There's been further friction in the Amazon between Greenpeace staff and angry loggers and townspeople. It's all ended peacefully but the situation was tense and they were holed up overnight under police protection. This from Reuters:
Police escorted a group of Greenpeace activists from a remote town in the Brazilian Amazon on Wednesday after hundreds of loggers and townspeople besieged them overnight in protest against an anti-global warming campaign, the environmental organization said.
Posted by jamie — 18 October 2007 at 8:55am
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Tissues: not something many of us spend a great deal of time thinking about. As long as they does the job, what more do you need? But when you begin to consider where that paper has come from and the impact it has on forest areas, it starts to become a lot more interesting. That's why we've produced a new tissue product guide - search the guide to discover which brands of toilet roll, kitchen towel, and tissues are kind to forests as well as your nose.
A new Greenpeace tissue league table released today reveals how Boots and Somerfield are fuelling the destruction of forests around the world. These companies are bottom of the table, because they sell few if any environmentally responsible tissue products.
omerfield have told Greenpeace that it has no plans to start using forest friendly fibre, while Boots stock only one environmentally friendly tissue product across their entire range. This is despite Boots having publicly committed to move towards sourcing all timber and paper products from well managed forests in 1992.
Posted by jamie — 3 October 2007 at 6:29pm
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A burnt area of the Amazon rainforest in Itaituba 2, a protected area (Photo: Daniel Beltra)
Seven years? It's a tall order but we have a cunning plan. Together with eight other national campaigning organisations, our Brazilian team have launched an ambitious proposal with a goal of zero deforestation by 2015.
The plan sets out specific targets that could see deforestation drop gradually over the next seven years, pushing for a cut of 25 per cent in the first year compared to figures for 2005/6. It's thinking on a massive scale, but we believe it can be done - with deforestation rates already falling and with a concerted effort it really could happen.
Posted by jamie — 30 August 2007 at 3:48pm
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As the narrator of this startling video states, "working in the Amazon forest is not for the faint of heart." In the past, people from campaigning organisations have been bullied by land owners and workers, facing intimidation, violence, death threats and even murder.
Posted by jamie — 29 August 2007 at 2:53pm
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Back in April, at the World Bank's spring meeting, there was much talk about the plight of the Congo rainforest. We'd just published a big report detailing how in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) logging titles were being granted in breach of a moratorium that the bank had been instrumental in establishing. The report launch was so high profile, we were able to force DRC's rainforest high onto the agenda of the World Bank meeting and have also managed to secure another session at the upcoming autumn meeting.
Posted by jamie — 29 August 2007 at 10:39am
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There have been further developments in the Amazon. As we reported last week, Greenpeace Brazil published its investigation into deals between a Brazilian government agency and logging companies over areas of rainforest under the guise of a land settlement programme.
Posted by jamie — 23 August 2007 at 4:13pm
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Our exposé earlier this week about how a Brazilian government agency is handing out areas of the Amazon rainforest to logging companies under the guise of a land settlement programme has set the proverbial cat among the pigeons. The government, has been stressing that deforestation levels are falling but has also said it will launch a full investigation into the situation.
Andre Muggiati, one of our Amazon campaigners, has been doing a slew of interviews for the Brazilian and international media, including the main national radio station in Brazil where he was followed by Guilherme Kassel, the Minister for Rural Development who is responsible for the National Institute of Colonisation and Land Reform (Incra). An impromptu debate ensued during which Muggiati invited the minister to join him on a visit to Santarém to see for himself the impact these underhand deals are having on the rainforest.
An agency of the Brazilian Federal Government, which only days ago was celebrating reductions in Amazon deforestation, is allowing logging companies to destroy large areas of the rainforest by assigning them 'land settlements' for poor communities, according to an eight-month Greenpeace investigation(1).
Posted by jamie — 21 August 2007 at 10:18am
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It was almost too good to be true. When the Brazilian government announced last week that deforestation rates in the Amazon had dropped for the third year running, it was certainly a cause for celebration. But it now transpires that one of the government's own agencies is colluding with logging companies so they can gain access to areas of high-value timber that would otherwise be off limits.
