NEWSBYMARGARET SWINK

Margaret Swink is the Communications Director of Ploughshares Fund, a global security foundation. Ploughshares Fund provides support to the Kansas City Physicians for Social Responsibility, a member group of the Kansas City Peace Planters.

Over 150 people have already died and more are sick from working at the nation’s leading manufacturer of nuclear weapons parts in Kansas City, MO. But instead of cleaning up the plant, run by Honeywell for the National Nuclear Security Administration, Kansas City is planning to rebuild and expand the facility. It will create new jobs, they claim, in an economy that badly needs them.

Many in Kansas City, however, believe that jobs building nuclear bombs aren’t the jobs they need to rebuild the local economy. Instead, they’ve created a proposal to convert the bomb factory into a wind energy plant, building on the area’s natural wind resources to create green-collar jobs that will last long into the future.

The plans for the new plant are being financed by a city municipal bond, and incentivized by millions of dollars in city tax incentives to Honeywell. The financial burden this imposes on the city should mean that the community has the right to choose what they want the plant to be used for, argues the Kansas City Peace Planters, the leading group opposing the plant. They’ve gathered almost 5,000 signatures asking the City Council to put the issue on November’s ballot, allowing the community to choose between building a bomb facility and building alternative energy components, including high-voltage power lines, turbines and windmills.

In second grade, Cole was assigned a project to be an environmental activist. He researched environmental causes around him and found that McDonald’s was buying paper that destroyed endangered forests in his home state.  With the help of Dogwood Alliance, a group that works on forests in the Southeast, Cole met with McDonald’s and asked them to change their ways.

Well, Ronald McDonald couldn’t say no to a second grader. After the meeting (and subsequent negotiations with Dogwood Alliance), Mickey D’s announced an industry leading paper policy, committing them to stop sourcing paper from endangered forests and to start buying FSC-certified instead. (For more on why we FSC is preferable, see my previous post.)

Last Friday, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) told Brazil that it should stop construction of the Belo Monte dam until human rights and environmental concerns had been resolved. In response, Brazil told the IACHR to mind its own business.

The IACHR’s ruling was in response to a complaint filed by several groups of Indigenous peoples opposed to the project, and is the latest salvo in a growing international movement against the dam. Construction on the dam has already started, but the fight isn't over yet.

As I’ve written before, the Belo Monte mega-dam project is slated to destroy an area of rainforest the size of Chicago, right in the heart of Brazil’s largest indigenous reserve: the Xingu River basin. According to groups opposed to the project, the completed dam would also threaten the survival of several indigenous groups and could make up to 50,000 people homeless. All this for an only minimal amount of energy. For these reasons, it’s been controversial since its inception, spurring conflicting legal rulings, several government officials’ resignations and a large international opposition that’s attracted celebrities on the order of James Cameron and Sting.

Last month’s landmark judgment against Chevron legally established for the first time that the oil major was at fault for ruining the traditional land of 30,000 Ecuadorians and a major swath of rainforest through reckless oil drilling. The Ecuadorian judge ruling in the case fined the oil company $9.5 billion, the estimated cost of clean-up plus a 10 percent mandatory reparations fee, and ordered the company to apologize or face double the fine.

This, unfortunately, is not the end of this long-running saga, which has been the subject of countless articles, campaigns and the award-winning documentary "Crude."

Not only is the company not apologizing, Chevron is refusing to accept any part of the court’s ruling and has filed a counter suit in U.S. courts alleging that the Ecuadorians have committed fraud, racketeering and pretty much every other terrible thing that Chevron’s lawyers can come up with. And they’ve put together a crack team of spin doctors to try and win the case in the court of public opinion.

Over the past few years, groups from Greenpeace to WWF have been campaigning to stop the ravages of palm oil cultivation on the unique rainforests of Indonesia.

This week, they had a big big victory. The world's second largest producer of palm oil, an Indonesian company called Golden Agri Resources (GAR), announced that it would no longer cut down rainforests in order to plant palm oil. And possibly even more important, it committed to protecting peatlands—the carbon rich soils underneath many rainforests that are outsized carbon emitters when destroyed.

The move comes after several large Western companies—including General Mills, Nestle, Burger King and HSBC—stopped doing business with GAR and its parent company, Sinar Mas, as a result of the group's notorious environmental damage. Additionally, the industry’s only certification body—the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil—issued them the group’s first-ever censure last fall.

The Great Bear Rainforest—a band of forest the size of Switzerland stretching north of Vancouver Island to the Alaskan Panhandle – is almost all that’s left of the highly unique and highly endangered temperate rainforest ecosystem. Like the more well-known tropical rainforests, Great Bear is home to huge trees and amazing biodiversity, including it’s namesake Kermode bear, a rare white-coated variety of black bear, and six separate species of salmon.

In the early 2000s, a landmark environmental campaign saved the Great Bear Rainforest from loggers. But now, after all of this work to preserve the forest, the Great Bear and its First Nations inhabitants are facing a new threat – tar sands oil.

Enbridge, the Canadian energy company most recently famous for an oil spill in Michigan that it has yet to clean up, has proposed a project to build 1,150 km of twin pipeline to carry oil from Alberta's Tar Sands project to Kitimat in Northern BC – crossing over 1,000 streams and rivers and miles of pristine rainforest. Once constructed, the pipeline would empty out into the fragile Northern BC coastline to fill the waiting bellies of an estimated 200 supertankers, exposing an entire coastal ecosystem to industrialized pollution and the risk of a massive spill.

The purpose of the project is to allow a 30 percent expansion of the Tar Sands project, which, as has been covered before here at Change.org, is one of the most destructive projects on Earth and Canada’s single largest source of climate pollution.

They’re not blue, and they don’t have tails. But in all other respects, the communities along the Xingu River in Brazil are living a story remarkably close to James Cameron’s Avatar.

After generations of living in one of Brazil’s largest networks of indigenous reserves, the lives and livelihoods of more than 40,000 indigenous people are being threatened by a massive dam project meant to power several new mining projects.

The planned dam is called Belo Monte. If completed, it would flood an area of rainforest the size of Chicago, destroying the only habitat of at least 10 endemic species, including two species of monkey. At the same time, it would choke off water to the entire downstream Xingu River area, critically damaging an environment and culture entirely reliant on the river system.

“For these people, it’s the end of the world as they know it,” says James Cameron in a short film he made to highlight the issue. “And they’re reacting accordingly.”

Between them, Asia Pulp and Paper (APP) and Asia Pacific Resources International Limited (APRIL) control 80 percent of the controversial Indonesian paper industry, which means that these two companies are some of the world’s leading forest destroyers. Both have active global advertising campaigns to attempt to cover up their destructive habits.

But one Silicon Valley blogger is determined to expose their dirty secrets.

Rhett Butler is the founder and lead blogger of Mongabay.com, one of the world’s only blogs focusing exclusively on forests. As a child, Butler was lucky enough to travel the world, and fell in love with rainforests. Now, he runs a blog dedicated both to education and reporting around some of the world’s most beloved ecosystems.

Last year, Butler drove a campaign that helped stop the export of rosewood from Madagascar, helping to halt the destruction of the Galapagos-like island rainforests. The site has also spurred activism and broader coverage around forest issues in places around the world.

“Mongabay's reporting sometimes seems to lead to subsequent broader coverage by mainstream media,” Butler wrote me in an email interview.

How often do you think about forests?

If your answer is not very much, you’re probably much like the rest of the world. Although forests are some of the world’s most important ecosystems (housing amazing biodiversity, stabilizing weather systems and keeping climate change-causing carbon out of the atmosphere) they tend to be more of a backdrop to campaigns centered on people or charismatic animals like owls, wolves or bears.

This year, the U.N. is hoping to make people think about forests just a little bit more, by declaring 2011 the International Year of Forests. Participating countries around the world will hold events – conferences, exhibitions, tree planting competitions and film festivals – all calling attention to the value of forests to their country and to the globe. A few examples:

As the new Chief Sustainability Officer at Kentucky Fried Chicken, you’d think that Roger McClendon would want to make KFC more, you know, sustainable. And he is trying, sort of.

The fast food joint has recently come under fire from environmental group Dogwood Alliance for destroying some of America’s last remaining southern hardwood forests to make paper for their famous buckets of chicken. And until McClendon came, the company had been pretty stubbornly relying on vague generalities to justify their destructive purchasing policies.

Like a lot of newbies on the job, our man McClendon decided to give this one the old college try, and announced that, more than 90 percent of KFC's paper is certified as sustainably harvested by the Sustainable Forest Initiative. (90 percent? What about the other 10?)

Nice try, Roger. Unfortunately, as I’ve written about before, SFI is essentially a marketing greenwash for the American Forest & Paper Association, the logging industry's trade group.