The Penan Blockade Against a New Gas Pipeline in Borneo

from Survival International

The Penan in Long Seridan are protesting against the building of a gas pipeline which is cutting through their ancestral land.
© Survival

Penan from the Long Seridan region have mounted a blockade to protest against the building of a gas pipeline which is cutting through their ancestral land and destroying their source of drinking water.

The 500km pipeline is being built by the Malaysian national oil company Petronas and is nearing completion. It will transport natural gas from the Malaysian state of Sabah, south to the coast of Sarawak.

2012: A Deadly Year for Environmentalists

With activists killed in Brazil, Cambodia, the Philippines, and elsewhere, 2012 may have been the worst year yet for violence against those working to protect the environment. So far, little has been done to halt this chilling development.

by Fred Pearce / Yale Environment 360

Where is Sombath Somphone? With every day that passes, the fate of one of Southeast Asia’s most high-profile environmental activists, who was snatched from the streets of Laos in December, becomes more worrisome.

His case has been raised by the State Department and countless NGOs around the world. But the authorities in Laos have offered no clue as to what happened after Sombath was stopped at a police checkpoint on a Saturday afternoon in the Lao capital of Vientiane as he returned home from his office. It looks increasingly like state kidnap — or worse, if recent evidence of the state-sponsored killings of environmental campaigners in other countries is anything to go by.

Personal danger is not what most environmentalists have in mind when they take up the cause of protecting nature and the people who rely on it in their daily lives. But from Laos to the Philippines to Brazil, the list of environmentalists who have paid for their activism with their lives is growing. It is a grim toll, especially in the last year.