By Peter Yeung From the skies above Creporizao, a remote town in the south of the Brazilian Amazon, the surrounding area looks like a vast blanket of dark green rainforest. But along the dirt roads and rivers that run through it like arteries are telling patches of muddy brown: illegal gold mines. Wildcat miners come […]
By Christopher Sergeant, Julian D. Olden Scars from large mining operations are permanently etched across the landscapes of the world. The environmental damage and human health hazards that these activities create may be both severe and irreversible. Many mining operations store enormous quantities of waste, known as tailings, onsite. After miners excavate rock, a processing […]
by Justin Catanoso Pope Francis, in an effort to reignite his influence as a global environmental leader, released an impassioned document Feb. 12 entitled Dear Amazon — a response to the historic Vatican meeting last autumn regarding the fate of the Amazon biome and its indigenous people. In a 94-page “exhortation,” Francis argued for the […]
By Jeff Turrentine Well, he told us he would do it. And now he’s actually doing it — or at least trying to. Late last week, President Trump, via the U.S. Department of the Interior’s Bureau of Land Management, announced that he was formalizing his plan to develop lands that once belonged within the Bears […]
By Jan Rocha President Jair Bolsonaro pressed forward with a “dream” initiative sending a bill to the Brazilian Congress on Wednesday that would open indigenous reserves in the Amazon and elsewhere to development, including commercial mining, oil and gas exploration, cattle ranching and agribusiness, new hydroelectric dam projects, and tourism — projects that have been […]
The Trump administration finalized plans Thursday to open public lands in Utah to the fossil fuel industry. The move completes a process begun in 2017 when the administration announced the largest rollback of land protection in U,S. history: It shrank Utah’s Bears Ears National Monument by 85 percent and its Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument by […]
By Julia Conley Climate action leaders have warned for years that marginalized frontline communities in poor countries are already facing the most destructive impacts of the climate crisis, and a new study confirms those fears, detailing how women in those regions are at greater risk for violence and abuse as the environment is degraded. The […]
Filipino scientists have discovered what might be the next big indigenous plant material for rehabilitating a mining site teeming with copper and arsenic — and it’s a largely ignored local fern. Published in the peer-reviewed journal Chemosphere, the study by a group of scientists led by Rene Claveria of the Ateneo de Manila University records […]
Goldman Sachs, one of the world’s largest investment banks, gave a minor victory to the divestment movement by declaring that it will not fund an new arctic oil explorations, as CNN reported. Citing the importance of the Arctic’s fragile ecosystem and its importance to indigenous populations, the investing giant said it will decline investing in […]