Year: 2009

2 arrested protesting Home Depots involvement in Chilean mega-dams

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Denver, CO- Two Earth First! activists were arrested at a Home Depot last week in Glendale, CO. The arrests followed a banner being hung off the roof of a Home Depot store reading “Dam Home Depot, NOT Patagonia!” Supporters of the arrested activists demand that Home Depot cut all ties to companies involved in the HidroAysen megadam project in Patagonia.

The banner-drop action was intended to remind both the public and the company: “We’ve fought The Home Depot before and won.” Almost ten years ago, Earth First! groups around the country joined with Rainforest Action Network and others forced Home Depot to adopt wood product policies that removed old growth from their shelves. But their ongoing economic involvement with the Chilean interests that are proposing to dam wild rivers with the HidroAysen project in Patagonia shows their commitments to ‘green business’ practices to be merely empty Public Relations maneuvering. Continue reading

Amazonian Indigenous Protest Provokes Peruvian Government Reprisals

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Published on Wednesday, May 27, 2009 by Environment News Service

by David Dudenhoefer

LIMA, Peru – After more than six weeks of protests by Peru’s Amazonian indigenous groups that have included blockades of major roads and waterways and the shutting down an oil pipeline pumping station, the Peruvian government has begun to crack down.

During the past two weeks, the administration of President Alan Garcia has declared a state of emergency in the country’s Amazon provinces, issued a decree allowing the military to help the national police maintain order there, and charged the protest’s leaders with crimes against the state. Continue reading

Urbanization, Gender and Energy in World History

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Introduction

In many ways, Vaclav Smil’s Energy in World History is indispensable for those wanting a better understanding of the changing relationship between human society and energy.  Yet, his account is not without its shortcomings.  For example, as I have addressed elsewhere, Smil neglects the role of international forces, such as imperialism, in fashioning energy use.  Nevertheless, this is not the only oversight in Energy in World History.  This article will briefly address how Smil also misrepresents the roles of urbanization and gender in a history on energy.

Urbanization

There is much work examining the causes and consequences of modern urbanization, and Smil does reference some of it (Bairoch 1991; Chandler 1987; Engels 1887; Kay 1832; Williamson 1982).  He also recognizes the dialectical character of urbanization.  On one hand, he highlights the negative ecological implications of this development.  Widespread environmental degradation, Smil writes, “stems from the extraction and conversion of both fossil fuels and nonfossil energies, industrial production, and rapid urbanization.  The cumulative effects of these changes can go beyond local and regional problems to cause destabilizing global biospheric change” (158).  In his view, pervasive, densely-populated human settlement depends on an enormous quantity of energy, a demand satisfied with energy-dense fossil fuels, not with biomass.  This makes modern urban living unsustainable.  On the other hand, the massive population shift away from rural to urban areas, characteristic of industrialization, resulted in an explosion of technological and energy-saving innovations in the city (209).  Nevertheless, from an energetic point of view, Smil’s evaluation is clear: “The infrastructural requirements of urban life increase average per capita energy consumption levels far above rural means even if the cities are not highly industrialized” (237). Continue reading

71 arrested in Copenhagen resisting the World Business Summit on Climate Change

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Protesters clashed with police in Copenhagen this weekend while attempting to disrupt the World Business Summit on Climate Change, a gathering of the worlds largest corporations and, not coincidentally, biggest polluters. Organized by the Danish government, the Business Summit gave corporate interests unprecedented access to the ongoing UN climate talks, including face time with UN General Secretary Ban Ki-moon and so called climate “hero” Al Gore.

The group of protestors, lead by a banner reading “Our Climate is not Your Business” attempted to breach police lines in order to disrupt the meeting. The lively group of activists wanted hightlight the damaging and disruptive role that corporations play in the international climate talks. The list of corporations attending included #1 carbon emitter in the world Shell Oil, Duke Energy (#12 at last count), and BP among other climate criminals.

“The Danish government appears to be under the impression that some of the world’s most polluting companies are going to put forward tough measures to tackle climate change,” said Kenneth Haar, a researcher with Corporate Europe Observatory. “But unfortunately this doesn’t seem likely to be the case. The majority of the corporations attending the World Business Summit on Climate Change seem more intent on pursuing business as usual – with the promise that future technologies will resolve the problem at a later date.

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