Sarayacu-Gemeinde bittet die Welt um Hilfe

Die Indianer aus Sarayacu im ecuadorianischen Amazonas wurden vor kurzem Opfer eines brutalen Überfalls. Ein Ölkonzern will jetzt mit Hilfe von Soldaten in Sarayacu nach Öl suchen. Neue, blutige Auseinandersetzungen drohen.

Aufgrund dieser Umstände haben die Indianer den Ausnahmezustand ausgerufen und sich mit einem Hilferuf an uns gewandt. Sie brauchen dringend Spenden für Kommunikationsmittel und Transportkosten.

Reinhard Behrend
Vorsitzender Rettet den Regenwald e.V.
http://www.regenwald.org

U.N. REPORT WARNS OF NITROGEN RUNOFF KILLING FISHERIES
MSNBC
March 29, 2004

http://msnbc.msn.com/id/4624359/

The number of oxygen-deprived "dead zones" in the world's oceans has been increasing since the 1970s and is now nearly 150, threatening fisheries as well as humans who depend on fish, the U.N. Environment Program announced Monday in unveiling its first-ever Global Environment Outlook Year Book.

These "dead zones" are caused by an excess of nitrogen from farm fertilizers, sewage and emissions from vehicles and factories. In what experts call a "nitrogen cascade," the chemical flows untreated into oceans and triggers the proliferation of plankton, which in turn depletes oxygen in the water.

While fish might flee this suffocation, slow moving, bottom-dwelling creatures like clams, lobsters and oysters are less able to escape.

"Humankind is engaged in a gigantic, global experiment as a result of the inefficient and often overuse of fertilizers, the discharge of untreated sewage and rising emissions from vehicles and factories," program executive director Klaus Toepfer said in a statement accompanying the report.

From small to vast zones

Toepfer noted that 146 dead zones -- most in Europe and the U.S. East Coast -- range from under a square mile to up to 45,000 square miles. "Unless urgent action is taken to tackle the sources of the problem," he said, "it is likely to escalate rapidly."

The program noted that some of the earliest recorded dead zones were in Chesapeake Bay, the Baltic Sea, Scandinavia's Kattegat Strait, the Black Sea and the northern Adriatic Sea.

The most infamous zone is in the Gulf of Mexico, where the Mississippi River dumps fertilizer runoff from the Midwest.

Others have appeared off South America, China, Japan, southeast Australia and New Zealand, the program said.

Preventive measures

The report was released in Jeju, South Korea, where governments from around the world are sending officials this week for a Global Ministerial Environment Forum.

The program noted preventive steps can be taken, citing these examples:

- European nations along the Rhine agreed to halve discharged nitrogen levels, reducing the discharge into the North Sea.

- Planting new forests and grasslands will help soak up excess nitrogen, keeping it out of waterways.

- Requiring vehicles to reduce nitrogen emissions.

- Fostering alternative energy sources that are not based on burning fossil fuels.

- Better sewage treatment would reduce nutrient discharges to coastal waters.

Global warming warning

But the report also noted new research that indicates global warming could aggravate the problem. Should humans double emissions of carbon dioxide, a key gas that many scientists fear is warming the Earth, that could change rainfall patterns, according to the research.

"In some areas, this in turn could lead to a marked increase in the levels of run-off from rivers into the seas," the U.N. program said. "They calculate that dissolved oxygen levels in the northern Gulf of Mexico, triggered by an increased discharge from the Mississippi River basin of 20 percent and a climb in temperature of up to four degrees Centigrade, could fall by 30 to 60 percent."

The U.N. report is online at:
http://www.unep.org/geo/yearbook


Informant: NHNE

Mobilfunkmast im Waidesgrund weiter in der Kritik

Petersberg (bg) Die Errichtung einer Mobilfunkanlage im Waidesgrund in Petersberg stößt weiter auf Widerstand: Die Bürgerinitiative Waidesgrund, welche die Errichtung verhindern will, ruft für Dienstag, 30. März, ab 8 Uhr zu einer Demonstration am Parkplatz des Waidesgrundstadions auf.

Vodafone-D2 möchte an dieser Stelle einen Sendemast errichten (unsere Zeitung vom 27. März). Unterstützt werden die Gegner der Anlage vom Kreis- und Stadtelternbeirat und von der Kreistagsfraktion der Grünen.

„Diese Sende- und Empfangsanlage wird den Protest aller Eltern hervorrufen, die erfahren, dass diese Anlage mitten in ein Schulviertel gebaut wird“, schreiben die Elternvertreter Lolita Banik-Reith (Stadt) und Helmut Reinke (Kreis) in einem offenen Brief an die Petersberger Gemeindevertretung und an Bürgermeister Karl-Josef Schwiddessen. Nach Informationen von Banik-Reith würden in den betroffenen Schulen 6500 Kinder unterrichtet. Der Gemeinde Petersberg werfen die Elternvertreter vor, in dieser Angelegenheit nicht zum Wohl der Mitbürger und der Kinder zu handeln.

Auch die Grünen zeigen sich „empört“. Kreistagsfraktionsvorsitzender Helmut Schönberger nennt die Genehmigung der Gemeinde für den Mast „verantwortungslos“. Er ruft dazu auf, „mit der Petersberger Bürgerinitiative in einen konstruktiven Dialog zu treten, um dem Mobilfunkbetreiber einen geeigneteren Standort anzubieten“.

Ein Beitrag aus der Fuldaer Zeitung vom 29. März 2004

http://www.fuldaerzeitung.de/sixcms/detail.php?id=80763

dazu auch:

Bündnis 90/Die Grünen

Mobilfunk: Die Sorgen der Menschen endlich ernst nehmen!

Die erneute Errichtung eines Mobilfunkmastes in einem sensiblen Bereich empört die Kreistagsfraktion von Bündnis 90/Die Grünen: „Im Waidesgrund in Petersberg, in einem Gebiet, was als Spiel- und Freizeitgelände genutzt wird, in dem es in unmittelbarer Nähe ein Schwimmbad, Schulen und Kindergärten gibt, und der Abstand zu den nächsten Wohnhäusern gerade einmal 150 m beträgt, gehört es sich einfach nicht, eine solche Baumaßnahme zuzulassen,“ unterstreicht Fraktionsvorsitzender Helmut Schönberger.

Da die gesundheitliche Gefährdung gerade jüngerer Menschen zumindest nicht auszuschließen sei, halte er das Vorgehen der Petersberger Gemeinde, im Waidesgrund einen Vodafone D 2 Mobilfunkmast zu genehmigen, den betroffenen Kindern, Bürgerinnen und Bürgern gegenüber für verantwortungslos. Auch wenn die gesundheitlichen Risiken umstritten seien, setzten doch gerade die Versicherungsgesellschaften, die den Mobilfunkbetreibern die Deckung für gesundheitliche Schäden verweigerten, deutliche Zeichen. Bei den jetzigen Beschlüssen der Gemeinde werde der gemeindliche Frieden schwer belastet, denn viele betroffene Menschen fühlten sich zurecht von ihren zuständigen Gemeindevertretern im Stich gelassen. Schönberger fordert, mit der Petersberger Bürgerinitiative in einen konstruktiven Dialog einzutreten, um dem Mobilfunkbetreiber einen geeigneteren Standort anzubieten.

http://www.sg-fulda.de/aktiv/redaktion/news-redaktion/2004_03_26_gruenen.shtml


Quelle: http://www.buergerwelle.de/body_newsletter_290304.html

By Francis X. Clines
New York Times
March 28, 2004

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/28/opinion/28SUN4.html?th

WASHINGTON - The word Potomac means "where the goods are brought in" and it dates from the local Indian tribe rudely displaced here centuries ago by colonial whites intent on a New World. The word seems perfect for the whiff of irony and history in the air this month as the last of 800,000 Indian artifacts -- priceless goods, in fact -- were trucked in from New York City to become the bedrock treasure of the new National Museum of the American Indian:

http://www.nmai.si.edu/

Even incomplete, the museum stands as a modernistic cynosure, defiantly staring down its immediate neighbor, the gleaming white Capitol, where so many treaty promises to American Indians were written and broken. The museum marks a grand turning point in that history, a sacred federal site ceded to Indian management and broadcasting a message of hardy survival, not tribal extinction, to throngs of tourists.

The museum -- a 10-story, cantilevered edifice suggesting a mesa with a cascading brook, indigenous landscaping (from corn bed to marshland), and a cladding of desert-toned Kasota limestone -- opens in September and is likely to be the last Smithsonian attraction built on the National Mall. It will offer a kaleidoscopic sampling of stories from hundreds of tribes that were consulted from the Arctic Circle to Tierra del Fuego.

The peerless collection -- from papoose carriers to sacred regalia, from armadas of dugout canoes to armories of bows and arrows -- is the rapacious trove of George Gustav Heye, the heir to an oil fortune who collected Indian treasures by the boxcar loads a century ago. A buccaneer with a Hearst-like obsession for hunting and gathering other peoples' stuff, Heye left a collection that stuns today's Indian leaders for its power to recapitulate so much lost history.

The collection, from towering totems to shimmering beadwork, had been crammed for decades into a 20,000-square-foot storage space in New York that few Americans knew to visit. The new Smithsonian enterprise offers 12 times that museum space, as well as an even larger state-of-the-art preservation center in suburban Maryland. Even then, the collection will have to be rotated across time like a galaxy to be fully sampled here and in its remaining Manhattan outpost, an already-open Customs House museum.

Quite poetically, what Heye collected as artifacts of a fading culture are about to be displayed instead as evidence of tribal resilience across 10,000 years in the Western Hemisphere. There now are about two million Indians in the United States, an eightfold rebound from the low point of tribal decimation after the Indian wars.

Indian leaders see the museum as an opportunity for what one termed "a cleansing and a blessing at the same time" -- a mix of honest history, resurgent pride and a sense of discovery that invites reconciliation. It has inspired tribal chiefs across America intent on tracking down and trying to reclaim other holy objects and human remains purloined in past "scientific" sweeps when "civilization regulations" were part of the federal dictate to force assimilation on the reservation tribes.

With more than five million visitors a year expected, the museum's spirit is decidedly more informational than confrontational. It aims to exude pride devoid of militancy. And it's a hospitable pride -- visitors will be able to sample five regional cuisines at the Mitsitam ("let's eat") Cafe there.

Featured tribes will hold court for tourists in a 100-foot-high "Potomac space," a circular, giant, lodgelike interior topped by a copper dome. The museum is oriented to Indian cosmology, with windows designed to track the sun's course across interior walls. Décor runs from wampum cabinet detailing to "grandfather rocks," prehistoric markers imported from the far ends of the hemisphere to display sacred tribal reference points.

Federal marshals were riding shotgun as the final truckload of artifacts arrived March 16 from Interstate 95: a kayak, a birch-bark canoe, a tule reed boat and a wooden canoe. They represented vessels from the hemisphere's four tribal corners. A welcoming prayer was offered by Emil Her Many Horses, a museum staff member. The Heye treasure, purchased and snatched so providentially from near and far, had finished its transfer intact back to the tribes' care. The museum opens for the autumnal equinox, with tens of thousands of Indians expected to march and dance, sing and pray at their new showcase status in America.


Informant: NHNE