Rare sea turtle nests in Kimberley at proposed gas refinery site

New Sea Turtle Study Confirms Significant Nesting at James Price Point

Hawksbill hybrid at James Price Point

The findings from the recent sea turtle study were released yesterday, casting further doubts over the scientific integrity of the W. Australia Government’s environmental impact assessment for the James Price Point gas hub.

SeaTurtles.org reported the nesting of the sea turtle in December and posted a video of the unusual sea turtle with the details here.

The peer-reviewed study into marine turtle nesting in the James Price Point area led by University of Melbourne marine biologist Malcolm Lindsay found 14 turtle nests and 38 false crawls

Tibetan Activist Sets Himself On Fire To Protest Chinese President’s Visit To India

Tibetan activist Jamphel Yeshi

Prior to the arrival of Chinese president Hu Jintao in the Indian capital of Delhi, a Tibetan activist named Jamphel Yeshi set himself on fire in protest during a demonstration, suffering severe burns that covered most of his body. The 27-year-old Tibetan exile ran screaming down the street as flames licked at his body before he collapsed on the ground, where fellow protesters tried to beat out the flames.

Once Yeshi’s inferno was finally put out, Indian doctors transported him to a local hospital. “His condition is very critical,” said Sonam Wangyal, one of Yeshi’s cousins. “The doctors had to do an operation to get him breathing.”

Yeshi’s self-immolation occurred near the Indian parliament in the center of Delhi, following a march by several hundred Tibetans to protest the Chinese president’s visit. Jintao is visiting India to participate in a meeting of “Brics” (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) leaders, according to the BBC.

“No one knew of his plans,” Wangyal said. “He did this act to fight for the rights of all the Tibetans.”

Over recent months, at least 25 Tibetans have set themselves ablaze to protest against Beijing’s rule over the region. Many of those who participated were monks, but most of the self-immolations took place in the Tibetan parts of the Sichuan province; this is only the second incident to occur in India in recent years. In 2011, a Tibetan exile similarly set himself on fire outside the Chinese embassy, but only suffered minor burns.

The struggle of Tibetans against Chinese colonization and industrial expansion certainly has an ecological component as well, which was identified in a story posted on the Earth First! Newswire earlier this year about the Tibetan village of Abin battling a gold mine on the sacred Mount Kawagebo, where villagers attempts to deal directly with the mining company resulted in threats and violence from agents hired by the company, and arrests by local police

College Professor Grilled by the FBI about Fracking Resistance

Cross Posted from NTDaily.com

An FBI agent and a Dallas police officer spoke last month with philosophy and religion professor Adam Briggle about specific materials in a syllabus for one of his courses on civil disobedience.

Law enforcement officials brought up an article in his curriculum that supports “monkeywrenching,” an act of sabotaging equipment performed by activists to stop projects they deem damaging to the environment.

Briggle believed the FBI agent and officer were only seeking information.

“They told me they are acting proactively and preventatively to smell out any signs of trouble for any potential eco-terrorist strikes revolving around the gas drilling issue on the Barnett Shale,” Briggle said.

The FBI agent referenced a chapter from the book “Ecodefense: A Field Guide to Monkeywrenching.” The first chapter, by Dave Foreman, calls on individuals “to act heroically in defense of the wild, to put a monkeywrench into the gears of the machine that is destroying natural diversity.”

“I told the FBI guy I counsel my students to break the law; just the unjust laws,” Briggle said. “As Foreman says, and Martin Luther King said, and Gandhi said, it should be a very serious and prolonged process to make sure you’ve gone through all the legal means first. That’s a very difficult thing to find out: what is an unjust law?”

The agent and police officer repeated several times that they supported free speech as protected in the First Amendment but explained there is a difference between protesting and violence.

“At one point they asked me, ‘Have you heard anything about IEDs [improvised explosive devices]?’” Briggle said.

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Mountain Justice Spring Break ends in protest at fracking company headquarters

On the morning of Wednesday, March 26, more than 30 anti-fracking activists from across West Virginia and Appalachia picketed the Bridgeport, West Virginia, office of EQT Energy. The group of activists were supporting two landowners, Eileen and Jim Burke, who came from Doddridge County to try and meet with officials about concerns they had about about EQT’s shale gas operations near their property.

Hydraulic Fracturing, commonly called fracking, is a controversial method of natural gas extraction that involves injecting millions of gallons of chemical-laden water deep underground in order to shatter the bedrock and release the gas

Southeast Earth First! Regional Rendezvous April 19-23, Eastern TN

Katuah Earth First! is hosting a Spring Rendezvous for the Southeast Region, April 19 -23, 2012 near Erwin, TN. The location and directions will be posted here once a site a has been chosen, so please check http://www.katuahearthfirst.org for updates. Be assured though, we have a lot to fight for.  Our forests and wilderness are under assault. Our water is being poisoned and privatized. Mountain Top Removal coal mining is just a fly rock away. Fracking is happening, coal ash and toxic sludge is piling up everywhere, and we have all things nuclear, including commercial power, weapons facilities, and radioactive waste from around the planet being transported, processed, and disposed.  Make your 2012 Earth Day more meaningful than ever…

Ecoprisoner Tim DeChristopher moved to isolated confinement

Tim DeChristopher after bidding in the 2008 auction.

The following is a message from the group Peaceful Uprisings, who has coordinated much of the support for Tim DeChristopher who was arrested for disrupting a December 2008 oil and gas lease auction on public land in Utah, conducted by the Bureau of Land Management. In July 2011, Judge Benson sentenced DeChristopher to two years in prison:

“On the evening of Friday, March 9th, Tim was summarily removed from the Minimum Security Camp where he has been held since September 2011, and moved into the FCI Herlong’s Special Housing Unit (SHU). Tim was informed by Lieutenant Weirich that he was being moved to the SHU (also referred to as “the hole”) because an unidentified Congressman had called from Washington DC, complaining of an email that Tim had sent to a friend. Tim was inquiring about the reported business practices of one of his contributors, threatening to return the money if their values no longer aligned with his own. For some absurd reason, this warrants an investigation. Tim will be held in isolated confinement until the investigation is concluded. There is no definite timeline for inmates being held in the SHU, some waiting months for the conclusion of an investigation.

 

FCI Herlong, California, minimum security camp

In the SHU, Tim’s movements are severely restricted. In the past two weeks, he has been allowed out of his 8 X 10 cell (which he shares with another inmate) four times, each time for less than an hour. Tim is allowed one book in his cell, and four in his property locker.  His writing means are restricted to a thin ink cartridge which makes correspondence extremely difficult.   He can receive mail from the outside, but has no other form of communication other than 15 minutes of phone calls per month

Earth Liberation Political Prisoners Sadie and Exile Punished for Being “Unrepentant”

by Leslie James Pickering

Earth Liberation prisoners Joyanna “Sadie” Zacher and Nathan “Exile” Block, who are a married couple, have been disallowed correspondence by their captors with the excuse that Sadie is “unrepentant” of her crimes.

Sadie and Exile are nearing the end of their seven-year-and-eight-month federal prison sentences for two million-dollar arsons prosecuted under the FBI’s Operation Backfire investigation into the Earth Liberation Front. Specifically, the couple has been convicted of the the $959,000 arson of the Romania Chevrolet dealership on March 30, 2001 and the $994,412 arson of Jefferson Poplar on May 21, 2001.

Hundreds protest oil tankers at march and rally in Vancouver

Vancouver protester Hunter Johnson covered herself with molasses to highlight concern about oil spills.

Hundreds of people marched through downtown Vancouver streets today (March 26) in a boisterous display of opposition to oil tanker traffic along British Columbia’s coast.

Organized by first nation and environmental groups, the demonstration came just days after the 23rd anniversary of the infamous Exxon Valdez spill in Alaska.

A noon rally at the Vancouver Art Gallery drew an estimated 1,000 protesters who chanted and held signs that read: “No tankers on our coast” and “Oil and water don’t mix”.

Speakers criticized Kinder Morgan’s planned expansion of the Trans Mountain pipeline to Burnaby and the proposed Enbridge Northern Gateway pipeline to Kitimat.

For full article see source as cross-posted from here

Ngäbes protest hydroelectric dam

Ngäbes block the highway in protest of potential hydro projects

“It was not nice work, but given the pattern of the country’s development, it had to be done.” – John Steinbeck, East of Eden

After an early February victory against proposed mining projects, the indigenous Ngäbes (pronounced naw-bey) continue to struggle to prevent construction of hydroelectric dams that could negatively impact their environment. Negotiations continue, now with UN involvement, but it seems unlikely the Ngäbes will be able to stop hydroelectric construction much longer.

The struggle of one indigenous group in one small Central American country may seem irrelevant in the face of more publicized world issues, like Jeremy Lin, but their fight represents a consistent human choice to sacrifice the environment in favor of economic development.

Hydro in Panama

Panama’s government has its sights on 31 hydro projects by 2013, including seven near the borders of indigenous territory. The government claims that the projects will reduce national energy costs and increase national income through export. However, these have proved inadequate motivators for the indigenous of whom only 1% have electricity and who already do not trust the government to compensate them for absorbing the potential environmental impacts. 

While it is difficult to say exactly what negative impacts will result, previous hydro projects on indigenous land in Panama resulted in displacement due to flooding, increased mosquito breeding grounds (in a country with a dengue problem) and submersion of trees, vegetation and farmland.

Environmental protesters target Dominion Va. Power

William Pickett of Richmond and Erica Gray of Henrico, members of the Coalition Against Nukes and the Alliance for Progressive Values, were among the anti-Dominion protesters in Kanawha Plaza this afternoon.

RICHMOND, Va. —

More than 100 people representing a slew of environmental groups gathered in downtown Richmond this afternoon to protest the policies of Dominion Virginia Power.

The protesters braved a drenching rain in Kanawha Plaza to listen to a series of speeches from activists decrying what they said is Dominion’s overreliance on fossil fuels and nuclear power and opposition to clean-energy legislation.

They then crossed Canal Street and encircled the Dominion headquarters building while chanting slogans and waving signs.

The groups participating included Greenpeace USA, Chesapeake Climate Action Network,  Climate Action Alliance of the Valley, 350.org, Virginia Alliance for a Cleaner Environment and the Alliance for Progressive Values.

cross-posted from here