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 | Mining & Drilling
By Steve Hargreaves / CNN
U.S. imports of what environmentalists are calling “dirty oil” are set to triple over the next decade, raising concerns over the environmental impact of extracting it and whether pipelines can safely transport this Canadian oil.
The United States currently imports over half a million barrels a day of bitumen from Canada’s oil sands region, according to the Sierra Club. By 2020, that number is set to grow to over 1.5 million barrels — or nearly 10% of the country’s current consumption.
The U.S. Energy Information Administration’s overall Canadian oil production numbers are in-line with the Sierra Club’s projected pace.
Bitumen is a heavy, tar-like oil. It needs to be heavily processed in order to be turned into lighter, easier to refine, crude oil. Because bitumen is so thick, to make it more fluid and easier to move by pipeline, it gets diluted with natural gas liquids.
Besides the sheer amount of energy and water needed to process and extract bitumen, environmentalists say it’s more dangerous to move because it’s more corrosive to pipelines than regular crude.
While the industry maintains bitumen is safe, the danger of transporting it is one of the reasons there is so much opposition to the Keystone pipeline expansion, which is supposed to carry it, among other oil products.
“We’ve got all this unconventional crude, and we’re completely unprepared for it,” said Michael Marx, a senior campaign director at the Sierra Club. “It’s definitely more dangerous” than regular oil.
Marx says bitumen is not only more abrasive than traditional crude, it’s 15 to 20 times more acidic.
The Sierra Club, along with other environmental groups, recently put out a report showing that pipelines in Alberta, where bitumen is commonly transported, had 16 times the number of leaks than pipelines in the United States, which generally don’t carry it.
Plus, when bitumen does leak, environmentalists say it’s harder to clean up. Unlike regular oil, they say it’s heavier than water, meaning it will sink to the bottom of lakes, rivers or bays.
“We just don’t have the technical sophistication to vacuum oil off the bottom of a river,” he said.
Bitumen currently comes into this country via a pipeline running from Alberta to Wisconsin and in the original Keystone pipeline that terminates in Illinois.
But Canada is planning on vastly increasing the amount of oil — and bitumen — that it gets out of its oil sands region. To get that oil out, more infrastructure needs to be built.
Along with the proposed Keystone expansion, other ideas call for pipelines to Canada’s West Coast, to the Atlantic Coast through New England, and an expansion of rail lines. All of these routes would pass through sensitive ecological areas.
Canada’s oil industry rejects the “dirty oil” moniker.
They say it is more energy and water intensive than some forms of light crude, but not more so than many of the other heavy oils used in the Untied States from places like Mexico, Venezuela, or even California.
The pipeline industry says transporting bitumen isn’t any more dangerous than transporting regular crude.
They point to other studies that show it’s not any more abrasive or corrosive to pipelines.
Read more from CNN: http://money.cnn.com/2012/04/30/news/economy/oil-imports/index.htm
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Apr 19, 2012 | Biodiversity & Habitat Destruction
By Rhett A. Butler / Mongabay
More than 150 new dams planned across the Amazon basin could significantly disrupt the ecological connectivity of the Amazon River to the Andes with substantial impacts for fish populations, nutrient cycling, and the health of Earth’s largest rainforest, warns a comprehensive study published in the journal PLoS ONE.
Scouring public data and submitting information requests to governments, researchers Matt Finer of Save America’s Forests and Clinton Jenkins of North Carolina State University documented plans for new dams in Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador, and Peru. They found that 40 percent of the projects are already in advanced planning stages and more than half would be large dams over 100 megawatts. 60 percent of the dams “would cause the first major break in connectivity between protected Andean headwaters and the lowland Amazon”, while more than 80 percent “would drive deforestation due to new roads, transmission lines, or inundation.”
“These results are quite troubling given the critical link between the Andes Mountains and the Amazonian floodplain,” said lead author Finer in a statement. “There appears to be no strategic planning regarding possible consequences to the disruption of an ecological connection that has existed for millions of years.”
Finer and Jenkins note that the Andes are a critical source of sediments, nutrients, and organic matter for the Amazon river, feeding the floodplain that supports the rich Amazon rainforest. The Amazon and it tributaries are critical highways for migratory fish that move to headwaters areas to spawn.”Many economically and ecologically important Amazonian fish species spawn only in Andean-fed rivers, including a number that migrate from the lowlands to the foothills,” the authors write. “The Andean Amazon is also home to some of the most species rich forests and rivers on Earth. The region is documented to contain extraordinary richness for the most well studied taxa… and high levels of endemism for the understudied fishes. Therefore, any dam-driven forest loss or river impacts are of critical concern.”Finer and Jenkins conducted a meta-analysis of river connectivity and infrastructure to produce an “ecological impact score” for all 151 dams. 47 percent of the dams were classified as “high impact” while only 19 percent were rated “low impact”. Eleven of the dams would directly affect a conservation area.
The hydroelectric projects would also have social impacts. Forty dams would be constructed “immediately upstream or downstream” on an indigenous territory.Worryingly the authors conclude that there is seemingly no basin-wide policy assessment of the potential social and ecological impacts of the dam-building spree.“We conclude that there is an urgent need for strategic basin scale evaluation of new dams and a plan to maintain Andes-Amazon connectivity,” said study co-author Jenkins in a statement. “We also call for a reconsideration of the notion that hydropower is a widespread low impact energy source in the Neotropics.” Finer and Jenkins warn that the perception dams in tropical forest areas are a clean energy source could lead to perverse subsidies for the projects via the carbon market.
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Apr 17, 2012 | Indigenous Autonomy, Lobbying
By Rachel Nuwer / The New York Times
At a casual glance, Lake Turkana in northern Kenya may not seem a fount of milk and honey. The temperature around the lake hovers around 100 degrees, and tourists are warned not to approach the water because of the crocodiles and vipers lurking among the volcanic rocks.
Yet Lake Turkana, the world’s largest permanent desert lake, is regarded by many anthropologists as the cradle of humankind. Today it serves a vital purpose for local indigenous communities that depend on its waters for fish and other resources; in 1997, citing its rich biodiversity, Unesco listed it as a World Heritage site.
Ikal Angelei, 31, one of the six winners of this year’s Goldman Environmental Prize, grew up playing on Lake Turkana’s dusty shores, chatting with old fishermen who sold their daily catch to her family and others. When she graduated from high school, she moved to the capital to study at the University of Nairobi, traveling later to the United States to earn a master’s degree in public policy and political science at Stony Brook University on Long Island.
Then she returned home and began working on community outreach for a group called the Turkana Basin Institute.
That’s when she learned about a proposed dam.
The chairman of the institute, Richard Leakey, approached her with a document outlining the plan for the dam, on the Omo River in Ethiopia — one of Lake Turkana’s lifelines. “He said to me, this is your people, your lake, your problem,” Ms. Angelei said in an interview. His words stirred her, she said, and she began researching the dam project in her spare time.
If completed, the Gibe 3 Dam() would be the largest hydroelectric plant in Africa and provide increased electrical power to Kenya and Ethiopia. But in a region more desperate for food than electricity, the dam would take a significant toll on water levels and thus on fisheries, potentially worsening relations between disparate communities that are already enmeshed in resource-based conflicts.
“At first, I thought, it can’t be real,” Ms. Angelei said. “I couldn’t imagine the area without the lake.” Reflecting on her father’s own anti-dam activism in the late 1980s, she began making phone calls, sending e-mails, and broadcasting appeals from a local radio station.
Day by day, her campaign gained resonance as more and more people from divided and marginalized local communities shared their stories with her. In 2009 she founded a grass-roots organization, Friends of Lake Turkana, to provide a unified voice for the peoples of the lake.
Together they demanded that the Kenyan government and investors in the dam halt the $60 billion project. To Ms. Angelei’s surprise, the World Bank, the European Investment Bank and the African Development Bank all withdrew their financing. Last year the Kenyan Parliament mandated that the government commission an independent environment assessment from Ethiopia.
“The feeling that the actual construction had lost its funding was amazing — it gives me hope that we can go on,” Ms. Angelei said.
The struggle is not quite over. China, the last big investor, is still pushing for construction. Ms. Angelei believes that ultimately governments will have to step up to put the Gibe 3 Dam to rest. “China may have green policies they’re trying to implement, but as long as there’s not a format for holding Chinese companies and banks accountable, then the policies do not work,” she said.
Taxpayers in Western countries could help by holding their governments responsible for backing flawed development projects, she added.
Although she has frequently been discouraged, Ms. Angelei said, witnessing the struggles of local families and women helped her keep her goal in sight. Often she was approached by strangers who could offer her little more than blessings and encouragement, she said: “It was seeing the look in people’s eyes that kept me going.”
For her efforts to protect her community, Ms. Angelei was awarded the Goldman Prize in the African regional category; each year, the prize is also awarded to a recipient in Asia, Europe, an island nation, North America and South or Central America. Each honoree receives an award of $150,000. (The program was initiated in 1990 by Richard and Rhoda Goldman, civic leaders and philanthropists in San Francisco.)
“These are people who normally go unrecognized but do so much of the work,” said Lorrae Rominger, the deputy director of the prize program. “Hopefully, when they go back to their country, people will look, listen, stop and want to know more about what they’re doing,” she said of the recipients.
As a young woman living in an an area where violence is out of check, Ms. Angelei stood out for “taking this risk upon herself and making such a big difference,” Ms. Rominger said.
Ms. Angelei said that struggling to make a difference is not easy but that not trying means becoming part of the problem. Her father often cited the adage that “it’s better to die on your feet than to live on your knees,” she said. “Even if you don’t win, at least you’re opening the platform for others after you.”
From The New York Times: http://green.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/04/16/to-fight-a-dam-rather-than-live-on-your-knees/
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Apr 10, 2012 | Colonialism & Conquest, Indigenous Autonomy
By Selva Rico Project
The Panamanian government has plans to build a massive hydroelectric plant within the Naso Indigenous Reserve. The Naso partake in week long road blocks as we hear from one of the matriarchs of the community, Virginia, and her views on what will become of their culture if the project is allowed to move forward.
From Selva Rica Project:
