Over the past 12 years, RAN has supported through our Protect-an-Acre small grants both Defense and Ecological Conservation of Intag (DECOIN) and Community Defense Council in the Intag region in the western Andes of Ecuador, a cloud forest ecosystem that is a globally significant biological hot spot. For 2 decades now, communities there have successfully led the struggle to halt all mining in the region, keeping out major Japanese and Canadian corporations.

Copper Mesa, until last year, was the owner of a two mining concessions in the Intag. But the company ran into a strong, organized opposition from communities, local government and, eventually even the national government, which eventually stripped Copper Mesa of its concessions in the country.

Now the Toronto Stock Exchange, which had been sued by 3 Intag activists, has delisted Copper Mesa from the exchange.

DECOIN organizer Carlos Zorrilla wrote in an email to Intag community supporters:

“This is a key victory in Intag’s very long and exhausting battle against mining interests. So big in fact, that I still find it difficult to believe. After all, this has been a dream of ours and something we’ve been working on for almost six years.”

Copper Mesa’s shares lost about 60% of their value in the 48 hours after the TSX delisting.

This report comes from John Akwetey with RAN Ghana.

Since the colonial time, the Indigenous people of Pokuase have depended on their Forest reserve, more than any other Indigenous group in Ghana. Everything about the Pokuase, including their cultural, rituals and portable drinking water, had been influenced by the rainforest. However, in the last years since corporate developers first moved to the area, the Indigenous people of Pokuase had suffered from various diseases through the contamination of their stream, forceful repression for trying to protect their forest reserve and lack of support in their struggle.

In the past, the United Nations Education, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) recognized the unique value of Pokuase culture and the Gua Koo forest reserve by declaring that the Pokuase “have long rich history of their natural environment, as evidenced by their strong tie with the Sunkwa stream.”

More »

With climate talks underway in Bangkok, Indigenous activists reviewing the text and engaged in the talks calling for no market-based REDD deal, Greenpeace activists blockading the tar sands in Alberta, and the EU investigating fraud in carbon trading schemes, today is a big day for the movement for climate justice.

Too bad it’s such a disappointing day for climate in the US. Today Senators Boxer and Kerry released their first draft of the Senate climate bill, a companion to the House ACES bill passed this past June. It calls for the US to reduce emissions by 20% of 2005 levels by 2020. By comparison, island nations and the world’s least developed countries are calling for 45% emissions reduction from 1990 levels by 2020.
More »

In a twist of fate, Jakarta’s Tempo is reporting that Arif Mundar, one of Indonesia’s climate negotiators, could not make it to the international climate summit in Bangkok because of heavy smoke in Sumatra.

Too many forest fires to even participate in climate talks? It is not looking promising for those in Bangkok that want to use the current momentum behind climate negotiations to curtail deforestation and deforestation’s associated carbon emmissions.

The dreaded climate fluxuation El Nino has officially descended upon Indonesia this year. Memories of the 1997 El Nino fire season remain fresh in Indonesian’s minds as a disaster for their forests, the global climate, and Indonesia’s national pride. More »

Finding your way to Climate Ground Zero is easy if you know where you’re going.  Well, even then I’ve learned that Google will lead me astray from time to time. But in terms of what CGZ is, well, I thought I knew.

I didn’t have a clue.

Well, maybe that’s unfair.

I knew what was going on in the mountains of Appalachia, I knew that people were fighting a powerful company that is extracting coal and destroying mountains and communities, and I knew that Climate Ground Zero refers to where the main battle for our global climate is going on – here in the heart of Coal Country, in the US where we produce the lion’s share, per capita, of the world’s greenhouse gases and half of that comes from coal. I knew that this battle is seriously heating up. But I didn’t know how serious.

Of course it’s serious that a company is mining coal with machines bigger than office buildings and tremendous amounts of explosives, carried daily in tankers that rip along these narrow two lane highways.

And of course it’s serious when people’s families are endangered, their homes destroyed by floods caused by the mining, and the mountains that sustain so much life, so much diversity, are being wiped out for corporate profit. In this area that is stunningly beautiful, terrible things are indeed happening.

Since 1991 Massey Energy has led the pack in the race to take all the coal available from the once-hallowed mountains of Appalachia. They have systematically led the charge and taken the lion’s share of profit in the most efficient form of coal mining available, Mountaintop Removal.

The EPA continues to grant the permits that allow this company to employ far fewer workers than ever before in the history of coal mining. An underground mine used to employ as many as 500 workers. Now these operations can employ as few as 19. More »

I just got home from the Animal Rights 2009 conference in Los Angeles, where I had the pleasure of meeting with activists from across the country involved in a broad a variety of important issues. At RAN’s table, we had a display that many activists found disturbing – linking the palm oil in vegan butter-substitute Earth Balance with rainforest destruction that is driving orangutans to the brink of extinction (almost 90% of orangutan habitat has already disappeared).

Earth Balance’s parent company Ventura Foods is one of Cargill’s biggest customers. And Cargill is the largest importer of rainforest-destroying palm oil into the U.S. More than 300 activists signed a petition urging Ventura Foods to stop purchasing palm oil from Cargill until that company makes a commitment to end rainforest destruction for palm oil plantations. Let’s hope Ventura Foods listens and puts some pressure on Cargill to shape up!

Check out the pictures of 100 or so of these activists sending a message to Earth Balance!

All too often those debating the solutions and proposed actions to tackle global warming fail to challenge the assumptions. While it’s important to deal with emissions it can be argued that the root causes of emissions lie farther upstream and can more effectively deal with the challenges we are facing. Cutting emissions is good. Investing in clean energy and cutting emissions before the fuel is readied is better. Read on.

The Carbon Logic Problem Statement | Grist. by Ken Ward

An acclaimed mountaineer, a Baptist minister and a distinguished economist were stuck in a pit. The mountain climber said, “Stand back boys, I’ll have us out in a jiffy,” but the walls of the pit were loose shale and she couldn’t gain purchase. Then the minster raised his arms high and in a deep sonorous voice called for deliverance but after an hour of prayer he too admitted defeat. Finally, the economist stood, brushed dirt of a shabby Harris tweed jacket and said, “This is easy. First, assume a ladder.”

Environmentalists are trying to get out of a deep pit too, and in our push for Waxman-Markey we are acting like the mountaineer, minister and economist. We support ACES because, well, it’s there, and we are accustomed to moving doggedly forward for the best we can get. We also hope for deliverance via a gentle greening, where fossil fuels wither away and a sustainable future of vegetable gardens, strong local communities and good jobs blossoms. Finally, we have invested in what may be termed serial delusional assumptions.

• In the beginning, we thought that Enron and others aiming to cash in on carbon trading (as they did in the sulphur market) would out-muscle fossil fuel giants.
• We believed that techno-policy crafted by tuned-in elites could be quietly slipped into place, avoiding a flat-out messy and risky political slug-fest.
• We were convinced that major corporations like BP, GE and WAL*Mart were honest in their pledge to shift away from fossil fuels and had both the means and will to do so.
• We had faith that a solid majority of the American public, properly educated, would support effective climate action, so long as we did not offend sensibilities with Chicken Little predictions.
• Finally, we now assume we can fix broken policy somewhere down the line, so anything is better than nothing. More »

Check out this fascinating post about organized crime, carbon offsets and smuggling illegally cut forest from Earth Island Journal’s EnvironmentaList.

Call it a case of fact following fiction.

Moviegoers may remember that the plot of the latest James Bond film, Quantum
of Solace, pivoted on a scheme by a global crime cartel to use a fake
eco-organization as a front for buying up the world’s precious resources and
then re-selling them at exorbitant prices. Just a case of Hollywood
storytelling, you say?

Well, in a similar real life case, Reuters reports that officials at
Interpol, the world’s largest international police agency, are warning that
organized crime syndicates may be eyeing carbon offsets as a way to commit
fraud and smuggle illegally cut forest products.

Government negotiators seeking to create an international agreement to
replace the Kyoto Protocol have proposed a plan known as Reduced Emissions
from Deforestation and Degradation (REDD). Each year, about 20 percent of
global greenhouse gas emissions are caused by deforestation — an amount
roughly equivalent to the emissions of the US or China. Preserving forest
ecosystems will help absorb all the carbon emitted by industry.

Under REDD, heavily forested countries such as Brazil, Indonesia, or Congo
could place a monetary value on the amount of carbon they save by not
cutting down their trees. They could sell those carbon credits to big
polluters looking to offset their emissions.

Environmental organizations have cautioned that turning trees into carbon
credits won’t really reduce industrial emissions, and that it could hinder
the overall effort to address climate change by devaluing the cost of
polluting. “You’d have rich countries basically paying the poorer countries
in the world to reduce emissions for them,” Greenpeace climate campaigner
Paul Wynn told AFP recently.

Friends of the Earth warns in a recent report that “the simple fact that
forests are becoming an increasingly valuable commodity means that they are
more likely to be wrested away from local people.”

Wrested away, for example, by Mafioso strongmen. Peter Younger, an
environmental crimes specialist at Interpol, says that with any valuable
commodity, there comes a chance for fraud.

“If you are going to trade any commodity on the open market, you are
creating a profit and loss situation,” Younger told Reuters. “There will be
fraudulent trading of carbon credits.”

Younger says that the fraud could consist of claiming credits for forests
that do not exist or were taken in land grabs. “Absolutely, organized crime
we will involved,” he says. “It starts with bribery or intimidation of
officials that can impede your business. If there are Indigenous people
involved, there’s threats and violence against those people. There’s forged
documents.”

According to Interpol’s Younger, organized crime groups are already using
the networks they set up for smuggling children, women, drugs, and firearms
for the illegal trade of forest products and wildlife. There is also
evidence that revenue from wood smuggling has funded armed conflicts.

Dealing with the situation will take more than your typical public interest
group lobbying, letter-writing, and protest tactics. “You say you want to
strike up partnerships to address illegal logging — who with?” Young
wonders. “Consider law enforcement efforts and not just relying on NGOs and
other nice people to do it for you.”

Integrity is everything when you’ve got limited resources and are committed to saving the world’s last remaining old growth forests, defending Indigenous rights, and stopping climate change. While we applaud the efforts of those who are actively trying to limit our emissions and put a system in place that will ensure that this is so, RAN won’t be satisfied with a solution that only solves part of the problem, and only to a limited degree. Here’s what Grist had to say about the “National Call to Action on Global Warming” that we chose not to sign on to, when others in our community did so.

Motion to reconsider
U.S. groups desert precautionary principle, 53 to 6
Posted by Ken Ward (Guest Contributor) at 11:05 AM on 19 Mar 2009

Grist – http://gristmill.grist.org/story/2009/3/18/23559/2600

After ducking the matter for a decade, U.S. environmental organizations finally pulled together a climate policy, but the National Call to Action on Global Warming issued by 53 organizations on March 5 is a mistake and should be reconsidered.

The National Call contains key elements that have been startlingly absent from our efforts to date — an assessment of climate risk, bright-line definition of solution, and a platform — but in attempting to thread a path between fundamentally irreconcilable political worldviews, the groups have fashioned a pushmepullyou compromise that will not gain us the traction we now require and squanders moral capital won at cost.

The National Call was hurried into place when it became clear that the irredeemably flawed cap-and-trade agenda of the U.S. Climate Action Partnership would otherwise be adopted by default. Yet, instead of coming down emphatically, if belatedly, behind Jim Hansen’s precautionary analysis and focusing on the central questions facing humanity — “how bad is it?” how much time do we have left?” and “what do we have to do to avert cataclysm?” — our major organizations choose to fudge the science and aim for something much smaller then the reordering of civics, economy, and society required to avert cataclysm.

What could and should be an illuminating, spirited civic debate between two sharply defined and fundamentally contradictory worldviews is now muddied by the introduction of a confused and confusing middle road position advanced by respected climate leaders. Split into three camps, we are further than ever from sharpening our story and worse off then before the National Call was issued.

No attempt was made to hide the illogic of the National Call, which claims to stand on “climate science” yet recommends inadequate, lower-end IPCC targets based on essentially antique science which does not fully encompass the risk of abrupt climate change. A bland statement acknowledging this fact (“more recent findings since the publication of the latest IPCC assessment suggest that even more urgent action may be needed”) is included in the Call without clarification or conclusion.

This throwaway statement, however, is the nub of the matter, because all recent evidence on factors affecting the pace and scale of ice shelf break-up in Antarctica and Greenland — the climate change “world killer” — is very, very grim, and all projections of fossil fuel use and GHG emissions continue to rise steeply. It could not be clearer that we are running the last lap and there will be no opportunity for “do-overs.”

What’s going on here? None of our organizations and leaders truly disagree with the precautionary position as a matter of science, so why did 53 sign on to an statement calling for less than we know is now necessary to avert catastrophe?

Six organizations — 350.org, Rainforest Action Network (RAN), Friends of the Earth (FOE), International Rivers Network (IRN), GlobalWarmingSolution.org and, contrary to original reports, Al Gore’s Alliance for Climate Protection — did not endorse the National Call and there are indications that the decision does not sit comfortably with every group which did. People should be worried, because the National Call puts the majority of our organizations on the same slippery track that compromised the integrity of EDF and NRDC.

I have a half-formed idea that the critical factor for leadership and organizations is no longer whether one accepts the reality of abrupt climate change, as it was for the last 10 years, but whether one believes in the possibility of abrupt political change and is willing to work for it. If so, then there is no reason at this stage to support inadequate compromises that cannot avert cataclysm and will merely run out the clock. We’re playing winner take all now.

If one cannot imagine a new American revolution, or shudders at the thought, then I suppose there is appeal in cutting the best deal going and hoping that Hansen et al. are wrong, but as a matter of strategy, it’s still the bad move. Whether or not “non-linear” social change is thought likely or desirable, driving toward it improves the outcome either way.

Environmentalist power is proportional to our moral authority, not our facility at brokering, and our moral authority is diminished when we speak less then the truth. The National Call to Action on Global Warming, relying on out of date IPCC science, is knowingly built on a foundation of sand. It reduces our moral authority (and we ought to start thinking about our members, donors, and staff in this regard) and should be reconsidered.

Having won consensus for joint action — a tremendous step forward — we must assert the new power that can and should have flowed from the achievement, and the best way to do so is by endorsing Jim Hansen’s call for a 300-350 ppm bright line. If we do this, then we act as a responsible movement, coalescing behind two opposed visions of political change and measures of appropriate precautionary behavior. If we do not do this, we churn already muddy waters and are worse off then if we had done nothing.

Great news from Australia! A logging company has settled its lawsuit against its activist critics, and believe it or not the logger is the one who has to pay the legal fees!

In 2004, the largest logger in Tasmania, Gunns Ltd. surprised the world by suing 20 of its strongest critics, charging them with 9 separate acts of misconduct. Every single action these activists had taken had been nonviolent, ranging from organizing massive street protests to lobbying government to stop Gunns from destroying Tasmania’s old growth forests. Had Gunns been successful, it would have sent a chilling effect across the world for all activists who exercise free speech in defense of the earth. Fortunately, this is one battle that the good guys won.

Now, a quick note on Gunns, which is about as bad as a logging company can get. It clearcuts old growth forests for copy paper, then sets fires in the forest to burn anything that might remain, and sets poison traps to kill any wildlife that has escaped the logging and fires and might feed on newly-established plantations. Naturally, activists across Australia and around the world got involved in protests against Gunns.

Among the Gunns 20 was the Australian Wilderness Society, an ally organization of RAN’s. Through our office in Japan, since 2006 RAN has been working with The Wilderness Society to educate Japanese customers about the beautiful old growth forests of Tasmania, the horrible logging practices of Gunns, and the role of the Japanese paper industry in supporting Gunns’ old growth logging. 80% of Tasmania’s pulp and paper is exported to Japan, where it is manufactured into disposable paper products like tissue and copy paper.

In 2007 RAN’s Global Finance campaign advised ANZ Bank to not finance Gunns’ pulp mill. Eventually ANZ listened, and to this date Gunns is struggling to find financing for the pulp mill. Meanwhile Gunns’ stock price is barely worth the old growth paper it’s printed on, and despite the horrible economic climate the company continues to pursue the idea that it needs to build a new pulp mill. Through our most recent conversations with Japanese customers, they are becoming less interested in buying Gunns’ paper: Ricoh, Canon and Fuji Xerox are all asking suppliers Oji Paper and Nippon Paper to exclude old growth fiber from Gunns.

After all of this pressure, from RAN, from Australian activists, and from concerned individuals around the world, Gunns today dropped its lawsuit, which sought $3.5 million in damages from the Gunns 20 activists, and instead is paying $350,000 in legal fees to The Wilderness Society!

One surprising measure of how effective forest activists are is the level of repression they face. Cheers to The Wilderness Society for standing up and fighting back!