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Climate Change, Despair & Empowerment Roadshow in Vancouver Wednesday 15th

Sunday, August 12th, 2007

From Rainforest Information Centre
1. Climate Change, Despair & Empowerment Roadshow in Vancouver Wednesday 15th
2. RIC Annual Report
3. Our new climate change website

Friends, after over 100 gigs in Australia and eastern N America, the Climate Change, Despair & Empowerment roadshow www.climate.net.au , is headed for Vancouver Wed August 15 and from there making its way down to San Francisco and then Hawaii. Presented by Kelly Tudhope from the RIC with the help of Pat Rasmussen of the World Temperate Rainforest Network, the roadshow teaches us how to transform despair into empowerment and inspires grass roots action to head off climate chaos.
Please forward this notice to any friends along the roadshow route. Vancouver, Olympia, Port Townsend, Seattle, Vashon Island, Portland, Eugene, Salem, Ashland, Takilma, Arcata, Santa Rosa, Bay Area, Sacramento, Nevada City and the Big Island.
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We’ve just produced our annual report for the fiscal year 2006-2007. This includes details of the many projects we’ve been working on and supporting from opposing the expansion of the oil industry in the Amazon headwaters to reforesting the sacred mountain Arunachala in the south of India. We’ve also been able to raise and distribute more funds this last year than ever before to support scores of cutting edge projects and individuals around the world working for ecological protection and regeneration, and for indigenous survival. See http://www.rainforestinfo.org.au/projects/grants.htm
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We have just launched our new climate change website and blog at http://www.climate.net.au. There is space for discussions on renewable technologies, biofuel, tree planting etc. as well as a discussion on “What Would Gandhi Do Now?” which begins with a very short film and then ideas for how to go from where we are now to where we want to be in a Gandhian fashion. (To join this one, visit http://www.climate.net.au/?p=30 )
We’re also starting a distributed research project at this website looking for answers and solutions. If you have experience in research and some time on your hands, please email me to participate in this. For example,
* what role will biological sequestration play, in forests www.theage.com.au/articles/2007/04/08/1175970936472.html and especially in the soil. www.amazingcarbon.com/ .
* Must we accept carbon trading as the foregone conclusion fund-raising mechanism? In the light of the criticisms of carbon trading at http://www.climate.net.au/?page_id=28 and http://www.tni.org/detail_pub.phtml?know_id=56&menu for example, surely there’s a better way?
* The production of cement is one of the major CO2 producers worldwide. Yet new ways of producing cement could dramatically slash this. How can we facilitate smooth technological transitions?
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The 40 Climate Change, Despair & Empowerment events that I presented on the E Coast in the spring were very heartening www.climate.net.au/articles/report.doc . 5 people in the NE travelled and trained with me and are available for presentations, please let me know if you’d like to organise something in that neck o the woods.


As part of the roadshow we gave away over 1000 copies of 2 DVDs to anyone who will use them to educate their people - “Boiling Point” with Ross Gelbspan and “Climate Change, Despair & Empowerment” with Ross Gelbspan and John Seed which, like many of our films now, also streams from Google . These same free films will be available through Kelly’s roadshow along with a new DVD by Jeremiah Wallack - “John Seed’s North American Roadshow 2007″ also streaming from Google . Please let me know if you’d like me to mail you one or more of these to help educate your community in empowered action to forestall climate chaos.
for the Earth
John Seed
ps, check out the comprehensive article on the history of the climate denial industry in, of all places, this weeks Newsweek

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/20122975/site/newsweek/site/newsweek/


Rainforest Information Centre
Box 368 Lismore
NSW 2480
AUSTRALIA
61 2 66897519
johnseed1@ozemail.com.au
www.rainforestinfo.org.au
www.climate.net.au

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Irony: Vanishing Subdivisions?

Saturday, August 11th, 2007

Hurry! It could already be too late to save one of these precious homes from the clutches of encroaching wilderness?

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Aceh War a Blessing in Disguise for Orangutans

Saturday, August 11th, 2007

August 07, 2007 — By Lewa Pardomuan, Reuters

MEDAN, Indonesia — War in Indonesia’s Aceh province has been a blessing in disguise for the orangutan, preventing logging firms and palm oil estates from entering one of the world’s richest expanses of rainforest. 
This has helped the critically endangered mammals flourish, at least for now. 
“If the civil war hadn’t happened and they all operate and clear the forest, we’ll be dealing with a few hundred orangutans now,” said Ian Singleton, scientific director of the Sumatran Orangutan Conservation Programme. 
“And if they clear these extra bits of forests here in the near future, then the same thing will happen again. All the orangutan will die. They don’t sort of like pack their bags and move somewhere else. They stay and die,” he told Reuters in North Sumatra’s provincial capital, Medan. 
The war in Aceh in on the tip of Sumatra had prevented logging concessions and palm oil estates, which had been granted permits during the 1990s, from operating around the so-called Leuser Ecosystem — the last place on Earth where orangutans, tigers, rhinos, leopards and elephants can be found in one area. 
The 2.6-million hectare (6.5 million acres) Leuser Ecosystem, roughly the size of Belgium and the largest protected rainforest area in Southeast Asia, covers parts of Aceh and adjacent North Sumatra province. 
“By preventing them from operating has given us a second chance to save the orangutan. We may have lost around 5,000 orangutans between 1995 and 2000, and then that suddenly stabilised because of the civil war,” said Singleton. 
There are about 7,300 Sumatran orangutans left in the wild. The number has been relatively steady in recent years but is half as many as the early 1990s, when there were estimated to be about 15,000. 
HABITAT LOSS, MORATORIUM 
“In the early-to-late 1990s, there was a lot of habitat loss, especially in Aceh in the lowlands. Much of that was legal forest clearance. There was also illegal forest clearance in protected areas and there was also conversion of forest to palm oil estates,” said Singleton. 
The conflict in Aceh ended in 2005 with a peace pact between Jakarta and the separatist Free Aceh Movement (GAM) after at least 15,000 people, most of them civilians, had been killed in the war that lasted for nearly three decades. 
Singleton said Aceh’s newly elected governor, Irwandi Yusuf, was under pressure from the central Jakarta government to open at least some of the logging concessions. 
In general, the Sumatra orangutan fared better than their cousins in the neighbouring island of Borneo, where annual forest fires, land clearing by farmers and plantations and poaching has drastically cut the numbers of the orange-haired apes. 
“The pet trade, the captive orangutans, tend to be a byproduct of habitat loss. And because there is so much habitat loss in Borneo now, the numbers that are coming into captivity are huge. Thousands every year, and that’s just lucky survivors.” 
The Sumatran Orangutan Conservation Programme was set up in 1990s to help save the animals by creating quarantine centres for confiscated pet apes. 
“We average only around 30 animals per year, two per month. Most of those animals are kept by military, police, local government officials — people who should know better,” Singleton said. 
Source: Reuters 

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