by DGR News Service | Nov 17, 2015 | Biodiversity & Habitat Destruction, Obstruction & Occupation
Bobby Arbess aka Reuben Garbanzo / Friends of Carmanah/Walbran
Sixty years of logging have left only five percent of the primary low-elevation ancient temperate rainforests of Vancouver island remaining. These are some of the world’s most biologically productive forests, attaining higher levels of plant biomass than any ecosystem on earth. The logging industry liquidated the vast majority of these diverse native old-growth forest ecosystems, replacing them with even-aged monoculture tree plantations.
In 1991, 78 days of civil disobedience successfully halted 16 kilometres of scheduled road development through the last, expansive roadless ancient forest wilderness of the Walbran Valley on south Vancouver island. The Road Stops Here campaign combined prolonged tree-sits, road blockades, office occupations, street theatre, dramatic banner hangings, international support and massive public pressure to protect the land a few kilometres upstream from Canada’s iconic Pacific Rim National Park/West Coast Trail. This area is now known as ‘ground zero’ in British Columbia’s ancient forest movement, and a new battle is heating up.
The 16,000 hectare Carmanah/Walbran Provincial Park established in 1994 was a bittersweet victory for environmental activists who fought to save the valley’s ecologically outstanding ancient forests. The park boundaries were drawn up at a roundtable of stakeholders dominated by transnational forest companies owning timber licenses in the valley. The largest and oldest western redcedar trees in the world live at the confluence of three main branches of the watershed, at the heart of the wilderness now known as the Central Walbran Ancient Forest. The 485 hectares north of Walbran river, though designated a “special management zone”, was excluded from full park protection.
Twenty-five years of intense public scrutiny and regulatory provisions have limited “harvesting” to one cutblock in the Central Walbran Ancient Forest. The area is once again the focus of a direct action struggle to keep industrial destruction such as chainsaws, heli-logging and road building out of this wild rainforest of giant trees adjoining the park.
Ongoing road building on steep slopes of the unprotected land-base opens more and more old-growth remnants to clearcut logging. In reaction, there is a growing resurgence of public support, particularly in rural communities, for preserving the unfragmented wilderness of the Ancient Forest. Before a twelve-year government policy of shutting down local unionized mills in favour of raw log exports, the rural communities were based on thriving forestry towns. Now they watch the last massive trees pass their windows on the backs of the same log trucks which exported their livelihoods.
In June 2015, logging company Teal Jones submitted a plan for eight cutblocks in the area. With approval given for a heli-logging operation to high-grade cut a grove of 500-1200 year old trees, logging is now imminent in this pocket wilderness within the traditional Pacheedaht First Nations territory.
There is a slow-growing yet persistent expression of opposition to the logging within the indigenous community, to the chagrin of band council leaders. These leaders maintain a close relationship with the logging company and manage their own logging operations elsewhere in their territory, with plans to build and run a sawmill to generate jobs and revenues.
Many economic alternatives to continued old-growth logging are being proposed to address the high unemployment and poverty in the community:
- ethnocultural forest tourism
- harvesting of non-timber and other traditional forest products such as mushrooms, berries, and basketry materials
- ecologically-managed second growth plantations
- value-added production of finished wood products
- maximizing employment per cubic metre of wood and minimizing impacts on the land, waterways and biological diversity who depend on healthy and old-growth forests for their continued survival
The remaining old-growth forests of the Walbran valley harbor the highest concentrations of the Marbled Murrelet, an endangered seabird, anywhere outside of Alaska. The forests also shelter other old-growth dependent birds including the Western Screech owl, Western Pygmy owl, and Northern Goshawk, all listed by the Committee on the Status of Endangered Wildlife in Canada (COSEWIC) as vulnerable or threatened. Fifteen years of old-growth forest canopy research has revealed hundreds of species found nowhere else in the world, inhabiting suspended soil habitats of the forest canopy. These unique microhabitats are found as much as two hundred feet off the forest floor, and are not supported by second-growth forests.
Climate activists are now pointing out the critical ecological role these old forests play for the whole world in sequestering atmospheric carbon and buffering against runaway climate change.
The provincial government has ignored several requests to protect the area, including a petition card campaign of 6000 signatures presented in the legislature in September.
Activists built a witness camp in mid-September to host a continuous presence of observers watching for the start of logging in approved cutblock 4424. Others recently established a “checkpoint” action camp on a main road into the area. In autonomous actions of non-violent civil disobedience, they have erected sporadic road barricades denying access to logging and road-building crews. Company officials have requested that activists move their camp to allow for preparation of a large landing for loading logs onto trucks. So far the activists have not responded to this request and a confrontation in this area may be imminent.
The activists are calling for people to converge on Vancouver Island to observe, support, or participate in actions; make supporting donations through their website; contact BC residents and politicians; and spread the news of the threats and the resistance. They encourage members of the international community to join the Friends of Carmanah/Walbran Facebook group to stay in the loop of daily developments and to access action updates, relevant links and articles, road instructions, and carpool information.
The Friends of Carmanah/Walbran is a loose-knit community of people around the world sharing the passion, resources and collective action to protect this ancient forest, once and for all.
by DGR Colorado Plateau | Nov 16, 2015 | Biodiversity & Habitat Destruction
By Stephany Seay / Buffalo Field Campaign
Winter is setting in. Snow is accumulating, and with the snow comes migration. The deep snows of Yellowstone’s high plateau drive elk, buffalo, deer, moose, pronghorn, and bighorn sheep down to lower elevations. Unfortunately for hundreds of wild buffalo, this migration can mean the end of their lives; not because food is hard to find — winter is extremely challenging, but they are well-equipped to use their huge heads to “crater” through snow to get to the life-giving grasses below — but because the lower-elevation grasslands they seek are located in Montana where they enter a deadly conflict zone put in place by livestock interests.
As the buffalo begin their winter migration, BFC volunteers begin their own, returning to camp from all points of the compass to stand with the buffalo. The early snowfall necessitates the opening of our Gardiner camp along the Park’s north boundary, which we will do this Saturday; it’s been quite a few years since we opened up Gardiner camp this early. Patrols are preparing for another difficult season of documenting all actions made against the buffalo, monitoring their migration, and sharing our stories and first-hand experiences in an effort to end this war against wild buffalo. Will you join us?
In the Hebgen Basin, west of Yellowstone National Park, at least ten buffalo have already been killed by treaty hunters, and Montana’s state hunt will begin on Saturday, with other treaty hunts to follow. In addition to six months of combined state and treaty hunts, Yellowstone National Park, the Montana Department of Livestock, and even some tribal entities, are aiming to capture and kill hundreds more buffalo. Through hunting and slaughter, the Interagency Bison Management Plan agencies intend to kill nearly 1,000 Yellowstone buffalo. There are fewer than 5,000 left, and the Yellowstone population — the world’s most important — is made up of America’s last continuously wild herds. Ecologically extinct throughout their native range, and not yet federally protected, bison are endangered. In 2014 we filed a petition with the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service to protect wild bison under the Endangered Species Act, and sometime this fall the USFWS is expected to issue their finding. If they issue a negative finding, rejecting ESA protection — and no thanks to politics, we expect they will — we are prepared to take the next step.
Come stand with the buffalo if you can, help keep us on the front lines, and continue to spread the word to save these sacred herds.
Wild is the Way ~ Roam Free!
by DGR Colorado Plateau | Oct 15, 2015 | Listening to the Land, Lobbying
By Center for Biological Diversity
After pressure from the Center for Biological Diversity and allies, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service announced Wednesday it will release about 10 Mexican gray wolves into the wilds of southwestern New Mexico–a move scientists say is crucial to reduce dangerous inbreeding of the rare creatures.
Just days earlier, the Center and allies sent a letter to Interior Secretary Sally Jewell, signed by 43 groups and scientists, asking her to release at least five packs of endangered Mexican gray wolves into New Mexico’s 3.3-million-acre Gila National Forest.
Back in 1998, after a Center lawsuit, the Service began reintroducing Mexican gray wolves from captive-breeding facilities into their historic U.S. Southwest range, where they had been obliterated by federal poisoning and trapping. But the Service only released wolves into a small part of Arizona’s Apache National Forest, which quickly filled with wolf families.
“Releasing Mexican wolves to the wild is the only way to save these animals from extinction,” the Center’s Michael Robinson told the Santa Fe New Mexican. “It’s vital now that enough wolves get released to diversify their gene pool and ensure they don’t waste away from inbreeding.”
Read more in the Center for Biological Diversity press release and the Santa Fe New Mexican.
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Dec 14, 2014 | Biodiversity & Habitat Destruction
By Robin McKie / The Observer
A stark depiction of the threat hanging over the world’s mammals, reptiles, amphibians and other life forms has been published by the prestigious scientific journal, Nature. A special analysis carried out by the journal indicates that a staggering 41% of all amphibians on the planet now face extinction while 26% of mammal species and 13% of birds are similarly threatened.
Many species are already critically endangered and close to extinction, including the Sumatran elephant, Amur leopard and mountain gorilla. But also in danger of vanishing from the wild, it now appears, are animals that are currently rated as merely being endangered: bonobos, bluefin tuna and loggerhead turtles, for example.
In each case, the finger of blame points directly at human activities. The continuing spread of agriculture is destroying millions of hectares of wild habitats every year, leaving animals without homes, while the introduction of invasive species, often helped by humans, is also devastating native populations. At the same time, pollution and overfishing are destroying marine ecosystems.
“Habitat destruction, pollution or overfishing either kills off wild creatures and plants or leaves them badly weakened,” said Derek Tittensor, a marine ecologist at the World Conservation Monitoring Centre in Cambridge. “The trouble is that in coming decades, the additional threat of worsening climate change will become more and more pronounced and could then kill off these survivors.”
The problem, according to Nature, is exacerbated because of the huge gaps in scientists’ knowledge about the planet’s biodiversity. Estimates of the total number of species of animals, plants and fungi alive vary from 2 million to 50 million. In addition, estimates of current rates of species disappearances vary from 500 to 36,000 a year. “That is the real problem we face,” added Tittensor. “The scale of uncertainty is huge.”
In the end, however, the data indicate that the world is heading inexorably towards a mass extinction – which is defined as one involving a loss of 75% of species or more. This could arrive in less than a hundred years or could take a thousand, depending on extinction rates.
The Earth has gone through only five previous great extinctions, all caused by geological or astronomical events. (The Cretaceous-Jurassic extinction that wiped out the dinosaurs 65 million years ago was triggered by an asteroid striking Earth, for example.) The coming great extinction will be the work of Homo sapiens, however.
“In the case of land extinctions, it is the spread of agriculture that has been main driver,” added Tittensor. “By contrast it has been the over-exploitation of resources – overfishing – that has affected sealife.” On top of these impacts, rising global temperatures threaten to destroy habitats and kill off more creatures.
This change in climate has been triggered by increasing emissions – from factories and power plants – of carbon dioxide, a gas that is also being dissolved in the oceans. As a result, seas are becoming more and more acidic and hostile to sensitive habitats. A third of all coral reefs, which support more lifeforms than any other ecosystem on Earth, have already been lost in the last few decades and many marine experts believe all coral reefs could end up being wiped out before the end of the century.
Similarly, a quarter of all mammals, a fifth of all reptiles and a seventh of all birds are headed toward oblivion. And these losses are occurring all over the planet, from the South Pacific to the Arctic and from the deserts of Africa to mountaintops and valleys of the Himalayas.
A blizzard of extinctions is now sweeping Earth and has become a fact of modern life. Yet the idea that entire species can be wiped out is relatively new. When fossils of strange creatures – such as the mastodon – were first dug up, they were assumed to belong to creatures that still lived in other lands. Extant versions lived elsewhere, it was argued. “Such is the economy of nature,” claimed Thomas Jefferson, who backed expeditions to find mastodons in the unexplored interior of America.
Then the French anatomist Georges Cuvier showed that the elephant-like remains of the mastodon were actually those of an “espèce perdue” or lost species. “On the basis of a few scattered bones, Cuvier conceived of a whole new way of looking at life,” notes Elizabeth Kolbert in her book, The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History. “Species died out. This was not an isolated but a widespread phenomenon.”
Since then the problem has worsened with every decade, as the Nature analysis makes clear. Humans began by wiping out mastodons and mammoths in prehistoric times. Then they moved on to the eradication of great auks, passenger pigeons – once the most abundant bird in North America – and the dodo in historical time. And finally, in recent times, we have been responsible for the disappearance of the golden toad, the thylacine – or Tasmanian tiger – and the Baiji river dolphin. Thousands more species are now under threat.
In an editorial, Nature argues that it is now imperative that governments and groups such as the International Union for Conservation of Nature begin an urgent and accurate census of numbers of species on the planet and their rates of extinction. It is not the most exciting science, the journal admits, but it is vitally important if we want to start protecting life on Earth from the worst impacts of our actions. The loss for the planet is incalculable – as it is for our own species which could soon find itself living in a world denuded of all variety in nature. As ecologist Paul Ehrlich has put it: “In pushing other species to extinction, humanity is busy sawing off the limb on which it perches.”
From The Guardian: http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2014/dec/14/earth-faces-sixth-great-extinction-with-41-of-amphibians-set-to-go-the-way-of-the-dodo
by DGR News Service | Oct 7, 2014 | Biodiversity & Habitat Destruction, Colonialism & Conquest, Protests & Symbolic Acts, Toxification
By Sacred Mauna Kea
Mauna Kea Protest
Tuesday, October 7, 2014 — 7am to 2pm,
Saddle Road at the entrance to the Mauna Kea Observatory Road
Native Hawaiians and non-Hawaiians will gather for a peaceful protest against the Astronomy industry and the “State of Hawaii’s” ground- breaking ceremony for a thirty-meter telescope (TMT) on the summit of Mauna Kea.
Native Hawaiians and non-Hawaiians will gather for a peaceful protest
against the Astronomy industry and the “State of Hawaii’s” ground-
breaking ceremony for a thirty-meter telescope (TMT) on the summit of
Mauna Kea.
CULTURAL ISSUES: Mauna Kea is sacred to the Hawaiian people, who
maintain a deep connection and spiritual tradition there that goes
back millennia.
“The TMT is an atrocity the size of Aloha Stadium,” said Kamahana
Kealoha, a Hawaiian cultural practitioner. “It’s 19 stories tall,
which is like building a sky-scraper on top of the mountain, a place
that is being violated in many ways culturally, environmentally and
spiritually.” Speaking as an organizer of those gathering to protest,
Kealoha said, “We are in solidarity with individuals fighting against
this project in U.S. courts, and those taking our struggle for
de-occupation to the international courts. Others of us must protest
this ground-breaking ceremony and intervene in hopes of stopping a
desecration.”
Clarence “Ku” Ching, longtime activist, cultural practitioner, and a
member of the Mauna Kea Hui, a group of Hawaiians bringing legal
challenges to the TMT project in state court, said, “We will be
gathering at Pu’u Huluhulu, at the bottom of the Mauna Kea Access
Road, and we will be doing prayers and ceremony for the mountain.”
When asked if he will participate in protests, he said, “We’re on the
same side as those who will protest, but my commitment to Mauna Kea is
in this way. We are a diverse people…everyone has to do what they know
is pono.”
ENVIRONMENTAL ISSUES: The principle fresh water aquifer for Hawaii
Island is on Mauna Kea, yet there have been mercury spills on the
summit; toxins such as Ethylene Glycol and Diesel are used there;
chemicals used to clean telescope mirrors drain into the septic
system, along with half a million gallons a year of human sewage that
goes into septic tanks, cesspools and leach fields.
“All of this poisonous activity at the source of our fresh water
aquifer is unconscionable, and it threatens the life of the island,”
said Kealoha. “But that’s only part of the story of this mountain’s
environmental fragility. It’s also home to endangered species, such as
the palila bird, which is endangered in part because of the damage to
its critical habitat, which includes the mamane tree.”
LEGAL ISSUES: Mauna Kea is designated as part of the Crown and
Government lands of the Hawaiian Kingdom.
Professor Williamson PC Chang, from the University of Hawaii’s
Richardson School of Law, said, “The United States bases its claim to
the Crown and Government land of the Hawaiian Kingdom on the 1898
Joint Resolution of Congress, but that resolution has no power to
convey the lands of Hawaii to the U.S. It’s as if I wrote a deed
saying you give your house to me and I accepted it. Nobody gave the
land to the U.S., they just seized it.”
“Show us the title,” said Kealoha. “If the so-called ‘Treaty of
Annexation’ exists, that would be proof that Hawaiian Kingdom citizens
gave up sovereignty and agreed to be part of the United States 121
years ago. But we know that no such document exists. The so-called
‘state’ does not have jurisdiction over Mauna Kea or any other land in
Hawaii that it illegally leases out to multi-national interests.”
“I agree with how George Helm felt about Kahoolawe,” said Kealoha. “He
wrote in his journal: ‘My veins are carrying the blood of a people who
understood the sacredness of land and water. Their culture is my
culture. No matter how remote the past is it does not make my culture
extinct. Now I cannot continue to see the arrogance of the white man
who maintains his science and rationality at the expense of my
cultural instincts. They will not prostitute my soul.’”
“We are calling on everyone, Hawaiians and non-Hawaiians alike, to
stand with us, to protect Mauna Kea the way George and others
protected Kahoolawe. I ask myself every day, what would George Helm
do? Because we need to find the courage he had and stop the
destruction of Mauna Kea.”
From Sacred Mauna Kea: http://sacredmaunakea.wordpress.com/
