Tag Archives: global warming

Too Little, Too Late?

20 Jul

Chico Mendes and his son Sandino in 1987

Back in the late 1980s, there was a period of perhaps 18 months within which three people I knew were murdered. They all lived in the Amazon, and all but one engaged in political activism focused on the rights of  peasants and forest dwellers in that enormous region. One, Chico Mendes was  — and became even more  — famous; his life, struggles for rubber tapper rights and death was the subject of films and books(including one of my own).

Another, Expedito Ribeiro de Souza, was president of the Sindicato de Trabalhadores Rurais, or Rural Workers Union, in Rio Maria, Para. He was exposing the appalling but widespread use of slave labour on big cattle ranches splayed among the stands of rain forest, and for that was threatened and killed.

The third was an affable, mild-mannered family man named Antenor Moreira. And he was murdered one day while working on his plot of land by a land dealer. They are just a few of the estimated 918 people killed in the Amazon between 1985 and April of this year.

Yet only now is the Brazilian government – already in its third Workers Party government – offering some kind of protection to people like them. At least 131 rural leaders, environmentalists and human rights defenders are slated for either regular visits from police to round-the-clock vigilance. And that list would have been larger if not for the fact that 42 people already on it have already been killed. Among them: the Silvas, a husband-and-wife team killed for trying to stop illegal loggers and charcoal-makers. They had already spent ten years alerting authorities to the threats they were receiving – and which in the end were carried out in cold blood last May.

The big question of course is not why has this taken so long – although that is a big question! – but will the promise of protection do any good? Will it change anything? In the end, if the Brazilian government makes it clear that harassment and killings of activists is always going to investigated and always going to be punished, there will be a lot less incentive to shoot someone for a $4000 (the price on the head of Jose Claudio Ribeiro da Silva ,for example.)

But that message is not being sent.

It would have to begin with the trials and sentencing, to name just one case, of the military personnel responsible for killing 19 Sem Terra rural workers in the state of Para in 1996. It would have to go on to bring justice to the many other criminals who are easily identified but living safely because of the power they (or their bosses) wield economically and politically in the region. It might even veer towards taking away or severely reducing the holdings of these people and turning them into extractive reserves, thus actually preserving rain forest.

Lucio Flavio Pinto

Meanwhile, another friend – and valuable source of information on the dirty dealings at play in the Amazon – Lucio Flavio Pinto, continues to receive threats.  The editor of the renowned  Jornal Pessoal, he received an International Press Freedom award in 2005 from the Committee to Protect Journalists. Yet the fact that he still has ample subject matter to expose in the Jornal Pessoal would seem to indicate that something far deeper than individual protection for those who seek justice in the Amazon is seriously lacking.

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Amazon, photo by Andrei Smoler

An interview with Dr. Ian Burton

11 Apr

Burning Rainforest in the Amazon

Dr. Ian Burton is a scientist emeritus with the Adaptation and Research Group of the Meteorological Service of Canada and adjunct professor with the University of Toronto’s Institute for Environmental Studies.  He also works with the Red Cross-Red Crescent Climate Centre in The Hague. He recently attended the conference on Community-Based Adaptation to Climate Change in Bangladesh.

What kind of organizations attended the Conference?

I’m not sure what the proportion was, but perhaps the larger proportion was made up of development and to some extent research NGOs, but mostly development NGO, with an international network (like) Care, Greenpeace and Oxfam. They were mostly organizational people who have been working at the community level.

It started off focused on climate change but many, many people came there with a community development view that was not necessarily focused on climate change and was in fact using the climate change vehicle for getting support for the things they wanted to do anyway. More holistic, more integrated, but this is an area that has been relatively neglected in development.

So what are poor communities doing to adapt to climate change?

Just a tremendous range and variety of things, so it’s hard to generalize about people and the problems they face in mountain regions or on the Bangladesh coast, in semi-arid regions and in tropical rainforests.

Can you give me some examples?

Rainwater collection, people who are short of water or seasonally short of water can and do benefit themselves by roof collection systems. It’s just one example, (but) it’s a simple technology; it doesn’t cost a lot; it’s been in use for a long time in a lot of different places. So a lot of this movement that is going on is about trying to expand that to other communities that haven’t been doing that. And in respect to climate change, there are situation where either you know now or can anticipate in the future where water availability will decrease. Doing that is a cheaper and more self-reliant alternative than asking somebody to come and put down a tube well.

Also preserving forests, not holus-bolus chopping down forests, trying to reduce that, replanting forest, planting different varieties, different species.

What about agriculture?

That was quite a pervasive theme. One thing that I saw that was actually quite interesting was down on this southwest coast of Bangladesh, (where) they are suffering from slow incremental sea-level rise but the more acute problem at the moment is salinity. These were mostly small subsistence farmers producing rice for their own consumption. And now there is quite an interesting growth in shrimp cultivation. I saw some rice paddies full of water with a dyke around it and it would have a net diagonally strung across it. And on one side they would be growing rice, and on the side there would be shrimp.

What I see going on is very encouraging. It’s additive to what’s been going on anyway. The existence of the climate change threat and the general acknowledgement that it’s going to hurt the poor countries and poor people most, so NGOs are picking that up and saying we need to factor climate change into all the things that we’re doing on community development.

So while the focus was on community-based adaptation to climate change, it’s also community-based adaptation to everything else.

Readers can find out a lot more about the conference by checking out the videos posted at www.oneworld.org

 

Tar babies

19 Sep

Originally uploaded by Greenpeace International

The Petroleum Producers Association of Canada is running a series of promotional spots on television these days. They show nice, just-regular people who happen to work for them in technical capacities, showing us all the great tree-planting and water filtering the Alberta tar sands industry takes on as it extracts usable fuel from the difficult oil laden bitumen.
Yet it is just as difficult to look at some of the deformed fish that are appearing in ever-larger numbers in Lake Athabaska, which is downstream from the oil sands. They have tumours and lesions and missing spines. Their bodies are loaded with contaminants and, as Robert Grandjambe told a Canadian Press reporter, “A lot of people are afraid to eat fish from the lake.”

Various scientific studies have found toxins in the lake, and local doctors are noticing higher-than-average rates of auto-immune diseases, cancer and other medical conditions among the residents of nearby communities. What’s more, another study done a few years ago found that average Albertans gain little from the tar sands boom, with massive profits going to the oil industry and their suppliers alone.

It takes two tonnes of the bitumen to produce a barrel of oil. The process of steam injection and refining it generates anywhere to two to four times the amount of greenhouse gasses per barrel of oil as the production of conventional oil. And six square metres of tailing are created for just one square metre of the bitumen to be mined. Those tailings now sit in extensive ponds, lakes really, of toxic sludge that kill thousands of migratory birds every year. What’s more a 2007 report for one company, Suncor, found that 5 million litres of polluted water had leaked from its lake into the groundwater.

But both the provincial government of Alberta and the Harper government are shrugging off the plethora of studies showing just how damaging the tar sands industry is turning out to be. Since it represents hundreds of millions of dollars of investment and is now responsible for at least half of all petroleum mining in Canada – the largest supplier of oil to the United states – they working hard at maintaining the fiction that this industry is largely benign.

Just like the green, sun-dappled images of those television spots. In reality, only about 2 per cent of ruined land has been reclaimed – a little more than one square kilometre of the 602-square kilometer total. 

The tar sands industry is making itself a lot of money with this archaic energy source. But at the same time, it’s giving rise to successive generations of sick people and even sicker wildlife: Canada’s tar babies, being born into an increasingly devastated environment.
To learn more about the human and environmental toll, check out Tar Sands Watch, and its roster of frightening statistics.

Follow

Get every new post delivered to your Inbox.