tagged w/ Lungs of the Earth
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Following years of intense pressure from the agribusiness sector, Brazil's parliament has approved destructive reforms to the country's forest protection. President Dilma has just 9 remaining days to veto this hatchet job before it becomes law. With the world watching, which side of history will she choose to be on? Will her legacy be Amazon ruin? Or, will she demonstrate courage and act on behalf of future generations?
This article appeared in the New York Times today.
YOU can urge President Dilma to do the right thing for Brazil, the Amazon and the planet.
Take action now by signing this petition, tell her to veto the new Forest Code!
More at the linkFollowing years of intense pressure from the agribusiness sector, Brazil's... more
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Agent Orange is one of the most devastating weapons of modern warfare, a chemical which killed or injured an estimated 400,000 people during the Vietnam War -- and now it's being used against the Amazon rainforest. According to officials, ranchers in Brazil have begun spraying the highly toxic herbicide over patches of forest as a covert method to illegally clear foliage, more difficult to detect that chainsaws and tractors. In recent weeks, an aerial survey detected some 440 acres of rainforest that had been sprayed with the compound -- poisoning thousands of trees and an untold number of animals, potentially for generations.
Officials from Brazil's environmental agency IBAMA were first tipped to the illegal clearing by satellite images of the forest in Amazonia; a helicopter flyover in the region later revealed thousands of trees left ash-colored and defoliated by toxic chemicals. IBAMA says that Agent Orange was likely dispersed by aircraft by a yet unidentified rancher to clear the land for pasture because it is more difficult to detect than traditional operations that require chainsaws and tractors.
Last week, in another part of the Amazon, an investigation conducted by the agency uncovered approximately four tons of the highly toxic herbal pesticides hidden in the forest awaiting dispension. If released, the chemicals could have potentially decimated some 7,500 acres of rainforest, killing all the wildlife that resides there and contaminating groundwater. In this case, the individual responsible was identified and now faces fines nearing $1.3 million.
According to a report from Folha de São Paulo, the last time such chemicals were recorded in use by deforesters was in 1999, but officials say dispensing the devastating herbicide may become more common as officials crack down on the most flagrant types of environmental crime.
"They [deforesters] have changed their strategy because, in a short time, more areas of forest can be destroyed with herbicides. Thus, they don't need to mobilize tree-cutting teams and can therefore bypass the supervision of IBAMA," says Jerfferson Lobato of IBAMA.
While Agent Orange was originally designed to clear forest coverage in combat situations, its use became a subject of controversy due to its impact on humans and wildlife. During the Vietnam War, the United States military dispersed 12 million gallons of herbicide, impacting the health of some 3 million, mostly peasant, Vietnamese citizens, and causing birth defects in around 500 thousand children. Additionally, the chemical's effect on the environment have been profound and lasting.
More at the linkAgent Orange is one of the most devastating weapons of modern warfare, a chemical... more
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A gold rush that accelerated with the onset of the 2008 global recession is compounding the woes of the Amazon basin, laying waste to Peruvian rain forest and spilling tons of toxic mercury into the air and water.
With gold's price soaring globally as the metal became a hedge against financial uncertainty, the army of small-scale miners in the state of Madre de Dios has swelled to some 40,000. The result: Diesel exhaust sullies the air, trees are toppled to get at the sandy, gold-flecked earth and the scars inflicted on the land are visible on satellite photos.
The work is dangerous and produces a fifth of Peru's overall annual yield of roughly 175 metric tons of gold that make this country the world's No. 5 producer. The mining also is almost entirely illegal.
"Extracting an ounce of gold costs from $400 to $500 and the profit is $1,000 per ounce," notes Peru's environment minister, Antonio Brack. In just a decade, gold has more than tripled in value.
The situation in the southeastern state of Madre de Dios, which borders Brazil and Bolivia, is mirrored in dozens of the countries where gold is similarly mined, and where the desperately poor often end up working for the most unsavory of opportunists.
Government controls are mostly futile.
Neighboring Colombia and Ecuador have mounted crackdowns in the past year — Ecuador's military last month dynamited 67 pieces of heavy equipment — but when authorities depart, the diggers troop back and work resumes. In Madre de Dios, the informal production is unrecorded, untaxed and carried out on public lands where claims are awarded by regional officials, many of them grown rich in the process.
As the industry has grown, heavy machinery has moved in bearing Caterpillar, Volvo and other international trademarks into a state the size of Maine or Portugal, whose remotest reaches are believed inhabited by uncontacted Indian tribes.
In February the Peruvian navy dynamited 13 dredges which, working in violation of a government ban, were choking the Madre de Dios river with silt, killing plants and destroying habitats. Protesting laborers blockaded Madre de Dios' only highway, and at least three people were shot and killed by police sent from Lima.
"One of the big hydraulic dredges we destroyed could easily harvest a kilogram (worth about $45,000) of gold a day," said Brack.
Rather than try to evict the thousands of protesting informal miners, the government decided to work to "formalize" their operations, which have denuded well over 180 square kilometers (70 square miles ) of jungle in Madre de Dios.
"In practice, nothing happened. They moved against a small percentage of dredges that are not necessarily what hurts the environment most," said Pavel Cartagena, an environmental activist who recently returned to Puerto Maldonado, the state capital, after death threats drove him away for a year.
Brack said the crackdown served notice to local politicians profiting from the industry.
"We found that nearly all the public officials in Puerto Maldonado were involved," the minister said. "In 2010, the regional mining director had a mining company. His No. 2 had one. His wife had one. His sister had one (as did) the sister of the No. 2. They were all in it. And you think anyone is going to regulate anything?"
The state prides itself on its biodiversity and attracts eco-tourists for its monkeys, macaws and anacondas. Yet its forest is pocked with craters gouged by grime-coated men who tear the earth away with high-pressure water hoses.
And that is only the beginning. To capture the gold flecks, mostly the size of a grain of sand, mercury is used because it is the cheapest, easiest method. It then seeps into the air and rivers, an estimated 35 tons (32 metric tons) a year in Madre de Dios alone, slowly poisoning people, plants, animals and fish, scientific studies show.
cont.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IUFg4AwUZZwA gold rush that accelerated with the onset of the 2008 global recession is... more
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The world's largest tropical forest, the Amazon, experienced something rare last year —a drought. It wasn't the earth-cracking kind of drought that happens in the American Southwest or the Australian outback, but it did stunt or kill lots of trees.
It was the second such drought in the Amazon in five years, and forest scientists are trying to understand why these droughts are happening, and what their effects will be for the planet.
The 2005 drought in the Amazon was so unusual that scientists called it a "100-year event" — something supposed to happen only once a century.
"This is what's quite alarming — that we've seen these two very unusual events," says Simon Lewis, a forest ecologist at the University of Leeds in Great Britain, who watched both droughts hit the Amazon. Lewis notes that several of the computer models that calculate the effects of climate change do predict that parts of the planet are going to get drier.
"And those two unusual events are consistent with those predictions that suggest that the Amazon may be severely impacted over the next few decades by these droughts," he says.
How Droughts Affect Forests
Writing in the journal Science, Lewis and his scientific team say the droughts are probably caused by the northward movement of especially warm water in the Atlantic Ocean. That shift carries moisture north, robbing big chunks of the Amazon of rain it normally would get.
The droughts can create a different forest — thinner, smaller and with a different mix of tree species. That, in turn, could affect the Earth's climate. As trees grow, they suck carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and store it, so a big forest like the Amazon is a carbon "sink."
But drought slows that process down — more carbon remains in the atmosphere, and that could warm the planet.
If the forest gets dry enough, air can get into the vessels that carry water through a tree — kind of like an air bubble in a fuel line — and a tree dies. If enough die, that too could affect the atmosphere.
"As these dead trees rot and release their carbon in their trunks and roots into the atmosphere as carbon dioxide, then we see it probably turning into a source of carbon emissions," Lewis says.The world's largest tropical forest, the Amazon, experienced something rare last... more
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A widespread drought in the Amazon rainforest last year caused the "lungs of the world" to produce more carbon dioxide than they absorbed, potentially leading to a dangerous acceleration of global warming. Scientists have calculated that the 2010 drought was more intense than the "one-in-100-year" drought of 2005.
They are predicting it will result in some eight billion tonnes of carbon dioxide being expelled from the Amazon rainforest, which is more than the total annual carbon emissions of the United States. For the second time in less than a decade, the earth's greatest rainforest released more carbon dioxide than it absorbed because many of its trees dried out and died.
Scientists believe that the highly unusual nature of the two droughts, which occurred in the space of just five years, may be the result of higher sea-surface temperatures in the tropical Atlantic, which could also be influenced by global warming caused by the release of man-made emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases. The Anglo-Brazilian team of researchers has emphasised that there is as yet no proof that the two highly unusual droughts in the Amazon are the direct result of rising carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere, but the scientists have warned that the world is gambling with its future if it fails to curb fossil fuel emissions.
Simon Lewis of Leeds University, the lead author of the study, said: "If greenhouse gas emissions contribute to Amazon droughts that in turn cause forests to release carbon, this feedback loop would be extremely concerning. Put more starkly, current emissions pathways risk playing Russian roulette with the world's largest rainforest.
"Two unusual and extreme droughts occurring within a decade may largely offset the carbon absorbed by intact Amazon forests during that time. If events like this happen more often, the Amazon rainforest would reach a point where it shifts from being a valuable carbon sink slowing climate change to a major source of greenhouse gases that could speed it up. Having two events of this magnitude in such close succession is extremely unusual, but is unfortunately consistent with those climate models that project a grim future for Amazonia."
cont.A widespread drought in the Amazon rainforest last year caused the "lungs of the... more
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The uprising In the Amazon is more urgent than Iran's - it will determine the future of the planet.
In the depths of the Amazon rainforest, the poorest people in the world have taken on the richest people in the world to defend a part of the ecosystem none of us can live without. They had nothing but wooden spears and moral force to defeat the oil companies – and, for today, they have won.
Here's the story of how it happened – and how we all need to pick up this fight. Earlier this year, Peru's right-wing President, Alan Garcia, sold the rights to explore, log and drill 70 per cent of his country's swathe of the Amazon to a slew of international oil companies. Garcia seems to see rainforest as a waste of good resources, saying of the Amazon's trees: "There are millions of hectares of timber there lying idle."
There was only one pesky flaw in Garcia's plan: the indigenous people who live in the Amazon. They are the first people of the Americas, subject to wave after wave of genocide since the arrival of the Conquistadors. They are weak. They have no guns. They barely have electricity. The government didn't bother to consult them: what are a bunch of Indians going to do anyway?
But the indigenous people have seen what has happened elsewhere in the Amazon when the oil companies arrive. Occidental Petroleum are facing charges in US courts of dumping an estimated nine billion barrels of toxic waste in the regions of the Amazon where they operated from 1972 to 2000. Andres Sandi Mucushua, the spiritual leader of the area known to the oil companies as Block (12A)B, said in 2007: "My people are sick and dying because of Oxy. The water in our streams is not fit to drink and we can no longer eat the fish in our rivers or the animals in our forests." The company denies liability, saying they are "aware of no credible data of negative community health impacts".
In the Ecuadorian Amazon, according to an independent report, toxic waste allegedly dumped after Chevron-Texaco's drilling has been blamed by an independent scientific investigation for 1,401 deaths, mostly of children from cancer. When the BBC investigator Greg Palast put these charges to Chevron's lawyer, he replied: "And it's the only case of cancer in the world? How many cases of children with cancer do you have in the States?... They have to prove it's our crude, [which] is absolutely impossible."
The people of the Amazon do not want to see their forests felled and their lands poisoned. And here, the need of the indigenous peoples to preserve their habitat has collided with your need to preserve your habitat. The rainforests inhale massive amounts of warming gases and keep them stored away from the atmosphere. Already, we are chopping them down so fast that it is causing 25 per cent of man-made carbon emissions every year – more than planes, trains and automobiles combined. But it is doubly destructive to cut them down to get to fossil fuels, which then cook the planet yet more. Garcia's plan was to turn the Amazon from the planet's air con into its fireplace.
Why is he doing this? He was responding to intense pressure from the US, whose new Free Trade Pact requires this "opening up", and from the International Monetary Fund, paid for by our taxes. In Peru, it has also been alleged that the ruling party, APRA, is motivated by oil bribes. Some of Garcia's associates have been caught on tape talking about how to sell off the Amazon to their cronies.
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Thank you to those who live in the Amazon who know what is most important to life on this planet. This of course didn't cause the Twitter frenzy the protests in Iran did, but nevertheless this too is about democracy... environmental democracy, and that to me is most important because without a sustainable environment you have nothing else.The uprising In the Amazon is more urgent than Iran's - it will determine the... more
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New satellite photographs show that the destruction of Brazil's fragile Amazon rainforest has exploded this year, fueling fears that the government's efforts to stop deforestation have been fruitless.
Brazil's DETER real-time monitoring system found that more than 430 square miles of forest, an area a bit smaller than the city of Los Angeles, vanished in the month of April, while about 2,300 square miles, larger than the state of Delaware, were destroyed between last August and April.
That nine-month total surpassed the entire acreage in the Amazon that was destroyed over the previous 12 months, according to DETER data. What's worse, the satellites couldn't see about half of the forest in April due to cloud cover, suggesting that actual deforestation likely was much greater.
That's raised red flags among environmentalists, who say that soybean farming, cattle production and illegal logging are destroying the world's largest rainforest despite the government's attempts to halt the deforestation.
Chopping down and burning the rainforest releases tons of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, contributing to global climate change. Brazil is the world's fourth-largest emitter of greenhouse gases, largely because of deforestation, according to the U.S.-based World Resources Institute.
Worse is yet to come, environmentalists said.
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Balancing survival with preserving nature. That is the challenge we face.
New satellite photographs show that the destruction of Brazil's fragile Amazon... more
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How can we throw it all away? 2030 is not that far off, and we are in danger of losing more than half of an ecosystem that regulates the climate of the Earth and is one of the largest sources of carbon and a habitat to thousands of species. But will we see this on our local news tonight?How can we throw it all away? 2030 is not that far off, and we are in danger of losing... more
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