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Benjamin McKeown

Last of the Amazon - National Geographic Magazine - 0 views

ngm.nationalgeographic.com/...wallace-text

HL uncontacted amazon

shared by Benjamin McKeown on 22 Mar 16 - Cached
  • Brazil’s dilemma: Allow widespread—and profitable—destruction of the rain forest to continue, or intensify conservation efforts.
  • The market forces of globalization are invading the Amazon, hastening the demise of the forest and thwarting its most committed stewards.
  • 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
  • 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.
  • In Brazil, the events set in motion by logging are almost always more destructive than the logging itself.
  • squatters, speculators, ranchers, farmers, and, invariably, hired gunmen.
  • . Land thievery is committed through corruption, strong-arm tactics, and fraudulent titles and is so widespread that Brazilians have a name for it: grilagem,
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • Stang saw human rights and environmental conservation in the Amazon as inextricably intertwined
  • 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.”
  • “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.”
  • 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
  • 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:
  • shiny new silos belonging to ADM, Bunge, and Cargill—all American multinationals.
  • azilians are not the only people profiting from soybeans. Along the 500-mile paved stretch of BR-16
  • 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
  • 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
  • These include plans to build seven dams on the environmentally sensitive Xingu and Madeira Rivers,
  • he dams will power aluminum smelters, and shipping channels will facilitate river transport of exports to Chinese markets.
  • s well as roads, power lines, oil and gas pipelines, and large-scale mining and industrial projects.
  • 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.
  • Water cycling
  • carbon sequestering
  • maintenance of an unmatched panoply of life.
  • 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,”
  • “It’s urgent to find mechanisms to compensate forest peoples, and their governments, for the ecosystem services their forests provide.”
  • 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.
Benjamin McKeown

Frozen conflict | The Economist - 0 views

www.economist.com/...ims-north-pole-frozen-conflict

arctic coasts

shared by Benjamin McKeown on 21 Apr 16 - No Cached
  • IN 2007 a Russian-led polar expedition, descending through the icy waters of the Arctic Ocean in a Mir submarine, planted a titanium Russian tricolour on the sea bed 4km (2.5 miles) beneath the North Pole. “The Arctic has always been Russian,
  • Denmark has staked a claim to the North Pole, too. On December 15th it said that, under the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), some 900,000 square kilometres of the Arctic Ocean north of Greenland belongs to it (Greenland is a self-governing part of Denmark).
  • Canada, which plans to assert sovereignty over part of the polar continental shelf (
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  • he prize for these countries is the mineral wealth of the Arctic, which global warming may make more accessible.
  • an eighth of the world’s untapped oil
  • perhaps a quarter of its gas.
  • Drilling for oil and gas there is extremely expensive, and falling oil prices have made the economics of Arctic energy even less favourable. This gives would-be prospectors an interest in co-operating, not in adding to the risks and costs.
  • The melting of the summer sea ice has also opened up trade routes between Asia and Europe via the top of the world; 71 cargo ships plied the north-east passage last summer, up from 46 in 2012
  • Russia
  • carried out extensive combat exercises in the Arctic for the first time since the end of the cold war
  • re-equipping old Soviet bases there and in July tested the first of its new-generation rockets,
  • Sweden spent part of the summer searching for a Russian submarine that it suspected of slipping into its territorial waters.
  • countries may control an area of seabed if they can show it is an extension of their continental shelf.
Benjamin McKeown

Good practice - 3x1 Citizens' Initiative - 0 views

www.ilo.org/...migmain.showPractice

HL culture globalization Mexico remittances civil society 3X1

shared by Benjamin McKeown on 09 Feb 15 - No Cached
  • The 3x1 initiative started as the 2x1 programme, which was established in Zacatecas, Mexico in 1993. This initiative aims to expand Home Town Associations' (HTA) community development funds: for every dollar contributed by HTA, the different government levels match this contribution. The 3x1 initiative stared operations in 2002. Projects include support for the church, town beautification, basic assistance in health and education, and constructing and improving public infrastructure. A small number of projects support wealth generation activities. Twenty-seven states in Mexico and 40 HTAs in the United States currently participate in this programme.
  • In, 2002 the 3x1 projects totalled US$ 43.5 million, a quarter coming from HTAs. Zacatecas received over one-third of the allocation, while Jalisco, Guanajuato, and Michoacan also participated significantly. Ten per cent of the projects focused on electrifications and economic infrastructure and over ten per cent focused on social infrastructure. Most of the communities targeted suffer basic development problems and have high emigration rates, and are in need of basic public infrastructure.
  • First, funds tend to flow to non-marginal communities; and, second, most projects funded are not productive. In response, the Mexican government has introduced a quota for marginal communities, and since 2002, to insist on productive investment.
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  • The practice encourages partnership between Mexicans abroad, local community leaders, and state and federal authorities.
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