Guest blogger Ashish Fernandes, oceans campaigner from our New Delhi office, explains how corporate giant Tata is taking legal action against Greenpeace India over an online turtle game.
It's been five years since Greenpace India
started its campaign against the Dhamra port project on the east coast of
India which threatens a host of wild species including horseshoe crabs and
crocodiles. The port happens to be a stone's throw away from one of the world's
largest nesting sites for the olive ridley sea turtle and India's second
largest mangrove forest, which is a Ramsar Wetland of International Importance
to boot.
The port is nearly built, but it's clear that we're still a huge thorn
in the side of the company behind this ecological disaster, the giant TATA
Steel corporation, which is a 50-50 stakeholder in the project. In the UK, the
TATAs are known for their takeovers of steelmaker Corus,
Tetley Tea and the Jaguar and Land Rover brands.
Posted by jamie — 14 January 2010 at 6:38pm
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Small islands bereft of mountains are going to sink beneath the waves as sea levels rise and for the millions of people living on them, climate change is not some distant, abstract concept but a concrete reality. As noted last week, the Sundarbans islands of India and Bangladesh have lost four islands completely. Sorry, 'lost' implies that they were carelessly misplaced behind a cupboard. 'Forcibly taken' would perhaps be more apt.
Posted by jossc — 5 January 2010 at 4:30pm
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At the mouth of the Ganges River lies the Sundarbans - 20,000 square
kilometres of Unesco protected mangrove forest stretching between India
and Bangladesh. It is home to 500 endangered Bengali tigers, countless
crocodiles and around 4.3 million people.
Posted by jamie — 19 August 2009 at 3:49pm
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It's not just on this country that people get so riled about climate change that they're driven into taking drastic action, action such as, oh I don't know, climbing a chimney stack in a coal-fired power station.
Posted by jossc — 20 March 2009 at 6:10pm
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Sea turtles have been nesting at Gahirmatha on the Orissa coast of India for hundreds, possibly thousands of years. But if we don't act now, we could see this change within a decade – an eye blink in geological timescales.
A new port being built at Dhamra, near Gahirmatha, will push the endangered olive ridley sea turtle closer to the slippery edge of extinction. The main threat to the turtles is posed by dredging to make a channel deep enough for large ships to anchor.