Commentary by Hambone Littletail Barely six weeks after dozens of Amazon natives were gunned down in cold blood by the Peruvian Army in the oil town of Bagua for protesting the cozy relationship between Big Oil and the government of President Alan Garcia, I find myself on the banks of the Mother of God River […]
By Michael Smith and Adriana Brasileiro July 31 (Bloomberg) — For four decades, Edimar Bentes and his family have survived by farming tiny clearings in the jungle near their dirt-floor shack in the state of Para in the Brazilian Amazon. On this April afternoon, Bentes, 56, squats in the driving rain and dips a glass […]
Swiss banks, Credit Suisse and UBS, together with the French BNP Paribas, are helping Singapore-listed Golden Agri-Resources raise up to 280 million Swiss francs ($258 million) to finance conversion of large areas of rainforest in New Guinea and Borneo for oil palm plantations, reports the Bruno Manser Fund (BMF), a group that campaigns on behalf […]
Researchers are starting to make sense of a severe drought that ravaged the Amazon rainforest four years ago. Their findings are terrifying. By Paul Brown In the summer of 2005, the Amazon rainforest suffered the worst drought it had seen in a century. Whole tributaries of the Amazon River dried up, leaving ferries stranded on […]
By Tim Hirsch Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva has approved a controversial bill allowing Amazon farmers to acquire an area of public land larger than France. But the president vetoed some of the most contentious clauses that would have enabled absentee landlords and companies to benefit from the measure. Smaller parcels of public […]
A Scottish firm has been implicated in funding a plan that would destroy the rainforest habitat of critically endangered orangutans in Sumatra. Jardine Matheson Holdings is the majority shareholder of Astra Agro Lestar, a palm oil company that plans to develop the peatland forests of Tripa in Aceh Province for oil palm plantations. Environmentalists say […]
By CARLA SALAZAR LIMA, Peru (AP) — Riot police used tear gas to turn student protesters away from Peru’s Congress on Thursday as thousands marched to back Amazon Indians resisting oil and natural gas exploration on their land. At least 20,000 students, labor union members and indigenous Peruvians from the country’s Andean highlands to […]
Satellite images released by NASA show nearly complete destruction of Rwanda’s Gishwati Forest between 1986 and 2001. Deforestation of the forest reserve is largely the result of subsistence harvesting and cultivation by refugees in the aftermath of the country’s 1994 genocide. Overall only 600 hectares of Gishwati’s original 100,000 hectares of forest remain, a […]
Armed gangs are logging rosewood and other valuable hardwoods from Marojejy and Masoala parks in Madagascar following abandonment of posts by rangers in the midst of the island nation’s political crisis, reports marojejy.com and local sources. "It is with great sadness that we report the temporary closure of Marojejy National Park to tourism," stated the […]
New study warns that even "safe" level of global warming will lead to huge increase in rainforest mortality rates by James Murray The impact of global warming on tropical rainforests will be so severe that even increases in temperature that are widely regarded as "safe" could raise tree mortality rates to such a level that […]
