Tag: Ecocide

Calls to Halt Construction of Massive Oilfield in One of Africa’s Last Wildernesses /+ video

   from Human Wrongs Watch and (IPS) By Ed Holt* Jul 8 2021

Wildlife and environmental campaigners have called for international action as concerns grow over a project to create a massive oilfield in one of Africa’s last wildernesses.

A large part of the oil exploration areas in both Botswana and Namibia falls within the Okavango River Basin which flows into the Okavango Delta, a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Fracking is banned in some countries and has been blamed for serious water pollution, among others, and threats to the regional water supply are among environmentalists’ biggest concerns.Credit: Servaas van den Bosch/IPS

Okavango Delta under threat from oil, gas exploration ...

ReconAfrica, a Canadian oil and gas company, has licensed drilling areas in over 34,000sq km of land in parts of northern Namibia and Botswana that overlap with Africa’s Kavango-Zambezi Trans-frontier Conservation Area (KAZA), which includes land in Angola, Botswana, Namibia, Zambia, and Zimbabwe.

A large part of the exploration areas in both Botswana and Namibia falls within the Okavango River Basin which flows into the Okavango Delta, a UNESCO World Heritage Site which supports the world’s largest remaining population of endangered savanna elephants, as well as dozens of other endangered or vulnerable species such as rhinos, wild dogs, and pangolins. It is also home to 200,000 people.

Paradise is Closing Down: The Ghastly Spectre of Oil ...

Paradise is Closing Down: The Ghastly Spectre of Oil …

Continue reading “Calls to Halt Construction of Massive Oilfield in One of Africa’s Last Wildernesses /+ video”

Life on Earth is Dying. Thousands of Species Cease to Exist. We humans are the Cause

By Robert J. Burrowes Global Research, May 13, 2021 Theme: Environment

On the day that you read this article, 200 species of life on Earth (plants, birds, animals, fish, amphibians, insects, reptiles) will cease to exist. Tomorrow, another 200 species will vanish forever.

The human onslaught to destroy life on Earth is unprecedented in Earth’s history. Planet Earth is now experiencing its sixth mass extinction event and Homo sapiens is the cause.

Moreover, this mass extinction event is accelerating and is so comprehensive in its impact that the piecemeal measures being taken by the United Nations, international agencies and governments constitute a tokenism that is breathtaking in the extreme.

Continue reading “Life on Earth is Dying. Thousands of Species Cease to Exist. We humans are the Cause”

Giant toxic Garbage dump Found in Mediterranean Sea

A huge dump on the bottom of the Mediterranean

It looks like a sequence of a post-apocalyptic film, but in reality it is the bottom of the Mediterranean. The images obtained by an underwater exploration robot have revealed an underwater landfill where you can find almost everything.

There are kitchen furniture, boats, toilet bowls, mattresses, tables, Christmas trees, clothes, wheels, bricks, dolls, boots, car mats, even a complete car, overturned and half-buried more than 500 meters deep. The sea urchins and fish use the garbage as a refuge and the crabs walk along the bottom dragging shreds of plastic.

Garbage found at the bottom of the Strait of Messina, in Italy.

It is the largest concentration of garbage ever recorded in deep waters anywhere in the world, according to the authors of a study published in Scientific Reports. The dump is at the bottom of the Strait of Messina, which separates the island of Sicily from the region of Calabria, in mainland Italy.

Continue reading “Giant toxic Garbage dump Found in Mediterranean Sea”

#FreeWestPapua: Trans-Papua Highway.. Ecocide and Genocide for Quick Cash $$

A Highway Megaproject Tears at the Heart of New Guinea’s Rainforest

 

…. illustrations and #FreeWestPapua info added…. The Indonesian government is building a 2,700-mile road network on the island of New Guinea, opening up some of the world’s last great tropical rainforests to development and threatening unique indigenous cultures. Can international pressure force Indonesia to scale back this megaproject?

By William Laurance • January 17, 2019

The Pacific island of New Guinea, which harbors one of the world’s largest and most intact tropical rainforests, is the epicenter of Australasia’s tropical biodiversity. The island’s unique denizens, including tree-kangaroos and birds of paradise, are representative of a regional flora and fauna so fantastically diverse that Charles Darwin once mused such creatures must have been made by a “separate Creator.” Today, researchers are still merely sampling its primeval intricacies.


The Indonesian military clears trees for a segment of the Trans-Papua Highway in northern Papua. Daniel Beltrá / Greenpeace

New Guinea is also among the most culturally and linguistically diverse places on earth, with human populations that are genetically distinct from all others alive today. Not until the 1930s did the Western world discover many hundreds of unique indigenous societies in New Guinea’s vast mountains and highlands. And only in the 1950s did European colonists, miners, and loggers begin to exploit the region.

Today, these unique rainforests are being carved up by a massive, ill-advised, and exceptionally risky road-building scheme. The Trans-Papua Highway will sprawl like a massive spiderweb over much of the Indonesian-ruled, western half of New Guinea, known as Papua or West Papua.


The areas circled are projected to experience intense deforestation when the Trans-Papua Highway is completed. Courtesy of William Laurance

Totalling 2,700 miles in length, this highway network will penetrate deeply into densely forested or remote mountainous regions to increase access to minerals, fossil fuels, timber, and land for agri-business ventures, including vast palm oil plantations. Many road segments will traverse precariously steep, virgin terrain. Continue reading “#FreeWestPapua: Trans-Papua Highway.. Ecocide and Genocide for Quick Cash $$”

Solar Foods, from just air and water, COULD save the planet

It sounds like science fiction but the Finnish company Solar Foods has already produced food with just water , electricity, the CO2 from air and trace chemicals. For starters this COULD in theory replace all animal feed with a cheaper, local, substitute, releasing 76% of arable land for forests or whatever, and abolishing world hunger.

The possibilities of Solar Food are endless, it looks like the ‘technical fix’ that could save the planet from runaway ecocide.

monsanto-ecocide

 

But as with all such promises it’s predator capitalism that rules, if we let it.  Perhaps Exxon, Bayer or Nestlé will buy up and bury the patents. And one of the first initiatives of the Solar Foods company is .. not to attack world hunger but to develop food growing technology on Mars!

Solar Foods produces an entirely new kind of nutrient-rich protein using only air and electricity.

An Electrifying Idea

What if we abandoned photosynthesis as the means of producing food, and released most of the world’s surface from agriculture?

By George Monbiot,   It’s not about “them”, it’s about us. The horrific rate of biological annihilation reported this week – 60% of the Earth’s vertebrate wildlife gone since 1970 – is driven primarily by the food industry. Farming and fishing are the major causes of the collapse of both marine and terrestrial ecosystems. Continue reading “Solar Foods, from just air and water, COULD save the planet”

“The Fire is Catching”: Fierce and Spreading Opposition to Fracked Gas Pipelines in the Virginias

Walking The Line: On the Frontlines Against the Pipelines

Image result for stop Mountain Valley Pipeline

via It’s Going Down  ..  The following report details the growing struggle against the Mountain Valley Pipeline on the Virginia and West Virginia border. In the Jefferson National Forest a line is being drawn.

If you turn North from highway 460 on the border of Virginia and West Virginia onto US 641, stay right at the fork, and stop with Pocahontas Rd on your left, you will run right into it. It’s a little gravel road that winds back into the mountain all the way to the AT. On it, a garrison of Forest Service trucks, state police, and private security idle their engines, enforcing the line.

Related image

On December 28, 2017 a line was drawn when Mountain Valley Pipeline, LLC obtained authorization to construct a 42 inch pipeline through the forest. The proposed channel would conduct fracked natural gas and disturb many communities opposed to the project and to natural gas infrastructure.

The Mountain Valley Pipeline (MVP) is a proposed 42-inch interstate fracked gas pipeline to run 303 miles from north-western West Virginia to south central Virginia. The project is budgeted at USD 3.5 billion. The MVP would enable significantly more gas to be shipped, which means significantly more gas can be extracted using fracking techniques in the Marcellus shale region. Tech and financial details   HERE https://www.banktrack.org/project/mountain_valley_pipeline/pdf

Continue reading ““The Fire is Catching”: Fierce and Spreading Opposition to Fracked Gas Pipelines in the Virginias”

American Ecocide: Dicamba mega toxic Herbicide escapes Control

This miracle weed killer was supposed to save farms. Instead, it’s devastating them.

By Caitlin Dewey   

BLYTHEVILLE, ARK. — Clay Mayes slams on the brakes of his Chevy Silverado and jumps out with the engine running, yelling at a dogwood by the side of the dirt road as if it had said something insulting.

Its leaves curl downward and in on themselves like tiny, broken umbrellas. It’s the telltale mark of inadvertent exposure to a controversial herbicide called dicamba.

Image result for Dicamba nightmare kills everything

“This is crazy. Crazy!” shouts Mayes, a farm manager, gesticulating toward the shriveled canopy off Highway 61. “I just think if this keeps going on . . .”

“Everything’ll be dead,” says Brian Smith, his passenger.

The damage here in northeast Arkansas and across the Midwest — sickly soybeans, trees and other crops — has become emblematic of a deepening crisis in American agriculture.

Farmers are locked in an arms race between ever-stronger weeds and ever-stronger weed killers.Image result for Dicamba nightmare kills everything

The dicamba system, approved for use for the first time this spring, was supposed to break the cycle and guarantee weed control in soybeans and cotton. The herbicide — used in combination with a genetically modified dicamba-resistant soybean — promises better control of unwanted plants such as pigweed, which has become resistant to common weed killers.Image result for Dicamba nightmare kills everything

The problem, farmers and weed scientists say, is that dicamba has drifted from the fields where it was sprayed, damaging millions of acres of unprotected soybeans and other crops in what some are calling a man-made disaster. Critics say that the herbicide was approved by federal officials without enough data, particularly on the critical question of whether it could drift off target.

Government officials and manufacturers Monsanto and BASF deny the charge, saying the system worked as Congress designed it. Continue reading “American Ecocide: Dicamba mega toxic Herbicide escapes Control”

Blockaders Force Trucks to Leave Lumber in Poland’s Bialowieza Forest


reblogged from Hambach Forest

The ancient Bialowieza Forest continues to be logged at times late into the night and from early hours of the morning by more than 3 harvesters capable of downing more than 500 trees a day.

However following a week long intermission the anti logging resistance strikes again. When the trucks loading lumber which is presently spread throughout the forest have been observed by morning patrols, over 30 activists left the Camp for the Primal Forest.

After reaching the nearby location, 6 lock-on doubles, later joined by two more, locked on with metal pipes to a 18 wheeler loaded with lumber and to another one that was practically empty.

The activists have locked on on top of the lumber load, on the sides and in the back and to lumber supports on the partially empty vehicle. Banners were dropped from the top, sides and front of the vehicles. Continue reading “Blockaders Force Trucks to Leave Lumber in Poland’s Bialowieza Forest”

Humans and our livestock and Pets are now 97% of land mammals

check it  here:   /mass_of_humans_vs_wild_animals_is_xkcd_correct/

Today wildlife accounts for only 3 percent of earth’s land mammals

…..”Our destruction is so familiar—so synonymous with civilization—in fact, that we tend to overlook how strange the world that we’ve made has become. For instance, it stands to reason that, until very recently, all vertebrate life on the planet was wildlife.

But astoundingly, today wildlife accounts for only 3 percent of earth’s land animals; human beings, our livestock, and our pets take up the remaining 97 percent of the biomass.

This Frankenstein biosphere is due both to the explosion of industrial agriculture and to a hollowing out of wildlife itself, which has decreased in abundance by as much as 50 percent since 1970. This cull is from both direct hunting and global-scale habitat destruction: almost half of the earth’s land has been converted to farmland.

The oceans have endured a similar transformation in only the past few decades as the industrial might developed during World War II has been trained on the seas. Each year fishing trawlers plow an area of seafloor twice the size of the continental United States, obliterating the benthos.
Gardens of corals and sponges hosting colorful sea life are reduced to furrowed, lifeless plains. What these trawlers have to show for all this destruction is the removal of up to 90 percent of all large ocean predators since 1950, including familiar staples of the dinner plate like cod, halibut, grouper, tuna, swordfish, marlin, and sharks.

Continue reading “Humans and our livestock and Pets are now 97% of land mammals”

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