TAG: amazon

Photos Reveal Ecuador Building Secret Oil Roads Deeper Into Richest Rainforest on Earth, the Yasuní National Park

Massimo De Marchi, Mongabay Waking Times In August 2012, professional photographers Ivan Kashinsky and Karla Gachet were on assignment for National Geographic in Yasuní National Park, home to arguably the most biodiverse rainforest in the world. While there, they happened to take an aerial shoot above an area known as Block 31 (see Map), a controversial oil concession located

Proposed Belo Monte Gold Mine Means More Devastation for Amazon & Indigenous People

Waking Times For years now the world has watched as native peoples of the Amazon along the Xingu river have battled against the government and corporate development of the Belo Monte Dam, a massive hydro-electric power station that will displace tens of thousands of indigenous people and destroy the natural eco-system along this important Amazon

Ayahuasca, Alternative Medicine and the Amazon Rainforest

Jonathon Miller-Weisberger, Guest Waking Times The awakening offered by ayahuasca, an alternative medicine practiced by the native tribes of the Amazon rainforest, requires deep reflection, and carries the risk of misinterpretation. Excerpted and reprinted with permission from Rainforest Medicine (North Atlantic Books, 2013) by Jonathon Miller Weisberger, which chronicles the practices, legends, and wisdom of the quickly

An Untamed Wilderness: 22-Year Old Produces Documentary on the Peruvian Amazon

Jeremy Hance, Mongabay Waking Times Spending a year on the Tambopata River in Peru’s deep Amazon, allowed 22-year-old Tristan Thompson, to record stunning video of the much the region’s little seen, and little known, wildlife. Thompson, a student at the University of the West of England, has turned his footage into a new documentary An Untamed

Video of Amazon Gold Mining Devastation Goes Viral in Peru

Rhett A. Butler, Mongabay Waking Times Video of illegal gold mining operations that have turned a portion of the Amazon rainforest into a moonscape went viral on Youtube after a popular radio and TV journalist in Peru highlighted the story. Last week Peruvian journalist and politician Güido Lombardi directed his audience to video shot from

Deforestation Surges as Ecuador Kills Amazon Protection Plan

Rhett Butler, Mongabay Waking Times Data released this week by Terra-i, a collaborative mapping initiative, shows that deforestation in Ecuador for the first three months of 2013 was pacing more than 300 percent ahead of last year’s rate. The report comes shortly after Ecuadorean President Rafael Correa killed off a proposed plan to prohibit oil drilling

Brazil Confirms Amazon Deforestation Increase

Mongabay Waking Times Data released by the Brazilian government Friday confirms an increase in Amazon forest loss. Brazil’s National Space Research Institute, INPE, updated data from its near-real-time deforestation tracking system, known as DETER. The system showed a near five-fold increase in forest loss during May 2013 relative to a year earlier, from 99 square

Peru Finally Declares State of Emergency Over Oil Contamination of the Amazon

Jeremy Hance, Mongabay Waking Times The Peruvian government has declared an environmental state of emergency after finding elevated levels of lead, barium, and chromium in the Pastaza River in the Amazon jungle, reports the Associated Press. Indigenous peoples in the area have been complaining for decades of widespread contamination from oil drilling, but this is the

DMT, Ayahuasca, The Pineal Gland – A Professor Talks Neurotheology

Clayton Crockett, Legacy Waking Times  Reach Out and Touch Faith Professor and chemist Steven Barker sits at his desk, surrounded by curious objects — a mortar and pestle, a DNA model, the cylinder of a spectrometer. Professor Steven Barker is a curious, if strange, man. And he does little to hide it, if he does

Tribe Rejects $9million Payment From Electricity Company Behind Destructive Amazon Dam

Mongabay Waking Times Leaders of more than two dozen Kayapó indigenous communities have rejected a $9 million offer from Brazilian state energy company Eletrobras to fund development projects in their region due to the the firm’s involvement in the construction of the Belo Monte dam, reports Amazon Watch, an activist group fighting the hydroelectric project.

The Visionary World Of Ayahuasca – Plant Spirit Shamanism In The Amazon

Howard G. Charing, Guest Writer Waking Times  Ayahuasca – Plant Spirit Medicine of the Amazon “We are not talking about passive agents of transformation, we are talking about an intelligence, a consciousness, an alive and other mind, a spirit, which of course we have no place in our society. Nature is alive and is talking

Confronting Deforestation: A World Hanging in the Balance

Staff Writer Waking Times Deforestation is one of the greatest threats to our planet today. As certain industries and communities have grown, they have cut down acres upon acres of forests that provide life-giving oxygen, absorb and hold carbon dioxide (CO2) from the atmosphere, and house countless animal and plant species. Deforestation of the Amazon Rainforest

Brazil Court Orders Halt to Work on the Belo Monte Dam

Rodrigo Bravo, Staff Writer Waking Times The huge Belo Monte dam project along the Xingu River in Brazil’s Amazon has been fiercely resisted by indigenous populations and those who understand the significance of further industrializing the Amazon.  In the fight against this massive project (the dam would be the world’s 3rd larges), it has seemed

Ecuador’s Achuar Declares Oil-free Amazon

Waking Times In solidarity with Mother Earth and the Amazon, the indigenous Achuar people of Ecuador are taking a solid ‘No’ stance against new expansion of oil and gas production in the world’s most biologically diverse and endangered lands.  As an alternative to the economies of energy extraction they are proposing that a new economy

In the Presence of Suffering

Charlie Veitch The Love Police  Suffering creates empathy and tolerance. It is mostly through suffering that we experience the fissures and limits of knowledge, of coping. Through the pain of loss or grief we see that every single human being on the planet is capable of despair, and in this mutual despair, we understand concepts

How I Became a Sorcerer

Singing to the Plants We have discussed the idea, widely held in the Upper Amazon, that human beings in general, and shamans in particular, have powerful urges to harm other humans, and that the difference between a healer and a sorcerer comes down to a matter of self-control. And on that there hangs a story. A

Protecting the Yasuni National Park in the Ecuadorian Amazon (Video)

Directly below this world treasure, however, lies an estimated 846 million barrels of oil that Ecuador is proposing to leave untapped in an effort to prohibit the burning of these fuels and the subsequent release of this CO2 gas and destruction of the rainforest. To do so, Ecuador is seeking contributions from oil producing nations to assist in the protection of this gem.

The Fight for Amazonia: The Internet Indians (Video)

“The internet is our weapon. We gave up fighting with bows and arrows a long time ago,” says Benki Piyako, the son of the chief of the Ashaninka in the Brazilian rainforest. “We all need to be interconnected if we want to live in safety on our territory.”

Stop the Belo Monte Monster Dam

The Belo Monte dam complex dates back to Brazil’s military dictatorship and the government has attempted to build it through various series of national investment programs including Brasil em Ação and the Program to Accelerate Growth. Original plans to dam the Xingu have been greenwashed through multiple public relations programs over the course of two decades in the face of intense national and international protest.


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