by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Feb 12, 2012 | Colonialism & Conquest, Indigenous Autonomy
By Indian Country Today staff
The Navajo call them Doko’oo’sliid, or “Shining On Top.” To the Hopi, the peaks are Nuvatukaovi, or “The Place of Snow on the Very Top.” Whatever name they bear, the San Francisco Peaks are sacred to no less than 13 tribes. So Thursday’s decision by the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals to allow Arizona Snowbowl to make artificial snow out of wastewater is a serious blow to Native American religious beliefs.
Tribes use the peaks for various ceremonies for healing, well-being, balance, commemoration, passages and the world’s water and life cycles.
The Navajo believe the Creator placed them between four mountains: Blanca Peak in Colorado, Mount Taylor in New Mexico, the San Francisco Peaks in Arizona and Hesperus Peak in Colorado. The San Francisco Peaks are the sacred mountains to the west of the Navajo homeland.
The Sacred Land Film Project points out that Navajos collect herbs from the slopes of the peaks and bury the umbilical cords of their children there.
A website dedicated to Navajo religion explains how Navajo beliefs differ from those held by Christians. “In contrast to the Judeo Christian religions which tend to celebrate people and events, and thus can be practiced anywhere, the Navajo religion is founded on relationships to specific places. The Navajo religion is defined by and cannot be separated from its relationship to specific geographical places. These sites are sacred because of special religious events which have occurred in that particular site.”
Ernie Zah, spokesman for Navajo Nation President Ben Shelly, said the decision February 9 was “a disappointment. Although the San Francisco Peaks are not within our reservation, they are within our traditional boundaries, within our realm of dwelling, and we make offerings on the Peaks, we have prayers and songs that incorporate not only the San Francisco Peaks but all elements of life, and this court decision to potentially allow the use of reclaimed water to generate snow negates our inherited traditional foundations.”
Lloyd Thompson, a Navajo medicine man, explained to the Navajo Times in 2002 that religious understanding isn’t extended to Native Americans. “If we (Navajo people) took sewer water and put it on Mount Sinai, we’d be put in jail, fined, and maybe even attacked,” he said. Mount Sinai is the site where Moses is said to have received the Ten Commandments from God. He also told the Navajo Times that the sewer water that would be used isn’t just contaminated with human waste but also with body parts and blood from hospitals and mortuaries.
Native American sacred sites aren’t like churches, mosques or synagogues where people can worship without interference because those buildings are owned privately. Many sacred sites are on federal land. A 2005 High Country News article discusses this aspect and asks “Can federal lands still be sacred?”
In the article Joe Shirley Jr., then-president of the Navajo Nation, said: “To Native Americans, desecrating the San Francisco Peaks with wastewater is like flushing the Koran down the toilet.”
Read more from Indian Country Today: http://indiancountrytodaymedianetwork.com/2012/02/10/sacred-site-faces-legalized-desecration-from-arizona-snowbowl-wastewater-97050
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Feb 11, 2012 | Toxification
By AFP
It is the nation’s second water pollution scare in a month, after factories in the southern region of Guangxi contaminated water supplies for millions with toxic cadmium and other waste in January.
The ship, reportedly South Korean, was docked in Zhenjiang city on the Yangtze river last Thursday when it leaked phenol — an acid used in detergents — into the water because of a faulty valve, local authorities reported.
Residents started complaining their tap water had a strange smell on Friday, and soon rumours that a capsized ship was polluting the river sparked a run on bottled water in at least two cities in Jiangsu province, the Shanghai Daily said.
One photo carried by the official China Daily newspaper showed a supermarket shelf stripped nearly bare as a customer loaded water bottles into a shopping cart.
The water quality had now returned to normal, the government of Zhenjiang, in Jiangsu, said in a statement late Tuesday.
A resident in the city of three million told AFP the run on water appeared to have eased on Wednesday.
“There was panic buying of bottled water for a couple of days. But it stopped after we received a government notice clarifying that the tap water is safe now,” the resident, who declined to be named, told AFP.
Zhenjiang officials would not comment when contacted by AFP on Wednesday. The South Korean Consulate in Shanghai, meanwhile, said it was not aware of the incident.
Phenol — also called carbolic acid — can irritate the eyes and skin, damage the liver and kidneys, and impair the nervous system if absorbed, according to the US Occupational Safety and Health Administration.
The incident comes hot on the heels of the more serious environmental scandal in Guangxi, where a 300-kilometre (190-mile) section of the Longjiang River was polluted by toxic cadmium and other waste.
Read more at Physorg: http://www.physorg.com/news/2012-02-yangtze-river-pollution-panic-china.html
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Feb 9, 2012 | Climate Change
By Steve Connor
The total volume of water that has melted from all of the world’s polar ice sheets, ice caps and mountain glaciers over the past decade would repeatedly fill Britain’s largest lake, Windemere, more than 13,000 times, according to one of the most comprehensive studies of the Earth’s frozen “cryosphere”.
Using a unique pair of satellites that have monitored the disappearing ice over the entire surface of the globe, scientists estimated that some 1,000 cubic miles of ice has disappeared between 2003 and 2010 – enough to cover the US in one-and-a-half feet of water.
The survey found that the melting of the cryosphere has been responsible for raising sea levels by about half an inch over the same period, equivalent to a rise of about 1.5mm a year. This was on top of sea-level increases due to the thermal expansion of seawater caused by rising ocean temperatures.
Data gathered by the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE), a joint satellite project run by Nasa and the German government, also found that the amount of ice melting from the mountain glaciers and ice caps that were not in Greenland or Antarctica was actually significantly smaller than previous estimates had suggested.
Instead of contributing nearly 1mm of sea level rise per year as previously suggested, some of the Earth’s glaciers and ice caps, especially in the Himalayas and other mountain ranges in Asia, were melting significantly slower than expected, contributing about 0.4mm of sea level rise per year – less than half the amount predicted.
One explanation for the previous overestimates could be that most of the glaciers that have been studied intensively are at lower altitudes and therefore more prone to melting. Higher glaciers are colder and less susceptible and yet only 120 glaciers out of 160,000 glaciers and ice caps have been directly measured from the ground.
The GRACE satellite experiment, however, covered the entire globe and found that all the world’s glaciers and ice caps combined, apart for those in Greenland and Antarctica, had lost about 148 billion tonnes of ice, or about 39 cubic miles, annually between 2003 and 2010. The individual glaciers on the fringes of Greenland and Antarctic contributed an additional 80 billion tons over the same period, the study published in Nature found.
“This is the first time anyone has looked at all of the mass loss from all of the Earth’s glaciers and ice caps with GRACE,” said John Wahr, professor of physics at the University of Colorado at Boulder, who was part of the research team that analysed the satellite data.
“The Earth is losing an incredible amount of ice to the oceans annually, and these new results will help us to answer important questions in terms of both sea-level rise and how the planet’s cold regions are responding to global change.”
Professor Jonathan Bamber, of Bristol University, said: “Melting glaciers are an iconic symbol of climate change… they seem to have been receding, largely uninterrupted, almost everywhere around the world for several decades.”
1,000 Cubic miles of ice has disappeared between 2003 and 2010 from polar caps.
From The Independent: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/billions-of-tons-of-water-lost-from-worlds-glaciers-satellite-reveals-6672129.html
