irst with new patrol ships and then by upgrading utility aircraft for operations in the country's northern regions.
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Canada Breaking Logjam on Arctic Equipment - 0 views
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Five ships will be constructed by Irving Shipbuilding of Canada, while Lockheed Martin is handling onboard combat systems in the CAN $3.5 billion (US $3.4 billion) project.
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Royal Canadian Air Force's CC-138 Twin Otter aircraft, which are used for utility transports in the Arctic. The project is expected to cost $20 million to $49 million.
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"Up in the north, it's still about survival," he said.With that in mind, the Canadian Army plans to outfit individual soldiers with new winter warfare equipment, including snowshoes, skis and toboggans. Up to $49 million will be spent on that gear with deliveries to begin in 2021.
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he Army plans to purchase up to 100 all-terrain vehicles capable of operations in the snow.
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Increasing the Canadian government and military's presence in the resource-rich Arctic is a key defense platform for Conservative Party Prime Minister Stephen Harper.
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Harper contends that the increased military and government presence is needed because oil, gas and minerals in the Arctic are critical to the country's economic growth. The types of incidents the Canadian Forces would most likely have to respond to in the Arctic, Jolin said, would be a major environmental disaster or a search-and-rescue operation, such as aiding a commercial cruise ship that has capsized after hitting an uncharted obstacle.
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"The biggest thing will be coordination, so you'll want to have the ability to mount a command post, have good radios and radars, good surveillance," he said. "It's about command and control, power generation and communications."
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construction of two polar communications and weather satellites.
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The Canadian military also has an increased surveillance capability planned for the Arctic, dubbed Polar Epsilon 2. The system will use the data produced by the Canadian government's Radarsat Constellation Mission (RCM) spacecraft currently under design. The RCM satellites are scheduled for launch in 2018.
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Originally the plan was to build a deep-water port at Nanisivik, but because of the high costs of construction in the Arctic that has been scaled back to a $130 million refueling site for the Royal Canadian Navy. The site will be used to support the new Arctic offshore patrol ships.
Last of the Amazon - National Geographic Magazine - 0 views
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Brazil’s dilemma: Allow widespread—and profitable—destruction of the rain forest to continue, or intensify conservation efforts.
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The market forces of globalization are invading the Amazon, hastening the demise of the forest and thwarting its most committed stewards.
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n the past three decades, hundreds of people have died in land wars; countless others endure fear and uncertainty, their lives threatened by those who profit from the theft of timber and land. In this Wild West frontier of guns, chain saws, and bulldozers, government agents are often corrupt and ineffective—or ill-equipped and outmatched. Now, industrial-scale soybean producers are joining loggers and cattle ranchers in the land grab, speeding up destruction and further fragmenting the great Brazilian wilderness.
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All of it starts with a road. Except
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nearly every road in the Amazon is unauthorized. There are more than 105,000 miles of these roads, most made illegally by loggers to reach mahogany and other hardwoods for the lucrative export market.
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In Brazil, the events set in motion by logging are almost always more destructive than the logging itself.
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squatters, speculators, ranchers, farmers, and, invariably, hired gunmen.
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. Land thievery is committed through corruption, strong-arm tactics, and fraudulent titles and is so widespread that Brazilians have a name for it: grilagem,
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landless squatters moved in from adjacent lots, working plots whose ownership the government failed to resolve. That has fueled a bloody showdown pitting the powerful absentee elites who raze forest for agribusiness against family farmers who clear small patches for crops but still depend on intact forest around them for survival.
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The first model was implanted during the military dictatorship, based on timber extraction and cattle. It’s predatory because it causes death, it’s not renewable, and it devastates the forest.” The alternative model, preached by Stang, is what Pontes calls social environmentalism. The first concentrates wealth, the second calls for its dispersion in small-scale agroforestry collectives.
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Stang saw human rights and environmental conservation in the Amazon as inextricably intertwined
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To Maggi, deforestation is an overblown issue, a “phobia” that plagues people who can’t grasp the enormity of the Amazon. “All of Europe could fit inside the Amazon,” he says, “and we’d still have room for two Englands.”
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“Look around,” he said, “you won’t find a single scrap of plastic here.” Motioning to a barnlike structure that stored herbicides and pesticides, he said, “We keep all our agrotoxins properly ventilated until use.” In a steady rain, our vehicle fishtailing in the mud, we approached a denuded gully straddling a narrow stream; a closer look revealed hundreds of saplings. “When we bought this property,” Maggi said, “this riverbank was totally stripped. Now we’re regenerating the area.”
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The land here is very poor. If you don’t take the right corrective measures, you couldn’t produce anything. It’s not true that soy degrades the soil. On the contrary, it puts into the soil what naturally isn’t there. Afterward, you can grow anything you want.” R
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searchers agree that proper management of soy fields can increase soil productivity. But in reality, no one knows for sure how long the thin, highly acidic Amazon soils can be propped up, raising the possibility of an eventual two-headed catastrophe:
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shiny new silos belonging to ADM, Bunge, and Cargill—all American multinationals.
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azilians are not the only people profiting from soybeans. Along the 500-mile paved stretch of BR-16
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between Cuiabá and Guarantã do Norte, there are no fewer than five John Deere dealerships. And at harvest time, fleets of the trademark green-and-yellow combines rumble across the fields flanking the highway, pouring rivers of golden soy into open-bed trucks bound f
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The new district adds to an expanded mosaic of parks, reserves, and conservation units that, together with indigenous territories, forms the bulwark of defense against the expansion of the frontier in the central Amazon. These measures may be paying off. Deforestation rates fell more than 30 percent in 2005, and preliminary numbers for 2006 are also down. Indian lands in the Xingu watershed are proving an especially effective barrier. There, militant Kayapó and Panará warriors armed with clubs and shotguns patrol their borders using satellite images furnished by international NGOs to pinpoint illegal clearing. As Stephan Schwartzman puts it: “Where Indian land begins is where deforestation ends.” But Brazil’s measures to protect the Amazon must be weighed ag
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These include plans to build seven dams on the environmentally sensitive Xingu and Madeira Rivers,
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he dams will power aluminum smelters, and shipping channels will facilitate river transport of exports to Chinese markets.
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s well as roads, power lines, oil and gas pipelines, and large-scale mining and industrial projects.
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The dams will also flood millions of acres of forest, releasing methane and other greenhouse gases, destroying biodiversity, and forcing indigenous communities to flee ancestral lands.
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Water cycling
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carbon sequestering
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maintenance of an unmatched panoply of life.
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It’s far more profitable to cut it down for grazing and farming than to leave it standing. “Tropical deforestation is a classic example of market failure,”
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“It’s urgent to find mechanisms to compensate forest peoples, and their governments, for the ecosystem services their forests provide.”
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Last summer, Cargill and Brazil’s other big soy traders agreed to a two-year moratorium on buying soy grown on newly deforested land in the Amazon. The agreement is sending a signal to soy producers that the environmental impact of their operations is increasingly important in the world marketplace.
Kayapo Courage - 0 views
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five officially demarcated tracts of contiguous land that in sum make up an area about the size of Kentucky. T
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9,000 indigenous people, most of whom can’t read or write and who still follow a largely subsistence way of life in 44 villages linked only by rivers and all-but-invisible trails.
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Kendjam,
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Xingu,
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itself a major tributary of the Amazon.
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shorts
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kids wearing only
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ears of the youngest among them were pierced with conical wooden plugs
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Kayapo pierce their infants’ earlobes
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ifts for our hosts: fishhooks, tobacco, 22 pounds of high-quality beads made in the Czech Republic.
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Barbara Zimmerman, the director of the Kayapo Project for the International Conservation Fund of Canada and the United States–based Environmental Defense Fund,
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chief, Pukatire,
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wearing glasses, shorts, and flip-flops.
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English he’d picked up on a trip to North America
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dispute about logging.
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Fissioning,” as anthropologists call it, is often the way Kayapo resolve disagreements or relieve the strain on resources in a particular area.
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a generator in a government-built nurses’ station; a solar panel array enclosed in a barbed wire fence; satellite dishes mounted on truncated palm trees. A few families have TVs in their thatch houses and enjoy watching videos of their own ceremonies, along with Brazilian soap operas. Pukatire showed us to a two-room schoolhouse built a few years ago by the Brazilian government—a pistachio-colored concrete structure with a tile roof and shutters and the luxe marvel of a flush toilet fed by well water.
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ngobe, or men’s house
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shelling nuts and cooking fish wrapped in leaves and buried in coals.
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crops of manioc, bananas, and sweet potatoes. A tortoise hunter
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loudly singing in the Kayapo custom to announce his successful quest for the land turtles that are a vital part of the village diet.
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soccer ball
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swallows; o
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kingbird
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evening baths,
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caimans
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persecution and disease that have ravaged nearly every indigenous tribe in North and South America.
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In 1900, 11 years after the founding of the Brazilian Republic, the Kayapo population was about 4,000. As miners, loggers, rubber tappers, and ranchers poured into the Brazilian frontier, missionary organizations and government agencies launched efforts to “pacify” aboriginal tribes, wooing them with trade goods such as cloth, metal pots, machetes, and axes. Contact often had the unintended effect of introducing measles and other diseases to people who had no natural immunity. By the late 1970s, following the construction of the Trans-Amazon Highway, the population had dwindled to about 1,300.
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1980s and ’90s the Kayapo rallied, led by a legendary generation of chiefs
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Ropni and Mekaron-Ti
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organized protests with military precision, began to apply pressure
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even kill people caught trespassing on their land.
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ar parties evicted illegal ranchers and gold miners, sometimes offering them the choice of leaving Indian land in two hours or being killed on the spot. Warriors took control of strategic river crossings and patrolled borders; they seized hostages; they sent captured trespassers back to town without their clothes.
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the chiefs of that era learned Portuguese
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enlist the help of conservation organizations and celebrities such as the rock star Sting,
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1988 the Kayapo helped get indigenous rights written into the new Brazilian Constitution, and eventually they secured legal recognition of their territory.
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Kararaô Dam
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Xingu River, which would have flooded parts of their land.
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the Altamira Gathering.
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Kayapo leaders made a brilliant translation of the Kayapo warrior tradition to the tradition of the 20th-century media spectacle,”
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e Kayapo population is now rapidly growing.
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shotguns and motorized aluminum boats to Facebook pages, they have shown a canny ability to adopt technologies and practices of the cash-based society at their borders without compromising the essence of their culture.
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hey have embraced video cameras to record their ceremonies and dances and to log interactions with government officials.
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based on the logo of the Bank of Brazil.
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1980s and in the 1990s sold mahogany logging concessions—alliances they came to regret and now have largely ended.
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Kayapo learned to organize and to put aside their sometimes fractious relations to cultivate unity of purpose among themselves
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the richest and most powerful of around 240 indigenous tribes remaining in Brazil. Their ceremonies, their kinship systems, their Gê language, and their knowledge of the forest and conception of the continuum between humans and the natural world are intact. What may be the most crucial of all, they have their land. “The Kayapo aren’t entering the 21st century as a defeated people. They aren’t degrading themselves,” Zimmerman told me. “They haven’t lost a sense of who they are.”
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At least for the moment. It’s one thing to teach the skills and ceremonies of traditional culture; it’s another to inspire a sense of why knowledge of how to make arrow-tip poison (from herbs and snake venom with beeswax as an adhesive) or stack tortoises or stun fish using oxygen-depriving timbo vines might be valuable to a generation beguiled by iPhones and the convenience of store-bought food. Interest in traditional dress, beadwork, and ancestral practices is still strong in Kendjam, but it’s not uniform, and even if it were, the threats from outside are daunting.
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400 Kayapo chiefs avowed their opposition to a raft of decrees, ordinances, and proposed laws and constitutional amendments that would gut their ability to control their land and prevent them, and any other indigenous group, from adding to their territory.
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a campaign to enable mining, logging, and agricultural interests to circumvent indigenous rights, now inconveniently guaranteed by the Brazilian Constitution. A
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. The Kararaô project is back under a new name: the Belo Monte hydroelectric complex.
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n Kayapo villages the division of labor falls along traditional lines. The men hunt and fish; the women cook, garden, and gather fruits and nuts.)
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two aluminum skiffs powered by Rabeta motors
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a bow and arrows over his shoulder
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Okêt a shotgun.
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It was as obvious to Meikâre as the meat department of a Stop & Shop would be to me. He and Okêt darted ahead. Fifteen minutes later a shot rang out, then two more.
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plugged the escape holes of a mole cricket nest in a sandbank and then had dug up and captured a batch of mole crickets, which they used to bait fishhooks and catch piranha.
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peacock bass and piabanha.
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Bic lighters a
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freshly whittled skewers.
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flashlight.
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he only things we need from the white culture are flip-flops, flashlights, and glasses,”
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his children had died of malaria not long after the founding of Kendjam.
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Portuguese from missionaries
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the program of pacification by the Indian Protection Service, a forerunner of the National Indian Foundation, or FUNAI,
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“Before contact we were clubbing each other to death, and everybody lived in fear,” he said. “Without a doubt things are much better today because people aren’t hitting each other over the head with war clubs.”
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“I am worried about our young people who are imitating whites, cutting their hair and wearing stupid little earrings like you see in town. None of the young people know how to make poison for arrows.
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You can’t use the white man’s stuff. Let the white people have their culture, we have ours.’ If we start copying white people too much, they won’t be afraid of us, and they will come and take everything we have. But as long as we maintain our traditions, we will be different, and as long as we are different, they will be a little afraid of us.”
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construction finally began in 2011 on the $14 billion Belo Monte.
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he complex of canals, reservoirs, dikes, and two dams is located some 300 miles north of Kendjam
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on the Xingu
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Its supporters defend it as a way of delivering needed electricity, while environmentalists have condemned it as a social, environmental, and financial disaster.
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the region’s indigenous people were not adequately consulted, Brazil’s federal Public Prosecutor’s Office filed a series of lawsuits to stop the complex, essentially pitting one branch of the government against another. The cases went to the country’s Supreme Court, but judgments have been deferred, and construction of Belo Monte has been allowed to proceed.
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nflux of an estimated 100,000 workers and migrants. The dams will flood an area the size of Chicago. Official estimates project that 20,000 people will be displaced; independent estimates suggest the number may be twice as high. The dams will generate methane from inundated vegetation in quantities that rival the greenhouse gas emissions of coal-fired power plants. The diversion of some 80 percent of the water along a 62-mile stretch of the Xingu will dry up areas that depend on seasonal floodwaters and are home to endangered species.
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ho still wear the lip disk
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carried a wooden war club,
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woman approached, held his hand, and began to sob. In a different culture bodyguards might have hustled her away, but Ropni seemed unfazed and in fact began sobbing as well. The anguished weeping was not the result of some fresh catastrophe but a form of ritual Kayapo mourning for departed mutual friends.
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“I don’t like Kayapo imitating white culture. I don’t like gold miners. I don’t like loggers. I don’t like the dam!”
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the chiefs of the eastern part of the territory had been accepting money from Eletrobras. Boxes of brand-new 25-horsepower boat motors were stacked on the porch of the Protected Forest Association headquarters.
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money that activists said was an attempt to dampen indigenous opposition to Belo Monte.
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he consortium building the dam was investing in wells, clinics, and roads in the area and was paying a dozen villages nearby an allowance of 30,000 reais a month (roughly $15,000) for food and supplies, which Schwartzman describes as “hush money.”
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More and more sad leaves were a part of Kayapo life,
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specially in villages close to towns on the Brazilian frontier.
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pollution from clear-cutting and cattle ranching had wrecked the fishing grounds, and it was not uncommon to see Kayapo shopping in supermarkets for soap and frozen chicken.
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In the old days men were men,” Ropni said. “They were raised to be warriors; they weren’t afraid to die. They weren’t afraid to back up their words with action. They met guns with bows and arrows. A lot of Indians died, but a lot of whites died too. That’s what formed me: the warrior tradition. I have never been afraid to say what I believed. I have never felt humiliated in front of the whites. They need to respect us, but we need to respect them too. I still think that warrior tradition survives. The Kayapo will fight again if threatened, but I have counseled my people not to go looking for fights.”
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FUNAI paperwork authorizing various matters they had discussed. Mekaron-Ti, who was fluent in the Western world as well as the forest world, signed his name quickly like someone who had written a thousand letters. But Ropni held the pen awkwardly. It was striking to see him struggle with the letters of his name, knowing what esoteric expertise was otherwise in his hands, how deftly he could fasten a palm nut belt, or insert a lip plate, or whittle a stingray tail into an arrowhead, or underscore the oratory that had helped secure a future for his people. In the Xingu Valley there had hardly ever been a more able pair of hands. But in the realm that required penmanship, the great chief was like a child.
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, 26 eastern Kayapo leaders met in Tucumã and signed a letter rejecting further money from the dambuilding consortium: “We, the Mebengôkre Kayapo people, have decided that we do not want a single penny of your dirty money. We do not accept Belo Monte or any other dam on the Xingu. Our river does not have a price, our fish that we eat does not have a price, and the happiness of our grandchildren does not have a price. We will never stop fighting... The Xingu is our home and you are not welcome here.”
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painted faces carrying water in old soda bottles,
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chopped off seedpods of the wild inga fruit.
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Can you be a Kayapo and not live in the forest?” Djyti thought for a while, then shook his head and said no. Then, as if contemplating something unthinkable, he added: “You are still a Kayapo, but you don’t have your culture.”
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In the past some anthropologists have fetishized cultural purity, fretting over the introduction of modern technology. But cultures evolve opportunistically like species—the Plains Indians of North America picked up their iconic horses from the Spanish—and strong traditional cultures will privilege themselves, making the accommodations they think will ensure their futures. We can question whether a man dressed in a parrot feather headdress and penis sheath is more valuable than one in a Batman T-shirt and gym shorts. But who can be blind to their knowledge of forest plants and animals or to the preeminent values of clean water, untainted air, and the genetic and cultural treasure of diversity itself?
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now turning to those first inhabitants to save ecosystems recognized as critical to the health of the planet—to defend essential tracts of undeveloped land from the developed world’s insatiable appetites.
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