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Leaked Map Reveals Big Gas Is Setting Its Sights on the Most Biodiverse Place on Earth
Leaked Map Reveals Big Gas Is Setting Its Sights on the Most Biodiverse Place on Earth
Part of a map from Pluspetrol, an exploration and production company, showing its interest in areas of Manú National Park in Peru’s Amazon. (Pluspetrol)
A leaked map shows that a private energy corporation based in Argentina is eyeing Manú National Park in Peru’s Amazon, one of the most biodiverse places on earth.
In a detailed article in The Guardian, environment writer David Hill, who researches forest governance in Peru from his location in the Amazon, traces the back-and-forth of Pluspetrol’s apparent quest for the hydrocarbons beneath the protected land:
The map vaguely and ignorantly – or hopefully? Disdainfully? – calls Manu a “reserve”, where gas operations are permitted. Not so in national parks. Peru’s 1997 Law of Protected Natural Areas states “the extraction of natural resources is not permitted” in parks, while the 2001 regulations for “protected natural areas” states the “settlement of new human groups and the exploitation of natural resources is prohibited.” In addition, the 1993 Constitution “obliges” the government “to promote the conservation of biological diversity and protected natural areas.”
Manu isn’t just any national park. It is home to members of several indigenous peoples – the Matsigenka, “Matsigenka-Nanti”, “Mashco-Piro”, Nahua, Quechua and Yine – while UNESCO, which has designated it a biosphere reserve and World Heritage Site, says that the biodiversity “exceeds that of any other place on earth.” In early 2014 scientists described Manu as “top of the [world’s] list of natural protected areas in terms of amphibian and reptile diversity”, and back in 2006 other scientists found that the number of bird and mammal species is the “largest for any similarly sized area in the world.”
“For 10 years [Manu] has held the title as the world’s richest protected area for birds and mammals,” Bruce Patterson, from The Field Museum in the US, told the Guardian.
Hill writes that the map was featured in April 2013 in a report by the Peruvian nongovernmental organization Ecodess. So why draw attention to it now?
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
VIDEO: John Oliver Urges Us to Wake Up to How Big Oil Is Killing People and Destroying North Dakota
VIDEO: John Oliver Urges Us to Wake Up to How Big Oil Is Killing People and Destroying North Dakota
In another informative and funny segment of HBO’s “Last Week Tonight,” John Oliver explores what has happened to North Dakota since the starts of its oil boom.
Local Resistance Can Overthrow Our Political Masters
Local Resistance Can Overthrow Our Political Masters
Smoke and fumes from a 2012 fire at the Chevron refinery in Richmond, Calif., sent 15,000 residents to hospitals or medical offices. Richmond City Council member Gayle McLaughlin, interviewed in the article below, is a vocal critic of Chevron’s effect on the environment and the corporation’s longtime political power over the city. (Eric Risberg / AP)
SANTA ANA, Calif.—All resistance will be local. We will have to dismantle the corporate state, piece by piece, from the ground up. No leader or politician is going to do it for us. Every community that bans fracking, every university and institution that embraces the boycott, divest and sanctions (BDS) movement, every individual who becomes vegan to thwart the animal agriculture industry’s devastation of the planet and holocaust of animals, every effort to build self-sustaining food supplies, every protest to halt the use of lethal force by police against our citizens, especially poor people of color, every act of civil disobedience against corporate power and imperialism will slowly transform our society.
Those who rebel, once they rise up, will build alliances with other rebels. This will give birth to a new political expression, one that will be fiercely anti-capitalist and will seek to sustain rather than destroy life. Rebellion will come from the bottom. I do not know if we can succeed. The forces arrayed against us are monstrous and terrifying. The corporate state has no qualms about employing savage and violent repression, wholesale surveillance, the criminalizing of dissent, and its propaganda machine to demonize us all. But I know this: We are the only hope. We are the people we have been waiting for. And if we do not act to save ourselves, the climate crisis and the corporate state that caused it will continue to ravage the ecosystem and human societies until catastrophic collapse occurs. Indeed, we are already frighteningly far down that road.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
