by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Jan 21, 2014 | Indigenous Autonomy, Indirect Action, Mining & Drilling
By Claire Stewart-Kanigan / The Dominion
“Eco-consciousness” and “green living” are centrepieces of product branding for the Toyota Prius. But that feel-good packaging has rapidly worn thin for members of the Algonquin Nation and residents of Kipawa, Quebec, who are now fighting to protect traditional Algonquin territory from devastation in the name of hybrid car battery production.
In 2011, after nearly two years of negotiations, Matamec Explorations, a Quebec-based junior mining exploration company, signed a Memorandum of Understanding with Toyotsu Rare Earth Canada (TRECan), a Canadian subsidiary of Japan-based Toyota Tsusho Corporation. The memorandum confirmed Matamec’s intention to become “one of the first heavy rare earths producers outside of China.” In pursuit of this role, the company plans to build an open-pit Heavy Rare Earth Elements (HREE) mine directly next to Kipawa Lake, the geographical, ecological, and cultural centre of Kipawa.
Rare earths are a group of 17 elements found in the earth’s crust. They are used to produce electronics for cell phones, wind turbines, and car batteries. Rare earths are notorious for their environmentally costly extraction process, with over 90 per cent of the mined raw materials classified as waste.
Toyota has guaranteed purchase of 100 per cent of rare earths extracted from the proposed Kipawa mine, for use in their hybrid car batteries, replacing a portion of Toyota’s supply currently sourced out of China.
Over the last seven years, China has reduced the scale of its rare earths exports via a series of annual tonnage export caps and taxes, allegedly out of concern for high cancer rates, contaminated water supply, and significant environmental degradation. Despite China’s stated intention to encourage manufacturers to reduce their rare earths consumption, the US, the EU and Japan have challenged China’s export caps through the World Trade Organization (WTO) and are seeking new deposits elsewhere for exploitation. Toyota and Matamec are seeking to make Kipawa part of this shift.
Kipawa is a municipality located on traditional Algonquin territory approximately 80 kilometres northeast of North Bay, Ontario, in what is now known as western Quebec. The primarily Indigenous municipality is home to approximately 500 people, including members of Eagle Village First Nation and Wolf Lake First Nation, of the Anishinaabeg Algonquin Nation. The town of Kipawa lies within the large Ottawa River Watershed, a wide-branching network of lakes, rivers and wetlands. Lake Kipawa is at the heart of the Kipawa region.
Lifelong Kipawa resident and Eagle Village First Nation member Jamie Lee McKenzie told The Dominion that the lake is of “huge” importance to the people of Kipawa. “We drink it, for one….Everyone has camps on the lake [and] we use it on basically a daily basis.” This water network nourishes the richly forested surroundings that make up the traditional hunting and trapping grounds of the local Algonquin peoples.
“Where the proposed mine site is, it’s my husband’s [ancestral] trapping grounds,” said Eagle Village organizer Mary McKenzie, in a phone interview with The Dominion. “This is where we hunt, we fish, I pick berries….We just want to keep our water.” Jamie Lee and Mary McKenzie also emphasized the role of lake-based tourism in Kipawa’s economy.
The Kipawa HREE project would blast out an open-pit mine 1.5 kilometres wide and 110 meters deep, from the summit of a large lakeside hill. It would also establish a nearby waste dump with a 13.3 megatonne capacity. Rock containing the heavy rare earth elements dysprosium and terbium would be extracted from the pit via drilling and explosives, processed at an on-site grinding and magnetic separation plant, and then transported by truck to a hydrometallurgical facility 50 kilometers away for refining.
Matamec confirmed in its Preliminary Economic Assessment Study that some effluence caused by evaporation and precipitation is inevitable, especially during the snowmelt period. A community-led presentation argued that this could create acid mine drainage, acidifying the lake and poisoning the fish.
“There’s going to be five [truckloads of sulfuric acid transported from pit to refinery] a day….[I]n a 15-year span, that’s 27,300 truckloads of sulfuric acid,” said Mary McKenzie. “We’re worried about spills and the environment….They’re talking about neutralizing [the acid], when a spill does occur, with lime. I have [sources that say] lime is also a danger to the environment.”
In a 2013 presentation in Kipawa, Matamec stated that while “some radioactivity [due to the presence of uranium and thorium in waste rock] will be present in the rare earth processing chain,” its effects will be negligible. Yet these reassurances ring hollow for some, who point to cancer spikes observed in communities near rare earths projects in China. In the project’s economic assessment, Matamec itself indicated that waste rock is too dangerous for use in concrete and dikes.
“Whatever goes up in the air [from blasting and evaporation] comes down….A lot of those particles are radioactive,” said Mary McKenzie. “Our animals eat this [plant matter potentially affected by the mine]….We depend on our moose, we depend on our fish, so that’s a scary situation.” The refining process also uses strong acids and bases.
While Matamec stated in the Assessment that “most” of the water used in processing will be recycled, a portion of the post-processing solution will be directed into the lake or tailings ponds. The mine is intended to be operational for 13 years, but tailings ponds would require maintenance for generations, and leaching is always possible. Adding to this risk, Matamec has “assumed that [certain] tailings will not be acid generating or leachable” and will therefore only use watertight geomembrane for a portion of the tailings ponds.
With the approval process being accelerated by both public and private factors, production could begin as early as 2015. Quebec’s regulations call for provincial environmental impact assessments only when projects have a daily metal ore production capacity that is considerably higher than the national standard—7,000 metric tons per day versus 3,000 in the Canadian Environmental Assessment Act. What’s more, by categorizing HREE in the same regulatory group as other metals, these tonnage minimums fail to reflect the higher toxicity and environmental costs of heavy rare earths extraction.
Because of this, the Kipawa project does not trigger a provincial-level assessment. It only requires clearance from the Canadian Environmental Assessment Agency and a certificate of authorization granted by the provincial Minister of Sustainable Development, Environment and Parks.
On the private side, the assessment process has been fast-tracked by a series of multimillion-dollar payments from TRECan to Matamec ($16M as of April 2013). According to Matamec president André Gauthier in a July 2012 press release, this makes Matamec “the only rare earth exploration company to have received funds to accelerate and complete a feasibility study and an environmental and social impact assessment study of a HREE deposit.”
The chiefs of Eagle Village and Wolf Lake First Nations have been demanding a consent-based consultation and review process since the project was quietly made public in 2011—one that exceeds “stakeholder” consultation standards and acknowledges the traditional relationship of the Algonquin people to the land. Residents only became widely aware of Matamec’s plans following the company’s community consultation session in April 2013.
Jamie Lee McKenzie has not been impressed by Matamec’s consultations. “They come in and they have a meeting…and they tell us all the good things about the mine,” McKenzie told The Dominion. “[They say,] ‘It will give you jobs. We need this to make batteries for green living,’ but that’s it.”
Local organizers told The Dominion that a Matamec-chaired community focus group had been cancelled during the early summer after one local participant asked that her critical questions be included in the group’s minutes. Following what many residents see as the failure of Matamec and provincial assessment agencies to meaningfully engage with Kipawa residents, the community has taken matters into their own hands.
In the summer of 2013, Kipawa residents began to organize, with the leadership of Eagle Village and Wolf Lake members. Petitions containing over 2,500 signatures were sent to provincial ministers, demanding a provincial environmental assessment as well as “public hearings to review the Mining Act…to strengthen rare earth environmental monitoring.” As of late November, there had been no official responses to the petitions, and no positive response to letter-writing campaigns directed at the office of the federal Minister of Environment. (Quebec adopted a new Mining Act in early December, as this article went to print.)
But demands have grown beyond calls for review. “We’re not okay with the BAPE [provincial assessment]; we’re not okay with the mine,” said Mary McKenzie. “We’re against the [project] 100 per cent.” In September, McKenzie helped organize a 100-person anti-mine protest on the shores of Kipawa Lake. In November, the resistance network formalized their association as the Lake Kipawa Protection Society, committed to stopping the mine through regional education, local solidarity, and creative resistance strategies like a “Tarnish Toyota” day of action.
The Kipawa HREE project, if approved, would open doors for the numerous other companies exploring the watershed—such as Globex, Fieldex, Aurizon, and Hinterland Metals—as well as for heavy rare earths mining in the rest of Canada.
“We have mining companies all over in our area here,” said Mary McKenzie. “Matamec is the most advanced, but it’s not just Matamec: we want all the mining out of our region.”
The mine is not the only project on the fast-track: Algonquin and local resistance efforts are picking up momentum, and backing down on protecting the water and land is not on the agenda.
“This is ancestral ground,” McKenzie stressed. “We can fight this.”
Claire Stewart-Kanigan is a student, Settler, and visitor on Haudenosaunee territory.
From The Dominion: http://dominion.mediacoop.ca/story/toyota-prius-not-so-green-after-all/20373
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | May 26, 2013 | Colonialism & Conquest, Indigenous Autonomy
By John Vidal / The Observer
Land conflicts between farmers and plantation owners, mining companies and developers have raged across Indonesia as local and multinational companies have been encouraged to seize and then deforest customary land – land owned by indigenous people and administered in accordance with their customs. More than 600 were recorded in 2011, with 22 deaths and hundreds of injuries. The true number is probably far greater, say watchdog groups.
The Indonesian national human rights commission reported more than 5,000 human rights violations last year, mostly linked to deforestation by corporations. “Deaths of farmers caused by the increase in agrarian conflicts all across Indonesia are increasing,” said Henry Sarigih, founder of the Indonesian Peasant Union, which has 700,000 members.
“The presence of palm oil plantations has spawned a new poverty and is triggering a crisis of landlessness and hunger. Human rights violations keep occurring around natural resources in the country and intimidation, forced evictions and torture are common,” said Sarigih. “There are thousands of cases that have not surfaced. Many remain hidden, especially by local authorities,” he says.
Communities complain that they are not warned, consulted or compensated when concessions are handed out and that they are left with no option but to give up their independence and work for minimal wages for the companies.
At fault are badly drafted laws, unclear regulations, corruption and heavy-handed security and paramilitary forces – all of which favour large business over the poor. Illegal land purchases and logging are mostly supported by police, armed forces and local government staff. Companies are even allowed to work with security forces.
Feelings run high when land is taken and livelihoods are wiped out by deforestation. In December 2011, 28 protesters from a logging concession area on Padang island in Sumatra sewed their mouths shut in front of the parliament building in Jakarta in a protest against having their land “grabbed” by a giant paper and pulp company.
Last year, three people were killed in a clash with security forces during a protest over gold prospectors in Bima on the island of Sumbawa. Farmers from Mesuji in Sumatra claimed that security forces murdered residents to evict them from their land.
Over 10m hectares (24.7m acres) of land has been given away and converted to plantations in the last 10 years, forcing thousands of communities to give up forest they have collectively used for generations. Politicians offer land to supporters and give permission to develop plantations with little thought for the human or ecological consequences. In addition, government attempts to move landless people from densely populated areas to less populous areas with “transmigration” policies have caused major conflicts with indigenous groups in provinces like Papua and Sulawesi.
“Who controls the land in Indonesia controls the politics. Corruption is massive around natural resources. We are seeing a new corporate colonialism. In the Suharto era you were sent to prison for talking about the government. Now you can be sent there for talking about corporations,” says Abetnego Tarigan, director of Friends of the Earth Indonesia in Jakarta.
Three of the group’s staff members, including its south Sumatra director, are in prison following protests at the involvement of the police and military in a land dispute involving a state-owned palm oil plantation firm. “The scale of the conflicts is growing. Every day new ones are reported. More and more police are now in the plantations. Government is trying to clamp down on mass protests,” said Tarigan.
“These developments are classed as ‘growth’ but what we are seeing is the collapse of communities of fisherfolk or farmers and increasing poverty. We are exchanging biodiversity for monocultures, local economies for global ones, small-scale producers are becoming labourers and community land is becoming corporate. This is the direction we are going.”
From The Guardian: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/may/25/indonesia-new-corporate-colonialism
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | May 12, 2013 | Agriculture, Building Alternatives, Climate Change
By Joshua Headley / Deep Green Resistance New York
In no other industry today is it more obvious to see the culmination of affects of social, political, economic, and ecological instability than in the global production of food. As a defining characteristic of civilization itself, it is no wonder why scientists today are closely monitoring the industrial agricultural system and its ability (or lack thereof) to meet the demands of an expanding global population.
Amidst soil degradation, resource depletion, rising global temperatures, severe climate disruptions such as floods and droughts, ocean acidification, rapidly decreasing biodiversity, and the threat of irreversible climatic change, food production is perhaps more vulnerable today than ever in our history. Currently, as many as 2 billion people are estimated to be living in hunger – but that number is set to dramatically escalate, creating a reality in which massive starvation, on an inconceivable scale, is inevitable.
With these converging crises, we can readily see within agriculture and food production that our global industrial civilization is experiencing a decline in complexity that it cannot adequately remediate, thus increasing our vulnerability to collapse. Industrial agriculture has reached the point of declining marginal returns – there may be years of fluctuation in global food production but we are unlikely to ever reach peak levels again in the foreseeable future.
While often articulated that technological innovation could present near-term solutions, advocates of this thought tend to forget almost completely the various contributing factors to declining returns that cannot be resolved in such a manner. There is also much evidence, within agriculture’s own history, that a given technology that has the potential to increase yields and production (such as the advent of the plow or discovery of oil) tends to, over time, actually reduce that potential and significantly escalate the problem.
Peak Soil
A largely overlooked problem is soil fertility. [1] A civilization dependent on agriculture can only “sustain” itself and “progress,” for as long as the landbase and soil on which it depends can continue to thrive.
The landscape of the world today should act as a blatant reminder of this fact. What comes to mind when you think of Iraq? Cedar forests so thick that sunlight never touches the ground? “The Fertile Crescent,” as this region is also known, is the cradle of civilization and if we take a look at it today we can quickly deduce that overexploitation of the land and soil is inherent to this way of life. The Sahara Desert also serves as a pressing example – a region once used by the Roman Empire for food cultivation and production.
But this problem has not escaped our modern industrial civilization either, even despite some technological advances that have been successful at concealing it. The only thing we have genuinely been “successful” at is postponing the inevitable.
Currently, industrial agriculture depletes the soil about a millimeter per year, which is ten times greater than the rate of soil formation. Over the last century, we have solved this problem by increasing the amount of land under cultivation and by the use of fertilizers, pesticides, and crop varieties.
Industrial civilization has expanded so greatly, however, that we currently already use most of the world’s arable land for agriculture. To solve the problems of peak soil today, as we have previously, would require doubling the land currently used for cultivation at the cost of some of the worlds last remaining forests and grasslands – most notably the Amazon and the Sahel. Not only is this option impractical, given the current state of the climate, it is wholly insane.
Another problem we face today is that more than a half-century of reliance on fertilizers and pesticides has severely reduced the level of organic matter in the soil. An advance in chemical fertilizers and/or genetic engineering of crops, while promising boosted yields in the near-term, will only further delay the problem while at the same time possibly introducing even greater health risks and other unforeseen consequences.
Decreasing Yields & Reserve Stocks
According to an Earth Policy Institute report in January, global grain harvests and stocks fell dangerously low in 2012 with total grain production down 75 million tons from the record year before. [2] Most of this decrease in production occurred as a result of the devastating drought that affected nearly every major agricultural region in the world. The United States – the largest producer of corn (the world’s largest crop) – has yet to fully recover from the drought last year and this is a cause for major concern.
Overall, global grain consumption last year exceeded global production requiring a large dependence on the world’s diminishing reserve stocks. And this isn’t the first time it has happened – 8 out of the last 13 years have seen consumption exceed production. In an escalating ecological crisis this is likely to be the new “normal.” This fact, in itself, is a strong indication that industrial civilization is dangerously vulnerable to collapse.
The issue here is two-fold: resource scarcity (industrial agriculture requires fossil fuels in every step of the process), soil degradation, and climate disruptions (droughts, floods, etc.) are severely reducing the yields of industrial agriculture; at the same time (and precisely because of those facts), we are becoming increasingly reliant on carryover reserve stocks of grains to meet current demands thus creating a situation in which we have little to no capacity to rebuild those stocks.
As Joseph Tainter describes in The Collapse of Complex Societies, a society becomes vulnerable to collapse when investment in complexity begins to yield a declining marginal return. Stress and perturbation are common (and constant) features of all complex societies and they are precisely organized at high levels of complexity in order to deal with those problems. However, major, unexpected stress surges (which do occur given enough time) require the society to have some kind of net reserve, such as excess productive capacities or hoarded surpluses – without such a reserve, massive perturbations cannot be accommodated. He continues:
“Excess productive capacity will at some point be used up, and accumulated surpluses allocated to current operating needs. There is, then, little or no surplus with which to counter major adversities. Unexpected stress surges must be dealt with out of the current operating budget, often ineffectually, and always to the detriment of the system as a whole. Even if the stress is successfully met, the society is weakened in the process, and made even more vulnerable to the next crisis. Once a complex society develops the vulnerabilities of declining marginal returns, collapse may merely require sufficient passage of time to render probable the occurrence of an insurmountable calamity.” [3]
Current global reserve stocks of grains stand at approximately 423 million tons, enough to cover 68 days of consumption. As population and consumption levels continue to rise while productive capacities fall, we will be more and more dependent on these shrinking reserves making our ability to address future stresses to the system significantly low.
Disappearance of the Arctic Sea Ice
One such “insurmountable calamity,” may be quickly on the horizon. This week, senior US government officials were briefed at the White House on the danger of an ice-free Arctic in the summer within two years. One of the leading scientists advising the officials is marine scientist Professor Carlos Duante, who warned in early April:
“The Arctic situation is snowballing: dangerous changes in the Arctic derived from accumulated anthropogenic green house gases lead to more activities conducive to further greenhouse gas emissions. This situation has the momentum of a runaway train.” [4]
Over the last few years, the excessive melting occurring in the Arctic region due to rising global temperatures has altered the jet stream over North America, Europe, and Russia leading to the very unprecedented heat waves and droughts responsible for most of the declining returns in agricultural production in recent years. As the warming and melting continue, these extreme weather events will exponentially get worse. In addition, the melting of the sea ice will significantly raise sea level with the potential to displace more than 400 million people.
The UK-based Arctic Methane Emergency Group recently released a public statement also indicating:
“The weather extremes from last year are causing real problems for farmers, not only in the UK, but in the US and many grain-producing countries. World food production can be expected to decline, with mass starvation inevitable. The price of food will rise inexorably, producing global unrest and making food security even more of an issue.” [5]
Social, Political, and Economic Instability
No civilization can avoid collapse if it fails to feed its population, largely because continued pressures on the system will result in the disintegration of central control as global conflicts arise over scarce necessities. [6] This process can occur rapidly and/or through a gradual breakdown. A likely scenario of rapid collapse would be the breakout of a small regional nuclear war – such as between Pakistan and India – which would create a “nuclear winter” with massive global consequences. If that could be avoided, then the threat of collapse will likely be more gradual through the continued decrease of marginal returns on food and essential services.
As these crises continue to increase in frequency and severity, their convergences will usher in a period of prolonged global unrest. [7] This was directly seen as a result of the 2007-08 grain crisis in which many countries restricted exports, prices skyrocketed, and food riots broke out in dozens of countries. Many of those countries were located within the Middle East and are credited as the fundamental circumstances that gave way to the Arab Spring in 2011.
This year the food price index is currently at 210 – a level believed to be the threshold beyond which civil unrest is probable. Further, the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization is already reporting record high prices for dairy, meat, sugar and cereals and also warns – due to the reduced grain stocks from last year’s droughts – that prices can be expected to increase later this year as well.
Another factor driving up the costs of food is the price of oil. Because the entire industrial agriculture process requires the use of fossil fuels, the high price of oil results in a corresponding rise in the price of food. The future of oil production and whether we have reached “peak oil” may still be a matter of contention for some, but the increasing reliance on extreme energy processes (tar sands, hydraulic fracturing, mountaintop removal, etc.) is a blatant indication that the days of cheap petroleum are over. This implies that costs for energy extraction, and therefore the price of oil and food, will only continue to rise dramatically in the foreseeable future.
As the struggle for resources and security escalates, governments around the world will rely more heavily upon totalitarian forms of control and reinforcement of order, especially as civil unrest becomes more common and outside threats with other countries intensify. However, this is also likely to be matched by an increase in resistance to the demands of the socio-political-economic hierarchies.
Emerging Alternatives
As system disruptions continue to occur and food and other essential resources become scarcer, remaining populations will have to become locally self-sufficient to a degree not seen for several generations. The need for restructuring the way in which our communities have access to food and water is greater now than perhaps ever before – and there are more than a few examples being built around the world right now.
A few weeks ago, I had the privilege of hearing a presentation at the Ecosocialist Conference in NYC on precisely these alternatives. Speaking on a panel entitled “Agriculture and Food: Sustainable or Profitable?” was David Barkin, a Distinguished Professor at the Universidad Autonoma Metropolitana in Mexico City, who has been collaborating with thousands of communities in Mexico and Latin America involved in constructing post-capitalist societies. [8]
In his presentation he spoke greatly about local groups – comprising of 30,000-50,000 people each, together being more than 130 million people – throughout Mexico and Latin America that are rebuilding their societies based on five principles that were written by the communities themselves and then systematized.
- Self-management; through a process of participatory democracy
- Solidarity; through rejecting the notion of wage-labor and re-organizing the entire work process
- Self-sufficiency; which includes contacts and exchanges between many organizations so that you are not limited to the resource or climate-base of a single community but a development of trade networks
- Diversification
- Sustainable regional resource management; most communities in Mexico and Latin American define a region based on the natural definition of watersheds, although that may not be the most applicable natural definition in other parts of the world
He also spoke of groups such as the EZLN as examples of groups building alternative models – not models that are working at a super-structural level to change government policy, but models that give power and control directly to the community for the purposes of self-sufficiency and sustainability.
In Peru, Bolivia, and Ecuador there is a phrase “El Buen Vivir” or “Sumak Kawsay,” – a cosmology that is said to come from indigenous cultures – that is actually informing how communities are rebuilding. It is proposed to promote sustainable relationships with nature and for communities to be less consumerist.
In addition to radically rebuilding our communities so that they exist not only wholly independent from industrial agriculture but also in harmony with the natural world, we need to build a greater resistance movement against industrial infrastructure that continues to threaten the very possibility of people all over the world from taking these steps.
Mining and its infrastructure, which is required for the development of solar panels and wind turbines, uses gigantic volumes of water for it to work. Because of this, in many parts of Mexico (where North American mining companies currently have concessions on 40% of the country’s land area) and Latin America, mining is a question of taking water away from agriculture. The struggle against mining is not just a struggle against environmental destruction, but it is a struggle for food.
The same can be said of foreign investments in wind turbine farms in Mexico and Puerto Rico, where local communities actually oppose these “renewable energy” infrastructures because they not only degrade the environment but also because it steals land that might otherwise be used for the direct needs of the locality.
Those of us in the most developed and industrialized nations need to radically alter our conceptions of sustainability and what is possible – a process that should be guided and influenced by those currently most vulnerable. Many well-meaning activists in the West tend to take perspectives that never really question our own standard of living – a standard of living David Barkin so rightfully articulated as an abomination.
We tend to favor “green energy” projects and the further development and industrialization of the “Global South” so that we don’t fundamentally have to make any sacrifices ourselves. Embedded in these perspectives are the racist and colonialist ideas that less developed countries in the world either don’t know what they want or don’t have the ability to create what they want themselves and thus need the technology and advances of the West to save them.
David Barkin’s presentation was a blatant reminder that this is far from the truth. Right now, in Mexico and Latin America, there are communities directly involved in building their own alternatives. And these aren’t communities of just a few hundred people; these aren’t small, insignificant projects. These are communities as large as 50,000 people each – an entire network of more than 130 million people – directly struggling and fighting for a radically different future.
We have much to learn and our time is running out. As industrial agriculture’s ability to produce food for the global population continues to decline, our resistance and our alternatives must escalate in lockstep – and there’s no reason for us to continue to ignore the alternative models and successes of our brothers and sisters in the rest of the world.
References
[1] Peak Soil
http://newint.org/features/2008/12/01/soil-depletion/
[2] Earth Policy Institute, Grain Harvest
http://www.earth-policy.org/indicators/C54/grain_2013
[3] Joseph Tainter, The Collapse of Complex Societies
[4] White House Warned on Imminent Arctic Ice Death Spiral
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/earth-insight/2013/may/02/white-house-arctic-ice-death-spiral
[5] Governments must put two and two together, and pull out all stops to save the Arctic sea ice or we will starve
http://www.ameg.me/index.php/2-ameg/49-announcement-governments-must-put-two-and-two-together-and-pull-out-all-stops-to-save-the-arctic-sea-ice-or-we-will-starve
[6] Can a Collapse of Global Civilization Be Avoided?
http://rspb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/280/1754/20122845.full#sec-4
[7] Why Food Riots are Likely to Become the New Normal
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/blog/2013/mar/06/food-riots-new-normal
[8] David Barkin – Ecosocialist Conference
http://youtu.be/6nJesyB5bdI?t=23m35s
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Sep 5, 2012 | Mining & Drilling, Obstruction & Occupation
By Rising Tide Australia
Activists entered the Hunter 8 Alliance compound at Rutherford before dawn today, erecting a wooden tripod to block access to the site, which is part of a Federally funded project to increase coal haulage capacity in the Hunter Valley. Activist Ned Haughton scaled the 10 metre high structure, where he remained for the next five and a half hours. Haughton has now been arrested, and will be charged with obstruction.
Steve Phillips, spokesperson for protest organisers Rising Tide, said: “This railway construction project is designed purely for the benefit of coal corporations, yet it is being paid for with taxpayers money.”
“Why are taxpayers dollars being handed over to rich mining corporations, in order to prop up a polluting industry that is destroying human health and the environment?”
“There is a coal rush under way in NSW, and public health, waterways, ecosystems, and the global climate are under assault. Massive coal mine projects, coal haulage projects, and coal port projects are in the pipeline. If all these projects go ahead, the consequences will be devastating.”
Today’s protest follows two consecutive days of community direct action against the Boggabri mine in the Gunnedah Basin – the coal industry’s “new frontier”. A major expansion of the Boggabri coal mine was approved by the NSW Government in July despite huge ecological impacts and overwhelming community opposition.
“We call on State and Federal Governments to abandon their infatuation with mining companies, and their addiction to fossil fuels. It’s time to take a stand and stop this coal rush before it’s too late.”
Key facts.
- The Maitland to Minimbah Third Track project is being constructed by Hunter 8 Alliance, which is a consortium of engineering company GHD, construction company John Holland, and the Federally owned Australian Rail Track Corporation.
- The objective of the project is to lift coal haulage capacity on the Hunter rail corridor to 200 million tonnes per annum. It includes construction of 23km of new rail track, and reconditioning of 9km of existing track.
- The Federal Government granted $114 million, through the ARTC, to the project.
From Rising Tide Australia
