Beyond Nuclear International
Tigers may soon burn not so bright
Tiger reserve in India could be plundered for uranium
By Mayank Aggarwal
- An expert panel on forests of the environment ministry has accorded in-principle approval for survey and exploration of uranium in Telangana’s Amrabad Tiger Reserve.
- The approval came even as most of the local forest officials in their site inspection reports recommended against it stating that it will adversely affect the flora and fauna.
- The forest officials also argued that if exploration takes place it will disturb wildlife. In addition to the tiger, the report noted the presence of a range of endangered animals like panther, sloth bear, wild dog, jungle cats, wolf, pangolin, Bonnet macaque, pythons, cobra, wild pig, Neelgai, spotted deer, and sambar at the reserve.
- India is home to about 60 percent of the world’s tiger population and a leader in tiger conservation. Tiger reserves, which cover about 2 percent of the country, are increasingly under threat from development projects.
The quest for uranium deposits to meet India’s nuclear power goals has now reached a tiger reserve in Telangana. An expert panel on forests of the Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change (MoEFCC) has recommended in-principle approval for a proposal by the central government’s Department of Atomic Energy (DAE) for survey and exploration of uranium over 83 square kilometres in Telangana’s Amrabad Tiger Reserve.
The proposal was considered by the Forest Advisory Committee (FAC) in its meeting on May 22, 2019. As per the minutes of the meeting, even though the FAC noted that there are “deficiencies in the proposal”, it recommended the project for “in-principle approval” considering that the project is “critical importance from national perspective.”
However, FAC stipulated that the approval is subject to the submission of all required documents and said that after “receipt of the same, the complete proposal may be placed before the competent authority for approval.” Following this, MoEFCC’s Deputy Inspector General of Forests Naresh Kumar wrote to Telangana government on June 19 requesting it to “submit the proposal along-with verified relevant documents” for identified boreholes for further consideration by the environment ministry.
Girl erased, but not gone
“Uganda’s Greta” was cropped from a photo; is her cause ignored, too?
By Linda Pentz Gunter
Recently, a scandal erupted over a decision by Associated Press to crop 23-year old Ugandan climate activist, Vanessa Nakate, out of a group photo that also featured Greta Thunberg.
The photo they ran showed four young white climate campaigners against the scenic backdrop of mountains in Davos, Switzerland, where the activists were making their case for emergency action at the annual summit of world leaders.
Vanessa Nakate’s tweet showed the AP’s cropped photo and the actual lineup.
The AP at first tried to excuse the mistake, claiming Nakate was erased due not to racism but “purely on composition grounds” because the building behind her “was distracting” and because they wanted to get Thunberg into the center of the picture.
What AP missed completely, and recognized in a later apology, was that whether the decision was aesthetic or not, the implications and consequences of omitting the one person of color from the group overrode any concerns about the ugliness of the building behind her. It should never have happened.
And so, Vanessa Nakate became the girl erased. But the bigger problem is that her cause continues to be erased as well. The alarm bells she is ringing about the consequences of the climate crisis in Africa, simply don’t make much press.
Past time to listen to Greta
“We must forget about net zero. We need real zero.”
Last week, Greta Thunberg, the now 17-year old Swedish climate activist, returned to Davos, Switzerland to once again address that meeting of world leaders. And, once again, she quietly urged those leaders — who continue to abdicate responsibility for the climate crisis — to take immediate action. “Let’s be clear. We don’t need a ‘low carbon economy.’ We don’t need to ‘lower emissions.’ Our emissions have to stop if we are to have a chance to stay below the 1.5-degree target,” she told them.
We felt it was worth reproducing her entire speech here, for those who may have missed it — or who want to circulate it — especially to our elected officials. We have also embedded the video of her speech, which you can watch on this page.
Greta Thunberg’s speech:
“One year ago I came to Davos and told you that our house is on fire. I said I wanted you to panic. I’ve been warned that telling people to panic about the climate crisis is a very dangerous thing to do. But don’t worry. It’s fine. Trust me, I’ve done this before and I can assure you it doesn’t lead to anything.
And, for the record, when we children tell you to panic we’re not telling you to go on like before. We’re not telling you to rely on technologies that don’t even exist today at scale and that science says perhaps never will.
We are not telling you to keep talking about reaching “net zero emissions” or ‘carbon neutrality’ by cheating and fiddling around with numbers. We are not telling you to ‘offset your emissions’ by just paying someone else to plant trees in places like Africa while at the same time forests like the Amazon are being slaughtered at an infinitely higher rate.
Planting trees is good, of course, but it’s nowhere near enough of what is needed and it cannot replace real mitigation and rewilding nature.
Planting trees its not enough while fires devastate the Amazon forest. (Photo: Fires in the Amazon rain forest, by ESA astronaut Luca Parmitano during mission to the International Space Station/Creative Commons)
Should women run the world?
Women are marching, but would they lead us to nuclear war?
By Linda Pentz Gunter
There is a widely held view that men have generally screwed up the planet with their wars and imperialism and their corporate malfeasance. Men, it is argued, should step aside and let women run the world. It is, frankly, self-evident, and it’s a view I have articulated myself more than once.
US senator, Elizabeth Warren, is making the case right now that a woman is not only more than capable — but actually ideal — as the next president of the United States. The squabble over whether or not Bernie Sanders told her differently only serves to accentuate that, appallingly, we are still, in the 21st century US, having this debate.
But declaring that it’s our turn to run things and men should step aside is also, I suspect, too simplistic an answer. It is good people who should run the world, not one gender over another. (I welcome the discussion — and dissent — this may provoke. And even as I write this, I am not convinced there is one right answer.)
Indeed, while women may be generally more nurturing and less aggressive than men, we don’t always get it right.
2017 Women’s March in D.C. (Photo by Polly Irungu is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)
There are plenty of stories currently flying around about the implosion of the Women’s March as an organization. Its founding leadership made a series of questionable decisions, including issuing policy decrees and attempting to trademark the name, all of which alienated its base.
The leadership also drew widespread protest — and prompted an exodus of Jewish supporters — when it was slow to distance itself from Louis Farrakhan’s Nation of Islam, designated a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center, and whose rally a Women’s March co-chair had attended.
Understanding Iran
Why did US president, Donald Trump, withdraw the US from the Iran nuclear deal? And will he still go to war against Iran? To better understand the implications of where we are now, we provide Vijay Prashad’s illuminating history of US-Iran relations.
When will winter come to an end?
Bu Vijay Prashad
On 17 January, Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, led the Friday prayers for the first time in eight years. He mocked the ‘American clowns’ who threatened Iran and said that Iran’s response to the US assassination of Major General Qassem Soleimani was a ‘slap in the face’ of US power.
Tensions between Washington, DC, and Tehran seem to have gone from a boil to a simmer, but they nonetheless remain. There is reason to believe that US President Donald Trump – reckless by nature – will launch an attack on Iran in the next few months. He might do so to distract from the impeachment trial he faces in the US Senate or to hasten his chances of re-election in November 2020.
In 2015, Iran, China, France, Germany, the United Kingdom, and the United States signed the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), the nuclear deal that seemed to stop the imperialist rush to war against Iran. At that time, Iranians took to the streets and to twitter to say, ‘winter is over’.
They quoted from an old protest song – Sar Umad Zemestoon, or ‘Winter Has Come to An End’. The song is based on the Armenian love song Sari Siroun Yar and was then re-written in the early 1970s by Saeed Soltanpour, a Marxist radical of the Cherikha-ye-Fadaee Khalq (People’s Devoted Guerrilla). When Iranians take to the streets in anticipation of a new period, this song seems to follow them: it was sung on the streets during the Iranian Revolution of 1979 and it was sung at campaign rallies of the Green Movement in 2009. It became the catchphrase for a new beginning in 2015. But winter never really ended.
Grand Canyon under “nuclear” attack
Water is life. Uranium will poison both
By Patricia J. Kelly and Robert Arnberger
Arizonans know that water is life; it is vital to us all and sustains our livelihoods. We cannot afford to let powerful industry interests sacrifice our water to pollution or depletion. We also cannot let those same interests destroy a landscape that supports an unparalleled regional economy and the livelihood of citizens who depend on it. But our water and our Grand Canyon is under attack by these very interests that see profit in the ground and downplay the risk of negative health impacts for generations to come.
In Arizona, we are concerned by the increasing number of calls to open areas around the Grand Canyon to uranium mining, a dangerous practice that risks destruction of groundwater, seeps and springs, and could impact the Colorado River — the drinking water supply for nearly 40 million people. Local government and tribal leadership have opposed the reckless potential destruction of our internationally cherished monument. But now, corporate polluters have a powerful ally on their side: President Trump.
The Colorado River supplies drinking water for 40 million people. (Photo: Jeff Hollett, Creative Commons/Flickr)
The Trump administration has taken steps that could lead to destruction around and within one of the world’s most iconic landscapes, including newly prioritizing uranium as a “critical mineral” and exploring ways to boost its production domestically. An administration working group is contemplating calls to lift a temporary, but important ban on mining around the Grand Canyon and taxpayer subsidies to make uranium mining profitable. These threats ignore health risks and put our communities and sacred sites at risk. They merge the need to protect not only our iconic natural landscapes but also our citizen’s health.
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