and elsewhere. But they’ve been told by exporters that if they spray their homes, they will lose their organic status and be unable to sell their crops.

The villagers are caught in a terrible dilemma: to spray and potentially save their children’s lives or to not spray and retain their ability to earn enough money to feed their families. With limited alternatives for income many would rather risk their health than destroy their livelihoods.

Returning to Apac hospital, Steeds finds Harriet’s family have pooled their resources and spent their life savings on her treatment. She has a long way to go but the prognosis is good: she will survive despite the odds, unlike the 320 people who die every day in Uganda.

While a campaign of insecticide spraying, distribution of free mosquito nets and drugs could dramatically reduce malaria death rates, the long-term solution is a vaccine which would free ordinary people from the corruption and mismanagement that too often costs them their lives.