RAINFOREST Action Network RAN
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</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">general category,</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">see also deforestation</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">wood for US
</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></p><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">aha-let: separation allows demonization: X hate America; dems are trying to destrpy the cty and then:</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" /><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Brazil's right-wing President Jair Bolsonaro is giving President Trump a run for his money in the alternative facts department.</font></div><div>
</div><div>Responding to international outrage following the news that there are record numbers of wildfires burning in the Amazon rainforest, Bolsonaro tried to shift the blame away from his pro-business administration and onto an unlikely culprit: non-governmental organizations.</div><div>
</div><div>"Everything indicates" that NGOs were planning to set fires to the forest, Bolsonaro said on Facebook Live Wednesday, as Reuters reported. When asked if he had proof, he could not provide any, answering that he had "no written plan."</div><div>
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</div><div>Later the same day, he repeated the claims at a steel industry congress in Brasilia, The Guardian reported.</div><div>
</div><div><b>"On the question of burning in the Amazon, which in my opinion may have been initiated by NGOs because they lost money, what is the intention? To bring problems to Brazil," he said.</b></div><div>
</div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Environmental groups, however, say that the fires are a result of deforestation encouraged by Bolsonaro's policies. He has promised to open the Amazon to mining and agriculture, and that has encouraged farmers to start illegal fires in order to clear land. Local papers report that farmers emboldened by weaker enforcement are even organizing "fire days" in some regions, according to The Guardian.</span></div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">
</span></div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">"This is a sick statement, a pitiful statement," Greenpeace Brazil Public Policy Coordinator Marcio Astrini told Reuters of Bolsonaro's remarks. "Increased deforestation and burning are the result of his anti-environmental policy."</span></div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">
</span></div><div><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">The fires came to global attention this week when Brazil's space agency announced that the number of fires burning in the year since Bolsonaro took office were up more than 80 percent when compared with the year before. On Wednesday, the hashtag #PrayforAmazonas was the No. 1 trending topic on Twitter worldwide.</span></div><div>
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</div><div>Experts attribute the fires to deforestation because this year has not been particularly dry.</div><div>
</div><div>"In the previous years [wildfires] were very much related to the lack of rain, but it has been quite moist this year," ecologist Adriane Muelbert told National Geographic. "That leads us to think that this is deforestation-driven fire."</div><div>
</div><div>Farmers and ranchers start fires to clear forest for soy or grazing land, but the fires then catch and spread. If this continues, ecologist and National Geographic Explorer-at-Large Thomas Lovejoy explained to the nature magazine that it could have devastating consequences for the rainforest, and for the world:</div><div>
</div><div>Lovejoy describes a cyclical system in which deforestation fuels forest loss, making the region drier, spurring even more deforestation. Much of the rain in the Amazon is generated by the rainforest itself, but as trees disappear, rainfall declines. Experts worry that this downward spiral could increasingly dry out the forest and push it to a point of no return, where it more resembles savannah than rainforest.</div><div>
</div><div>"The Amazon has this tipping point because it makes half of its own rainfall," says Lovejoy. That's why, he says, "the Amazon has to be managed as a system."</div><div>Not only would such a change endanger the 40,000 species of plants, 1,300 species of birds, 430 mammals and 400 to 500 indigenous communities that call the Amazon home, it would also make it harder to fight the climate crisis. The world's largest tropical rainforest is an important store of carbon, absorbing millions of tons of emissions per year.</div><div>
</div><div>Given the global stakes, it's no wonder that Bolsonaro has come under international scrutiny for his policies, as The Guardian explained. Both Germany and Norway recently suspended donations to the Amazon Fund, and there is pressure for the EU to block a trade agreement with Brazil and other countries in South America.</div><div>
</div></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">bryan keogh</font></div><div><div style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; outline: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; background: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><div class="content-header-block" style="margin: 0px; padding: 4px 0px 0px; border-width: 0px 0px 0px 24px; border-top-style: initial; border-right-style: initial; border-bottom-style: initial; border-left-style: solid; border-top-color: initial; border-right-color: initial; border-bottom-color: initial; border-left-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); border-image: initial; outline: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; background: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0); display: inline-block; left: -12px; line-height: normal; position: relative;"><h1 class="entry-title instapaper_title " itemprop="name" style="margin: 0px; padding: 4px 0px 6px; border: 0px; outline: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; background-image: initial; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; -webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; text-rendering: optimizelegibility; line-height: normal; display: inline;"><span style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; outline: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; background: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0); left: -12px; position: relative;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Strict Amazon protections made Brazilian farmers more productive, new research shows</font></span></h1></div></div><time datetime="2018-11-05T11:43:58Z" itemprop="datePublished" content="2018-11-05T11:43:58Z" style="margin: 0px 0px 0px -12px; padding: 6px 12px; border: 0px; outline: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; background-image: initial; background-position: initial; background-size: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; display: inline-block;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">November 5, 2018 </font></time></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">https://theconversation.com/<b>strict-amazon-protections-made-brazilian-farmers-more-productive</b>-new-research-shows-105789</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Jair Bolsonaro, Brazil’s new president, will make many decisions during his four-year term, from combating violence to stimulating a stagnant economy.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Those decisions will have large impacts on Brazilians, who remain deeply divided over the controversial election of this far-right populist.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">But some of Bolsonaro’s decisions will affect the entire world, namely his promises to cut environmental protections in the Brazilian Amazon.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The Amazon’s uncertain fate</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>The Amazon is the world’s largest tropical rainforest and a major global food exporter.</b></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">The Amazon Basin also provides the rains that nourish Brazil’s productive croplands to the south, a breadbasket for the world. The rainforest’s destruction could cause large-scale droughts in Brazil, leading to nationwide crop losses.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">An estimated 9 percent of Amazonian forests disappeared between 1985 and 2017, reducing the rainforest’s ability to ...partic cattle ranching ...<b>strict environmental protections passed by President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva in 2004. His Workers Party cracked down on illegal land clearing in the Amazon, making Brazil a world leader in rainforest protection.</b></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">But deforestation in the Amazon has begun to climb again recently.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>Brazilian President Michel Temer, a conservative who entered office in 2016 during a deep recession, has loosened enforcement of federal anti-deforestation laws, slashed the environmental ministry’s budget and opened the Amazon to mining.</b></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Satellite data reveal that between August 2017 to 2018, 1.1 million acres of Brazilian Amazonian forest were cleared – the highest deforestation rate since 2007.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
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</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Brazil’s next president.]</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">President-elect Bolsonaro has promised to further slash environmental protections in Brazil, saying that federal conservation zones and hefty fines for cutting down trees hinder economic growth.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Specific plans include eliminating protections for <b>indigenous</b> territories that safeguard forests from private developers and reducing fines for illegally clearing land.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Bolsonaro also wants to dismantle Brazil’s Ministry of the Environment, which enforces environmental laws.</b></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Brazil’s agricultural innovations</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">The president-elect’s deregulatory agenda is supported by the Bancada Ruralista, a powerful congressional caucus that defends Brazilian agribusiness interests.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Despite the lobby’s stance that regulation hurts business, Brazil’s strict environmental laws have actually helped Amazonian farmers, my recent research shows.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">From 2004 to 2014, Brazil’s federal government employed a host of tactics to reduce Amazonian farmers’ incentives to clear land. It increased penalties for deforestation, making it far more expensive to create new grazing land. Simultaneously, it offered state-subsidized, low-interest financing for farmers who adopted more sustainable practices.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>Those policies encouraged innovations that have made Amazon farmland much more productive. In a co-authored study published in October in the journal Global Environmental Change, my colleagues and I found that food production in the Amazon has substantially increased since 2004.</b></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Amazonian farmers are now planting and <b>harvesting two crops – mostly soybean and corn – each year, rather than just one. This is called “double cropping.”</b></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Our study found that land in double cropping in Brazil’s most important agricultural state, Mato Grosso, increased from 840,000? acres in 2001 to more than 10.6 million acres in 2013, boosted by improved environmental laws.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Farmers are getting richer</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Environmental regulation of the Brazilian Amazon has helped farmers improve business in other ways too, our research found.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>Improved pasture management in Mato Grosso state led the number of cattle slaughtered annually per acre to double, meaning farmers are producing more meat – and therefore earning more money – with their land.</b></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Ranchers who add crops into pasture areas can more than quadruple the amount of beef produced because cattle raised in integrated crop and livestock systems gain weight more quickly. That spares remaining Amazonian forests from deforestation.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>These sustainable ranching practices also reduce the greenhouse gases associated with beef and leather production. Better nourished cows are slaughtered sooner, meaning fewer burps per cow per lifetime, leading to lower methane emissions.</b></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Brazil’s progressive environmental protections have even pushed corporations that operate in the Amazon to adopt more sustainable practices.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>Since 2006, hundreds of multinational food and timber companies, including <span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Cargill and Nestle</span>, have adopted “zero-deforestation commitments” – pledges that they will never again source products from farmers who continue to deforest their land.</b></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">The commitments started in the Brazilian Amazon and have since extended to all forests on the planet, including the Indonesian and Malaysian rainforests.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Brazilian law, which restricts Amazonian farmers from clearing more than 20 percent of their land and requires them to <b>federally register their property for monitoring</b>, has made it easier for zero-deforestation companies to drop producers who cut down trees.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Saving the Amazon</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Strong environmental protections are necessary to save the Amazon, protecting Brazil and the world from the loss of this critical, fragile habitat.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">If Brazil’s next president dismantles its environmental laws, corporations could abandon their zero-deforestation standards in the Amazon. That could have ripple effects in other threatened habitats worldwide.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Far from being bad for business, Brazil’s Amazonian protections help sustain the country as a global breadbasket.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">If Bolsonaro scraps them, he won’t just imperil a legendary rainforest. He’ll hurt Brazilian farmers, too – and the consumers worldwide who depend on them.</font></div><div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">trump faLLOUT:</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><a href="https://www.ecowatch.com/amazon-deforestation-unrecoverable-tipping-point-2639358982.html"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" color="#000000">https://www.ecowatch.com/amazon-deforestation-unrecoverable-tipping-point-2639358982.html</font></a></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>The Amazon rainforest in Brazil is being clear cut so rapidly — a rate of three football fields per minute — that it is approaching a "tipping point" from which it will not recover, </b>according to <span style="text-decoration-color: rgb(82, 149, 70); line-height: 1.5;">the Guardian</span>.lnx]</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">As trees are lost, researchers said there is a <b>risk that large areas could transition from rainforest to savannah as they lose the ability to make their own rainfall from evaporation and from plants giving off water </b>vapor, according to <a href="https://www.newsweek.com/brazil-bolsonaro-illegal-deforestation-amazon-rainforest-tipping-point-1451270" target="blank" style="text-decoration-color: rgb(82, 149, 70); line-height: 1.5;">Newsweek</a>.</font></p><div class="rebellt-item col1" data-id="1" data-is-image="False" data-reload-ads="false" id="rebelltitem1"><p /><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">A transition on that scale could have significant implications for global warming since the <a href="http://www.ecowatch.com/tag/rainforests" style="text-decoration-color: rgb(82, 149, 70); line-height: 1.5;">rainforest</a> absorbs vast amounts of atmospheric carbon. Recent <a href="https://science.sciencemag.org/content/365/6448/76?hwshib2=authn%253A1562396078%253A20190704%253Ac3ad5971-c185-4942-9acd-92aa24c51c06%253A0%253A0%253A0%253AS1lvoYPtq07c7tMzRommqA%253D%253D" target="blank" style="text-decoration-color: rgb(82, 149, 70); line-height: 1.5;">research</a> has shown the potential for massive tree plantings to remove excess carbon from the atmosphere.</font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">"It's very important to keep repeating these concerns. There are a number of tipping points which are not far away," said Philip Fearnside, a professor at Brazil's National Institute of Amazonian Research, as <span style="text-decoration-color: rgb(82, 149, 70); line-height: 1.5;">the Guardian</span> reported. "We can't see exactly where they are, but we know they are very close. It means we have to do things right away. Unfortunately that is not what is happening. There are people denying we even have a problem."</font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>The alarming rate of <a href="https://www.ecowatch.com/tag/deforestation" style="text-decoration-color: rgb(82, 149, 70); line-height: 1.5;">deforestation</a> and its acceleration confirms suspicions that new president <a href="https://www.ecowatch.com/tag/jair-bolsonaro" rel="noopener noreferrer" style="text-decoration-color: rgb(82, 149, 70); line-height: 1.5;">Jair Bolsonaro</a> has allowed illegal land invasion, logging and burning. Bolsonaro has called his <a href="http://terrabrasilis.dpi.inpe.br/app/dashboard/alerts/legal/amazon/aggregated/" target="blank" style="text-decoration-color: rgb(82, 149, 70); line-height: 1.5;">own government's satellite data</a> lies. </b>The president's comments followed preliminary satellite data that showed more than 400 square miles of the rainforest had been cleared in the first half of July — an increase of 68 percent from the entire month of July last year, according to the <a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-49052360" target="blank" style="text-decoration-color: rgb(82, 149, 70); line-height: 1.5;">BBC</a>.</font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Bolsonaro, the far right politician who has said he is fulfilling a mission from God, dismissed concerns expressed by European Union members and called it hypocritical since so many European forests have been wiped out.</font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">"You have to understand that the Amazon is Brazil's, not yours," Bolsonaro said, as <span style="text-decoration-color: rgb(82, 149, 70); line-height: 1.5;">the Guardian</span> reported. "If all this devastation you accuse us of doing was done in the past the Amazon would have stopped existing, it would be a big desert."</font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);" /></div><div class="rebellt-item col1" data-id="2" data-is-image="False" data-reload-ads="false" id="rebelltitem2"><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);" /><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The DETER-B satellite system that the Brazilian government started to use in 2015 to track deforestation has shown that the record setting July deforestation is on pace to clear enough forest to fit New York City twice by the end of the month.</font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The DETER satellite data is considered preliminary. Detailed figures are released at the end of the year when data from other satellites and observatories is also collected, according to <a href="https://www.newsweek.com/brazil-bolsonaro-illegal-deforestation-amazon-rainforest-tipping-point-1451270" target="blank" style="text-decoration-color: rgb(82, 149, 70); line-height: 1.5;">Newsweek</a>.</font></p><p style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">"Unfortunately, it is absurd, but it should not catch anyone by surprise. President Jair Bolsonaro and minister Ricardo Salles are dismantling our socio-environmental policies," said Carlos Rittl, the executive secretary of the <a href="http://www.observatoriodoclima.eco.br/en/" target="blank" style="text-decoration-color: rgb(82, 149, 70); line-height: 1.5;">Climate Observatory</a>, an NGO formed by a coalition of environmental groups, as <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/jul/25/amazonian-rainforest-near-unrecoverable-tipping-point" target="blank" style="text-decoration-color: rgb(82, 149, 70); line-height: 1.5;">the Guardian</a> reported.</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">After years of conservation, Brazil's environmental track record has nose-dived in the first seven months of Bolsonaro's administration</b><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">. </span><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">He has given environmental oversight to the agriculture minister, who is the leader of a farming lobby. <b>His foreign minister called climate science a part of a global Marxist plot.</b>The government has invited businesses to register land counter-claims in areas that are protected nature reserves, indigenous territories and areas dedicated to sustainable production by native forest people, according to <span style="text-decoration-color: rgb(82, 149, 70); line-height: 1.5;">the Guardian</span>.</span></font></p></div></div></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">ref</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">https://yyy.theguardian.com/world/2019/jul/25/amazonian-rainforest-near-unrecoverable-tipping-point</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">guk no lnx</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>Amazon deforestation accelerating towards unrecoverable 'tipping point'</b></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>Data confirms fears that Jair Bolsonaro’s policy encourages illegal logging in Brazil</b></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Jonathan Watts in Altamira</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"> @jonathanwatts</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Thu 25 Jul 2019 17.40 BST Last modified on Thu 25 Jul 2019 21.37 BST</font></div><div>
</div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"> Amazon rainforest turned into farmland. An area the size of Greater London has been lost this month. Photograph: Nacho Doce/Reuters</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>Deforestation of the Brazilian Amazon has surged above three football fields a minute, according to the latest government data, pushing the world’s biggest rainforest closer to a tipping point beyond which it cannot recover.</b></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">The sharp rise – following year-on-year increases in May and June – confirms fears that president Jair Bolsonaro has given a green light to illegal land invasion, logging and burning.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Clearance so far in July has hit 1,345 sq km, a third higher than the previous monthly record under the current monitoring system by the Deter B satellite system, which started in 2015.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">With five days remaining, this is on course to be the first month for several years in which Brazil loses an area of forest bigger than Greater London.</font></div><div>
</div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>The steady erosion of tree cover weakens the role of the rainforest in stabilising the global climate. Scientists warn that the forest is in growing danger of degrading into a savannah, after which its capacity to absorb carbon will be severely diminished, with consequences for the rest of the planet.</b></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">“It’s very important to keep repeating these concerns. There are a number of tipping points which are not far away,” said Philip Fearnside, a professor at Brazil’s National Institute of Amazonian Research. “We can’t see exactly where they are, but we know they are very close. It means we have to do things right away. Unfortunately that is not what is happening. There are people denying we even have a problem.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>It may also complicate ratification of Brazil’s biggest ever trade deal with the European Union if EU legislators decide the South American nation is not keeping its side of the bargain, which includes a commitment to slow deforestation in line with the Paris climate agreement.</b></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">The official numbers from the National Institute for Space Research are a growing embarrassment to Bolsonaro, who has tried to fob them off as lies and criticised the head of the institute.<b> Earlier this week, the president insisted the numbers should be screened by the ministry of science and technology and shown to him before being made public so that he did not get “caught with his pants down”</b>.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>This has raised fears that the data could be vetted in future rather than automatically updated online each day as is currently the case.</b></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">In his first seven months in power, Bolsonaro, who was elected with strong support from agribusiness and mining interests, has moved rapidly to erode government agencies responsible for forest protection.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>He has weakened the environment agency and effectively put it under the supervision of the agricultural ministry, which is headed by the leader of the farming lobby</b>.<span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"> His foreign minister has dismissed climate science as part of a global Marxist plot. The president and other ministers have criticised the forest monitoring agency, Ibama, for imposing fines on illegal land grabbers and loggers. The government has also moved to weaken protections for nature reserves, indigenous territories and zones of sustainable production by forest peoples and invited businesspeople to register land counter-claims within those areas.</span></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">This has emboldened those who want to invade the forest, clear it and claim it for commercial purposes, mostly in the speculative expectation it will rise in value, but also partly for <b>cattle pastures, soya fields and mines.</b></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Earlier this month, it was reported that <b>thousands of gold miners illegally invaded Yanomami indigenous territory near the border with Venezuela. Elsewhere, illegal loggers have mounted at least two attacks in response to Ibama enforcement operations, </b>according to the Folha newspaper. On 4 July, they reportedly burned an Ibama truck in Espigão d’Oeste, Rondônia state and last week they were said to have burned bridges in Placas, Pará state.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Rather than defend his officials, the environment minister Ricardo Salles appeared to side with the loggers when he gave a speech to a group of them in Rondônia soon afterwards, in which he reportedly told them: “The timber industry deserves to be respected … What happens today in Brazil, unfortunately, is the result of years and years and years of a public policy of producing laws, rules, regulations that are not always related to the real world. What we are doing now is precisely bringing the legal part of the real world that happens in every country from north to south.”</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">During a recent G20 meeting, Bolsonaro told the German chancellor Angela Merkel that she had no right to criticise because Brazil’s conservation record was superior to that of Europe’s. This is a dubious claim, according to Climate Observatory, which cites World Bank data that shows Germany has given protected status to a bigger share of its land than Brazil.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);"><b>Brazil is also going backwards fast.</b> After an 80% reduction in the rate of deforestation between 2006 and 2012, successive governments have relaxed protections. Clearance has been creeping up. Last year, deforestation rose 13% to the highest level in a decade. This year is on course to be far worse and the trend is back towards the dark days of the early 2000s.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">“Unfortunately, it is absurd, but it should not catch anyone by surprise. President Jair Bolsonaro and minister Ricardo Salles are dismantling our socio-environmental policies,” said Carlos Rittl, the executive secretary of the Climate Observatory, an NGO formed by a coalition of environmental groups.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">He said Salles had eradicated the department responsible for policies to combat deforestation, that no leaders have been appointed in eight of the nine Ibama regional offices, and that operations to combat environmental crimes declined 70% between January and April 2019 compared with the same period last year.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The Deter satellite data is considered preliminary, but it is usually a guide to the longer-term trends. More detailed annual figures are usually released towards the end of the year, after the National Institute for Space Research has calculated data from the more powerful Prodes satellite system.</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);">Trees are considered essential to climate stability. Earlier this month, a study indicated that planting a trillion trees could remove two-thirds of all the emissions that have been pumped into the atmosphere by human activities. <b>But scientists say maintaining existing forests, particularly in the tropics, is far more important.</b></font></div></div><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><a href="https://theconversation.com/high-value-opportunities-exist-to-restore-tropical-rainforests-around-the-world-heres-how-we-mapped-them-119508">https://theconversation.com/high-value-opportunities-exist-to-restore-tropical-rainforests-around-the-world-heres-how-we-mapped-them-119508</a></font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></p><ul style="box-sizing: border-box; margin: 20px 0px 0px; padding: 0px;" helvetica="Helvetica" neue="Neue" arial="Arial" sans-serif="sans-serif" text-align="text-align" center="center" background-color="background-color" rgb="rgb"><li class="hidden-xs" style="box-sizing: border-box; list-style-type: none; padding: 0px 0px 23px; font-weight: 700; line-height: 1.33;"><a data-ga-action="Home Headlines: Headline" href="https://www.democracynow.org/2019/5/29/headlines/deforestation_of_amazon_up_by_20_over_9_months" style="box-sizing: border-box; background-color: transparent; text-decoration-line: none; outline: 0px; border: 0px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" color="#000000">Deforestation of Amazon Up by 20% Over 9 Months</font></a></li></ul><h1 class="pageTitle" itemprop="name" style="margin: 0px 0px 15px 20px; padding: 0px; direction: ltr; line-height: 28px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font style="" size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></h1><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><a rel="nofollow" target="blank" href="https://insideclimatenews.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=7c733794100bcc7e083a163f0&id=9381f3c3ff&e=06876ede6b" style="text-decoration: none; font-weight: normal;">World's Alarming Rate of Forest Loss Threatens a Crucial Climate Solution</a>
BY: GEORGINA GUSTIN
More
corporations and countries are committing to preserve forests, yet new
global data show tree loss rates are still dangerously high — with
severe climate consequences.
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The world's forests continue to disappear at an alarming rate,
threatening a resource that scientists say is a crucial "natural
solution" for controlling climate change on an urgently short timescale.
</font><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Last year, the planet saw its fourth-highest level of tropical tree
loss since the early 2000s—about 30 million acres, according to a new
analysis published Thursday.</font>
<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Those losses have continued even as more corporations and countries
made commitments to preserve forests, and as scientists emphasized that
maintaining forests must be a global priority—as crucial to staving off
the worst risks of climate change as cutting fossil fuel use.</font></p><div class="widget widget-newsletter-block mc-embed-signup embed-horiz fbia-strip">
</div>
<p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Forests absorb roughly a quarter of the carbon dioxide emitted by
human activity each year. Destroying all of the world's forests would
release the same amount of stored carbon as burning all the planet's
readily extractable fossil fuel deposits, a <a href="http://www.climateandlandusealliance.org/scientists-statement/">group of prominent scientists wrote</a>.</font>
<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">"Continued tropical forest loss pulls the rug out from under efforts
to stabilize the global climate," said Frances Seymour, a senior fellow
with the World Resources Institute (WRI), which publishes the annual
forest assessment. "For every hectare of forest lost, we're one step
closer to the scary scenario of runaway climate change, because forests
not only store carbon, they continue to absorb it as they grow."</font></p><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">....
</font></p></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></div><div><a href="https://www.alternet.org/2019/04/we-do-not-want-to-disappear-indigenous-peoples-go-to-court-to-save-the-amazon-from-oil-company-greed/"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" color="#000000">https://www.alternet.org/2019/04/we-do-not-want-to-disappear-indigenous-peoples-go-to-court-to-save-the-amazon-from-oil-company-greed/</font></a></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">On F<span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">ebruary 27, hundreds of Indigenous Waorani elders, youth and leaders arrived in the city of Puyo, <b>Ecuador.</b> They left their homes deep in the Amazon rainforest to peacefully march through the streets, hold banners, sing songs and, most importantly, submit documents to the provincial Judicial Council to launch a lawsuit seeking to stop the government from auctioning off their ancestral lands in the Pastaza region to oil companies. An eastern jungle province whose eponymous river is one of the more than 1,000 tributaries that feed the mighty Amazon, Pastaza encompasses some of the world’s most biodiverse regions.</span></font></div><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><span style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">
</span></font></div><div class="p1_31" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Co-filed with the Coordinating Council of the Waorani Nationality of Ecuador–Pastaza (Pastaza CONCONAWEP), a political organization of the Waorani, and the Ecuadorian Human Rights Ombudsman against the Ecuadorian Ministry of Energy and Non-Renewable Natural Resources, the Secretary of Hydrocarbons and the Ministry of Environment, the lawsuit alleges that the <b>Waorani’s rights granted to them under the Ecuadorian constitution “</b>were violated due to an improper consultation process prior to an oil auction which would offer up the Waorani’s lands in the Pastaza region to the highest bidding oil company,” <a href="https://www.amazonfrontlines.org/chronicles/waorani-lawsuit-press-release/" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">according to Amazon Frontlines</a>, a nonprofit advocacy group supporting the Indigenous peoples living in the Amazon rainforest. The government’s auction, announced in February of last year, included <a href="https://www.labroots.com/trending/earth-and-the-environment/8370/indigenous-women-activists-fight-save-ecuador-s-land" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">16 new oil concessions</a> covering nearly seven million acres of roadless, primary Amazonian forest across southeast Ecuador.</font></p><div class="p2_31" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><div class="alt_ad_block" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><div class="teadsNative" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">A hearing to argue the lawsuit was held in Puyo on March 13, but according to Amazon Frontlines, the group of assembled Waorani women “broke into song in court and did not stop” until the judge, “unable to be heard over the songs of the Waorani women … called the parties’ lawyers to the bench and <a href="https://www.amazonfrontlines.org/chronicles/suspended-waorani-lawsuit/" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">declared the suspension of the hearing</a> until a translator was found.” The Waorani said that, in keeping with Waorani tradition, they would only accept a translator approved by their elder leaders. “The Waorani have their own authorities and their own systems, which must be respected by the Western systems,” Lina Maria Espinosa, attorney for the Waorani petitioners and a member of Amazon Frontlines’ legal team, told the Independent Media Institute. “This case is an example of the country’s obligation to apply intercultural justice.”</font></p><div class="p3_31" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><strong style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Concessions vs. Constitutional Rights</font></strong></p><div class="p4_31" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The concessions overlap with the titled territories of the Shuar, Achuar, Kichwa, Waorani, Shiwiar, Andoa and Sápara nations, with one block located almost entirely within Waorani territory. If taken over by the fossil fuel industry, the Indigenous coalition warns, the health and livelihoods of the communities living in the area—as well as the region’s unique biodiversity and sensitive ecosystem—will be threatened. But regardless of the environmental and sociocultural threat, the plaintiffs argue that the concessions trample on their constitutional rights.</font></p><div class="p5_31" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In November 2018, following pressure from Ecuador’s Amazonian Indigenous nationalities, Carlos Pérez, the nation’s hydrocarbon minister, reduced the auction from <a href="https://energytransition.org/2019/02/ecuador-oil-extraction/" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">16 blocks to two</a>. But it may end up being a pyrrhic victory, as the government said that the land may still be <a href="https://news.mongabay.com/2019/03/indigenous-group-sues-ecuador-for-earmarking-its-land-for-oil-drilling/" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">put on the auction block in the future</a>. In addition, Pérez asserted that there should be no issue with the remaining two blocks, claiming that “<a href="https://amazonwatch.org/news/2018/1206-ecuadors-yasuni-bait-and-switch" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">there aren’t any Indigenous [people] there</a>.” However, according to Amazon Watch, a nonprofit based in Oakland, California, the two blocks <a href="https://amazonwatch.org/news/2018/1206-ecuadors-yasuni-bait-and-switch" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">overlap with the titled territory</a> of the Sápara, Shiwiar and Kichwa nations, and sightings of Tagaeri-Taromenane have been reported in the area, which is located along Ecuador’s border with Peru.</font></p><div class="p6_31" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><div class="alt_ad_block" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Adding insult to injury was the emergence in November 2018 of a <a href="https://fr-fr.facebook.com/YASunidos/posts/compartimos-el-documento-con-el-cual-ls-yasunidos-en-ejercicio-de-nuestro-derech/1568197109870454/" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">leaked draft</a> of a presidential decree that revealed the government’s plans to <a href="https://amazonwatch.org/news/2018/1206-ecuadors-yasuni-bait-and-switch" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">permit oil drilling in a protected area</a> established for the Tagaeri-Taromenane that had previously been off-limits to fossil fuel development.</font></p><div class="p7_31" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><strong style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Industrial Development vs. Indigenous People</font></strong></p><div class="p8_31" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Ecuador is one of the <a href="https://www.eia.gov/beta/international/data/browser/#/?pa=00000000000000000000000000000000002&c=ruvvvvvfvtvnvv1vrvvvvfvvvvvvfvvvou20evvvvvvvvvvvvuvo&ct=0&tl_id=5-A&vs=INTL.57-1-AFG-TBPD.A&vo=0&v=H&start=2014&end=2016" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">smallest oil producers</a> in the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC)—only the Republic of the Congo, Equatorial Guinea and Gabon pump less. But that has not hindered it from making big deals with oil-hungry nations. In 2009, a year after Ecuador defaulted on around <a href="https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/2017/1/14/14265958/ecuador-drilling-oil-rainforest" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">$3 billion worth of debt</a>, then-President Rafael Correa made an oil-for-cash agreement with China. In exchange for selling his nation’s crude oil to Petrochina, China provided Ecuador with a <a href="https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/2017/1/14/14265958/ecuador-drilling-oil-rainforest" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">$1 billion loan</a>.</font></p><div class="p9_31" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><b>Now the country seeks to attract investments totaling around <a href="https://www.reuters.com/article/us-ecuador-landrights-indigenous/from-ecuadors-amazon-to-presidents-palace-indigenous-women-demand-end-to-drilling-idUSKBN1GZ2N3" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">$800 million</a> to boost the production of oil,</b> which the government maintains is critical to improving the nation’s economy. “It’s time for the private sector to invest,” said President Lenín Moreno in the 2018 televised address, arguing that public-private partnerships in the infrastructure, oil, energy, mining and telecoms sectors could generate <a href="https://www.ft.com/content/394a1848-3719-11e8-8b98-2f31af407cc8" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">$7 billion of investment by 2021</a>.</font></p><div class="p10_31" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The government, as it has for decades, is yet again facing stiff opposition against untrammeled industrial development from its Indigenous population. “We are demanding that the Ecuadorian state respect our territory and self-determination,” <a href="https://news.mongabay.com/2019/03/indigenous-group-sues-ecuador-for-earmarking-its-land-for-oil-drilling/" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">said</a>Nemonte Nenquimo, a Waorani leader and CONCONAWEP representative. “This fight didn’t grow overnight; it’s been the fight of the Waorani for years.”</font></p><div class="p11_31" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Indeed, the latest legal action launched in Puyo stems from the state’s broken promise. In December 2017, following a <a href="https://www.labroots.com/trending/earth-and-the-environment/8370/indigenous-women-activists-fight-save-ecuador-s-land" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">two-week, 200-mile march</a> by Indigenous activists from the Amazon jungle to Quito, the nation’s capital, demanding an end to extractive industry development on their territories, the Moreno administration made a commitment to the Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of Ecuador (CONAIE), Ecuador’s largest Indigenous organization, to <a href="https://www.labroots.com/trending/earth-and-the-environment/8370/indigenous-women-activists-fight-save-ecuador-s-land" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">end new oil and mining concessions</a> in regions where local Indigenous nationalities had not been consulted. However, as the current suit <a href="https://www.amazonfrontlines.org/chronicles/waorani-lawsuit-press-release/" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">alleges</a>, the Waorani were not properly consulted.</font></p><div class="p12_31" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Specifically, <a href="https://tinyurl.com/7mb4ko2" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">Article 57, section 7 of the constitution</a> guarantees “free prior informed consultation, within a reasonable period of time, on plans and programs for prospecting, producing and marketing nonrenewable resources located on their lands which could have an environmental or cultural impact on them.” The suit claims these rights were violated as the Waorani were not properly consulted prior to the announcement of the new oil concessions. In addition, the Ecuadorian government is also bound by <a href="https://tinyurl.com/y2gbgzku" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">two international agreements</a> to consult with its Indigenous populations: Convention 169 of the International Labor Organization (ILO), ratified by the nation in 1998, and the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, which was adopted in 2007.</font></p><div class="p13_31" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">However, many activists and Indigenous leaders ultimately don’t want consultation at this point; they want oil development to end entirely. “We took the president at his word regarding the end of oil and mining concessions in our territories,” <a href="https://amazonwatch.org/news/2018/0301-ecuador-to-offer-new-oil-concessions-despite-government-pledge-to-the-contrary" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">said</a> Jaime Vargas, CONAIE’s president. “We don’t need more consultation, however. Given the destruction in the northern Ecuadorian Amazon and in other areas of the world at the hands of the oil industry, we already have enough information to say ‘No’ to all oil activity.”</font></p><div class="p14_31" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Mitch Anderson, executive director and founder of <a href="https://waoresist.amazonfrontlines.org/action/" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">Amazon Frontlines, which created a petition</a> on behalf of the Waorani urging the Ecuadorian government to halt oil development on Indigenous land, told the Independent Media Institute:</font></p><div class="p15_31" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“There are two different courses for the Ecuadorian government here. The first is an all-in bet on oil, and the last half-century has already shown us what that road leads to: environmental degradation, institutional corruption and further indebtedness to foreign interests, in this case China. Or they can take an urgently needed, forward-thinking path which supports forest protection, respects Indigenous rights and promotes investment in green economic alternatives that will ultimately contribute to the building of a sustainable future for the country and planet.”</font></p><div class="p16_31" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“Oil has not brought development for the Waorani,” Alicia Cahuiya of the Waorani group <a href="https://in.reuters.com/article/ecuador-landrights-indigenous/from-ecuadors-amazon-to-presidents-palace-indigenous-women-demand-end-to-drilling-idINL8N1R4739" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">told</a> President Lenín Moreno at a meeting at the presidential palace in Quito in March 2018. “It has only left us with oil spills and sickness.”</font></p><div class="p17_31" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><strong style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">A History of Pollution</font></strong></p><div class="p18_31" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8;"><font style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 102);" size="4" face="Times New Roman">The current lawsuit is the latest salvo in a protracted battle between Indigenous people across Ecuador and fossil fuel interests that has been going on <a href="https://www.alternet.org/2018/01/chevron-accused-2-million-witness-bribery-plot-ecuador-pollution-case/" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">since 1993</a>, when local tribes turned to the legal system to compel <b>Texaco—and now Chevron, its parent company since 2000—to clean up the Ecuadorian Amazon rainforest</b> and care for the people who have been sickened by the oil operations that began in 1967, when Texaco struck oil in the country’s northeastern province of Sucumbíos.</font></p><div class="p19_31" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In a 2008 Los Angeles Times <a href="https://articles.latimes.com/2008/apr/20/opinion/op-feige20" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">op-ed</a> about that legal battle, author and former public defender David Feige wrote that Texaco’s environmental legacy in the region “includes as many as 16 million gallons of spilled crude—50 percent more than the <em style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Exxon Valdez</em>dumped in Prince William Sound, Alaska, in 1989; hundreds of toxic waste pits, many containing the chemical-laden byproducts of drilling; and an estimated 18 billion gallons of waste, or ‘produced,’ water, which some tests have shown to contain possibly cancer-causing polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons at levels many times higher than those permitted in the U.S. All these pollutants were discharged in one of the most sensitive ecosystems in the world—the Amazon rainforest.”</font></p><div class="p20_31" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">This troubling history makes the current administration’s push to auction off land to oil drilling all the more ill-advised. “When we extract oil, it has a very high price for the environment, and sometimes, it’s not paid by those who use the oil,” <a href="https://www.livescience.com/46319-oil-drilling-contaminated-amazon.html" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">said</a> Antoni Rosell-Melé, an environmental chemist at the Autonomous University of Barcelona in Spain, who co-authored a 2017 <a href="https://www.uab.cat/web/newsroom/news-detail/oil-contamination-in-the-amazon-modifies-chemical-composition-of-rivers-1345668003610.html?noticiaid=1345734672816" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">study</a> that found that the Amazon rainforest in neighboring Peru is suffering from extensive contamination from decades of fossil fuel development.</font></p><div class="p21_31" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">In that study, the researchers analyzed nearly 3,000 water samples from four Amazon rivers gathered between 1987 and 2013 and found an “extremely elevated presence of chloride, chromium, barium, lead and hexavalent chromium,” industrial chemicals involved in oil drilling that are toxic to humans, wildlife and the environment. The researchers also estimate that oil extraction activities in the region have changed the overall chemical composition of the Amazon’s waters, including 30 percent more salt than is naturally present.</font></p><div class="p22_31" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><strong style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Destroy the Rainforests, Destroy Ourselves</font></strong></p><div class="p23_31" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The Indigenous fight in Ecuador is a fight that anyone who cares about biodiversity and the global climate should join. After all, the Ecuadorian Amazon isn’t just one of the most sensitive ecosystems in the world—it’s key for the environmental health of the entire planet. Known as the “<a href="https://www.ceh.ac.uk/news-and-media/news/tropical-rainforests-lungs-planet-reveal-true-sensitivity-global-warming" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">lungs of the planet</a>,” the Amazon rainforest “inhales” carbon dioxide and “exhales” oxygen, helping to stabilize the global climate by safely storing up to <a href="https://www.worldwildlife.org/places/amazon" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">140 billion metric tons of carbon</a>. Deforestation by extractive and agricultural industries releases this carbon into the atmosphere, further accelerating global warming, the effects of which are felt across the world, from <a href="https://www.climatecentral.org/news/us-with-10-feet-of-sea-level-rise-17428" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">rising seas along U.S. coasts</a> and <a href="https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/global-warming/big-thaw/" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">melting Arctic glaciers</a>, to <a href="https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/2018/07/are-fires-in-europe-the-result-of-climate-change-/" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">wildfires in Europe</a> and <a href="https://reliefweb.int/report/south-africa/climate-change-tripled-likelihood-drought-pushed-cape-town-water-crisis-day-zero" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">droughts in Africa</a>.</font></p><div class="p24_31" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Ecuador is also home to an astounding number of species. The nation is the <a href="https://rainforests.mongabay.com/20ecuador.htm" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">eighth most biodiverse on Earth</a> and the <a href="https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/ece3.1102" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">most biodiverse when considering the number of species by unit area</a>. It is home to the <a href="https://rainforests.mongabay.com/20ecuador.htm" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">highest number of species by area worldwide</a>, including more than 1,500 species of birds, more than 840 species of reptiles and amphibians, and more than 300 species of mammals. Ecuador’s Yasuni National Park boasts nearly 20,000 plant species, more flora than anywhere on Earth.</font></p><div class="p25_31" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">But despite its high level of biodiversity, Ecuador also has a <a href="https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/ece3.1102" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">low representation of species</a>living within its protected areas. According to a 2014 <a href="https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/ece3.1102" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">study</a> conducted by a team of researchers from the Technological University Indoamerica in Quito, there are more than 100 vulnerable, endangered and critically endangered species in the Ecuadorian Amazon for which conservation goals have been missed. Lawyers for the Indigenous communities fighting oil development can also refer courts to the nation’s constitution, which provides “protection of ecosystems, biodiversity and the integrity of the country’s genetic assets, [as well as] the <a href="https://tinyurl.com/7mb4ko2" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">prevention of environmental damage</a>.”</font></p><div class="p26_31" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Unfortunately, the pro-drilling camp “doesn’t see the forest,” said Waorani leader Nenquimo in her <a href="https://www.commondreams.org/views/2018/11/29/message-indigenous-resistance-and-inspiration-amazon" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">keynote address</a> at last year’s <a href="https://tinyurl.com/ntkt6fa" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">Bioneers conference</a> in Marin, California, which gathered leaders and activists involved in environmental protection and the rights of nature around the globe. “They see oil wells where we see gardens. They see money where we see life.” Sharing her fight to protect her ancestral lands from exploitation by industrial development, Nenquimo warned that if given “a foothold in our lands,” the oil industry “will bring money, sickness and contamination. They will try to divide our families and change our way of thinking.”</font></p><div class="p27_31" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">“Our fight is not just a fight about oil,” she said. “This is a fight about different ways of living. One that protects life and one that destroys life.”</font></p><div class="p28_31" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Penti Baihua, a leader of the Waorani village of Bameno, has seen firsthand the destruction of life that the outside world has brought to his idyllic slice of the jungle—from the oil spills that drive out local species his people rely on for sustenance to the destruction of ancient rainforest to make room for new cocoa and coffee plantations. What will happen to him, his family, and his community if extractive and agricultural industries continue the destruction of his ancestral home? Baihua said simply, “<a href="https://www.nrdc.org/onearth/village-ecuadors-amazon-fights-life-oil-wells-move" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">We do not want to disappear</a>.”</font></p><div class="p29_31" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><span style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Reynard Loki is a writing fellow and the editor and chief correspondent for <a href="https://independentmediainstitute.org/earth-food-life/" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;">Earth | Food | Life</a>, a project of the Independent Media Institute. He previously served as the environment, food and animal rights editor at AlterNet and as a reporter for Justmeans/3BL Media covering sustainability and corporate social responsibility. He was named one of FilterBuy’s “Top 50 Health & Environmental Journalists to Follow” in 2016. His work has been published by Truthout, Salon, BillMoyers.com, EcoWatch </span>and<span style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;"> Truthdig, among others.</span></font></p><div class="p30_31" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><p style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px 0px 17px; padding: 0px; line-height: 1.8; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><span style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">This article was produced by </span><a href="https://independentmediainstitute.org/earth-food-life/" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration-line: none; transition: color 0.3s ease 0s; cursor: pointer;"><span style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">Earth | Food | Life</span></a><span style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; margin: 0px; padding: 0px;">, a project of the Independent Media Institute.</span></font></p><div><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></div><p style="font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; box-sizing: border-box; -webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; margin-top: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; line-height: 29.124px; widows: 1; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></p><h1 class="widgetheadline h1" style="margin: 10px 0px 0px 10px; padding: 0px; cursor: pointer; overflow-wrap: break-word; line-height: 22px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><a class="widgetheadline-text custom-post-headline" href="https://www.ecowatch.com/congo-basin-rainforest-deforestation-2618692110.html" style="text-decoration-line: none; word-break: break-word; overflow-wrap: break-word; padding: 0px; margin: 0px; line-height: 31px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" color="#000000">Congo Basin Rainforest Could Be Gone by 2100</font></a></h1><div class="body js-expandable clearfix js-listicle-body js-update-url css-listicle-body-2618692110" data-elid="2618692110" data-authors="Mongabay" data-headline="Congo Basin Rainforest Could Be Gone by 2100" style="margin: 10px; line-height: 24px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><div class="body-description" style=""><div class="widgetbrief"><p style="margin: 10px 0px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">By Morgan Erickson-Davis</font></p><p style="margin: 10px 0px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Africa's Congo Basin is home to the second largest <a href="https://www.ecowatch.com/tag/rainforests" style="text-decoration-line: none; overflow-wrap: break-word;">rainforest</a> on the planet. But according to a new study, this may soon not be the case. It finds that at current rates of <a href="https://www.ecowatch.com/tag/deforestation" style="text-decoration-line: none; overflow-wrap: break-word;">deforestation</a>, all primary forest will be gone by the end of the century.</font></p><p style="margin: 10px 0px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The study was conducted by researchers at the University of Maryland (UMD) in the U.S. who analyzed satellite data collected between 2000 and 2014. Their results were published Wednesday in <a href="http://advances.sciencemag.org/content/4/11/eaat2993" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none; overflow-wrap: break-word;">Science Advances</a>. It reveals that the Congo Basin lost around 165,000 square kilometers (approximately 64,000 square miles) of forest during their study period.</font></p></div><div class="js-appear-on-expand" style="transition: all 350ms ease 0s; height: 0px; overflow: hidden; opacity: 0;"><div class="widgetshow-more with-primary-color js-keep-reading js-page-view-and-reload-embeds" style="cursor: pointer; border-radius: 15px; float: left; padding: 7px; font-weight: 600; background-color: rgb(240, 240, 240);"><span class="show-more js-expand"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" color="#000000">Keep reading...</font></span></div></div></div><p style="font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; box-sizing: border-box; -webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; margin-top: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; line-height: 29.124px; widows: 1; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">...But why? Is it due to industrial pressure like in South America and Southeast Asia where the majority of deforestation has been done for soy, <a href="http://www.ecowatch.com/tag/palm-oil" style="text-decoration-line: none; overflow-wrap: break-word;">palm oil</a> and other commodity crops? Or commercial logging, which is razing forests on the <a href="https://news.mongabay.com/2018/10/chinese-demand-wiping-out-forests-in-the-solomon-islands-new-report/" target="blank" style="text-decoration-line: none; overflow-wrap: break-word;">Solomon Islands</a> and <a href="https://news.mongabay.com/2018/08/high-risk-that-chinas-timber-from-png-is-illegal-new-report/" target="_blank" style="text-decoration-line: none; overflow-wrap: break-word;">Papua New Guinea</a>?</font></p><p style="margin: 10px 0px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Not so much, according to this newest study. It reveals that the dominant force behind rising Congo deforestation, driving more than 80 percent of the region's total forest loss, is actually small-scale clearing for subsistence <a href="http://www.ecowatch.com/tag/agriculture" style="text-decoration-line: none; overflow-wrap: break-word;">agriculture</a>. The researchers write that most of it is done by hand with simple axes.</font></p><p style="margin: 10px 0px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">According to the authors, the preponderance of small-scale deforestation of Congo rainforest is due largely to poverty stemming from political instability and conflict in the region. The Congo Basin rainforest is shared by six countries: Cameroon, the Central African Republic (CAR), the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), Equatorial Guinea, the Republic of the Congo (RoC) and Gabon. Of these, the DRC holds the largest share of Congo forest—60 percent—and is home to more people than the other five combined. The DRC, along with CAR, has a human development index in the bottom 10 percent, meaning that lifespans, education levels and per capita GDP there are among the lowest in the world....</font></p><p style="font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; box-sizing: border-box; -webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; margin-top: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; line-height: 29.124px; widows: 1; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></p><p style="font-variant-numeric: normal; font-variant-east-asian: normal; box-sizing: border-box; -webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased; margin-top: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; line-height: 29.124px; widows: 1; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></p><p style="margin-top: 8px; margin-bottom: 8px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></p><p style="margin-top: 8px; margin-bottom: 8px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><a href="https://www.alternet.org/world/bolsonaro-brazil-slayer-amazon" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; outline: none;">https://www.alternet.org/world/bolsonaro-brazil-slayer-amazon</a></font></p><p style="margin-top: 8px; margin-bottom: 8px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></p><p style="margin-top: 8px; margin-bottom: 8px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">judge who jailed lula promoted</font></p><p style="margin-top: 8px; margin-bottom: 8px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></p><p style=""><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">==</font></p><p style=""><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">naming and shaming banks that fund mountaintop removal</font>
<font size="4" face="Times New Roman"> </font>
<font size="4" face="Times New Roman">nance; Rainforest Action Network leader Mike Brune, whose organization’s protests against banks exposed the coal industry’s financial underbelly.</font></p><p style=""><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></p><div style=""><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">moved from FORMERLY AMAZON RAINFOREST, THIS NOW REFERS TO CARBON SINK</font></div><div style=""><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></div><div style=""><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><a href="https://www.alternet.org/environment/rainforest-action-network-why-defending-indigenous-rights-integral-fighting-climate" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; outline: none;">https://www.alternet.org/environment/rainforest-action-network-why-defending-indigenous-rights-integral-fighting-climate</a></font></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
</font></div><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Even as the Trump administration rolls back regulations meant to protect Americans from pollution, the EPA recently released a <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29470121" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; outline: none;">report</a> that finds that people of color are much more likely to breathe toxic air than their white counterparts. The study’s basic findings—that non-whites bear a higher burden in terms of pollution that leads to a range of poor health outcomes—is supported by other <a href="https://www.colorlines.com/articles/report-oil-refineries-increase-health-risks-millions-african-americans" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; outline: none;">similar studies</a>, and underpins the issue of environmental injustice that impacts many politically marginalized communities.</font></div><p dir="ltr" style="margin: 0px 0px 22px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); line-height: 32px !important;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">It’s these communities that are hardest hit by the climate crisis––even though they are the least responsible for causing it. In addition, these communities, by design, are most imperiled by environmentally devastating extractive industries like coal mining, tar sands, fracked gas, and more. Let’s be clear: Climate change isn’t just a scientific issue—it’s an issue of racial inequity, economic inequity and cultural genocide.</font></p><p dir="ltr" style="margin: 0px 0px 22px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); line-height: 32px !important;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Indigenous peoples around the world are quickly becoming the generation that can no longer swim in their own waters, fish in their rivers, hunt their traditional foods or pick their traditional medicines. The climate isn’t just changing the landscape—it’s hurting the culture, sovereignty, health, economies and lifeways of Indigenous peoples around the world. Yet despite the immense impacts climate change and fossil fuel industries have on Indigenous cultures and ways of life, Indigenous communities are tremendously resilient.</font></p><div style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); margin-bottom: 20px;"><p dir="ltr" style="margin: 0px 0px 22px; line-height: 32px !important;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">This was strikingly clear at the <a href="https://www.ienearth.org/pme2018/" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; outline: none;">17th Protecting Mother Earth conference</a>, where tribal leadership and environmental activists called for a unified front to help find solutions. Hosted by the <a href="https://ienearth.org/pme2018" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; outline: none;">Indigenous Environmental Network</a>, the Nisqually Indian Tribe and <a href="https://www.indigenousclimateaction.com/" style="text-decoration-line: none; font-weight: bold; outline: none;">Indigenous Climate Action</a>, the conference provided a space for hundreds to come together to share lessons, celebrate victories, and build stronger alliances to defend and protect land, water, the climate, and Indigenous rights. "</font></p></div></div><div style=""><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></div><div style=""><p style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; line-height: 17.024px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">A contract signed in Jakarta on Tuesday by the owners of Asia Pulp and Paper, which is based in Indonesia, has received the qualified endorsement of its tormentor, Greenpeace after it agreed to log solely plantation timber.</font></p><p style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; line-height: 17.024px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The man who brokered the deal, Australian Scott Poynton, from the Forest Trust, said this ‘‘could be a real turning point in the fight against deforestation’’.</font></p><p style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; line-height: 17.024px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">‘‘APP has got such a complex political, environmental and economic context, if they can do it, there’s no excuse for any other company to have deforestation in their supply chain,’’ he said.</font></p><span style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; vertical-align: baseline; line-height: 17.024px;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">
Read more: <a href="http://www.smh.com.au/environment/a-turning-point-for-deforestation-20130205-2dwps.html#ixzz31hvmz8ju" style="margin: 0px; padding: 0px; border: 0px; font-weight: inherit; font-style: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; text-decoration: none;">http://www.smh.com.au/environment/a-turning-point-for-deforestation-20130205-2dwps.html#ixzz31hvmz8ju</a></font></span></div><div style=""><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">=</font></div><p style="outline-style: none; line-height: 18px; margin: 12px 0px 0px; padding: 0px 0px 6px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Bruce Wrobel, the chief executive of Herakles Farms, claims his company’s efforts to flatten a chunk of Cameroon’s dense rainforest to develop a palm oil plantation are borne of a desire to address a "dire humanitarian need".</font></p><p style="outline-style: none; line-height: 18px; margin: 12px 0px 0px; padding: 0px 0px 6px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Yet this week Herakles has had to suspend its activities in Cameroon following a forestry ministry order for the company to halt clearing work at their Talangaye nursery in the southwest region of the country.</font></p><p class="pageTitle" itemprop="name" style="margin: 12px 0px 0px; padding: 0px 0px 6px; direction: ltr; line-height: 18px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); outline-style: none;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><a href="http://www.greenpeace.org/international/en/news/Blogs/makingwaves/answer-from-herakles-farms-cameroon/blog/44009/" target="blank" style="outline-style: none; margin: 0px;">Greenpeace has long been among those calling out Wrobel and his company over their failure to tell the real truth over their project.</a> The suspension of work is merely the latest evidence that the proposed plantation is a mess, despite the company’s ever-present PR machine....</font></p><p class="pageTitle" itemprop="name" style="margin: 0px 0px 15px 20px; padding: 0px; direction: ltr; line-height: 28px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><a href="http://www.greenpeace.org/international/en/news/Blogs/makingwaves/herakles-cameroon-palm-oil-project-starts-to-/blog/45259/"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" color="#000000">http://www.greenpeace.org/international/en/news/Blogs/makingwaves/herakles-cameroon-palm-oil-project-starts-to-/blog/45259/</font></a></p><p class="pageTitle" itemprop="name" style="margin: 0px 0px 15px 20px; padding: 0px; direction: ltr; line-height: 28px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">see heraklex exposed oakland inst</font></p><h1 class="title" id="page-title" style="font-weight: normal; padding: 20px 20px 15px 0px; margin: 5px 0px 0px; letter-spacing: -0.02em;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><br class="Apple-interchange-newline" />The Herakles Files: CEO’s False Image</font></h1><div class="tabs" style=""><div class="region region-content" style=""><div id="block-system-main" class="block block-system"><div class="content"><div id="node-4107" class="node node-blog-post clearfix" about="/herakles-files-ceo" typeof="sioc:Item foaf:Document"><div class="content"><div class="field field-name-field-date field-type-date field-label-hidden" style="padding: 0px 0px 10px;"><div class="field-items" style=""><div class="field-item even"><span class="date-display-single" property="dc:date" datatype="xsd:dateTime" content="2013-06-05T00:00:00+00:00" style="font-style: italic;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Wednesday, June 5, 2013</font></span></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-author field-type-text field-label-hidden" style="padding: 0px 0px 10px;"><div class="field-items" style=""><div class="field-item even"><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">by Jettie Word</font></p><p><span style="line-height: 1.538em;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Bruce Wrobel, the CEO of Herakles Farms and founder of the nonprofit organization All for Africa, is a self-proclaimed “environmentalist and activist for the poor.”[1] Upon first glance, his initiatives in Africa seem to support these claims--but scratch the surface and the evidence to the contrary is overwhelming. A new report by the Oakland Institute and Greenpeace, <a href="http://www.oaklandinstitute.org/herakles-exposed" style="">Herakles Exposed</a>, reveals the company’s <a href="http://www.oaklandinstitute.org/herakles-farms-documentation" style="">internal documents</a> that highlight the discrepancy between the image Bruce Wrobel hopes to cultivate and his company’s actual practices. As shown in the report, Herakles Farms not only sidesteps sustainable practices, but also appears to be caught in an unstable financial situation in spite of its attempts to bypass responsible social and ecological practices.</font></span></p></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden" style="padding: 10px 40px 10px 0px; line-height: 1.6em;"><div class="field-items" style=""><div class="field-item even" property="content:encoded"><p><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Herakles Farms says it is “committed to addressing the complex issues of food s...</font></p></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div><p class="pageTitle" itemprop="name" style="margin: 0px 0px 15px 20px; padding: 0px; direction: ltr; line-height: 28px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">--</font></p><p class="pageTitle" itemprop="name" style="margin: 0px 0px 15px 20px; padding: 0px; direction: ltr; line-height: 28px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">aug 2013</font></p><p style="line-height: 19px !important; text-rendering: auto !important; margin: 0px 0px 18px !important;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Bruce Wrobel is fired from SITHE GLOBAL (SG). It is not clear from the release whether his sacking is connected to his management style and malpractices in the now famous Herakles Debacle in Cameroon. No mention is made in the release about SG activities in Cameroon.</font></p><p style="line-height: 19px !important; text-rendering: auto !important; margin: 0px 0px 18px !important;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The agro-industrial component of SG is known as Herakles Farms alias Sithe Global - Sustainable Oils Cameroon (SG-SOC).</font></p><p class="pageTitle" itemprop="name" style="padding: 0px; direction: ltr; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); margin: 0px 0px 18px !important; line-height: 19px !important; text-rendering: auto !important;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Even though the Ministry of Forestry and Wildlife (MINFOF) has lifted its ban on the company in Cameroon, HF is witnessing serious financial problems as financial institutions are not so ready to back such a liability.</font></p><p class="pageTitle" itemprop="name" style="padding: 0px; direction: ltr; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); margin: 0px 0px 18px !important; line-height: 19px !important; text-rendering: auto !important;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">---</font></p><p style="margin: 0.4em 0px 0.5em; line-height: 19.1875px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4">The <b>Order of the Sith Lords</b>, also known as <b>Bane's Sith Order</b>, the <b>Banite Sith</b>, or simply <b>Sith</b>, was an ancient <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kratocracy" title="Kratocracy" style="text-decoration: none; background-image: none;">kratocratic organization</a> and primary recurring <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antagonist" title="Antagonist" style="text-decoration: none; background-image: none;">antagonists</a> in the <i><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Wars" title="Star Wars" style="text-decoration: none; background-image: none;">Star Wars</a></i> <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fictional_universe" title="Fictional universe" style="text-decoration: none; background-image: none;">universe</a>. Its members were dedicated to Sith philosophy and to mastering the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_side(Star_Wars)" title="Dark side (Star Wars)" style="text-decoration: none; background-image: none;">dark side</a> of the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Force(Star_Wars)" title="Force (Star Wars)" style="text-decoration: none; background-image: none;">Force</a>.<sup id="cite_ref-sw-en_1-0" class="reference" style="line-height: 1em; unicode-bidi: -webkit-isolate;"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sith#cite_note-sw-en-1" style="text-decoration: none; background-image: none; white-space: nowrap;">[1]</a></sup> The Sith members, known as <b>Sith Lords</b> or <b>Dark Lords of the Sith</b>, traditionally use the title <b>Darth</b> before their Sith name. The Sith are the archenemies of the quasi-religious <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jedi" title="Jedi" style="text-decoration: none; background-image: none;">Jedi</a> and, like them, their main weapon is the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lightsaber" title="Lightsaber" style="text-decoration: none; background-image: none;">lightsaber</a>. By the events of both trilogies, there exist only two at a time: a master and an apprentice, and are the main antagonists in the <i>Star Wars</i> film series as well as in many other <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Wars_Expanded_Universe" title="Star Wars Expanded Universe" style="text-decoration: none; background-image: none;">Expanded Universe</a> works.</font></p><p class="pageTitle" itemprop="name" style="margin: 0.4em 0px 0.5em; padding: 0px; direction: ltr; line-height: 19.1875px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); text-rendering: auto !important;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The first use of the word "Sith" was in the novelization of <i><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Wars:Episode_IV-A_New_Hope" title="Star Wars: Episode IV - A New Hope" class="mw-redirect" style="text-decoration: none; background-image: none;">Star Wars: Episode IV - A New Hope</a></i>, as a title for <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darth_Vader" title="Darth Vader" style="text-decoration: none; background-image: none;">Darth Vader</a>, the "Dark Lord of the Sith". The Sith were not formally introduced or mentioned on-screen until the release of <i><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Wars:Episode_I-The_Phantom_Menace" title="Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace" class="mw-redirect" style="text-decoration: none; background-image: none;">Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace</a></i>, in 1999, though they had been named in some Expanded Universe works before that time.</font></p><p class="pageTitle" itemprop="name" style="margin: 0.4em 0px 0.5em; padding: 0px; direction: ltr; line-height: 19.1875px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); text-rendering: auto !important;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">--</font></p><p style="margin: 0.4em 0px 0.5em; line-height: 19.1875px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font face="Times New Roman" size="4"><b>Kratocracy</b>, (from the Greek κρατερός <i>krateros</i>, meaning "strong"), is according to <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Pepperell_Montague" title="William Pepperell Montague" style="text-decoration: none; background-image: none;">Montague</a>,<sup id="cite_ref-1" class="reference" style="line-height: 1em; unicode-bidi: -webkit-isolate;"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kratocracy#cite_note-1" style="text-decoration: none; background-image: none; white-space: nowrap;">[1]</a></sup> government by those who are strong enough to seize power through force or cunning.</font></p><p class="pageTitle" itemprop="name" style="margin: 0.4em 0px 0.5em; padding: 0px; direction: ltr; line-height: 19.1875px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); text-rendering: auto !important;"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">The term was also used by <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kropotkin" title="Kropotkin" class="mw-redirect" style="text-decoration: none; background-image: none;">Kropotkin</a> in <i><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutual_Aid:A_Factor_of_Evolution" title="Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution" style="text-decoration: none; background-image: none;">Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution</a></i>, but is now rarely seen.</font></p><h1 class="pageTitle" itemprop="name" style="margin: 0px 0px 15px 20px; padding: 0px; direction: ltr; line-height: 28px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"></font></h1><h1 class="pageTitle" itemprop="name" style="margin: 0px 0px 15px 20px; padding: 0px; direction: ltr; line-height: 28px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">Journalist Exposes How Private Investigation Firm Hired by Chevron Tried to Recruit Her as a Spy to Undermine $27B Suit in Ecuadorian Amazon</font></h1><div style=""><a href="http://www.democracynow.org/2010/8/16/journalist_exposes_how_private_investigation_firm"><font size="4" face="Times New Roman" color="#000000">http://www.democracynow.org/2010/8/16/journalist_exposes_how_private_investigation_firm</font></a></div><div style=""><font size="4" face="Times New Roman"><span style="line-height: 21px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">An exposé in </span><i style="line-height: 21px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">The Atlantic</i><span style="line-height: 21px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"> magazine reveals how one of the world’s largest private investigation firms, Kroll, hired by oil giant Chevron, tried to recruit an American journalist to undermine a massive $27 billion lawsuit against Chevron brought by the residents of the Ecuadorian Amazon. We speak with the journalist, Mary Cuddehe, and with Han Shan, the coordinator for Amazon Watch’s Clean Up Ecuador campaign. [includes rush transcript]</span></font></div><p style=""><font size="4" face="Times New Roman">73
Mary Cuddehe,
“A Spy
in
the
Jungle.”
The
Atlantic,
August
2,
2010.</font></p><p style=""><font style="" size="4" face="Times New Roman">==</font></p></div>
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