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 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.
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. Let Peru's President know intact, standing rainforests - looked after by their traditional indigenous inhabitants - are a requirement for local advancement and global ecological sustainability.
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 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.
Brazil's industrial agriculture lobby has forced through their Congress changes to the forest code, 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.
The New York State government is set to end its fracking ban – 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 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. The vital First Nations salmon economy will be devastated. 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.
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.
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