Aerial view of steam and smoke rising from the Syncrude Mildred Lake mining facility in 2014. Photo: Alex MacLean / climatestate.com

Trudeau will fuel the fires of our climate crisis if he approves Canada’s mega mine

By Tzeporah Berman 10 December 2019 (The Guardian) – This week, the Canadian government is in Madrid telling the world that climate action is its Number 1 priority. When they get home, Justin Trudeau’s newly re-elected government will decide whether to throw more fuel on the fires of climate change by giving the go-ahead to […]

Repparfjord is near the northernmost point of Norway. On 30 November 2019, Norway greenlit a copper mine that will dump two million tons of tailings in Arctic fjord each year. Photo: Thomas Nilsen / The Barents Observer

Norway greenlights copper mine that will dump two million tons of tailings in Arctic fjord each year – “Dumping of mining waste will kill every living thing on the ocean floor in the immediate area and disturb spawning grounds over a much greater distance”

ByThomas Nilsen 30 November 2019 (The Barents Observer) – “Allowing this to happen with a protected national salmon fjord doesn’t make sense at all,” said Silje Lundberg, head of Naturvernforbundet. The organisation is the Norwegian branch of Friends of the Earth. Lundberg said the planned dumping of tailings from the copper mine to the fjord […]

People gather for an anti-government protest in Santiago, Chile, Friday, 1 November 2019. Groups of Chileans continued to demonstrate as government and opposition leaders debated the response to weeks of protests that paralyzed much of the capital and forced the cancellation of two major international summits. Photo: AP Photo

From Algeria to Hong Kong, 2019 was a year of anti-establishment rage – “What unites the protests is that all are responding to a sense of exclusion, pessimism about the future, and a feeling of having lost control to unaccountable elites”

5 December 2019 (AFP) – Angry citizens have swelled the streets of cities across the globe this year, pushing back against a disparate range of policies but often expressing a common grievance — the establishment’s failure to heed their demands for a more equitable future. While street protests are nothing new, experts say the intense […]

Protesters block an intersection during the WTO protests in Seattle, 30 November 2019. Photo: The UW Daily

The Battle of Seattle: 20 years later

By James Galasyn 30 November 2019 (Desdemona Despair) – It was twenty years ago today: the protests against the third WTO Ministerial Conference, held in Seattle on 30 November 1999. The ongoing clashes between protesters and the Seattle Police Department came to be known as the Battle of Seattle, and they set the tone of […]

Animation showing deforestation in Brazil’s Mato Grasso state, 1984-2018. Graphic: William Neff / The Washington Post

Brazil’s Bolsonaro calls Amazon deforestation “cultural”, says it “will never end”

By Marina Lopes 20 November 2019 SAO PAULO, Brazil (The Washington Post) – Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro shrugged off a government report that deforestation in the Amazon reached an 11-year high on his watch, saying Wednesday he expects the destruction of the world’s largest tropical rainforest to continue. “Deforestation and fires will never end,” the […]

An aerial view of the Cachimbo Biological Reserve in Altamira, Brazil, reveals the scale of the burned land in the Amazon basin, in August 2019. Critics of Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro trace the recent spike in fires to his administration’s anti-environmental policies. Photo: João Laet / AFP / Getty Images

Amazon rainforest sees biggest spike in deforestation in more than a decade – “Forests fall, indigenous leaders are killed, and environmental laws are shattered”

By Colin Dwyer 18 November 2019 (NPR) – Picture, for a second, just how vast New York City is. All told, including Staten Island, the Bronx and every block in between, the massive metropolis takes up more than 300 square miles. Now, try to picture a hunk of land more than 12 times that size. That’s […]

Indigenous leader Paulo Paulino Guajajara photographed in September 2019. He was hunting on 1 November 2019 inside the Arariboia reservation in Maranhao state when he was attacked and killed by illegal loggers. Photo: Ueslei Marcelino / REUTERS

Illegal loggers assassinate Amazon indigenous warrior who guarded forest, wound another – “The Bolsonaro government has indigenous blood on its hands”

By Anthony Boadle and Leo Benassatto 2 November 2019 BRASILIA (Reuters) – Illegal loggers in the Amazon ambushed an indigenous group that was formed to protect the forest and shot dead a young warrior and wounded another, leaders of the Guajajara tribe in northern Brazil said on Saturday. Paulo Paulino Guajajara, or Lobo (which means […]

A Brazilian soldier puts out fires at the Nova Fronteira region in Novo Progresso, Brazil, on 3 September 2019. Photo: Leo Correa / AP

The Amazon hasn’t stopped burning. There were 19,925 fire outbreaks last month, and “more fires” are in the future – “The government is looking to promote mining and ranching in the Amazon”

By Jorge L. Ortiz 18 October 2019 (USA Today) – The proliferation of fires in the Amazon rainforest drew international attention in August, especially when French President Emmanuel Macron called for urgent action. Since then, the eyes of the world have shifted elsewhere as House Democrats launched an impeachment inquiry against President Donald Trump, Hurricane […]

A protester shakes hands with a security officer in Quito, Ecuador, on Sunday, 13 October 2019, as they celebrate the government’s announcement that it has cancelled an austerity package and restored fuel subsidies. The package had triggered violent protests that paralyzed the economy and left seven people dead. Photo: Dolores Ochoa / AP

Ecuador reaches fuel subsidy deal to end violent protests

By Chris Arnold 14 October 2019 (NPR) – Ecuadorian President Lenin Moreno and leaders of the country’s indigenous peoples have reached a deal to cancel a disputed austerity package. The move follows nearly two weeks of violent, widespread protests. The unrest began after Moreno ended government subsidies that have helped keep fuel prices low in […]

The sun shines orange through through smoke from wildfires in Bolivia in September 2019. Photo: Adolfo Lino / Mongabay

Fires still being set in blazing Bolivia – Up to 18 million wild animals killed, including 500 rare jaguars – “Bolivia needs to rethink its agricultural strategy, as the future of its immeasurable biodiversity is at stake”

By Claire Wordley 1 October 2019 (Mongabay) – Despite over six weeks of firefighting, the infernos destroying Bolivia’s forests continue to spread. 5.3 million hectares (about 13.1 million acres) — an area larger than the whole of Costa Rica — have been destroyed, and about 40 percent of that area was forest. A perfect storm of factors — from […]

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