Orangutans dying as demand for palm oil soars

Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

From instant noodles to ice cream, palm oil is found in roughly half of all packaged supermarket products. Demand for the product has led to the destruction of Indonesian jungles which are home to a large number of wild orangutans. NBC News Correspondent Ian Williams travels to Indonesia and follows a man fighting to save one of our closest relatives.

BELO MONTE IS STOPPED !!!!! « Indigenous Brazil

In a historic trial in the evening this Monday (13/8) the Fifth Chamber of the Federal Regional Court 1st region ruled by unanimity the stoppage of the works of the Belo Monte hydroelectric complex. The measure was taken by the TRF when judging a resource of embargo promoted by the Federal Public Ministry (MPF). The fine provided for if the determination is not fulfilled is r $ 500 thousand per day. The decision of the fifth class was based on article 1, item 2 of International Labour Organization (ILO), which determines a prior consultation to the main affected by works: indigenous communities, who live on site. This consultation shall be held solely by the National Congress, which according to judge Souza prudent, has not occurred. As rapporteur, ignore the Belo Monte plant would be irresponsibleTrial that can stop the Belo Monte plant construction is suspended”The National Congress issued Legislative Decree No. 788 of 2005 without listening to indigenous communities, such as the ILO and paragraph 3 of the Brazilian Constitution, authorizing the beginning of works and ordering that a posthumous study,” said the judge. “However, the Constitution does not authorize a study posthumously, but yes, a preliminary study. So given by Ibama licensing is invalid, “he added. The judge stressed that Souza Prudent to query is essential when dealing with Indians of the construction of a complex as this. In addition, the measure is supported in article 231, and paragraphs of the Brazilian Constitution, which establishes a special protection to indigenous lands, their stories and customs. “The Indians are human beings who have the same rights of any Brazilian citizen. In addition, the works of Belo Monte endanger the aviation of the 7 Falls waterfall, “says the judge.

Read more

How Trees Communicate (video)

Researchers at the University of British Columbia are concluding that trees are interacting with one another in a symbiotic relationship that helps the trees to survive. Connected by fungi, the underground root systems of plants and trees are transferring carbon and nitrogen back and forth between each other in a network of subtle communication. Similar to the network of neurons and axons in the human brain, the network of fungi, roots, soil and micro-organisms beneath the larger ‘mother trees’ gives the forest its own consciousness.

Dr. Vandana Shiva invites you to join her in India with Global Exchange

Join the Call to Suspend the Belo Monte Dam

Sign Belo Monte Dam Petition

A New Satellite Tool Tracks Deforestation - NYTimes.com

Green, A Blog about Energy and the Environment, June 25, 2012, 2:31 PM
By RACHEL NUWER

http://www.terra-i.org/Karolina Argote/Louis Reymondin

An international team of researchers presented a new tool at the Rio+20 sustainability conference last week: the first satellite system for monitoring deforestation across Latin America in nearly real time. While such programs have existed in Brazil for several years, the program, called Terra-I, fills a much-needed gap for some smaller Latin countries that are losing forests at an equal or higher rate.

“Everyone more or less understands maps,” said Mark Mulligan, a geographer at King’s College London and one of the project’s designers. “Having dynamic maps that show where forest loss is occurring is more effective than statistics you always hear about — ‘we’ve lost another patch of forest the size of Wales.’ ” Now, he said, people can visualize exactly where and how quickly that forest was felled, including which towns or protected areas that it lay near.

The project is a collaboration, involving Dr. Mulligan; a graduate student, Louis Reymondin; the International Center for Tropical Agriculture in Colombia; the Nature Conservancy; and the School of Engineering and Management of Vaud in Switzerland.

Using NASA’s Modis satellite sensor, it depicts land changes every 16 days at a resolution of 250 square meters (about 2,700 square feet) on the ground. The constantly updated maps are freely available online as a simple overlay on a Google map or formatted for more sophisticated Web mapping software. “People familiar with Google Maps can just look down at their own areas,” Dr. Mulligan said. “And we provide the data so others who have methods for manipulating geodata can actually do further things with the data than we’ve done.”

Preliminary results revealed that the effects of deforestation in parts of Colombia have more than quadrupled, increasing by 340 percent since 2004. More than a million hectares (2.5 million acres) of forest have been felled in Paraguay’s Gran Chaco region. “I think the Gran Chaco results are quite surprising — there’s much greater deforestation than we expected,” Dr. Mulligan said.

For Terra-I to work, the researchers had to train the system to differentiate between seasonal changes in vegetation and human-induced impacts. They developed a computational neural network and taught the program to recognize those changes with old data from 2004 to 2005.

Brazil in particular was a good starting point for teaching the machine, since large swaths of land often change from all forest to no forest. From there, the scientists are refining the system to distinguish between visual obstacles like cloud cover and flooded rivers and to home in on more sporadic deforestation.

In many parts of the world, the details of what’s being cut where and when are splotchy, making managing a given patch of forest — let alone an entire country’s holdings — tricky. Dr. Mulligan and his colleagues hope the new tool will help governments, conservationists and those drafting climate-related policies to accurately assess landscape changes and make decisions — how to balance livelihoods and food security with biodiversity conservation, for example, or how to design more eco-efficient agriculture.

Now that monitoring for Latin America is up and running, the team is working on systems for Asia and Africa. Those areas are proving more challenging, though: forests there often occur in disconnected patches rather than one green blanket, and deforestation tends to be carried out by small-scale individual operations rather than large corporations.

Still, they are working on methods to improve their algorithms so they can better function in an African or Asian context. They are also brainstorming on ways to bolster their computing power, since continuously running an analysis of each pixel of data taken every 250 square meters on the continental scale is “hugely computationally intensive,” Dr. Mulligan said.

The Rio+20 attendees and others seemed to respond favorably to Terra-I’s debut, Dr. Mulligan said, with the Web site logging around 2,300 hits on the first day of the conference. “The best way to improve a system is to get people to use it,” he said, although so far most people have just taken a quick look. “It takes time for people to come back after figuring out, O.K., now what can I do with it?”

Saving The Rainforest By Internet - Brazil Offers Free Internet to Amazon Tribes

CIO News

In an effort to protect the Amazon, the world’s largest rain forest, Brazil will provide Internet signal by satellite to 150 Amazon communities, reports CNN.com. Environment and communications ministers and the Forest People’s Network signed an agreement on Thursday. The provision of Internet access to native Indian tribes will allow them to report illegal logging and ranching, ask for help, and fortify rain forest preservation efforts. Many of these communites are only reachable by riverboat.

City and State goverments must first install telecenters with computers in selected areas, then the federal government will provide satellite connection.

The Forest People’s Network is a digital web for monitoring, protection and education.

Rainforest Facts:

Rainforests once covered 14% of the earth's land surface; now they cover a mere 6% and experts estimate that the last remaining rainforests could be consumed in less than 40 years.
One and one-half acres of rainforest are lost every second with tragic consequences for both developing and industrial countries.
Rainforests are being destroyed because the value of rainforest land is perceived as only the value of its timber by short-sighted governments, multi-national logging companies, and land owners.
Most rainforests are cleared by chainsaws, bulldozers and fires for its timber value and then are followed by farming and ranching operations, even by world giants like Mitsubishi Corporation, Georgia Pacific, Texaco and Unocal.
The Amazon Rainforest has been described as the "Lungs of our Planet" because it provides the essential environmental world service of continuously recycling carbon dioxide into oxygen.
At least 3000 fruits are found in the rainforests; of these only 200 are now in use in the Western World.
Currently, 121 prescription drugs currently sold worldwide come from plant-derived sources. And while 25% of Western pharmaceuticals are derived from rainforest ingredients, less than 1% of these tropical trees and plants have been tested by scientists.
Vincristine, extracted from the rainforest plant, periwinkle, is one of the world's most powerful anticancer drugs. It has dramatically increased the survival rate for acute childhood leukemia since its discovery.
Experts agree that by leaving the rainforests intact and harvesting it's many nuts, fruits, oil-producing plants, and medicinal plants, the rainforest has more economic value than if they were cut down to make grazing land for cattle or for timber.
The latest statistics show that rainforest land converted to cattle operations yields the land owner $60 per acre and if timber is harvested, the land is worth $400 per acre. However, if these renewable and sustainable resources are harvested, the land will yield the land owner $2,400 per acre.

Read more