Rather than respond substantively to criticism over the Malaysian government and industry's expansion of deadly oil palm plantations into Brazil and Liberia's rainforests [1], the Malaysian government is resorting to despotic censorship to stifle dissent. References to plans by Malaysia‘s federal land agency to establish up to 100,000 hectares of oil palm plantations in the heart of Brazil's Amazon rainforest are being systematically removed from the government's Internet servers. And all emails referring to Malaysia's global rainforest for oil palm land grab flowing through Streamyx, the monopoly Internet service provider in Malaysia, are not being delivered.

"It is clear that Malaysian citizens do not enjoy freedom of information, which is tragic, because their government is leading the destruction of Earth's rainforests with their tax money," asserts Dr. Barry, Ecological Internet's President. "For decades Malaysian timber companies have behaved like timber Mafia across the Asia-Pacific, bribing and waging violence to rip out millions of year old rainforest ecosystems for timber. This once off raping of the land is now being followed by planting of oil palm, in what can only be described as south-south neo-colonialism. We demand that the Malaysian government respond to our criticism, cancel the projects, and commit to freedom of expression regarding their rainforest policies."

Over-developed, over-populated, and land and water scarce Asian and Middle East nations embark upon global land grab to produce food and agrofuels; threatening global human rights, rainforest and other natural ecosystems, and regional and global ecological sustainability. Deadly global ecological issues require global citizens to unite in escalating protest action!

By Earth's Newsdesk, a project of Ecological Internet (EI)
CONTACT: Dr. Glen Barry, glenbarry@ecologicalinternet.org

Relatively rich countries in Asia and the Middle East, short of food and water at home, have leased or purchased more than 20 million hectares of farmland in Africa and Latin America, equal to 25 percent of Europe's farmland. This global "land grab" by foreign governments and companies is a result of last year's food crisis and a shortage of arable land and water. About one-quarter of these investments are for biofuel plantations [search]. Ecological Internet's current global campaign against Malaysian oil palm plantations in the Amazon rainforests [1] fits within the context of this larger trend.

Malaysia‘s federal land agency will soon break ground on a joint venture with a Brazilian firm to establish 30,000-100,000 hectares of oil palm plantations in the heart of Brazil's Amazon rainforest. Sime Darby, a Malaysian palm oil producer, will invest $800 million for 200,000 hectares (500,000 acres) of palm oil and rubber plantations in Liberia. "It is increasingly difficult to acquire arable plantation land in Asia and thus it is imperative that new frontiers be sought to meet increasing demand," said Ahmad Zubir Murshid, chief executive of Sime Darby. "Sime Darby will also have the first mover advantage over future entrants into Liberia in terms of securing choice land."

"This flood of land grabs by emerging nations, mostly of land under local customary land tenure, is eerily reminiscent of past and ongoing European and U.S. colonial practices," states Dr. Glen Barry, Ecological Internet's President, who is a practicing Political Ecologist and hold a Ph.D. in Land Resources. "We are witnessing the intensification of social turmoil caused by climate change, land and water scarcity, and over-population and inequitable consumption. Until these root causes of global ecosystem collapse are addressed, there is no chance of achieving equitable and just global ecological sustainability."

Malaysia's government owned and subsidized oil palm cooking oil and biofuel industry -- the scourge of Asia and the world's rainforests -- is continuing to expand, this time into the heart of the Brazilian Amazon

BRIEF BACKGROUND:
TAKE ACTION HERE NOW: Malaysia‘s Federal Land Development Authority (FELDA) will soon break ground on a joint venture with a Brazilian firm to establish 30,000-100,000 hectares (ha; 75,000 – 250,000 acres) of oil palm plantations in the heart of Brazil's Amazon rainforest. Similar oil palm development continues to devastate Asia-Pacific's rainforests, and increasingly the world, with some thirty square miles of carbon and biodiversity rich habitat being cleared a day to provide cooking oil and transport biodiesel. Oil palm agrofuel is heralded as a climate change mitigation measure, yet the initial rainforest clearance leads to much more carbon release than its production and use avoids.

Large scale biofuel production runs counter to urgently addressing climate change and threatens to cause more deforestation, hunger, human rights abuses, and degradation of soil and water. Global ecological sustainability and local well-being depend critically upon ending all industrial development in the world's remaining old forests -- including plantations, logging, mining and dams. The amount of primary and old growth forests that have been lost has already overshot the carrying capacity of Earth. Globally there are not enough old forests to maintain climatic and hydrological cycles, meet local forest dwellers' needs, and to maintain ecosystems and the biosphere in total. Local peoples must be assisted to fully protect, restore and benefit from intact, standing forests.

TAKE ACTION!

No Biomass/No Burning! Truly renewable energy must be defined as including no energy production or climate mitigation claims from food based agrofuels, live plants and ecosystems, or burning biomass of any type.

TAKE ACTION HERE NOW! As the urgent need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions is belatedly gaining recognition within the United States, a suite of policy initiatives, including the Markey-Waxman "American Climate and Energy Security Act 2009" (ACESA), are being considered that promote biomass such as tree plantations, and forest and agricultural 'waste', as renewable energy. Given well known issues of sustainability regarding industrial agriculture and land mismanagement, the need to more clearly define just what "renewable" means is clearly shown. It is vitally important that renewable energy be defined, within the context of federal energy and climate policy, in strictly ecological sustainability terms, including renewable energy and low carbon fuel standards.

In an alarming trend, burning and refining of plant biomass and also toxic municipal waste (or for that matter anything that burns) is being falsely promoted as renewable and of benefit to reducing emissions that cause climate change. Humans already consume a large amount of the energy represented in annual biological growth. To try to consume more of Earth's primary productivity is clearly unsustainable land use. Even partial replacement of fossil fuels with fresh plant biomass energy is absolutely impossible for more than a few years. Trying will denude Earth and make a very different planet, that is hostile and uninhabitable to human life. TAKE ACTION HERE NOW!

By Earth's Newsdesk, a project of Ecological Internet (EI)
CONTACT: Dr. Glen Barry, glenbarry@ecologicalinternet.org

Côte d'Ivoire's (Ivory Coast) main palm oil company, Palmci, on Friday announced it was abandoning a major plantation scheme in the south of the country after opposition by environmentalists to destruction of 12,000 hectares (29,700 acres) of primary rainforests. Tanoé Swamps Forest is one of the last remaining old growth forests in the country and the last refuge for three highly endangered primates -- the Miss Waldron's Red Colobus, the Geoffroy's colobus and the Diana roloway -- as well as home to many endangered plant species.

In June of 2008, Ecological Internet and Rainforest Rescue of Germany initiated the first major international campaign against the Tanoé Swamps Forest oil palm project and in support of local opposition. Leading global consumer products company Unilever was then poised to destroy Ivory Coast's rainforests [search] as both investor and customer, after having just made a supposed commitment -- falsely heralded by some -- to rainforest protection and certified oil palm, but starting in 2015.

Critically, as our recent alert demanded, biofuel's indirect land use impacts [search], starting with corn ethanol, are to be considered when determining a fuel's net impact upon emissions. Looking at the full inputs to corn ethanol -- including energy used in planting and transport, land pressures leading to increased deforestation, and coal for distillation -- shows it clearly has a sum negative impact upon climate. Careful examination of the inputs and indirect land impacts of other biomass based fuels such as cellulosic biofuels will clearly show the same thing.

Earth has no spare biomass to power our vehicles. Progress is being made on the global campaign to stop fuel production from biomass, particularly at the expense of food and ecosystems. The Earth's terrestrial ecosystems are past their carrying capacity, and rather than increasing pressures upon primary productivity, the human enterprise must power down and enter an era of ecological restoration. Rainforest Rescue and Ecological Internet's alert objectives were met and, along with many others, we helped counter the energy industry's extreme pressure. These regulations must now go global and continue to be strengthened.

Regulators at the California Air Resources Board (CARB) are poised later this week to declare that biofuel from corn ethanol [search] cannot help the state address climate change. In assessing the true environmental cost of corn ethanol, it was found this biofuel is worse than petroleum when total greenhouse gas emissions are considered. This is because as with all monocultures, corn ethanol for biofuels lead to numerous other indirect land use changes. Increased industrial agriculture results in rising land pressures and the loss of soil and forest carbon sinks elsewhere. Such a declaration disallowing corn ethanol biofuel from counting as emissions reductions would be a considerable blow to the corn-ethanol industry in the United States and would likely set a national precedent.

Ecological Internet and Rainforest Rescue are concerned with America's growing ethanol industry, and the precedent it sets for massive agricultural industrialization of the world's remaining rainforests and other natural wildlands. Please call upon the CARB to heed the overwhelming evidence that agrofuels worsen climate change through further deforestation and the destruction of other soils and ecosystems, drive food prices up, force more people worldwide into hunger, malnutrition and landlessness; and decimate biodiversity and ecosystems. TAKE ACTION!

TAKE ACTION! The Australian government is failing to establish and implement a rigorous climate change policy adequate to respond to the global climate emergency. The Rudd Government’s emissions trading scheme (ETS) [search] aims to cut emissions by 5 percent by 2020 and 60 percent by 2050. The Government’s cowardly response to its greatest challenge has been explicitly condemned by climate scientists and implicitly condemned by devastating bushfires which killed 200 people.

Australia's per capita greenhouse gas emissions are among the highest in the world, and their economy is based heavily upon the deadly coal fossil fuel industry which exerts undue political influence. Unsustainable Australian lifestyles including native forest clearing and wasteful water use threaten their continent's fragile ecosystems, and the drought and intensified bushfires are a precursor of Australian and global ecosystem collapse to come.

Given imminent strengthened regulation of greenhouse gases in the United States and Europe, it is time for Australia to embrace sufficient climate change policies including committing to ambitious targets that will require ending its use and export of coal, and stopping native forest clearing. TAKE ACTION!

(Earth) -- Ecological Internet (EI) welcomes the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's ruling today that carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases "may endanger public health or welfare", a finding that opens the door to future regulation of such emissions under the Clean Air Act. EI continues to demand that emission cuts be fast and large, that Congress not weaken planned E.P.A. carbon regulation, and that Congress abandon cap and trade legislation for a simple, highly effective, carbon tax. And that the U.S. leads at Copenhagen or feel the consequences.

The E.P.A said in its proposed endangerment finding that "based on rigorous, peer-reviewed scientific analysis of six gases – carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide, hydrofluorocarbons, perfluorocarbons and sulfur hexafluoride – that... these gases are at unprecedented levels as a result of human emissions, and these high levels are very likely the cause of the increase in average temperatures and other changes in our climate." Human health and welfare was thus threatened by increased severity and intensity of storms; more frequent drought, heatwaves, and forest fires; rising sea levels; and harm to water resources, agriculture, wildlife and ecosystems.

Insofar as the carbon market can pay for this protection and restoration; without allowing over-developed countries to continue polluting, threaten indigenous and local land rights, while supporting community based ecoforestry uses of standing forests, they are worthy of support. If carbon monies pay for non-existent "sustainable management" and other industrial development of primary forests, replacing them with plantations and much diminished secondary forests (both in terms of biodiversity and carbon), it will facilitate the biosphere's continued decline. Old forest destruction must end to sustain Earth.

Others like RAN and Greenpeace [search] disagree and support first time "well-managed" ancient forest logging. They are dangerously wrong and will bear the shame of having enabled such activities at this critical juncture for global ecological sustainability.

The climate change movement's [search] struggle has now gone from trying to minimize impacts to continue living largely as we have, to just maintaining a climate and biosphere that are operable and will allow for continued shared survival. It is not time to give up. Just the reverse, it is time to redouble our efforts in order to maintain a habitable Earth. We have the answers -- ending coal, old forest logging and industrial agriculture -- to continued human being. And despite escalating police brutality against lawful protest [ark], we must wage an escalating Stewardship Revolution if we and all Gaia's creatures are to survive.

Governments have until Copenhagen to lead at which point they may need to be replaced. Simultaneous to massive protest, I urge you to begin preparing yourself to adapt and survive. A piece of land you are willing and able to defend is critical. Abrupt deadly change may come next year, or there may be a lull, but have no doubt, the global ecosystem is collapsing. If you have not already, I urge you to read EI's recent Earth Meanders, which further explains the stakes and options. I beseech you to start preparing and steeling yourself for coming struggles. Be part of a New Earth Rising.

By Dr. Glen Barry, Ecological Internet
Earth Meanders come from Earth's Newsdesk

Human Hubris
Gaia (or the Earth System if you rather) is not a science project, it is alive (albeit sick) and fully inhabited. To speak of geo-engineering the climate before having exhausted local, national and international efforts to reduce emissions, protect and restore old forests, reform industrial agriculture, and other ecologically sufficient policies to sustain being, is rash and foolhardy. Continued ill-conceived technological, industrial diminishment of naturally operating ecosystems can only hasten and ensure global ecological collapse.

Sadly, President Obama's new science advisor, John Holdren, has indicated the administration is investigating geo-engineering -- massive planetary alterations such as shooting aerosols into the upper atmosphere -- to 'solve' climate change and associated ecological crises. The Obama administration is clearly signaling it is going to take a compromising, technology heavy approach to climate change policy. Social change and personal transformation necessary to achieve global ecological sustainability have received nary a mention.

Obama's climate policies will not be guided by what science tells us is required to stop hazardous warming. Rather, the U.S. government will only pursue policies that do not threaten economic growth, and rely upon more industrial technologies at the expense of natural ecosystems. Given America's history of exceptionalism, I suppose such hubris -- going from doing nothing to address climate change, directly to seriously considering engineering the biosphere, completely skipping the stages of self-examination and national transformation -- is to be expected.

The venture will start with 30,000 hectares cultivated near Tefe and Manuas. FELDA has a 70 percent stake in the venture, called Felda Global Ventures Brazil Sdn Bhd, while Braspalma of Brazil holds the remaining stake.The project would include the establishment of a palm oil biodiesel production plant. There is no spare biomass to be had for fuel at the expense of the Amazon's life giving natural ecosystems.

The venture could be the first of many oil palm projects in the Brazilian Amazon, as the scourge of Malaysian oil palm development goes global. The Brazilian Congress is weighing a law that would allow landowners to count plantations as forest towards their legal forest reserve requirement. By law landowners in the legal Amazon must retain 80 percent forest cover on their holdings. A recent study estimated that 2.3 million square kilometers of the Brazilian Amazon are suitable for growing oil palm.

Rainforest Rescue (Rettet den Regenwald) and Ecological Internet are committed to working together to expose the ecological damage done to forests, water, climate and local livelihoods by industrial agriculture, and its proposed expansion for agrofuels.

TAKE ACTION: Tell Leading Climate Scientists, Industrialists and Negotiators to Stop Promoting Industrial Scale Biochar

By Earth's Newsdesk, a project of Ecological Internet
CONTACT: Dr. Glen Barry, glenbarry@ecologicalinternet.org

(Earth) -- An international declaration was today launched by 147 organisations, including Ecological Internet, opposing the growing hype and political support for Biochar. The groups signing the declaration "strongly oppose the inclusion of soils in carbon trade and offset mechanisms, including in the Clean Development Mechanism.” The groups further assert that "the 'biochar' initiative fails to address the root causes of climate change.” [1]

Those issuing this warning range from small farmers associations and forest protection groups to international environmental networks and human rights advocates. Further organizations are being invited to sign the declaration. Ecological Internet has independently organized a protest alert questioning whether enough "waste biomass" and "degraded and marginal" lands exist to carry out geoengineering of the Earth's land and climate at the scale proposed, and without intensifying industrial tree plantations and all their attendant problems. [2]

Thankfully the ecological science and advocacy is catching up with the hype and hucksterism. Reasonable questions are being raised [ark] regarding the sustainability of corn-based ethanol, and even 2nd generation industrial plantation based biofuel and biochar production given finite land, fertilizers and water; and in the face of exponential increases in population and demand for energy.

Our recent alert with Rainforest Rescue has already led to partial success, as the decision on whether to increase the corn ethanol blend from 10% to 15% has been delayed for a year. It is highly likely this ongoing agrofuel protest was instrumental in delaying what had appeared to be certain approval for the proposal. Let's use this reprieve to continue organizing to resist agrofuels at the expense of food, people, ecosystems and climate. In addition to health and economic concerns, we are successfully making with others the point that "If using one acre of corn to make ethanol leads to just one-tenth of an acre of rainforest clearing, then all the benefits of avoided gasoline for the first 30 years are wiped out."

Blog entry with Rainforest Rescue

(Earth) -- Ecological Internet (EI) has committed to furthering its leadership in use of the Internet to facilitate environmental conservation by establishing major new Facebook and Twitter presences[1]. While Ecological Internet's President, Dr. Glen Barry, is widely credited with inventing blogging[2] in 1993, a subject of his Ph.D. dissertation; until now EI has not embraced the large, commercial social networking sites. Supporters are asked to follow and recommend these efforts.

"Facebook's improvement upon public profiles made the time ripe to commit to these technologies to further biocentric thought and an ecologically sufficient policy agenda. The use of RSS/XML technologies has matured to the point where we can micro-blog in one place and have it replicate to all our sites and profiles. And Ecological Internet has long offered our own major RSS/XML newsfeeds of ecological media, alerts, and commentary which others are encouraged to share[3]," said Dr. Glen Barry.

Blog entry with Rainforest Rescue

By Earth's Newsdesk, a project of Ecological Internet
CONTACT: Dr. Glen Barry

(Earth) -- Ecological Internet is pleased to announce the second issue of their "New Earth Rising" e-zine, entitled "Ecological Sustainability, the Growth Machine, and the Financial Crisis". There, nearly a dozen authors explore the implications of the current economic crisis for the survival of the Earth and all her creatures, including humans.

In the lead article, entitled "New Green Deal or Not: Industrial Capitalism Is Assured Death", the e-zine's editor, Dr. Glen Barry, critically examines New Green Deal proposals that supposedly will solve climate change while providing jobs. He concludes their focus upon economic stimulus to promote more economic growth, without reining in consumption, human population, natural resource use and ecosystem destruction, will make things worse. The e-zine arose from his earlier critically acclaimed "Earth Meanders" essay series.

"Nothing grows forever. It is amazing how few recognize economic decline as the inevitable outcome of an economy based upon growth at the expense of natural ecosystems. Required green policies, such as ending the use of coal and old forest logging, must occur regardless if they create or destroy jobs, just to maintain being," says Dr. Barry.