Posts Tagged ‘Indigenous Peoples’
Life as a continuous, all-encompassing stream
Ever think of Life that way? Then check out this short excerpt and follow the link to read:
Burning Through the Roots
| By Dawn Adrian |
“I spent much of my childhood here, in the Valley of the Sun. The name of this place—Phoenix—reflects the fact that the city’s founders knew they were building a new city upon the ruins of an ancient one. A people called the Hohokam left behind a network of canals here that the early white settlers cleaned out and put to use in their own agricultural fields. I am sure you know the story of the Phoenix, also called the Firebird, that those city founders had in mind. It is a mythic being that died in flames in order to give new life to the young Phoenix that rose from the ashes of its consumed parent.
Americans have been preventing wildfires in forests for the better part of sixty-five years. That’s equivalent to bustling about the Firebird’s nest with water hoses and extinguishers, dousing any sparks or hints of flame, deciding on our own that the Firebird’s nest really shouldn’t be permitted to burn. Fire is dangerous, after all, and it kills the Firebird! But the forests have finally managed to start burning anyway these last few years, and they’re not likely to stop any time soon. So now when the nest is burned to ashes and the Firebird with it, we let salvage loggers and tidiers and planters and terracers come in and sweep up the mess because it’s so unsightly—but can be sold, not incidentally, for a last profit. In the process, we lose any chance we ever had to have a Firebird—or a forest—ever grow there again……”
Dawn Adrian is founder of the Tapestry Institute on science and native wisdom. This article is from her opening plenary address at the 2009 Metanexus conference, “Cosmos, Nature, Culture,” held in Phoenix, AZ.
Chevron Using Six Public Relations Firms to Discredit Indigenous Groups In Ecuador
Daryl Hannah tests water in Ecuador
Chevron Using Six Public Relations Firms to Discredit Indigenous Groups In $27.3 Billion Environmental Case In Ecuador
Lobbyists – Mac McLarty, John Breaux, Trent Lott, Mickey Kantor, Carla Hills and Others – Charged With Misrepresenting Facts
Amazon Defense Coalition
20 November 2009
Washington, DC – Chevron has retained at least twelve public relations firms and lobbyists to discredit claims of Amazon indigenous groups on the eve of an expected multi-billion dollar judgment against the oil giant in an environmental lawsuit in Ecuador, according to representatives of the tribes in the U.S.
Although Chevron is near the top of the list of highest-spending lobbyists in Washington, the campaign seems to be backfiring. Politico, one of the most influential publications on Capitol Hill, reported this week that Chevron’s lobbying was “drawing fire from environmentalists, media ethicists, state pension funds, New York’s attorney general, members of Congress, and even Barack Obama when he was a Senator.”
Questioning World Bank Palm Oil Funding and Forest Carbon Finance in Indonesia
Rainforest Portal: Action Alert
Ombudsman report on 20 years of corrupt IFC, World Bank Group lending to the Indonesian oil palm industry casts doubt on Bank’s fitness to manage international forest carbon funds that may emerge at Copenhagen climate talks.
The World Bank Group’s International Finance Corporation (IFC) ignored its own environmental and social protection standards when it approved over a twenty year period nearly $200 million in loan guarantees for palm oil production in Indonesia. The IFC has temporarily frozen new investments in oil palm projects and is reviewing all current oil palm projects. The message must be conveyed to the World Bank that oil palm and any finance of industrial development that deforests or diminishes primary tropical rainforest must permanently end. And certainly oil palm — or any logging of primary forests, or replacement of primary forests with plantations — is not worthy of REDD forest carbon funding.
Obama Urged to Sign Native Rights Declaration
By Haider Rizvi Copyright © 2009 IPS-Inter Press Service
UNITED NATIONS, May 6 (IPS) – The United States is considering whether to endorse a major U.N. General Assembly resolution calling for the recognition of the rights of the world’s 370 million indigenous peoples over their lands and resources.
“The position on [this issue] is under review,” Patrick Ventrell, spokesperson for the U.S. mission to the U.N., told IPS about the Barack Obama administration’s stance on the non-binding U.N. Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.
Approved by a vast majority of the U.N. member states in September 2007, the General Assembly resolution on the declaration was rejected by the George W. Bush administration over indigenous leaders’ argument that no economic or political power has the right to exploit their resources without seeking their “informed consent.”
