by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Jul 13, 2012 | Biodiversity & Habitat Destruction
By Mongabay
94 of the world’s 103 lemur species are at risk of extinction according to a new assessment by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) released by the group’s Species Survival Commission during a workshop this week.
Lemurs, a group of primates that is endemic to the island of Madagascar, are threatened by habitat destruction and poaching for the bushmeat trade. The update to the IUCN’s Red List of Threatened Species shows that 23 lemurs are now classified as ‘Critically Endangered’, 52 are ‘Endangered, 19 are ‘Vulnerable’ and three are ‘Near Threatened’. Only three lemur species are listed as ‘Least Concern’. The new numbers are alarming relative to the last assessment — carried out in 2005 — which identified 10 species as ‘Critically Endangered’, 21 as ‘Endangered’, and 17 as ‘Vulnerable’.
“The results of our review workshop this week have been quite a shock as they show that Madagascar has, by far, the highest proportion of threatened species of any primate habitat region or any one country in the world,” said Christoph Schwitzer, the Head of Research at Bristol Zoo Gardens who serves on the IUCN Species Survival Commission’s Primate Specialist Group. “As a result, we now believe that lemurs are probably the most endangered of any group of vertebrates.”
“This new assessment highlights the very high extinction risk faced by Madagascar’s unique lemur fauna and it is indicative of the grave threats to Madagascar biodiversity as a whole, which is vital to supporting its people,” added Russ Mittermeier, President of Conservation International (CI) and Chair of IUCN/SSC’s Primate Specialist Group. “As the forests go, so do lemurs and a host of benefits derived from them.”
The plight of lemurs has significantly worsened since a 2009 military coup plunged the country into a political crisis which undermined its institutions, led to abandonment of conservation initiatives, undercut Madagascar’s emerging ecotourism industry, and contributed to a sharp rise in illegal logging and commercial lemur hunting. Andry Rajoelina, the politician who seized the presidency during the coup, remains in power.
Read more from Mongabay: http://news.mongabay.com/2012/0713-lemurs-madagascar.html
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Jul 12, 2012 | Mining & Drilling, Toxification
By Abrahm Lustgarten / ProPublica
New research has concluded that salty, mineral-rich fluids deep beneath Pennsylvania’s natural gas fields are likely seeping upward thousands of feet into drinking water supplies.
Though the fluids were natural and not the byproduct of drilling or hydraulic fracturing, the finding further stokes the red-hot controversy over fracking in the Marcellus Shale, suggesting that drilling waste and chemicals could migrate in ways previously thought to be impossible.
The study, conducted by scientists at Duke University and California State Polytechnic University at Pomona and released today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, tested drinking water wells and aquifers across Northeastern Pennsylvania. Researchers found that, in some cases, the water had mixed with brine that closely matched brine thought to be from the Marcellus Shale or areas close to it.
No drilling chemicals were detected in the water, and there was no correlation between where the natural brine was detected and where drilling takes place.
Still, the brine’s presence – and the finding that it moved over thousands of vertical feet — contradicts the oft-repeated notion that deeply buried rock layers will always seal in material injected underground through drilling, mining, or underground disposal.
“The biggest implication is the apparent presence of connections from deep underground to the surface,” said Robert Jackson, a biology professor at the Nicholas School of the Environment at Duke University and one of the study’s authors. “It’s a suggestion based on good evidence that there are places that may be more at risk.”
The study is the second in recent months to find that the geology surrounding the Marcellus Shale could allow contaminants to move more freely than expected. A paper published by the journal Ground Water in April used modeling to predict that contaminants could reach the surface within 100 years – or fewer if the ground is fracked.
Last year, some of the same Duke researchers found that methane gas was far more likely to leak into water supplies in places adjacent to drilling.
Read more from TruthOut: http://truth-out.org/news/item/10244-new-study-fluids-from-marcellus-shale-likely-seeping-into-pa-drinking-water
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Jul 12, 2012 | Mining & Drilling
By Dawn Paley / Vancouver Media Co-op
Paraguay’s major newspaper is reporting today that the government of Paraguay–which came to power after a coup on June 22–has agreed to resume negotiations with Montreal-based Rio Tinto Alcan for a $4 billion aluminum plant.
The announcement follows a coup that led to the deposition of President Fernando Lugo, who was replaced by Federico Franco, head of the right-wing Paraguayan Liberal Party. Corporate media have called the coup a “lightning-quick impeachment,” but Lugo himself has said his removal constitutes an “institutional coup.” He was deposed after a rapid political trial which took place over a total of 32 hours.
According to Lugo, the coup was the work of a handful of economic elites and members of the political old guard. It appears there are Canadians among those preparing to make good off of the political upheaval in Paraguay.
Prior to the coup, Montreal based Rio Tinto Alcan was in negotiations with the Lugo government regarding the company’s plans to build an aluminum smelter in Paraguay. Talks, however, had stalled because of a disagreement on the price Rio Tinto Alcan would pay for energy.
“Evidently there were negotiations between Lugo’s government and Rio Tinto [Alcan], not negotiations as to whether we would permit the arrival or Rio Tinto [Alcan] or not,” Abel Enrique Irala, a researcher with the Paraguay Peace and Justice Service (Serapaj) told the Media Co-op this morning from the capital, Asunción. “The arrival of the company was a given. The negotiations were about the use of energy and the price or subsidy that the company would be granted to the transnational.”
Irala noted that the negotiations were advancing slowly, and were becoming increasingly part of a national public debate. “Now, with Franco in power, the negotiations are closed, taking place behind four walls as we say here, and will certainly happen more quickly,” said Irala. “The government will certainly be more charitable towards Rio Tinto Alcan and their work in the country.”
Reuters reported last week that since the swearing in of the new finance minister following the coup, the government planned to sign a decree shortly to allow the resumption of negotiations regarding the smelter. That decree passed today, authorizing the coup government to negotiate with Rio Tinto Alcan.
Rio Tinto Alcan doesn’t appear to be the only corporation taking advantage of Lugo’s ouster. “One can deduce that [Franco] has already met with regional, national and international business people, who represent transnational power,” said Irala.
From Vancouver Media Co-op: http://www.mediacoop.ca/story/rio-tinto-alcan-talks-paraguay-coup-government/11625
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Jul 11, 2012 | Agriculture, Colonialism & Conquest, Indigenous Autonomy
By Survival International
Survival has received disturbing reports from members of several tribes in Ethiopia’s Lower Omo Valley, which describe how the government is destroying their crops to force them to move off their land into designated resettlement areas.
Those most affected by the land grabs are Suri, Bodi and Mursi pastoralists, and the Kwegu hunter-gatherer people.
Many families are now desperate as they have no sorghum, and their cattle grazing land is also being rapidly destroyed as the government continues to lease out their land for sugar cane and oil palm plantations.
Some Bodi communities are already being moved in to camps against their will. A Bodi man said, ‘They are taking our land by force. The bulldozer even cleared the gardens where our crops were growing. They went right through where our sorghum was growing.’
The Mursi have been told they must sell their cattle, and will be moved to the resettlement camps by the end of this year. One Mursi woman said, ‘The other day I went to the Omo River. I went to my grain stores to get the grain and it was gone. My grain stores had been thrown away (by bulldozers). I don’t like what they are doing. When I went I just cried. Our grain stores were gone. Now we will have big problems. We don’t know what to do. Maybe we will die.’
Access to the Omo River is being blocked as the government continues to clear land and build roads to the sugar cane plantations, which are part of the state run Kuraz Sugar Project.
The government is also leasing large tracts of tribal land to national and foreign investors. To the west of the Omo National Park, the Suri are protesting against a Malaysian company which is planting oil palm on some of their best cattle grazing land.
According to one Suri man, ‘The government went with soldiers and for two weeks tried to prevent the Suri from planting crops. This was to force the people to be hungry and accept moving into the resettlement site. Most of the Suri are afraid to go to the place where they plant crops. Only a few went. In one village near the Malaysian plantation, three houses were burned down, with grain stores inside. This was done by the plantation workers.’
Human Rights Watch recently launched a damning new report ‘What Will Happen if Hunger Comes?’ which documents how government security forces are driving communities to relocate from their lands through violence and intimidation, threatening their entire way of life with no compensation or choice of alternative livelihoods.
From Survival International: http://www.survivalinternational.org/news/8467
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Jul 10, 2012 | Climate Change
By Fiona Harvey / The Guardian
Climate change researchers have been able to attribute recent examples of extreme weather to the effects of human activity on the planet’s climate systems for the first time, marking a major step forward in climate research.
The findings make it much more likely that we will soon – within the next few years – be able to discern whether the extremely wet and cold summer and spring so far experienced in the UK this year are attributable to human causes rather than luck, according to the researchers.
Last year’s record warm November in the UK – the second hottest since records began in 1659 – was at least 60 times more likely to happen because of climate change than owing to natural variations in the earth’s weather systems, according to the peer-reviewed studies by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in the US, and the Met Office in the UK. The devastating heatwave that blighted farmers in Texas in the US last year, destroying crop yields in another record “extreme weather event”, was about 20 times more likely to have happened owing to climate change than to natural variation.
Attributing individual weather events, such as floods, droughts and heatwaves, to human-induced climate change – rather than natural variation in the planet’s complex weather systems – has long been a goal of climate change scientists. But the difficulty of separating the causation of events from the background “noise” of the variability in the earth’s climate systems has until now made such attribution an elusive goal.
To attribute recent extreme weather events – rather than events 10 years ago or more – to human-caused climate change is a big advance, and will help researchers to provide better warnings of the likely effects of climate change in the near future. This is likely to have major repercussions on climate change policy and the ongoing efforts to adapt to the probable effects of global warming.
Peter Stott, of the UK’s Met Office, said: “We are much more confident about attributing [weather effects] to climate change. This is all adding up to a stronger and stronger picture of human influence on the climate.”
But the researchers also said that not every extreme weather event could be attributed to climate change. For instance, the extremely cold British winter of 2010-11 – starkly exemplified by the satellite picture of the UK and Ireland covered in white on Christmas Eve, as snow gripped the nations – was owing to variations in the systems of ocean and air circulation. Although such cold winters are now only half as likely as they were several decades ago, owing to a generally warming climate across the world, extremely low temperatures of this type are still possible depending on circulation effects – in this case, a negative North Atlantic Oscillation, the circulation system that is a key determinant of European weather.
Floods in Thailand last year, another example studied in the research, were also not judged to be due to climate change but to other factors such as changes in the management of local river systems.
Following and predicting temperature rises tends to be much less complex than predicting – and attributing the causes of – changes in precipitation patterns.
This year’s weather in the UK is an example. The Met Office has said the record wet conditions, which have brought serious flooding to regions from Yorkshire to the south-west, were owing to “a particularly disturbed jet stream”. That is the weather system across the north Atlantic that normally lies at higher latitudes during the British summer, but has been lower in latitude than usual for several years running, bringing wet and sometimes cold conditions. Some research has suggested that the massive melting of Arctic ice has been responsible for this effect – by changing the patterns of warmer and colder winds in the upper atmosphere.
But the key question – of whether man-made global warming is putting a dampener on British summers – will take several years to solve, according to Stott. “This is an open question in terms of research – it is too early days to be able to say,” he said.
From The Guardian: http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2012/jul/10/extreme-weather-manmade-climate-change
