Plans are to build a highway through Alto Purus - Peru’s largest national park – comprised of vital intact Amazonian rainforest ecosystems and inhabited by at least two 'uncontacted' indigenous tribes. Let Peru's President know intact, standing rainforests - looked after by their traditional indigenous inhabitants - are a requirement for local advancement and global ecological sustainability.
Earth is facing the twin global ecological emergencies of abrupt climate change and land being scoured of natural ecosystems. Sadly, corporate American NGOs and the United Nations are responding to these crises by further promoting logging ancient forests. The United Nations REDD+ program to protect primary and old growth forests as a climate change and deforestation solution has been hi-jacked by logging interests and their big pro-logging NGO friends, and will instead subsidize primary forest logging for new plantations. REDD has become a gravy train for consultants, greenwashing NGOs and charlatans of many sorts - claiming logging ancient rainforests for the first time protects them! Old standing natural forest ecosystems are key to sustaining climate, ecosystems, biodiversity, local livelihoods humanity and the Earth System. Corporate NGOs supporting REDD+ must be compelled to stop their old forest logging greenwash - or face ridicule, protest, and an end to public support, until they do.
Brazil's industrial agriculture lobby has forced through their Congress changes to the forest code, the primary legal instrument related to Amazon rainforest protections. It has been done without any scientific inputs, and in a way that will greatly expand industrial agriculture by reducing ecological protections. Newly elected President Dilma Rousseff must be encouraged to veto the bill, something she promised to do during the election. Efforts to address forest code deficiencies must recommence in a manner that incorporates the latest agro-ecological science regarding sustainable agriculture and the importance of large, connected and intact rainforest ecosystems within agricultural landscapes. Without a veto, recent progress in Amazon rainforest protection is at stake just as Brazil is to host the Rio+20 Earth Summit in 2012.
Plans by Uganda's President to partially destroy the Mabira rainforest - one of the nation's most important rainforest preserves - have surfaced again after being defeated in 2007. Let the Ugandan government know rainforests and their ecological services including water, climate and biodiversity are far more important than sugar which can be grown elsewhere. Together with local opposition Ecological Internet has defeated this project twice before, let's do it again.
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