Vale, the Brazilian mining company responsible for two deadly dam collapses since 2015, has another dam that’s at “imminent risk of rupture,” a government audit warns. The Xingu dam at Vale’s Alegria mine in Mariana municipality, Minas Gerais state, has been retired since 1998, but excess water in the mining waste that it’s holding back … Continue reading After two collapses, a third Vale dam at ‘imminent risk of rupture’→
Brazil’s Movimento dos Atingidos por Barragens has been fighting for decades against the privatization of water and for popular control over natural resources. This article originally appeared in Roarmag. Featured image: Vale open pit iron ore mine, Carajas, Para, 2009 By Caitlin Schroering Todos somos atingidos (“We are all affected”) — Common MAB saying A … Continue reading Inside the struggle for water sovereignty in Brazil→
Editor’s note: This article, which originally appeared in The Ecologist, clearly shows the strong contradiction between the bright green hope of a transition to “green energy” and the material reality. The dirty secret of “Green energy” is that it requires a lot of rare resources which have to be extracted by heavy mining. By Hannibal Rhoades Communities, … Continue reading Reject the extractive EU Green Deal→
This article originally appeared in The Conversation. By David Tindall, Professor of Sociology, University of British Columbia The RCMP has recently been arresting protesters who had set up blockades to prevent the logging of old-growth forests on Vancouver Island. Environmentalists say the Fairy Creek watershed, near Port Renfrew, is the last old-growth area left on southern Vancouver Island, outside … Continue reading Why people are risking arrest to join old-growth logging protests on Vancouver Island→
Editor’s note: While it’s true that “it is the profit machine that is polluting our atmosphere, warming our planet, and destroying our ecosystems”, the real root of human destructiveness lies further back in history, when groups of people started agriculture, building cities and forming human supremist ideologies that disconnected human cultures from all other living … Continue reading Covid, climate, and ‘dual metabolic rupture’→
This article originally appeared on Counterpunch. BY GEORGE WUERTHNER In a recent May 29 Bend Bulletin article, Senator Merkley asserted he “wants to boost spending on forest management by $1 billion annually through work, such as thinning and prescribed burning, to reduce the prospects of catastrophic wildfires.” An unexamined assumption is that thinning/logging work significantly reduces the … Continue reading What Jeff Merkley Gets Wrong About Forests and Fire→
by Austin Price, for Earth Island Journal SIXTEEN MILLION YEARS AGO, a volcano erupted over the Yellowstone hotspot near the present-day border of Oregon and Nevada. The blast expelled 1,000 cubic kilometers of rhyolite lava as the land collapsed into a 30-mile-long, keyhole-shaped caldera. Magma, ash, and other sediments entered the keyhole, and for the … Continue reading The Rush For White Gold [Dispatches from Thacker Pass]→
The Australian government has moved to create two new marine protected areas that cover an expanse of ocean twice the size of the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park. The two parks will be established around Christmas Island and the Cocos (Keeling) Islands in the Indian Ocean to the northwest of continental Australia. The new parks, … Continue reading New Australian marine parks protect area twice Great Barrier Reef’s size→
Biodiversity is plummeting, but restoring rivers could quickly reverse this disastrous trend. This article was produced by Earth | Food | Life, a project of the Independent Media Institute. By Alessandra Korap Munduruku, Darryl Knudsen and Irikefe V. Dafe In October 2021, the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) will meet in China to adopt a new post-2020 global … Continue reading Rivers Are Key to Restoring the World’s Biodiversity→
