On January 19, Minister for Environment in the O’Neil-Namah Government, Hon Thompson Haroquave, carried through on his promise to the people of Papua New Guinea and ensured that Parliament repealed amendments to the Environment Act that had been made in favor of the Chinese mining company, MCC.
Please take another step today in the campaign to protect the sacred Ukok Plateau from the construction of a damaging gas pipeline.
Noe Navarro is from an Indigenous Maya Mam community in the north-western part of Guatemala, called San Miguel Ixtahuacan, San Marcos. He has been involved in social activism over the past ten years, helping to organize the community's struggle against the infamous Marlin gold mine, which has been operating in San Miguel since 2005, and has been environmentally as well as socially damaging for his community.
In a protest to defend the natural resources of Bangladesh on December 29th, more than 35 people were left injured after police confronted the activists with batons and tear gas. The demonstration aimed to pressure the Bangladesh Ministry of Power and Energy to accept a set of seven demands, including the cancellation of concessions to build the Phulbari open-pit coal mine as well the eviction of GCM Resources, the London-based mining company currently financing the Phulbari project.
Gazprom, the major financer for Russia’s natural gas pipeline that would bisect the Ukok Plateau en route to China, appears to have dropped the project for 2012.
Two community activists who have been outspoken against the illegal logging and land concessions within the Prey Lang forest in Cambodia are being targeted by local police. Roeun Sopheap and Sim Sean have reported patrols of police waiting outside their homes and have been living in hiding throughout the past month.
On December 15th, GCM held its annual shareholders’ meeting in London, amidst throngs of protesters demonstrating outside the building. Protesters waved banners tagging the project as”modern day colonialism,” and carried “eviction notices” from the people of Bangladesh telling the company to abandon the Phulbari Coal project and leave the country, according to a report from the news site Morning Star.
This short documentary about threats to the Prey Lang forest and the Kuy community’s efforts to protect it was produced by Cambodian student Kim Samath as part of the Southeast Asian Student Documentary Award Competition. To make her film, "Prey Lang - Fire of Light, Light of Hope," she traveled to the Prey Lang Forest to investigate how people live within Cambodia’s largest forest, which is under constant threat of deforestation.
See the film here:
In a vote of 2 to 1, Papua New Guinea’s Supreme Court ruled that the Chinese owners of the Ramu nickel mine may dump toxic waste from their mine and refinery directly into the Bismarck Sea at Basamuk. The plaintiffs in the case were Rai Coast landowners Louis Medaing and 1083 others, representing thousands of Indigenous families whose livelihoods depend on the health of the marine ecosystem.
Land Acknowledgement
We acknowledge that we are headquartered on Massachusett land, in Cambridge, MA, and we thank the past, current, and future Indigenous stewards of this territory.