Clodsire

cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/4507353

During the Eid el-Fitr, the holiday at the end of Ramadan, Muin Abu Al-Mehza, 58, would usually celebrate together with his family and go visit relatives, as per tradition.

Muin has two sons and two daughters. One daughter moved to Kuwait with her husband. But his other children live close by, and his oldest son, Sami, 31, built an apartment for his family above Muin’s home.

The holidays were always a time for celebration for the family, as it generally is for everyone in Gaza.

But the past two festive seasons have been anything but joyous in the besieged and devastated coastal territory, home to 2.3 million people now facing starvation and Israel’s genocidal military violence again.

Last Ramadan, Muin’s family was struggling with an acute shortage of food. They had been displaced from their home and were struggling for shelter, warmth and water.

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cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/4500663

Seven Indigenous nations have withdrawn from discussions over an oil and gas liquids pipeline in Michigan, citing federal agencies’ failure to adequately engage with tribal governments during the process.

The move is expected to trigger lawsuits the tribes hope will block the controversial Line 5 project, a 645-mile pipeline that carries over half-a-million barrels of crude oil and natural gas liquids per day and runs between the United States and Canada. Enbridge, the company behind Line 5, has proposed a tunnel under the Great Lakes in order to replace a section of the 72-year-old pipeline.

The tribal nations have been involved with the permitting process since 2020, when Enbridge applied to build the underground tunnel for the pipeline, but have grown increasingly dissatisfied with negotiations they say ignored tribal expertise, input, and concerns, and undermined treaty rights.

“Tribal Nations are no longer willing to expend their time and resources as Cooperating Agencies just so their participation may be used by the corps to lend credibility to a flawed [Environmental Impact Statement] process and document,” they wrote in a March 21 letter to the corps.

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cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/4496640

Jill Falcon Ramaker couldn’t believe what she was hearing on the video call. All $5 million dollars of her and her colleagues’ food sovereignty grants were frozen. She watched the faces of her colleagues drop.

Ramaker is Turtle Mountain Anishinaabe and the director of Buffalo Nations Food Sovereignty at Montana State University – a program that supports Indigenous foodways in the Rocky Mountains and trains food systems professionals – and is supported by the United States Department of Agriculture, or USDA.

“The funding that we had for training and infrastructure leading to raising our own foods that are healthy and not highly processed and culturally appropriate, has stopped.” Ramaker said. “We don’t have any information on when, or if, it will resume.”

In his first two months in office, President Trump has signed over 100 executive orders, many specifically targeting grants for termination that engage with diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives and climate-related projects associated with the Inflation Reduction Act. Climate change destroys the places and practices central to Indigenous peoples in the United States, and is exacerbated by droughts and floods that also affect foods essential to Native cultures. Food sovereignty programs play a crucial role in fighting the effects of climate change by creating access to locally grown fruits, vegetables, and animal products.

“It feels like we’re just getting started in so many ways,” Ramaker said.

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cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/4484610

A French court found Marine Le Pen guilty Monday in an embezzlement case and followed up the verdict with a sentence barring her immediately from running for office for five years. Le Pen abruptly left the Paris courtroom before hearing how long she will be banned from running for public office.

Le Pen and 24 other officials from her National Rally were accused of having used money intended for European Union parliamentary aides to pay staff who worked for the party between 2004 and 2016, in violation of the 27-nation bloc’s regulations. Le Pen and her co-defendants deny wrongdoing.

The biggest concern for Le Pen was that the court may declare her ineligible to run for office preventing her from running for president in 2027 -- a scenario she had described as a “political death.”

The Constitutional Council ruled Friday, in a separate case, that imposing the punishment immediately was constitutional.

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cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/4480913

Scattered across the United States, hundreds of thousands of abandoned mines scar the earth, posing a safety hazard to passing hikers and a health risk to nearby communities. But cached inside piles of refuse and ponds of toxic waste, there are also elements as critical for the 21st-century economy as coal was for the industrial revolution. Now, an obscure federal government program known as the Earth Mapping Resources Initiative, or Earth MRI, is identifying the high-tech minerals concealed in these mines — as well as those hidden beneath the Earth’s surface.

Developed by the U.S. Geological Survey, or USGS, during the first Trump administration, Earth MRI aims to comprehensively map the nation’s underground deposits of “critical minerals” — an ever-growing list of elements and compounds considered vital for national security and the economy. In 2021, Earth MRI received a massive funding boost through the bipartisan infrastructure law, accelerating federal scientists’ efforts to figure out which parts of the country are rich in minerals used in clean energy technologies, semiconductors, and high-tech weaponry. While the Trump administration has moved aggressively to reverse most of former President Joe Biden’s climate policies, it appears to agree with the prior administration’s desire to locate — and, eventually, mine — more of these resources.

Many Biden-era climate and energy initiatives remain in limbo following the Trump administration’s freeze on the disbursement of grant funding and mass firing of federal employees — but Earth MRI got an early greenlight to resume operations.

“This is a program that has survived both the Trump and Biden administrations,” Peter Cook, a critical minerals policy expert at The Breakthrough Institute, an environmental solutions research organization, told Grist. “They’re both definitely interested in critical minerals.”

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cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/4477254

Vent, who is Koyukon Athabascan and Iñupiaq, was raised by her great-grandmother and her aunties in Huslia, a village of 300 in the vast, wild country south of the Brooks Range in northern Alaska. No roads traversed the spruce forest and boggy tundra. Rivers scrawled in great loops from the base of the mountains, writing their history across the flats in oxbow lakes and sloughs that gleamed with light. Huslia lay along one of the largest waterways, the Koyukuk. For generations, it and the region’s other major rivers had served as highways connecting the Alaska Native communities scattered in this trackless landscape to one another and to the fish camps and hunting places and berry-picking grounds where residents like Vent harvested much of their food.

Over a decade ago, Vent joined an auntie at a public meeting in Huslia’s community hall, where villagers had gathered to discuss a state proposal for a new road. Maps detailed a route that, if built, would begin northeast of Huslia from the Dalton Highway, the only major road in northern Alaska, and run more than 200 miles west, nearly to the Inupiat village of Kobuk, one of several on the Kobuk River. The so-called Ambler Access Project—led mostly by the state’s economic development arm, the Alaska Industrial Development and Export Authority, or AIDEA—would allow foreign companies to develop copper mines near Kobuk. Trucks would travel the new road up to 168 times per day, carrying ore concentrate. Once they reached the Dalton Highway, they would transport the ore south to Fairbanks, where trains would carry it to a port in south-central Alaska—a total journey of about 800 miles.

The stakes were high. The road would slice across the Koyukuk, the Kobuk, and nine other major rivers as well as thousands of streams, threatening the peoples’ supply of salmon, sheefish, and whitefish with toxic spills and sediment runoff. It would also interrupt the migratory path of the Western Arctic caribou herd—until recently, Alaska’s largest—threatening another key source of sustenance for more than 40 communities.

Vent was impressed by the elders she heard speak at the meeting. “They knew that showing up was going to help prevent this happening to our land and our animals and our water and our people,” Vent, now 24, told me.

But Vent and other opponents came to believe that the road was about more than the mines at its terminus. It would open one of the largest expanses of unbroken land left on Earth to industrial development. The new artery could be the starting point for yet more roads and mines, and perhaps ultimately allow public access to places long protected by their remoteness. “It’s about the Western world wanting to come in and take from Indigenous people,” Vent said. “Once this road opens, there’s no going back.”

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cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/4461754

The United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) said in a statement on Monday that the number of Palestinians Israel has displaced in the occupied West Bank since the beginning of its ongoing offensive has reached 40,000.

Dubbed “Operation Iron Wall,” the ongoing Israeli military invasion overtook the northern West Bank in mid-January, leading to the forcible displacement of thousands of residents. On February 10, UNRWA said that “the forced displacement of Palestinian communities in the northern West Bank is escalating at an alarming pace.”

According to UNRWA, the number refers to Palestinians displaced from the Tulkarem, Jenin, and al-Far’a refugee camps, where the Israeli offensive has expanded. This marks the longest-running Israeli military campaign in the West Bank since the Second Intifada.

“Forced displacement in the occupied West Bank is the result of an increasingly dangerous and coercive environment,” the UNRWA statement said. “The use of air strikes, armoured bulldozers, controlled detonations, and advanced weaponry by the Israeli Forces has become commonplace — a spillover of the war in Gaza.”

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cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/4346239

The Great Bear Rainforest is the largest intact temperate coastal rainforest in the world. It’s been home to First Nations for over 12,000 years. It was an immense achievement in conservation when it became a protected area in 2016. The British Columbia government calls it a “global treasure.” It’s beautiful and rich with life.

All of that is true — but what’s also true is that an abandoned cannery in the Great Bear Rainforest has been leaching pollutants for decades, even after it was protected. Today, some contaminants like mercury are between double and 200 times regulation standards.

Heiltsuk people have been fighting for the cleanup since the 1980s. The site is home to Namu, an ancient Haíɫzaqv (Heiltsuk) village. The Heiltsuk never ceded their land, but much of it, including Namu, was seized and treated as private property. In 1893 a settler named Robert Draney established a bustling cannery. It was an economic success and the centre of a vibrant community, employing many Heiltsuk people, until it was suddenly shuttered in the 1980s after industry profits dropped.

Within the imposed colonial system, Namu traded hands without Heiltsuk permission. The most recent corporate owner is now legally dissolved and the Namu lands have reverted to the Crown.

The Heiltsuk want to protect their land, and to make it habitable again.

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cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/3776799

Beef is one of America’s most beloved foods. In fact, today’s average American eats three hamburgers per week.

American diets have long revolved around beef. On an 1861 trip to the United States, the English novelist Anthony Trollope marveled that Americans consumed twice as much beef as Englishmen. Through war, industry, development and settlement, America’s love of beef continued. In 2022, the U.S. as a whole consumed almost 30 billion pounds (13.6 billion kilograms) of it, or 21% of the world’s beef supply.

Beef has also reached iconic status in American culture. As “Slaughterhouse-Five” author Kurt Vonnegut once penned, “Being American is to eat a lot of beef, and boy, we’ve got a lot more beef steak than any other country, and that’s why you ought to be glad you’re an American.”

In part, the dominance of beef in American cuisine can be traced to settler colonialism, a form of colonization in which settlers claim – and then transform – lands inhabited by Indigenous people. In America, this process centered on the systemic and often violent displacement of Native Americans. Settlers brought with them new cultural norms, including beef-heavy diets that required massive swaths of land for grazing cattle.

As a food historian, I am interested in how, in the 19th century, the beef industry both propelled and benefited from colonialism, and how these intertwined forces continue to affect our diets, culture and environment today.

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cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/3759886

Millions of bison once roamed the grasslands, until colonialism nearly wiped them out. Now, Indigenous people are bringing them back and restoring balance to their homelands

My Métis ancestors hunted and lived relationally with Buffalo, and I can envision how the prairies must have looked hundreds of years ago when millions roamed freely from Alaska’s boreal forests to the western grasslands of Mexico, across the continent from Banff to the eastern Appalachian Mountains. Then colonizers nearly wiped them out, part of a deliberate genocidal effort to starve the Indigenous nations of the plains.

Now, there are far fewer Buffalo to be seen, but Indigenous communities are working to rematriate them to the grasslands. Rematriation, a concept advanced by the late Sto:lo author Lee Maracle, is the process of restoring lands and cultures, done with deep reverence to honour not only the past and present but also the future, and rooted in Indigenous law.

The Buffalo Treaty, signed in September 2014 by eight nations, now has more than 50 signatories and includes 11 articles emphasizing co-operation, renewal and the restoration of Buffalo populations. This cross-border collaboration aims to return Buffalo to their rightful wild status, as they are currently considered “domestic” due to their historical confinement, a word that hardly suits their ancestral legacy.

Buffalo don’t care about borders, and yet, there are rigid regulations in place that stop their movement. The treaty envisions ecological corridors that will allow Buffalo to migrate and roam freely, similar to elk, bears, deer and moose. These corridors are essential for maintaining genetic diversity, supporting the vast ecosystem dynamics of the plains, preserving cultural and spiritual connections for Indigenous peoples and ensuring the long-term viability of bison populations by preventing overgrazing and disease outbreaks.

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cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/3680066

• The WAP Complex of protected areas that straddles the border region of Benin, Burkina Faso and Niger is one of West Africa’s most important protected areas and a haven for many iconic endangered species.
• Servals, caracals and African wildcats are also found in the WAP Complex, but almost nothing is known about their status, distribution, ecology or threats.
• Covert surveys of medicine markets in the region have found serval and caracal skins, though it’s not known if the skins originated within the WAP Complex.
• The presence of jihadist militants in the region severely impacts conservation and research, particularly in the Niger and Burkina Faso portions of the complex.

In the border region between Benin, Niger and Burkina Faso lies a network of protected areas that form one of the largest intact wildernesses in West Africa. The W-Arly-Pendjari (WAP) Complex is a mosaic of gallery forests, savannas and riparian habitats, and the last refuge for many of the region’s most iconic species, including West African lions (Panthera leo leo), savanna elephants (Loxodonta africana) and cheetahs (Acinonyx jubatus).

With conservation focused on these threatened and beloved species, it’s easy for the small cats to get lost. There are three species of small cats — servals (Leptailurus serval), caracals (Caracal caracal) and African wildcats (Felis lybica) — in the WAP complex. Though all three have a conservation status of least concern on the IUCN Red List, there are few hard facts about their numbers in the WAP Complex or West Africa. With continuing insecurity plaguing the region, and little money for small cat research, these species risk falling even further into obscurity.

At the heart of the WAP Complex lie three strictly protected areas: Pendjari National Park in Benin, Arly National Park in Burkina Faso, and W Regional Park, which straddles the Benin, Burkina Faso and Niger border region. Together, these parks, along with adjoining hunting zones, wildlife reserves and areas under other forms of protection, cover 34,000 square kilometers (13,100 square miles). The core area, about half of it, is a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

Over the past few years, the region has been plagued by insecurity. Jihadist militants are entrenched in the Burkina Faso and Niger portions of the complex, with violence increasingly spilling over into Benin. Conservation work has become difficult and dangerous, though South Africa-based organization African Parks, which manages Pendjari National Park and the Benin portion of W, still carries out some biomonitoring activities, says Jacques Kougbadi, marketing and communications coordinator for African Parks.

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