Community Justice vs. Minas Conga Mine

Local indigenous farmers on horseback form part of a protest against the Minas Conga gold mine, June 17, 2013

From Root Force:

A recent Reuters article examines the role that community justice institutions have played in the struggle against the Minas Conga mine in Peru, which would be the country’s largest gold mine. The indigenous- and peasant-led resistance movement has already led to the project being placed on hold once and the President’s cabinet being reshuffled twice.

Although the article quotes several people who are obviously deeply uncomfortable with the traditional, indigenous-influenced rondero justice model due to its failure to place all authority in the hands of the state, it obviously strives to paint a fair picture. The article seems relevant not just for its relation to the Minas Conga struggle in particular, but also for expanding our frame of reference in regard to models of community justice and organizing.

For those of you who are skimmers, don’t deprive yourself of the pleasure of the article’s concluding quote:

Ronderos in Cajamarca say they stopped carrying guns years ago. Punishments they mete out draw on traditional Andean practices, ranging from push-ups to lashings with cow whips. [NOTE:  Peruvian cow whips are thick, not thin like the “Indiana Jones”-style whip that is designed to draw blood. Not that it necessarily feels good to be hit with one. —Root Force]

One of the most severe sentences is the “rondero chain” that requires offenders to toil in fields by day and parade barefoot through frigid villages by night, some ronderos said. It can go on for days or weeks as people are handed off from one village squad to another.

Referring to Mines and Energy Minister Jorge Merino, a laughing Ponce said: “We would make Merino carry out a rondero chain for three or four months. [Peruvian President Ollanta] Humala would get six months.”

Peru peasant squads rally against U.S. firm’s $5 billion gold mine

(Reuters) – Forty years ago, peasants in rural Peru banded together as “ronderos” – Spanish for “people who make the rounds” – to curb cattle rustling.

Today, squads of these ronderos are working toward a different aim – thwarting an American mining company’s planned $5 billion gold mining project that they contend would spoil lakes vital to the local population high in the Andes.

The CRC: Another Dead Freeway

Hart Noeker / Mismanaging Perception

As I begin writing this, Saturday night, June 29th, 2013, news of the death of the Columbia River Crossing freeway mega-expansion has just been published. Just hours ago the Portland Tribune broke the story: CRC champion and Oregon governor John Kitzhaber had admitted defeat, declaring the decade long project that has already wasted $170 million dollars as officially dead.  Not only would there be no money for construction, but the Washington state senate refused to pass a transportation package withany planning funds for the CRC whatsoever. Shortly after the Tribune article came out, The Columbian updated that the CRC planning office in Vancouver will be closing shortly. I don’t think anyone had realized how close this thing was to total death until just now.

Paddlers Charge Silver River Protesting Expected Cattle Ranch

Paddlers charge the iconic Silver River, protesting Adena Springs Ranch. Photo: Matt Keene

By Matt Keene / Earth First! Newswire

Grassfed beef ain’t all it’s cracked up to be.

Take Adena Springs Ranch, a proposed cattle ranch being developed by billionaire Frank Stronach in Florida. The beef project is expected to span 10,000 acres and, according to their website, hold up to 15,000 cattle. Adena Springs Ranch plans to raise the cattle on a grassfed diet, calling their industrial farming practices “healthier” and “better for the environment.”

This past Saturday, individuals concerned with the proposed ranch gathered alongside the iconic Silver River, a river formed from the discharge of Silver Springs, one of the largest natural artesian wells in the world.

Update from the Trees: Notes from White Castle

Cross Posted from The Trees

Last night I slept in a warm, soft, bed, my housemates murmuring and playing music a floor below; tonight I lay on the cold, damp, ground a Yew Tree right above me, with cinnamon red bark and a trunk that twists and curves, an old gnarled body reaching for the sky.

 I hear the Yew Tree grows quite slowly, curving and bending its way toward the much taller, Douglas Firs. Swaths of pale-green lichen hang from the branches and blanket the trunks of these giants, a sign that the air is clean and moist. I look down. I am stepping on  decaying logs, turning into fecund soil, right below my feet. There is a mass of life and death out here, feeding into itself, again and again: a perfect, waste-less, system.

BLM Threatens Mesa Verde with Oil and Natural Gas Drilling

Mesa Verde is the US’s largest archeological preserve

By Scott Streater / E&E reporter

The Bureau of Land Management is proposing to offer eight parcels near southwest Colorado’s Mesa Verde National Park in a November oil and natural gas lease sale, a move that has sparked concerns from local government leaders who fear drilling could degrade air quality and other natural resources in the region.

The eight parcels just east of the national park were among 12 covering about 12,000 acres that BLM’s Tres Rios Field Office deferred from a February lease sale. The agency pulled the parcels after the National Park Service, park advocates and conservation groups objected on the grounds that oil and gas drilling could negatively affect air quality and natural resources at the park.

TD Bank Declares its Love for the Ecological Resistance…

And the Nature Conservancy isn’t a total sell out

from Earth First! Newswire

Just kidding. And so was the Tar Sands Blockade this morning, when they sent out a fake press release from an email address at yourtdbank.com, to a parody website designed to look like TD Bank’s press page announcing the bank’s divestment from Keystone XL. Here’s what they had to say for themselves in a follow up press release:

49 Acts of Powerline Sabotage, 19 Acts of Oil Pipeline Sabotage in Last Six Months

by Russ McSpadden / Earth First! News

Smoke rises over a recent pipeline attack in Marib governorate, a tribal region in Yemen.

According to compiled reports from the Yemen Times  over 60 acts of industrial sabotage have taken place since January within the tribal area of the Marib governorate in Yemen, cutting power to Sana’a, the nation’s capital 170 miles to the east, and crippling the government’s oil and gas infrastructure. Oil and gas revenue provides 70 percent of the state’s budget.    

350 and Maine EF! Block Train Exporting Dirty Oil to Canada

Cross posted from Commondreams.org

– Jon Queally, staff writer

Six Maine residents were arrested late Thursday night after a larger group of climate activists blockaded a set of tracks passing through the small town of Fairfield in order to prevent a train carrying 70,000 gallons “fracked” oil headed to a refinery in neighboring New Brunswick, Canada.

Associating themselves with a growing national campaign of direct action against the fossil fuel industry called “Fearless Summer,” the protesters at the scene erected a large scaffold over the tracks and held signs reading “Trains for people, not for oil” and “This train’s bound for Gory” (pun intended).

Police arrived, and after several warnings for the protesters to disperse, the six who refused were arrested as the scaffolding was destroyed with a chain saw.

Local media reported a surprisingly large law enforcement response with police from numerous towns showing up at the scene, including troopers from the State Police.

350 Maine*, the statewide group associated but independent from international organization 350.org that led the action, said the goal was to draw attention to the “fracked oil” that is quietly passing through the state on a regular basis. Local members of Earth First also participated in the action.

Goodbye, Miami

By century’s end, rising sea levels will turn the nation’s urban fantasyland into an American Atlantis. But long before the city is completely underwater, chaos will begin

by Jeff Goodell / Rolling Stone

When the water receded after Hurricane Milo of 2030, there was a foot of sand covering the famous bow-tie floor in the lobby of the Fontaine­bleau hotel in Miami Beach. A dead manatee floated in the pool where Elvis had once swum. Most of the damage occurred not from the hurricane’s 175-mph winds, but from the 24-foot storm surge that overwhelmed the low-lying city. In South Beach, the old art-deco­ buildings were swept off their foundations. Mansions on Star Island were flooded up to their cut-glass doorknobs. A 17-mile stretch of Highway A1A that ran along the famous beaches up to Fort Lauderdale disappeared into the Atlantic. The storm knocked out the wastewater-treatment plant on Virginia Key, forcing the city to dump hundreds of millions of gallons of raw sewage into Biscayne Bay. Tampons and condoms littered the beaches, and the stench of human excrement stoked fears of cholera. More than 800 people died, many of them swept away by the surging waters that submerged much of Miami Beach and Fort Lauderdale; 13 people were killed in traffic accidents as they scrambled to escape the city after the news spread – falsely, it turned out – that one of the nuclear reactors at Turkey Point, an aging power plant 24 miles south of Miami, had been destroyed by the surge and sent a radioactive cloud over the city.   Continue Reading….

It Makes More Sense to Just Burn Down the Banks

Art by Alex Schaefer.

by Adam Jung / Huffington Post

Before we get any further in this article I want to first say “Hello” to the NSA. So, What did you have for breakfast? Second, I should probably be clear that I’m not advocating burning anything, including a bank. However, objectively, I’m not sure why someone shouldn’t.

Yesterday a judge ruled that Jeff Olson, a 40 year old man from San Diego, California will face thirteen years for using washable children’s chalk outside three Bank of America branches to promote credit unions over large banks. In making his ruling, Judge Howard Shore, who I can only assume has the same disdain for the Constitution that I hold for broccoli, ruled that Olsen’s defense was prohibited from “mentioning the First Amendment, free speech, free expression, public forum, expressive conduct, or political speech during the trial.” To be clear, the judge outlawed citing the constitutional law that protects Olsen’s actions in defence of his actions.