Deforestation

By Barriere Lake Solidarity Around 20-30 members of the Algonquins of Barriere Lake were read their rights by Sûreté du Québec officers late last night, warning of arrests today if people did not allow logging to proceed. Yesterday, families from the Barriere Lake Algonquin First Nation who are impacted by the Resolute logging operation issued a letter to Quebec’s Ministry of Natural Resources voicing their opposition to the Ministry’s unilateral decision to clear-cut their territory. The impacted families also proposed to the Quebec government several resolutions to work together towards peaceful co-existence in the region. ...

By Oliver Milman / The Guardian The world’s densest population of orangutans is set to be “extinguished” by a massive new wave of fires that is clearing large tracts of a peat swamp forest in the Indonesian island of Sumatra, conservationists have warned. Environmentalists claim that satellite images show a huge surge in forest blazes across the Tripa peat swamp in order to create palm oil plantations, including areas that have not been permitted for clearing. ...

By The Wilderness Society Today the U.S. House of Representatives passed a package of anti-wilderness bills (H.R. 2578), including H.R. 1505, the “National Security and Federal Lands Protection Act.” H.R. 1505 would hand over “operational control” of federal public lands within 100 miles of the Canadian and Mexican borders to the U.S. border patrol, and could open national parks, wildlife refuges, wilderness and other public lands to development, such as construction and road building. Rep. Raul Grijalva’s (D, AZ-7) amendment to strike H.R. 1505 from the package was unfortunately defeated. This package of bills now awaits movement in the Senate. ...

By Agence France-Presse Surging demand for palm oil in India for cooking and everyday grocery items is driving tropical forest destruction in Indonesia, Greenpeace said Tuesday. In its report “Frying the Forest” the group called on Indians to boycott products by brands Britannia, ITC, Parle and Godrej, such as biscuits and soap, until the companies commit to sustainable palm oil supply chains. “Palm oil plantations in Indonesia are expanding rapidly every year to meet India’s demands,” Greenpeace forest campaigner Mohammed Iqbal Abisaputra said in Jakarta. ...

By Survival International Earth’s ‘most threatened tribe’ has made a desperate appeal for the Brazilian government to halt the illegal logging that is ravaging its territory, as the Amazon’s logging season starts in earnest. The Awá tribe already suffers the fastest rate of deforestation in the Amazon, and the start of the dry season has in previous years brought a huge upsurge in illegal loggers. The Awá’s urgent message pleads with Brazil’s Minister of Justice to ‘evict loggers from our land immediately… before they come back and destroy everything.’ ...

By Vincent Bevins / Los Angeles Times The Brazilian government is pressing forward with controversial legislation that critics say will lead to widespread destruction of the Amazon rain forest. After months of heated discussion, President Dilma Rousseff on Monday presented a final version of the bill that was heavily influenced by the country’s powerful agricultural lobby. The update to the country’s 1965 Forestry Code would reduce both the amount of vegetation landowners must preserve and the future penalties paid for those who currently flout environmental laws. After valuable wood is sold, much of the land in deforested areas ends up being cleared for grazing cattle and agriculture. ...

By Jeremy Hance / Mongabay According to a new report by Greenpeace, top U.S. car companies such as Ford, General Motors, and Nissan are sourcing pig iron that has resulted in the destruction of Amazon rainforests, slave labor, and land conflict with indigenous tribes. Spending two years documenting the pig iron trade between northeastern Brazil and the U.S., Greenpeace has discovered that rainforests are cut and burned to power blast furnaces that produce pig iron, which is then shipped to the U.S. for steel production. ...

By Paulina Abramovich / Agence France-Presse A new gold rush is sweeping through Latin America with devastating consequences, ravaging tropical forests and dumping toxic chemicals as illegal miners fight against big international projects. With international market prices for metals high, informal “wildcat” mining has been on the rise in recent years in countries like Bolivia, Colombia and Peru, itself one of the largest producers of silver, copper and gold. Mining investments in those countries are expected to reach some $300 billion in 2020, according to the Inter-American Mining Society. ...

By Max Wilbert / Deep Green Resistance Lester Brown’s exhaustively researched book, Plan B 4.0 – Mobilizing to Save Civilization, is a bold and impressive effort to chart a course to ecological sustainability, one of very few books that attempts this worthwhile goal. Brown lists 4 steps that Plan B 4.0 focuses on to achieve sustainability: Stabilize climate by cutting emissions by at least 80% by 2020 Stabilize population at 8 billion or lower Eradicate poverty Restore natural earth systems (soil, aquifers, forests, grasslands, oceans) These are excellent goals to begin with, and show that Brown is extremely serious about his mission, and is truly concerned about justice and the welfare of the human population. They also show that he understands one of the fundamental obstacles to true change – the interlocking relationship between environmental destruction and human exploitation. For example, Brown calls for debt relief for poor nations – an admirable position against the interests of international financiers and for the interests of poor and exploited people. Few analysts truly understand this relationship at both a theoretical and real-world level, and Brown moves beyond the average call for sustainability by acknowledging the seriousness of this issue. ...

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. ...