The European Commission – the executive branch of the European Union (EU) – will be voting in the next couple days whether to designate Canada’s tar sands [search] as being “highly polluting”. Given tar sands’ terrible ecological impacts upon our shared global atmosphere – and Canadian boreal forests, water, and indigenous peoples - the answer should be painfully obvious, and a resounding YES. Such a designation would be a significant setback for tar sands growth. Yet given the power of the ecocidal oil oligarchy which rules Canada and much of the world, empowered global citizens need to let the EU know the world expects, indeed demands, the EU do the right thing in condemning tar sands – in order to establish a level playing field for a renewable, efficient, and conservation based energy future.

By Dr. Glen Barry, Ecological Internet
Earth Meanders come from Earth's Newsdesk

Human Family’s Ecocidal Death Wish

The ecological foundation of being is unraveling before our very eyes. Without ecosystems there is no life. Fiercely loving Earth is the answer. Let's sustain global ecology together like our shared survival and abundance depends upon it. And while we set out using classic civil disobedience tactics, let’s not dismiss out of hand any obstruction, uncivil disobedience, sabotage and targeted insurgency tactics – that are non-terrorist – and that may be necessary to achieve global ecological sustainability. The human family’s shared survival depends upon passionately defending Earth using all means necessary.

Earth's ecosystems are collapsing under the burden of human growth, destroying our one shared biosphere that makes life possible. Industrial growth – frantically destroying ecosystems to feed insatiable, ever-growing appetites – is an aberration, a mistake, a disease. If left untreated, this will be the end of the human family, all life, and Earth's very being. Infinite economic growth at the expense of ecosystems is impossible, and seeking endless and inequitable growth in consumption and population can only lead to collapse and massive die-off.

Humanity’s last best chance to justly and equitably sustain a livable planet is to protect and restore ecosystems, end fossil fuels, and a people's power Earth revolution to utterly destroy the ecocidal industrial growth machine. We are all bloody fools to tolerate and not immediately overthrow a violently ecocidal system that is killing us all. If we all understood the implications of global ecosystem collapse, we would go now, together, and slay the global growth machine. It is too late to escape profound ecological decline, yet complete disastrous social and ecological collapse – and possible end to most or all life – may yet be avoided.

Sustaining ecology must become society’s central organizing principle or humans and all species face horrendous death. Globally it is time for radical change to simply survive converging ecology, food, war, water, inequity, population, climate, jobs, ocean, and extinction crises. It is deeply troubling most "environmentalists" deny the severity of ecosystem collapse, rejecting out of hand revolutionary measures sufficient to sustain ecology.

TAKE ACTION HERE NOW!

Plans are to build a highway through Alto Purus - Peru’s largest national park – comprised of vital intact Amazonian rainforest ecosystems and inhabited by at least two 'uncontacted' indigenous tribes [search]. The Alto Purus protected rainforest in south-east Peru is an area of incredible biodiversity covering some of the most pristine forests in the southwestern Amazon and home to jaguars, monkeys and pink dolphins. To cut it with a road would compromise the integrity of the entire Amazonion basin and trigger the swift demise of some of Earth’s last isolated hunting and gathering tribes. One of the 'uncontacted' tribes in the park is known as the 'Mashco-Piro', thought to be the largest group i

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Earth is facing the twin global ecological emergencies of abrupt climate change and land being scoured of natural ecosystems. Sadly, corporate American NGOs and the United Nations are responding to these crises by further promoting logging ancient forests. The United Nations REDD+ program to protect primary and old growth forests as a climate change and deforestation solution has been hi-jacked by logging interests [search] and their big pro-logging NGO friends, and will instead subsidize primary forest logging for new plantations. REDD has become a gravy train for consultants, greenwashing NGOs and charlatans of many sorts - claiming logging ancient rainforests for the first time protects them! Old standing natural forest ecosystems are key to sustaining climate, ecosystems, biodiversity, local livelihoods humanity and the Earth System. Corporate NGOs supporting REDD+ must be compelled to stop their old forest logging greenwash - or face ridicule, protest, and an end to public support, until they do.

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Brazil's industrial agriculture lobby has forced through their Congress changes to the forest code [search], the primary legal instrument related to Amazon rainforest protections. It has been done without any scientific inputs, and in a way that will greatly expand industrial agriculture by reducing ecological protections. Newly elected President Dilma Rousseff must be encouraged to veto the bill, something she promised to do during the election. Efforts to address forest code deficiencies must recommence in a manner that incorporates the latest agro-ecological science regarding sustainable agriculture and the importance of large, connected and intact rainforest ecosystems within agricultural landscapes. Without a veto, recent progress in Amazon rainforest protection is at stake just as Brazil is to host the Rio+20 Earth Summit in 2012.

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Belize’s renowned rainforests [search], beaches, and Mayan homelands are threatened with a resource rampage by a corrupt government confronted with massive foreign debt. With the Prime Minister's permission, Colorado-based oil company US Capital Energy is drilling seismic testing lines through the ecologically spectacular Sarstoon-Temash national park - against international treaty commitments and a Belizean Supreme Court ruling. These cleared lines are now being used by poachers to ransack the rainforest, with stolen timbers transported to Guatemala and onward to China.

By Ecological Internet, http://www.climateark.org/
Contact: Dr. Glen Barry, glenbarry@ecologicalinternet.org

Last week the Northern Gateway tar sands pipeline [search] approval process - meant to transfer filthy tar sand oil from Alberta, Canada to Asia – was delayed one year until at least the end of 2013. The $5.5-billion, 1,200-kilometre double pipeline would transport up to 525,000 barrels per day of crude from Alberta’s environmentally devastating tar sands oilfields – traversing innumerable waterways, temperate rainforests, and sensitive coastal ecosystems – to ocean-going tankers for transport to Asia. The Enbridge Northern Gateway joint review panel announced the decision by email, noting “significant public interest in the Northern Gateway project.”

The pipelines would go through B.C.'s sensitive Pacific North Coast ecosystem, and threatens First Nations’ land and salmon economy. One mishap – such as project developer Enbridge’s recent broken pipeline fouling the Yellowstone River – will bring disastrous results and long-term loss of marine life, pristine waterways, and sensitive coastal ecosystems. First Nation opposition is strong and united, making clear the pipeline will never be allowed over their land, and with suggestions of massive civil disobedience if approved. The pipelines could not be constructed without breaking First Nation unity through financial inducements, or simply taking their land.

Today is my birthday and it’s going to be a good time. So as I craft a day of mirth, free spirit and all my favorite activities, let me ruminate upon what I wish for as gifts on this special day.

I want peace on Earth, real peace, the kind where the armies demobilize and don’t remain standing like it used to be. Peace where trillions aren’t wasted from funding public social needs. I want a real and permanent turning of tanks into ploughshares. War’s obscene waste of energy, materials, human potential and life cannot persist if human and ecological being are to continue. I want it to end now.

The truth is we are one human family, one species, perhaps from different lineages with a crazy uncle, but a family nonetheless. And I want us to start acting like it. Nation state boundaries are a new false construct meant to divide us. As a human family I want our basic universal rights strictly and unconditionally observed. The human condition is absolute freedom as long as we don’t hurt others. I want gods and governments off of and out of my body.

The New York State government is set to end its fracking ban [search] – a dangerous natural gas drilling method – placing its citizens, water and ecology at great risk. Fracking blasts water mixed with toxics at high pressure into the ground to shatter deep bedrock – releasing toxic methane, chemicals and other contamination – while destroying crucial water resources and destabilizing the land. Tell Democratic Governor Andrew Cuomo that fracking will never be environmentally acceptable, much less sustainable, and that it needs to be permanently banned. Failure to do so makes him personally responsible for vast water contamination that will forever poison New York citizens he has sworn to serve and protect.

The proposed Canadian Enbridge Northern Gateway tar sands pipelines [search] seek to export filthy oil to Asia. The delay of the Keystone pipeline – largely due to people power protest – makes this route all the more vital to Canada, if tar sands production and transport to the international marketplace are to grow. Ecosystems will be placed at risk from Alberta's massive clearcut mining of boreal forest, Western Canada's intricate waterways, to British Columbia’s precious and fragile temperate rainforests and coastal waters, endangering the First Nations' salmon economy. To keep the anti-tar sand campaign momentum, this pipeline must be delayed and eventually stopped too! With stalwart indigenous opposition, and the magnitude of vital and sensitive ecosystems to be traversed, our chances are good. This alert was first launched and hundreds of thousands of protest emails sent a year ago, and has now been updated.

TAKE ACTION HERE NOW!

The world is careening towards abrupt climate change and global ecosystem collapse. Global climate talks have been stymied by an inability to reconcile the historic carbon debt for past inequitable development with reasonable demands that all nations commit to differentiated emissions reductions. Tell Durban climate meeting delegates that failure to act now upon the looming climate emergency means governments have abdicated and the people will lead.

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Plans by Uganda's President to partially destroy the Mabira rainforest - one of the nation's most important rainforest preserves - have surfaced again after being defeated in 2007. Let the Ugandan government know rainforests and their ecological services including water, climate and biodiversity are far more important than sugar which can be grown elsewhere. Together with local opposition Ecological Internet has defeated this project twice before, let's do it again.

- Once again Ecological Internet’s true global rainforest action network questions the dominate paradigm that primary rainforests exist to be industrially logged [search]. The Rainforest Action Network and Forest Stewardship Council are first time industrial primary forest logging which must end immediately. Standing, intact primary rainforests and all old forests must be fully protected from certified and carbon forestry, and restored to continue powering global ecosystems and advance local communities.

(Earth) - Today San Francisco based Rainforest Action Network (RAN) will throw yet another swanky celebrity filled party to REVEL and congratulate themselves for logging primary forests to protect them, and to raise further money for such "rainforest protection". RAN continues to hold to the myth that primary rainforests - 500 year old trees in millions of year old ecosystems - should be "sustainably managed" for consumption such as toilet paper and lawn furniture. Noted author Naomi Klein will be RAN's guest of honor, receive an award, and has been vocal in defending the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) brand of disaster capitalism.

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SHAME! Rainforest Action Network (RAN) is one of the primary obstacles to protecting ancient rainforests [search] as they promote their first time industrial logging. RAN founded and ardently supports the Forest Stewardship Council's (FSC) [search] destruction of 320,000,000 acres of primary forests (the size of South Africa), including for toilet paper and lawn furniture. This week RAN throws another swanky celebrity filled party to congratulate themselves for logging primary forests to protect them, and to raise further money for more such "rainforest protection". Noted author Naomi Klein will be their guest of honor and receive an award from RAN. Please make Naomi aware of this greenwash, ask that she decline the award to protest RAN's disaster capitalism, and demand that RAN resign from FSC.

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Geoengineering [search] is the proposed large scale manipulation of Earth’s oceans, soils, sunlight and atmosphere with the intent of combating climate change. The UK government and scientific establishment have begun dangerous experiments into the controversial idea of large-scale release of sulfur aerosol directly into the stratosphere in large volumes. They are acting like renegades, as international agreements are in place forbidding such experiments which are not in controlled settings. Simply, a biosphere cannot be engineered. The only way to address climate and ecology change is to end ecosystem loss and fossil fuel use; while equitably reducing emissions, consumption and population. Please tell UK scientists to cancel experiments planned to test equipment for injecting sulfur particles into the stratosphere to counteract global warming. It is too risky and continued geoengineering research - and all but certain implementation if field trials show promise - will certainly have horrific unintended consequences for our shared biosphere - necessary for a habitable Earth.

By Dr. Glen Barry, Ecological Internet
Earth Meanders come from Earth's Newsdesk

Introduction

On the tenth anniversary of 9/11 attacks upon America, I too mourn 3,000 victims of a monstrous criminal evil. Yet as a politically unaffiliated free thinker and global citizen, I am acutely aware that this was only the beginning of the decade’s violent criminal atrocities. I will not and cannot forget America’s dramatic and incautious over-reaction, as mostly decent countrymen and women lashed out with a murderous vengeance. Some 250,000 to one million have been killed in Iraq and about 50,000 in Afghanistan by America’s illegal wars and military aggression (some estimates run much higher). Why bring this up today? Because those that write history control our future, and the true story of American war crimes has not been told.

Post-911, America’s political leaders with vast public support, turned loose its vengeful legions and killing machines, in effect murdering – as occurs with all war deaths – at least 100 to 350 times as many innocents in Persia and Arabia as were lost in the twin towers. The vast majority of these casualties are innocent civilians that loved their children, worked, and prayed to their god just like their New York brethren. Given that several hundred thousand to a million innocent Middle East civilians have been murdered in a decade of American cold-blooded revenge for 9/11, this essay will ask whether this is enough and the wars of murderous vengeance can end now.

Once again Ecological Internet’s true global rainforest action network contributes to questioning and obstructing the dominate paradigm that primary rainforests exist to be industrially logged

Papua New Guinea has launched a Commission of Inquiry into foreign land grabs of pristine, indigenous owned primary rainforests for clearcut logging and supposed oil palm development. PNG has the world’s third largest rainforests [search], but sadly industrial logging and oil palm are booming, and large, intact old rainforest ecosystems are dwindling fast. An entrenched and voracious Malaysian timber-mafia has until now virtually owned the government and the nation’s rainforests.

“Special Agriculture and Business Leases” (SABL) covering 5.2 million hectares (12.8 million acres) were granted 74 times in recent years by former Prime Minister Michael Somare. These agriculture projects skirted forestry laws and customary land ownership, allowing clearcuts of primary rainforests on customary land without consent, for oil palm which may or may not get planted. Local national led NGOs such as the highly successful ACT NOW![1] and others expressed concern that SABL leases were improperly executed and would result in large scale logging without providing agricultural development.

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The struggle over the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline [search] – which would run over 1,500 miles from Alberta, Canada to Texas, extending the reach of Canada's filthy and addictive tar sands trade far into the United States – is shaping up to be an epic political battle. When Alberta, Canada's tar sands are fully developed, along with its vast proposed pipeline network, the planet will be pushed into abrupt and runaway climate change. Ongoing environmental protest in Washington DC to stop the tar sands pipeline was decimated this past Friday by Obama's State Department approval of the pipeline. On tar sands and fracking in particular, President Obama has abandoned his green base, meaning after an early retirement he will have time to earn that Nobel Prize. Barring Obama’s final rejection of tar sands pipelines, a decision that is his to make, it should be returned immediately.

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The struggle over the Keystone XL pipeline – which would run 1,500 miles from Alberta to Texas, extending the reach of Canada's filthy and addictive tar sands trade far into the United States – may be the biggest environmental fight of the year. When Alberta, Canada's tar sands are fully developed, along with its vast proposed pipeline network, North America and much of the world will be further addicted to filthy, life destroying dirty energy for decades. Tar sand production and use is highly carbon intensive, and development of this and other filthy synthetic fossil fuels (and coal) may well push the planet into abrupt and runaway climate change. From August 20th – September 3rd environmental groups are planning a peaceful protest in Washington DC to stop the pipeline as a step to defuse what they call the largest carbon bomb in North America. This is Ecological Internet’s affinity email protest, addressed to President Obama, the only person that can refuse pipeline permits.

CONTACT: Dr. Glen Barry, glenbarry@ecologicalinternet.org

WHEN GOOD RAINFOREST GROUPS GO BAD you get monoculture and secondary forest plantations where ancient intact primary rainforests once stood, called sustainable forest management and carbon forestry, by BINGO’s (big NGOs) and United Nations greenwashers, paid for with your membership fees and taxes. Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) is primary forest logging greenwash by money-sucking environmental bureaucracies. Rainforests and other old forest must be protected and restored for local and global ecology and local eco-development from standing forests.

Please donate now to Ecological Internet’s “End Primary Forest Logging Campaign” at http://www.rainforestportal.org/shared/donate/end_primary_forest_logging/ in order to help turn this draft document into a polished, photogenic, researched and footnoted report on BINGO’s Increased Old Forest Greenwash. Relax, there are typos, but wanted to get this out right now in draft.

INTRODUCTION
What would you say to me if I told you the world’s pre-eminent environmental organizations, widely perceived as the leading advocates for rainforests and old growth, have for decades been actively, indeed intimately, involved in logging the world’s last old forests. Would you call me a liar? Tell me I am mentally ill? Or because of the cognitive dissonance would you simply ignore me, thinking it impossible? Well here goes nothing…

There is a global conspiracy to log the Earth’s last primary forests – destroying ancient forests for disposable consumer items – while claiming it is “sustainable forest management” and “carbon forestry”. A number of public forest advocacy groups are going so far as to actually claim that industrial first-time primary forest logging is good for climate, ecosystems and local peoples.