Save Eco Destinations

Picture by BioGems

Illegal logging is devastating the rainforest on the eastern side of the Peruvian Andes.

Companies are making their way there to chop down old-growth mahogany and other rare species of hardwood trees, profit from them, and leave the land and wildlife – an entire ecosystem – derelict. These asshat loggers also hunt monkeys, birds, and other animals.

The carbon dioxide released from the trees that get chopped down, of course, adds to global warming, or climate change (whichever term you’re most keen on).

After the companies ravage the land, nobody goes back to plant trees where they once used to be. Instead, the areas are taken over by settlers, road builders and farmers.

BioGems Defenders, an organization that works to protect threatened and endangered wildlife and wildlands in the Americas, is made up of networks of people like you (yes, you!) and me – activists. Over 500,000 people now comprise the organization, and contribute to different causes by sending out emails asking for justice. It’s pretty sweet: check out their victories. BioGems Defenders is part of the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC).

In 2007, BioGems Defenders helped stop the illegal mahogany trade such that U.S. imports of mahogany from that region decreased tenfold in just a year.

In 2008, U.S. Congress passed legislation banning the import and sale of illegal wood into the country.

BioGems Defenders is now trying to pressure U.S. and Peruvian authorities to eradicate the illegal wood trade altogether.

Please take action here.

Demonstators block the entrance to Camp Garcia Naval Base January 13, 2003 in Vieques, Puerto Rico. For decades, warships and planes used it as a firing range before it was closed in 2003. A new U.S. congressional report, prepared for a hearing on March 12, 2009, says officials from the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry (ATSDR), a branch of the Health and Human Services department charged with protecting the public near toxic pollution sites, "deny, delay, minimize, trivialize or ignore legitimate health concerns" of residents exposed to the toxic munitions left behind. Photo from www.cpcml.ca

The U.S. polluted Puerto Rico through live-fire and bombing exercises from WWII until 2003 while it used the area as the biggest training ground for the U.S. Atlantic Fleet Forces. 

The Navy is now fortunately trying to undo the damage by cleaning its shit up. But not because they’re a magnanimous bunch. In truth, it’s a response to the Vieques Government and almost 9,300 residents going after the U.S. Govt for polluting their land and burdening the population with illnesses.

Awesome: the Department of the Interior wants to turn the area into a wildlife reserve once it’s cleaned up. Yay. And small portions of the area including undeveloped beaches have already been opened to the public as a wildlife refuge by the Fish and Wildlife Service.

Sucky: to “clean it up” by getting rid of hazardous unexploded munitions, the Navy wants to detonate them in the open air. Actually, it’s already started conducting these explosions. The Navy also wishes to burn 100 acres of tropical jungle to find where the hell they placed cluster bombs and explode them.

Imagine the smoke, violent noise (causing mass anxiety and general disruption, I presume), destruction and other crap that would – once again – plague the region’s humans, non-humans, and ecosystems if the Navy goes ahead with this at full capacity.

photo by NOAA - ccma.nos.noaa.gov

Naturally, the locals are pissed and suspicious. For a long time now, locals have resisted the Navy’s operations on their home land. And they know this clean-up scheme will screw them once more.

“The great majority of emergency room visits here last year were for respiratory problems,” said Evelyn Delerme Camacho, the mayor of Vieques, PR. “Can they guarantee that contaminants or smoke won’t reach the population? Would we have to wait and see if there’s a problem?”

Head of the Navy’s Vieques restoration program Christopher T. Penny said that thus far, using a remote-control device to penetrate the vegetation has not yielded favorable results. Further, it unexploded bombs are too powerful and therefore unsuitable to be exploded in detonation chambers. Nice bullshit detector.

EPA reps defend the Navy and claim its plans are standard protocol. EPA deputy director in San Juan Jose C. Font went as far as to say the detonations do not pose a threat to human health (um, what about the fauna and flora, genius?) – if limited (what is “limited”?) amounts go off at a time and the wind remains calm. He said that the air quality would be consistently monitored throughout the detonations.

"A gift for Vieques from Clinton and the U.S. Navy" - photo by thegully.com

Gee, with the stellar reputation of the U.S. throughout the Americas, not to mention globally, I’m sure the peeps at Vieques will trust the EPA’s every word and take a chill pill.

After all, the TNT, napalm, depleted uranium, mercury, lead and other chemicals, including PCBs, all potentially present at Vieques are all harmless.

Oh – also, the EPA said the cleanup could last up to a decade.

Excuse me?

Bastards!

More bullshit:

“In 2003, the federal Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry, which assesses health hazards at Superfund sites, concluded that levels of heavy metals and explosive compounds found in Vieques’s soil, groundwater, air and fish did not pose a health risk.

Really? That’s funny, because cancers of the breast, cervix and uterus have increased by 300% over the past 20 years.

But this year the registry agency said it would “rigorously” revisit its 2003 finding, and its director, Dr. Howard Frumkin, plans to visit Vieques on Wednesday to meet with residents.”

PR is asking Obama to get his ass in gear and “achieve an environmentally acceptable cleanup” and “closely monitor the health of the people of Vieques and promote appropriate remedies.” It is the least the U.S. could do. The least.

Because if those bombs are not removed, accidental explosions could take place. Any. Time. Actually, this may happen regardless.

“The real risk is that there’s no technology available that would guarantee that they’ve removed every piece of ordnance,” said Jacqueline MacDonald Gibson, an assistant professor of environmental sciences and engineering at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill.

Always shitting on everyone. I am so sick of their bullshit. I guess ignorance is bliss. Just reading Naomi Klein’s Disaster Capitalism, for example, makes my blood boil. My mother has had friends “disappear” during a dictatorship funded by the U.S. Government in the late 1970s. I won’t even get into Pinochet. Jesus Christ…

Some good news:

Once the whole mess is over, locals want to use the area for ecotourism too, and housing. These people live in poverty.

Fishers are already enjoying catching their prey in peace, and endangered turtles such as the loggerheads might finally be able to reclaim the land for nesting once the chaos subsides.

Source: NYT.

Parrots in the Amazon (photo by Orthopod1)

I am not a big fan of the World Bank, but maybe this time they’ve done something laudable: the bank has approved a $1.3 billion loan for the Brazilian government to spend on improving environmental management programs.

Given the environmental charge of the Amazon in the world (one-third of the planet’s tropical rainforests), this is good news! Maybe this effort will have a domino effect leading to less deforestation of the Brazilian rainforest. I’m hoping and hard, you better believe it.

The program focuses on forests, water conservation and energy efficiency. All aspects of the program will be involved in the climate change cause, e.g. deforestation leads to biodiversity loss and climate change, therefore, the program’s interests will include diminishing deforestation in Brazil.

Nice. After all, a better environmental management program really isn’t if ravaging deforestation isn’t dealt with! Honestly, I can’t help but be suspicious, even cynical at times. But Brazil does have a lot hanging on the Amazon, since it contains 60% of it, so their motivation lies there. Probably.

“This requires a commitment from all levels of government, whether federal, state or municipal, paying special attention to social programs, many of which include programs for sustainable growth,” said Guido Mantegna, Brazil’s Minister of Finance.

No sh*t. I mean, would we be that surprised if this money ended up being used on pseudo-green projects that would ultimately harm the environment? Anything’s possible with money, and if it were environmentalists who had it, we wouldn’t be in this mess. Plus, they had $488.6 million to spend on the environment and chose to fork it over to the military for “protection.”

To round it out a bit, here’s a related article you might be interested in: whether Obama should give Brazil $16 billion yearly to conserve the Amazon rainforests.

See you soon and don’t forget to add Save Eco Destinations on Twitter!

Have you ever visited the lush Indonesian rainforest? If not, you may never get to do it.

The rainforest nestled within Indonesia comprises the third largest rainforest region in the world-it’s a big deal. And we, with the help of global warming, are burning it.

The study on fire in the forests of Sumatra and Borneo, Indonesia, has analyzed the past 50 years of records of visibility at local airports and came up with the aforementioned and very depressing results. Drought years turned the area from fire-resistant to fire-prone, Robert Field, an atmospheric physicist from the University of Toronto told the New Scientist. And during fires, the burning of peat in the swamps beneath the forests can (a) burn for months at a time and (b) releases more smoke and carbon dioxide than anything else.

“Land managers respond to the drought by using fire to clear more land. In dry years, they burn deeper into the forest, which in turn releases more carbon dioxide,” James Randerson, UC Irvine climate scientist, said about another recent study.

“The abrupt transition can be attributed to rapid increases in deforestation and population growth,” Field said.

The worst offender, deforestation, of course, is to make room for farming-hey, another reason to go hardcore vegetarian, if you needed one. Another exacerbating factor has been the nefarious El Niño storms in the Pacific, all the way since 1960.

Randerson says his study’s findings point to the imperative need to include limits on deforestation in future climate agreements, that climate and land use should not, as it usually is, be considered separately from each other when calculating how changes will affect harmful gas emissions and thus global warming.

Say bye bye to the Indonesian rainforest.

As a nature lover, this comes as obviously dismal news. I feel worst for the fauna inhabiting the area. Despite the mosquitoes and my allergy to certain bug bites, e.g. spiders, which make my eyelids swell up and barely let me see, I heartily enjoy spending time amidst trees and shrubs, flowers and fresh soil. I guess I’ll never get to lie on the ground and stare up at the sunny sky through the trees in the rainforest of Indonesia, though.

Flooding in Tartagal, Argentina

If you called in or emailed Argentine President Cristina Kirchner last week, you deserve an enthusiastic pat on the back: it worked!

Greenpeace reports that over 1,000 people harassed the government daily demanding the signed implementation of the Forest Law-and we got it. Things like this always make me smile, and wide.

Such efforts are crucial to fight deforestation and the resulting natural disasters such as the flooding in Tartagal, up in the northwestern province of Salta in Argentina, where thousands lost their homes to the violent infiltration of volumes of mud.

Deforestation is about destroying the fertility of soil, biodiversity, and leaving the soil useless to protect the land against intensive flooding (due to accelerated erosion) as it warps the natural regulation of river basins. Fighting it is, therefore, imperative to our planet-and our human and non-human community.

Meanwhile, Tartagal lays drowned in mud, with dead animals rotting in the streets, people missing, snakes everywhere, its waters polluted, and ravenous mosquitoes sucking the blood out of everyone in sight. As a bonus, people have to watch out for explosives in certain areas, as oil companies’ explosives were dragged out by the flood. Some explosives have fortunately been found and subsequently deactivated. Apparently, something as seemingly innocuous as a cell phone can trigger them.

The people in Tartagal are poor and humble, with nothing to spare and now nothing at all. The capitalist efforts to force oil out of the ground, tear down trees, and the ten million other atrocities they commit every second of every day make me want to puke.

Please take action however way you can to spread the word when you hear of something, and make your voice heard to demand change.

Always remember the wise Margaret Mead’s words: “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed people can change the world. Indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.”

Floods in Tartagal, 2009

In the northwest of Argentina lays a province called Salta, a popular tourist spot, whose trees corporations love to chop down. Salta comprises many rich ecosystems-well, fewer and fewer ecosystems these days.

Currently, the city of Tartagal has been experiencing very destructive floods-since at least 2006, actually! Watch a video here . Every year Argentina gets a rerun, and in other provinces too, e.g. Tucumán (see picture above).

The 2006 flood is evidence that the deforestation of this region’s Argentine forests is a direct cause of these dismal consequences. Now thousands of people have lost their homes because some greedy corporate businessmen have sold their souls to desecrate the planet and fill their fat pockets with crisp dollar bills.

It’s 2009, and still there’s been no progress. There is no firm policy against the massacre of Salta’s forests. See, last year, 1.5 million Argentines stood up and helped create the Forest Law-which hasn’t been put into practice by the government. It’s a shame that with a woman-a minority-president, things remain the same as before. But hey: greed knows no sex, race, class, sexual orientation, or anything else, right? Dough is dough, and when you’re vile enough to rig an election to win the presidency, people can’t expect much…

Please tell the Argentine Government what you think and demand they stop Salta’s deforestation – stop the Forest Law boycott!! or, if you can speak a little Spanish and can spare a couple of bucks, speak up! Call the Red Greenpeace Phone Line at 0011-5411-4000-5580 Mondays through Fridays from 7AM to 3PM EST and tell President Cristina Kirchner to get her ass in gear about the Forest Law.