So, so sad.

Chief Raoni cries when he learns that Brazilian president, Dilma, released the beginning of construction of the hydroelectric plant of Belo Monte, even after tens of thousands of letters and emails addressed to her, which were ignored as were the more than 600,000 signatures.

The death sentence of the peoples of Great Bend of the Xingu river is enacted. Belo Monte will inundate at least 400,000 hectares of forest (1544 square miles); an area bigger than the Panama Canal, expelling 40,000 indigenous and local populations and destroying habitat valuable for many species - all to produce electricity at a high social, economic and environmental cost, which could easily be generated with greater investments in energy efficiency.

Edited a little for grammar and to add in the conversion to square miles.

We need our energy to be clean, and you just can't get much cleaner than hydroelectricity.

The real tragedy here is lack of a plan/resources/determination to reforest and to stop illegal logging.

. . . losing 1555 square miles of inhabited jungle is something I could never consider clean.
There has to be better ways to charge up iPhones, run TV's, etc. Just the loss of biodiversity, not to mention the cultural genocide, is horrific.

Message removed by moderator. Click here to review the message board rules.

have been murdered over the past week.....for protecting the Amazon Forest.

I'm sure some Corporate son-of-a-short-dick is making out like a bandit on this.

Just wait until something happens Three Gorges in China....

"Three environmentalists have been murdered over the past week..."

Even man woman and child "deserves" what few that have the power have wrought? How about the 600,000 that tried to stop this? Your broad brush stinks and is a useless piece of judgment.

is that it destroys pieces of the environment and hurts a lot of people.

--imm

:wtf:

exactly what the poster said.

if you uproot indigenous cultures and kick them out of their lands, that's dirty energy.

where are these people going to go --Rio?

What land was never owned by anyone?

I guess we could all be clambering to put windmills and solar panels in the antarctic. But that has limited utility.

It's turned our rivers into tightly managed lakes and decimated anadromous fish runs. Yeah, hydropower is much cheaper than coal, nuclear, even natural gas. But it is limited and has drastically changed the ecology of the region.

Solar and wind...give me some more of that!

I love hydro power for what it's given us, but in fish stocks, it has cost us dearly. Then again, so have several other human policies around habitat exploitation.

This project in the OP, seems unconscionable. Human cultural damage aside, the amount of habitat they are going to flood is just mind boggling. I doubt we even know what all is in there.

and the fucking project isn't worth the existence of an entire peoples.

when an indigenous culture is moved, that's what it is.

don't sleep well at night thinking it's "clean" energy. it's dirty. truly.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=115&topic_id=101846&mesg_id=101846

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=115&topic_id=95870&mesg_id=95870


All the organic matter in the forest that is covered by that reservoir will begin to rot, producing methane -- a more potent GHG than CO2.

Message removed by moderator. Click here to review the message board rules.

to protect the rights of the indigenous and unempowered. Damn.....So very sad.

:cry:

. . . the beginning of the end of his people's existence.

:cry:

Message removed by moderator. Click here to review the message board rules.

Message removed by moderator. Click here to review the message board rules.

Message removed by moderator. Click here to review the message board rules.

:hi:

Dams are not necessarily CLEAN ENERGY!

They can screw up Nature royally!

:cry:

he first set foot here.

have to do with this story? Certainly, all of humankind has been raping the land since forever. Native Americans included. Lots of animals hunted to extinction. Quite a few socities wiped out due to their own greed. And now a woman is doing the raping. But, always nice to dumb things down to "white man bad".

Brazil's ruling class is white. The Russians forced the Native Alaskans to hunt the otter almost to extinction. Do you know how they forced them?

Seriously? I suppose you'll include white women now too, right? The truth is, everyone has been raping the land since forever. Industrialization just makes the process happen at a much accelerated pace. And plenty of non-Europeans have been raping the land with industrialization as well. Europeans were among the first to actually try to protect the environment in the new industrialized, heavy populace age.

So what exactly is the point of demonizing white men from this OP?

The issue anymore is a global problem, seen in every nation, and your comment seems to be trying to place blame on "white men" rather than trying to fix the problem. Scapegoating by race and gender usually is frowned upon.

One more culture gone and hundred or thousands more species threatened or gone.

Disgusting.

It doesn't matter what 'the people' want.

It is a war against the feminine (yin) spirit represented by the indigenous nations and peoples.

And it leads to fulfillment of the hate & death wish so sickly clung to by the whacko, out-of-balance right wing which has monumental craploads of fear in its soul that it has not the courage to face on honest terms.

emulate THEIR way of life, instead of imposing our not-so-great culture on them.

What will happen to them now? :cry:

:(

Thanks for the thread, Richard D.

anyone who would even consider wrecking the Amazon should at the least be sterilized, and all their relatives too. That's exactly the kind of behavior that will be examined if we ever get as far as finding the greater galactic community. If we don't improve, we'll be judged a cancer on the universe.

Message removed by moderator. Click here to review the message board rules.

that means you don't have to examine where your own electricity is coming from (the wall socket, duh!).

:sarcasm:

. . . to all of you who recommended this important article.

I wish I knew what to do about this.

If so many signatures did not move the ptb I don't know what I can personally do. It breaks my heart.

Payakan worked with Sting and others on this issue since before 2003. It's been a long battle.

These rain forests take up a lot of carbon dioxide, and produce a lot of oxygen. Without them, we might as well kiss our asses goodbye.

Yep folks, capitalism is killing us, the planet, and everything we know.

At any rate, you nailed it.

who is obviously distressed and so sad that those who have the control don't give a damn about what the people want. It makes me sick. :-(