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Pacific Lumber carries out dangerous extractions of tree sitters

June 17— The tree that the activist known as Remedy lived in for a year was ascended by contract climbers hired by Pacific Lumber (PL) this morning with the intention of removing protesters and cutting the giant old growth redwood tree. Other activists have occupied the tree continuously since Remedy, a 28-year-old woman from Olympia, Washington was forcibly taken out of the tree Mar. 17, starting a month-long process to remove sitters from nearly two dozen old growth trees they were occupying in efforts to save the remnants of forest in this severely impacted watershed.

The action by Pacific Lumber this morning, observed by only one sheriff’s deputy, was described by those on the scene as highly dangerous, as the tree-sitter had his arms locked into a 55-gallon barrel filled with concrete. The contract climbers, not trained to do this sort of work, planned to lower the heavy barrel with the protester attached to it from a height of about 130 feet.

The old-growth redwood tree, with a girth of about 12 feet, was topped and limbed after Remedy was taken down, but given the resilience of old-growth redwoods, would recover if left alone. Local residents have been raising funds to purchase this tree and several other ancient trees from the timber company, who would profit more from a purchase than logging the few remaining trees.

Over 50 people were arrested over the course of two months this spring, amid “SLAPP suits (Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation, designed to quash dissent) filed by PL and cross-complaints filed by activists charging assault by the contract climbers.

Freshwater, CA has been the site of many demonstrations by forest defenders and landowners alike, who have been protesting flooding of their homes and roadways from logging-caused sedimentation of Freshwater Creek.

The Freshwater Creek watershed has been heavily logged throughout the past 20 years and less than four percent of its original forest remains. Freshwater Creek was the subject of one of the most extensive watershed studies ever done in California, which concluded that the watershed is severely impaired and that all logging should cease and desist immediately. Pacific Lumber ignored the analysis and has continued to clear-cut residual old-growth forests on steep and unstable slopes while disregarding the concerns of residents.

Source: Earth First! Bay Area Coalition for Headwaters

Police to aid developers in gas pipeline with Malaysia

By Marwaan Macan-Markar

Bangkok, Thailand, June 20 (IPS)— On top of fighting crime and directing traffic, Thailand’s national police force will soon have another beat — the support and “protection” of the development of a long-disputed gas pipeline project with neighboring Malaysia.

The country’s police chief affirmed this new combination of the police and development following a meeting this week with senior police officials in the southern Songkhla province.

The police will provide security to ensure that the construction of the pipeline, which is due to commence soon, will be hassle-free, national police chief Sant Sarutanond was quoted as having told Friday’s Bangkok Post, an English-language daily.

The estimated 400 policemen who have been assigned this task will also have another duty — dealing with the groundswell of opposition to the Thai-Malaysian pipeline project from local communities.

But this pattern of development — using the police to protect a disputed project — has already prompted worry among some quarters in Thailand, and they are expected to grow.

“This will add to the atmosphere of fear among the communities affected by the pipeline,” said Parichart Siwaraksa, a member of the Environment Impact Assessment Panel, a national body. “Sending the police does not help solve the discontent that started at the beginning of this project.”

It will also cement the dispute that is at the heart of this issue — “a clash between the national interest versus the local way of life,” she added during an interview. “This has not been addressed seriously, and from the current efforts there are no signs it will.”

As troubling for some activists is the prospect of the police provoking the affected local communities in Songkhla to demonstrate violently, as opposed to the largely non-violent methods they have pursued so far.

“There is a fear that the police will try to instigate the villagers, make them turn violent, and then arrest them with a number of charges,” said Penchom Saetang, coordinator of the Campaign for Alternative Industry Network, a non-governmental environment lobby.

“We have already noticed signs of this psychological pressure, mental violence in some villages,” added Ananta Boonsopon, a medical doctor and community leader in Hat Yai, a town in the south that has seen anti-pipeline demonstrations. “In some villages like in Ban Nay Rai, the police do it at night, flashing lights into homes, showing who is strong.”

These worries are not unfounded given a clash that erupted in December last year, when a peaceful demonstration of community leaders and grassroots activists in Hat Yai provoked a harsh police crackdown. Over 30 demonstrators and 15 policemen were injured.

The attempt by some government leaders and the police to pin blame on the pipeline protestors has not stuck. This month, for instance, two highly respected bodies delivered a scathing judgement on the “force” and “suppression” pursued by the police.

The Hat Yai police chief and a government minister must be held responsible for the violence against the villagers who were out protesting, stated the Thai senate’s committee on public participation. Both men had violated the law and ignored the orders of Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra to deal with the demonstrators peacefully, it added.

Following its own investigations, the National Human Rights Commission declared that the force used by the police to drive away the unarmed demonstrators was “disproportionate” and “unjust.”

Such realities were also not lost on Hina Jilani, the UN special representative on human rights defenders, during her assignment in late May to investigate the conditions under which Thai human rights activists work.

The threats and intimidation against activists opposed to the gas pipeline are very clear, she told the media.

These developments were the latest in a sequence of events that go back to April 1998, when Bangkok and Kuala Lumpur signed a contract — followed by another in October 1999 — to build the pipeline as a joint venture between Malaysia’s Petronas and the Petroleum Authority of Thailand (PTT).

This venture, which also includes a 225-kilometer offshore pipeline, will see one billion cubic feet of gas being carried a day from the Gulf of Thailand into Malaysia.

The pipeline project, which will also have a two-unit gas separation plant in Songkhla, is due to be completed in 2005 at an estimated cost of US $565 million.

Little of that has impressed the local communities in Songkhla. After all, the people living in the 23 villages that the pipeline will pass through see more damage than gain to their lives as a result of the pipeline.

Available reports point to some 10,000 lives being affected by the pipeline and the nearby sea and marine life, which the villagers depend on for their living, being polluted.

“It was very clear from the beginning that this project would have an impact on the local communities, but they were never considered or involved in the decisions made,” said Parichart, whose environment panel reviewed this project from the outset.

The rage that such a reality produced among the villagers refuses to abate. Community leaders and grassroots activists have made it known they will continue their opposition to the pipeline by staging demonstrations along its route.

“We will do so peacefully. We have no guns, we only have our rights,” said Ananta, the community leader. “For violence to happen or not will be up to the police. The people will not start it.”

Endangered Species of the Southern US

A weekly column by Shawn Gaynor

A high-flying squirrel

CAROLINA NORTHERN FLYING SQUIRREL (Glaucomys sabrinus coloratus) Status: Endangered, 1985 (no critical habitat designated) Range: Yancey County (NC), Haywood County (NC), and in the vicinity of Mt. Mitchell (exact county undetermined), Carter County (TN), and Sevier County (TN)

DESCRIPTION: The northern flying squirrel is a small nocturnal gliding mammal some 26O to 3O5 millimeters (1O to 12 inches) in total length and 95-14O grams (3-5 ounces) in weight. It possesses a long, broad, flattened tail (8O percent of head and body length), prominent eyes, and dense, silky fur. The broad tail and folds of skin between the wrist and ankle form the aerodynamic surface used for gliding. Adults are gray with a brownish, tan, or reddish wash on the back, and grayish white or buffy white ventrally. Juveniles have uniform dark, slate-gray backs, and off-white undersides. The northern flying squirrel can be distinguished from the southern flying squirrel by its larger size; the gray base of its ventral hairs as opposed to a white base in the southern species; the relatively longer upper tooth row.

At the end of the last ice age, as the glaciers receded north, climate zones shifted, causing the migration of whole ecosystems. The warming temperatures left much of what would later become the southern United States unable to support the boreal forests that had covered much of the area. In most areas the forest retreated north following the cooler climate. In the southern Appalachian Mountains, these forests didn’t only retreat north; they retreated up, to the cooler mountaintop weather. Eventually this left these boreal forests in mountaintop areas separated by hundreds, sometimes thousands of miles from other boreal forests.

Some animals that depend on the boreal forest became isolated in these mountaintop areas from their cousins that moved north. This type of isolation, over time, is one of the key factors in species separating along evolutionary lines.

This is what happened to the Carolina Northern Flying Squirrel. Isolated from its northern relatives, the squirrel is a subspecies of the Northern Flying Squirrel.

Found only in the area straddling North Carolina and Tennessee, the squirrel makes its home in the ecotone between the high elevation islands of remnant boreal forest, and hardwood forests. An ecotone is a border between different ecosystems; where a forest edges up to wetland, for example.

The squirrel uses both of these ecosystems to provide itself with a diet of fungi, lichens, and insects. Though both forest types are necessary for feeding, the squirrel nests in the hardwood forest area.

An ecotone is a precarious niche for an animal to live in. It limits the range of the Carolina Northern Flying Squirrel dramatically, as only a narrow band of habitat is suitable.

The squirrel is extremely rare. It was not described by western science until 1953. Its rarity, and elusiveness, has made it a hard animal to study. Since 1968 only 25 have been captured for study, mostly from Roan Mountain.

It is unclear what the future holds for the Carolina Northern Flying Squirrel. In its natural environment the squirrel has to worry about becoming a meal for birds, particularly owls, which are still relatively abundant in the area.

Now the squirrel also has to compete with logging, development, and road building in the high southern Appalachian areas in which it lives. The Southern Flying Squirrel, a much more aggressive and territorial species, has also been known to push out Northern Flying Squirrel populations. In addition to having to compete for a very narrow range, the squirrel faces the problem of the decay of the boreal ecosystem in general. Air pollution and disease have lead to much of these high forests dying off in recent years.

Additionally, the general climate change associated with global warming threatens to push these ice age remnant forests out of the southern mountains altogether.

US oil giant faces court battle over Burma violations

By Andrew Gumbel

June 19— One of America’s most powerful oil conglomerates looks likely to get its comeuppance in court over its overseas business practices after spreading a trail of misery through a small rainforest village in the Tenasserim region of Burma in November 1994.

When the Union Oil Company of California, or Unocal, started working on a gas pipeline project there, it contracted out security operations to the Burmese military regime; and that was when the horror began.

According to court documents, Burmese soldiers entered a house in the village, broke into the rice storeroom with an axe, kicked the woman of the house and pushed her down some stairs. After a brief hunt for her husband, the soldiers came back and kicked the woman again, knocking her unconscious and pushing her into a lighted fireplace. They kicked her infant daughter into the fire too.

The soldiers wanted the family to relocate to another village to make way for the pipeline, and they weren’t about to take “no” for an answer. The baby desperately needed medical care, but the soldiers forced the family to stay in a field without water for two days as they ransacked their belongings. By the time the family had paid off the soldiers, by selling a cow, it was too late. The baby died from an infected head wound.

The human rights organzations that have brought a suit against Unocal allege that the Yadana pipeline project has led to dozens of similar incidents, as well as rape and extortion. They say villagers — who are left unnamed in the suit for their own protection — have been systematically relocated and pressed into forced labor.

Invoking an old United States law — the Alien Tort Claims Act of 1789, which was passed to combat piracy on the high seas but has now been adapted to confront other infractions of the “laws of nations” — they argue that Unocal and other companies must be held accountable for violations committed overseas in their name. And they are now just one step away from forcing the issue into open court. A panel of federal appeals judges in San Francisco heard final arguments this week on whether Unocal should be made to stand trial. Although a ruling is not expected for a few weeks, early indications are that a trial will indeed take place, setting a new legal precedent for US corporations and heralding the possibility of new standards of corporate behavior in some of the most isolated corners of the world.

There is, of course, nothing new in allegations of gross corporate misbehavior overseas, and critics of US foreign policy have often accused Washington of deliberately subverting or overthrowing democratically elected governments to suit the corporate interests.

What is new is the legal approach to challenge the corporations. The Alien Tort Act was first revived about 20 years ago to chase down disgraced generals and deposed despots such as Ferdinand Marcos, but it was adapted in the 1990s to pursue corporations.

Rick Herz, a lawyer with Earth Rights International, said: “The principle is the same, since corporations are persons under the law.

“Aiding and abetting — that’s a direct liability. Companies like Unocal argue that they are not responsible for the actions of their subsidiaries and contractors, but notions of liability through joint venture or agency are basic tort theories, common throughout the United States and the rest of the world.” Another suit, against ChevronTexaco over the deaths of villagers in Nigeria who had opposed its plans for a series of oil platforms, is also close to coming to trial.

The prospect of an avalanche of suits against big corporations has so spooked the Bush administration — always a good friend to the oil industry — that last month the Justice Department filed a brief in the Unocal case denouncing the Alien Tort Act as “an obscure provision” and arguing its application posed a direct threat to, among other things, the war on terrorism.

The San Francisco appeals court has indicated it is less than impressed with this line of argument. The Justice Department was not allowed to participate in this week’s oral arguments, and large corporations who wanted to file similar briefs were denied.

Herz said: “Their position is outrageous and their analysis is silly. They are trying to overturn 23 years of consistent precedent by arguing that the act was meaningless when it was passed. They are arguing that upholding human rights fundamentally conflicts with US foreign policy, when one would have thought it was to uphold them.”

Source: Independent (UK)