Why is the Broome Community opposed to the development?:
The Broome community is opposed to the development because they believe it will have wide range of environmental, cultural and social impacts on life in our town and on the nearby country. Most people have visited the Pilbara and seen the impacts that major resource development projects bring.
Photo Damian Kelly
ACTION OF THE DAY
A MAJOR national bank has been forced to remove more than 100 misleading out of order signs from its ATMs after being targeted by anti-coal activists.
A MAJOR national bank has been forced to remove more than 100 misleading out of order signs from its ATMs after being targeted by anti-coal activists.
A score of ANZ Banking Group machines sprawled across six capital cities were plastered with "out of order" signs on Sunday after campaigners launched their latest bid to draw attention to the bank's funding of the coal industry.
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Because it will turn a beautiful little town into a stinking hell hole that even the few well connected people who will make money out of this would not want to live in.
ReplyDeleteThe fight for Ecuador's oil and wildlife
ReplyDeleteAmerican biologist Kelly Swing..
This is the Tiputini research station, on the edge of Yasuni National Park in Ecuador, where the foothills of the Andes meet the Amazonian rainforest
Yasuni is terra incognita, one of the beastliest, lushest, most fecund, abundant but unknown places on earth. Up to 100 people from two tribes of warlike Huaorani Indians live there in voluntary isolation and, within a kilometre of where we are standing, it has been estimated, live 150 frog, 120 reptile, 600 bird and 200 mammal species, including nearly 100 species of bat.
So far, nearly 1500 species of plants and 400 fish species have been found in the 9800 sq km national park. When it comes to insects, says Swing, Yasuni is world class.
...These berries make soap, those plants are good contraceptives, this leaf is good for kidney and heart diseases. There are troops of spider and woolly monkeys, frogs smaller than a fingernail, tapirs the size of horses, as well as ants that taste of lemon and berries so poisonous you could die in seconds if you ate one. Most amazing is the "walking tree", which follows the light, hitches up its roots and moves 7m or more.
Last month, some Yale University undergrads stumbled across a mushroom capable of eating polyurethane plastic.
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And it wasn't until 2007, when 960 million barrels of oil were discovered in one part of the Yasuni park, that people realised that the most biodiverse place on earth could be totally destroyed. The oil under Yasuni, it was calculated, would earn Ecuador US$7 billion ($8.3 billion) but would last the world just 10 days.
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Oil was touted as the start of a new era of development: Ecuador joined Opec and borrowed massively. In the first years, oil built hospitals, schools and roads. But 45 years later, Ecuador has just half of its reserves left - 4.5 billion barrels, of which 20 per cent lies below Yasuni.
Albert Acosta was the oil and mines minister when the Yasuni find was made. Today, he is a radical ecologist, and will stand as a presidential candidate for a group of left-wing parties in next month's election.
"The reality is that oil has not brought development," says the charismatic academic. "It has helped our infrastructure, but it has brought us immense contamination and environmental destruction. Oil has not solved the problems of Ecuador."
.. Acosta hesitated. He knew that the find presented the country with perhaps its last chance to develop in the traditional way, but he also knew it would push the oil frontier deeper into the Amazon, release 400m tonnes of climate-changing gases and make the destruction of a vast and pristine area inevitable. To extract oil from Yasuni would need wells, ports, pipelines, roads and villages. "And because this is a particularly heavy crude oil vast amounts of water will have to be injected back into the earth, inevitably leading to pollution.
"I knew the oil industry. I used to work in it. I could see the monster from the inside. I began to think we were poor because of our resources. I called it the curse of abundance."
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To see what could happen to Yasuni if the oil there is exploited, I travel to Lago Agrio, Texaco's base camp in the 1970s, now an oil-rush town. The great primary forests have long gone. Lago Agrio and the area around it is a social and ecological disaster zone, after the company allegedly spilled nearly 17 million gallons (64 million litres) of crude oil and dumped 20 billion gallons of drilling wastewater between 1964 and 1990. Guerilla groups, drug traffickers and criminal gangs pour over the Colombian border into what is now an industrialised landscape; pipelines snake within metres of houses; companies flare gas night and day from refineries; and the pollution, although better than it was in the 1970s, continues.
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FULL STORY AT : http://www.nzherald.co.nz/animals/news/article.cfm?c_id=500834&objectid=10861534