A while back we posted about a bomb threat against the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society’s ship, the Steve Irwin. Well, the mystery has been solved: a drunk fisherman called in the threat on his cell phone from his ship across the harbor.
Kenneth James Archer admitted to calling in the threat because of a “dispute” with the crew members of Sea Shepherd. Police tracked him down because he made the call to the police from his cell phone.
Gorden Allen Bates tied a horse to the back of his truck and then proceeded to stop the vehicle and beat the animal with a PVC pipe while his 13-year-old daughter kicked it in the face. Luckily, a state trooper happened onto the scene.
The five Sea Shepherd crew members on board the Steve Irwin found Tasmanian police back at their ship a few weeks after they had confiscated all their video material from the latest campaign. But this time, the police arrived to protect the crew.
“Someone called in a bomb threat about 20 minutes ago, stating that it would detonate in 30 minutes,” a police officer told the crew. “You therefore have 10 minutes left.”
The research, titled “Warfare in Biodiversity Hotspots” and published in the new issue of Conservation Biology, used environmental group Conservation International’s data to compare the earth’s battle zones to 34 “biodiversity hotspots.”
Faced with skyrocketing inflation, a tanking economy, and incredible political instability, the government of Zimbabwe is turning to elephant meat in a desperate attempt to feed hungry soldiers.
A senior officer in the Zimbabwe Defence Forces told ZimOnline that Zimbabwe Parks and Wildlife Management Authority struck a deal resulting in the slaughter of elephants to feed soldiers at army barracks across the country. The officer, who remained anonymous, said there were six elephant carcasses delivered to military barracks last week and that the delivery was a welcome relief.
The ZDF has been instrumental in keeping embattled President Robert Mugabe in power, despite his having lost in a general election to the main opposition party of Morgan Tsvangirai in April of 2008. But the economic turmoil in Zimbabwe is putting considerable strain on a government that had little money to effectively govern in the first place. Read the rest of this entry »
According to the environmental group Panalipdan-Southern Mindanao Region (SMR), one of their leaders — Fernando “Dodong” Sarmiento — has been brutally murdered. Read the rest of this entry »
A federal jury ruled yesterday that Chevron had done nothing wrong a decade ago when it called the Nigerian military to control protesters who had taken control of an oil platform, demanding better treatment and jobs.
In the end, the military killed two protesters. Accounts of the incident vary drastically: Chevron says the protesters were violent, armed, and had taken workers hostage, while the protesters and their lawyers claim they had been entirely peaceful and engaged in civil disobedience.
Is the Iraq War all about oil? Maybe not. But even former Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan has acknowledged the action was “essential” to protect the world’s access to oil. With many of the world’s top-producing oil and gas fields in decline, is it unreasonable to suggest there will be more military action to defend our “right” to fossil fuels?
Not according to the National Priorities Project, which today released a report that finds the U.S. is spending $97 billion to $215 billion a year on military efforts to defend oil and natural gas reserves around the world. That means as much as 30 percent of the U.S.’s military budget is aimed at protecting access to fossil fuels.
That fungus among us may be the answer to uranium-polluted soils eventually being brought back into use.
Researchers at Dundee Unversity in the UK have determined that fungi can block uranium from finding its way into plants, animals or the water supply.
Scientists have found that what they call free-living and plant fungi can, “colonise depleted uranium surfaces and transform the metal into uranyl phosphate minerals”. Read the rest of this entry »
The Vietnam-era poster that said, “War is not healthy for children and other living things,” had it right. Modern warfare can wreak environmental havoc like never before, according to the upcoming issue of World Watch magazine.
In the January/February 2008 issue, author Sarah DeWeerdt explores the unprecedented levels of environmental destruction caused by recent conflicts in Rwanda, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Iraq. She also describes ecocide, which is the deliberate destruction of natural places as a war tactic. (The use of defoliants like Agent Orange by the U.S. military during the Vietnam war, for example, has been blamed for the destruction of half of southern Vietnam’s mangroves and 14 percent of its hardwood forests.)
Even the movement of refugees during wartime can inflict serious damage on the environment, DeWeerdt writes. Of the 2 million Hutus who fled the Rwandan genocide in 1994, nearly three-quarter of a million settled near a United Nations World Heritage site, Virunga National Park. To get the firewood and building materials they needed to survive, the refugees cut down about 35 square kilometers of the protected forests.
The full environmental impact of the ongoing Iraq war remains to be seen, according to DeWeerdt. However, scientists have already found that the first Gulf War damaged the protective layer of microorganisms that covers desert areas. The loss of that cover, which might takes thousands of years to bounce back, is being blamed for more sandstorms in the region.
When Iraqi forces retreated from Kuwait during the first Gulf War, they torched nearly 800 oil wells across the region. The fires burned for eight months, and any oil that didn’t burn pooled into lakes that have since hardened or sunk into the sands. The United Nations Environmental Program called the act “one of the worst engineered disasters of humanity.”
Then there are the environment and health threats posed by nuclear materials in today’s Iraq. Not the fabled weapons of mass destruction that were never found, but the depleted uranium the U.S. is using for armor and missiles and the radioactive materials that were looted early on in the conflict. The Sierra Club of Canada reports that barrels of uranium oxide stolen from the Tuwaith nuclear plant in Iraq in 2003 were dumped out then washed in rivers. The containers have subsequently been used to transport and store food.
Incidents like that could eventually cause more than 1,000 people to die of leukemia, according to Iraq’s national nuclear inspector.
“Warfare is likely to have the most severe, longest-lasting effects on protected areas that harbor endangered species, and slow-to-recover ecosystems such as deserts,” DeWeerdt writes in her article. “Even in the most fragile environments, sometimes nature — and people –can surprise us.”
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