The big corporate brotherhood encircling COP10's premises are united by a very simple creed: a vague, weak treaty is better for business and Nature must be monetized to have any worth at all. We in civil society must be equally clear in our thinking if we hope to foil their threat.
Thousands of activists are expected to come to COP10 representing issues as varied as the living world itself. Finding common ground and mutually intelligible language will be a real challenge and we might as well start those explorations here.
Some neo-abolitionists are seeking a Universal Declaration of Planetary Rights that would liberate natural life from the slavery of property law and accord it freedoms of its own. Imagining how that could and should work is the first step to achieving it and we look forward to your help.
For those visiting Japan for the first time, there are lots of lovely sane traditions here that have nurtured biodiversity for many centuries. Though hard to see in the gargantuan COP10 hall or the lifeless river next door, this wisdom does survive and is still struggling to prevail, and we offer samples here.
For many long-time activists, our struggle is our glory, but just to keep from burning out we've learned to love our partying, too. COP10 will offer some deadly struggles, but also many lively performances, concerts and side events that will be listed here.
More than one-in-four of all flowering plants are under threat of extinction according to the latest report to confirm the ongoing destruction of much of the natural world by human activity.
As a result, many of nature's most colourful specimens could be lost to the world before scientists even discover them, claims the research, published today in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B.
Extinction is likely to be one of our longest-lasting legacies.
To address this crisis, we will need landscape-level management of wilderness and human-impacted areas, community involvement, legislation, economic incentives, bioliteracy, unified conservation science, and attention to the prime drivers of extinction: growth of the human population and its aggregate consumption.
The new field of ecological economics, which synthesizes human activities and natural processes, can quantify the costs and benefits of biodiversity protection.
We need a social transformation, through education and ecological literacy, to make human-caused extinction a thing of the past, like the slave trade, apartheid, and the Iron Curtain.
Excerpt: "Pesticides are war chemicals that kill - every year 220,000 people are killed by pesticides worldwide... We are witnessing a massive corporate genocide - the killing of people for super profits. To maintain these super profits, lies are told about how, without pesticides and genetically modified organisms (GMOs), there will be no food. In fact, the conclusions of International Assessment of Agricultural Science and Technology for Development, undertaken by the United Nations, shows that ecologically organic agriculture produces more food and better food at lower cost than either chemical agriculture or GMOs."
The United Nations has apparently taken note of Norton's ongoing efforts to better the world that we live in because they've just appointed him the illustrious title of UN Goodwill Ambassador for Biodiversity. In layman's terms, that means that he'll be responsible for garnering support for environmental conservation projects, working in tandem "with the UN Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) to spotlight the crisis of biodiversity and ensuring that world leaders take appropriate measures to protect the environment" – three roles that he is already intimately familiar with.
WASHINGTON — A sobering new report warns that the oceans face a "fundamental and irreversible ecological transformation" not seen in millions of years as greenhouse gases and climate change already have affected temperature, acidity, sea and oxygen levels, the food chain and possibly major currents that could alter global weather.
The report, in Science magazine, brings together dozens of studies that collectively paint a dismal picture of deteriorating ocean health.
"This is further evidence we are well on our way to the next great extinction event," said Ove Hoegh-Guldberg, the director of the Global Change Institute at the University of Queensland in Australia and a co-author of the report.
Eco-minded tyrants need not apply. A new analysis of foreign aid presented on Sunday at the Society for Conservation Biology meeting in Edmonton, Canada, shows that countries with the worst governance scores receive less generous conservation funding from the international community.
Daniel Miller, a political scientist at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor and colleagues used a new, independent foreign aid database, AidData.org, which officially launched online in March, to sort through 9,445 biodiversity projects in 171 countries that account for US$18 billion in funding since 1980.
Interview with Jeff McNeely, IUCN Chief Scientist, on the importance of Satoyama and similar landscapes for biodiversity, future agriculture and societal sustainability.
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By Akiko Okazaki, Tomohisa Yamaguchi, and Akemi Kanda Asahi Shimbun July 3, 2010
A new dispute is emerging between developing and industrialized countries, with the battle expected to reach a head in Nagoya.
Developing countries are demanding a larger share of benefits from their supplies of the plants and micro-organisms that form the raw materials for many food, pharmaceutical and cosmetics products.
Companies in industrialized nations that develop these products already fear that these "genetic resources" may no longer be readily available if new rules favor developing countries.
A resolution to the dispute will likely depend on the outcome of the 10th Conference of the Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity (COP10) meeting in Nagoya in October.
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Nice parting gift...
Big News
"The piecemeal approach to fighting corporate abuses keeps us spread thin, separated, on the defensive, riveted on the minutiae, and fighting on their terms... It is not that corporation over there or this one over here that is the enemy. It is not one industry's contamination of our drinking water or another's perversion of the lawmaking process that is the problem--rather it is the corporation itself that must be addressed if we are to be a free people." -- Jim Hightower
