by Deep Green Resistance News Service | May 1, 2012 | Biodiversity & Habitat Destruction
By Jeremy Hance / Mongabay
Six years after the Yangtze river dolphin (Lipotes vexillifer), or baiji, was declared “functionally extinct” by scientists, another marine mammal appears on the edge of extinction in China’s hugely degraded Yangtze River. In less than two months, 32 Yangtze finless porpoises (Neophocaena asiaeorientalis asiaeorientalis), a subspecies of the finless porpoise, have been found dead in Dongting and Poyang Lakes in the Yangtze, reports the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF).
The porpoises are suffering from many of the same impacts that pushed the baiji to extinction: illegal electrofishing, strikes by boat propellors, poisons, and possibly pollution and food shortages from lower water levels linked by officials to climate change. Autopsies show that at least two of the animals were killed by electrofishing and boat propellers.
“This tragedy shows that Yangtze finless porpoise is facing enormous challenges,” Lei Gang, head of WWF China’s Central Yangtze program, said in a press release. “The porpoise deaths illustrates that without effective measures to fundamentally reverse the trend of ecological deterioration, future of the incredible creature is far from certain. We have to act immediately.”
Researchers believe that around 1,000 Yangtze finless porpoises survive in the river with the population in dramatic decline. Currently, the IUCN Red List is evaluating the subspecies to see if the situation warrants classifying the population as Critically Endangered.
Breakneck development, including a series of dams, with little environmental regard has left the ecology of the Yangtze River in shambles. Aside from the baiji’s extinction, many of the river’s key species are vanishing. The Chinese paddlefish (Psephurus gladius), arguably the world’s biggest freshwater fish, is listed as Critically Endangered with only two fish confirmed since 2002. Scientists fear the fish may be soon gone for good, if not already, after a 2009 survey couldn’t find a single fish. In addition the Chinese alligator (Alligator sinensis), the Yangtze sturgeon (Acipenser dabryanus), and the Yangtze soft-shell turtle (Rafetus swinhoei) are all listed as Critically Endangered.
Still, a controversial new hydroelectric project, the Xiaonanhai Dam, is moving ahead despite concerns that it will finish off a number of the river’s endangered fish, many found no-where else in the world.
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Apr 30, 2012 | Agriculture, Biodiversity & Habitat Destruction
By Tom Knudson / The Sacramento Bee
The day began with a drive across the desert, checking the snares he had placed in the sagebrush to catch coyotes.
Gary Strader, an employee of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, stepped out of his truck near a ravine in Nevada and found something he hadn’t intended to kill.
There, strangled in a neck snare, was one of the most majestic birds in America, a federally protected golden eagle.
“I called my supervisor and said, ‘I just caught a golden eagle and it’s dead,’ ” said Strader. “He said, ‘Did anybody see it?’ I said, ‘Geez, I don’t think so.’
“He said, ‘If you think nobody saw it, go get a shovel and bury it and don’t say nothing to anybody.’ ”
“That bothered me,” said Strader, whose job was terminated in 2009. “It wasn’t right.”
Strader’s employer, a branch of the federal Department of Agriculture called Wildlife Services, has long specialized in killing animals that are deemed a threat to agriculture, the public and – more recently – the environment.
Since 2000, its employees have killed nearly a million coyotes, mostly in the West. They have destroyed millions of birds, from nonnative starlings to migratory shorebirds, along with a colorful menagerie of more than 300 other species, including black bears, beavers, porcupines, river otters, mountain lions and wolves.
And in most cases, they have officially revealed little or no detail about where the creatures were killed, or why. But a Bee investigation has found the agency’s practices to be indiscriminate, at odds with science, inhumane and sometimes illegal.
The Bee’s findings include:
• With steel traps, wire snares and poison, agency employees have accidentally killed more than 50,000 animals since 2000 that were not problems, including federally protected golden and bald eagles; more than 1,100 dogs, including family pets; and several species considered rare or imperiled by wildlife biologists.
• Since 1987, at least 18 employees and several members of the public have been exposed to cyanide when they triggered spring-loaded cartridges laced with poison meant to kill coyotes. They survived – but 10 people have died and many others have been injured in crashes during agency aerial gunning operations over the same time period.
• A growing body of science has found the agency’s war against predators, waged to protect livestock and big game, is altering ecosystems in ways that diminish biodiversity, degrade habitat and invite disease.
Sometimes wild animals must be destroyed – from bears that ransack mountain cabins to geese swirling over an airport runway. But because lethal control stirs strong emotions, Wildlife Services prefers to operate in the shadows.
“We pride ourselves on our ability to go in and get the job done quietly without many people knowing about it,” said Dennis Orthmeyer, acting state director of Wildlife Services in California.
Basic facts are tightly guarded. “This information is Not intended for indiscriminate distribution!!!” wrote one Wildlife Services manager in an email to a municipal worker in Elk Grove about the number of beavers killed there.
And while even the military allows the media into the field, Wildlife Services does not. “If we accommodated your request, we would have to accommodate all requests,” wrote Mark Jensen, director of Wildlife Services in Nevada, turning down a request by The Bee to observe its hunters and trappers in action.
“The public has every right to scrutinize what’s going on,” said Carter Niemeyer, a former Wildlife Services district manager who worked for the agency for 26 years and now believes much of the bloodletting is excessive, scientifically unsound and a waste of tax dollars.
“If you read the brochures, go on their website, they play down the lethal control, which they are heavily involved in, and show you this benign side,” Niemeyer said. “It’s smoke and mirrors. It’s a killing business. And it ain’t pretty.
“If the public knows this and they don’t care, I’m not going to lose any sleep over it,” Niemeyer said. “But they are entitled to know.”
Agency officials say the criticism is misleading. “If we can use nonlethal control first, we usually do it,” said William Clay, deputy administrator of Wildlife Services. “The problem is, generally when we get a call, it’s because farmers and ranchers are having livestock killed immediately. They are being killed daily. Our first response is to try to stop the killing and then implement nonlethal methods.”
In March, two congressmen – Reps. John Campbell, R-Irvine, and Peter DeFazio, D-Ore. – introduced a bill that would ban one of Wildlife Services’ most controversial killing tools: spring-loaded sodium cyanide cartridges that have killed tens of thousands of animals in recent years, along with Compound 1080 (thallium sulfate), a less-commonly used poison.
“This is an ineffective, wasteful program that is largely unaccountable, lacks transparency and continues to rely on cruel and indiscriminate methods,” said Camilla Fox, executive director of Project Coyote, a Bay Area nonprofit.
“If people knew how many animals are being killed at taxpayer expense – often on public lands – they would be shocked and horrified,” Fox said.
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Apr 29, 2012 | Biodiversity & Habitat Destruction
By Eddie North-Hager / University of Southern California
Every year nearly 7 million birds die as they migrate from the United States and Canada to Central and South America, according to a new USC study published on April 25 in the journal PLoS ONE.
The birds are killed by the 84,000 communication towers that dot North America and can rise nearly 2,000 feet into the sky, according to the authors of “An Estimate of Avian Mortality at Communication Towers in the United States and Canada.”
Placing that figure in context, the Exxon Valdez oil spill killed 250,000 birds and the Empire State building is 1,250 feet high.
“This is a tragedy that does not have to be,” said lead author Travis Longcore, associate professor in the USC Spatial Sciences Institute at the USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences.
The taller the tower the greater the threat, the study found. The 1,000 or so towers above 900 feet accounted for only 1.6 percent of the total number of towers. Yet these skyscraper towers killed 70 percent of the birds, about 4.5 million a year, Longcore said.
Most of the birds spent winter in places like the Bahamas and summer in Canada. With names like the Common Yellowthroat and the Tennessee Warbler, they could fit in the palm of one’s hand.
“These birds eat insects and keep our forests healthy,” Longcore said. “They are quite beautiful. We have a long history of appreciating birds. Millions of people watch birds.”
However, the birds are not generally killed by running into the tower itself but the dozens of cables, known as guy wires, that prop up the thin, freestanding structure, Longcore said.
During bad weather, the birds were pushed down by cloud cover and flew at lower altitudes. The clouds also removed navigation cues, such as stars, leaving only the blinking or static red lights of towers.
The blinking did not fool the birds, but towers with a static red light resulted in more dead birds.
“In the presence of the solid red lights, the birds are unable to get out of their spell,” Longcore said. “They circle the tower and run into the big cables holding it up.”
Longcore estimated that changing the steady-burning lights on the 4,500 towers greater than 490 feet tall (about 6 percent of the total) could reduce mortality about 45 percent, or about 2.5 million birds. The study also recommended that businesses share towers to reduce their number and build more freestanding towers to reduce the need for guy wires.
Read more from University of Southern California News: http://news.usc.edu/#!/article/34016/millions-of-birds-perish-at-communication-towers-usc-study-finds/
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Apr 26, 2012 | Biodiversity & Habitat Destruction, Repression at Home
By The Guardian
A prominent Cambodian anti-logging activist, who helped expose a secretive state sell-off of national parks, has been shot dead by police in a remote south-western province while guiding journalists to the scene of illegal logging.
A Cambodian human rights organisation, Licadho, said the confrontation occurred on Wednesday when Chut Wutty, director of the Phnom Penh-based environmental watchdog Natural Resource Protection Group, refused to hand over a memory card with photos taken in the nearby forest by him and two journalists from the Cambodia Daily newspaper.
Licadho said he had taken the journalists to see large-scale forest destruction and illegal rosewood smuggling near a Chinese-built hydroelectric dam in Koh Kong, and on the way out of the forest came to a checkpoint where military police demanded the memory card.
However, Colonel Kheng Tito, a military police spokesman, said a policeman was also killed and claimed that Chut Wutty had been armed. “We are investigating the incident so we don’t have much detailed information,” he said. “All we know is that our military policeman was doing his duty and encountered this person and there was gunfire.”
He said: “Both sides were injured and later died in hospital.”
Military police detained the two journalists, according to Kevin Doyle, the Cambodia Daily’s editor-in-chief. He called for the safe return of Cambodian reporter Phorn Bopha, and Olesia Plokhii, a Canadian. The two were now “in the company of the army or military police in the forest”, said Doyle.
Chut Wutty, who was in his forties and leaves a wife and two children, had a reputation for speaking out against logging and corruption by government and big business. He campaigned against the government’s granting of so-called economic land concessions to scores of companies allowing them to develop land in national parks and wildlife sanctuaries.
He was particularly critical of Cambodia’s military police, who are often deployed to protect private business interests.
Kheng Tito said his officer had encountered Chut Wutty while patrolling against “forest crimes”.
He said: “Chut Wutty was also an activist against forest crimes; we don’t know how it became like this.”
The destruction of Cambodia’s forests and the forced eviction of rural families by armed men connected to influential businessmen was “so sad”, Chut Wutty told Reuters in February during an investigation in Koh Kong, near where he was shot.
Chut Wutty’s death was a “tragedy,” said Neang Boratino, a co-ordinator in Koh Kong province for the respected Cambodian Human Rights and Development Association (ADHOC). “This is a threat to all forestry activists who work for the preservation of the nature,” he said.
Chut Wutty is the most prominent activist to meet a violent death in Cambodia since Chea Vichea, a union leader who fought for better pay and conditions for clothing workers until his 2004 assassination.
From The Guardian: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/apr/26/cambodia-police-shoot-dead-antilogging-activist
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Apr 22, 2012 | Biodiversity & Habitat Destruction, Colonialism & Conquest, Indigenous Autonomy
By Gethin Chamberlain / The Observer
Logging companies keen to exploit Brazil’s rainforest have been accused by human rights organisations of using gunmen to wipe out the Awá, a tribe of just 355. Survival International, with backing from Colin Firth, is campaigning to stop what a judge referred to as ‘genocide’.
Trundling along the dirt roads of the Amazon, the giant logging lorry dwarfed the vehicle of the investigators following it. The trunks of nine huge trees were piled high on the back – incontrovertible proof of the continuing destruction of the world’s greatest rainforest and its most endangered tribe, the Awá.
Yet as they travelled through the jungle early this year, the small team from Funai – Brazil’s National Indian Foundation – did not dare try to stop the loggers; the vehicle was too large and the loggers were almost certainly armed. All they could do was video the lorry and add the film to the growing mountain of evidence showing how the Awá – with only 355 surviving members, more than 100 of whom have had no contact with the outside world – are teetering on the edge of extinction.
It is a scene played out throughout the Amazon as the authorities struggle to tackle the powerful illegal logging industry. But it is not just the loss of the trees that has created a situation so serious that it led a Brazilian judge, José Carlos do Vale Madeira, to describe it as “a real genocide”. People are pouring on to the Awá’s land, building illegal settlements, running cattle ranches. Hired gunmen – known as pistoleros – are reported to be hunting Awá who have stood in the way of land-grabbers. Members of the tribe describe seeing their families wiped out. Human rights campaigners say the tribe has reached a tipping point and only immediate action by the Brazilian government to prevent logging can save the tribe.
This week Survival International will launch a new campaign to highlight the plight of the Awá, backed by Oscar-winning actor Colin Firth. In a video to be launched on Wednesday, Firth will ask the Brazilian government to take urgent action to protect the tribe. The 51-year-old, who starred in last year’s hit movie The King’s Speech, and came to prominence playing Mr Darcy in the 1995 BBC adaptation of Pride and Prejudice, delivers an appeal to camera calling on Brazil’s minister of justice to send in police to drive out the loggers.
The Awá are one of only two nomadic hunter-gathering tribes left in the Amazon. According to Survival, they are now the world’s most threatened tribe, assailed by gunmen, loggers and hostile settler farmers.
Their troubles began in earnest in 1982 with the inauguration of a European Economic Community (EEC) and World Bank-funded programme to extract massive iron ore deposits found in the Carajás mountains. The EEC gave Brazil $600m to build a railway from the mines to the coast, on condition that Europe received a third of the output, a minimum of 13.6m tons a year for 15 years. The railway cut directly through the Awá’s land and with the railway came settlers. A road-building programme quickly followed, opening up the Awá’s jungle home to loggers, who moved in from the east.
It was, according to Survival’s research director, Fiona Watson, a recipe for disaster. A third of the rainforest in the Awá territory in Maranhão state in north-east Brazil has since been destroyed and outsiders have exposed the Awá to diseases against which they have no natural immunity.
“The Awá and the uncontacted Awá are really on the brink,” she said. “It is an extremely small population and the forces against them are massive. They are being invaded by loggers, settlers and cattle ranchers. They rely entirely on the forest. They have said to me: ‘If we have no forest, we can’t feed our children and we will die’.”
But it appears that the Awá also face a more direct threat. Earlier this year an investigation into reports that an Awá child had been killed by loggers found that their tractors had destroyed the Awá camp.
“It is not just the destruction of the land; it is the violence,” said Watson. “I have talked to Awá people who have survived massacres. I have interviewed Awá who have seen their families shot in front of them. There are immensely powerful people against them. The land-grabbers use pistoleros to clear the land. If this is not stopped now, these people could be wiped out. This is extinction taking place before our eyes.”
Read more from The Guardian: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/apr/22/brazil-rainforest-awa-endangered-tribe
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Apr 19, 2012 | Biodiversity & Habitat Destruction, Indigenous Autonomy, Mining & Drilling
By Paul Watson / The Toronto Star
A mining boom that has turned Canada’s North into the country’s fastest growing economy is threatening a vast stretch of the Yukon that is one of the continent’s last unspoiled wildernesses.
Central Yukon’s Peel River watershed, a pristine region almost as big as New Brunswick, is just one of the natural treasures coveted by mining and oil and natural gas companies riding surging global commodity prices.
Demand for the mineral resources of the Yukon, the Northwest Territories and Nunavut is so strong, the Conference Board of Canada expects their economies to grow by an average 7 per cent in 2012 and 2013, “easily outpacing the Canadian average.”
The hunger for resources from rapidly developing countries such as China and India are combining with a warming climate and new technology to draw mining, oil and natural gas companies farther north.
That trend isn’t going to be short-lived, predicts the Conference Board, a privately funded economic and policy research agency.
“Over the past two years, new mines have reached the production stage in both territories, and more are scheduled to start up over the next decade. From 2012 to 2025, mining’s share of the Yukon and Nunavut economies will double.”
After decades of struggling to thrive, the territories’ governments, and many of their people, are eager to cash in on the resource bonanza.
But opponents insist the environment is too fragile, and the economic benefits too limited, to justify the inevitable damage to nature.
A major front line in their escalating battle over Canada’s North is the Peel watershed, a rare North American gem, most of which aboriginal leaders and conservationists are determined to keep away from miners and drillers.
The Peel watershed is drained by seven major rivers that run untamed through mountain ranges and lush valleys where nature has been left largely to her own since the dawn of time.
For some 67,000 stunning square kilometres, there are no parks or marked trails, no campgrounds or RV hookups, only isolated hunting camps, and the wild plants and animals that live in one of Canada’s most diverse ecosystems.
Human visitors number only in the hundreds each year, mainly paddlers and hunters who venture into the remote region in canoes or on horseback and float planes.
The region is rich in iron ore, gold, uranium, zinc and other minerals as well as oil and natural gas.
Mining companies have several camps on the edge of the watershed, waiting for the green light from the Yukon’s government to rush in, clear roads and start digging.
Last summer, a six-member planning commission appointed by the government and First Nations, proposed a compromise that would permanently protect only 55 per cent of the Peel watershed.
Another 25 per cent would be conserved, with periodic reviews to decide if it should be opened up to development. Various land uses, including mining, would be allowed in the remaining 20 per cent.
It was less than what First Nations and conservationists had fought for, but they accepted the compromise. The Yukon government reserved judgment as it went into an election last fall.
In February, the Yukon’s new premier, Darrell Pasloski, a former Conservative Party candidate for the federal Parliament, announced what he called eight core principles to guide decisions on how to regulate land use in the Peel.
They include a call for “special protection for key areas,” while pledging to “manage intensity of use” and “respect the importance of all areas of the economy.”
Pasloski’s government also said it would respect private interests and final agreements with First Nations.
Along with conservation groups, leaders of the First Nations accuse the government of dumping the planning commission’s widely supported plan, forged through some seven years of study and often bitter debate.
Pasloski’s promise of more consultations is actually cover for an effort to gut the commission’s compromise, said Karen Baltgailis, executive director of the Yukon Conservation Society.
“They are proposing to completely change the plan and open up the Peel watershed to roads and industrial development,” Baltgailis said from Whitehorse, the federal territory’s capital.
Leaders of the Tr’ondek Hwech’in, Na-Cho Nyak Dun, Vuntut Gwitchin, and the Gwich’in Tribal Council accused the Yukon government of violating the Umbrella Final Agreement, a framework for settling land claims.
Read more from The Toronto Star: http://www.thestar.com/news/canada/article/1162051–hungry-miners-covet-yukon-s-pristine-peel-watershed-wilderness
