Environment

Protestors targeted annual general meetings of Enbridge and Bank of America this week for the devastating environmental consequences of extracting energy from two new and unconventional sources: tar sands and mountain top coal. Read More

KLM, the Dutch airline, has been forced to backtrack from a plan to use oil from jatropha seeds grown in Indonesia for commercial flights, after Friends of the Earth Netherlands put out a report criticizing the potential impact on local food supplies. Read More

Dalla Al Baraka, a major Saudi conglomerate, has acquired two million acres of farmland in eastern Sudan, to produce food for export. While the investors are hoping to wean Saudi Arabia off imports from South America, such agreements have also caused concern among local Sudanese farmers. Read More

A shale oil boom in North Dakota is displacing residents from the Fort Berthold Indian Reservation. Fires light up the sky every night as natural gas is flared off while the ground water has been contaminated with toxic chemicals. Read More

An oil spill in northern Russia from a joint venture between Lukoil and Bashneft has damaged fragile reindeer pastures in yet another blow to the indigenous Nenets people. Environmental activists have warned about such disasters for decades but few precautions have been taken by the oil companies. Read More

Is Walmart going green? Mike Duke, the company's CEO, says in a new 126 page report that the company is becoming more sustainable and responsible while "building meaningful, long-term change." Activists disagree. Walmart's "environmental impact has only grown over the last seven years" they say in a counter-report. Read More

Grupo Bozovich - Peru's biggest hardwood exporter - has been accused of harvesting illegal timber, in a new report by the Environmental Investigation Agency. The Laundering Machine report claims that many of the timber certificates do not represent the actual source of the wood. Read More

Two controversial multinational projects in Orissa, an eastern Indian state, face high level decisions in the next few weeks: a bauxite mine in the Niyamgiri hills planned by Vedanta of the UK and an iron and steel refinery in Jagatsinghpur being developed by POSCO of South Korea. Read More

Puerto Rican citizen groups are protesting two renewable energy projects: a 30 megawatt solar energy project in Yabucoa by Western Wind Energy corporation from Vancouver and a 75 megawatt windmill array in Santa Isabel by Pattern Energy of San Francisco. The reason: these projects will threaten scarce farm land on the food dependent island. Read More

The Karoo desert in the Western Cape region of South Africa is threatened by companies like Shell, the Anglo-Dutch oil company, Falcon Oil & Gas and Bundu Oil & Gas that want to frack for natural gas. Read More