Alberto Rotondo, executive of Tahoe Mine, San Rafael in Guatemala, gave direct orders to assassinate members of the community San Rafael Las Flores. The investigation of the mining conflicts in San Rafael Las Flores, Santa Rosa, took a 180 degrees turn, after the Public Ministry submitted audio from wiretapping as evidence. In the audio it can be clearly heard how Alberto Rotondo, head of the San Rafael Mining Security outfit ordered to assassinate opponents of the mine. The newspaper Siglo.21 published today a report titled “Rotondo ordered: Kill those sons of B..”, the report documents how the Security Chief gave direct orders to assassinate mining protesters and opponents of the mining project.

Twenty years ago today, about 30 residents of Tofino were driving up and down the highway by Long Beach, communicating via handheld radios, tracking a helicopter carrying B.C.’s premier of the day and select media. A local guy listening in on emergency, aviation and boat communications was transmitting the play-by-play, while the helicopter sought a quiet landing spot where the premier could make a “contained” statement about the fate of Clayoquot Sound’s forests. Nothing that followed, however, in what was to become the Clayoquot Summer of 1993, could be construed as “contained.”

The United Nations has demanded an immediate halt to the expansion of a major gas project in the Peruvian Amazon, over concerns that it poses a grave risk to the lives of uncontacted Indians living nearby. In a letter to the Peruvian government, the UN’s Committee for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD) requested the ‘immediate suspension’ of plans to expand the existing Camisea gas project further into the Nahua-Nanti reserve, as it ‘threatens the physical and cultural survival of the indigenous peoples living there.’

Hunger strike by Chief Theresa Spence against new government legislation and long term denial of indigenous rights sparks nation wide movement

November 26, 2012 Fort McMurray, AB – Today the Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation (ACFN) received a decision from the Alberta Court of appeal dismissing their application for leave to appeal a decision of the Joint Review Panel to not review the adequacy of Crown consultation before deciding whether to approve Shell’s Jackpine Mine expansion project. The First Nation is extremely disappointed and is currently reviewing their options to address the lack of adequate consultation with respect to Shell’s tar sands project.

Kandi Mossett, organizer with Indigenous Environmental Network and citizen of the Mandan, Hidatsa, Arikara Nation, discusses the impacts of fossil fuel extraction on her community, and their struggle to stop a new refinery on the Fort Berthold Reservation in North Dakota.

For weeks we've watched the State Department's sham review of Keystone XL unfold, with no calls from congress for corrective action. The silence was finally shattered this week, as a group of 14 Senators and Representatives, led by Sen. Bernie Sanders, sent a letter to the President and the Inspector General of the State Department, calling for a formal investigation into this scandal.1 This process being conducted by the State Department is a crime in progress. But with a final decision is coming before the end of the year, it's not over yet. This is a crucial moment to amplify congressional calls for an investigation. Join congressional leaders in calling for an independent investigation of the State Department's tar sands scandal.

Early this morning on the Xingu River outside of Altamira, an estimated 600 indigenous people from 21 tribes, as well as fishermen, occupied the construction site of the Belo Monte Dam, demanding a definitive end to the project. Events are very fluid on the ground, and internet has been out in the region, so information is coming in bit by bit. We know that early on, the mobilization declared their intent to not leave the site until the Belo Monte Dam was cancelled for good.

After 29 years of impunity for crimes against humanity and genocide committed during the internal armed conflict against the Maya People, on Thursday October 13 Judge Carol Patricia Flores indicted one of the intellectual authors of the genocide - José Mauricio Rodríguez Sánchez - who was the Director of Intelligence (G2) for the military high command from April 1982 to April 1983 in the government of Efraín Ríos Montt. In 2001, survivors of the genocide launched a case against the 1982-1983 military high command made up of Head of State Efraín Ríos Montt, Minister of Defence General Oscar Humberto Mejía Víctores and General Hector Mario Lopez Fuentes.

.. there were more than 150 women from Vancouver's Downtown Eastside standing in the middle of the intersection of Granville and Georgia Streets, demanding that their voices be heard at their own Inquiry. It was simultaneously heartbreaking and amazing.

At the Occupy Wall Street campgrounds in lower Manhattan, you can find just about anything. Like the sign held by a Marine vet wearing a "Don't Tread on Me" t-shirt (with a "Ban Fracking Now" sticker on one sleeve) and military pants: "2nd time I've fought for my country, 1st time I've known my enemy." It could give you chills. And then there were the older women who cornered me on a visit to the encampment. They were noticeable in part because Zuccotti Park is largely a stakeout for the young and in part because they were insistently shoving a petition at me. It was a call to stop fracking -- the practice of injecting water and potentially dangerous chemicals into rock formations to release natural gas, which can poison local drinking water. (I signed.)

Unless good sense intervenes, it looks increasingly likely that the State Department will approve the Keystone XL pipeline, which would carry a coarse, acidic crude oil from northern Alberta in Canada to refineries on the Gulf Coast of Texas. That would be a mistake.

Leonard Peltier, an indigenous rights activist jailed in the United States for decades, has received the first Mario Benedetti Foundation international human rights prize, the group said Monday.

The Dene Nation has helped prepare an accord opposing the Keystone XL pipeline with First Nations, tribal leaders, and property owners in the United States and Canada. The accord was agreed to at a meeting on the Rosebud Sioux reservation in South Dakota last week, and is the latest in a serious of coordinated actions between different entities with diverse interests opposing the pipeline.

La Via Campesina in Movement… Food Sovereignty now! from La Via Campesina on Vimeo. A phenomenal view of one of the most powerful, most necessary movements in activist and community history

NEW TOWN, North Dakota --The resistance to the dirty Tar Sands announced plans for civil disobedience in Washington to send a message to the Obama Administration to halt a plan for use of the dirtiest oil on the planet, which threatens natural resources and humanity in North America, including Indian country.

Indian country leaders are being courted with "greenwashing," as corporations attempt to profiteer from the new Green Movement which seeks to halt global warming and create alternative energy sources. The scam of carbon credits, and waste incinerators disguised as renewable energy and recycling projects, are the latest corporate hoaxes.

Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation, Beaver Lake Cree Nation and Enoch Cree Nation received a favourable judgment from the Federal Court of Canada late yesterday afternoon.

National Geographic magazine has again focused attention on Alberta’s oilsands, this time with an article on Enbridge’s proposed Northern Gateway project titled “Pipeline Through Paradise.” The magazine will hit newsstands this week, but the online version is available now. The article details the sinking of B.C. Ferries’ Queen of the North in 2006, and the oil still leaking from the submerged vessel, suggesting this is a taste of what is in store for the north coast of B.C.

An audit of the BC Environmental Assessment Office (BC EAO) commissioned by the Northwest Institute for Bioregional Research raises explosive evidence of the length to which the BC government went to help Taseko Mines Ltd. (TML).

Dear Friends, This will be a slightly longer letter than common for the internet age—it’s serious stuff. The short version is we want you to consider doing something hard: coming to Washington in the hottest and stickiest weeks of the summer and engaging in civil disobedience that will likely get you arrested. The full version goes like this: As you know, the planet is steadily warming: 2010 was the warmest year on record, and we’ve seen the resulting chaos in almost every corner of the earth.

Environmental devastation of the land, water, and air - the largest industrial energy project in the world is extracting crude oil from bitumen found beneath the pristine boreal forest of Alberta, Canada. Effecting a land mass equivalent in size to Florida or England, Both industry and government are putting money before the health and security of its people and the environment.

A big battle is shaping up over environmental regulation of Canada’s oil sands, the second-largest oil deposits in the world. And, surprisingly, it’s Conservatives against Conservatives. In this corner, it’s Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s federal Conservatives, who just gained a majority government. In that corner, it’s Alberta’s conservative provincial government, led by hard-nosed, oil-industry friendly premier Ed Stelmach.

The Canadian company TransCanada is hoping to win State Department approval of construction of the Keystone XL pipeline, which would carry “oil sands” oil to the Gulf Coast for refining. To this end, it has spent $310,000 this year lobbying in Washington for the cause.

A U.S. appeals court…modified a lower court order that barred Ecuadorean villagers from collecting an $8.6 billion award against Chevron…for polluting the Amazon rain forest. A three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals…

Two tribes along the route of the Kearl Module Transportation Project have asked to take part in litigation designed to halt it. Western Montana's Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes, as well as the Nez Perce of Idaho, filed a motion in Missoula County District Court Wednesday asking to have their say in the suit against the Montana Department of Transportation.

A Wikileaks cable reveals the US Embassy in Lima, Peru, identified Indigenous activists and tracked the involvement of Bolivian President Evo Morales, Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, Bolivia Ambassador Pablo Solon, prominent Quechua activist Miguel Palacin Quispe and community leaders.

A phenomenal look at the heart of a pristine wilderness - both boreal and marine - that is threatened by oil expansion projects.

On the surface, there is a disproportionate power imbalance between Jackie Thomas, chief of the Saik'uz First Nation of British Columbia, and Enbridge Inc., the Calgary-based pipeline giant.

After an eighteen-year, multinational court battle, Chevron was found guilty today in an Ecuadorian court and fined $8 billion for pollution that amounted to an ecological disaster and seriously harmed the human rights of the indigenous inhabitants in a small and sensitive part of the rainforest.

The social criteria of “Love, Earth” also outline “freedom of association and the effective recognition of the right to collective bargaining,” “fair remuneration of employees that is in compliance with the local and national laws and consistent with the prevailing local standards in the countries of operation,” and “maintain reasonable employee work hours in compliance with local standards and applicable laws.”

Using a law written to prosecute the Mafia, Chevron Corp. on Tuesday filed a racketeering lawsuit against a team of lawyers who have been fighting the company over oil field pollution in Ecuador.

In the wake of an independent panel concluding that water monitoring in the tar sands is inadequate, environmentalists are calling on Ottawa to bypass the Alberta government in order to fully enforce the pollution provisions of the federal Fisheries Act. Even before today’s release of the panel’s findings, the Alberta government tried to pre-empt federal action by announcing its own lengthy process to fix water monitoring in the tar sands, after maintaining for years that nothing was wrong.

After a year of scathing billboards in foreign cities, a virtual revolving door of American politicians and Hollywood celebrities, and a very public trial over 1,600 dead ducks, it may be hard to imagine how Alberta's oilsands could get any more prominent.

In secret negotiations with state agencies and public officials, the world’s wealthiest corporations began hatching plans several years ago to transform rivers and rural roads in the Northwest and Northern Rockies into a permanent industrial corridor to the Tar Sands of Alberta, Canada.

I have come to the UNFCCC COP-16 climate talks in Cancun, Mexico as a member of Grassroots Solutions for Climate Justice — North America a delegation of Indigenous Peoples and representatives from fossil fuel impacted communities who are on the frontlines of addressing the climate crisis.

“We will not allow the proposed Enbridge Northern Gateway Pipelines, or similar Tar Sands projects, to cross our lands, territories and watersheds, or ocean migration routes of Fraser River salmon”.

Indigenous Peoples of Canada and their allies from around the world are in Cancun at the COP-16 climate summit demanding real action to reduce fossil fuel pollution.

The Onondaga, a member nation of the Haudenosaunee Iroquois Confederacy and long leaders as healers of the environment face a new threat: Hydraulic fracturing, or fracking.

In Canada's tar sands, giant oil corporations are turning huge tracts of pristine forest into a wasteland of open pit mines, smoke stacks and toxic lagoons. This pollution is causing cancer hot spots in indigenous communities downstream.

Indigenous Environmental Network hosted an informal meeting between Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) and elected leadership from First Nations in Alberta and BC to discuss Indigenous rights violations in their communities as a result of the world's largest and most destructive development known as Canada's Tar Sands.

75 groups from across Canada, the U.S. and Europe have signed a petition calling on the federal and Alberta governments to immediately phase out existing tailings lakes and deny any proposed project that would create new tailings lakes. Greenpeace issued the call-out last week, and 45 groups across Canada, including 23 Alberta-based groups, six U.S. groups, and one group from Europe have signed on to support a moratorium on destructive tar sands practices. To date, there have been over 600 signatories to the petition.

Two environmental groups have at least a temporary victory to celebrate after a federal judge voided a permit, granted in 2005, for the expansion of a coal mine on Navajo land in New Mexico.

The 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in a split decision Sept. 21 denied the Cherokee Nation’s appeal of a lower court ruling that excluded the tribe from a controversy between Oklahoma and Tyson Foods Inc. and other poultry dealers over disposal of poultry waste in the Illinois River watershed, which spans about 1 million acres along the Oklahoma/Arkansas border.

The residents of Pavillion, a rural community on the Wind River Indian Reservation in central Wyoming have been told by federal agencies not to drink their water and to use fans and ventilation while bathing or washing clothes to avoid the risk of explosion.

A dozen Greenpeace activists wearing bathing suits and covered in molasses intended to resemble crude oil held up their hands like stop signs in the business district of Montreal last month.

We show that the oil sands industry releases the 13 elements considered priority pollutants (PPE) under the US Environmental Protection Agency's Clean Water Act, via air and water, to the Athabasca River and its watershed.

Indigenous communities in Canada and the United States are singing the same tune in opposition to TransCanada’s Keystone XL pipeline.

To what extent has the land been restored? Will it provide a sustainable ecosystem? And is it the first tailings pond reclamation of many? Joining us for this discussion is Terra Simieritsch, a policy analyst with the Pembina Institute.

On Monday, September 27 and Tuesday, September 28, Peter Mansbridge will be hosting The National from Alberta. We'll have two nights of special coverage of the vastly profitable and highly controversial oilsands.

After his tour, on September 29th he met with Alberta Premier Ed Stelmach, and held a press conference. Reactions to that press conference.

From British Columbia to Quebec, from Canada to the United States to the United Kingdom, a movement inspired by the resistance of the Unist’ot’en of the Wet’suwet’en First Nation people to an oil pipeline proposed by the pipeline giant Enbridge is gaining momentum.

The campaign is so startlingly global and diverse and multi-faceted that most campaigners don’t even know of the existence of most of the other campaigners.

Environmental groups got their way Tuesday when a public hearing into a proposed oilsands mine in northern Alberta was abruptly adjourned.

A summer of spilled oil has only thickened the plot as the U.S. government weighs a pipeline proposal that would as much as double the southern flow of controversial Canadian crude.

A B.C. First Nations leader took a defiant stand against a plan to build an oil pipeline across B.C. as he appeared Tuesday before a federal panel holding hearings on the massive project.

A study set to be published on Monday has found elevated levels of mercury, lead and eleven other toxic elements in the oil sands’ main fresh water source, the Athabasca River, refuting long-standing government and industry claims that water quality there hasn’t been affected by oil sands development.

CALGARY, Alberta, Aug 24 (Reuters) - Environmental groups demanded on Tuesday that Alberta's energy regulator rescind its approval for Syncrude Canada Ltd's plans to reduce toxic waste from oil sands production, saying they do not meet the regulator's own regulations.

In 2005, the Keweenaw Bay Indian Community tried to lease the sacred Eagle Rock site from the State of Michigan for ceremonial use. Located in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula near Marquette, Eagle Rock and the surrounding Yellow Dog Plains are part of lands ceded to the tribe for hunting and fishing by an 1842 government treaty upheld by the courts again in 1983.

Why did a parliamentary committee suddenly destroy drafts of a final report on tar sands pollution? Here's what they knew.

he US Ambassador to Canada is in Calgary with a message for the Alberta government. He wants more done to clean up the oilsands.

Environmentalists have just escalated their war against the Alberta oilsands.

With the Calgary Stampede underway, billboards asking Americans to rethink their travel plans to Alberta rolled out across four major US cities today (cities that bring the most US tourists annually to Alberta) marking the first wave of a multi-year ad campaign aimed at revealing Alberta to be one of the world’s dirtiest destinations.

Rep. Henry Waxman (D-CA), a senior member of Congress and chair of the powerful Congressional Committee on Energy and Commerce has penned a public letter to the Secretary of State, Hilary Rodham Clinton, in which he states strong opposition to a planned oil pipeline that would transport Canada's controversial tar sands oil to the US Gulf Coast.

A delegation of indigenous and community leaders from Ecuador is visiting Louisiana this week at the invitation of the United Houma Nation, a tribe in coastal Lafourche and Terrebone parishes that has been hit hard by the BP oil catastrophe.

British oil firm BP has been fined $5.2m (£3.5m) by the US Interior Department.

If we could go back in time before the BP Deepwater Horizon rig exploded on April 20, what would we learn? What steps would have helped avert what is now the nation's worst environmental disaster? Could this hindsight help us prevent similar catastrophes in the future? Would our political leaders have the moral compass to "get it right" this time around?

As details continue to emerge on just how extensively BP cut corners at the expense of safety, and 60,000 barrels of oil gushes into the Gulf each day, nearly two months after the Deepwater Horizon explosion, 50 members of Congress submitted a letter to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to press her and the Obama administration not to rush to approve a new tar sands oil pipeline that would stretch over 2,000 miles of the United States from Canada to the Gulf of Mexico.

Update: The International Whaling Commission (IWC), which was supposed to decide a way forward for whales over the next decade has ended without an agreement.

Recently local Alaskan communities were leaked a new draft of a plan to log 80,000 acres of the Tongass forest making its way through the US Senate Energy and Natural Resources committee.

The Innu communities of Matimekush-Lac John and of Uashat mak Mani-Utenam, supported by the member communities of the Innu Strategic Alliance, are undertaking concrete actions to have their rights respected and to make the governments understand that no mining development is to take place on the territory without prior consent of the Innu people.

For a month, a small group of American Indians and environmental activists occupied an isolated patch of woods in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula where the world’s third-largest mining company, Rio Tinto, is preparing to drill for nickel and copper.

As the oil spill disaster in the Gulf deepens, Canada's oil industry is taking advantage of the catastrophe to offer its dirty oil as an alternative to offshore drilling. A report released this week crushes that myth, Tar Sands Invasion: How Dirty and Expensive Oil from Canada Threatens America’s New Energy Economy, details the enormous financial and environmental costs associated with what has been termed the largest and most destructive project on the planet.

Just under 11% of shareholder votes at today’s annual general meeting of oil giant Shell refus[ed] to back management over the controversial Canadian tar sands…

Nils Gilman describes deviant globalization as "the unpleasant underside of transnational integration." These are not marginal, "informal" activities. These are enormous, complex businesses straight out of the Harvard Business Review. The drug business in Mexico, for example, employs 400,000 people. A thousand-dollar kilo of cocaine grows in value by 1400-percent when it crosses into the U.S. -- nice profit margin there.

Enbridge Inc.’s ambitious plan to build an oil sands pipeline to the West Coast will succeed despite opposition from first nations and environmentalists as well as concerns about pipeline overcapacity, the company’s chief executive officer says.

Anglo American was challenged at its April 22 AGM in London on a range of issues including a legacy of sickness among former miners in South Africa,

The film entitled AvaTarsands: The Dirty Sequel includes a musical interlude sung by Tar Sands oil executives and features a cameo by a blue-faced President Obama. The film funded by Corporate Ethics International asks Americans to write to President Obama warning that Canada’s Tar Sands do not fit in the new clean energy economy.

As the 17 year old lawsuit between oil giant Chevron and the Ecuadorian Indians draws to a close, the plaintiffs are arguing that they have uncovered damning new evidence that could seriously undermine the oil company’s legal case.

Money talks - make yours do that. This film unequivocally show that what is happening to the people and the land around the Alberta tar sands is absolute disgrace on every level.

Play the Polaris Institute's Tar Nation video game: Spray dirty oil sands crude at Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper and PM candidate Michael Ignatieff until you've pushed them completely out of the tar sands. Win the game (or click here) to send a letter to both -- urging them to stop supporting the dirtiest oil on the planet.

March 5 /CNW/ - The Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers (CAPP) responded to the "Avatarsands" ad in Hollywood's Variety newspaper, making a variety of misleading claims regarding First Nations. See: http://www.newswire.ca/en/releases/archive/March2010/04/c6952.html.

James Cameron, a Canadian born and raised near the majestic boreal forest, has shined a light on a dark reality. Find out more at: dirtyoilsands.org

On February 25, 2010 a lawsuit was filed on behalf of eight plaintiffs in the Supreme Court of the State of New York against The Coca-Cola Co. and Coke processing and bottling plants in Guatemala.

The low, flat-topped hills of south Orissa have been home to the Dongria Kondh long before there was a country called India or a state called Orissa.

Last October, Wayuu Indigenous leader Karmen Ramirez Boscan was in London as a guest of London Mining Network member group Colombia Solidarity Campaign.

The Dongria Kondh say plot of James Cameron’s blockbuster reflects their plight as they struggle to stop company from opening bauxite mine on sacred mountain.

A conflict over gold mining in El Salvador reveals that Cafta [Central American Free Trade Agreement] and similar deals may enable private firms to circumvent environmental laws…

The environmental Ministry of Brazil has announced a controversial project to build a huge hydroelectric dam in the middle of the Amazon forest has been granted an environmental license.

The report exposes the role of EU institutions in constructing a complex political and legal architecture which allows European transnational companies to operate with impunity in the region.

A new report on the potentially negative environmental impacts of an oilsands pipeline to the West Coast has opened a new front for environmentalists opposed to the idea.

Online animation visualizes First Nations opposition along proposed Enbridge pipeline route; pipeline is bringing First Nations together to protect their lands and waters.

This week a group of investors, including faith-based and global institutional investors with assets close to $200 billion, released a statement calling on companies to be more proactive in ensuring the minerals in their electronics components are not fueling the war in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), which has claimed more than 5 million lives.

The Equator Principles, launched in June 2003, commit adopting banks to take the social and environmental impact of projects into account when providing project finance.

This past November people from all over Mexico gathered in the Valley of Perote, where the village of La Gloria is located, for the fifth Asamblea Nacional de Afectados Ambientales [National Assembly of Environmentally Affected].

SIGN THE PETITION AT http://chevrontoxico.com ! A heartfelt message from the Amazon rainforest communities in Ecuador to new Chevron CEO John Watson: "We don't want to continue dying of cancer."...

Last month, a legendary leader of the West Papua self-determination movement, OPM, was ambushed and shot dead by Indonesian police.

Canada is one of many governments who have sent “delegates” to Copenhagen to derail the UN climate conference…but Prime Minister Harper and his delegation no longer have stealth on their side. They are leaving a trail of oily Tar Sands wherever they go.

Canada's tar sands have been internationally criticized as one of the world's largest industrial sources of greenhouse gases, but the energy-intensive extraction of oil also has a less-noted impact on the local environment.

Chile’s Supreme Court...handed down a landmark ruling on indigenous water rights in a case that pitted Region I Aymara communities against Agua Mineral Chusmiza,

A new handbook lays out the methodology for cultural mapping, providing indigenous groups with a powerful tool for defending their land and culture, while enabling them to benefit from some 21st century advancements.

US President Barack Obama has vowed not to forget American Indian tribes, as representatives gathered for a White House conference on native issues.

This clip is tragedy plus outrage plus allegations of corporate greed and indifference.

South Dakota Tar Sands Pipelines is maintained by Plains Justice, a public-interest law center that represents Dakota Rural Action in the Keystone XL pipeline proceedings at the South Dakota Public Utilities Commission.

Today a damning new report from the Co-operative Financial Services and WWF-UK debunks the idea that carbon capture and storage (CCS) will significantly counter the high levels of greenhouse gases emitted in the production of oil from tar sands deposits in Alberta, Canada.

Indigenous natives in the Amazon are headed to the town of Salvacion in Peru with a plan to forcibly remove the Texas-based Hunt Oil company from their land as early as today.

A coalition of tribes, conservationists, and commercial fishing groups filed suit today in San Francisco Superior Court to block a precedent-setting agency proposal to strip endangered species protections from threatened coho salmon in northern California's Klamath River watershed.

Riki Ott, a rare combination of commercial salmon “fisherm’am” and PhD marine biologist (and author of Not One Drop: Betrayal and Courage in the Wake of the Exxon Valdez Oil Spill), knows very well the impacts of oil companies’ broken promises.

The Sekuruwe community in the Mapela area, north of Mokopane in Limpopo Province, has been taking action for the last three days to demand cooperation from the Sekuruwe Section 21 Company in the reexhumation and reburial of community graves desecrated by Anglo Platinum and its subcontractor, Phuti Funeral Homes.

A recent decision by a group of multinational companies that include Nike, Adidas, and Timberland [as well as Wal-Mart and Carrefour] to boycott beef and leather products from the Brazilian Amazon

With another session of Parliament starting up this week, Canadian resource executives will be casting an uneasy eye away from their mining developments and toward the halls of Ottawa.

Britain's Advertising Standards Authority (ASA), a group that regulates advertisements, has again banned a "misleading" ad by the palm oil industry, reports the Guardian.

A $100 million slush fund can buy you a lot of things, but it doesn’t look like it can buy Enbridge support for its Northern Gateway pipeline and tanker project in northern BC.

Native American and environmental groups filed suit in federal court today challenging a proposed tar sands oil pipeline that would bring the dirtiest oil on Earth from Canada to the United States.

Eight Maasai villages in the Loliondo region of Tanzania have been burnt to the ground, leaving 3,000 people without food, water or shelter. On 4 July, heavily armed Tanzanian riot police set fire to Maasai homesteads and foodstores to evict them from their ancestral land

Flying in the face of a growing host of military experts and research showing the contrary, Secretary Clinton decided that Enbridge’s Alberta Clipper dirty oil sands pipeline is in the U.S. national interest. Presidential Executive Order 11423 allows the Secretary to permit the pipeline ONLY if she judges it’s in the national interest.

An international coalition of environmental and Native American groups strongly opposed Thursday's U.S. State Department decision to issue a permit for a pipeline to carry the dirtiest oil on earth from Canada to the U.S. and vowed to challenge it in court.

The United States Federal Court again rejected arguments from Rio Tinto in a massive human rights claim brought by South Pacific islanders claiming the world’s largest mining company conspired with the government of Papua New Guinea (PNG) in crimes against humanity, racial discrimination and war crimes.

Barely six weeks after dozens of Amazon natives were gunned down in cold blood by the Peruvian Army in the oil town of Bagua for protesting the cozy relationship between Big Oil and the government of President Alan Garcia, I find myself on the banks of the Mother of God River in Salvacion, Peru, wondering if all those folks died in vain.

The Royal Bank of Canada (RBC) is the leading funder of Canadian tar sands oil extraction -- Canada's fastest growing source of water pollution and global warming emissions. The Rainforest Action Network has been asking the bank to end its involvement with the oil sands, but so far the company hasn't shown much leadership.

NIKE, Inc. today reinforced its commitment to the environment by releasing new leather sourcing guidelines aimed at helping slow the rate of Amazon deforestation due to cattle grazing within the basin.

Dear Colleagues, Supporters, and Friends, I hereby resign as president of the Reputable Mainstream Environmental Lobbying Organization. The global political will necessary to thwart catastrophic climate change has not materialized. I hold myself partially responsible

An ecumenical delegation of ten leaders from Canadian churches and church organizations, a hereditary Indigenous chief from British Columbia and partners from Ecuador and Nigeria traveled in Alberta from May 21 to 27 to learn more about the tar sands and their impacts on people and the earth

I spent a day a few weeks ago in São Paulo at the headquarters of a major Brazilian beef company — or, to put it another way, the cutting edge of tropical conservation.

Roger Moody is an expert on mining and mining transnationals. He has spent years uncovering the facts about how mining companies operate.

Today Calvert Investments [part of Calvert Group] removed Weyerhaeuser from the Calvert Social Index of sustainable and responsible companies due to Weyerhaeuser’s failure to meet the Index’s standards for Indigenous Peoples’ Rights...[also refers to AbitibiBowater, Boise]

The disposable placemats in the La Biche Inn feature grand prairie scenes from aboriginal and European disagreements, highlights of the Northwest Rebellion of 1885.

Mechanisms to mitigate disputes with local communities, can reduce risk for companies seeking to profit from forest use while at the same time helping protect rights of forest people, argues a new report published today by the The Forests Dialogue (TFD)

Right now, while the United States is working to move into a clean energy economy, a stealth dirty oil mega project is sneaking across the border.It's up to us to stop it.

A few years ago Rio Tinto walked away from one of the most controversial mines in its recent history – the Flambeau copper project in Wisconsin, USA. A coalition of Native American and local people had taken up arms against one of the world’s biggest mining companies, but lost.

A report submitted this week to a court in Ecuador finding dangerous levels of contamination at oil wells Chevron says it cleaned up in the 1990s is expected to reinforce a fraud indictment against two Chevron lawyers in a $27.3 billion environmental lawsuit against the oil company.

Father Edilberto Sena arrives at Rural Radio station and takes up his position behind the microphone. He reaches into his pocket and pulls out his script for today's show. One question is scribbled on it for the daily debate: ‘Why is this happening?'

The amount Alberta owes First Nations affected by oilsands development could easily outstrip all the royalties the province has earned off the resource if courts rule in favour of native bands, said a lawyer for the Beaver Lake Cree Nation on Thursday.

It has been called the world’s second “oil war,” but the only similarity between Iraq and events in the jungles of northern Peru over the last few weeks has been the mismatch of force. On one side have been the police armed with automatic weapons, tear gas, helicopter gunships and armored cars. On the other are several thousand Awajun and Wambis natives, many of them in war paint and armed with bows and arrows and spears.

Serious questions over Shell Oil's alleged involvement in human rights abuses in Nigeria emerged last night after confidential internal documents and court statements revealed how the energy giant enlisted the help of the country's brutal former military government to deal with protesters.

The first ever comprehensive survey of caribou worldwide (known as reindeer in Europe) has found that the species has suffered a staggering decline. Researchers from the University of Alberta discovered that the caribou population has fallen 60 percent in half as many years.

The Work Bank's private lending arm has withdrawn a $90 million loan to Brazilian cattle giant Bertin, following Greenpeace's release of a report linking Bertin to illegal deforestation of the Amazon rainforest, report environmental groups, Friends of the Earth-Brazil and Greenpeace.

Brazil's three largest supermarket chains, Wal-Mart, Carrefour and Pão de Açúcar, will suspend contracts with suppliers found to be involved in Amazon deforestation, reports O Globo.

“This is a life or death situation for people of the North,” says Yellowknife Councillor Kevin Kennedy, a member of the municipal council that brought the resolution to this year’s annual meeting. “The Government of Canada needs to take stronger steps to protect water, fish, migratory species and people living in downstream communities.”

Fined $25m by the US federal court for funding a terrorist organisation, Chiquita, the US-based banana distribution company, is now facing a number of new lawsuits.

Royal Dutch Shell, the big oil company, agreed to pay $15.5 million to settle a case accusing it of taking part in human rights abuses in the Niger Delta in the early 1990s, a striking sum given that the company has denied any wrongdoing.

Brazil's president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, writing in the Guardian in March, offered us these words of hope: "No country has a larger stake in reversing the impact of global warming than Brazil. That is why it is at the forefront of efforts to come up with solutions that preserve our common future." Lula's words are fine. But we are still waiting for real action.

At least 30 are dead following a clash between police and Indians protesting oil development in Peru's Amazon region.

One of the presentations, made in the May 2009 UN Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues in New York, highlighted opposition by the San Carlos Apache of Arizona to the prospect of a major new copper mine, to be operated jointly by Rio Tinto and BHP Billiton.

A partnership between local villages and conservation groups, headed up by the Bonobo Conservation Initiative (BCI), has led to the creation of a new 1,847 square mile (4,875 square kilometer) reserve in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC).

U.S. District Court Judge James Redden has told the federal government what to consider in order to restore Columbia basin salmon runs. The judge released a letter to the parties on Monday as part of long running litigation brought by fishing and conservation groups aimed at rebuilding the once vast salmon runs of the Columbia River and its tributaries. Read Judge Redden's letter: http://www.earthjustice.org/library/legal_docs/redden_letter_2009_columbia-snake_biop.pdf

UK mining giant Vedanta Resources was dealt a double blow today as the OECD agreed that all the complaints made by Survival about the company’s planned bauxite mine in Orissa merit further consideration,

The first original production by and for Babelgum, Downstream focuses on the controversy surrounding the development of Alberta's oil sands. This beautifully photographed documentary is an eye-opening investigation into one of the world's most polluting oil operations. It includes interviews with ecologists, Canadian politicians, local residents and a very dedicated doctor, discussing the environmental, economic and health issues surrounding the oil sands development.

Ecopetrol, has signed a deal with...oil company, Petrobras, which has a contract to explore in two regions of the Peruvian Amazon – both inhabited by uncontacted tribes..

In what is being hailed as a victory for indigenous groups in the Brazilian Amazon, Brazil's Supreme Court sided with Indians from the Raposa Serra do Sol reservation in a 30-year land dispute with large-scale farmers in the northern state of Roraima, near the border with Venezuela, reports the Associated Press.

The federal government has a long history of cheating American Indians, and not all of this dirty dealing is in the distant past. On Monday, the Supreme Court hears arguments in a suit by the Navajo, who lost millions of dollars’ worth of coal royalties because the government helped a coal company underpay for their coal.

The McArthur River winds through Australia’s remote Northern Territory creating lush floodplains that sustain vast herds of kangaroos, wallabies and cattle. Above them, finches, wild turkeys, and flocks of migratory birds fill an endless sky.

Campaigner commentary from Amazon Watch on the "Clean Up Ecuador" campaign.

The Coastal Alliance for Aquaculture Reform (CAAR) today slammed the BC government for once again failing to invest in the development of a new, green technology industry that would address the numerous devastating impacts of open net-cage salmon farming in coastal waters while creating jobs for the new economy.

…since the late 1990’s, the Federal government began to grant mining concessions…[in Chiapas] to transnational mining corporations, for the most part based in Canada…The mining reforms…which played a part in paving the way for NAFTA…

The Mikisew Cree and Athabasca Chipewyan First Nations and environmental group ForestEthics have placed a full-page ad in USA Today highlighting the human and environmental damage wrought by Canada's Tar Sands.

WRI [World Resources Institute] analyzed existing community engagement standards and guidance, as well as experiences in several high profile projects. Based on this analysis, WRI developed seven Principles for Effective Community Engagement for extractive and infrastructure projects...

A coalition of indigenous rights' groups and grassroots environmental organizations will oppose the World Wildlife Fund's move to improve environmental stewardship of the aquaculture industry through a certification system.

June days lengthen and snow melts to reveal tiny bright wildflowers and nutritious lichens. Thousands of pregnant caribou gather in tight circles. They are gaunt and exhausted from their six-hundred-mile migration from the boreal forests of Saskatchewan.

An Anglo-French oil company hoping to drill for oil on uncontacted tribes’ land in the Peruvian Amazon may be forced to abandon the project after the government threatened to withdraw investment in it.

The U.S. District Court for the District of Hawai'i affirmed the U.S. Army's duties under a October 4, 2001 settlement with Malama Makua (represented by Earthjustice)

The issue of human rights and mining is highlighted in a first-of-a-kind investigation into the relocation of communities to make way for mining.

Western Mining Action Network and Indigenous Environmental Network Indigenous Communities Mining Mini-Grant Program. Application Deadline: February 1, 2009.

Twenty years after the killing of Chico Mendes, one of the world's most prominent rainforest defenders, hundreds of human rights and environmental activists still face the threat of assassination in Brazil, a new study claims.

On the day Canadian finance ministers are meeting in Saskatoon to discuss financial breaks for Tar Sands, environmental groups took out an ad in the local Saskatoon paper, the Star Phoenix, that asks ‘How will Canada’s finance ministers spend your money?’

The Black Mesa Water Coalition came into Denver on Saturday December 06, 2008. There were 40 plus members in their caravan, which included citizens of the Dine and Hopi Nations.

The Swinomish Indian Tribal Community and Skagit County Diking District No. 22 today filed a formal settlement agreement that ends the litigation over the district's drainage practices in the Skagit delta.

Indigenous peoples have historically gained little from large-scale resource development on their traditional lands, and have suffered from its negative impacts on their cultures, economies and societies.

Indigenous leaders in Brazil say they have won an important victory for the rights of their community, at a key hearing of the Supreme Court.

International financial institutions (IFIs), including the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF), have actively promoted and financed the liberalization of the hydrocarbon and mining sectors of national economies across the globe.

"Social license to operate" is an intriguing new phrase that has entered corporate parlance in recent years.

WITH THAT WONDERFUL sense of federalism she showed America in the fall campaign, Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin reportedly remarked to Gov. Chris Gregoire that Alaska fishermen should get dibs on fish in Alaska's waters.

Berta Robledo, a nurse at the National Pediatric Hospital here, was hunched over the counter at La Blanca, a popular old quarter restaurant, a magnifying glass in one hand, a dictionary in the other, and a print copy of a petroleum "reform" law pending in the Mexican Congress spread before her on the Formica.

An article in The Chicago Tribune - "Organic definition for fish flounders: Critics: USDA proposal for seafood labeling inconsistent" - includes:

Confronted with statements by Rainforest Action Network (RAN) spokespeople questioning the company’s social and environmental record, Archer Daniels Midland (ADM) CEO Patricia Woertz admitted that rainforests are being destroyed in Brazil.

Electric utility PacifiCorp has tentatively agreed to remove four dams from the Klamath River, in a deal that would end one of the West's most rancorous water disputes and could serve as a settlement model for similar fights.

"If we don't have land and we don't have anywhere to carry out our traditional lifestyles, we lose who we are as a people. So, if there's no land, then its equivalent in our estimation to genocide of a people." George Poitras, Mikisew Cree First Nation

Anti-mining advocates here greeted with resistance the Department of National Defense's plan to deploy soldiers to foreign-backed mining projects for protection from communist attacks.

From the mining of raw materials to energy production to the manufacturing process itself, industry guzzles tons of water. The Cananea Consolidated Copper Company -- one of the world's largest open pit copper mines, run by Grupo Mexico

Russian environmental and indigenous rights organizations filed a joint lawsuit against Exxon Neftegas Limited, an ExxonMobil subsidiary, to prevent environmental damage from the controversial Sakhalin-I project in the Russian Far East

A new study finds that international project financiers, including the leading international banks and the International Finance Corporation, do not have a robust framework for minimizing the social risks posed by their projects.

A Maine environmental coalition announced Thursday that it had raised the $25 million it needed to buy three dams from a power company under an agreement to restore a number of fish species in the Penobscot River.

Rights Action is extremely concerned for the safety of members of the National Committee of CUC (the Campesino Unity Committee), and for the safety of members of the Maya Keqchi communities of La Isla, Caserio el Mirador Semao, Corazon de Mais, and Teleman Punto 15, all in the municipality of Panzos, Alta Verapaz, Guatemala.

Oil companies operating in the Tar Sands were fined only $249,000 in 2006, despite numerous environmental violations including 240 air quality exceedances by just one company. By comparison, library fines for Alberta's largest cities, Calgary and Edmonton, totaled more than $4 million that same year, in 2006, or 16 times more than what all the oil companies were fined for their environmental violations.

In late June, representatives of indigenous communities of the Bismark Sea region of Papua New Guinea gathered to discuss deep sea mining and express their concerns over the potential environmental, social and economic impacts of this experimental new mining process.

For over 20 years, Ajang Kiew, a Penan Leader, has been setting up blockades to protect his Native Customary Rights land from the intrusion of logging companies. To his dismay, his cries and efforts have fallen on deaf ears. Now, he sets up one final struggle before oil palm and tree plantations take over for good.

Talk about a death-defying escape. Sea lice, parasitic crustaceans that torment salmon, jump ship when their host gets nabbed by a bigger fish--and they then latch onto the predator. This previously unknown escape tactic, described in a study published online this week in Biology Letters, may mean bad news for an entire food web.

Ontario is on the cusp of helping oil-sands emissions explode. Shell Canada wants permits to be granted by the end of this year for a new refinery in Sarnia to process oil from its oil-sands mines in Alberta for use in gas tanks across the GTA.

Chevron is also Accused of Lying To Shareholders Over the $16 Billion Damages Claim In Ecuador Rainforest Case By Amazon Defense Coalition

Today’s sentencing to six months in jail of Kitchenuhmaykoosib Inninuwug (KI) First Nation Chief Donnie Morris and six other council members is the latest, but by no means the last, installment of an ongoing conflict fueled by government inaction between century-old mining legislation and legal entitlements.

I’m going to talk about Drummond, because it is a North American company. It arrived in Colombia in 1987. It obtained a claim to exploit coal in a region of ten thousand hectares in the Caribbean region of Colombia. This mine is in Cesar province. In 1995, when the shaft was opened, the workers, because of the company’s pressures and violations of their rights, became unionized in order to resist. This is open-pit mine. When they took away the top layer of land to get down to where the coal is, the communities living in the areas surrounding the mine were displaced. Moreover, the water sources in those areas were removed, obstructed, so the ecosystem changed as well.

Houston – Oil company executives considering bidding for controversial concessions in the Peruvian Amazon today applauded an indigenous leader who had traveled from the rainforest to warn them not to enter community land.

In each cup of coffee we drink the major issues of the twenty-first century — globalization, immigration, women's rights, pollution, indigenous rights, and self-determination — are played out in villages and remote areas around the world. In Javatrekker: Dispatches from the World of Fair Trade Coffee, a unique hybrid of Fair Trade business, adventure travel, and cultural anthropology, author Dean Cycon brings readers face-to-face with the real people who make our morning coffee ritual possible.

Members of Rainforest Action Network (RAN) protested the environmental and human rights practices of Weyerhaeuser Corp. at the Building Industry Show today, deploying a balloon banner in the atrium of the Long Beach Convention Center that read, “Weyerhaeuser and iLevel: Clearcutting Human Rights. Ask Me How!” Weyerhaeuser was permitted to exhibit its iLevel “green” wood in the show’s green pavilion, despite the fact that the wood was clear-cut from the traditional territory of Canada’s Grassy Narrows First Nation against the community’s wishes.

Ethical Investment Research Services (EIRIS) and the Centre for Australian Ethical Research (CAER) today released a joint report exploring the challenges and opportunities faced by companies operating in areas where the rights of indigenous peoples are threatened. The report also analyses the measures companies are implementing to address indigenous and land rights issues.

Oil on Ice is a one-hour television documentary/WebDVD that examines the the battle over oil development within the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.