Women often play a crucial role in environmental conflicts over oil extraction, mining and logging activities, shrimp farming and tree plantations. These courageous women do not hesitate to challenge political power, local tyrants and armed violence for protecting the surrounding natural resources they and their family depend on. Therefore they protect their culture, way of life, sacred places, livelihood means and so on.
Bulletin articles
The United Nations declared 2010 to be the International Year of Biodiversity. According to the official web site, “It is a celebration of life on earth and of the value of biodiversity for our lives. The world is invited to take action in 2010 to safeguard the variety of life on earth: biodiversity.” Biodiversity is portrayed as our “natural wealth”, on which we rely to provide us with “food, fuel, medicine and other essentials” we “simply cannot live without.”
Africa is richly endowed with mangroves, which cover over 3.2 million hectares, extending from Mauritania to Angola on the Atlantic coast and from Somalia to South Africa along the Indian Ocean.
The last remnants of forests in Bangladesh are disappearing and much of the blame goes to local peoples’ “slash and burn” agriculture. The government –supported with loans and funds from multilateral and bilateral financial institutions- is actively promoting the plantation of trees and would thus appear to be trying to revert the situation.
An article published in the newspaper “La Tercera”(1) and taken up on the Mapuche IMC blog (2) reveals the results of research carried out by scientists from Valdivia’s Austral University that link the presence of native forests with greater water production.
The December 2004 tsunami that played havoc on several Asian coasts also exposed the level of human-made destruction of protective greenbelts including mangroves along coastlines. The need to re-establish natural protective greenbelts followed suit with quite often failed attempts.
A recent report by Greenpeace (“Why logging will not save the climate: the fallacy of GHG emissions reductions from so-called ‘Sustainable Forest Management’ (SFM) or Reduced Impact Logging (RIL) of natural forests”) evaluates greenhouse gases (GHG) emissions from the various forms of industrial logging.
Reduced emissions from deforestation and forest degradation (REDD) is based on a simple idea: Making forests worth more alive than dead. But on closer examination, it is not simple at all. To forest peoples, forests already are worth more alive than dead. REDD could involve the biggest ever transfer of control over forests – to international carbon financiers and polluting companies.
In tragic circumstances such as those being suffered by the Haitian people, it becomes very difficult to think and talk about anything else. But thinking –before talking- is something that is strikingly absent in the daily information we receive about the crisis in this country.
The Chittagong Hill Tracts (CHT) in southeastern Bangladesh bordering Burma is one of the last remaining forested regions in the country, and is the ancestral domain of a dozen indigenous communities collectively known as the Jumma peoples (from “jum” = shifting cultivation). These peoples have ethnic, linguistic and religious identities totally different from the Bengali Muslim majority. Under British rule, the region was autonomous, largely off-limits to outsiders and almost exclusively inhabited by indigenous peoples.
The Copenhagen Accord - the agreement reached by a group of countries at the Copenhagen Climate Change Summit and imposed on the rest - was defined by Transnational Institute’s Praful Bidwai as “a travesty of what the world needs to avert climate change”: The two degrees Celsius increase target in global temperature is 0.5 degrees above the target accepted by the majority of UN nations; poor countries are mainly left to fend for themselves in terms of adapting to climate change; and eventually, violations of the Copenhagen Accord w
The Penan have been living in the rainforests of Sarawak since time immemorial. They used to hunt and gather food from the rainforest and they lived on sago, a starch extracted from the pith of sago palm stems, until the 1950s, when they decided to settle at village locations where they live today. (1)