Amazon Waorani Tribe Threatened by Oil Drilling

The fight for preservation of the Amazon from the ravages of oil production is shown through the story of the Waorani Tribe who are trying to keep their ancestral lands safe. A great investigative piece by Ann Curry of NBC:
NBC News’ Ann Curry journeyed deep into the Amazon Rainforest to a village called Bomeno in Ecuador. Bomeno is home to the rarely seen people of the Waorani Tribe. The tribe and the rainforest they call home is increasingly being threatened by environmental damage caused by oil drilling.

Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Efforts to preserve part of the Yasuni Rainforest in Ecuador: Yasuni ITT United Nations Development Program Amazon Watch – Yasuni The Kichwa and Hauorani tribes’ efforts to preserve its ancestral land: Saniisla.org Avaaz.org Huaorani blog Change.org Tiputini Biodiversity Station: Tiputini-Universidad San Francisco de Quito

The earth is not a resource bin - it is alive and on a remarkable journey ~ Cosmologist Brian Swimme speaks at Marylhurst University

When I was a child in Jamaica, my father built a large telescope in our backyard in Havendale. It was anchored into the ground in a cement platform. An avid amateur astronomer in those days, my father was president of the Astronomical Association of Jamaica and I remember him telling me about the time that a comet was visible in the night sky and he woke me up in the pre-dawn hours so that I could see it through the telescope. I was three years old in 1965 when the great Comet Ikeya-Seki gave earth its spectacular show and while I don’t specifically remember being woken up to see it, I think back fondly to that time when a father woke a sleepy child so that he could show her the wonders of something special taking place in the universe.

It is that wonder at the universe and our place in it that has inspired the life and brilliant work of the imminent cosmologist and evolutionary philosopher Brian Swimme. I had the privilege to hear Dr. Swimme speak on Thursday evening at Marylhurst University as he delivered an inspiring talk titled The Cosmic Force of Feeling.

Swimme’s books include The Universe is a Green Dragon and The Universe Story with Thomas Berry and The Journey of the Universe with Mary Tucker. He teaches at the California Institute of Integral Studies and recently won an Emmy award for his new documentary that aired on PBS, The Journey of the Universe (see below for clip).

Swimme is that rare breed of scientist: a cosmologist who dares to go beyond the conventional Newtonion scientific point of view by bridging the humanities and the sciences without losing sight of the gifts of both. For a lay audience Swimme makes the world of cosmology accessible and wondrous. He decodes scientific discoveries about the nature of the universe by giving us analogous examples that allows us to see ourselves and our human actions placed in context with the larger forces that operate within the universe.

Swimme tells us that there is nothing more human than wondering about the universe and our place in it. He says a full human life includes questions. “We get swept into a life and that movement is a feeling – something moves and attracts us – that isn’t something we create. It is a wave that had its start in the universe and we participate in this wave.”

He says that Thomas Berry got him to think about “what does it mean that we are discovering a fundamental unique account of the universe?”

Swimme acknowledges that he has a different point of view from conventional scientists and that he tries to include explorations of scholars in the humanities as well as the sciences. He says that Berry said that scientists don’t understand the implications of the story of the universe. They get the data but miss the bigger picture of its implications. “The question of meaning is not something that science wants to consider.”

The great discovery of contemporary science is that the universe is not simply a place, but a story – a story in which we are immersed, to which we belong, and out of which we arose. This story has the power to awaken us more deeply to who we are. For just as the Milky Way is the universe in the form of a galaxy, and an orchid is the universe in the form of a flower, we are the universe in the form of a human. And every time we are drawn to look up into the night sky and reflect on the awesome beauty of the universe, we are actually the universe reflecting on itself. And this changes everything. ~ Brian Swimme and Mary Tucker The Journey of the Universe

Swimme said that he tries to imagine what would have happened had Copernicus gone to London in 1543 to explain his newly discovered theory that the Sun is the center of the solar system. At that time England had been going downhill for 300 years with effects of the plague, etc and this new theory was met with great skepticism.

Swimme makes the analogy that we also, in 2013 are suffering a kind of plague: consumerism and the fact that Americans idolize money. Swimme says “we have a bizarre situation where our economic achievement is ruining the planet but conventional wisdom is that we need to increase economic activity! The earth is not a resource bin. It’s actually alive and on a remarkable journey. But the default worldview is that earth is a hardware store.”

Swimme describes how his own consciousness about the earth changed back in 1986 when he read an article in the New York Times about a conference being held at the Smithsonian. The article said that scientists were saying that the present moment is the most destructive in at least 65 million years. In other words, not since the demise of the dinosaurs has there been such a destructive time of extinction taking place on the planet. Swimme gets big laughs from the audience when he describes how this information hit him. It was presented on page 26 of the New York Times, and astonishingly received no follow up in days after.

“There is something massively out of alignment – it is a spiritual pathology when your actions are accomplishing the opposite of what you think you are doing. There is a stark lack of coherence and to hear it means we’ve got to re-think things at a very deep level. We have to change our Newtonian way of thinking. Our challenge now is to give birth to a civilization that is congruent with the forces of the universe.”

For more on Brian Swimme, see his website at The Story of the Universe.

Watch Journey of the Universe on PBS. See more from pbs.

Coming to a subdivision near you: Canada's dirty tar sands oil

Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Big Life Protecting Wildlife in Amboseli Ecosystem

Please consider donating to Big Life Foundation to support their great efforts in protecting endangered wildlife from poaching. See their film on the important work they are doing:

Christiane Amanpour on the Poaching and Trafficking of Wildlife

Christiane Amanpour from ABC News on the escalation in the horrific poaching and trafficking of wildlife fueled by demand from China:

Symphony of Science: Al Gore on Climate Reality

RIP Qumquat...Elephants gunned down...please stop the madness

Qumquat and her family brutally slaughtered~ Photo by Nick Brandt the day before..

My heart breaks with this news of the senseless slaughter of elephants that is raging across Africa. The latest horrific story comes from Kenya where the elephant matriarch Qumquat, who was photographed just the day before by the amazing photographer Nick Brandt, was slaughtered for her tusks along with three generations of her family leaving a lone traumatized orphan. This maddening elephant slaughter is being driven by the desire for ivory in China. Estimates are that 35,000 elephants are being killed each year in Africa. At this rate elephants in the wild will be wiped out within 15 years. Read and weep. And if you are so inclined, please consider helping out the Big Life Foundation which is doing what it can to protect these beloved elephants.

From the NYT Dot Earth blog:

Qumquat, one of the best-known matriarchs in the elephant population of the Amboseli ecosystem on the Kenya-Tanzania border, was photographed with her family on October 27 by Nick Brandt. Just 24 hours later, the old female and most of the others were gunned down by poachers. One day later, the old female and nearly all of the other elephants in this group were found slaughtered. Their faces had been hacked off by the poachers to be sure they gleaned every ounce of ivory from the tusks.(Click here for photographs of the result – not for the squeamish.)

Read on for a description of this incident and the resulting hunt for the killers by Richard Bonham, who co-founded Big Life Foundation with Brandt a few years ago to raise money for anti-poaching patrols around the park. There’s more on their work on Dot Earth (the same post is here in Chinese). Here’s Bonham’s report from the field:

THREE GUNSHOTS, THEIR FATAL EFFECT, AND PURSUIT OF THE KILLERS
The crack of a heavy rifle, designed specially to kill elephants, is unmistakable. It’s a little like a sonic boom, a crash followed by a roll of sound not unlike thunder.
This is what the Big Life rangers, manning an observation point on the Tanzania border, heard on Sunday afternoon. Three shots in quick succession.
This triggered the radio network to burst into life, as they called in for support from Kenya Wildlife Service and other Big Life teams in the area. The reaction was textbook, and in less than an hour and half, a combined unit of Big Life and KWS rangers were on the scene.
As dusk set in, a ranger spotted three men. One of the poachers raised a rifle and fired at the rangers, sending the team scurrying for cover. It would have been suicide to continue the pursuit in the fading light, so the teams pulled back to resume the follow-up at first light.
I arrived by plane at sunrise the following day to give aerial support and look for carcasses. After an hour and half of fruitless searching, we received news that a fresh tusk, still covered in blood, had been found on the poachers’ tracks. The follow-up team split up, some continuing with the poachers tracks, others backtracking to find the carcasses.
At midday the gut-wrenching news arrived. Three dead elephants had been found, their faces cut away, their ivory gone.
The team from Amboseli Elephant Research identified the dead as Qumquat, born in 1968, one of Amboseli’s most famous and oldest matriarchs, and her two daughters, Qantina and Quaye.
Just 24 hours before they were gunned down, Nick Brandt took the above photo of the three of them, alive on their last afternoon together.  You can see that he was just a few feet from the family, so trusting, so relaxed. Such easy pickings for poachers with a mind to murder for profit.
At the front is Qumquat, beyond her two daughters, Qantina and Quaye. As for the three youngest, two are missing, the younger almost certainly dead now. Only the youngest calf is alive, a story in and of itself….
RESCUE OF QUMQUAT’S ORPHANED CALF
When the rangers found the carcasses, Qumquat’s youngest calf, only ten months old, was also there, watching over his mother’s carcass. The calf, traumatized at having watched its mother shot and butchered, had stood vigil all night alone.
He was caught – not easy – and led to a position where the David Sheldrick Wildlife Trust rescue team could get it onto a vehicle. He was then transferred to an aircraft chartered in from Nairobi, which then flew him back to the Sheldrick orphanage.
The professionalism of this operation, orchestrated by the Sheldrick Trust, was so smooth, that any First World emergency response ambulance would have been proud to have been a part of it. Sadly they have had too much practice in recent years.
All in all, it was a good example what can happen when everyone pulls together, in this case Big Life Foundation, Kenya Wildlife Service,  Amboseli Trust for Elephants and the David Sheldrick Wildlife Trust.
ARREST OF NOTORIOUS POACHER WHO KILLED QUMQUAT
Meanwhile, the poachers’ tracks that the Big Life teams had been following had disappeared where the poachers entered settled country. Even bringing in the dog unit at this stage would have been fruitless.
But as it so often does, Big Life’s informer network came through. We were informed of the location of one of the key poachers, and the following day, the Big Life teams, in partnership with KWS, arrested him.
It was a notorious long-term poacher who, to be honest, we had already arrested a year ago. He had been jailed, but then released far too soon. This time, we are confident he will be put away for a long time. We also know the identity of one of the other poachers, who is in hiding. Generally, they eventually surface, and we will be waiting.
But it’s so disturbing, once again, how the poachers, greedy and brutal, gunned down Qumquat’s daughters, who possessed such small tusks, for just a few extra dollars. All in a day’s ‘work’.
HELP US STOP THE KILLING
After a week in which Amboseli’s elephants suffered the worst single slaughter in some time, we ask ourselves what we need to do differently. We are determined to do more, to make sure that something like this does not happen again. There are two clear solutions:
MOBILE CAMPS 
We need rangers in the right place at the right time. The solution – additional mobile camps – is low tech, simple and reasonably cheap. Our permanent outposts would have the capability of setting up 4-man mobile camps that can be deployed into areas as the wildlife moves, or where a poaching threat is deemed serious or imminent. The costs are just over $2000 per mobile camp, one for each of the 14 current outposts.
We believe that it will make a huge difference – not just because it will mean we can get men to the scene faster, but also as a deterrent, because poachers will not know when and where the camps will be deployed.
DIGITAL RADIO NETWORK
Our current radio system, which has to cover the 2 million acres Big Life rangers patrol, is completely inefficient compared to the new digital systems. Amongst many major improvements, all the new digital radios, vehicle or handheld, have built in GPS, and as such can be tracked in real time on screens in the radio room of Big Life HQ.
In an incident such as the Qumquat family killing, we would have known exactly where all our units were and which unit was best placed to respond. We could have then directed them much more efficiently. This could have made the difference in tracking down the poachers in time before they escaped.
There are many more reasons why this system will dramatically improve Big Life operations and ultimately pay for itself. A full breakdown can be read here.
The costs for the above are :
14 x MOBILE CAMPS @ $2000 each $28,000
EXTRA RUNNING COSTS FOR MOBILE CAMPS$12,000
NEW DIGITAL COMMUNICATION SYSTEM$65,000
TOTAL$105,000
$105,000 would pay for these immediate major improvements to our anti-poaching operations. 
We would be hugely grateful if you donated today, something, anything towards this amount, knowing that animals’ lives, and the health of an entire precious ecosystem would be improved by your contribution.
Qumquat was a truly special matriarch, who successfully led her herd for many years.
In one hellish afternoon, three generations of her herd were exterminated. But there are thousands of other Qumquats and sons and daughters all across the vast African ecosystem. Please help us to protect them.
Thank you in advance, Nick Brandt & Richard Bonham
Donate at :
www.biglife.org/donations
I was glad to see Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, even amid so many other pressing foreign-policy challenges, committing the United States to doing more to cut the illicit trade in wildlife and related products. There’s no time to lose. Keep track of this issue on Twitter using this tag: #stopwildlifecrime.

Climate Action 2.0: DIVESTMENT

Hurricane Sandy Hope River Jamaica

Let’s face it: changing light bulbs and recycling are not working. It’s just not enough. We continue to blast more and more carbon into the atmosphere each year. Scientists tell us the safe limit for carbon in the atmosphere is 350 parts per million. We’re at 392 parts per million and the upward march continues. The climate is warming and Hurricane Sandy is just a harbinger of what’s to come if we continue to gorge on fossil fuels. As Bloomberg Business Review so starkly stated last week: “It’s Global Warming, Stupid.”

So what can we do? How do we turn this thing around when we face an industry that basically owns Congress? That denies climate change is happening, and that operates with total impunity. How do you convince a morally-absent behemoth that its short-sighted profits-before-life business plan needs to change? How do we get a movement together that takes the MATH seriously?

I’m excited about the new path of climate action proposed by Bill McKibben and 350.org that aims to show the fossil fuel industry the power of what a movement can do.

From 350.org: The Do The Math tour will make it clear why the fossil fuel industry is so determined to block progress. As McKibben wrote in a groundbreaking article in Rolling Stone this June, the climate crisis can be boiled down into three simple numbers: 2°C, 565 gigatonnes, and 2,795 gigatonnes.

Even the most conservative governments in the world have agreed that global warming should be limited to no more than 2°C. Scientists say to meet that target we can only emit an additional 565 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. But the fossil fuel industry has 2795 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide in their reserves, nearly five times too much — and everyday they spend millions of dollars looking for more.

“What this math shows is that the fossil fuel industry is a rogue industry,” said McKibben. “You can have a healthy fossil-fuel balance sheet, or a relatively healthy planet – but now that we know the numbers, it looks like you can’t have both.”

I call it Climate Action 2.0. This new approach aims to engage universities, colleges, pension funds and religious institutions around the country to divest from their investments in the fossil fuel industry. This divestment strategy to bring about change to recalcitrant actors has worked before. Witness the demise of the apartheid regime of South Africa which was brought to its knees through the power of collective divestment in South African companies.

Nobel Peace Prize laureate Archbishop Desmond Tutu said: “We could not have achieved our freedom and just peace without the help of people around the world, who through the use of non-violent means, such as boycotts and divestment, encouraged their governments and other corporate actors to reverse decades-long support for the apartheid regime. Students played a leading role in that struggle.”

Now it is time to send the fossil fuel industry a similar message.

I attended the 350.org Do the Math tour event in Palo Alto, California on Saturday night. The event was sold out, as it was in Seattle, Portland and other cities last week. This movement is mobilizing and 350.org has a lot of support material to get people informed and set-up to planning and staging successful divestment campaigns on campuses and other institutions. There is already one university that has taken the bold step of divestment. Stephen Mulkey, President of Unity College in Unity, Maine wrote this about the decision of the Board of Trustees to divest:

"I am proud to be a part of the 350.org program of divestment, and I am especially proud of the Unity College Board of Trustees for their willingness to make this affiliation. Indeed, the Trustees have been on the path of divestment for over five years. The Trustees have looked at the College’s finances in the context of our ethical obligation to our students, and they have chosen to make a stand. I can think of no stronger statement about the mission of Unity College.

Our college community will lead by fearless action. We will confront policy makers who continue to deny the existence of climate change. We will encourage those who work in higher education to bravely step out from behind manicured, taxpayer funded hedges, and do what needs to be done. We will not equivocate, and we will meet those who have been misled by climate change denial in their communities.

The time is long overdue for all investors to take a hard look at the consequences of supporting an industry that persists in employing a destructive business model. Because of its infrastructure and enormous economic clout, fossil fuel corporations could pump trillions into the development of alternative energy. Government subsidies and stockholder shares could be used constructively to move these corporations to behave responsibly.

Higher education is the crown jewel of the United States system of education, and it remains the envy of the world. Higher education has always been dedicated to the highest standards of honesty and integrity. If our nation’s colleges and universities will not take a stand now, who will?"

If you live on the east coast, visit the website to see the upcoming tour dates and do not miss this event if the climate and the future of life on earth means anything to you. And if you are considering divestment of your own individual portfolio, the Forum for Sustainable and Responsible Investment is a good resource.

For the earth.