For more than 12,000 years, native people inhabited several villages clustered around the roar of Wyam of N’ch-iwana — Celilo Falls on the Columbia River — the center of a vast salmon-based fishing and trading economy and the nucleus of many sacred sites, petroglyphs and burial grounds. Celilo Falls was a natural wonder, by volume the largest…
A court in Papua New Guinea this week cleared the way for the Chinese state-owned China Metallurgical Group Corp. to proceed with a $1.5 billion nickel-mining project, which had been blocked by injunctions over the environmental impact of the company’s plan to dispose of mine tailings in the ocean. The long-awaited decision denied a petition for…
Two thought leaders with clashing viewpoints on the future of environmental stewardship will be going head to head on the topic of whether technologies like nuclear power can be used to foster sustainability, at 7 p.m. on July 21 at the David Brower Center in Berkeley, as part of Earth Island Presents. Winona LaDuke, Anishinaabekwe (Ojibwe)…
U.S. Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar yesterday announced a six-month extension of the moratorium on new uranium mining claims in a million-acre buffer zone around the Grand Canyon. The temporary ban — enacted in July 2009 and due to expire next month — will now be in effect until December of this year, while the Bureau…
Earlier this month, leaders of Peru’s indigenous Q’eros people effectively blocked geneticists from collecting DNA samples from their community as part of National Geographic’s ongoing Genographic Project, which has been gathering DNA from people around the world. Members of the Genographic Project had planned to arrive on May 7 to begin collecting samples from several…
Now in its fourth week, the Glen Cove spiritual encampment in Vallejo, Calif., is still going strong as Native American activists and supporters continue their round-the-clock occupation of the sacred Ohlone burial site in an effort to protect it from development. (See previous SLFP news post.) Although the protest has delayed construction at the 15-acre site,…
After a nearly 20-year hiatus, uranium mining has resumed on public lands surrounding the Grand Canyon. In late December 2009, Denison Mines Corp. began extracting high-grade uranium ore from its Arizona 1 mine, located about 10 miles from the boundary for Grand Canyon National Park. The mine had been shut down in 1992, never having produced any…