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Aug. 22— In the largest act of environmental sabotage in US history, the Earth Liberation Front (ELF) has accepted responsibility for a $50 million fire in San Diego, California, that destroyed an unfinished five-story condominium complex on Aug. 1. The complex is owned by Garden Communities, the second largest developer in Southern California. Nationwide, Garden Communities owns more than 40,000 apartments and 25 million square feet of commercial space.

Fire crews arrived on the scene and evacuated apartments surrounding the 34-acre construction site. No one was hurt in the blaze, which was credited to the ELF through a painted slogan: “If you build it-we will burn it. E.L.F.” The fire was in San Diego’s Golden Triangle area, which boasts a mix of luxury apartments, upscale office buildings, fashionable retail centers and biotechnology companies. The Golden Triangle is adjacent to Rose Canyon-home to bobcats, coyotes, ash-throated flycatchers, red-shouldered hawks, barn owls, and orioles, as well as at least two rare and threatened plants.

From 2,000 years ago until the last century, the Kumeyaay people inhabited a seasonal village in Rose Canyon, gathering acorns from the once-abundant coastal live oaks, weaving baskets from the arroyo willow and hunting not far from where a seven-million-dollar crane was destroyed by the ELF fire. San Diego County is one of the most rapidly growing regions in the US and has been identified as one of the world’s 25 biodiversity “hotspots.” It also boasts the fifth worst rush-hour commute in the nation.

The Garden Communities project was approved in 2000, despite opposition from nearby residents. Many who hike Rose Canyon’s four-mile length are tired of the sprawl engulfing the canyon and have expressed support for the ELF’s efforts to draw attention to the development of San Diego’s last remaining wetlands and wild places. The US Fish and Wildlife Service transferred Endangered Species Act implementation authority to the developer-friendly San Diego government in 1998. The Multiple Species Conservation Plan (MSCP) acts as a regional Habitat Conservation Plan that was established to cover nearly 900 square miles. As one of the Southwest’s first large-scale plans to protect entire ecosystems rather than just particular species, the MSCP has proven to be inadequate in preserving native biodiversity and ensuring the recovery of endangered animals and plants in San Diego County.

“I think it’s a positive statement that at least someone somewhere is trying to point out that over-development is clogging our already congested urban areas. This is a war to protect the environment, to raise the consciousness of people,” said 41-year-old Richard Marose, a local restaurant manager. Marose also noted that rain and humidity made the night of the fire moist enough to prevent it from spreading to Rose Canyon: “The canyon would have gone up in smoke if this was done at any other time.” He refused to talk to agents from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms who wanted to question him.

This particular project, La Jolla Crossroads, when completed would comprise 1,800 apartments with an average monthly rent of $1,340. The 42-acre Nobel Research Center, which will house the biotechnology company IDEC Corporation, is planned to be built adjacent to the site. Following the fire, a small, hand-printed sign was taped to a traffic barrier near the construction site: “Thank-You E.L.F. Burn Baby Burn.” Tad Simmons of Carlsbad said that as an environmentalist he had mixed feelings about the fire. “Part of me thinks it’s kind of cool that somebody had the guts to stand for something like this--a cause, and that nobody ever gets hurt.”

No arrests have been made, but the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force said several suspects were being tracked. On Aug. 14, FBI agents raided the home of animal rights activists affiliated with the San Diego-based Compassion for Farm Animals (CFA). CFA organized a lecture with Rod Coronado on the day of the ELF fire. Agents seized phone lists, a computer, a video camera and videotape of the lecture, which was part of on-going Revolution Summer events in San Diego. Since the fire, CFA activists have been under constant surveillance and have had their home mysteriously broken into and vehicle stolen.

By Julia Olmstead

Bogota, Colombia— A global biosafety treaty set to take effect this week won’t slow Colombia’s transition to genetically modified organisms for its major food crops, according to scientists and consumer advocates here.

The Cartagena Protocol on Biosafety will require labeling of gene-spliced imports such as seed, livestock and grain beginning September 11. The treaty, ratified by Colombia in May, also requires risk assessment and government consent before the organisms are released into a country’s environment.

But the United States has not ratified the pact, and many provisions appear unlikely to withstand challenges before the World Trade Organization. The proposed US-backed Free Trade Agreement of the Americas also would bar restrictions on genetically modified imports throughout the hemisphere. And St. Louis-based Monsanto seems positioned to win Colombia’s approval of new gene-spliced crops.

President Alvaro Uribe Vélez’s administration says genetic engineering can ease the country’s agricultural crisis. Colombia already allows crops of gene-spliced cotton and blue carnations.

Monsanto supplies the cotton seed, engineered to include a gene from Bacillus thuringiensis, a type of soil bacteria that kills larvae of many insects. The gene occurs in every cell of the cotton plant and produces an insecticide, the basis of a Monsanto claim that the seed reduces pesticide use.

Monsanto won approval to sell the cotton seed to Colombian farmers last year. The company said tests during Colombia’s 2000-2001 growing season determined that the cotton did not harm insect populations and that the risk of cross-pollination with conventional crops was insignificant.

But many scientists criticized the tests as inconclusive. Colombia’s Environment Ministry wrote that the results “cannot be extrapolated to the rest of the country, and more research should be done on the implications of Bt cotton in commercial use.”

Monsanto designed the cotton to control plagues of butterflies and moths, according to agronomist Germán Alonso Vélez, director of a nongovernmental group called Seeds. “In Colombia the problem is the cotton picudo — the pest that 70 percent of pesticides here are used for,” he said in his downtown Bogotá office. “This won’t solve the farm problem. This will just solve the problems of three or four multinational corporations.”

Environmentalists say Monsanto has rigged the approval process. The National Technology Council backed the cotton’s commercial introduction in a closed-door meeting in March 2002, just minutes after removing its president and replacing its vice president with a Monsanto representative, Vélez said. Seeds, Rosario University and the Bogotá-based Colombian Consumers filed an unsuccessful class-action suit last October against the Colombian Agriculture Institute’s authorization of the cotton crops.

Monsanto’s influence in Colombia stems partially from supplying glyphosate, the herbicide of a US-backed effort to eradicate coca and opium poppy, the crops used to make cocaine and heroin.

Monsanto is following its cotton victory by pressing the government to allow field testing of Roundup Ready corn and soybeans. The company has genetically modified both seeds to resist the effects of glyphosate.

But some studies show weeds building quick resistance to the herbicide. And studies in Saskatchewan, the Canadian state, have linked glyphosate to Fusarium, a soil fungus that harms many crops. The European Union and Canada ban Roundup Ready seeds.

Food staples ranging from yucca to rice to coffee, meanwhile, are undergoing genetic modifications at Colombian facilities such as the Center for Research on Tropical Agriculture in the western town of Palmira.

Seeds is urging a Colombian moratorium on genetically modified organisms until the government has the technology and political independence to evaluate the crops.

By Ameer Shahul

Bangalore, India, Sept. 10— A major controversy is brewing in the southern Indian state of Andhra Pradesh over the proposed mining of uranium deposits near a remote village in Nalgonda district. Environmental groups and the local community have rejected claims by the government-managed Uranium Corporation of India Limited (UCIL) that mining poses no danger to the health of the region’s inhabitants.

Concerns include the ghastly consequences that uranium mining may have on public health, the threat to water sources and its location near a national tiger reserve. The huge project will cover 322 hectares of land and take 20 years to fully extract the uranium deposits.

Environmentalists, human rights activists, political parties and left organizations, and even animal rights activists, have banded together under the banner of the Movement Against Uranium Project to fight UCIL’s planned mine. MAUP has urged UCIL to abandon its proposal to mine the radioactive ore and called on the state government to cancel the company’s mining license.

“The government can and must reject this project proposal,” said Praful Bidwai of the Coalition for Nuclear Disarmament, which is part of MAUP.

The trouble began when UCIL reported the discovery of a significant uranium deposit, estimated at 11 million tons, in the Lambapur-Peddagutta plateau region, above the Nagarjuna Sagar water reservoir. UCIL also announced that it would set up a plant in the area to process raw uranium ore.

Residents and environmentalists fear that contaminated storm-water runoff from the open-cut uranium mine could enter the reservoir, as well as negatively impacting on the Krishna River basin, one of the region’s largest sources of water for drinking and farming purposes.

Another worrying feature of the project is that the proposed “uranium processing zone” in Mallapuram is within four kilometers of the Akkampally Reservoir, a dam that supplies drinking water to 600 villages in the area and to the state capital of Hyderabad, 140 kilometers away.

These are not the only reasons why locals are vehemently opposed to the project, even though it would provide the region with better roads, more employment and increased economic activity. Villagers are aware of the impact that another UCIL mine has had in Jaduguda, in the eastern state of Jharkhand.

Jaduguda villagers suffer from high rates of skin diseases, cancers, brain damage, kidney disease, hypertension, disorders of the central nervous system, congenital deformities, insomnia, nausea, dizziness and sore joints.

According to independent surveys, in the seven villages within one kilometer of the Jaduguda mine’s tailings dam, which is used to dump liquid and solid by-products of uranium processing, 47percent of the women have reported disrupted menstrual cycles and 18 percent have suffered miscarriages or stillbirths in the past five years. A third of the women cannot conceive, according to studies conducted by the Jharkhand Organization Against Radiation. The organization estimates that 30,000 people in 15 villages are exposed to dangerous levels of radiation.

These facts worried the villagers of Nalgonda, causing them to think twice before accepting the operation of a similar mine near their homes.

Abiding by Indian government regulations, UCIL did prepare an environmental impact analysis (EIA). However, villagers and environmentalists point out that many issues went unanswered in the document. Activists and villagers also report that the company held EIA hearings in an inaccessible area, in order to limit the participation of locals and to avoid media attention.

Greenpeace India has expressed doubts over the EIA’s figures on the amount of waste that the mine will generate. The EIA states that 300 million tons of waste will be produced over 20 years of mining, a considerable underestimate, according to Greenpeace.

If other uranium mines run by UCIL are any guide, workers at the proposed Nalgonda mine, and nearby villagers, will not know how much radiation they will be exposed to. Though each employee at UCIL mines wears a radiation-measuring device, readings are seldom revealed and employees are only treated at company hospitals. Under India’s Atomic Energy Act, UCIL does not have to divulge its employees’ health records.

UCIL, which began mining nine years before India first tested an atom bomb in 1974, doubled its daily production of uranium ore to 2000 tons in 2001. Its three uranium mines — at Jaduguda, Bhatin and Narwapahar (with a processing and by-products recovery plant at Jaduguda) are the source of uranium for India’s 10 nuclear power stations.

India’s nuclear sites are not open to international inspections. The Atomic Energy Act forbids Indian scientists and politicians from speaking out openly against the country’s highly secretive nuclear program or the conditions at Indian uranium mines.

The Indian government exploded three more nuclear bombs in May 1998, triggering a nuclear arms race with archrival Pakistan, which responded by detonating an equal number of bombs within a few months. As the flexing of nuclear muscles continues on the Indian subcontinent, Indian nuclear planners have been prompted to explore for more deposits to meet the increasing demand for uranium.

Shortnose sturgeon
Acipenser brevirostrum
Status: Endangered 1967
Range: Eastern US rivers from
Connecticut to northeastern Florida

Description: The shortnose sturgeon is a small sturgeons, rarely exceeding 3.5 feet in length and 14 pounds in weight. It has a short, conical snout with four barbels in front of its large underslung mouth. Five rows of bony plates (called scutes) occur along its body: one on the back, two on the belly, and one on each side. The body coloration is generally olive-yellow to gray or bluish on the back, and milky-white to dark yellow on the belly. The peritoneum (body cavity lining) is black.

The Shortnose sturgeon gets its name from its short pointy nose. It is one of the oldest known species, with a fossil record that dates back over one hundred million years. Though rarely seen because of its bottom feeding habits and reluctance to bite at bait, before the colonization of the eastern seaboard of what is now the United States the fish lived in abundance in the lower sections of large coastal rivers. They now occupy only 16 rivers.

The Shortnose sturgeon is an anadromous fish, meaning it spends part of its life in fresh water and part in salt water. It spends most of its time in river estuaries, where the fresh water flowing out from rivers mixes with the incoming ocean tides to create brackish (semi-salty) water.

Since colonial times the fish was prized as a source of meat and caviar for export to Europe, and it is speculated that overfishing destroyed may populations.

In addition to overfishing, dredging, pollution and dams nearly drove the species to extinction. The Shortnose sturgeon is particularly sensitive to all of these activities. Its feeding habits and tendency to remain on river bottoms make dredging an immediate risk to the fish. Pollution also has a substantial impact on the Shortnose, as biomagnification of pollutants in the food chain accumulate in fish due to its diet of invertebrates. Many pollutants have also robbed rivers of the oxygen needed by fish for survival, leading to large population drops between the late 1940s and 1970.

By far the most serious impact on the ancient fish has been the dams that separate it from its spawning grounds. The Shortnose is very particular about were it spawns. It swims upriver from its feeding ground, sometimes more then 100 miles. It does this, depending on water temperature, between late March and early May. There it looks for silt-free rock bottomed streams with swift currents that will sweep the fry, which are poor swimmers, downstream.

It takes the Shortnose sturgeon a long time to reach sexual maturity — between 5 to 8 years. Males spawn every other year, females every third year. Unfortunately, the Shortnose sturgeon’s naturally slow rate of reproduction leaves it especially vulnerable. Negative impacts on the species may last for decades because it does not quickly recuperate. Luckily, Shortnose sturgeon are long-lived. The oldest known female reached 67 years of age and the oldest known male was 32.

Though the species has been recognized as being in risk of extinction for over 30 years, no habitat conservation plan has been issues by the US Fish and Wildlife Service for its protection.

In the Neuse River of North Carolina, the removal of the Quaker Neck Dam in 1998 reopened 1,000 miles of waterways for the Shortnose sturgeon and other migrating fish species to be able to reach their historical spawning grounds.

Like all species protected under the Endangered Species Act of 1973, it is illegal (not to mention immoral) to kill or posses a Shortnose surgeon, so if you catch one, throw it back!

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Mexico tries a new tactic against Chiapas rebels: conservation

Analysis by Bill Weinberg

Lacandon Selva Rainforest, Chiapas, Mexico, Aug. 21— As all eyes remain on the messy aftermath of the Iraq war and the strategic oil resources of the Persian Gulf, war threatens to return again to the United States’ own “backyard” — southern Mexico and Central America. Here, as in the Gulf, struggles for control of petroleum and other key resources are at stake.

In this past December’s prelude to the anniversary celebrations of their New Year’s Day 1994 armed rebellion, the Maya Indian rebels of the Zapatista National Liberation Army (EZLN) in Mexico’s southern state of Chiapas broke the official silence they had been maintaining since September. The silence, and the breaking off of all dialogue with the government, was an official protest to a Mexican Supreme Court ruling that upheld a series of constitutional reforms on indigenous rights. The constitutional reform package was ostensibly based on the Zapatistas’ peace plan, hashed out painstakingly with federal legislators years earlier.

But the rebels charged that the plan was gutted, with binding provisions on control of territory excised by Congress after the fact. The accord was challenged in the courts by the rebels’ supporters — including indigenous groups and village municipal governments across Mexico — as failing to meet international standards on self-determination. But the Supreme Court ruled it had no jurisdiction to overturn the so-called Indian Rights Law, sending the peace process with the EZLN back to square one nearly nine years after it was initiated.

In the Dec. 29 communiqué, the Zapatistas asserted their defense of the indigenous autonomous government in the Chiapas rainforest, the rebel zone of the Lacandon Selva. The EZLN’s Subcomandante Marcos pledged that the rebels would resist the government’s planned removal of pro-Zapatista peasant communities from the Montes Azules Biosphere Reserve, in the heart of the Selva. “There will not be a peaceful expulsion,” wrote Marcos.

At this moment, army troops are stationed in the area of the biosphere reserve, awaiting government orders to eject the self-governing rebel Indian communities. Since they emerged in the 1994 rebellion, these jungle “autonomous municipalities” have been protected by the cease-fire under which the peace accords were negotiated. Now President Vicente Fox is preparing to move against the settlements in the name of ecology.

While the Zapatistas say they will refuse to give up their guns until their original peace plan is approved, they have hardly fired a shot in anger since the truce that ended their 1994 uprising. Now, many are growing impatient with the deadlock. On the Jan. 1 anniversary celebrations, 15,000 Zapatistas — masked but unarmed — marched on the Chiapas highlands city of San Cristobal de Las Casas, which the rebels had briefly occupied during the uprising.

Last Oct. 12, hundreds of Zapatista sympathizers marked Dia de la Raza by blocking the entrance to the main Chiapas military base, Rancho Nuevo. They demanded demilitarization of Chiapas and protested Fox’s “Plan Puebla-Panama” (PPP), which calls for a series of new superhighways, ocean-to-ocean pipelines, and hydro-electric dams across southern Mexico and Central America as arteries for global trade and development.

“These lands belong to the people and we will not abandon them,” said one protest leader. “The riches belong to those of us who have lived here for centuries and we will oppose their globalization.”

Ironically, just as protecting the biosphere reserve — the embattled and shrinking heart of the rainforest — has become an urgent priority, megadevelopment plans for the Lacandon Selva, put on hold when the Zapatistas seized the jungle in 1994, are now back on track. At the forefront are long-stalled plans for a giant hydro-electric complex on the Usumacinta River, which cuts through the heart of the forest and forms the border with Guatemala. The Inter-American Development Bank has undertaken studies on funding of the project. The oil exploitation plans, which would expand south into the rainforest from the industry’s toxic heartland along the Gulf Coast in Tabasco, are also being revived after nine years.

More ironically still, the Zapatistas and their supporters claim that even the conservation imperative in the UN-recognized biosphere reserve masks a corporate agenda. The Maya inhabitants of the Selva, the “autonomous municipalities” loyal to the EZLN, say that — contrary to both UN guidelines and the peace plan principles — Montes Azules is not being protected for the resident indigenous peoples, but for transnational biotech corporations that hope to profit from the region’s vast genetic wealth.

Two years ago, the California firm Diversa signed a three-year “bio-prospecting” deal with the Mexican government. Diversa, which has a similar deal with the US Interior Department for Yellowstone National Park, was granted access to Mexico’s biosphere reserves, with areas like Montes Azules especially targeted. In the deal, the government got $5,000 to train and equip personnel from the Mexican National Autonomous University who are actually to collect the samples; $50 per sample; and royalties between 0.3 and 0.5 percent of net sales on products derived. By contrast, the US Interior Department in the Yellowstone deal got $15,000 in equipment, royalties from 0.5 to 10 percent, and a $100,000 fee up front.

The University of Georgia and the UK-based Molecular Nature Ltd. have signed on for a similar five-year project. This one, dubbed “Drug Discovery and Biodiversity Among the Maya of Mexico”— specifically targets Chiapas. Hoping to tap the vast reservoir of ancient Maya herblore, the program was to receive $2.5 million from the US International Cooperative Biodiversity Groups (ICBG), a consortium of agencies including the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation, and the Department of Agriculture. Researchers hoped to draw on indigenous healers’ wealth of knowledge about tens of thousands of curative plants in the region. The researchers would share their data with private pharmaceutical and biotech firms that were commercial partners in the deal.

But last year, a coalition of traditional Maya healers in Chiapas declared victory following the cancellation of the ICBG program. The Chiapas Council of Traditional Indigenous Midwives and Healers (COMPITCH) led the campaign against the program, coordinating Maya communities and international environmental groups, such as Canada’s Rural Advancement Foundation International. COMPITCH declared their non-cooperation with the project, and denounced it as “biopiracy,” asserting the impoverished Maya communities would receive little benefit from any patents developed.

Another key player in the privatization of Chiapas biodiversity is Alfonso Romo Garza, an agro-industrialist who has a joint project in the biosphere reserve with Conservation International (of which he is a board member). In 1991, Conservation International brokered a “debt-for-nature” swap, buying a $4 million chunk of Mexico’s debt for the right to establish a genetic research station in Montes Azules. But Romo’s interests may lie less in conservation than expanding control over global agribusiness seed stock through his Monterrey-based Grupo Pulsar.

Romo is also an official promoter of Fox’s PPP, with its visions of interoceanic rail and highway links, industrial pods, and free-trade zones stretching from the Panama Canal to the Mexican state of Puebla. The Zapatistas decry the PPP as a “counterinsurgency” measure aimed at bringing the restive Indian communities of the Mexican south (and Central America) under industrial control.

There is an uneasy symmetry between this mega-scheme and the paradoxically interlocking plan — backed by Conservation International and the World Bank — to integrate Montes Azules into a “Mesoamerican Biological Corridor,” linking the biosphere reserves and other protected rainforests of the isthmus as far south as Panama. This symmetry raises the vision of these tropical forests surviving only as corporate-administrated genetic colonies in the midst of devastated zones of industrial sprawl.

Bill Weinberg, who frequently reports from Central and South America, is the author of Homage to Chiapas: The New Indigenous Struggles in Mexico (Verso).

Source: In These Times

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