Cross Posted from Tree Biotech 2013
Join Earth First!, Global Justice Ecology Project and the Campaign to STOP GE Trees for a week of resistance to genetically engineered trees. From May 26-June 1, the International Tree Biotechnology 2013 Conference is taking place in Asheville, NC. This conference is a gathering of many of the major players in the genetically engineered tree business and we intend to greet them with spirited protest.
In case you didn’t know, a tornado touched down in Oklahoma, killing at least 51 people (20 children among them). We can’t control the weather, we can try to stop climate change before it gets worse, and we can definitely help build solidarity networks to respond to emergency situations. FEMA is too busy picking which trees to cut down in the San Francisco Bay area. Solidarity is all we have.
Cross Posted from Infoshop.org
We are collecting information about how people can support independent relief efforts supporting the people in Oklahoma affected by the May 20, 2013 tornado.
Cross Posted from OccupythePipeline
BREAKING! OtP took to the high seas today to interrupt the New York League of Conservation Voters’ Spring Gala, which was funded by the hydro fracking industry and thrown in honor of Michael Bloomberg.
The New York League of Conservation Voters is hosting a Spring Gala tonight, May 20, 2013, honoring New York’s Mayor Michael Bloomberg for being environmentally friendly. While Bloomberg has some green policies, there is a big non-green blot on his record. Bloomberg’s push for NYC buildings to convert from #4 or #6 oil to fracked natural gas and the attendant plethora of gas pipelines (built while waiting for permission to be built) including Spectra’s on the Gansevoort Peninsula, all touted as Eco-friendly while actually bad for the environment and potentially very dangerous.
By P Sainath, Counterpunch
Suicide rates among Indian farmers were a chilling 47 per cent higher than they were for the rest of the population in 2011. In some of the States worst hit by the agrarian crisis, they were well over 100 per cent higher. The new Census 2011 data reveal a shrinking farmer population. And it is on this reduced base that the farm suicides now occur.
Apply the new Census totals to the suicide data of the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) and the results are grim. Sample: A farmer in Andhra Pradesh is three times more likely to commit suicide than anyone else in the country, excluding farmers. And twice as likely to do so when compared to non-farmers in his own State. The odds are not much better in Maharashtra, which remained the worst State for such suicides across a decade.
Cross Posted from Democracy Now
Hundreds of farm workers and their supporters are in New York City ahead of Wendy’s shareholder meeting to demand improved working conditions for those who pick its tomatoes. The fast-food giant — which has nearly 6,600 restaurants in the U.S. and around the world, ranking second only to McDonald’s — is the latest target in the Fair Food Campaign organized by the Coalition of Immokalee Workers. So far, McDonald’s, Subway, Burger King and Taco Bell have all joined the White House-recognized social responsibility program, agreeing to pay an extra penny per pound of tomatoes to raise wages and only buy from fields where workers’ rights are respected. We speak with CIW farm worker and organizer, Gerardo Reyes-Chávez.
By Adam Vaughan, The Guardian
Oxford University’s Shell Geoscience Laboratory is funded with £5.9m from the oil company.
Students and alumni of Oxford University will protest this afternoon at the opening of a new lab in its Earth sciences department that is funded with £5.9m from oil company Shell.
Campaigners say the partnership – which will see the climate andenergy secretary, Ed Davey, attend the Shell Geoscience Laboratory’s official opening on Thursday – undermines the university’s credibility and conflicts with its work on climate change. Oxford alumni including environmental campaigner Jonathon Porritt and solar entrepreneur Jeremy Leggett yesterday called Shell “a particularly inappropriate choice of funder” in a letter published in the Guardian.
Cross Posted from PRWatch
DBA Press and the Center for Media and Democracy today released the results of a year-long investigation: “Dissent or Terror: How the Nation’s Counter Terrorism Apparatus, In Partnership With Corporate America, Turned on Occupy Wall Street.”
The report, a distillation of thousands of pages of records obtained from counter terrorism/law enforcement agencies, details how state/regional “fusion center” personnel monitored the Occupy Wall Street movement over the course of 2011 and 2012. Personnel engaged in this activity at fusion centers include employees of municipal, county and federal counter terrorism/homeland security entities. Such entities include local police departments, the FBI and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (including U.S. DHS components such as the Transportation Security Administration).
The report also examines how fusion centers and other counter terrorism entities that have emerged since the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 have worked to benefit numerous corporations engaged in public-private intelligence sharing partnerships.
Cross Posted from Times of India
Dozens of locals from Golconda protested the axing of 81 trees in Naya Qila, demanding the arrest of the guilty persons and speeding up of the probe by the forest and district administration into the incident.
Locals said heritage and environment violations were unheard of in Naya Qila, until Hyderabad Golf Association’s golf course took shape. In one of the biggest-ever environmental massacres in recent times, 81 neem trees were axed to clear way for the expansion of 18-hole golf course earlier this month.
Forest officials, who began counting the felled trunks of the neem treeson May 12, initiated a probe, saying this is the third and biggest instance of tree cutting that has come to light in Naya Qila. According to them, the Archaelogical Survey of India and the Hyderabad Golf Association were the prime suspects.
By Bob Brown, ABC
The Swift Parrot is flying towards extinction. Yet the forest ‘peace deal’ signed between loggers and theWilderness Society, Australian Conservation Foundationand Environment Tasmania (I am a founding member of the first and a life member of the second) threatens unprecedented penalties for forest campaigners who try to stop swift parrot nesting sites being logged.
Written into the Tasmanian Forests Agreement 2012 (pdf)(the ‘peace deal’) is a ‘durability’ clause aimed to stop future protests against logging in native forests. This month, the Legislative Council (upper house) expanded it so that either house of parliament can block the national park proclamations and other forest reservations in the agreement if there is any “substantial” forest protest against ongoing logging between now and October next year.
Amongst immediate and agreed logging plans are those to flatten three areas (called coupes) of swift parrot nesting habitat in Bruny Island’s forests.
By Will Poter, Vice
Most people have heard of tree-sitting—a tactic environmentalists use to prevent old-growth trees from being cut down and whole forests decimated. In its heyday, in the late 1990s and early 2000s, members of groups like Earth First! climbed 100-foot-tall Redwoods and stayed there to save them. Beginning in 1997, one woman in Humboldt, California, named her tree Luna and stayed in it for two years, until enough money could be raised to prevent it from being axed. In 1998, in a Northern California old-growth forest, another treesitter named David “Gypsy” Chain was “accidentally” killed when loggers felled a tree that came crashing into the protester. He died instantly of massive head trauma.
This style of protest was also hugely successful—that is, until a series of arrests in 2005 against radical environmentalists who were labeled “terrorists.” It scared the shit out of the environmental-activist community, and folks started drifting away.
Now, there’s a vibrant national protest movement reviving those “direct action” tactics of civil disobedience again, and adding a new political savvy to the mix. They, too, have been incredibly effective. In Oregon, in the summer of 2011, one blockade took 50 cops, a backhoe, and a 125-foot-crane to remove treesitters. A few days later, activists locked themselves together in an Oregon Department of Forestry office. The group responsible, the Cascadia Forest Defenders, say they won’t stop until the Elliott State Forest is protected from clearcutting.
As a result—surprise, surprise—politicians are trying to create new laws that make tree-sits and other direct-action techniques illegal. The bills even single out the Elliott State Forest campaign by name and allow corporations to sue protesters for costing them money.
On April 29, two bills passed the Oregon House that would hit tree sitters and non-violent protesters with felonies and mandatory minimum sentences.
EF! DAM
Ecodefense
