Amazon Indians unite against Canadian oil giant - Survival International
http://www.survivalinternational.org/news/9023
Amazon Indians from Peru and Brazil have joined together to stop a Canadian oil company destroying their land and threatening the lives of uncontacted tribes.
Hundreds of Matsés Indians gathered on the border of Peru and Brazil last Saturday and called on their governments to stop the exploration, warning that the work will devastate their forest home.
The oil giant Pacific Rubiales is headquartered in Canada and has already started oil exploration in ‘Block 135’ in Peru, which lies directly over an area proposed as an uncontacted tribes reserve.
In a rare interview with Survival, a Matsés woman said, ‘Oil will destroy the place where our rivers are born. What will happen to the fish? What will the animals drink?’
Le dernier conflit à Gaza résumé en une photo.
Fuite d’un projet secret d’exploration gazière dans un site classé au Patrimoine mondial de l’Unesco - Survival International
http://www.survivalfrance.org/actu/8966
Un rapport confidentiel obtenu par le quotidien britannique The Guardian, révèle le projet secret du géant argentin Pluspetrol d’exploration gazière dans l’une des plus importantes zones protégées du Pérou, le célèbre parc national du Manu et dans une réserve habitée par des groupes d’#Indiens_isolés.
Ce rapport, qui émane de l’agence environnementale Quartz Services S.A., dévoile l’intention de Pluspetrol d’étendre ses activités au-delà de sa concession actuelle – dite bloc 88 – vers le bloc Fitzcarrald. Le bloc 88 est déjà l’un des plus importants projets gaziers d’Amazonie, connu sous le nom de Camisea.
Le rapport de Quartz établit que les activités de la compagnie ‘se poursuivront non seulement dans le bloc 88, mais s’étendront également dans la région protégée du parc national du Manu’.
Survival qui a interrogé à plusieurs reprises le gouvernement péruvien et les compagnies d’#exploitation_gazière sur ce projet d’extension de leurs activités dans la région, n’a obtenu que de vagues réponses indiquant qu’aucun projet concret d’exploration n’était prévu.
Gas company targets protected Manú park in Peruvian Amazon
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2013/feb/11/gas-company-manu-park-amazon?intcmp=122
Leaked document reveals Pluspetrol is eyeing a region where biodiversity ’exceeds that of any other place on Earth’
L’avidité pathologique du gros commerce, rien ne l’arrête. C’est bien pour ça que la planète et accessoirement nous, sommes condamnés à brève échéance.
Projet annulé, youpi
http://seenthis.net/messages/115339
Andean glaciers show record melting | Climate News Network
http://www.climatenewsnetwork.net/2013/01/andean-glaciers-show-record-melting
Andean glaciers show record melting
January 25, 2013 in Science
The Pastoruri glacier in Peru’s Cordillera Blanca is one of the Andean glaciers monitored by the scientists in the study published in The Cryosphere. Image: Edubucher/Wikimedia Commons
The Pastoruri glacier in Peru’s Cordillera Blanca is one of the Andean glaciers monitored by the scientists in the study published in The Cryosphere. Image: Edubucher/Wikimedia Commons
By Tim Radford
Tropical glaciers in the Andes are melting faster than at any time in the last three centuries, scientists say — and the cause must be the warming of the atmosphere.
LONDON, 25 January – Glaciers in the tropical Andes are in retreat. They are losing ice at an accelerating rate and, in the most comprehensive study so far, scientists identify the cause as atmospheric warming.
A team from France, Switzerland, the US, Bolivia, Peru, Ecuador and Colombia report in the journal The Cryosphere, published by the European Geosciences Union, that they tried to measure the mass of ice at high altitude and compare those measurements with records that date back more than 60 years.
The World Until Yesterday by Jared Diamond – review | Books | The Guardian
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2013/jan/09/history-society
Très intéressante recension (mais pas que…) du dernier livre de Jared Diamond.
Far ahead of his time, Boas [1858-1942] believed that every distinct social community, every cluster of people distinguished by language or adaptive inclination, was a unique facet of the human legacy and its promise.
(…)
The other peoples of the world are not failed attempts at modernity, let alone failed attempts to be us. They are unique expressions of the human imagination and heart, unique answers to a fundamental question: what does it mean to be human and alive? When asked this question, the cultures of the world respond in 7000 different voices, and these answers collectively comprise our human repertoire for dealing with all the challenges that will confront us as a species as we continue this never-ending journey.
C’est le point de vue de l’auteur de l’article, Wade Davis, natif de Colombie Britannique http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wade_Davis qui s’oppose à la vision linéaire et évolutionniste d’une « marche vers la civilisation » dont, pour lui, J. Diamond est un représentant. Et dont il se moque assez ironiquement :
One could be forgiven for concluding that traditional societies have little more to teach us save that we should embrace healthier diets, include grandparents in child rearing, learn a second language, seek reconciliation not retribution in divorce proceedings, and eat less salt.
Sa conclusion :
The voices of traditional societies ultimately matter because they can still remind us that there are indeed alternatives, other ways of orienting human beings in social, spiritual and ecological space. This is not to suggest naively that we abandon everything and attempt to mimic the ways of non-industrial societies, or that any culture be asked to forfeit its right to benefit from the genius of technology. It is rather to draw inspiration and comfort from the fact that the path we have taken is not the only one available, that our destiny therefore is not indelibly written in a set of choices that demonstrably and scientifically have proven not to be wise. By their very existence the diverse cultures of the world bear witness to the folly of those who say that we cannot change, as we all know we must, the fundamental manner in which we inhabit this planet. This is a sentiment that Jared Diamond, a deeply humane and committed conservationist, would surely endorse
Sa critique de J. Diamond donne diablement envie de lire … les livres de W. Davis.
Saltando Muros | Secretaría de Cultura de la Nación
http://www.cultura.gob.ar/becas/saltando-muros
La Dirección Nacional de Patrimonio y Museos de la Secretaría de Cultura de la Presidencia de la Nación informa que se encuentra abierta la convocatoria para participar del proyecto de fotografía “Saltando Muros”, organizado por la Fundación Fondo Internacional de las Artes, con la colaboración de la Secretaría General Iberoamericana, y del cual participan Argentina, Chile, España, Perú, Puerto Rico, República Dominicana y Uruguay.
Los objetivos de este proyecto son los de activar el trabajo de las nuevas generaciones de artistas, promover la fotografía como instrumento para el cambio de la realidad social, la eficacia de la redes sociales en el proceso de transformación del cambio social y la función educadora de los museos.
10 Reasons Countries Fall Apart
By Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson
Foreign Policy
July/August 2012
Economists Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson, authors of Why Nation Fails, bring an interesting perspective to the question of “failed states” by focusing on domestic institutions and the role of political and economic elites. By giving concrete examples of what they call “extractive” economic institutions, they shed light on the following disincentives to growth: the endemic lack of property rights in North Korea, forced labor and coercion in Uzbekistan, the former professional caste system in apartheid South Africa, the elite’s monopolistic control of the economy in Mubarak’s Egypt or its rejection of new technologies in 19th Century Russia and Austria, the absence of effective centralized state and system of laws in Somalia, the government’s weak control over the territory in Colombia or its inability to provide public services in Peru, the political exploitation of rural populations in Bolivia, and the intense extraction of natural resources in Sierra Leone. While these are undoubtedly central to understand why some states fall apart, the two economists only present part of the picture, as they tend to neglect that these countries are not isolated but included in complex geopolitical dynamics.
Colm Tóibín reviews ‘The Dream of the Celt’ by Mario Vargas Llosa, translated by Edith Grossman · LRB 13 September 2012
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v34/n17/colm-toibin/a-man-of-no-mind
By 1895 there were seven million bicycles worldwide, using most of the world’s rubber. Soon the automobile created even more demand: in 1910 the United States was building two hundred thousand cars a year; by 1920 the figure was two million. The problem was that rubber didn’t grow in places where it could easily be collected: it grew most abundantly in the tropical forests of the Congo and Amazon basins. Since there were no roads in these areas, the rubber would have to be carried long distances under appalling conditions. The Congo was under the direct and personal control of Leopold II, which meant that the treatment of those who did the carrying was not tempered by any law or set of humane rules. The transporters were flogged and tortured, had their hands amputated, were raped, held hostage and murdered as a matter of course. Their fragile society was decimated. More or less the same happened in the Putumayo in Peru, organised by a company registered in London. This is how we got the bicycle and the car until rubber was planted in more accessible places.
Killings of environmentalists appear on rise; conflict over shrinking resources intensifies - The Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/killings-of-environmentalists-appear-on-rise-conflict-over-shrinking-resources-intensifies/2012/06/20/gJQAzkgepV_story.html
A report released Tuesday by the London-based Global Witness said more than 700 people — more than one a week — died in the decade ending 2011 “defending their human rights or the rights of others related to the environment, specifically land and forests.” They were killed, the environmental investigation group says, during protests or investigations into mining, logging, intensive agriculture, hydropower dams, urban development and wildlife poaching.
The death toll reached 96 in 2010 and 106 last year, said the report, which was released as world leaders gathered in Rio de Janeiro for a conference on sustainable development. The report’s annual totals for the six prior years range from 37 in 2004 to 64 in 2008.
aussi ici
http://seenthis.net/messages/76721
et ceci
Global grab for land and forests kills 1 a week
http://farmlandgrab.org/post/view/20672
Drug Traffickers Take Note of Peru’s Illegal Timber Trade
http://insightcrime.org/insight-latest-news/item/2497-drug-traffickers-take-note-of-perus-illegal-timber-trade
Timber traffickers in Peru have built a huge logistical network for bribing officials and moving illegally harvested wood out of the country, and now drug traffickers are taking advantage of this to move their own product.
Emerald Energy Exploits Colombian Andes
http://www.corpwatch.org/article.php?id=15690
“Emerald Energy is destroying the land and water,” Armando Acuña, a municipal council member from Garzón, told CorpWatch. “Their exploration, with underground explosions is causing landslides and the ground to sink, homes, and crops are being destroyed and we are losing our water.”
Emerald Energy, founded in London in 1996, was awarded its first exploration permit for the Matambo Bloc in Gigante. (Governments typically auction off oil exploration rights on specific parcels of land known as blocks or blocs) After drilling the first well in 1998, the company began a rapid expansion: It built multiple platforms in Matambo, and opened up new well sites in the Llanos Basin and Middle Magdalena River Valley in Colombia, as well as in other countries including Peru and Syria.
“socialized for scarcity” - Paul Farmer
http://www.pih.org/news/entry/pih-co-founder-dr.-paul-farmer-reflects-on-haitis-progress-two-years-after-
we are all—the poor and those who serve them—socialized for scarcity. Some part of our brain assumes that if Mirebalais gets the lion’s share of attention—if it actually becomes a flagship project—then some other effort (Cerca Lasource, say, or Cange or Saint-Marc) must suffer. The same holds for elevating Butaro Hospital in Rwanda or the Tomsk prison in Siberia or one teaching hospital over another, or Malawi projects versus those in Lesotho.
But in our best moments, all of us know that this sort of thinking is wrong-headed. (...)
every care provider—nurse or doctor or social worker or community health provider—working on the frontlines of global health knows full well that the great majority of our patients’ clinical problems are directly linked to poverty. Hence PIH-affiliated projects like “A Thousand Jobs for Haiti” (...) Hence scholarly work in Rwanda to try to document collateral benefits that investments in health and education provide for economic development. Hence our peculiar obsession with the efflorescence of hotels, small businesses, beauty shops, and other small enterprises around PIH-affiliated hospitals.
J’apprends des choses avec internet : Panela (en fait, ramené par une amie colombienne)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panela
Panela (Spanish pronunciation: [paˈnela]) is unrefined whole cane sugar, typical of Latin America, which is basically a solid piece of sucrose and fructose obtained from the boiling and evaporation of sugarcane juice.
Common Spanish names: rapadura, raspadura, chancaca, papelón, piloncillo, panocha, atado dulce or empanizao. In India, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka a similar product is made which is called gur or jaggery. In Brazil, it is known as rapadura. In Laos, it is called nam oy (ນ້ຳອ້ອຍ).
Brazil warns of humanitarian crisis as Haitians arrive in their thousands | The Guardian
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/dec/13/brazil-humanitarian-crisis-haitians-arrive
Human rights activists and politicians in the Brazilian Amazon have warned of an imminent humanitarian crisis, as hundreds of Haitian migrants continue to pour into the region in the wake of the 2010 earthquake.
http://static.guim.co.uk/sys-images/Guardian/About/General/2011/12/13/1323775422723/The-Champs-de-Mars-tent-c-005.jpg
#réfugiés #Haiti #Brésil
Showdown in Peru : Indigenous communities kick out Canadian mining company (Relevé sur le net)
http://www.dominionpaper.ca/articles/4161
Earlier this spring, an anti-mining Indigenous movement in Peru successfully ousted a Canadian mining company from their territory. “In spite of government repression, if the people decide to bring the fight to the bitter end, it is possible to resist the pressure of mining and oil companies,” Peruvian activist and journalist Yasser Gómez told The Dominion. 5;;;° Source: The Dominion
240 #Wikileaks cables on pharmaceutical data exclusivity | Knowledge Ecology International
http://keionline.org/node/1210
#cablegate #pharma via @jamie_love
avec des extraits pertinents ici http://keionline.org/node/1209
farmlandgrab.org | Asian agri fund eyes Peruvian palm oil as Malaysia exhausts supply of land
http://farmlandgrab.org/post/view/19098
Asian Agri Capital, a Singapore private-equity firm that focuses on early-stage plantations, is seeking to raise $100 million to invest in palm oil and other tropical commodities in Southeast Asia and Latin America.
Obama’s War on Whistleblowers | Linda Greene (CounterPunch)
►http://www.counterpunch.org/greene06302011.html
Teresa Chambers is the luckiest whistleblower in the United States. She lost her job as the first woman chief of the U.S. Park Police after she told the media in 2004 that the department was below the number required to perform the job adequately. She sued, and in January 2011 won her case.
But her victory is a rarity in the 21st century as President Barack Obama, who as an Illinois senator was instrumental in passing legislation to protect government whistleblowers, has effectively criminalized public servants who risk their jobs to speak out and expose waste, corruption and unethical behavior among their colleagues.
When campaigning in 2008, Obama promised to protect whistleblowers, saying (...)
Obama’s War on Whistleblower
►http://www.counterpunch.org/greene06302011.html
Since he became president, Obama, acting under the Espionage Act, has indicted five whistleblowers who allegedly leaked sensitive government information, the New York Times reported on June 11. “In 17 months in office, President Obama has already outdone every previous president in pursuing leak prosecutions.”
Uncontacted tribe found deep in Amazon rainforest | World news | The Guardian
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/jun/22/new-tribe-discovered-amazon
“Among the main threats to the well-being of these groups are illegal fishing, hunting, logging, mining, cattle ranching, missionary actions… and drug trafficking,” he said. Oil exploration over the border in Peru could also have a negative impact on indigenous tribes in region.
Oxi: Twice as powerful as crack cocaine at just a fraction of the price | Society | The Guardian
http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2011/may/30/oxi-crack-cocaine-south-america
A highly addictive hallucinogenic has exploded on to South America’s drug scene, with devastating consequences
“The majority of first-time users become addicted on their first contact with the drug. Most of them go seven to 10 days without sleeping, without eating. They start to go into a process of degeneration. After months of use … they go into a state where they look like zombies, wandering … in search of pleasure.”
Peruvian president calls bin Laden killing #miracle from Pope John Paul II – CNN Belief Blog - CNN.com Blogs
http://religion.blogs.cnn.com/2011/05/02/peruvian-president-calls-bin-laden-killing-miracle-from-pope-joh
While many world leaders praised the U.S. killing of Osama bin Laden, the president of Peru went a step further on Monday, calling the development the first miracle of Pope John Paul II since he was beatified last weekend.
“I have said that his first miracle has been to remove from the Earth this demonic incarnation of crime, evil and hatred,” Peruvian president Alan Garcia said, according to CNN affiliate America TV in Peru.
UK firm’s partner ’wanted Peru to curb priests in mine conflict areas’ | Business | The Guardian
http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2011/jan/31/wikileaks-bhp-billiton-peru-mining-communities
A mining company in Peru part-owned by a British FTSE 100 company agitated for the removal of teachers and Catholic bishops to new posts away from “conflictive mining communities”, according to a leaked US cable obtained via WikiLeaks.
An executive of the company, in which BHP Billiton has a one-third stake, urged diplomats to persuade the Peruvian government and church to “rotate” such professionals out of sensitive areas, the secret document said.
The US and Canadian ambassadors, who hosted a summit of foreign mining executives in Peru in August 2005, requested specific examples of “anti-mining” teachers and bishops “who engage in inappropriate activities” to take to government and church leaders, the cable claimed.