by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Feb 28, 2012 | Mining & Drilling, Toxification
By Ecowatch
Each year, mining companies dump more than 180 million tonnes of hazardous mine waste into rivers, lakes, and oceans worldwide, threatening vital bodies of water with toxic heavy metals and other chemicals poisonous to humans and wildlife, according to report released on Feb. 28 by two leading mining reform groups.
An investigation by Earthworks and MiningWatch Canada identifies the world’s waters that are suffering the greatest harm or at greatest risk from the dumping of mine waste. The report, Troubled Waters: How Mine Waste Dumping is Poisoning our Oceans, Rivers, and Lakes, also names the leading companies that continue to use this irresponsible method of disposal.
Mine processing wastes, or tailings, can contain as many as three dozen dangerous chemicals including arsenic, lead, mercury, and cyanide. The report found that the mining industry has left mountains of such waste from Alaska and Canada to Norway and Southeast Asia.
“Polluting the world’s waters with mine tailings is unconscionable, and damage it causes is largely irreversible,” said Payal Sampat, international program director for Washington, D.C.-based Earthworks. “Mining companies must stop using our oceans, rivers, and lakes as dumping grounds for their toxic waste.”
The report says some multinational mining companies are guilty of a double standard.
“Some companies dump their mining wastes into the oceans of other countries, even though their home countries have bans or restrictions against it,” said Catherine Coumans, research coordinator for Ottawa-based MiningWatch Canada. “We found that of the world’s largest mining companies, only one has policies against dumping in rivers and oceans, and none against dumping in lakes.”
There are safer methods of disposing of mine tailings, including returning the waste to the emptied mine. In other places, dumping of any kind is too risky. No feasible technology exists to remove and treat mine tailings from oceans; even partial cleanup of tailings dumped into rivers or lakes is prohibitively expensive.
“We are really suffering because of the millions of tons of mine waste that Barrick Gold dumps in and around our river system every year,” said Mark Ekepa, chairman of the Porgera Landowners’ Association. “Our rivers run red, our houses have become unstable, we have lost fresh drinking water and places to put our food gardens, and sometimes children get carried away by the waste.”
A number of nations, including the U.S., Canada, and Australia, have had restrictions on dumping mine tailings in natural bodies of water. Even these national regulations, however, are being eroded by amendments, exemptions, and loopholes that allow destructive dumping in lakes and streams. Even though U.S. law long banned lake dumping, in 2009 the U.S. Supreme Court allowed Coeur D’Alene Mines of Idaho to dump 7 million tonnes of tailings from the Kensington Gold Mine in Alaska into Lower Slate Lake, filling the lake and destroying all life in it.
In Canada, Taseko Mines Ltd. is proposing to reclassify Little Fish Lake and Fish Creek in British Columbia as a tailings impoundment for its proposed Prosperity Gold-Copper Mine. The watershed is home to grizzly bear and highly productive rainbow trout, and is an important cultural area for the Tsilhqot’in People. After being refused environmental approvals for the past 17 years, the company has re-applied with plans to build a tailings impoundment to dispose of 480 million tons of tailings and 240 million tons of waste rock in the basin of the creek and lake, burying the ecosystems under a hundred meters of waste.
From Ecowatch
Photo by Dominik Vanyi on Unsplash
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Feb 28, 2012 | Mining & Drilling
By Lesley Clark and Renee Schoof / McClatchy
With President Barack Obama facing fire from Republicans over the rising cost of gasoline, the White House moved quickly Monday to trumpet a Canadian company’s decision to build a section of the controversial Keystone XL pipeline from Cushing, Okla., to Houston after Obama blocked a longer path last month.
Press Secretary Jay Carney hailed TransCanada’s announcement and used it to counter Republican criticism that the administration has stifled oil and gas production. He said that the Oklahoma to Texas section of the pipeline would “help address the bottleneck of oil in Cushing that has resulted in large part from increased domestic oil production, currently at an eight-year high.”
The company’s decision, Carney said, “highlights a little-known fact — certainly, you wouldn’t hear it from some of our critics — that we approve, pipelines are approved and built in this country all the time.”
Obama’s decision last month to reject the full 1,661-mile Keystone XL pipeline from Canada’s tar sands has become a focal point of Republican efforts to portray him as responsible for the recent spike in gasoline prices, and they fault him for blocking a project they say would create jobs and reduce America’s dependence on oil imports from unstable foreign sources.
The Republican speaker of the House of Representatives, John Boehner of Ohio, poked fun Monday at the White House salute of TransCanada’s decision.
“The president is so far on the wrong side of the American people that he’s now praising the company’s decision to start going around him,” Boehner said in a statement to ABC News.
A recent national survey by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press suggests that Obama’s Keystone decision could become a political liability. Though 37 percent of those surveyed said they’d not heard of the pipeline, 66 percent of those who had heard of it said the government should approve it, while just 23 percent opposed it.
In fact, energy experts say that the Keystone XL pipeline wouldn’t do much to lower gasoline prices. The recent price spike stems largely from speculators bidding up prices at a time of growing fear of future oil-supply disruptions if a war with Iran develops over its nuclear program.
TransCanada will be the second pipeline moving oil from Cushing to the Gulf Coast. The other is already built and owned by Enbridge Inc. The two pipelines will reduce the glut of oil in the Midwest “and in doing so will raise the price of oil in Cushing and the Midwest and will lower the price very slightly in the rest of the world,” said Severin Borenstein, a professor at the Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley.
Prices in the Midwest could go up between 10 and 30 cents a gallon, ending the region’s cheaper gasoline compared to other areas, he said. If the full pipeline is constructed, the impact on world oil prices would “never really be noticed” because it would be so small, a few cents or less per gallon, that it would be “lost in the noise of other changes.”
TransCanada also told the State Department on Monday that it plans to submit a new application for the rejected segment of the pipeline, and Carney said the president’s rejection last month “in no way prejudged future applications.”
The White House contends that House Republicans forced Obama to reject the earlier cross-border application by not giving it enough time to review the project.
Republicans accuse Obama of putting off the decision until after the 2012 elections so as not to upset environmentalists.
Environmental groups made the pipeline a test of Obama’s will to move the country off fossil fuels and to slow climate change. They also say the pipeline would put the Ogalalla Aquifer, streams, farms and wildlife habitat at greater risk of oil spills.
Kim Huynh of Friends of the Earth said in a statement Monday that the pipeline would be an “environmental disaster” and called the administration’s welcome of TransCanada’s plan “an alarming about-face.”
“The administration must stop trying to have it both ways,” Huynh said. “President Obama cannot expect to protect the climate and to put the country on a path toward 21st century clean energy while simultaneously shilling for one of the dirtiest industries on Earth.”
From TruthOut: http://www.truth-out.org/white-house-applauds-decision-build-part-keystone-xl-pipeline/1330439983
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Feb 27, 2012 | Colonialism & Conquest, Indigenous Autonomy, Lobbying, Noncooperation
By Gale Courey Toensing / Indian Country Today
While Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper was holding his first Crown-First Nations summit with indigenous leaders at the Old Ottawa City Hall last month, the Algonquins of Barriere Lake gathered outside to rally against what members say is an unwanted and illegitimate council imposed on their community by the Canada government.
The Algonquins of Barriere Lake (ABL) have been protesting the imposed council since August, 2010 when the Canadian government’s Aboriginal Affairs and Northern Development Canada (AANDC), the ministry that oversees indigenous issues, announced that a new chief and council had been elected by “acclamation” according to Section 74 of Canada’s colonial-era Indian Act of 1876. (To put the Indian Act in historical context, Canada became the Dominion of Canada in 1867 as part of the British Empire during Queen Victoria’s reign from 1837–1901. A year after the Indian Act was passed, Queen Victoria became the Empress of India.)
An unknown number of ABL members traveled approximately three hours from their rural community in Quebec to Ottawa on January 24 for the protest.
“We’re here to show that our community is still united in asking the government to retract the imposition of Section 74 on our community,” ABL spokesperson Michel Thusky told the Leveller. “We want the federal government to rescind its decision on imposing Section 74 on our customary selection process.”
Section 74 says that the Minister of Aboriginal Affairs and Northern Development can impose an electoral system on First Nations with customary leadership selection processes: “Whenever he deems it advisable for the good government of a band, the minister may declare by order that after a day to be named therein the council of the band, consisting of a chief and councilors, shall be selected by elections to be held in accordance with this Act.”
The ABL are among just two dozen First Nation bands that follow a customary leadership selection process. Members say that their inherent right to do so is protected not only by Canada’s Constitution, but also by the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. They attribute the strength of their community, language, knowledge and protection of the land to the endurance of their customary governance system and say losing it will have devastating consequences on their way of life.
The federal government-run “election” in 2010 yielded fewer than a dozen ballots, but it announced nonetheless that a new chief and council were elected. A overwhelming majority of the community members had boycotted the so-called election. Of Barriere Lake’s total population of about 500 people, including children, nearly 200 members signed a resolution rejecting the entire process, even Casey Ratt, the “acclaimed” chief declined to accept the position. The ABL have protested and held demonstrations calling for their traditional governance and treaty rights for the past two years, but the imposed council remains in place.
“We have been campaigning against this, reminding people that our custom is who we are, our identity, our language, our way of life. We don’t accept to be in this system of colonization,” community spokesperson Norman Matchewan told the Leveller.
The community also continues to protest the federal and provincial Quebec governments’ violation of the 1991 Trilateral Agreement, a resource-use accord that was supposed to create a sustainable development plan for the community’s traditional approximately 4,000 square miles that would include revenue sharing, resource co-management and economic independence for Barriere Lake.
The agreement was highly acclaimed as an innovative environmental treaty at the time of its signing, but ABL members say that federal and provincial governments have refused to implement the plan.
Tony Wawatie, a former ABL spokesman, told ICTMN that the Crown-First Nations summit was “a big scam” to distract attention from the crisis at Attawapiskat.
“But we’re still stuck with the Harper government for another three years and it’s for sure they’re doing everything they can to undermine the collective rights of First Nations peoples across Canada,” Wawatie said. “Their agenda is about assimilation and extinction of our rights. It’s sad that it’s happening all over and they’re trying to have a public campaign by bringing in a process for economic development but undermining people who want to protect their Indian-ness, if you will, their identity. That’s what I see happening.”
From Indian Country Today:
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Feb 27, 2012 | Mining & Drilling
By Agence France-Presse
TransCanada Corp announced Monday it would go ahead with construction of part of its Keystone XL oil pipeline that does not require US presidential approval, a stretch from the state of Oklahoma to the US Gulf Coast.
The company also said it will resubmit its proposal for the entirety of the pipeline from Canada that was rejected last month by US President Barack Obama, a move that sparked an election-year row over energy policy and the environment.
The new presidential permit application would include “an alternative route in Nebraska as soon as that route is selected,” as well as an “already reviewed route” in Montana and South Dakota, TransCanada added.
Company president Russ Girling said he hoped the lengthy environmental review of the original project — much of it unchanged in the new proposal — will mean a shorter approval process once a new route in Nebraska is determined that avoids the ecologically sensitive Sandhills area, which lies above a vital agricultural aquifer.
The White House welcomed the re-application, saying “we support the company’s interest in proceeding with this project, which will help address the bottleneck of oil in Cushing that has resulted in large part from increased domestic oil production, currently at an eight-year high.”
Obama’s office said in a statement that “moving oil from the Midwest to the world-class, state-of-the-art refineries on the Gulf Coast will modernize our infrastructure, create jobs, and encourage American energy production.
“We look forward to working with TransCanada to ensure that it is built in a safe, responsible and timely manner, and we commit to take every step possible to expedite the necessary Federal permits,” the White House added.
From Bangkok Post: http://www.bangkokpost.com/news/world/281884/part-of-keystone-xl-oil-pipeline-to-go-ahead-company
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Feb 27, 2012 | Indigenous Autonomy, Listening to the Land
By Catherine Saez, Intellectual Property Watch
The International Indigenous Forum, in an unprecedented collective move, decided yesterday to withdraw from the discussions of the WIPO Committee on Genetic Resources taking place from 14-22 February. The move calls into question the legitimacy of the negotiations.
As delegates were working on a compilation text at the twentieth session of the Intergovernmental Committee on Intellectual Property and Genetic Resources, Traditional Knowledge and Folklore (IGC), an Indigenous Peoples representative, speaking on behalf of the International Indigenous Forum, announced the withdrawal from active participation in the IGC.
In a statement [pdf in English], [pdf in Spanish] that the representative could not read in its entirety in plenary, the group said that Indigenous Peoples have participated as experts in IGC sessions, and worked in good faith. They have, according to the statement, “made efforts over the years to submit to the IGC sessions our collectively developed and sound proposals, which have been ignored or left in brackets in negotiation texts.”
As the “titleholders, proprietors and ancestral owners of traditional knowledge that is inalienable, nonforfeitable and inherent to the generic resources that we have conserved and utilized in a sustainable manner within our territories,” the group feels that “the discussion on intellectual property rights and genetic resources should include Indigenous Peoples on equal terms with the States since the work will directly impact our lives, our lands, our territories and resources.”
As a consequence, they said they decided “unanimously, to withdraw our active participation in the work developed by this Committee until the States change the rules of procedure to permit our full and equitable participation at all levels of the IGC.”
Under the current rules of procedures, Indigenous Peoples have observer status at the IGC. They can make proposals to the negotiations but those proposals have to be endorsed by at least one delegation to be taken into account.
Participation Being Eroded Gradually, Representatives Say
In an interview with Intellectual Property Watch, Indigenous Peoples representatives Debra Harry, executive director of the Indigenous Peoples Council on Biocolonalism, and Lucia Fernanda Jófej Kaingáng, the representative of the Instituto Indigena Brasileiro para Propriedade Intelectual (INBRAPI), said that since the beginning of the IGC the Indigenous Peoples’ participation has been narrowed and they have been excluded from key bodies like the “friends of the chair.” In this particular meeting, they were not able to participate in the team of facilitators drafting the negotiating text, they said.
Most of the textual proposals made by the Indigenous Peoples are not currently included in the present text, they said. The text that was actually taken into account is put forward in a way that does not reflect their original proposal, they added. For example, in Objective 1, paragraph 1.1.1., the current text says: “[including the sovereign rights of [States] nations and peoples, the rights of indigenous peoples and local communities, as well as private property rights] in accordance with domestic legislation [in patent applications].” Additions such as “states,” “private property rights,” and “patent applications,” have transformed the original proposal.
Change of the Rules of Procedure Needed, Indigenous Peoples Say
According to Harry and Jófej Kaingáng, the WIPO Legal Council told the Indigenous Peoples representatives at the last session that a change in the rules of procedure to allow full and equal participation would require a decision from the WIPO General Assembly. At present, the rules of procedure do not anticipate having Indigenous Peoples take an active part in the IGC, General Assembly or a diplomatic conference to discuss an instrument, they said. “For Indigenous Peoples, it does not make sense to participate in the IGC session but not be able to participate in the final stages of discussion” they said. Indigenous Peoples have been calling for a change in the rules of procedure since the 18th session of the IGC to no avail, they added.
“Instead, the WIPO Secretariat put forward a draft study [pdf] on the participation of observers in the work of the IGC, including nine proposals, none of which recommends a change in the rules of procedure to increase the participation of Indigenous Peoples or their level of participation,” Harry said. “States need to put forward some language that is asking for a change in the rules of procedures.”
“Indigenous Peoples participation brings legitimacy to the process and they need to have an effective and equal participation in all levels of the process: drafting groups, friends of the chair group, facilitators committee,” Harry said. Indigenous Peoples have collective rights under the United Nations system and states do not take those rights into account, according to the representatives. “We cannot participate in a process that undermines our rights,” Harry said. “If we cannot have a fair and effective participation, we are essentially participating in a process that will diminish our rights.”
In Brazil, 15 percent of the national territory belongs to Indigenous Peoples, and this territory is best conserved, said Jófej Kaingáng. “We are owners and holders of GR.” In Brazil, Indigenous Peoples have exclusive rights to use natural resources inside their land, and GRs are natural resources, she said.
Previously in the week, a representative from Tupac Amaru said that Indigenous Peoples’ proposals are not considered even when they are supported by governments. “We consider this discriminatory,” he said.
“Some Indigenous Peoples say they have the right to sit beside states that have colonised them,” said Ronald Barnes, who represents the Indian Council of South America (CISA). “Gaps and loopholes are being created that are not going to give us our rights,” he said.
Indigenous representatives during the week urged negotiators to “keep to the high standards” of the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples,” and other international instruments. WIPO is a UN organisation.
“States are asserting national sovereignty over genetic resources, but state sovereignty is not absolute,” Harry said. “If the final instrument fails to recognise Indigenous Peoples’ rights, states may become gate keepers on our genetic resources and traditional knowledge and this would undermine our right to self-determination.” This right is inscribed in the international legal framework, for example in the UN International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, she said.
“If the outcome of this process is reached without our equal participation, we would consider the process to have no bearing on us.” Harry said.
IGC government delegates’ reaction to the withdrawal of the Indigenous Peoples group was generally one of “regret”, but no suggestions for addressing the concern, for instance by granting them equivalent status in negotiations.
From Intellectual Property Watch: http://www.ip-watch.org/2012/02/22/indigenous-peoples-walk-out-of-wipo-committee-on-genetic-resources
