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"El Castillo," a Mayan temple on the Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico, with a mysterious "light beam" emerging from the top. Photo courtesy: Hector Siliezar via lifeslittlemysteries.com
When Hector Siliezar visited the ancient Mayan city of Chichen Itza with his wife and kids in 2009, he snapped three iPhone photos of El Castillo, a pyramid that once served as a sacred temple to the Mayan god Kukulkan. A thunderstorm was brewing near the temple, and Siliezar was trying to capture lightning crackling dramatically over the ruins.
In the first two images, dark clouds loom above the pyramid, but nothing is amiss. However, in the third photo, a powerful beam of light appears to shoot up from the pyramid toward the heavens, and a thunderbolt flashes in the background.
Siliezar, who recently shared his photographs with occult investigators, told Earthfiles.com that he and his family didn't see the light beam in person; it appeared only on camera. "It was amazing!" he said. He showed the iPhone photo to his fellow tourists. "No one, not even the tour guide, had ever seen anything like it before."
The photo has surfaced on several Mayan doomsday discussion forums. But was the light beam a sign from the gods — a warning about Dec. 21, 2012, the date that marks the end of the Mayan calendar cycle, and when some people fear the world will end? Or is it simply the result of an iPhone glitch?
According to Jonathon Hill, a research technician and mission planner at the Mars Space Flight Facility at Arizona State University, which operates many of the cameras used during NASA's Mars missions, it is almost definitely the latter. Hill works with images of the Martian surface taken by rovers and satellites, as well as data from Earth-orbiting NASA instruments, and is fully versed in the wide range of potential image artifacts and equipment errors.
He says the "light beam" in the Mayan temple photo is a classic case of such an artifact — a distortion in an image that arises from the way cameras bounce around incoming light.
It is no mere coincidence, Hill said, that "of the three images, the 'light beam' only occurs in the image with a lightning bolt in the background. The intensity of the lightning flash likely caused the camera's CCD sensor to behave in an unusual way, either causing an entire column of pixels to offset their values or causing an internal reflection [off the] camera lens that was recorded by the sensor." In either case, extra brightness would have been added to the pixels in that column in addition to the light hitting them directly from the scene.
Evidence in favor of this explanation is the fact that the beam, when isolated in Photoshop or other image analysis software, runs perfectly vertical in the image. "That's a little suspicious since it's very unlikely that the gentleman who took this picture would have his handheld iPhone camera positioned exactly parallel to the 'light beam' down to the pixel level," Hill told Life's Little Mysteries.
It's more likely that the "light beam" corresponds to a set of columns of pixels in the camera sensor that are electronically connected to each other, but not to other columns in the sensor, and that this set of connected pixels became oversaturated in the manner described above.
"That being said," Hill said, "it really is an awesome image!"
Any opinions, readers?
No idea where this is located; but, I just couldn't pass it up. Photo courtesy: wallpaperseek.com
Urban air pollution is set to become the biggest environmental cause of premature death in the coming decades, overtaking even such mass killers as poor sanitation and a lack of clean drinking water, according to a new report.
Both developed and developing countries will be hit, and by 2050, there could be 3.6 million premature deaths a year from exposure to particulate matter, most of them in China and India. But rich countries will suffer worse effects from exposure to ground-level ozone, because of their ageing populations – older people are more susceptible.
Even the Big Apple (New York, NY) is barely visible under a cloak of smog. Photo courtesy: Wikipedia
The warning comes in a new report from the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), which is a study of the global environmental outlook until 2050. The report found four key areas that are of most concern – climate change, loss of biodiversity, water and the health impacts of pollution.
If current policies are allowed to carry on, the world will far exceed the levels of greenhouse gas emissions that scientists say are safe, the report found. "I call it the surrender scenario – where we would be if governments do nothing more than what they have pledged already?" said Simon Upton, environment director at the OECD. "But it could be even worse than that, we've found."
The view of smog covering central London, UK from Hampstead Heath in April 2011. Photo courtesy: Matt Dunham/AP via guardian.co.uk
The report said that global greenhouse gas emissions could increase by as much as half, as energy demand rises strongly, if countries fail to use cleaner forms of energy. Water demand is also likely to rise by more than half, and by 2050 as much as 40% of the global population is likely to be living in areas under severe water stress. Groundwater depletion would become the biggest threat to agriculture and to urban water supplies, while pollution from sewage and waste water – including chemicals used in cleaning – will put further strain on supplies.
However, the OECD study also said that there are some actions that governments can take quickly to tackle some of the key problems. For instance, many governments treat diesel fuel for vehicles differently than petrol for tax purposes, with tax breaks that encourage the take-up of diesel. But although diesel vehicle fuel produces lower greenhouse gas emissions than petrol, it is far worse for spewing out small particulate matter, which is bad for urban pollution. "In environmental terms, there is no reason to give diesel tax breaks over petrol," said Upton.
Beijing, China, which is one of the countries likely to be worst hit by pollution-triggered deaths in coming decades. Photo courtesy: David Gray/Reuters via guardian.co.uk
Governments could also remove other environmentally harmful subsidies, such as fossil fuel subsidies and subsidies for water that encourage irresponsible use of the resource. Biofuels are another potential danger area, because although they can emit less carbon than conventional fossil fuels, they also contribute to reducing biodiversity and put further strains on water use, so governments should consider carefully whether to go down the biofuels road, Upton warned.
Upton said that if governments took action now, and developed long-term views of these environmental problems, it would give them a much greater chance of avoiding the worst outcomes. "The key thing is that these four biggest problems are interconnected – biodiversity is affected by climate change and land use, water is linked to health problems, for instance. You can't solve any one of these in isolation. So to be effective, governments have to focus on all of these four and look very closely at the connections between them," he said.
Male mosquito feeding on a leaf. Photo courtesy: Leszek.Leszczynski/CC BY 1.0
Today, the Florida Keys Mosquito Control District, is holding a meeting about potential trials involving the release of genetically-modified male mosquitoes into the delicate ecosystem of the Florida Keys. The stated purpose of the trials is to investigate controlling the spread of dengue fever.
The company behind the technology, British firm Oxitec, explains that sterile males would be released to compete with wild males for female insects, which would then have no offspring and reduce the population of the next generation. Food & Water Watch, which is strongly opposed to the project, clarifies that the males are not actually sterile — they reproduce; but, they pass on a lethal gene that prevents the offspring from ever reaching adulthood.
Oxitec has described the technology as “birth control for insects.” (Sounds more like post-birth abortion to me.)
There's plenty of opposition to the idea, which would seem to combine the risks of two unpredictable worlds: when non-native species are introduced into new environments and when genetically-engineered organisms are released into the wild, often with unforeseen consequences.
In the case of plants, one of those consequences is superweeds. I'd hate to find out what the mosquito parallel for a superweed would be.
“We cannot stress strongly enough how dangerously misguided this application is. Oxitec hopes to use the neighborhoods and precious ecosystem of the Keys as their private, for-profit laboratory," said Wenonah Hauter, Food & Water Watch executive director, said in a statement. "This feels much more like Oxitec testing its living, breeding technology than a serious attempt to control disease, and the people of Florida deserve protection."
Reviews are still pending from both federal and state agencies. Food & Water Watch is calling on government agencies not to approve this technology, the risk assessment for which it says Germany's Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Biology called "scientifically deficient" and said it made "questionable pivotal scientific assertion[s]."
“There are better, safer ways to control Dengue and agricultural pests – we don’t need expensive GE insects. Oxitec badly needs FDA approval to keep their finances flowing," said Hauter. "This is why the company downplays any concerns raised, but those concerns are still there and growing with time. The Federal Government must step in and prevent this unnecessary and risky trial.”
Lodgepole pines killed by mountain pine beetle in Colorado, 2008. Photo courtesy: Jeffrey A. Hicke, University of Idaho via LiveScience
Insects are essential to a healthy forest environment, but bad bugs are bad news for forests. Throughout North America and the world, forests are experiencing some of the worst outbreaks of insects and diseases in recorded history.
As for the forests' future, researcher Jeffrey Hicke quips: "I'd rather be a beetle than a tree."
There are a cast of characters causing unprecedented levels of mortality to trees across millions of acres of North American forests, from the New Jersey Pine Barrens to the deserts of the Southwest.
One insect responsible for a staggering level of damage is the mountain pine beetle (Dendroctonus ponderosae). As the focus of much of Hicke's research, the mountain pine beetle is an aggressive bark beetle that can infest and kill lodgepole pine (Pinus contorta), limber pine (Pinus flexilis), whitebark pine (Pinus albicaulis), sugar pine (Pinus lambertiana) and bristlecone pine (Pinus longaeva).
Major beetle outbreaks affect 30 million acres in the western United States and British Columbia, Canada. Hicke's team analyzed data from the United States and Canadian forest services, and estimated that since 1997, bark beetles have killed 6 billion trees. The culprit in 63 percent of the cases was the mountain pine beetle.
Through his research at the University of Idaho, Hicke seeks to understand the causes and consequences of outbreaks. Hicke uses aerial surveys and data from satellites to spatially quantify the extent of outbreaks and determine their timing.
His efforts contribute to a wide collaboration of universities and are supported by the National Science Foundation, Department of Energy, Forest Service, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, National Park Service and United States Geological Survey.
Hicke's work and the work of others point to climate as a major driver of the outbreaks. Cold winters kill the mountain pine and other bark beetles and warmer winters help them survive. Because they allow beetles to complete life cycles within one year instead of two or more, warmer overall annual temperatures synchronize beetle populations for mass attacks on host trees.
Drought and high temperatures stress trees, which makes them more susceptible to beetle attack. For example, stressed pinyon pines are susceptible to engraver beetles (Ips confusus), which they normally withstand. In addition, insects and diseases are expanding into habitats previously too cold to be hospitable. For example, warming conditions have exposed high-elevation trees such as the whitebark pine to beetle attack. As a consequence, in 2011 the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service added the whitebark pine to the list of candidate species eligible for Endangered Species Act protection.
Non-native species also pose an increasing threat to forests. In recent decades, trade liberalization has allowed buyers and sellers to move goods more freely across borders. Harmful nonnative pests and diseases stow away in shipments of goods and are inadvertently introduced into new habitats. These introductions pose a major problem to native tree species that have not adapted to withstand these exotic pests.
Outbreaks of forest insects and diseases have potentially dire consequences not just for the trees but also for critical ecosystem processes such as wildfire burning and carbon cycling.
Conserving and restoring forest carbon stocks is an important means of mitigating climate change. Healthy forests act as carbon sinks (natural or artificial reservoirs that accumulate and store carbon-containing chemical compounds), but outbreaks of insects and diseases can release this carbon from forests, turning them into carbon sources. Millions of fallen, decaying trees killed by the mountain pine beetle can be a significant source of carbon.
A 2008 study published in the journal Nature found that after a mountain pine beetle outbreak, the forest and its decaying trees gave off the carbon equivalent of five years of emissions from Canada's transportation sector.
The magnitude and duration of impacts of beetle outbreaks on the carbon cycling depend on a number of factors, the team concluded in a paper published Dec. 23 in the Journal of Geophysical Research-Biogeosciences.
Using remote sensing data and simulations postdoc Steve Edburg, Hicke and their collaborators were able to understand how insect outbreaks, carbon fluxes and climate change interact. Their models take multiple, interacting factors into account, and will enable forest managers to anticipate where outbreaks are likely to occur; this will help policy-makers to understand the implications of insects and diseases on climate change mitigation by forests.
A skull, possibly from a new species of human, recovered from Longlin cave in Guangxi province, China. Photograph: Darren Curnoe via guardian.co.uk
Mysterious fossils of what may be a previously unknown type of human have been uncovered in caves in China, ones that possess a highly unusual mix of bygone and modern human features, scientists reveal.
Surprisingly, the fossils are only between 11,500 and 14,500 years old. That means they would have shared the landscape with modern humans when China's earliest farmers were first appearing.
"These new fossils might be of a previously unknown species, one that survived until the very end of the ice age around 11,000 years ago," said researcher Darren Curnoe, a palaeoanthropologist at the University of New South Wales in Australia.
"Alternatively, they might represent a very early and previously unknown migration of modern humans out of Africa, a population who may not have contributed genetically to living people," Curnoe added.
At least three fossil specimens were uncovered in 1989 by miners quarrying limestone at Maludong or Red Deer Cave near the city of Mengzi in southwest China. They remained unstudied until 2008. The scientists are calling them the "Red Deer Cave People," because they cooked extinct red deer in their namesake cave. [Photos of the Red Deer Cave People]
"They clearly had a taste for venison, with evidence they cooked these large deer in the cave," Curnoe said.
Carbon dating, a technique that estimates the radioactive decay of carbon in samples of charcoal found with the fossils helped establish their age. The charcoal also showed they knew how to use fire. Stone artifacts found at the Maludong site also suggest they were toolmakers.
A Chinese geologist found a fourth partial skeleton, which looks very similar to the Maludong fossils, in a cave near the village of Longlin in southwest China in 1979 while prospecting the area for oil. It stayed encased in a block of rock, neglected in the basement of an archaeological research institute, until 2009 when the international team of scientists rediscovered the fossils.
"In 2009, when I was in China working with co-author Professor Ji Xueping, he showed me the block of rock that contained the skull," Curnoe recalled. "After picking my own jaw up from the floor, we decided we had to make the remains a priority of our research."
The Stone Age fossils are unusual mosaics of modern and archaic human anatomical features, as well as previously unseen characteristics. This makes them difficult to classify as either a new species or an unusual type of modern human.
This artist's reconstruction by Peter Schouten suggests what the Red Deer Cave People may have looked like when alive some time between 11,500 and 14,500 years ago. Photo courtesy: LiveScience
For instance, the Red Deer Cave people had long, broad and tall frontal lobes like modern humans. These brain lobes are located immediately behind the forehead, and are linked with personality and behavior.
However, the Red Deer Cave people differ from modern Homo sapiens in their prominent brow ridges, thick skull bones, flat upper faces with a broad nose, jutting jaws that lack a humanlike chin, brains moderate in size by ice age human standards, large molar teeth, and primitively short parietal lobes — brain lobes at the top of the head associated with sensory data. "These are primitive features seen in our ancestors hundreds of thousands of years ago," Curnoe said.
Unique features of the Red Deer Cave people seen neither in modern nor known archaic lineages of humans include a strongly curved forehead bone, very broad nose and eye sockets, and very flat cheeks that flare widely to the sides to make space for large chewing muscles. In addition, the place where the lower jaw forms a joint with the base of the skull is unusually wide and deep.
All in all, the Red Deer Cave people are the youngest population to be found anywhere in the world whose anatomy does not comfortably fit within the range of modern humans, whether they be modern humans from 150 or 150,000 years ago, the researchers noted.
"In short, they're anatomically unique among all members of the human evolutionary tree," Curnoe told LiveScience.
The Red Deer Cave people lived in China at the end of the ice age. "They survived the final and one of the worst cold episodes, known as the Last Glacial Maximum, which ended around 20,000 years ago," Curnoe said.
"The period around 15,000 to 11,000 years ago when they thrived in southwest China is known as the Pleistocene-Holocene transition, and it saw a shift to climates and ecological communities the same as those of today," Curnoe added. "It also saw the demise of the megafauna in most places, including a giant deer that was exploited by the Red Deer Cave people and recovered in large numbers from the Maludong site."
"This time also saw a major shift in the behavior of modern humans in southern China, who began to make pottery for food storage and to gather wild rice — this marks some of the first steps towards full-blown farming," Curnoe said. "The Red Deer Cave people were sharing the landscape with these early pre-farming communities, but we have no idea yet how they may have interacted or whether they competed for resources."
Although modern-day Asia contains more than half of the world's population, researchers still know little about humans there after our ancestors settled Eurasia about 70,000 years ago, Curnoe said. No human fossils less than 100,000 years old had been found in mainland East Asia that resembled anything other than anatomically modern humans until now. These new findings are fossil evidence that this region may not have been devoid of our evolutionary cousins.
"The discovery of the Red Deer Cave People opens the next chapter in the latest stage of the human evolutionary story, the Asian chapter," Curnoe said. "It's a story that's just beginning to be told."
A key reason the scientists have not yet decided how to classify the Red Deer People scientifically has to do with one of the major ongoing questions for scientists investigating human evolution — "the lack of a satisfactory biological definition of our own species, Homo sapiens," Curnoe said. "We still don't have one that most of us agree upon."
"I think the evidence is slightly weighted towards the Red Deer Cave people representing a new evolutionary line," Curnoe said. "First, their skulls are anatomically unique — they look very different to all modern humans, whether alive today or in Africa 150,000 years ago. And second, the very fact they persisted until almost 11,000 years ago when we know that very modern-looking people lived at the same time immediately to the east and south suggests they must have been isolated from them. We might infer from this isolation that they either didn't interbreed or did so in a limited way."
Recent findings suggest that other, different evolutionary lines may have also lived in the region, such as the "hobbit" or Homo floresiensis on the island of Flores in Indonesia.
"This paints an amazing picture of diversity, one we had no clue about until this last decade," Curnoe said.
The Red Deer Cave people might possibly even be related to a mysterious branch of humanity known as the Denisovans only discovered in the past two years, whose DNA suggests they were neither like us nor Neanderthals.
"It is certainly possible that the Red Deer Cave people (represent) an interbreeding event between modern humans and some other population like the Denisovans," Curnoe said.
Ultimately, to see how closely or distantly related the Red Deer Cave people are to modern humans or even the Denisovans, the scientists want to extract and test DNA from the fossils. "We've had one attempt already, but without success," Curnoe said. "We'll just have to wait and see if we're successful in our future work."
This recent photo, released by Rutgers University on March 13, shows a new species of frog in the jungle -- New York's concrete jungle. The mottled green creature was for years mistaken as belonging to a widespread variety of the leopard frog. But now scientists realized this is a new species. (AFP Photo/Brian Curry)
Amazed biologists have uncovered a new species of frog in the jungle -- New York's concrete jungle.
The mottled green creature was for years mistaken as belonging to a widespread variety of the leopard frog. But now scientists realize this is new.
"For a new species to go unrecognized in this area is amazing," UCLA biologist Brad Shaffer said Wednesday.
New York is surrounded by wetlands and other nature-filled areas. But this latest urban creature appears to have chosen one of the grittiest corners as the center of its habitat: Yankee Stadium in the Bronx.
In the journal Molecular Phylogenetics and Evolution, Shaffer and other scientists compared the frog's DNA to that of other leopard frog species in the region. That's when they understood they were looking at a leopard frog, but a different kind.
"Many amphibians are secretive and very hard to find, but these frogs are pretty obvious animals," said Shaffer.
"This shows that even in the largest city in the US, there are still new and important species waiting to be discovered."
Lead paper author Cathy Newman, now of Louisiana State University, was studying leopard frogs when her colleague Jeremy Feinberg at Rutgers University asked her to probe some "unusual frogs."
"There are northern and southern leopard frogs in that general area, so I was expecting to find one of those that for some reason had atypical behaviors or that were hybrids of both," Newman said.
"I was really surprised and excited once I started getting data back strongly suggesting it was a new species. It's fascinating in such a heavily urbanized area."
Feinberg said he'd been immediately curious.
This frog gave a repeated croak, not the "long snore" of other leopard frogs.
"When I first heard these frogs calling, it was so different, I knew something was very off," Feinberg said.
Photo courtesy: David Berkowitz/CC BY 2.0
For decades, zones designated for wildlife conservation in Southern Africa have played a crucial role in shielding vulnerable species from the threats of poaching and encroaching development, but such areas have largely been scattered islands of protection through animals' otherwise perilous migration routes. But now, thanks to an unprecedented alliance between five key nations to create the world's largest conservation area, wildlife in Africa will be able to get around much more freely -- and safely.
In a ceremony this week, leaders from Angola, Botswana, Namibia, Zambia and Zimbabwe have agreed to establish a sprawling 170,000 square mile preserve to span respective borders for the sake of wildlife. Up until now, the five nations had each independently maintained a total of 36 unconnected conservation zones, but that model proved insufficient from protecting migrating animals along their cross-border migrations.
With the formation of the vast new reserve, dubbed the Kavango Zambezi Transfrontier Conservation Area, or KAZA, animals with historically broad stomping grounds, like elephants and rhinos, will enjoy unfettered access to an area roughly the size of Sweden.
This isn't the first time conservationists sought such international cooperation to establish a large wildlife conservation area, reports the Washington Post, but this latest effort has focused on involving people living in the region who might actually serve to benefit from KAZA as much as wildlife:Previous attempts to set up massive cross-border conservancies in Africa have failed largely because impoverished local communities weren’t engaged to help before governments signed up, said Chris Weaver, the World Wildlife Fund’s regional director in Namibia.
“This is very different. It has a very strong community focus,” he told The Associated Press in a telephone interview.
He said local communities are getting jobs and revenue from tourism in return for their role in protecting the environment.
With the formation of KAZA, the world's largest wildlife reserve, conservationists are hopeful that some sense of normalcy will have the chance to return for a host of animals which have too long been impacted by our arbitrary borders.
“The unequivocally engaging thing is that some of a oceanic basins might maybe be a small bit younger than we now believe,” Bridges told OurAmazingPlanet. Photo courtesy: ethiosun
Several winters ago, a team of geophysicists from Missouri flew to the eastern edge of Africa, strapped on bulky backpacks and began walking. They were looking for a set of huge stripes in the Tendaho Graben, a place within the Afar Depression of Ethiopia, where Africa's continental crust is stretching thin and a new ocean will eventually form.
But the stripes they sought — and eventually found — aren't visible to the naked eye. They're magnetic stripes, similar to the ones lining the ocean floor at mid-ocean ridges. David Bridges, a geophysicist from the Missouri University of Science and Technology, and his colleagues sniffed them out using a bit of geological detective work, lots of walking and the hulking magnetometers strapped to their backpacks.
The Tendaho Graben's magnetic stripes are important because they're the first ones scientists have documented on land, Bridges said. Even more importantly, because these stripes have formed before the area becomes a water-covered basin, they may change the way researchers interpret the planet's oceans.
"The really interesting thing is that some of the oceanic basins may perhaps be a little bit younger than we currently believe," Bridges told OurAmazingPlanet.
The underwater relatives of Tendaho's magnetic stripes were first documented in the 1950s by geophysicists who set sail to take thousands of seaboard magnetic readings. The researchers eventually began to see that their readings sketched out distinct sets of stripes running parallel to mid-ocean ridges, and that each stripe's magnetic alignment was the reverse of neighboring stripes.
The striped magnetic pattern develops because, as oceanic crust pulls apart, magma rises to the surface at mid-ocean ridges and spills out to create new bands of ocean floor. Ferromagnetic minerals in the hot magma align themselves with the Earth's magnetic field, which completely reverses its north-to-south polarity every now and then, and freeze in that alignment as the magma cools. Later, after the planet's magnetic field flips again, the next stripe of new ocean floor aligns its polarity in the opposite direction.
"For many ocean basins, the timing of their openings has been based on the appearance of these magnetic stripes," because scientists long believed that the stripes first appeared when seafloor spreading started, Bridges said.
But the stripes that Bridges' team found in Tendaho may prove that conventional wisdom wrong.
Tendaho's magnetic bands, which measure 6 mi (10 km) wide, are embedded in continental crust, not oceanic crust. And unlike magnetic stripes on the ocean floor, Tendaho's formed through diking: as the African crust stretched thin, streams of magma intruded the continental crust and hardened. Like in the oceanic stripes, ferromagnetic minerals in the dikes aligned with the planet's magnetic field as the magma hardened. Their magnetic signals are very similar to those of ocean-floor stripes.
This all happened sometime between 1.8 million years ago, when the region's continental crust began to break apart, and 780,000 years ago, when the Earth's magnetic poles last flipped, Bridges said.
Scientists predict it could be as many as 2 million years before the crust in the Tendaho Graben ruptures and begins to form an ocean basin. Altogether, this means that Tendaho's magnetic stripes could predate the future ocean basin by nearly 4 million years.
And magnetic stripes may predate other ocean basins, too.
"Other groups have found evidence suggesting that perhaps the Atlantic basin opened up a little later than what's currently believed," Bridges said. "It's sort of an interesting time in this field."
Part of the Amazon. Photo courtesy: Ivan Mlinaric/CC BY 2.0
Possibly this should be blogged in green, the colour of deception. Or perhaps red, the colour of blood. Check out the details; and, draw your own conclusions. Were the natives deceived into signing?
The Amazon rainforest remains one of the most mysterious regions on the planet, home to an invaluable treasure-trove of cultural and ecological wealth -- but it too can be had for the right price.
Today, a carbon crediting company finalized a $120 million deal with Amazonian tribal leaders to gain sole rights to a 8,800 sq mi (22,792 sq km) swath of forest in Northern Brazil. Under the terms of the contract, the tribespeople living in the region will no longer be able to grow crops or harvest timber on their ancestral land for a period of thirty years, leading some to question whether the decision was finalized with due consideration.
In the agreement between indigenous South Americans and a European company, members of Brazil's Mundurucu tribe will relinquish their rights to a parcel of Amazon rainforest, roughly the area of the U.S. state of New Jersey, to Celestial Green Ventures, a vendor of carbon-credits based in Ireland.
According to O Estado de Sao Paulo, a Brazilian media outlet which examined the contract, this deal guarantees the company three decades of unrestricted access to the Mundurucu's tribal land and unlimited rights the biodiversity contained there at a rate of roughly $4 million per year. During this time, the Indians would be disallowed to practice their agricultural traditions which have stood as the cornerstone of their society for generations.
"The Indians often sign contracts without knowing what they are signing. They are unable to cut down a tree and are eventually paving the way for biopiracy," says historian and anthropologist Marcio Meira.
In light of these restrictions, investigators are now examining the legality of the contract which may have been signed without the Mundurucu tribe's unanimous consent.
There are 672 Indigenous Territories in Brazil, accounting for 13 percent of the country's total area. These reserves were originally established to protect the land rights of indigenous communities on their traditional land. However, outside interests have increasingly sought to gain access to these region's resources, through illegal means like clandestine logging, and legal channels such as today's $120 million contract agreement.
Indigenous territories are largely autonomous from federal law, meaning that not even Brazil's Army would necessarily have jurisdiction over Celestial Green Ventures's newly acquired land. (Wow!! Now that scares me.)
This deal granting a European company rights to 8,800 sq mi (22,792 sq km) of Indian Reserve is just the latest in a series of sizable land grabs on the part of Celestial Green Ventures. O Estado reports that the firm already possesses 16 similar contract agreements throughout the Amazon totaling more than 77,000 sq mi (199,430 sq km); or, roughly twice the area of Portugal. (Anyone else thinking Hidden Agenda?)
Answering claims that such arrangements are made without full understanding on the part of Indian communities, Celestial Green Ventures asserted that their contracts are submitted to a "rigorous process of free, previous and informed consent on the part of the Indian communities." Additionally, the company says its mission is to carry out "an innovative, financially savvy and environmentally sustainable investment vehicle, which offers an opportunity to invest in REDD projects which deliver co-benefits including conservation of the rainforest, biodiversity protection and also contributes towards essential socio-economic improvements for the local communities."
While it's unclear what effect a company's possession of nation-size swaths of pristine Amazon rainforest will have in the region, some worry it could give rise to biopiracy, wherein a ecosystem's unique biodiversity and cultural knowledge is tapped for financial gain, and often detrimentally so. (Unfortunately, in cases of biopiracy, the originating country is often exploited mercilessly until there is not one drop left to be had; then, they fold tent and slip away into the night. The people the land originally belonged to are not compensated for any damage done nor do they receive any part of any profit made.)
Brazilian Environment Minister Izabella Teixeira addressed these concerns, commenting that "[Brazil] must ensure that opportunities to advance the development of biodiversity action disguise of biopiracy."
Given the restrictions of government over indigenous territories, however, there may be little recourse available to prevent the Indian's ancestral lands, held under legal contract, from being exploited or misused.
If you are interested in expressing your concerns regarding this seemingly inequitable contract, please contact:
Snail Mail:
Celestial Green Ventures
93 St Stephens Green
Dublin 2
Republic of Ireland.
Telephone:
00353 (0) 1 428 3404
Email:
info@celestialgreenventures.com
or: you can click here and be taken to their website where a comment form is provided.
The Gobi desert in Mongolia. Photo courtesy: Honza Soukup/CC BY 2.0
It's not quite the proverbial butterfly flapping its wings creating a hurricane across the world, but desertification in Mongolia is generating dangerous dust storms thousands of miles away.
Former South Korean Ambassador to China Kwon Byong Hyon made the connection more than a decade ago, and has helped spearhead an effort since then to plant trees in Mongolia, hoping to improve both the lives of nomadic desert herders there and the air quality his own children are exposed to back home in Seoul.
"Intense dust storms have blown across Korea throughout recorded history, but their frequency and intensity have increased in recent decades," PRI journalist Daniel Grossman reported recently for The World, profiling Kwon's "crusade to combat the yellow clouds at their source, hundred of miles away in the Gobi desert of China and Mongolia."
A nomadic family outside their fabulously versatile and movable 'ger' (yurt) in the Gobi desert near Choir, Mongolia. Photo courtesy: Angelo Juan Ramos/CC BY 2.0.
Severe desertification and drought in Mongolia, which is warming twice as fast as the global average, is making life more difficult than ever for traditional livestock herders. It's also sending an unhealthy amount of dust across Asia.
The anti-desertification initiative Kwon founded, Future Forest, has recruited Korean and Chinese students to help plant some 4 million trees in an effort to "prevent the eastward spread of the deserts, the very source of the much-feared yellow dust storms," according to the Korea Herald. For his work, he has been named the first "Sustainable Land Management Champion" by the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification.
And Kwon is not alone. Korean activist Dong Kyun Park has also been raising money in Korea to plant trees in Mongolia, efforts that Grossman says has inspired "high-level government talk of reforesting denuded areas" in Mongolia and the establishment of a new nursery for native tree species in the capital city of Ulan Bator.
"El Castillo," a Mayan temple on the Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico, with a mysterious "light beam" emerging from the top. Photo courtesy: Hector Siliezar via lifeslittlemysteries.com
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