Piper Hoffman, Nation of Change Waking Times “Adam,” a poor 19-year-old Indonesian, found a job driving trucks for a palm oil plantation that paid $6 a day. The foreman picked him up for a three-week, two-thousand mile journey to the worksite in Borneo. Along the way the terms of employment changed: Adam wouldn’t be paid for two …
Rhett A. Butler, Mongabay Waking Times The extent of gold mining in the Peruvian Amazon has surged 400 percent since 1999 due to rocketing gold prices, wreaking havoc on forests and devastating local rivers, finds a new study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). The assessment, led by Greg Asner of the Carnegie …
Rhett Butler, Mongabay Waking Times Data released this week by Terra-i, a collaborative mapping initiative, shows that deforestation in Ecuador for the first three months of 2013 was pacing more than 300 percent ahead of last year’s rate. The report comes shortly after Ecuadorean President Rafael Correa killed off a proposed plan to prohibit oil drilling …
Lacey Avery, Mongabay Waking Times In the next few months, the beating of fragile fiery orange and black wings will transport the monarch butterfly south. But the number of monarch butterflies (Danaus plexippus) reaching their final destination has steadily declined, dropping to its lowest level in two decades last winter, according to a recent survey. …
Mongabay Waking Times Data released by the Brazilian government Friday confirms an increase in Amazon forest loss. Brazil’s National Space Research Institute, INPE, updated data from its near-real-time deforestation tracking system, known as DETER. The system showed a near five-fold increase in forest loss during May 2013 relative to a year earlier, from 99 square …
Tanya Dimitrova, Mongabay Waking Times In order to meet the European Union’s goal of 20% renewables by 2020, some European utility companies are moving away from coal and replacing it with wood pellet fuel. The idea is simple: trees will regrow and recapture the carbon released in the burning of wood pellets, making the process …
Tonya Dimitrova, Mongabay Waking Times The role of tree DNA tracking is increasing in the fight against illegal logging as evidenced by prosecution cases in USA and Germany. Modern DNA technology offers a unique opportunity: you could pinpoint the origin of your table at home and track down if the trees it was made from …
Amazon Watch Waking Times It was 7 a.m. when I started talking with Maini while she waited with me in line for four hours at the Altamira private hospital in the remote jungle boomtown deep in the Brazilian Amazon. Maini is the second oldest of Seu Sebastião’s four children. Ten years ago, her father Seu …
Chris Bourne, Openhand Contributor Waking Times This video is entitled “The Most Important Topic for 2013”, and next to the continued Ascension of Gaia, I have to agree. It’s one that everyone should definitely see and inwardly process. It’s about the devastating impact on our 3D planet by human intervention. It is vitally important ‘inside’ information …
LeAnn Fox and Jean-Pierre Ruiz, Guest Writers Waking Times Palm oil is used on a wide variety of products, including foods. One of these companies is Kellogg’s, maker of a wide variety of food products and best known for its cereals. While Kellogg’s touts its environmentally-friendly practices, its actual practices are far from being so. …
Staff Writer Waking Times Deforestation is one of the greatest threats to our planet today. As certain industries and communities have grown, they have cut down acres upon acres of forests that provide life-giving oxygen, absorb and hold carbon dioxide (CO2) from the atmosphere, and house countless animal and plant species. Deforestation of the Amazon Rainforest …
Ross Heaven, Guest Writer Waking Times Shamanic healing often employs plants to good effect, though it is rarely about herbalism, per se. Indeed, most shamans are explicit that the pharmacological properties of the plants they employ are of far less importance than the spirit which is held by the plant. It is the spirit which …
Waking Times In the battle to keep big oil from spoiling the earth’s most precious natural gems, it helps to take a close look at the treasures we are wasting before the damage is done. SPOIL is a powerful, award winning documentary on the Great Bear Rainforest, in Canada’s British Columbia, showing the splendor of …
Waking Times What are the true costs of growing Soy in South America? In Paraguay over 2.6 million hectares are used for growing soy, which is primarily used as animal feed for factory farms in Europe. While European farmers may delight in having access to cheap GMO food for their meat farms, this practice has …
Rodrigo Bravo, Staff Writer Waking Times The huge Belo Monte dam project along the Xingu River in Brazil’s Amazon has been fiercely resisted by indigenous populations and those who understand the significance of further industrializing the Amazon. In the fight against this massive project (the dam would be the world’s 3rd larges), it has seemed …
Charlie Veitch The Love Police Suffering creates empathy and tolerance. It is mostly through suffering that we experience the fissures and limits of knowledge, of coping. Through the pain of loss or grief we see that every single human being on the planet is capable of despair, and in this mutual despair, we understand concepts …
Naturally evolved ancient forests are sacred and primeval life giving shrines, and standing and intact, large and contiguous primary rainforest and other old forests are a requirement for sustaining global ecology and achieving local advancement. Old forests are a vital part of the biosphere’s ecological infrastructure – and have a prominent, central role in making the Earth habitable through their cycling of carbon, energy, water, and nutrients.
This important documentary was filmed in the fast disappearing Indonesian rainforest and is not narrated, however, its message is clear and frightening. The home of the Orangutan and many other wildlife species in Indonesia is being decimated at an alarming rate by consumer need and greed.
