Bolivia: Long march against Amazon Highway

BOLIVIA
Amazon Road Plan Has Native People on the March Again
By Franz Chávez

LA PAZ, Aug 12, 2011 (IPS) – Indigenous people in the eastern lowlands of Bolivia are again preparing to make the long march to La Paz, 21 years after their first such protest. They have vowed to make the trek in defence of their lands, which they say are threatened by plans for a highway to be built with the backing of the Brazilian government.

The 600-km march in repudiation of the projected road for heavy vehicle traffic through Bolivia’s Amazon region will set out Monday, Aug. 15 from Trinidad, the capital of the northeastern province of Beni, to La Paz in the western highlands, the seat of the Bolivian government.

The decision to mount the protest march follows the breakdown of talks between the Confederation of Indigenous Peoples of Eastern Bolivia (CIDOB) and the authorities in charge of the road project, which will affect a vast area between Beni and the central province of Cochabamba that is rich in biodiversity and where coca leaf cultivation is expanding.

The goal of the protest is to protect 13,000 people belonging to the Yuracaré, Trinitario and Chimán ethnic groups living in the area to be traversed by the road, indigenous leader Adolfo Moye of the autonomous Isiboro Sécure National Park and Indigenous Territory (TIPNIS) told IPS. He is an outspoken opponent of the 306-km road that would link Villa Tunari, in Cochabamba, to San Ignacio de Moxos, in Beni.–

Read More Here   http://ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=56835

 

Help Yuracaré, Trinitario and Chimán fight for their Amazon


permaculture:Eat Fresh Food all Year

Enjoy Fresh Food in Winter

Be more self-reliant by using natural cold storage.

Picture yourself on a frosty Christmas Day(okay in the Nth Hemisphere) serving your own tomatoes or carrots so sweet they’re like candy. And there you are in January, pulling crisp, fresh, raw heads of Chinese cabbage from a box in your cool cellar. Now it’s February, and in one hand, you’re hefting one of those big, rough-looking but fine-grained ‘Long Season’ beets for dinner and, in the other hand, several apples for the lunch box.

Fast-forward to March, and you’re returning to the warm kitchen with a fistful of carrots. Even in April? Of course. That’s you proudly adding your own garden-grown potatoes and garlic to the dinner menu.

In May, you might even find yourself, as we have, eating homegrown sweet potatoes. If you don’t grow a garden, you can buy carefully grown local vegetables in the fall, when they are at peak condition and prices are low, and store them for winter………..

Natural cold storage dovetails beautifully with the best use of your garden space. Many storage crops can be grown as succession crops after early peas, lettuce, radishes, spinach and snap beans.

This fall crop is the second half of the growing season, the half we miss out on if we don’t replant. When you have a cold place waiting for them, these fall-harvested vegetables can carry you well into a new-year bonus of productivity from the same patch of garden soil.

Nigeria: Shell admits 2 oil spills to deny 6800

Restoration of Nigeria’s environmentally devastated oil-producing Niger Delta region could take up to 30 years, cost $1 billion and become the largest cleanup operation in history, the United Nations said Thursday. A landmark report from the U.N. Environmental Program (UNEP) concluded that pollution from more than 50 years of oil operations in Nigeria’s Ogoniland region is more far-reaching than thought. The assessment, commissioned by the Nigerian government and funded by oil giant Shell, comes on the heels of the company admitting liability for two spills in Nigeria. Nigeria’s Niger Delta, the world’s third largest wetland, is diverse and rich with mangroves and fish-rich waterways. But oil drilling has turned it into one of the most oil-polluted places on Earth with more than 6,800 recorded oil spills, accounting for anywhere from 9 million to 13 million barrels of oil spilled, according to activist groups. But the environmental disaster has never received the kind of attention paid to last year’s oil catastrophe along the U.S. Gulf Coast. Amnesty International, which has researched the human rights impacts of pollution in the Delta, said people in the region have experienced oil spills on par with the Exxon Valdez disaster every year for the last half century. This has been going on for 50 years, with corruption, Neo Colonialism  and the criminal Oil Corporations working together. The damage would take at least 50 years to remedy, but this will never happen-.

Shell's defeat is also important for the future in that it highlights the effectiveness of taking court cases in the main homeland of a Corporation.

http://edition.cnn.com/2011/WORLD/africa/08/04/nigeria.oil.cleanup/

Nuke Meltdowns: radiation goes off the scale!

(IPS/Al-Jazeera) – Record levels of radiation have been recorded at the damaged Fukushima Daiichi plant reactor, just months after the nuclear accident resulting from the earthquake and tsunami in March.

The Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) reported that Geiger counters – a hand-held device used to measure radiation – registered their highest possible reading at the site on Monday.

Al Jazeera’s Aela Callan, reporting from Japan’s Ibaraki prefecture, said the level recorded was “fatal to humans” but that it was contained just to the plant’s site. However, scientists are planning to carry out more tests on Tuesday.

On Tuesday, TEPCO said it found another spot on the ventilation stack itself where radiation exceeded 10 sieverts per hour, a level that could lead to incapacitation or death after just several seconds of exposure.

The company used equipment to measure radiation from a distance and was unable to ascertain the exact level because the device’s maximum reading is 10 sieverts.

 

we’ll need 27 planet Earths by 2050,

Protecting bits of nature here and there will not prevent humanity from losing our life support system. Even if areas dedicated to conserving plants, animals, and other species that provide Earth’s life support system increased tenfold, it would not be enough without dealing with the big issues of the 21st century: population, overconsumption and inefficient resource use.

Without dealing with those big issues, humanity will need 27 planet Earths by 2050, a new study estimates.

The world population, currently at seven billion, is well beyond Earth’s ability to sustain. By 2050, with a projected population of 10 billion people and without a change in consumption patterns, the cumulative use of natural resources will amount to the productivity of up to 27 planet Earths, the study found.

Sustaining the current seven billion people on the planet requires a major shift in resource use. At present, the average U.S. citizen’s ecological footprint is about 10 hectares, while a Haitian’s is less than one. The planet could sustain us if everyone’s footprint averaged two ha, Mora said.

Read more HERE   http://ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=56685

 

Another of the authors, Peter Sale from the Canadian Institute for Water, Health and the Environment, put it like this:
"We are just taking too much - managing forests in such as way as they degrade, same with coastal waters, and we have to stop doing this as a species.
"I don't have a solution - I have struggled for some time trying to think what is the way to get people to realise how important this is - but if we don't find it soon, the future is a very grim one.
"We're talking about losing 50% of species in the next half century - that's faster than any previous mass extinction event - and anybody who thinks we can go through a mass extinction and be perfectly fine is just deluding themselves."

THE SOLUTION To Over Consumption   (some notes)

Assuming that a World anti capitalist revolution is not going to happen right now… more’s the pity… It’s high time that radical environmental groups began to think REAL.

One step that could be taken is to stop using fossil fuels. A huge but not impossible task. Renewable energy is approaching the level where it’s ‘cheaper’ than using fossil fuels. A safer, CO2-free non polluting fuel for vehicles has always existed  SEE HERE  https://thefreeonline.wordpress.com/category/ammonia-nh3-co2-free-fuel/

But the root of the problem is the mad greed and superconsumption that is the basis of the universal capitalist system.

A common sense moral approach would be for example to sabotage a coal plant, an arms or car factory  etc.  This is already happening, on a very small scale. Check it out HERE,  https://thefreeonline.wordpress.com/category/prison   Such largely symbolic publicity actions maybe only benefits the competition and put people out of work, but if many thousands of people were to start doing it …

Blogging to the consciences of middle class youth is all fine and good, but Direct Action on a massive scale is now needed.

Another sane  and moderate  idea (since their actions are destroying the planet) would be to physically attack  investors and directors in the worst Corporations. Let them retreat already to the luxury bunkers they are urgently preparing. However the ‘ruling class’ have all the security forces on the planet just itching to pounce on anyone who ‘gets real’ in this way, and every media outlet ready to scream ‘terrorist’ for the next 20 years. Also the question of guilt is very relative, few really understand what they are doing, and all of us know we are participating in trashing the Earth…. cont/

Read More HERE  http://southwestearthfirst.wordpress.com/2011/05/07/deep-green-resistance-strategy-to-save-the-planet/

Runaway Ice Melt NOW in Arctic

Here in Spain we’re having a cool summer. The Atlantic has been blocked by high pressure, giving us north winds. But in the Arctic temperature are up to 10 degrees C above normal, and ice melting may set a new all time record, causing unexpected and possible ‘runaway’ climate events worldwide.. Far from being a wakeup call, climate talks are ‘dead in the water’, and the arctic ice melt has sparked an obscene capitalist  power struggle to exploit natural resources in this fragile wilderness.

After a 10,000-year absence, massive wildfires have returned to the Arctic tundra

Arctic sea ice extent declined rapidly through the first two weeks of July, at a rate averaging nearly 120,000 square kilometers (46,000 square miles) per day. Ice extent is now tracking below the year 2007, which saw the record minimum September extent.” So far this summer, Arctic sea ice has been melting at a record pace. Satellite data, which go back to 1979, show that ice extent is currently lower than it was at the same time in 2007, the year that went on to shatter all previous records for low ice extent in September, the end of the melt season. Global Warming is both a cause and an effect of the ice melt-  Runaway Climate Change is caused by ‘Feedback’ or ‘Loop’ effects.. Less ice means heat is absorbed instead of reflected melting more ice which… Melting permafrost releases methane which raises temperature which melts more permafrost which…… Unheard of tundra fires release methane and blacken earth raising temperature , melting permafrost and causing more fires…. ETCETCETC We live in a fragile skin of breathable gas in an immense vacuum. The imminent danger is of uncontrollable climate change which could make the whole planet uninhabitable, like all others in our Solar System. The only solution is to immediately begin transition to an economy without CO2 releases..  This is perfectly possible. See other posts on NH3 fuel,.. cheaper, safer and CO2 -Free! https://thefreeonline.wordpress.com/category/ammonia-nh3-co2-free-fuel/

Climate talks ‘Dead in the Water’

This process is dead in the water,” said Yvo de Boer, the former head of the U.N. Climate Change Secretariat who stepped down last year to work at KPMG, a consultancy and auditing firm.

“It’s not going anywhere,” he said during the June 6-17 talks in Bonn among negotiators trying to avert more heatwaves, floods, droughts and rising sea levels.

Disputes between rich and poor on sharing curbs in greenhouse gases mean gridlock over the Kyoto Protocol, the existing U.N. plan which obliges about 40 industrialized nations to cut greenhouse gas emissions until 2012.

Article continues: http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/06/19/us-climate-idUSTRE75G2TC20110619

Runaway Ice Melt NOW in Arctic

Arctic sea ice extent declined rapidly through the first two weeks of July, at a rate averaging nearly 120,000 square kilometers (46,000 square miles) per day. Ice extent is now tracking below the year 2007, which saw the record minimum September extent.”

SEE DETAILS OF CO2-FREE fuel HERE   https://thefreeonline.wordpress.com/2011/06/22/green-gas-still-ignored-in-rush-for-profits/

See all NH3 posts HEREhttps://thefreeonline.wordpress.com/category/ammonia-nh3-co2-free-fuel/