Happy MLK Day. What you don't hear the "corporate media" talking about today is the lack of environmental justice based on race. Sure you hear the panic about lead based paint in toys...but rarely a mention of lead paint in low income housing. You hear the tone of fear in talk of pollution/pesticide and their increasing cancer/health risks, but rarely a mention of the races most directly affected. Your Environmental News...to Use...Don't just dream of a cleaner world...go out and make it so.

Did oil canals worsen Katrina's effects? 10,000 miles of oil canals in the Mississippi River delta may be a key to the role that the oil industry played in the $135 billion disaster, the nation's costliest. Associated Press.

Asthma crisis is a call for all minorities. Such a high number of young African-Americans living in neighborhoods along the Dan Ryan Expressway have asthma that Chicago is often called the epicenter of the disease. Chicago Tribune

In many ways, the World Bank is a magnificent institution, with many tremendous people working at it, with a highly valuable large charter in terms of changing the world for the better.

The World Bank is a vital source of financial and technical assistance to developing countries around the world.

our mission of global poverty reduction and the improvement of living standards. ... we provide low-interest loans, interest-free credit and grants to developing countries for education, health, infrastructure, communications and many other purposes.

Sadly, as is all too known by anyone who pays attention, the World Bank's core charter does not speak to sustainability, does not address ensuring that the path for generating wealth does not foster disaster for tomorrow.

Take over our rainforest  
By Daniel Howden, The Independent

Guyana, the former British colony, sandwiched between Venezuela and Brazil, is home to fewer than a million people but it is also home to an intact rainforest larger than England. In a dramatic offer, the government of Guyana has said it is willing to place its entire standing forest under the control of a British-led, international body in return for a bilateral deal with the UK that would secure development aid and the technical assistance needed to make the change to a green economy.

The deal would represent potentially the largest carbon offset ever undertaken, securing the vast carbon sinks of Guyana's pristine forest in return for assisting the economic growth of South America's poorest economy.

Speaking in his office in the capital, Georgetown, on the Caribbean coast, Guyana's President, Bharrat Jagdeo, said the offer was a chance for Britain to make a "moral offset" and underline its leadership on the most important single issue facing the world – climate change.

This initiative could be another great opportunity for "Al Gore" to put the spotlight on the issue of "Global Warming."

And September 24, 2007 - the day of the meeting in New York City - it will be around the time when Al Gore can announce that he is running for president on the 2008 presidential election.

Perfect timing and a great opportunity to get maximum publicity.

I just ate a banana, a yellow one.  I don't often think of bananas as being my favorite fruit, mostly because they are so common and so cheap, but if bananas were rare, hell, I'd really think of them as a delicacy.

The bananas that are found in western stores and supermarkets are Cavendish bananas, and they constitute about 10% of the world's crop of bananas.  

The banana and the plantain are actually a vital source of food and many other products and about 400 million people depend on them.

Of all the words in the English language defining some aspect of death, to me, "extinction" for obvious literal reasons is the one word that most evokes existential fears. So, why do we not take it seriously?

Unfortunately, extinction is a natural due course in time. Countless species have come and gone throughout Earth’s multi-billion-year history, and there is little doubt that humans will also someday experience the unavoidable biological phenomenon. Nevertheless, it seems we humans cannot be bothered with thinking about such an end to our own existence. After all, our species is strong and vital. We are survivors; the inheritors of Earth’s bounty - lords of our domain - over all we survey.

That said, what do we have to worry? Surely, many, many more species will turn to dust before earthly conditions deteriorate so bad that mankind – is reduced to just another susceptible species - forced to succumb to an inevitable fate.

It's hard to get people excited about Latin America politics--a bit like asking for a brisk DKos discussion of methods of solving differential equations. But please read on--our future may depend on it.

I just returned from a quick trip to the Amazon Rainforest. Fortunately (or unfortunately, as your politics may dictate) I took along a bargain copy of John Perkins' Confessions of an Economic Hitman on the advice of a DKos commenter. It was a "born again" experience.

I'm going to share a number of very specific political situations and insights in a couple of diaries this week. http://www.dailykos.com/...

But first, I'd like to share with you the comments of children I saw there.

Given the dire state of our environment these days, writing about it can be a frustrating endeavor to say the least. But knowing that the industrial-strength deforestation-taking place in South America is hastening our planet’s demise -- makes writing about it essential -- if we’re ever to stop it or at least slow it down. That said, the fact that Bush administration complicity turns up in just about every article I read about hydrocarbon exploration around the world, makes me sick to my stomach.

We all know that the entire BushCo agenda is all about control of the world’s hydrocarbon development. It doesn’t matter where it’s at – from Alaska to Brazil in the Western Hemisphere to Nigeria and Uzbekistan in the East – nowhere is safe from BushCo’s expropriation of Earth’s non-renewable resources. These environmental rapists will stop at nothing; the Iraq invasion taught us that.

The Center for American Progress is hosting Colombian President Alvaro Uribe on Wednesday, May 2 at 1 pm for a discussion on a wide variety of topics. Press and audience members will have a rare opportunity to pose questions to the secretive Bush ally Uribe, who is in the United States to repay a visit by President Bush and make his case for a free trade agreement. Before the event, starting at 11:45, labor union officials and Colombia monitors will hold a die-in to protest Uribe's ties to rightist paramilitaries (more info below).

Here are 10 questions that those inside for the conversation need to ask President Uribe:

Ecuador wants the world to pay it not to develop oil fields in rain forset. They say they want half the revenue they are forgoing, which the President said might be $350,000,000 per year.

I don't think the model is necessarily bad, but the rest of the world had best be careful. The oil would stay in the ground, available to be mined when the price of oil goes even higher, in the future. The economic value that Ecuador is forgoing, as opposed to the revenue, has to be figured after discounting the saved immediate expenses in drilling and the retained value in the ground.

Presumably, the oil is cheap enough to get at that Ecuador really is giving something up by not taking the cash in hand. And maybe in the future, there will be less intrusive economically feasible methods of extraction than there are now. So it probably does make some sense for the world to pay something to keep the area intact. But Ecuador's offer to take half is much more favorable to them than it seems.

Accusing international activists of painting an unnecessarily bleak picture of Orangutans (Pongo pygmaeus), the Malaysian government said it deplores such seeming propaganda that undermines the national oil palm industry.

It’s even worse than we thought.

Brazilian government officials claim some success in the reduction of deforestation. Between 2005 and 2006 about 6,450 square miles were cleared – an 11% decrease from the previous year – a seemingly significant reduction for such a short time period. But numbers can be deceiving, especially when the official numbers do not reflect the actual numbers.

Unfortunately, supported by a vast network of new roads, loggers continue to destroy the rainforest at an alarming rate. Satellite imagery recently produced for the state of Para – where the Trans-Iriri Highway is located – shows deforestation has increased by upwards of 50% since 2004, numbers in direct contradiction of national figures.

While the US MSM covers the World Bank's Wolfowitz's mistress scandal a far bigger story is ignored. The World Bank has enabled massive illegal logging of the planet's second largest tropical rainforest in the Congo. This logging threatens the existence of the Pygmy people who depend on the forest for sustenance. Moreover, it has severe environmental consequences for global warming, species diversity, and provides habitat for endangered primates - gorillas, chimpanzees, and bonobos.

The Congo rainforest of central Africa is a vast, lush expanse that is second only in size to the Amazon, and home to three of the four great apes - gorillas, chimpanzees, and bonobos - as well as millions of people.

But in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), the forests are being threatened by a misguided plan to use the timber industry to help alleviate poverty. Instead of helping one of the poorest countries on Earth, it will lead to the destruction of the rainforest and even greater hardship for the people who live there.

There's a fascinating story in yesterday's Washington Post detailing  massive destruction of forests worldwide.  The culprit?  China.  But behind China, the real culprits?

More beyond the fold.

There have a been a number of diaries discussing the ugly underbelly of biodiesel production - namely palm oil cultivation's slash and burn deforestation tactics that produce a great deal more CO2 emissions than are saved. Now this from the Guardian in the UK:

The Orang Utan, one of man's closest and most enigmatic cousins, could be virtually extinct within five years after it was discovered that the animal's rainforest habitat is being destroyed even more rapidly than had been predicted.

A United Nations report has found that illegal logging and fires have been overtaken as the primary cause of deforestation by a huge expansion of oil palm plantations, which are racing to meet soaring demand from Western food manufacturers and the European Union's zeal for biofuels.

So what can we do?

"MIAMI (AP) - Republican presidential candidate John McCain warned on Wednesday against the spread of socialism in Latin America and pledged to give the region renewed U.S. attention if elected"

Yesterday I diaried about the extinction of the Baiji, one of only four freshwater dolphin species in the world.  I noted someone's comment that "it is a true tragedy that the most publicized single moment for an endangered animal, like the Baiji, is the moment it officially disappears."

So, today, I wanted to highlight how such extinctions come to be: by a series of little-noticed habitat losses, factory openings, or minor political decisions.  If you do a little digging on the Internet, it's not hard to find roads leading to more imminent extinctions:

The governor of the Brazilian state of Pará, Simão Jatene, signed decrees yesterday creating 15 million hectares (57,915 sq miles) of newly protected rainforest, an area roughly the size of Illinois. This is positive action in efforts to save the Amazon rainforest from being lost forever. The rainforest is so precariously close to the "tipping point" that marks its death.

These seven newly protected areas will help boost Amazon conservation efforts in Brazil. According to the World Wildlife Fund (WWF), these rainforest areas are being threatened by illegal gold mining, hunting, unsustainable logging, and irregular agriculture and cattle ranching. Pará is, as the AP describes, "a region infamous for violent conflicts among loggers, ranchers, and environmentalists."