VISIONSHARE

VISIONS: WEIRD AND WONDROUS

2012-01-31T10:41:00.002-02:00

LANDSCAPE2010 from TAKAHIRO KIMURA on Vimeo.

Amazing art and animation ... makes one think too!

Re-BORN / ADAM & EVE from TAKAHIRO KIMURA on Vimeo.

Re-BORN / GULLIVER from TAKAHIRO KIMURA on Vimeo.

David Garland - The Long View from TAKAHIRO KIMURA on Vimeo.

MOTHER TREES

2012-01-29T19:16:00.002-02:00

A forest is a community held together by tall strong mother trees who know that survival is based on helping each other. Not only do trees communicate, they are wise. We could learn about our own survival from them, especially from the grandmas and grandpas...

THE ULTIMATE BEETLE

2012-01-29T14:08:00.000-02:00

BSA tells more about Huichol Art: Transforming A Vintage Beetle in Mexico (2010):

For this piece eight members of two Huichol families took the task to create a piece of art, seven months in the making, by using more than two million glass beads and a vintage Volkswagen as a canvas. Inspired by the designs of Francisco Bautista, a patriarch of one of the families, they incorporated their traditional indigenous theologies and cultural symbols with modern vernacular.

The web is loaded with information about the Huichol people and their culture. Here is a wonderful general resource page and google's image page and (thanks to Taska's tip) some traditional music.

DANCE OF THE SPIRITS

2012-01-29T12:07:00.000-02:00

Real-time capture by Alister Chapman of the Aurora Borealis triggered by recent solar storms.

DAMN! - DAMN! - DAMN! THE FOREST RAPERS ARE AT IT AGAIN

2012-01-27T15:50:00.004-02:00

During my forest-defender days in Oregon we used to say that when the environmentalists achieve a victory, it's only temporary but when the industry wins it's permanent. It doesn't take rocket science to know how long it will take to regrow a 500 year-old tree.

OREGON WILD reports that the US Congress proposes to take apart hard-won forest protections to help local economies. It asks:

As Oregon and the rest of the nation work to recover from the Great Recession, should we entrust management of our public forests to private logging corporations that are exporting record numbers of logs overseas and paying next to nothing in taxes to help struggling local governments?

Over 20 years ago, when I was on the road as a forest defender, I made the video below to help folks understand the issues. Unfortunately, the rap is just as relevant today. The only thing that has changed it that there is less ancient forest to protect. Please help my friends in Oregon try to hold the line against further destruction. Take action here. You can really help spreading the alert with 'likes' and 'shares' at Facebook and the social networks and, of course, email lists. Please do what you can.

NOTE: The video is long -- it can also be viewed in three 15 minute parts: Part I - Part II - Part III

OUR BEAUTIFUL MOTHER

2012-01-27T13:45:00.001-02:00

NPR's Mike Memmott explains how it was done:

The "Blue Marble" image of Earth snapped by the crew of Apollo 17 in 1972 is one of the most famous photos ever taken. When it appeared, we all suddenly saw the world in a much different way.

In the years since, NASA has added other "Blue Marble" photos to its collection, and has used technology to enhance and sharpen the images.

Today the space agency unveiled what it's calling the "most amazing high definition image of Earth — Blue Marble 2012." This one was taken "from the VIIRS instrument aboard NASA's most recently launched Earth-observing satellite — Suomi NPP," NASA says, and is a "composite image [that] uses a number of swaths of the Earth's surface taken on January 4, 2012."

Here a slideshow that adds previous views that include most of our home places:

ROADS AND RAINFORESTS

2012-01-27T01:08:00.001-02:00

As Roads Spread in Rainforests, The Environmental Toll Grows

From Brazil to Borneo, new roads are being built into tropical forests at a dizzying pace, putting previously intact wilderness at risk. If we hope to preserve rainforests, a leading researcher says, new strategies must be adopted to limit the number of roads and reduce their impacts.

NASA satellite views of annual road expansion in Rondonia State Brazil 2000-2009. The distance across the view is approximately 500 kilometers or 300 miles.

by William Laurance
(re-posted from YALE Environment360)

We live in an era of unprecedented road and highway expansion — an era in which many of the world’s last tropical wildernesses, from the Amazon to Borneo to the Congo Basin, have been penetrated by roads. This surge in road building is being driven not only by national plans for infrastructure expansion, but by industrial timber, oil, gas, and mineral projects in the tropics.

Few areas are unaffected. Brazil is currently building 7,500 kilometers of new paved highways that crisscross the Amazon basin. Three major new highways are cutting across the towering Andes mountains, providing a direct link for timber and agricultural exports from the Amazon to resource-hungry Pacific Rim nations, such as China. And in the Congo basin, a recent satellite study found a burgeoning network of more than 50,000 kilometers of new logging roads. These are but a small sample of the vast number of new tropical roads, which inevitably open up previously intact tropical forests to a host of extractive and economic activities.

“Roads,” said the eminent ecologist Thomas Lovejoy, “are the seeds of tropical forest destruction.”

Despite their environmental costs, the economic incentives to drive roads into tropical wilderness are strong. Governments view roads as a cost-effective means to promote economic development and access natural resources. Local communities in remote areas often demand new roads to improve access to markets and medical services. And geopolitically, new roads can be used to help secure resource-rich frontier regions. India, for instance, is currently constructing and upgrading roads to tighten its hold on Arunachal Pradesh state, over which it and China formerly fought a war.

Of course, roads are not just an environmental worry in the tropics. In forested areas of western North America, one of the best predictors of wildfire frequency is the density of roads. In Siberia, road expansion is promoting a sharp increase in logging and forest fires. And new roads in the Arctic could potentially alter epic mammal migrations.

But no other region can match the tropics for the sheer scale and pace of road expansion and the degree of environmental change roads bring. Road building has a range of direct impacts on rainforest ecology. In wet tropical environments, the cut-and-fill operations associated with road construction can impede streams, increase forest flooding, and drastically increase soil erosion. Roads also discharge chemical and nutrient pollutants into local waterways and provide avenues of invasion for many disturbance-loving exotic species.

Roads that cut through rainforests can also create barriers for sensitive wildlife, many of which are ecological specialists. Studies have shown that even narrow (30 meter-wide), unpaved roads drastically reduce or halt local movements for scores of forest bird species. Many of these species prefer deep, dark forest interiors; they have large, light-sensitive eyes and avoid the vicinity of road verges, where conditions are much brighter, hotter, and drier. A variety of other tropical species — including certain insects, amphibians, reptiles, bats, and small and large mammals — have been shown to be similarly leery of roads and other clearings.

And by bringing naïve rainforest wildlife into close proximity with fast-moving vehicles, roads can also promote heavy animal mortality. For some creatures, especially those with low reproductive rates, roads could potentially become death zones that help propel the species toward local extinction.

Although the direct effects of roads are serious, they pale in comparison to the indirect impacts. In tropical frontier regions, new roads often open up a Pandora’s box of unplanned environmental maladies, including illegal land colonization, fires, hunting, gold mining, and forest clearing. “The best thing you could do for the Amazon,” said the respected Brazilian scientist Eneas Salati, “is to bomb all the roads.”

In Brazilian Amazonia, my colleagues and I have done studies showing that around 95 percent of all deforestation occurs within 50 kilometers of highways or roads. Human-lit fires increase dramatically near Amazonian roads, even within many protected areas. In Suriname, most illegal gold mining occurs near roads, whereas in tropical Africa we have found hunting to be so intense near roads that it strongly affects the abundance and behavior of forest elephants, buffalo, duikers, primates, and other exploited species. Roads can sharply increase trade in bushmeat and wildlife products; one study found that eight killed mammals were transported per hour along a single road in Sulawesi, Indonesia.

Paved highways are especially dangerous to forests. They provide year-round access to forest resources and reduce transportation costs, causing larger-scale impacts on forests and wildlife than do unpaved roads, which tend to become impassable in the wet season. The proposed routes of new highways often attract swarms of land speculators who rush in to buy up cheap forest land, which they then sell to the highest bidder.

Perhaps the most damaging aspect of paved highways is that they spawn networks of secondary roads, which spread further environmental destruction. For instance, the 2,000-kilometer-long Belem-Brasília highway, completed in the early 1970s, has today evolved into a spider web of secondary roads and a 400-kilometer-wide swath of forest destruction across the eastern Brazilian Amazon. As my colleagues and I showed in a 2001 study published in Science, large expanses of the Amazonian forest could be fragmented by the advance of new highways and roads in Brazil. According to our models, by the year 2020, rates of forest destruction would rise by up to 500,000 hectares per year, and the area of forest that remained in large, unfragmented tracts — exceeding 100,000 square kilometers — would decline by 36 percent.

Can the environmental impacts of tropical roads be minimized? In theory, the answer is “Yes, partially.” Frequent culverts can reduce the effects on streams and hydrology. Impacts on animal movements can be reduced by keeping road clearings narrow enough so that canopy cover is maintained overhead, providing a way for arboreal species to cross. In high-priority areas, such as certain national parks, rope-bridges are being used to facilitate road crossings of monkeys and possums. For small ground-dwelling species, culverts beneath roads can allow road-crossing movements, and even large animals such as Asian elephants will use highway underpasses that are designed to be wildlife-friendly.

Measures also exist to limit the devastating indirect impacts of roads, such as illegal land colonization and forest clearing. One of the most vital steps is to legally establish parks or reserves along road routes in advance of road construction. Such reserves often substantially reduce forest incursions, though they rarely halt them entirely. Another promising idea is to promote railroads rather than highways in tropical wilderness regions. Because railroads stop only at fixed locations, the spatial patterns of forest exploitation and movement of forest products can be more easily controlled and monitored than with roads.

In practice, however, limiting the environmental impacts of roads in developing nations is expensive and risky. Tropical nations rarely have the institutional capacity, human capital, or financial resources to adequately manage development in their remote frontier regions, frequently leading to a “resource grab” revolving around illegal trade and outright theft of natural resources, which is greatly facilitated by road expansion.

When it comes to tropical roads, I believe three conclusions are inescapable. First, highways and roads are the single biggest factor determining the pattern and pace of tropical forest destruction. New roads that slice deep into intact forest tracts are especially devastating.

Second, among the many human drivers of environmental change, road building is one of the most readily amenable to policy modification. In practical terms, it is far easier to cancel or relocate a road project than it is to, say, reduce human overpopulation or halt harmful climate change.

Finally, if we hope to maintain intact tropical forests and their vital ecosystem services and biodiversity, then we simply must get serious about tropical roads. And there is only one real solution: carefully plan and limit frontier road expansion.

How can this be achieved? First, we need to sensitize political decision-makers, economists, infrastructure planners, and the general public about the myriad environmental costs of road expansion, especially into intact forests. The biggest road projects are often being supported by international lenders — such as the Asian, African, and Inter-American development banks — and by foreign aid doled out by China, the U.S., and the European Union. Educating such decision-makers needs to be done both generally and on a project-by-project basis.

When I was president of the Association for Tropical Biology and Conservation, one of my key goals was to use the organization’s scientific expertise and credibility to combat some of the most environmentally risky plans for frontier road expansion. We were especially active in critiquing plans to punch new roads into the cores of national parks, such as Yasuní in Ecuador, Kerinci Seblat in Indonesia, and the Serengeti in Tanzania.

Another key priority should be better frontier law enforcement and forest monitoring, given that much road building in tropical nations is illegal or unplanned. Special attention should be focused on the more-aggressive timber, oil, gas, and mineral corporations, many of which are known to engage in bribery and collusion in their efforts to gain unbridled access to forest resources.

There is also a dire need to improve environmental impact assessments (EIAs) for planned roads. In Brazil, for instance, EIAs for several major Amazonian highways focused only on a narrow strip along the road route itself, while completely ignoring the devastating indirect effects of roads. Similarly, EIAs for major development projects, such as large mines and hydroelectric dams, often ignore the impacts of road proliferation that such projects inevitably promote.

Finally, given that tropical deforestation is a massive source of greenhouse gas emissions, international carbon-trading funds should be used to better plan and mitigate road projects, to establish new protected areas in advance of road construction, and to halt the most ill-advised road projects altogether. In the end, the easiest and most cost-effective way to limit the manifold pressures from roads may be simply not to open Pandora’s box in the first place.

POSTED ORIGINALLY ON 19 Jan 2012

IS THE SOCIAL-ECOLOGICAL VISION BEING LOST IN BRAZIL?

2012-01-25T20:39:00.001-02:00

During the last election campaign for President of Brazil the greatly esteemed eco-social theologian Leonardo Boff urged a popular front between the first-round victor, pro-development Dilma Rousseff and pro-environment Marina Silva who had garnered an amazing 20 million votes, both of whom shared common Labor Party roots.

Leonardo Boff proposed the pragmatic and visionary agenda of the alliance: The first task would be to defeat the pro-business and privatization-oriented candidate José Serra; and, secondly to go on to manifest a

"... dream of a popular social democracy, and to reconcile ecological and human nature to ensure a happy future together for us and for a mankind that looks to us full of hope.

Serra was solidly defeated but there has been little progress toward the dream of reconciling ecological and human nature. According to Alexei Barrionuevo's report in today's NY Times:

SÃO PAULO, Brazil — Brazil has made great strides in recent years in slowing Amazon deforestation and showing the world it was serious about protecting the mammoth rain forest.

The rate of deforestation fell by 80 percent over the past six years, as the government carved out about 150 million acres for conservation - an area roughly the size of France - and used police raids and other tactics to crack down on illegal deforesters, according to both environmentalists and the government. Brazil's former environment minister, Marina Silva, became an internationally respected defender of the Amazon. She ran for president in 2010 on the Green Party ticket and won 19.4 percent of the votes.

But since Dilma Rousseff was elected president in late 2010, there have been signs of a shift in the government's attitude toward the Amazon. A provisional measure now allows the president to decrease the lands already created for conservation. The government is granting more flexibility for large infrastructure projects during the environmental licensing process. And a proposal would give Brazil's Congress veto power over the recognition of indigenous territories.

"What is happening in Brazil is the biggest backsliding that we could ever imagine with regards to environmental policies," said Ms. Silva, who now devotes her time to environmental advocacy.

Now, a bill seeking to overhaul the 47-year-old Forest Code, a central piece of environmental legislation, is the most serious test yet of Ms. Rousseff's stance on the environment.

The debate over the law has revealed the stark disconnect between a population that is increasingly supportive of conserving the Amazon and a Congress in which agricultural interests in the country's rural north and northeast still hold sway. The furor comes as Brazil is set to hold a United Nations conference on sustainable development in Rio de Janeiro in June. (continue to full article)

The furor may erupt tomorrow when President Dilma Rousseff addresses the World Social Forum which is meeting in the southern Brazilian city of Porto Alegre.

Participants are raging against global inequality and the destruction of the environment, with specific criticism of Brazil's plans to build the massive Belo Monte hydro-electric plant in the Amazonian region and the country's new Forest Code which is being debated in Congress. Let's see how Dilma handles the expected challenge.

TREEHUGGER'S DREAM

2012-01-25T04:24:00.000-02:00

Want to live close to the earth and forests but afraid of the sacrifice? The extraordinary manifestations in the photo collection of Jason Ferguson show that it could be a dream-come-true.

GLOBAL ECONOMIC GROWTH AND DEFORESTATION

2012-01-24T20:10:00.005-02:00

The NY Times reports today: I.M.F. Reduces Estimates for Global Growth:

The International Monetary Fund warned on Tuesday that global growth prospects had dimmed as the sovereign debt crisis in the euro zone entered a “perilous new phase.” Releasing quarterly updates of three reports on the outlooks for the economy, debt and global financial stability, the fund cut its estimates of global growth this year to 3.25 percent, from the 4 percent it forecast in September...

According to the NY Times, the I.M.F. warned against governments cutting their stimulus packages: "The main risk is that too many countries will cut their budgets too deeply, too soon, sapping demand from the still-weak global economy."

The huge dilemma is that global economic growth and Amazon deforestation (and other degradations of nature) are related. Philip Fearnside who is one of the leading researchers of Amazonian socioeconomic and ecological trends recently noted:

Deforestation in Brazil remains a serious problem despite the fall in rates between 2005 and 2010. Only part of this decrease was the result of government programmes or stricter enforcement of environmental laws.The main reason was that the international price of beef and soya fell from 2003 to 2007, and this was followed by the global economic collapse that began in 2008. Over that period, the Brazilian real almost doubled relative to currencies such as the US dollar. This cut the profits of commodity exporters deeply, as all their expenses remained in reals while their revenues were in diminished foreign currencies. Such macroeconomic “windfalls” can help contain deforestation, but they are only temporary.

Thus, we are faced with an uncomfortable choice between a slowed flow manufactured products -- such as from China

Shipping containers in a Chinese port

and a slowed flow of commodities -- such as as beef from Brazil

Deforestation for cattle in Capixaba Acre Brazil

The developed economies don't want to give up what they've got and the developing economies don't want to give up the opportunity to get something like it. The result is that it is unlikely that an ecologically meaningful political solution will emerge in Brazil, in Europe, in China or globally. The giant of economic development is already too big and further development through endless growth without limit is an illusion, but it is one that is too powerful to break with childish dreams of clever politics or policy. More likely, we will simply move from bubble to bust and back until nature's justice kicks in.

Can we really keep marketing the land, its products and services? Can the market really be the final arbiter? What are its limits? Perhaps only catastrophe can show them to us? Perhaps Nature's justice will be the teacher? Perhaps we must face a "crisis shock" for adolescent-in-the-market consciousness of the Industrial Age to yield to the limited-growth-and-mutuality consciousness associated with being part of a global community. Hopefully, there can be a consciousness that compassionately connects humanity and the land.

As is so often the case, the great naturalist and father of the American land ethic, Aldo Leopold, offers a deep insight: "We abuse land because we regard it as a commodity belonging to us. When we see land as a community to which we belong, we may begin to use it with love and respect."

Global crises may offer the beginning, the cracks through which to see our world differently. Same old, same old won't work!

SHAMAN SONGS FROM THE AMAZON FOREST OF ACRE

2012-01-24T17:16:00.002-02:00

Ayahusca music recording session by the igarape at the Yawanawa Festival 2011, Acre, Brazil. This song calls the force of rapé, shuru, tobacco, and many animals of the forest. Musicians from left to right are Tuim Huni Kui, Ninawa Pai da Mata, Ninawa's brother, Thiago Moreno Maia.

Below is the song of Seu Agostinho, the revered Pajé (Shaman) who passed to the astral in late December 2011. The audio is weak at times but It brings much joy to have these pictures of this much loved man.

Recorded on November 26, 2011, one month before the passing of Seu Augustino by a film crew in Village Novo Segredo, visiting the park of medicinal plants. He sings -- sitting at the foot of a great Samaúma tree -- the song that he received a meditation after the consecration of medicines made from flowers, a great gift ... he will be mised forever .

And here is a re-post of the Call of the Samaúma, a video produced by the World Bank in a moment of true inspiration:

Thanks to Eduardo Bayer for posting clips from the 2011 Yawanawa Festival in Acre.

AMAZON UPDATE

2012-01-24T15:18:00.000-02:00

It's not looking good. Here's an update from Mongabay:

Deforestation, climate change threaten the ecological resilience of the Amazon rainforest

(01/19/2012) The combination of deforestation, forest degradation, and the effects of climate change are weakening the resilience of the Amazon rainforest ecosystem, potentially leading to loss of carbon storage and changes in rainfall patterns and river discharge, finds a comprehensive review published in the journal Nature.

Peruvian smugglers traffic illegal rainforest timber from Brazil to America

(01/11/2012) An investigation by Brazil's Federal Police has detailed a significant trade of illegally logged rainforest wood by Peruvian nationals making its way from northern Brazil to the U.S. and Mexico, reports O Globo.

Colonization program remains important driver of deforestation in Brazil

(01/10/2012) Government-subsidized colonization of the Amazon rainforest remains an important driver of forest loss in Brazil, but has mixed economic value, argues a paper published in Biological Conservation.

TURN CHILDREN TURN

2012-01-24T14:03:00.000-02:00

A marvelous clip by Lorena and Pafy of Ana Rosa and Ana Clara dancing at the recent birthday party of Master Counselor Luiz Mendes

THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN THE VIRTUAL AND THE REAL?

2012-01-22T22:58:00.003-02:00

Lots of differences but here's one that really makes a difference...

THE MYSTERY OF MAGIC -- HALLELUJAH!

2012-01-22T19:23:00.002-02:00

Leonard Cohen explains...

Beginning and ending this weekend with gifts from Canadians Buffy Sainte-Marie (previous post) and Leonard Cohen (who seems to grow more vital with every year). Truly, my weekend had a quality like that. It was lovely, INDEED! I hope that yours was similarly blessed.

GOD IS ALIVE MAGIC IS AFOOT

2012-01-21T15:43:00.000-02:00

BELO MONTE SHUT DOWN BY PROTESTERS

2012-01-20T17:22:00.000-02:00

Here's the latest report from International Rivers

In the first days of the New Year, Brazilian contractors quietly started blockading the Xingu River to allow construction to start on the massive Belo Monte Dam. Often called the "Pandora Dam" by mainstream media because of James Cameron’s support for the struggle against it, the hydroelectric project could become the world’s third largest. While construction had started on roads and associated works several months ago, the building of coffer dams to divert the flow of the river started during the Brazillian new year holiday, presumably to sidestep the scrutiny of civil society, NGOs and regional activists. But escape scrutiny it did not.

The Movimento Xingu Vivo para Sempre organized an action to stop construction of the coffer dams on January 18th, denouncing the illegitimate process and lack of consultation that have become a hallmark of the Belo Monte Project. For two hours a small but determined group of protestors blocked work from continuing on Belo Monte's Pimental site, and informed the workers about the damage the dam would have in their community.
Antônia Melo, coordinator of the Xingu Vivo movement, called the project a “crime of the Federal Government” and said, "To take away the river is to take away the life of its people, because water is life."

Much damage has already been caused construction in the region. Clearing rainforest, building roads – and the telltale sign of dam construction in the region, red mud that clouds the water of the Xingu river – all make water dangerous to drink, pollute the river, kill fish and threaten the habitat of endangered species, such as the endangered Zebra Pleco.

The construction activities have already degraded the water quality of the Arara indigenous tribe. The tribe has appealed to the Public Prosecutor of the state of Pará to file a lawsuit against dam builder Norte Energia S.A. to recoup damages and try to reclaim some of their lost livelihood.

Josinei Arara, a member of a threatened Arara indigenous community nearby said, "The dam builders have kept none of their promises to compensate our village; in they meantime, they're assassinating our river."  

The fate of the Xingu river looks grim, but indigenous communities across the Amazon will continue to fight against further construction with the Movimento Xingu Vivo para Sempre.
With water quality being impacted so severely this early on in construction, and the other impacts that are causing harm to indigenous communities such as the Arara, Norte Energia is in clear violation of the Brazilian Constitution and international standards – the project should be immediately cancelled and rights violators should be held accountable.
More information:

Press Release: Protestors Paralyze Belo Monte Dam Construction Works
Belo Monte Campaign

THE CALLS OF THE CABOCLOS

2012-01-20T16:57:00.000-02:00

The feast day of São Sebastião also calls for honoring the Caboclo vision of defending the forest. (re-posted from Visionshare 03 March 2011)

The term caboclo has multiple meanings in Brazil. In earliest usage during colonial times it meant friendly or "tame" Indian. Later, it came to refer to the afro-indio-european racial mix and also to the simple people who live close to the forests and rivers of Amazonia.

On the spiritual plane, the Afro-Brazilian religions celebrate the caboclos as spirits or entities of the forest who are warriors defending the abundance of Nature or messengers delivering cures and good medicines to the needy.

On a personal note, in some quarters here in Acre I am known as the Caboclo Americano, a label that brings forth both delight and laughter because of the contradictions involved. In Brazil, Americans are generally perceived as complicated city folks whereas caboclos are perceived as simple forest people. That someone might actually embrace such contradictions by being of both is "off the map." But, the truth that I believe says that we need a new map, an ancient-future one. We need warriors of nature and lovers of the future. And this requires that we find a way to mix the simple harmonies of the past with the complex cacophonies of modernity.

From the past, here are some of the traditional Umbanda songs.

One of the most loved songs tells of Jurema (the spirit of clear water) and of her love for wearing a plume of green. Indeed, one might consider Cabocla Jurema as the Princess of Green. Here it is as sung by one of the giants of Brazilian popular music, Maria Bethania.

And again, sung here by our dear friend Nei Zigma during a visit to Fortaleza. This simple version, with the sounds of children in the background, touched me deeply. It still opens my heart and brings tears to my eyes.

The lyrics are:

Cabocla your plume is green
your plume is green
is the color of the sea

is the color of Cabocla Juremá
is the color of Cabocla Juremá
is the color of Cabocla Juremá

Juremá

I go bathe myself
in the clear waters
in the waters of Jananina
there in clear waters

There are many ways that the caboclos call, from the fierce voice of the warrior to the sweet call of the lover, but the message is always the same:

If we give love and protection to Nature, the result will be abundance for all.

The calls of the caboclos are growing stronger. They are arriving more often and many of my friends are responding. We are reaching out to each other. We are carrying a dream of acting together. Together, we want to deliver a vision. For the future.

I asked the Oracle of the I Ching of what it thought of such a project...

Heaven and Earth embrace, giving birth to Peace.

The Superior Person serves as midwife,
presenting the newborn gift to the people.

The small depart; the great approach.
Success.
Good fortune.

NOW, THE WORK BEGINS

VIVA! SÃO SEBASTIÃO VIVA!

2012-01-20T16:25:00.001-02:00

VIVAS for São Sebastião and Oxossi and the entire band of caboclos and nature spirits of the forests of Brazil.

Later tonight, at the great party and feast, we will eat the Coboclo altar.

ONE OF THE QUICKEST VICTORIES EVER!

2012-01-20T15:16:00.000-02:00

SOPA and PIPA postponed indefinitely after protest

By Julianne Pepitone @CNNMoneyTech January 20, 2012: 11:37 AM ET

Hundreds turned out for a New York protest against SOPA and PIPA, a pair of controversial anti-piracy proposals.

NEW YORK (CNNMoney) -- When the entire Internet gets angry, Congress takes notice. Both the House and the Senate on Friday backed away from a pair of controversial anti-piracy bills, tossing them into limbo and throwing doubt on their future viability.

The Senate had been scheduled to vote next week on the Protect IP Act (PIPA) -- a bill that once had widespread, bipartisan support. But on Friday, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said he was postponing the vote "in light of recent events."

Meanwhile, the House of Representatives said it is putting on hold its version of the bill, the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA). The House will "postpone consideration of the legislation until there is wider agreement on a solution," House Judiciary Committee Chairman Lamar Smith said in a written statement.

The moves came after several lawmakers flipped their position on the bills in the wake of widespread online and offline protests against them.

Tech companies, who largely oppose the bills, mobilized their users this week to contact representatives and speak out against the legislation. Sites including Wikipedia and Reddit launched site blackouts on January 18, while protesters hit the streets in New York, San Francisco, Seattle and Washington, D.C. Google (GOOG, Fortune 500) drew more than 7 million signatures for an anti-SOPA and PIPA petition that it linked on its highly trafficked homepage.

The tide turned soon after the protest, and both bills lost some of their Congressional backers.

"I have heard from the critics and I take seriously their concerns," Smith said Friday in a prepared statement. "It is clear that we need to revisit the approach on how best to address the problem of foreign thieves."

PIPA and SOPA aim to crack down on copyright infringement by restricting sites that host or facilitate the trading of pirated content. (Click here for our explainer: What SOPA is and why it matters.)

Backed by media companies, including CNNMoney parent Time Warner, the bills initially seemed on the fast track to passage. PIPA was approved unanimously by a Senate committee in May.

But when the House took up its own version of the bill, SOPA, tech companies began lobbying heavily in opposition -- an effort that culminated in this week's demonstrations.

Reid hinted that PIPA may not be dead yet, saying: "There is no reason that the legitimate issues raised by many about this bill cannot be resolved."

First Published: January 20, 2012: 11:33 AM ET

KEEP YOUR EYE ON THE HOLE, NOT THE BALL

2012-01-19T15:40:00.000-02:00

Jason Lanier writes about the "False Ideals of the Web"

"There is an outdated brand of digital orthodoxy that ought to be retired. In this worldview, the Internet is a never-ending battle of good guys who love freedom against bad guys like old-fashioned Hollywood media moguls. The bad guys want to strengthen copyright law, and make it impossible to post anonymously copied videos and stories. Our melodrama is driven by a vision of an open Internet that has already been distorted, though not by the old industries that fear piracy."

My quarrel with the libertarians has always been about their absurd faith in a tempting illusion of freedom. The fact is that if government is eliminated from regulating the Internet as a public domain, it will become an increasingly private domain. The corporations will step into the power vacuum and rule via non-representative, non-inclusive, non-transparent, and non-accountable market mechanisms. Does anyone expect that Google or Facebook or another Internet giant will not censor and control to suit their own need to market products? Indeed, they already do!

As Bobby McGee said, "Freedom is just another word for nothing left to lose." The saints and sages can handle renunciation of the material world but, for most people or the "public interest", the question will not be about freedom per se. It will be about who and what does freedom serve. As every golfer knows, it's important to keep your eye on the hole and not the ball. The "hole" here is the open center of the Internet that must be accessible and safeguarded in service to all.

It's worth reading all of Jason Lanier's "False Ideals of the Web"

YOU DECIDE

2012-01-19T11:23:00.000-02:00

You have brains in your head.
You have feet in your shoes.
You can steer yourself
any direction you choose.

You're on your own.
And you know what you know.
And YOU are the guy
who'll decide where to go.

~ Dr. Seuss ~

(Oh, the Places You'll Go!)

Re-posted from Panhala

TODAY WAS NUTS, RIGHT?

2012-01-19T04:04:00.000-02:00

That's how Fight for the Future begins its email report of the strike against SOPA day. The results were amazing. Read the report:

Google launched a petition. Wikipedia voted to shut itself off. Senators' websites went down just from the sheer surge of voters trying to write them. NYC and SF geeks had protests that packed city blocks.

You made history today: nothing like this has ever happened before. Tech companies and users teamed up. Tens of millions of people who make the internet what it is joined together to defend their freedoms. The free network defended itself. Whatever you call it, the bottom line is clear: from today forward, it will be much harder to mess up the internet.
The really crazy part? We might even win.

Approaching Monday's crucial Senate vote there are now 35 Senators publicly opposing PIPA. Last week there were 5. And it just takes just 41 solid "no" votes to permanently stall PIPA (and SOPA) in the Senate. What seemed like miles away a few weeks ago is now within reach.

But don't trust predictions. The forces behind SOPA & PIPA (mostly movie companies) can make small changes to these bills until they know they have the votes to pass. Members of Congress know SOPA & PIPA are unpopular, but they don't understand why--so they're easily duped by superficial changes. The Senate returns next week, and the next few days are critical. Here are two things to think about:

1. Plan on calling your Senator every day next week. Pick up the phone each morning and call your Senators' offices, until they vote "no" on cloture. If your site participated today, consider running a "Call the Senate" link all next week.

2. Tomorrow, drop in at your Senators' district offices. We don't have a cool map widget to show you the offices nearest you (we're too exhausted! any takers?). So do it the old fashioned way: use Google, or the phonebook to find the address, and just walk in, say you oppose PIPA, and urge the Senator to vote "no" on cloture. These drop-in visits make our spectacular online protests more tangible and credible.

That's it for now. Be proud and stay on it!

--Holmes, Tiffiniy, and the whole Fight for the Future team.

___

P.S. Huge credit goes to participants in the 11/16 American Censorship Day protest: Mozilla, 4chan, BoingBoing, Tumblr, TGWTG, and thousands of others. That's what got this ball rolling! Reddit, both the community and the team behind it, you're amazing. And of course, thanks to the Wikimedians whose patient and inexorable pursuit of the right answer brought them to take world-changing action. Thanks to David S, David K, Cory D, and E Stark for bold action at critical times.

GOOGLE SAYS 4.5 MILLION SIGNED ITS ANTI-SOPA PETITION IN ONE DAY

2012-01-19T03:08:00.001-02:00

First, the story of record-breaking people power rising to defend the Internet: Google says 4.5 million signed its petition. And that's not counting all the other on-line petitions!

Here's what's at stake:

PROTECT IP / SOPA Breaks The Internet from Fight for the Future on Vimeo.

Today, we -- that's you and me and the 75,000 websites that participated -- made history! Oops, I should say, "we started making history." The Senate Bill will be up for vote on 24 January. The entertainment media moguls will strike back. It's not a done deal. Please keep up the petition pressure and support the anti-SOPA movement.

WE ARE ON STRIKE -- PLEASE JOIN

2012-01-18T15:49:00.004-02:00

[UPDATE: WOW !!!!! Web Protests Piracy Bills, and Senators Change Course. We've got the momentum. Please keep up the pressure.]

NOTE: I have no idea how to temporarily dis-able this page, so I'll just pass along what the movement folks are doing.

Read editorial at Mashable

Join us at http://sopastrike.com/

And please contact your senators. Here is the U.S. on-line petition. Please share it widely. Or, if you prefer, here is the avaaz global petition.

KARMA YOGA

2012-01-17T13:54:00.005-02:00

Peter Brook's 1989 interpretation of Krishna revealing the Bhagavad Gita to Prince Arjuna (excerpt from the Mahabharata).

There's more to the story:

and the final words of Bhishma

In India it is said that if it does not appear in the great epic of the Mahabharata it does not exist. As Krishna says, the true battlefield has no weapons. The great Sufi poet Rumi put it this way: "Out beyond all notions of right and wrong there is a field. Will you meet me there?"

TRANQUILO

2012-01-17T08:15:00.002-02:00

Tranquilo (tranquil) is a commonly used Portuguese word for feeling peaceful amidst the play of passions and pressures. The photo is from Joe Riley's Panhala page and it portrays, for me, a calm and firm moment of balance between the inner and the outer.

FOREST PRIMEVAL

2012-01-16T15:11:00.000-02:00

Filmed in Malaysia, the narration is adapted from Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad:

We Were Wanderers On A Prehistoric Earth from James W Griffiths on Vimeo.

REMEMBERING MARTIN LUTHER KING

2012-01-16T11:49:00.000-02:00

A photo and psalm from Panhala to honor Martin Luther King, whose day is today.

Psalms 15

Lord, who can be trusted with power,
and who may act in your place?
Those with a passion for justice,
who speak the truth from their hearts;
who have let go of selfish interests
and grown beyond their own lives;
who see the wretched as their family
and the poor as their flesh and blood.
They alone are impartial
and worthy of the people's trust.
Their compassion lights up the whole earth,
and their kindness endures forever.

(A Book of Psalms, translations by Stephen Mitchell)

A BELL FOR SUNDAY (and for every day)

2012-01-15T14:21:00.004-02:00

There are many versions of Thich Nhat Hanh's "The End Of Suffering" meditation. The one above has been my favorite. Now, there's another that has text and great cinematography. Of course, the real thing is what happens in the heart.

The Great Bell Chant (The End of Suffering) from R Smittenaar on Vimeo.

FROM THE HEART OF DEVOTION

2012-01-13T11:46:00.002-02:00

JOHN PRINE -- SPANISH PIPEDREAM or BLOW UP YOUR TV

2012-01-13T10:26:00.000-02:00

Spanish Pipedream

John Prine

She was a level-headed dancer on the road to alcohol

And I was just a soldier on my way to Montreal

Well she pressed her chest against me

About the time the juke box broke

Yeah, she gave me a peck on the back of the neck

And these are the words she spoke

Blow up your TV throw away your paper

Go to the country, build you a home

Plant a little garden, eat a lot of peaches

Try an find Jesus on your own

Well, I sat there at the table and I acted real naive

For I knew that topless lady had something up her sleeve

Well, she danced around the bar room and she did the hoochy-coo

Yeah she sang her song all night long, tellin' me what to do

Blow up your TV throw away your paper

Go to the country, build you a home

Plant a little garden, eat a lot of peaches

Try an find Jesus on your own

Well, I was young and hungry and about to leave that place

When just as I was leavin', well she looked me in the face

I said "You must know the answer."

"She said, "No but I'll give it a try."

And to this very day we've been livin' our way

And here is the reason why

We blew up our TV threw away our paper

Went to the country, built us a home

Had a lot of children, fed 'em on peaches

They all found Jesus on their own

When just as I was leavin', well she looked me in the face

I said "You must know the answer."

"She said, "No but I'll give it a try."

And to this very day we've been livin' our way

And here is the reason why

We blew up our TV threw away our paper

Went to the country, built us a home

Had a lot of children, fed 'em on peaches

They all found Jesus on their own

THE MAN WHO PLANTED TREES

2012-01-10T02:31:00.001-02:00

The Man Who Planted Trees from Max Urai on Vimeo.

Jean Giano's classic is not to be dismissed as a romantic myth. Science is beginning to say much the same thing. Trees make rain. Here's how:

(Note: For the English subtitles, start the video and click the red CC button.)

HOW DOCTORS DIE

2012-01-05T20:05:00.002-02:00

"Passage" -- image by Lou Gold

By Ken Murray re-posted from Nexus

Years ago, Charlie, a highly respected orthopedist and a mentor of mine, found a lump in his stomach. He had a surgeon explore the area, and the diagnosis was pancreatic cancer. This surgeon was one of the best in the country. He had even invented a new procedure for this exact cancer that could triple a patient’s five-year-survival odds—from 5 percent to 15 percent—albeit with a poor quality of life. Charlie was uninterested. He went home the next day, closed his practice, and never set foot in a hospital again. He focused on spending time with family and feeling as good as possible. Several months later, he died at home. He got no chemotherapy, radiation, or surgical treatment. Medicare didn’t spend much on him.

It’s not a frequent topic of discussion, but doctors die, too. And they don’t die like the rest of us. What’s unusual about them is not how much treatment they get compared to most Americans, but how little. For all the time they spend fending off the deaths of others, they tend to be fairly serene when faced with death themselves. They know exactly what is going to happen, they know the choices, and they generally have access to any sort of medical care they could want. But they go gently.

Of course, doctors don’t want to die; they want to live. But they know enough about modern medicine to know its limits. And they know enough about death to know what all people fear most: dying in pain, and dying alone. They’ve talked about this with their families. They want to be sure, when the time comes, that no heroic measures will happen—that they will never experience, during their last moments on earth, someone breaking their ribs in an attempt to resuscitate them with CPR (that’s what happens if CPR is done right).

Almost all medical professionals have seen what we call “futile care” being performed on people. That’s when doctors bring the cutting edge of technology to bear on a grievously ill person near the end of life. The patient will get cut open, perforated with tubes, hooked up to machines, and assaulted with drugs. All of this occurs in the Intensive Care Unit at a cost of tens of thousands of dollars a day. What it buys is misery we would not inflict on a terrorist. I cannot count the number of times fellow physicians have told me, in words that vary only slightly, “Promise me if you find me like this that you’ll kill me.” They mean it. Some medical personnel wear medallions stamped “NO CODE” to tell physicians not to perform CPR on them. I have even seen it as a tattoo.

To administer medical care that makes people suffer is anguishing. Physicians are trained to gather information without revealing any of their own feelings, but in private, among fellow doctors, they’ll vent. “How can anyone do that to their family members?” they’ll ask. I suspect it’s one reason physicians have higher rates of alcohol abuse and depression than professionals in most other fields. I know it’s one reason I stopped participating in hospital care for the last 10 years of my practice.

How has it come to this—that doctors administer so much care that they wouldn’t want for themselves? The simple, or not-so-simple, answer is this: patients, doctors, and the system.

To see how patients play a role, imagine a scenario in which someone has lost consciousness and been admitted to an emergency room. As is so often the case, no one has made a plan for this situation, and shocked and scared family members find themselves caught up in a maze of choices. They’re overwhelmed. When doctors ask if they want “everything” done, they answer yes. Then the nightmare begins. Sometimes, a family really means “do everything,” but often they just mean “do everything that’s reasonable.” The problem is that they may not know what’s reasonable, nor, in their confusion and sorrow, will they ask about it or hear what a physician may be telling them. For their part, doctors told to do “everything” will do it, whether it is reasonable or not.

The above scenario is a common one. Feeding into the problem are unrealistic expectations of what doctors can accomplish. Many people think of CPR as a reliable lifesaver when, in fact, the results are usually poor. I’ve had hundreds of people brought to me in the emergency room after getting CPR. Exactly one, a healthy man who’d had no heart troubles (for those who want specifics, he had a “tension pneumothorax”), walked out of the hospital. If a patient suffers from severe illness, old age, or a terminal disease, the odds of a good outcome from CPR are infinitesimal, while the odds of suffering are overwhelming. Poor knowledge and misguided expectations lead to a lot of bad decisions.

But of course it’s not just patients making these things happen. Doctors play an enabling role, too. The trouble is that even doctors who hate to administer futile care must find a way to address the wishes of patients and families. Imagine, once again, the emergency room with those grieving, possibly hysterical, family members. They do not know the doctor. Establishing trust and confidence under such circumstances is a very delicate thing. People are prepared to think the doctor is acting out of base motives, trying to save time, or money, or effort, especially if the doctor is advising against further treatment.

Some doctors are stronger communicators than others, and some doctors are more adamant, but the pressures they all face are similar. When I faced circumstances involving end-of-life choices, I adopted the approach of laying out only the options that I thought were reasonable (as I would in any situation) as early in the process as possible. When patients or families brought up unreasonable choices, I would discuss the issue in layman’s terms that portrayed the downsides clearly. If patients or families still insisted on treatments I considered pointless or harmful, I would offer to transfer their care to another doctor or hospital.

Should I have been more forceful at times? I know that some of those transfers still haunt me. One of the patients of whom I was most fond was an attorney from a famous political family. She had severe diabetes and terrible circulation, and, at one point, she developed a painful sore on her foot. Knowing the hazards of hospitals, I did everything I could to keep her from resorting to surgery. Still, she sought out outside experts with whom I had no relationship. Not knowing as much about her as I did, they decided to perform bypass surgery on her chronically clogged blood vessels in both legs. This didn’t restore her circulation, and the surgical wounds wouldn’t heal. Her feet became gangrenous, and she endured bilateral leg amputations. Two weeks later, in the famous medical center in which all this had occurred, she died.

It’s easy to find fault with both doctors and patients in such stories, but in many ways all the parties are simply victims of a larger system that encourages excessive treatment. In some unfortunate cases, doctors use the fee-for-service model to do everything they can, no matter how pointless, to make money. More commonly, though, doctors are fearful of litigation and do whatever they’re asked, with little feedback, to avoid getting in trouble.

Even when the right preparations have been made, the system can still swallow people up. One of my patients was a man named Jack, a 78-year-old who had been ill for years and undergone about 15 major surgical procedures. He explained to me that he never, under any circumstances, wanted to be placed on life support machines again. One Saturday, however, Jack suffered a massive stroke and got admitted to the emergency room unconscious, without his wife. Doctors did everything possible to resuscitate him and put him on life support in the ICU. This was Jack’s worst nightmare. When I arrived at the hospital and took over Jack’s care, I spoke to his wife and to hospital staff, bringing in my office notes with his care preferences. Then I turned off the life support machines and sat with him. He died two hours later.

Even with all his wishes documented, Jack hadn’t died as he’d hoped. The system had intervened. One of the nurses, I later found out, even reported my unplugging of Jack to the authorities as a possible homicide. Nothing came of it, of course; Jack’s wishes had been spelled out explicitly, and he’d left the paperwork to prove it. But the prospect of a police investigation is terrifying for any physician. I could far more easily have left Jack on life support against his stated wishes, prolonging his life, and his suffering, a few more weeks. I would even have made a little more money, and Medicare would have ended up with an additional $500,000 bill. It’s no wonder many doctors err on the side of overtreatment.

But doctors still don’t over-treat themselves. They see the consequences of this constantly. Almost anyone can find a way to die in peace at home, and pain can be managed better than ever. Hospice care, which focuses on providing terminally ill patients with comfort and dignity rather than on futile cures, provides most people with much better final days. Amazingly, studies have found that people placed in hospice care often live longer than people with the same disease who are seeking active cures. I was struck to hear on the radio recently that the famous reporter Tom Wicker had “died peacefully at home, surrounded by his family.” Such stories are, thankfully, increasingly common.

Several years ago, my older cousin Torch (born at home by the light of a flashlight—or torch) had a seizure that turned out to be the result of lung cancer that had gone to his brain. I arranged for him to see various specialists, and we learned that with aggressive treatment of his condition, including three to five hospital visits a week for chemotherapy, he would live perhaps four months. Ultimately, Torch decided against any treatment and simply took pills for brain swelling. He moved in with me.

We spent the next eight months doing a bunch of things that he enjoyed, having fun together like we hadn’t had in decades. We went to Disneyland, his first time. We’d hang out at home. Torch was a sports nut, and he was very happy to watch sports and eat my cooking. He even gained a bit of weight, eating his favorite foods rather than hospital foods. He had no serious pain, and he remained high-spirited. One day, he didn’t wake up. He spent the next three days in a coma-like sleep and then died. The cost of his medical care for those eight months, for the one drug he was taking, was about $20.

Torch was no doctor, but he knew he wanted a life of quality, not just quantity. Don’t most of us? If there is a state of the art of end-of-life care, it is this: death with dignity. As for me, my physician has my choices. They were easy to make, as they are for most physicians. There will be no heroics, and I will go gentle into that good night. Like my mentor Charlie. Like my cousin Torch. Like my fellow doctors.

Ken Murray, MD, is Clinical Assistant Professor of Family Medicine at USC.

Thanks to José Murilo for the tip.

Readers may want to check out the interesting comments at the original post.

FOOL'S GOLD AND THE GORDIAN KNOT

2012-01-05T12:31:00.000-02:00

Illustration by K.Y.Craft

Events of 2011 show that no matter how solid the science, some people will never accept that humans are causing global warming. So how can we cut the Gordian Knot that is manmade global warming?

by Auden Schendler, reposted from the Atlantic

One version of the myth of King Midas holds that he was not greedy. Instead, he loved his daughter so much that he longed to leave her a stable future. When given the chance, he asked for the golden touch as a way to create an endowment. But when they embraced, she turned to gold as well. In trying to protect his beloved daughter, Midas destroyed her.

Some climate change deniers have the same admirable motive as Midas. The actions required to solve climate, they fear, will preclude us from capturing the wealth that can benefit or save many children today. Even the left argues that a rising economic tide lifts all boats, despite the fact that continued growth probably dooms the planet to runaway warming. Environmentalists fear that no action on climate condemns us to an even more costly fate that threatens every child, forever.

Finding a fix, then, seems close to impossible. What we learned in 2011--a banner year for human understanding of climate change and its impact on our lives--helps explain why.

In October, climate-change skeptic Dr. Richard Muller released the results of a two-year study at the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature Project that was funded in part by the Koch brothers, leading climate deniers. Muller's report, in his own words, found that "global warming is real." In fact, Muller found warming to be "on the high end" of what others had found. The results were reported in the Wall Street Journal's editorial page.

2011 also gave a taste of what climatologists have long predicted: that a warmer world will experience more severe weather events, both droughts and storms. PBS reported on "mind-boggling extreme weather" resulting from warming, what Dr. Jeff Masters, Director of Meteorology at the Weather Underground, Inc. calls "steroids for the atmosphere." This summer, droughts in the Southwest matched those of the dust bowl and a tornado outbreak blew away the record 1974 season. USA Today reported how natural disasters were straining FEMA's budget. In the last week of 2011, Vermont fixed the last of the roads destroyed by flooding from Hurricane Irene.

At the same time, still more peer-reviewed science came out showing that the anthropogenic warming signal is unmistakable. Grant Foster and Stefan Rahmstorf's paper in Environmental Research Letters stripped out the known non-human influences on climate (El Niño, volcanic aerosols and solar variability, among others) and found human-induced warming to be clear and consistent.

Meanwhile, a new paper by Kevin Anderson and Alice Bows, from the Tyndall Center for Climate Change Research at the University of Manchester and published in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society argued that society is at substantial risk of exceeding warming of 2°C, the threshold widely seen to be the difference between something to which we could possibly adapt and disaster.

Last, and least noted, has been the inability of climate deniers to produce peer-reviewed science showing that warming is not human caused. Their anecdotal claims are easily debunked: the sun is at a minimum, despite record global temperatures. Cosmic-ray activity hasn't coincided with modern warming. Volcanoes emit far less CO₂ than humans. Water vapor is a greenhouse gas that is exacerbated by CO₂ induced warming. The earth has warmed before, of course, but always with a well understood cause, just like we have today.

One might imagine the economic damage of 2011's storms would get deniers thinking. Can we continue to rebuild roads and bridges, sump out towns and drench fires, or, might ought we do something about it? And since cutting CO₂ emissions will cool the planet, is that not a good place to start?

Well, no. In 2011, the result of the head-smacking obviousness of the science, as Naomi Klein pointed out in The Nation, is that opposition has become even more strident, in large part because deniers are no fools. Fully dealing with climate change, Klein observed, would require "that we break every rule in the free-market playbook and that we do so with great urgency." The climate message didn't fail, Klein argued: It simply got through too clearly.

At the same time that the right became more rigid, Leslie Kaufman of the New York Times reported on the radicalization of the environmental movement in response to lack of policy action. She quoted Roger Ballentine, a climate adviser to the Clinton White House:

"The failure to address climate is catastrophic, and young people are justifiably outraged. What we have now is an antagonized grassroots calling for a radicalized approach." Such an approach did develop, most notably in the form of 12,000 protesters who surrounded the White House and blocked the Keystone XL pipeline that would bring the most carbon-intensive fuel--tar sands oil--into the US from Canada.

In 2011, scientific certainty didn't clear up anything at all, it just energized the left and the right, in opposite directions, confirming historian Naomi Oreskes's notion that climate-change denial has never been about the science, it was always about ideology.

So we start 2012 with an unprecedented understanding of climate science and the consequences of warming, and at the same time seemingly irreconcilable differences on what to do, a Gordian Knot of a problem; complex and intractable, ingeniously self-tightening.

Solutions will require the boldness, innovation, and rule breaking of Alexander the Great, who famously used a sword to cut that knot. But uniquely today, we'll need the political right and left to hold the blade without killing each other first. Some feel the only path to this future is enough of a climate signal--Manhattan under water--to make action obvious. Others see bipartisan solutions percolating even today: eliminating the payroll tax and replacing it with a carbon fee, for example, or eliminating subsidies for big oil and using that money for clean energy development, meet goals both left and right.

Sometimes the best way to solve a problem is to understand its cause. Who, for example, tied the legendary Gordian Knot, a good metaphor for the puzzle we face today? It turns out it was a man known by some to be kind and fair, but whose vision of affluence led to disaster. He was a king. And his name was Midas.

AMAZING WAY TO PLAY

2012-01-05T02:53:00.003-02:00

A correction: Ronnie is a man.

Here's another video of this amazing musician...

Ronnie also sings...

Check out more of his videos.

THE BEST COMMUNICATION IS TELEWOMAN

2012-01-04T16:07:00.000-02:00

Hat tip to Avi for another great one.

IT DEPENDS ON YOUR POINT-OF-VIEW

2012-01-04T09:50:00.010-02:00

"Cola para ver el final de la crisis" ("The queue to see the end of the crisis") by el silencio

I was recently having a wide-ranging email exchange about the economic and political madness of the world with my dear friend Kelpie Wilson which closed with me asking, "Is the madness part of the corrective? Or, am I drinking too much ayahuasca?" Kelpie responded, "I am amazed at how little that stuff seems to affect your mental sharpness, but only you know the answer!"

Well now... the truth is that I don't know the answer. It seems to me that ayahuasca both heightens my clarity and shifts my point-of-view. But, it's confusing because often the new point-of-view gives less of an "answer" than a deeper sense of the contradictions of earthly life and the existence of many truths. As consciousness shifts, so does point-of-view -- often toward more compassion and respect for diversity -- and this seems fundamental.

Here's an example: In my last post, I was awe-struck by a video of the birth of an elephant, the miracle of life, the power of the Mother.

I sent the full blog post to the political commentator Andrew Sullivan because he likes kooky cultural stuff and videos of nature, which he often publishes as a "Mental Health Break" from the madness of politics. I sensed that he would grab this one.

That he did! But he put it to a very different use as commentary on yesterday's messy Republican primary in Iowa. Living now in Brazil, I had not been alert to the fact that the elephant is the symbol of the Republican Party.

At first I was miffed because he had put it to such a different purpose than mine. Then, I looked again, saw how perfectly it fit his purpose, and realized (once again!) that two people can look at the same thing and see something very different.

It all depends on your point-of-view... or, perhaps, on what you've been drinking.

Mental health? I'll let the reader decide.

AMAZING ELEPHANT BIRTH

2012-01-02T03:06:00.004-02:00

I am awe-struck by this video.

Life is beyond measure or description.

I want to say more but there are no words for it.

I just watch the gift

of the birth

of the breath

of the step

and feel the power of the Mother.

GREETING THE NEW YEAR

2012-01-01T14:44:00.001-02:00

Worth singing always, below is how it was in 1976:

A BLESSED AND HOPEFUL 2012 TO ALL

2011-12-31T19:37:00.001-02:00

These young Haitian refugees recently arrived in Brasiléia AC, full of hope for a better life in Brazil.

JOY FROM BRAZIL

2011-12-26T17:41:00.000-02:00

Brasil Pandeiro por Luigi Bertolli
(Brazil Tambourine by Luigi Bertolli)

FELIZ NATAL

2011-12-24T19:23:00.000-02:00

Love, Light, Peace, Blessings and Good Things to All.

Amor, luz, paz, bênçãos e coisas boas para todos.

SOLSTICE: INTO THE LIGHT OR THE DARK?

2011-12-21T15:27:00.000-02:00

"the light at the end of the tunnel" -- photo by AlicePopkorn at Flickr

This year, the Solstice occurs on the morning of 22 December when the arc of the sun reverses the journey of light and darkness in our days. If you are in the North, you'll be heading into more light as we in the South will be heading into more darkness. It all depends on where one stands.

Might it be like that as well in the interior world where we also take a stand? What determines our view of our individual and collective futures? What obstacles must be overcome? Václav Havel, who led a "velvet revolution" against totalitarian rule in Czechoslovakia and recently died, left us a poignant point-of-view:

For the real question is whether the brighter future is really always so distant. What if, on the contrary, it has been here for a long time already, and only our own blindness and weakness has prevented us from seeing it around us and within us, and kept us from developing it? (from The Power of the Powerless)

TIME FOR OFFERING TEARS FOR THOSE UNDER BRUTAL REGIMES AND GRATITUDE FOR THOSE WHO ARE NOT

2011-12-19T13:23:00.000-02:00

One atrocious event in Egypt in a world of far too many events like this one. I post it just because I have some faith in awareness -- that somehow feeling the pain can lead to better outcomes and even mere tears will not be in vain.

CESÁRIA ÉVORA -- SAUDADES

2011-12-19T11:51:00.004-02:00

Cesária Évora, who brought the music of the tiny Cape Verde islands off Senegal to a worldwide audience, died on Saturday in Mindelo, on São Vicente, her native island in Cape Verde. She was famous for bringing the melancholy morna style, which is full of what is known in Portuguese as saudade, to the world.

Saudade is a word that is impossible to translate adequately. It describes a deep emotional state of nostalgic longing for something or someone that was held dearly but is now lost. The feeling, somehow, is also very sweet because it recalls something truly loved that survives in the heart -- a loss that lives on and brings a guiding light. The world now says, "saudades" and knows that the light of Cesária Évora will live on.

More at...

Al Jazeera newscast

Cesária Évora web site

SHOP TILL YOU DROP

2011-12-18T21:59:00.001-02:00

Shop Till You Drop by Bansky

More wall art by Bansky here.

TO OUR SAVIORS

2011-12-17T10:50:00.000-02:00

View more from the master image-maker el silencio.

DEFORESTATION IN BRAZIL: WILL THERE BE MORE OR LESS?

2011-12-15T22:40:00.005-02:00

Deforestation for cattle in Capixaba, Acre, Brazil

[Update December 16, 2011: Greenpeace Brazil reports that a law was passed and signed that would exclude the Federal enforcement agency IBAMA from policing against illegal logging, passing the responsibility to local authorities who are often less resistant to violations of the law.]

The fierce struggle over setting limits to deforestation in Brazil continues. The good news is that the final vote on a revised Forest Code has been delayed until March, 2012 which pushes it close to the major UN environmental conference RIO+20 where President Dilma hopes to showcase Brazil as a global green leader who can halt deforestation and demonstrate sustainable development.

The bad news is that the delay was forced in the Chamber of Deputies by the powerful agribusiness bloc that does not want to accept even the relatively small green amendments that were introduced as the proposed law passed through the Senate. So, the battle lines have been drawn and across the next months we can expect intense campaigning on all sides.

Here's how the World Wildlife Fund sees the situation:

Brazil's destructive Forest Code vote delayed - but only till March

15 December 2011

Thanks in part to campaigners across Brazil and the world, final voting on controversial and destructive changes to the country’s Forest Law has been postponed until March 2012. It's a great first success - but the battle’s not over, and we still need your support to spread the word, and help make sure damaging changes are stopped.

It was announced this week that the Brazilian House of Representatives has postponed its final voting on changes to the Forest Code. A vote in favour could still see vast areas of tropical forest in the Amazon and elsewhere destroyed for cattle ranching and agriculture.

The postponement is a great success for environmental and social movements, both within Brazil and beyond, who have actively campaigned against the changes since they were drafted earlier this year. It buys time to build the campaign further and encourage more action to stop the changes.

One of the major criticisms has been the incredible pace at which Congress has been driving the process, often ignoring the input of scientists, environmentalists and small-scale producers.

There’s also been confusion about what the draft text has actually contained at various stages. According to the Comitê Brasil, a coalition of which WWF is part, the draft bill text is "full of ambiguities designed to bend socio-environmental criteria to satisfy the specific needs of the large-scale agribusiness interests, thereby running against the Constitution and the international climate commitments made by [Brazil’s current and previous] governments."

Postponement of the voting will give both politicians and the public more time to analyse the implications of the changes to the law.

Of course it’s not only opponents of the changes who are seizing the opportunity of more time. It’s already clear that the agribusiness lobby plan to use the coming months to reverse some of the positive amendments to the text that were made in the Senate this autumn. And that means we will have to work hard to keep environmental issues on the agenda.

"We are calling on society to be vigilant in regard to this highly complex issue,” warns WWF‘s CEO in Brazil, Maria Cecília Wey de Brito, who urges Brazilians to ensure that the House of Representatives does not approve the text without correcting its flaws.

“President Dilma Rousseff made a commitment during her election campaign that she would not permit any new waves of deforestation. It is of fundamental importance that she should exercise her power of veto and eliminate those amendments that concede amnesty for environmental crimes and stimulate new deforestation."

Last month, WWF and a coalition of concerned NGOs in Brazil handed over a petition of 1.5 million signatures to the President. The petition represents the voices of Brazilians who oppose the law - which a recent poll found to be as much as 80% of the population.

We gave our backing to those voices by launching an international email campaign. You can send an email to President Rousseff today.

While the current draft of the law (revised by the Senate) is an improvement on the original proposal, there are still many clauses that we consider unacceptable. Here’s a snapshot…

(To recap first on the current law: in the Amazon, landowners are legally required to preserve 80% of the forest on their land. Any deforestation beyond 20% is illegal, which leads to fines and the obligation to restore the deforested area. There are also certain areas that are permanently protected from deforestation because of their role in preventing soil erosion and flooding, like steep slopes, hilltops and riverbanks. Again, deforestation is illegal and subject to fines and restoration.)

The revised Forest Law would:

Provide amnesty for areas illegally deforested before July 2008, including riversides and springs, and reduce the obligation to reforest.

Alter the definition of a hilltop, making many areas more vulnerable.

Make it possible to obtain amnesty and exemption from reforestation simply through a declaration that the deforestation took place before 2008, with no requirement for objective proofs like satellite monitoring.

Make it possible, in cases where some form of restoration is still required, to use non-native species for 50% of the area, which could fuel the planting of oil palm or eucalyptus monocultures and negatively impact biodiversity.

Allow illegal deforestation to be compensated for through restoration in places other than where the deforestation took place, condemning whole regions to become 'monoculture deserts' especially in the Brazilian south and south-east.

Allow highly polluting activities like shrimp farming in coastal areas that are fundamental to mangrove swamp ecology.

We'll keep you up to date with developments - and we’ll be calling on you in the New Year to help step up the pressure on Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff, who still has the power to veto destructive elements of the proposed changes to the law.

IS GOD BRAZILIAN?

2011-12-15T17:27:00.003-02:00

Chevron's oil spill off the coast of Brazil.

Brazil got lucky this time in that the spill came on a Chevron project rather than on a Brazilian Petrobras project. Pointing the finger at the bad gringo corporation is a great smokescreen to hide the fact that Brazil is investing billions in dangerous extreme deep-water drilling that will inevitably produce its share of accidents, not to mention the fossil fuel contribution to global warming. There is so much deep-down oil off the coast Rio de Janeiro state that ex-President Lula and many others previously concluded that "God is Brazilian."

Treehugger reports about the current situation:

Things just keep getting worse for Chevron. First, a deepwater drilling mishap off the coast of Brazil last month caused thousands of barrels of oil to spill into the Atlantic, which only after some dodging did Chevron take responsibility for, followed by Brazil's petroleum agency deciding to suspend the company's drilling rights altogether. And then there are the fines which could end up costing Chevron close to $100 million. But lo, it gets worst yet. Today, the oil giant admitted that the situation is far from resolved as many had assumed. That's right, the leak continues, and Chevron's not sure when it can be stopped.

[Update: The Wall Street Journal reports that "A Brazilian federal prosecutor on Wednesday asked a judge to shut down all Chevron Corp. and Transocean Ltd. operations in Brazil in a lawsuit that seeks some 20 billion Brazilian reais ($11 billion) in damages from the companies, the latest legal broadside to the firms since oil leaked from a well they operate in early November."]

[Update 2: Reuters has an interesting analysis by Jeb Blount that says there's a new breed of Federal prosecutors who are taking aggressive stands in defense of the environment and it is scaring investors. Maybe Brazilian public opinion which has become strongly pro-environment in the populous urban areas is beginning to have an impact. Know hope.]

Weeks after the spill began in early November, loosing an estimated 110,000 gallons in the waters 230 miles off the coast of Rio de Janeiro, Chevron moved to plug it with cement. Still, several hundreds of gallons continued to trickle up from the sea floor.

And now, nearly a month after their initial fix was put in place, Chevron Brazil's environmental supervisor Luiz Alberto Pimenta Borges told leaders that oil is still leaking, and that his company isn't sure quite how or when it can be capped.

This ongoing spill is Brazil's worst in recent memory, though many fear that it will hardly be the last. Allowing companies like Chevron rights to drill in the region's oil-rich Frade field was just one element of the nation's ambitious energy ambitions directed at becoming one of the world's leading exporters of petroleum over the course of the next decade. The latest incident serves as a unwelcome reminder of the dangers of offshore drilling; evidence of just how easily things can go wrong, and just how difficult they can be to right.

And guess who is BRAZIL'S NEWEST OIL PARTNER

A DAY OF VISIONARIES FROM ACRE

2011-12-15T08:43:00.001-02:00

Raimundo Irineu Serra (Mestre Irineu)

Françisco Alves Mendes Filho Cena (Chico Mendes)

Today is the anniversary of the birth of two great men who received their missions deep in Brazil's western-most state of Acre, back when it truly seemed as the end of the world. But for them it was the center of the universe and a place from which they could launch their visions into the world.

Mestre Irineu (December 15, 1892 — July 6, 1971) was born in the northeastern state of Maranhão and migrated to Acre where he became a rubber-tapper and later founded the syncretic religion (mixing African, Indian and Christian elements) Santo Daime which has since spread around the globe.

Following Mestre Irineu's birth by 52 years, Chico Mendes (December 15, 1944 – December 22, 1988) was a Brazilian rubber tapper in Acre, and a unionist and environmental activist. He fought to stop the burning and logging of the Amazon rainforest to clear land for cattle ranching, and founded a national union of rubber tappers in an attempt to preserve their profession and the rainforest that it relied upon. He was murdered in 1988 by ranchers opposed to his activism.

The life and actions of Chico Mendes live on as a global movement for rainforest protection and sustainability and most recently inspired the campaign of Marina Silva who garnered an astounding 20 million votes in the first round of the Presidential election and placed the Green agenda on the center stage of Brazilian politics.

Here is a Santo Daime hymn celebrating Mestre Irienu (sung at the Luiz Mendes community of Fortaleza in rural Acre):

A DROP OF WATER + 10

2011-12-14T13:37:00.008-02:00

A brilliant Brazilian campaign against the Belomonte monster dam, with some of the country's biggest stars, is going viral -- more than 1,200,00 hits so far in the Brazilian version. The English version is above. Please help amplify it -- sign and share now.

When you start the video, there should be English subtitles. If not, click on the red CC button at the lower right of the player frame and choose English. Also, you can eliminate the captions by clicking on the blank red button.

The petition (in English and Portuguese) is here.

ALL MY RELATIONS

2011-12-13T15:26:00.000-02:00

I have this little altar where I place the symbols of some of my important pieces, shift them around, and look at them in diverse ways. It's a fun meditation. Sometimes, when it seems too fascinating, I get get saved by remembering the Buddha raising his hand and saying, "Finger pointing to the moon -- look at the moon, not the finger." And then I recall being told, "Don't look at altars. Something was put in your heart for a reason. Just look in your heart." Can't really talk about that but I sometimes I get a few pointers at the altar -- like now -- and I feel grateful.

FRIDA KALHO

2011-12-12T08:37:00.000-02:00

WHO BY FIRE?

2011-12-12T07:39:00.002-02:00

Based on an ancient Hebrew chant of atonement, Leonard Cohen's classic wake-up call offers a profound response to the hubris that dominates our world.

"Who shall I say is calling?"

THE TIMES (CLIMATE) ARE A CHANGIN

2011-12-11T12:50:00.002-02:00

Disastrous Deal in Durban: "The main element of the deal struck in Durban is that all the world’s countries will start discussions next year aimed at signing an agreement by 2015 that will come into force in 2020." (read more)

Nina Simone's cover of the Bob Dylan classic has the perfect tone of righteous anger:

Come gather 'round people
Wherever you roam
And admit that the waters
Around you have grown
And accept it that soon
You'll be drenched to the bone
If your time to you is worth savin'
Then you better start swimmin'
Or you'll sink like a stone
For the times they are a-changin'

The message from today's youth is "You've been negotiating all my life."

ADDICTED TO RISK

2011-12-10T12:42:00.001-02:00

Selected as one of the best TED Talks of the year, here's a sample of Naomi at her best.

[Note: Obama decided to reduce the political risk of tar sand oil by deferring the Keystone pipeline decision until after the 2012 election. Now, Canada must decide whether to wait for the US market to open or to build a pipeline to the Pacific for shipment to Asia. It's all about where, when and how and not about NOT doing it -- that's how the addiction works.]

HOW TO ENJOY LIFE

2011-12-10T09:18:00.000-02:00

Looks like fun. So simple.

CAPITALISM AND THE CLIMATE

2011-12-09T12:50:00.001-02:00

Once again, Naomi Klein nails it. Capitalism-vs-climate is a must read.

Klein's view will seem radical to those steeped too deeply in market mythologies that don't work well as limits are reached. Here's a brief helpful background video about why we are stuck in a growth economy. If you want a more in-depth ecological view check out Herman Daly's Toward a Steady State Economy.

This is not an ideological rant. It's the emerging ancient-future awareness that nature is reciprocal -- the only way to keep taking is to keep giving back and there's no place other than the earth itself where capital accumulation leads to a virtuous cycle of abundance and consumption. We reap what we sow -- nothing more and nothing less. Mutuality more than competition leads to survival.

IF PRAYER WOULD DO IT

2011-12-09T11:29:00.000-02:00

If prayer would do it
I'd pray.

If reading esteemed thinkers would do it
I'd be halfway through the Patriarchs.

If discourse would do it
I'd be sitting with His Holiness
every moment he was free.

If contemplation would do it
I'd have translated the Periodic Table
to hermit poems, converting
matter to spirit.

If even fighting would do it
I'd already be a blackbelt.

If anything other than love could do it
I've done it already
and left the hardest for last.

~ Stephen Levine ~

(Breaking the Drought)

IS DILMA DECIDING TO SIDE WITH THE BIG POLLUTERS SEEKING A CLIMATE TREATY DELAY IN DURBAN?

2011-12-05T13:32:00.000-02:00

In a shocking development, the BBC reports:

The politics of the UN climate process are undergoing something of a fundamental transformation. Increasingly, countries are dividing into one group that wants a new global treaty as soon as possible - the EU plus lots of developing countries - and another that prefers a delay and perhaps something less rigorous than a full treaty. The US, Russia and Japan were already arguing for a longer timeframe. ...But BBC News has learned that Brazil and India took the same position.

AVAAZ says, "President Dilma is considering the unthinkable -- siding with the US and other big polluters at UN climate negotiations in Durban. We have to bring her to her senses before it's too late." Here is the petition.

"THE FIRST TIME EVER I SAW YOUR FACE"

2011-12-04T06:38:00.000-02:00

Possibly the greatest love song ever written, "The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face" is a 1957 folk song written by Ewan MacColl for his wife Peggy Seeger. It was popularized by Roberta Flack and became a breakout hit for the singer after it appeared in the 1971 Clint Eastward film Play Misty for Me. Though the song first appeared on Flack's 1969 album First Take, it topped the Billboard Hot 100 and won the Grammy Award for Song of the Year three years later.

FROM THE FASTEST FINGERS IN THE WORLD

2011-12-04T06:20:00.000-02:00

Paco de Lucia, John McLaughlin and Al di Meola at the Mediterranean Sundance

THE SAMAÚMA IS STILL CALLING

2011-12-03T12:58:00.004-02:00

Four years ago -- during more ecologically sensitive times -- the Brazilian Government, the NGOs and the World Bank all cooperated to produce this magnificent video. That was before Dilma Rousseff and her developmentalist comrades in mining, energy and agribusiness took control and decided to ramrod the Belo Monte Monster Dam and the weakening of Brazil's Forest Code. As the political mood changed and the world looked on aghast, the Call of the Samaúma has become even more urgent. Please join the beat and pass it on.

Amazon Watch and Comitê Brasil are excellent sites to watch for latest developments.

BRAZIL WINS FOSSIL OF THE DAY AWARD

2011-12-03T11:36:00.000-02:00

For the first time in the history of the "Fossil of the Day" award, Brazil took first place for its ridiculous statements in defense of its new forest code. The Climate Action Network (CAN) -- a worldwide network of over 700 Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) in more than 90 countries, working to promote government and individual action to limit human-induced climate change to ecologically sustainable levels -- is giving the awards for absurd statements being made at the UN Climate talks being held in Durban, South Africa. Read more about it here.

HERE'S TO THE CRAZY ONES

2011-12-02T18:56:00.000-02:00

"Here's to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently. They're not fond of rules, and they have no respect for the status quo. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify and vilify them. About the only thing you can't do is ignore them because they change things. They push the human race forward. And while some may see them as crazy, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do."

THE WORLD TO DILMA: Save the Amazon

2011-12-02T14:16:00.000-02:00

Thousands marched through the streets of São Paulo earlier this year.

1,408,899 people from more than 100 countries have signed a petition at Avaaz.org calling on President Dilma to make Brazil an international leader on the environment by taking immediate action to save Brazil's precious forests.

Now, with a very bad Forest Code on a fast track through Congress, a presidential veto may be the only way to save the forest.

Read WWF's excellent review of the current situation.

Here's a link (Google translation) to the reports from the coalition of activist in defense of the forest.

THREATS TO AMAZÔNIA: An excellent analysis from Philip Fearnside

2011-12-01T21:24:00.001-02:00

Re-posted from the Financial Times

The Amazonian biome faces multiple threats, ranging from deforestation to climate change. Although the forest’s vastness can give a false sense of security, many of the forces leading to its destruction are expected to increase.

Deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon continues, with various forces and actors dominant in different locations. Other Amazonian countries, such as Bolivia, Peru and Ecuador, hold approximately one-third of the biome and also have advancing deforestation.

Cattle pasture is the main cause of deforestation in most of the Brazilian Amazon. But soyabeans are also important along the southern edge of the forest, especially in the state of Mato Grosso. Soya is pushing cattle into the interior of the Amazon, causing “indirect” deforestation.

In addition to the visible economy, based on the sale of products such as beef and soya, there are illegal forces linked to deforestation, including illegal logging. This is as true of small (if increasingly organised) landless squatters as it is of large land grabbers, called grileiros, who illegally obtain claims to vast tracts of forest.

Deforestation also plays a role in land speculation and the laundering of money from drugs, corruption and tax evasion.

Deforestation in Brazil remains a serious problem despite the fall in rates between 2005 and 2010. Only part of this decrease was the result of government programmes or stricter enforcement of environmental laws.

The main reason was that the international price of beef and soya fell from 2003 to 2007, and this was followed by the global economic collapse that began in 2008.

Over that period, the Brazilian real almost doubled relative to currencies such as the US dollar. This cut the profits of commodity exporters deeply, as all their expenses remained in reals while their revenues were in diminished foreign currencies.

Such macroeconomic “windfalls” can help contain deforestation, but they are only temporary.

Indeed, the fragility of the decline in deforestation was exposed this year, when clearing advanced, especially in Mato Grosso.

This was in anticipation of a general pardon of past environmental crimes as part of a congressional revision of Brazil’s “Forest Code”. The revised code, passed by the lower house in May and nearing a critical vote in the Senate, did not include forgiveness for violations committed in 2011. However, the lower-house version granted “amnesty” for violations to 2008, fuelling expectations of further amnesties.

The revised law is only part of the tremendous headway recently made in weakening environmental protections. Pending legislation tabled by the “ruralist bloc”, the congressional representatives of large landholders, would strip IBAMA, the federal environmental agency, of its power to inspect farmers and fine wrongdoers. Another proposal aims to prevent the federal government from creating more protected areas and indigenous reserves unless local politicians agree, which they rarely do.

In addition, Dilma Rousseff, the president, has pushed hard to curtail the environmental licensing process for infrastructure projects. The government has launched a programme to build dams and open highways, pipelines and electrical transmission lines into Amazonia. Such initiatives mean more, rather than less, deforestation.

The worst is the BR-319 highway that would connect Manaus in central Amazonia with the “arc of deforestation” along the forest’s southern edge.

The existing road network in northern Amazonia, plus planned additional roads, would make approximately half of what remains of Brazil’s Amazon forest accessible to migration.

In addition to outright deforestation, climate change represents another significant threat.

Much of Amazonia is expected to become hotter and drier because of global warming. The conversion of ever more forest into cattle pasture, which reduces water recycling, only adds to this process.

Amazonia is already experiencing severe droughts, and these are expected to become more severe and frequent.

Droughts are caused by two phenomena, both linked to global warming. The first is El Niño, the warming of surface water in the tropical Pacific Ocean (as happened before the forest fires of 1997-98 and 2003 in Roraima state).

The second is the Atlantic dipole, caused by a warming of surface water in the Atlantic (as happened before the fires of 2005 and 2010 in Acre state).

There is substantial uncertainty in global climate models as to the severity and timing of future Amazonian droughts. The UK Meteorological Office’s Hadley Centre model has traditionally been the most catastrophic.

However, a new version tested in 2011 showed much less forest die-off than its predecessor. Most other models also show Amazonia becoming drier and hotter. These include the NCAR model from the US, and models from Germany, Japan and Canada.

The GFDL model from the US projected more rain in Amazonia at the time of the last report from the Intergovernmental Model on Climate Change. But it has since had an error corrected and no longer shows this encouraging result.

Be that as it may, substantial areas of forest are near their limits for tolerating greater heat and drought, especially in eastern and southern Amazonia.

Forest fires, which are not included in current climate models, increase the risk. Forest death would be followed by transformation either to savannah or low-biomass woody vegetation.

International agreement to control global warming is therefore an urgent priority.

Otherwise, forest die-off implies significant carbon emissions, making climate change even more difficult to control at a global scale.

Philip Fearnside is a researcher at the National Institute for Research in Amazonia at Manaus, Brazil.

FIDDLING WHILE THE AMAZON BURNS

2011-12-01T20:41:00.000-02:00

Re-posted from The Economist

Keeping the world’s biggest forest standing depends on greens, Amerindians and enlightened farmers working together—if lawmakers let them

Dec 3rd 2011 | JACI-PARANÁ, RONDÔNIA

DRIVE out of Porto Velho, the capital of the Amazonian state of Rondônia, and you see the trouble the world’s largest forest is in. Lorry after lorry trundles by laden with logs; more logs lie by the road, to be collected by smugglers who dumped them on the rumour of a (rare) roadcheck. Charred tree-stumps show where ranchers burned what the loggers left behind; a few cattle roam sparsely through the scrubby fields. In places the acid subsoil shows through, sandy and bone-pale. Seen from above, the roads look like hatchet blows, with dirt tracks radiating outward like thinner wounds. The picture is reproduced across the Amazon’s “arc of deforestation” (see map).

The Brazilian Amazon is now home to 24m people, many of them settlers who trekked those roads in the 1960s and 1970s, lured by a government promise that those who farmed “unproductive” land could keep it. Chaotic or corrupt land registries left some without secure title. Rubber-tappers, loggers, miners and charcoal-burners came too. The most recent arrivals are 20,000 construction workers building dams on the Madeira and Xingu rivers to provide electricity to Brazil’s populous south. They have attracted some 80,000 camp-followers, many of whom squat on supposedly protected land.

The population of Jaci-Paraná, the nearest town to the Jirau dam being built on the Madeira, has risen from 3,500 to 21,000 in a decade—but it still has just four police. Prostitutes and drug-dealers do well. On payday, says Maria Pereira, a teacher, busloads of construction workers hit town to drink and fight. Knife-killings are common. When the dam is finished, many of the new residents will move on. Behind them, a bit more of the Amazon will be gone.

Brazil’s government no longer encourages cutting down the forest. Nearly half of it now lies within indigenous reserves, or state and federal parks where most logging is banned. Private landowners must abide by the Forest Code, a law dating from 1965 that requires them to leave the forest standing on part of their farms (four-fifths in the Amazon, less elsewhere), and in particular around the sources and banks of rivers, and on hillsides.

But the code is routinely flouted. Less than 1% of the fines levied for failing to observe it are ever paid, because of uncertain ownership and poor enforcement. The Suruí, an Amerindian people, recently mapped its territory in Rondônia, on paper strictly protected. The tribe was shocked to find that 7% had been cleared.

In Brasília 2,000km (1,250 miles) and a world away, politicians are haggling over laws that will affect the fate of the forest. Some legislators are pushing a bill that would give Congress, rather than the president, the power to create new reserves. That would probably mean fewer new ones—a blow for the forest, says Ivaneide Bandeira of Kanindé, a non-profit group in Rondônia. “Indigenous people protect the forest better than anyone else,” she says.

The Senate is poised to vote on a new version of the Forest Code, already approved by the lower house. The president, Dilma Rousseff, wants a final version on her desk before Christmas. Everyone agrees that change is needed. The share of private land that must be set aside has risen since 1965 and farmers who were once in compliance but omitted to update their paperwork can end up lumped in with lawbreakers. Kátia Abreu, a senator who is the president of the main farm lobby, says farmers find such uncertainty “deeply worrying”. Environmentalists dislike it too, since it encourages loggers and land-grabbers by fuelling disrespect for the law.

But the consensus has gone no further. The farm lobby wanted all past land clearance regularised, arguing that if farmers had to replant trees, crop output would fall, food prices soar and poor Brazilians go hungry. Greens countered that an amnesty would fuel future deforestation. So far, at least, the farm lobby is winning. The current draft allows farmers to dodge fines for illegal logging and postpone their obligation to replant by simply declaring that their violations were committed before July 2008 and by enrolling in a vague and leisurely “environmental recovery programme”, to be run by individual states.

“This is an amnesty in all but name,” says Maria Cecília Brito, the head of WWF-Brazil, a conservation group. “Without safeguards, states will be able to postpone forever the requirement to act.” After several years in which the annual rate of deforestation fell, this year it has risen, possibly because landowners think the new code will let them get away with it. Law-abiding farmers are outraged. When Darci Ferrarin bought a large farm in Mato Grosso in 1998, he knew that its riverbanks had been illegally cleared. He paid to replant. “Those who deforested illegally should go to jail,” declares his son, Darci Junior.

The only promising aspect of the new code, thinks Roberto Smeraldi of Amazônia Brasileira, a green NGO, is that it offers benefits such as subsidised loans to landowners who have always stuck by the rules, or who are reforesting faster than the law demands. But he laments the missed opportunity for a grand bargain to align opposed interests. A cap-and-trade system like those used to limit industrial pollution in rivers could have helped farmers short of set-aside to comply with the law by paying neighbours with more than the legal minimum to maintain it. That would both have spared farmers from costly replanting and cut future deforestation by making standing forests financially valuable.

Ms Rousseff promises to veto any amnesty for illegal deforesters. But the figleaf of the “environmental recovery programme” may give her scope to temporise, and with a heavy legislative schedule she may be tempted to do so. If she does, the Amazon’s best hope will lie with the enlightened farmers and indigenous tribes who care for their land better than the state is willing to.

For Mr Ferrarin, the way to halt deforestation is to use existing farmland better. Almost half his farm of 13,350 hectares (33,000 acres) is set aside as forest; the rest supports 3,000 cattle as well as soya and several other crops, farmed in rotation. Innovative no-till methods cut carbon emissions, fertiliser use and labour. The Ferrarins run workshops to teach other farmers about such “integrated farming” techniques. Mr Ferrarin’s daughter, Valkiria, runs a cattle-breeding programme, with an on-site IVF clinic where embryos from prize animals are implanted in surrogates. A productive farm can support an extended family for several generations, he says.

Cassio Carvalho do Val’s father settled in Redenção in Pará in 1959. It was then virgin rainforest: the last 150km of the journey was by donkey, carrying dried meat, rice and beans. Nine-tenths of the 300,000 hectares he was granted has since been sold, but the farm is still vast (the average farm in the United States comprises around 160 hectares), and unproductive, with just one cow per hectare of pasture. But his son has started to fatten his cows with grain and plans to try integrated farming. “It’s the dream of every crop farmer to be a rancher,” he says with a laugh. “It’s so much easier.” But he thinks he needs to keep up with the times.

The Suruí set an example

Some of Brazil’s indigenous peoples are redoubling their efforts to protect the standing forest. The 1,300 Suruí have moved their 25 villages to the borders of their territory to get early warning of incursions. With help from Kanindé and others, since 2005 they have started to reforest where intruders have cleared. To the inexperienced eye, the new trees already look ancient (though to the Suruí the sparser cover is still obvious). Next year the tribe will host other indigenous peoples who want to repair deforestation on their own lands. They hope to start teaching non-indigenous folk, too.

The Suruí are the first Brazilian tribal people to set up a REDD project, an international aid scheme to prevent deforestation. Up to 10% of the income generated will go to local non-Indians, to show them that standing forest can create jobs and income. “We are not saying, don’t use the forest,” explains the chief, Almir Narayamoga Suruí. “We are saying you should think about the medium and long term when you decide how to use it.” That will be easier if the politicians approve a Forest Code that looks to the future, not the past—and then provide the means to enforce it.

HELP NEEDED: A CALL FOR TRANSLATORS

2011-12-01T13:02:00.000-02:00

The award-winning documentary (below) gives an excellent review of the struggle for the Sanctuary of Shamans in Brasilia. It needs to be translated from Portuguese to English. If you are bi-lingual (English and Portuguese) and would like to help, please contact Marcello Pedroso -- cellopedroso@gmail.com -- who is coordinating the group translation project.

Here is the video in Portuguese:

THE BLESSING OF FRIENDSHIP RENEWED

2011-11-30T15:36:00.001-02:00

Grandmother Agness Pilgrim and me -- Photo by Marisol Villanueva

My October reunion in Brasilia with Grandmother Agnes Pilgrim, one of my dearest friends from Oregon, brought tears of joy to my eyes. At near 90 years of walking this earth, she traveled all the way to Brazil to be with the Council of 13 Indigenous Grandmothers. May the Creator grant her many more years of spreading her smiles and blessings around the world.

Salvé Vovó Aggie

PLEASE HELP OUR FRIENDS ALVARO TUKANO AND PAJÉ SANTXÎE

2011-11-29T23:22:00.014-02:00

Eye-to-eye with Alvaro Tukano

[Correction: In an earlier version of this post Alvaro Tukano was mistakenly identified as Pajé Santxiê. Sorry for the confusion. See a Pajé Santxîe photo at the end of this post.]

On a recent trip to Brasilia, I made a friend. It was an "Indian sort of thing" of looking into each others eyes and "just knowing." What happened is that I asked Alvaro Tukano if I could take his picture. He surprised me by grabbing my camera and giving it to someone else to take our picture. He looked into my eyes and said, "You are a warrior of the forest. You have friends. We need more friends." It was a done deal. Perhaps the "indigenous eye" already saw this post in the mind but I'm only now becoming aware of the story as I write this post.

"It's complicated", as they love to say in Brazil, but Alvaro Tukano knows that friendship can cut through the complexities. Here's the short version of the problem and how you can help:

There's a very special area within the Federal District of Brasilia that remains as a remnant wildland cerrado and sits on top of natural clear water springs that feed into the city's water supply. The area's status was never completely clarified under the general plan for Brasilia and for the last 40 years Indians of various ethnic lines have been occupying it with a dream of creating a Shamans Sanctuary. The Indian agency had been petitioned based on the standard unit of 50 hectares (125 acres) which is designated for protected settlements. In response, the Indian agency proposed a 4 hectare site which is unacceptable. Pajé Santxiê and his colleagues have been leading forces insisting that Santuário Não Se Move (Sanctuary Does Not Move).

The slow and difficult negotiations have gone on for years until recently when everything changed. The newly-elected governor of the Federal District in collusion with a billionaire developer decided that this would be the perfect place for an up-scale eco-smart pricey residential development that could be ready as a green showcase for the coming World Cup soccer games and the Olympics. As the pressure mounted the Indians were harassed and finally attacked by a force of hundreds of police, private security personnel using pepper spray and the current range of tactics used against "occupation" people and demonstrators.

Now the location has become a gathering place for sustainable development activists who are struggling against Brazil running roughshod over nature and indigenous peoples at many locations across Brazil including the Belo Monte Monster Dam, the devastating revisions of the national Forest Code, and the continuing murder of Indigenous activists.

In the nation's capital the battle lines have been drawn at the proposed Shamans Sanctuary. You can read more about it (in Google translation from Portuguese) and view videos at here and here and here and here.

HERE IS HOW YOU CAN HELP

PLEASE SIGN THE PETITION (Google translation from Portuguese). International support is critical because Brazil is trying to polish it's green image before the court of world opinion.

Here is the sign-on in Portuguese but only the first three lines are required as follows: #1 - Your Name; #2 - Your email; #3 -- Your city.

Please share this post widely. It's an easy way for you to make friends with Alvaro Tukano, Pajé Santxiê and their fellow warriors at a critical moment in their struggles.

Here is a picture of Pajé Santxiê addressing Oregon's Grandmother Agnes Pilgrim at the Council of 13 Indigenous Grandmothers held in Brasilia in late October.

View more photos at the Sanctury's Facebook page.

LET THERE BE LIGHT

2011-11-28T12:18:00.003-02:00

A GOOD IDEA: Let's All do It

2011-11-27T22:50:00.000-02:00

... or at least start by singing about doing it. Even if the world stays as it is, we don't have to give them our sense of humor.

ONE OF MY ALL-TIME FAVORITES

2011-11-27T21:00:00.000-02:00

Thanks to Juba for posting this marvelous find.

SPECTACULAR DIGITAL CULTURE FESTIVAL IN RIO

2011-11-27T18:25:00.001-02:00

The Festival of CulturaDigital.Br begins next Thursday (02 December) with ex-Minister of Culture and world musician Gilberto Gil as its special ambassador.

Check out the cutting edge website which is in both Portuguese and English.

Here's a teaser video:

THE DAILY VIEW: Forest Beings

2011-11-27T17:07:00.001-02:00

When I was a child I loved to imagine faces and critters in the clouds or cracks in the sidewalks or, especially, in the bark of trees. A few weeks ago I spent a few hours wandering through the forest trying to recapture that child's way of seeing. I was able to record some of the results with the camera. (Guess I'm still crazy after all these years. Graças a Deus!)

SWITCHING ON THE LIGHTS AFTER BLACK FRIDAY: Two Options

2011-11-27T13:42:00.004-02:00

"One hundred thousand people flocked to see the offical festive switch-on of the metal structure floating on Rio's Rodrigo de Freitas Lagoon. The 542 tonne structure, wrapped in 3.3 million light bulbs was the centrepiece of an eight minute fireworks show, which has become one of the city's main tourist attractions. More than a million people are expected to view the structure before the lights are turned off on Three Kings' Day on January 6." (via UK Telegraph)

And far away, after a year of devastating forest fires, another option -- hardly a grand spectacle or major tourist attraction but it seems like a great concept for smaller venues:

BAD FOREST CODE PASSES BRAZILIAN SENATE

2011-11-25T20:10:00.000-02:00

In what may go down as one of the worst environmental crimes of the 21st Century, the Brazilian Senate voted on Wednesday to retain most of the bad changes to the national Forest Code that had passed the House of Deputies earlier this year. Brazil's international commitments to mitigating climate change, maintaining biodiversity and it's status before the upcoming RIO+20 global environmental meetings are now on collision course with the insatiable demand of its agri-business sector. In the coming months the issue will be laid squarely before President Dilma Rousseff who has thus far avoided comment.

re-posted from JustMeans

A revised version of Brazil's Forest Code, a piece of legislation that regulates the use of forest coverage on private properties in Brazil, and whose draft was approved in Congress on Wednesday (23), has sent shockwaves through the sustainability community in the country and abroad.

An incensed debate has gripped the country over the last year, which culminated in yesterday's vote. The new draft, which is designed to meet the requirements of the rural business, has been rushed through the House and the Senate and did not take into account expert opinion from scientists, who object to the new version of the law vehemently.

"The report continues to pardon those who deforested illegally and will promote more deforestation. What used to be an environmental crime now has become fantastic business", said Mrcio Astrini, Greenpeace's head of Amazon campaign.

Scientists have warned the new law will open way for the clearance of more than 175 million acres, or roughly the size of Germany, Italy and Austria combined, which would be come mostly pasture for livestock and soy monocultures to feed cattle, mostly.

This volume of deforestation would release more than 25 billion tons of CO2 into the atmosphere, or four times the goal for global reductions in greenhouse gas emissions under the Kyoto Protocol during 2008-12.
WWF, which has been campaigning against the revised legislation from the beginning of the debate, said the proposed changes severely contradict Brazil's efforts to become an environmental and sustainability leader on the global stage.

"Brazil will be cutting itself off from a growing global market for responsibly sourced goods, in addition to forgoing the countless benefits provided by a healthy Amazon, such as clean air and water, stable weather patterns and various other environmental services", it said.

"We are watching, just before Brazil hosts Rio + 20, a clear attempt to dismantle Brazil's environmental legislation," stated WWF-Brazil's CEO Maria Cecilia Wey de Brito. "This is something unprecedented in our history."

The bill will go back to the House before being sent to President Dilma Rousseff, who can still veto it. "In the next phase, she will have to keep her word to veto or break her campaign promises", said Mr. Gasparini in reference to Ms. Rousseff's promise to not pardon those who have deforested.

The current Forest Code was written in 1965 and requires landowners to keep a certain percentage of their land as untouched forest, from 20 percent in certain areas to 80 per cent in the Amazon. The new laws would give amnesty from heavy fines to landowners who cleared forest illegally between 1965 and July 2008.

Rules related to the clearing of hills would be relaxed and forest areas near rivers would have to be between 100 and 330 feet from the river bank, which conservationists say will are not enough.

A recent report compiled by Imazon and Proforest found that Brazil lags behind other BRIC countries in terms of legislation that protects forest coverage. Compared with China, Russia and India, Brazil loses the race towards sustainability by deforesting more than it reforests.

"GAIA IS A TOUGH BITCH": Lynn Margulis, RIP

2011-11-25T15:12:00.009-02:00

Lynn Margulis receiving the National Science Award -- photo by Paul Hosefos/The New York Times

Lynn Margulis, who was one of the giants of evolutionary biology and the co-author with James Lovelock of the original Gaiia Hypothesis, has died. Famously and controversially she has asserted that life at the cellular level is a community and that mutuality or symbiosis is as significant as random mutation in evolution. She also challenged the New Age fuzzy-wuzzy gentle Earth Goddess spin given to the Gaiia Hypothesis saying that, "Gaiia is a tough bitch." But, in this era of climate change, her observation of what happens when science and culture clash strikes me as the most poignant: "If science doesn't fit in with the cultural milieu, people dismiss science, they never reject their cultural milieu!"

Even though I understand little of the deep science that underlies her work, I've always intuitively identified with her spirit and mission ("I didn't believe things from books or authorities; I wanted to find out for myself."). In reading about her today, I got a hint as to a possible source of my affinity toward her -- she was born in Chicago on March 5, 1938, as was I. Maybe, it's in the stars.

Continue over the jump for a text about Gaiia and a great video interview.

"Gaia Is a Tough Bitch" by Lynn Margulis

My primary work has always been in cell evolution, yet for a long time I've been associated with James Lovelock and his Gaia hypothesis. In the early seventies, I was trying to align bacteria by their metabolic pathways. I noticed that all kinds of bacteria produced gases. Oxygen, hydrogen sulfide, carbon dioxide, nitrogen, ammonia — more than thirty different gases are given off by the bacteria whose evolutionary history I was keen to reconstruct. Why did every scientist I asked believe that atmospheric oxygen was a biological product but the other atmospheric gases — nitrogen, methane, sulfur, and so on — were not? "Go talk to Lovelock," at least four different scientists suggested. Lovelock believed that the gases in the atmosphere were biological. He had, by this time, a very good idea of which live organisms were probably "breathing out" the gases in question. These gases were far too abundant in the atmosphere to be formed by chemical and physical processes alone. He argued that the atmosphere was a physiological and not just a chemical system.

The Gaia hypothesis states that the temperature of the planet, the oxidation state and other chemistry of all of the gases of the lower atmosphere (except helium, argon, and other nonreactive ones) are produced and maintained by the sum of life. We explored how this could be. How could the temperature of the planet be regulated by living beings? How could the atmospheric gas composition — the 20-percent oxygen and the one to two parts per million methane, for example — be actively maintained by living matter?

It took me days of conversation even to begin to understand Lovelock's thinking. My first response, just like that of the neo-Darwinists, was "business as usual." I would say, "Oh, you mean that organisms adapt to their environment." He would respond, very sweetly, "No, I don't mean that." Lovelock kept telling me what he really meant, and it was hard for me to listen. Since his was a new idea, he hadn't yet developed an appropriate vocabulary. Perhaps I helped him work out his explanations, but I did very little else.

The Gaia hypothesis is a biological idea, but it's not human-centered. Those who want Gaia to be an Earth goddess for a cuddly, furry human environment find no solace in it. They tend to be critical or to misunderstand. They can buy into the theory only by misinterpreting it. Some critics are worried that the Gaia hypothesis says the environment will respond to any insults done to it and the natural systems will take care of the problems. This, they maintain, gives industries a license to pollute. Yes, Gaia will take care of itself; yes, environmental excesses will be ameliorated, but it's likely that such restoration of the environment will occur in a world devoid of people.

Lovelock would say that Earth is an organism. I disagree with this phraseology. No organism eats its own waste. I prefer to say that Earth is an ecosystem, one continuous enormous ecosystem composed of many component ecosystems. Lovelock's position is to let the people believe that Earth is an organism, because if they think it is just a pile of rocks they kick it, ignore it, and mistreat it. If they think Earth is an organism, they'll tend to treat it with respect. To me, this is a helpful cop-out, not science. Yet I do agree with Lovelock when he claims that most of the things scientists do are not science either. And I realize that by taking the stance he does he is more effective than I am in communicating Gaian ideas.

If science doesn't fit in with the cultural milieu, people dismiss science, they never reject their cultural milieu! If we are involved in science of which some aspects are not commensurate with the cultural milieu, then we are told that our science is flawed. I suspect that all people have cultural concepts into which science must fit. Although I try to recognize these biases in myself, I'm sure I cannot entirely avoid them. I try to focus on the direct observational aspects of science.

Gaia is a tough bitch — a system that has worked for over three billion years without people. This planet's surface and its atmosphere and environment will continue to evolve long after people and prejudice are gone. (read more with discussion at The Edge)

And here's the interview:

GIVING THANKS

2011-11-24T19:05:00.000-02:00

My mother Alice Zabelin Gold was born in Chicago, Illinois on Thanksgiving Day in 1910, the first of five children born to my Russian immigrant grandparents Barney and Minnie Zabelin who came to the USA for a better life. Alice gave her better life to me. I am eternally grateful.

SITA SINGS THE BLUES

2011-11-24T18:13:00.000-02:00

This marvelous ancient-future animation has been online for a few years but somehow I missed it until now when it gives me a big chuckle and the occasion for a happy share.

Learn more from the animator Nina Paley here.

WORTH PONDERING

2011-11-24T09:56:00.000-02:00

A POIGNANT POINT-OF-VIEW

2011-11-22T14:28:00.000-02:00

From the NY Times columnist Roger Cohen:

In France, according to a Pew Research Center survey, only 27 percent of the population now believes that “our people are not perfect, but our culture is superior.”

I haven’t read such depressing news in a long time. When humility overtakes French culture, it’s over, folks.

Here in the United States, according to the same survey, 60 percent of Americans over 50 believe “our culture is superior.”

I’m not sure what’s more terrifying: the new French modesty or an old U.S. delusion.

GLOBALIZATION'S FINEST

2011-11-22T12:56:00.000-02:00

YES! Our new world of connectivity can be very beautiful.

THE DAILY VIEW: Library Layers

2011-11-05T12:16:00.000-02:00

Libraries can be a playground for the imagination. The Biblioteca Publica in Rio Branco is a marvelous place. Here is a single photo of trees, fish, cars, houses, books and more that I saw while going to the children's area. The child in my eye (and camera) was delighted.

BRAZIL'S RISING INFLUENCE MEETS RESISTANCE

2011-11-05T05:32:00.001-02:00

Noah Friedman-Rudovsky for The New York Times -- Bolivian indigenous groups undertook a 325-mile march from the central lowlands to La Paz, to protest a Brazilian-backed road project through their territory. More Photos »

Re-posted from the NY Times
By SIMON ROMERO

LA PAZ, Bolivia — Sandal-clad indigenous protesters have excoriated their president, calling him a “lackey of Brazil.” Angry demonstrations in front of Brazil’s embassy here denounced its “imperialist” tendencies. Bolivian intellectuals lambasted the “São Paulo bourgeoisie,” likening them to the slave hunters who expanded the boundaries of colonial Brazil.

Such heated words used to be reserved for the United States, which has wielded extraordinary influence across Latin America. But as American dominance in the region recedes and Brazil increasingly flexes its newfound political and economic might, it has begun to experience the pitfalls of the role as well: a pushback against the hemisphere’s rising power.

“Power has shifted from one side of Avenida Arce to the other,” said Fernando Molina, a local newspaper columnist, referring to the street in La Paz where the Brazilian ambassador’s residence sits opposite the towering embassy of the United States.

Brazilian endeavors are being met with wariness in several countries. A proposal to build a road through Guyana’s jungles to its coast has stalled because of fears that Brazil could overwhelm its small neighbor with migration and trade.

In Argentina, officials suspended a large project by a Brazilian mining company, accusing it of failing to hire enough locals. Tension in Ecuador over a hydroelectric plant led to bitter legal battle, and protests by Asháninka Indians in Peru’s Amazon have put in doubt a Brazilian dam project.

But perhaps no Brazilian project in the region has stirred as much ire as the one here.
Financed by Brazil’s national development bank — a financial behemoth that dwarfs the lending of the World Bank and has become a principal means for Brazil to project its power across Latin America and beyond — the plan was to build a road through a remote Bolivian indigenous territory. But it provoked a slow-burning revolt; hundreds of indigenous protesters arrived here in October after a grueling two-month march that took them up the spine of the Andes, denouncing their onetime champion, President Evo Morales, for supporting it.

“Llunk’u of Brazil,” read one of their placards, calling the president a minion of Brazil, in Quechua, an indigenous language. Mr. Morales, Bolivia’s first indigenous president and an avowed environmentalist, suddenly found himself at odds with an important part of his political base, defending a Brazilian project that could increase deforestation. He eventually yielded to the protesters’ demands and ruled out the road though the territory.

Companies from other countries, notably China, are also expanding rapidly in Latin America and occasionally confronting hostility. But Brazil is the region’s largest nation, with a population of about 200 million people, and the size and boldness of its rise over the past decade help explain some of the tension it has generated.

Hundreds of thousands of Brazilian immigrants and their descendants have settled in Paraguay, often buying up land for large-scale agriculture in a country with a much smaller population. Called Brasiguayos, they have been both celebrated for helping Paraguay’s economy boom and demonized for controlling large tracts of land, at times leading land activists to burn Brazilian flags.

More than a century ago, before it became a republic, Brazil was an empire with occasional designs on neighbors’ territory, often serving as an arbiter in disputes in Latin America.

Brazil now relies on a sophisticated diplomatic corps, rising foreign aid payments and the deep pockets of its development bank, which finances projects not just in Latin America but in Africa as well.

“When Kissinger came to Brazil more than three decades ago, he warned his hosts that they could end up being feared rather than loved by their own neighbors,” said Matias Spektor, a professor at Brazil’s Fundação Getulio Vargas, an elite educational institution, referring to the former American secretary of state, Henry A. Kissinger, and his efforts to forge stronger ties with Brazil in the 1970s.

“Now Brazil is engaging Latin America more deeply, without a clear policy of addressing the anxiety that can accompany this process,” Mr. Spektor said. “There’s the real danger of being on the receiving end of anger in certain places.”

Here in Bolivia, the United States once had unrivaled influence, before Mr. Morales’s election in 2005. Since then, Mr. Morales has clashed repeatedly with Washington while warming to other countries, notably Brazil, Venezuela, Cuba and Iran. Since 2008, when Mr. Morales expelled the American envoy, Philip S. Goldberg, the United States has not had even an ambassador here.

But Brazil’s profile has grown. A Brazilian company, OAS, won the $415-million road contract in 2008, with financing coming from the National Bank for Economic and Social Development in Brazil. It is making about $83 billion in loans in 2011. The World Bank, by comparison, lent $57.4 billion.

As the protest march against the road began advancing through the lowlands in August, Brazil’s popular former president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, flew to Bolivia to deliver a speech sponsored by the Brazilian company to businessmen and to meet with Mr. Morales. (Mr. da Silva’s aides argued the road dispute was not part of the trip’s agenda.)

The trip came at critical time, when talks were faltering. But Mr. da Silva’s trip failed to ease the tension, and it became known his visit was part of a three-country trip paid for by OAS and Queiroz Galvão, another Brazilian construction company, which included stops in Costa Rica and El Salvador.

“It’s obvious that Brazil just wants our resources,” said Marco Herminio Fabricano, 47, an artisan from the Mojeño indigenous group who was among the marchers to La Paz. “Evo feels like he can betray us to his Brazilian allies.”

Brazilian officials insist that the road has nothing to do with betrayals or resource grabs.
“We want Brazil to be surrounded by prosperous, stable countries,” Marcel Biato, Brazil’s ambassador to Bolivia, said about infrastructure financing in Bolivia and elsewhere in South America.

Indeed, Brazilian authorities argue that their country has access to other sources of raw materials, as well as to routes across the continent through which it can send goods to ports on the Pacific.

But the road does hold strategic importance for coca growers, perhaps Mr. Morales’s most loyal constituency, made up largely of Quechua- and Aymara-speaking Indians, setting up a clash between them and other indigenous groups that live in the territory.

Brazil continues to nurture an array of plans in Bolivia, including several hydroelectric projects and an ambitious antidrug policy that involves deploying drones on the border and training and equipping Bolivian security forces.

But the road dispute has put Brazil on watch here. “Just as China consolidates regional hegemony in Asia, Brazil wants to do the same in Latin America,” said Raúl Prada Alcoreza, a former senior official in Bolivia’s government who is now a fierce critic of Mr. Morales.

“A Bolivian process intended to provide an alternative, and the social movements which helped make this government possible,” Mr. Prada said, “end up being trampled by Brazilian interests.”

Sara Shahriari contributed reporting.

THE MESSAGE

2011-11-04T17:03:00.001-02:00

I recently had the privilege, at the Gathering of the Grandmothers in Brasilia, of meeting and listening to some representatives of the peoples of the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta in Colombia.

The speaker said something that struck me as profound: "We don't have religion. We have nature." I know that I'll be contemplating its meaning for a long time. The message comes from the heart of the world.

THE DIVIDED MIND

2011-10-31T11:47:00.003-02:00

BELO MONTE UPDATE

2011-10-29T11:23:00.000-02:00

Brazilian Amazon groups invade the construction site and withdraw peacefully.

The NY Times report is here.

Press releases and news via Amazon Watch are here.

SENDING UP PRAYERS

2011-10-28T11:14:00.004-02:00

The finale of the recent visit of the Council of 13 Indigenous Grandmothers to Brasilia was a ceremony at the Esplanada in the center of the Brazilian Federal Government to send up prayers for the protection of indigenous lands and the free clear flow of the waters.

More photos from the gathering...

VIVA EVO! VIVA!

2011-10-26T11:24:00.001-02:00

Bolivian President Evo Morales -- photo by Jasmine Milani

Bolivian President Evo Morales has sent an amendment to Congress, halting the project to build a road through the Isiboro Secure National Park and Indigenous Territory (TIPNIS), which is home to around 50,000 indigenous people from various ethnic groups. “Therefore, the issue of the TIPNIS has been resolved,” Morales said.

More on the story from BBC.

FEDERAL JUDGE RULES AGAINST BELO MONTE LICENSE

2011-10-19T16:35:00.001-02:00

re-posted from Mongabay:

The environmental license for the controversial Belo Monte dam violates the constitutional rights of indigenous communities and is therefore illegal, ruled a federal judge in Brazil on Monday.

Judge Selene Maria de Almeida concluded that the 2005 decree that authorized the dam is illegal because Congress failed to carry out a consultation process with communities that will be affected by the dam. The consultation process is a right guaranteed to indigenous communities under Brazil's constitution.

A statement from International Rivers and Amazon Watch, groups campaigning against the dam, explains Almeida's ruling:

Almeida’s decision cited the need for Brazil to comply with its commitments to ILO Convention 169 and other international agreements that require free, prior and informed consent among indigenous peoples regarding projects that significantly affect their territories and livelihoods. Almeida’s decision spotlights a major gap between domestic and international legal frameworks regarding indigenous rights and their effective implementation within current practices of dam-planning and licensing in Brazil.

In Monday’s federal court hearing, Almeida’s decision discarded arguments by lawyers representing the Brazilian government that the Belo Monte Dam infrastructure and reservoirs would not be physically located on indigenous lands and, as a result, there was no need for consultations with indigenous peoples. Citing overwhelming evidence from official sources and independent researchers, Almeida concluded that the diversion of 80% of the Xingu River into artificial channels and reservoirs would have devastating impacts downriver for the Arara, Juruna and Xikrin Kayapó indigenous peoples, given inevitable losses to the tribes' ability to catch fish, raise crops, and navigate freely. As such, prior consultations by the Brazilian Congress with indigenous communities are required before the dam project can be legally authorized.

Judge Almeida concluded that the Brazilian Congress should have also based its decision concerning authorization of Belo Monte on the conclusions of the project’s environmental impact assessment, including anthropological studies on its consequences for indigenous peoples.

Almeida's decision comes less than three weeks after another judge ordered a halt to construction activities due to concerns over the impact on local fisheries.

Amazon Watch says that despite the recent rulings, the case is far from over. It will likely end up in Brazil's Supreme Court.

Belo Monte has proven extremely controversial. The $11-17 billion project, which would block most of the flow of the Xingu River and inundate thousands of hectares of rainforest, has been fiercely opposed by indigenous groups and environmentalists. Critics say the dam will operate well below capacity for much of the year when river levels are low. It will also disrupt fish migration patterns, affecting local livelihoods.

THE DAILY VIEW: Nossa Senhora Aparecida

2011-10-13T10:50:00.000-03:00

Nossa Senhora Aparedcida is the patroness of Brazil and yesterday was Her day. Due to computer problems I couldn't post this yesterday but today I can report that the traditional kid's parties and celebrations were GREAT.

Salve a Rainha do Brasil.
Salve Nossa Senhora Aparecida.

THE DAILY VIEW: On Strike

2011-10-08T18:46:00.000-03:00

My old Dell laptop went belly-up last night. I'm not sure if the problem is terminal or if the old guy is just on strike. I was using it while waiting for a better notebook to be returned from a distant repair but the postal workers have been on strike. For the moment that's two strikes against blogging so I'm going to take a break from computer and Internet until it all sorts out. For me, it could be a very good time.

I'll send out an alert when I'm posting again. Hope you'll stay tuned.

"POSTCARD" FROM ACRE

2011-10-08T14:34:00.012-03:00

Andrew Revkin requested that I send Dot Earth a blog "postcard" [update: published at Dot Earth on 10/11/11] commenting on the October 3, 2011 press release from Brazil’s Ministry of Environment announcing, "the lowest Amazon deforestation rates for the month of August since monitoring began in 2004."

My response is more of a letter:

"The Brazilian government’s proactive enforcement measures and near real-time satellite monitoring of the forest regions led to a 21.8 percent drop in deforestation rates by from July to August 2011, and a 38.2 percent decrease compared to August 2010 figures." (more on the story here)

I was surprised by this claim. While Brazil's law enforcement actions have seriously reduced the incidents of large-scale deforestation (and should be applauded for doing so) the claim that overall recent deforestation rates have fallen did not seem justified by month-to-month data that are often inaccurate.

I asked for some science input from Foster Brown who is a professor of Ecology at the Federal University of Acre and a scientist with the Woods Hole Research Center. His current specialty is satellite monitoring and remote sensing of climate and forest events in the western Amazon. Here is his response:

I checked the data at the National Institute for Space Research (INPE) web site: http://www.inpe.br/noticias/noticia.php?Cod_Noticia=2674.

These are data from DETER, a program for alerting about deforestation events with a minimum detectable size of 25 hectares. (This would be an area approximately the size of 60 football fields.) Much of the deforestation in Acre, for example, is produced by clearing 10 hectares or less of forest. Consequently, these data are extremely useful to alert authorities about the occurrence of large-scale deforestation events, but do not capture small-scale deforestation.

I am not alone in concern about how to use DETER data. In the same report (cited above) INPE emphasizes, "Because of cloud cover varies from one month to another and also the resolution of the satellite, INPE does not recommend comparing data from different months and years obtained by DETER."

In sum, it is an important tool, but the DETER data do not represent total deforestation rates occurring on a monthly basis in the Brazilian Amazon.

Ultimately, this is much more than a "numbers game". The context surrounding these deforestation statistics is that Brazil has been promising the world that it can greatly increase its food, fuel and energy production and simultaneously achieve a dramatic reduction in deforestation. However, large-scale sustainable development remains a noble but yet unproven promise full of contradictions and dilemmas.

The Amazon deforestation results are important not only in Brazil but for the whole world. I've portrayed the larger view in my post, "Why Belo Monte (and Amazon Deforestation) Matter in the Big Picture".

Hopefully, there will be no backsliding but serious danger flags were waved earlier this year. The new president of IBAMA (Brazil's Environmental Protection Agency) Curt Trennepohl shocked the world with what seemed like a major retreat from sustainability and social justice -- first, by licensing the extremely controversial Belo Monte Dam and then by telling an Australian TV interviewer that his job was not to protect the environment but "to minimize the impact." When thinking that the microphones were turned off Trennepolh went on to say that Brazil would do to it's indigenous people what Australia had done to theirs. (View this disturbing declaration at You Tube)

Brazil has made great strides in reducing deforestation but the Forest Code is now under attack in Congress and the future may include much more deforestation. Clearly, a strong Forest Code is what Brazil must maintain to be a leading global voice arguing that forests AND development are possible. BUT now this is an open question. With the approaching UN Conference on Sustainable Development RIO+20 in June of next year, the world is watching.

I, along with many others, are hoping that Brazil will have the wisdom and will to break free of the old-style destructive models and achieve its vision of developing with social justice and environmental sustainability. We will see.

SOMETHING'S HAPPENING

2011-10-07T17:13:00.003-03:00

Right Here All Over (Occupy Wall St.) from Alex Mallis on Vimeo.

[Update -- 11 October 2011: Check out Tom Friedman's NY Times Column coincidently with a title similar to this post. Paul Gilding's theme is that we are witnessing The Great Disruption.]

And, now, the environmentalists are joining.

“For too long, Wall Street has been occupying the offices of our government, and the cloakrooms of our legislatures,” wrote Bill McKibben, co-founder of 350.org, in an email to supporters before the march. “They’ve been a constant presence, rewarded not with pepper spray in the face but with yet more loopholes and tax breaks and subsidies and contracts. You could even say Wall Street’s been occupying our atmosphere, since any attempt to do anything about climate change always run afoul of the biggest corporations on the planet. So it’s a damned good thing the tables have turned.”

In Brazil there is a growing following of Occupy Wall St. Anti-corruption is the universal theme. From watching the US, folks are learning that when corruption is made legitimate with laws and bailouts, it is still corrupt. No one want's their future stolen -- economically, socially or environmentally -- legally or not.

HOW TO BE A SPIRITUAL WARRIOR

2011-10-06T15:03:00.007-03:00

[AVAAZ has a petition you can sign in support of the Wall St. protests. The running totals will be posted in the middle of the occupation.]

Deepak Chopra, one the world's leading New Age voices, says,

Right now Wall St. is the pure culture of money at its most selfish, greedy, and anti-social. If you aren't angry about that, you aren't breathing.

re-posted from HuffPo

The "Occupy" Movement: Turning Anger Into Awareness

If you haven't found yourself caught up in the Occupy movement yet, the best place is in the thick of the action. I went down to Wall Street one night to see for myself. Like many people, if not all, the outcome of the financial crash still rankled. No one can watch the TV coverage of the Occupy America sit-ins and marches without sharing in some kind of frustration and anger.

When you get down there, though, you feel something else. Unlike the Tea Party, the Occupiers are young and idealistic, repeating a time-honored coming of age phase that is being acted out in public. Anyone who has lived through the sixties can stand aside and predict what will happen, because it has happened so often before. Ideals become lost in confusion, cynicism, and hard clashes with authority and other reactionary forces.

But let's not make such predictions. If Occupy America turns anger into awareness, we might get something like a Tea Party for the left. Or even better, a reform movement that marches for an ideal that succeeds. If the Tea Party represents the ornery, "I'm mad as hell, and I won't put up with it anymore" side of America, the Occupiers represent the side that says, "This country stands for justice and equality."

Despite the media coverage of mass arrests, despite the Times's finger-wagging that the movement is often muddled and misinformed, none of that is the point. The point is justice. Unlike the anti-war movement of fifty years ago, now we have a President who believes in justice and equality. It's fashionable to bash President Obama right now, but he has had to make choices between bad and worse, facing an intractable downturn and an opposition that leaves him no breathing room.

If Occupy America can channel its anger into awareness, the next step is to ask, "What is our goal?" When I was down among the demonstrators, I led a meditation on that question, and it seemed to calm down the people around me, which demonstrates, I think, that the whole Occupy movement is about angry idealists, not just people who feel screwed by Wall St., although that is the spark and the point of injustice that somehow must be faced.

Pragmatists claim that one outcome -- a heavily regulated financial sector -- will never happen. The banks were bailed out three years ago, and once they felt strong, they lobbied with all their might to insure that no meaningful regulation would be passed. that is outrageous, of course, and so is the immorality of how Wall St., having caused the crash, continues to take ungodly risks, but now with a government guarantee that they won't fail, no matter how reckless their behavior. Right now Wall St. is the pure culture of money at its most selfish, greedy, and anti-social. If you aren't angry about that, you aren't breathing.

We stand at a pivotal moment when anger can continue to fester and feed upon itself -- if that's what you want, the Tea Party is ready to welcome you with open arms. Or anger can rebuild the system that caused all the problems. Occupy America is pure democracy against pure power, because nobody should have any illusion about who holds all the aces. I can't predict where the movement will go; perhaps it will fizzle out tomorrow with a resigned sigh.

But I do know that truth must be spoken to power. Eventually, all change starts there, by ignoring the odds and the threat of punishment, by standing up and saying "I accuse you of injustice." This action must be taken over and over again, and if the people speaking truth to power have right on their side and not just a boiling stew pot of rage, things will change. There's no reason why an Arab spring can't turn into an American autumn.

[AVAAZ has a petition you can sign in support of the Wall St. protests. The running totals will be posted in the middle of the occupation.]

Perhaps a non-violent Ghandi-like movement is possible. I'm no prophet but I can see that this is catching the attention of people here in Brazil who are far from the action. It seems that it's time to know hope... and sign the petition.

THE DAILY VIEW: Iara

2011-10-05T17:16:00.000-03:00

Iara - photo by Lou Gold (wall graffiti)

I pass this image of Iara often during late night walks. On the darkened street, she is glowing.

More from Wikipedia...

Iara is the name of a figure from Brazilian mythology based on ancient Tupi and Guaraní mythology. The word derives from Old Tupi yîara = y + îara (water + lord/lady) = lady of the lake (water queen). She is seen as either a water nymph, siren, or mermaid depending upon the context of the story told about her.

THE DAILY VIEW: Peace

2011-10-04T04:48:00.005-03:00

Peace -- image by Lou Gold

Today is the celebration of the life and vision of Saint Francis of Assisi.

As has been said, many times in many ways in many traditions, "The answer is in our hands."

PEACE

Lord, make me an instrument of your peace.
Where there is hatred, let me sow love.
Where there is injury, pardon.
Where there is doubt, faith.
Where there is despair, hope.
Where there is darkness, light.
Where there is sadness, joy.

O Divine Master,
grant that I may not so much seek to be consoled, as to console;
to be understood, as to understand;
to be loved, as to love.
For it is in giving that we receive.
It is in pardoning that we are pardoned,
and it is in dying that we are born to Eternal Life.

Amen.

Peace is not a mystery. It is a practice. It's in our hands and, as the great Buddhist living teacher of peace Thich Nhat Hanh shows, it is in every step.

His poem fits perfectly the vision of Saint Francis, who is also known as Brother Sun.

Peace is every step
The shining red sun is my heart
Each flower smiles with me
How green, how fresh they all grow
How cool the wind blows
Peace is every step
It turns the endless path to dust