Important Victory in Campaign Against Enbridge’s Gateway Project, Timber Wars in Australia, plus more

from rabble.ca
On Friday, October 1, 2010, at the delegates at the Union of British Columbia Municipalities (UBCM) Annual General Meeting in Whistler, voted resoundingly in opposition to the proposed Enbridge Northern Gateway Pipeline and oil tanker traffic on the province’s North Coast. In a press release, Leslie Johnson, a councillor with the Village of Queen Charlotte, stated, “I am overwhelmed and very grateful to the delegates of the UBCM for standing up for coastal communities on an issue that has provincial and national significance.”

Uneasy truce carved from log wars
from theage.com
by Maris Beck
AT 5am the loggers would roll in. The activists were ready: locked to bulldozers, lying on platforms in the giant trees, waiting for the headlights, deep in the Goolengook forest in East Gippsland.
“The adrenalin!” recalled protest leader Stuart Paton, who lived in the forest for five long years. “It was kind of like a war mentality.”
Another activist, Tama Green, said that offsetting the hardships were the sunny days, good friends and small wins that kept them going. Ms Green remembers mornings waking up: ”It’s all crisp and clear and the birds are singing … and you’re like, ‘Yep, they can’t log this.’ ”
The decades-long struggle over the Goolengook, which raged between environmentalists, the state government and loggers, culminated on Friday in a kind of coming together.
On one of those dazzlingly crisp days, Environment Minister Gavin Jennings, surrounded by former protesters and traditional owners – but no loggers – officially launched the new East Gippsland National Park.
The park covers 45,000 hectares, including the contested Goolengook that is home to 400-year-old trees and rare and threatened species such as the long-footed potoroo, spot-tailed quoll, powerful owl and slender tree fern.

Anti-corporate pirates lampoon corporate plunderers

from greenleft.org
Putting a new twist on the “What shall we do with a drunken sailor” shanty, the pirates sang “What shall we do with the corporate thievers?” (or alternatively “the planet destroyers”), then heartily suggested “make ’em all work for a dollar a day”, “lock ’em all up on Christmas Island” and “make ’em all swim in their toxic waste.”
While the “scurvy dogs” of the Forbes $8000-per-head conference plotted how to further fill their bottomless pockets, the anti-corporate pirates outside noted that the wealth of the tiny few came from exploiting the working majority across the globe, as well as pillaging the planet’s natural resources and destroying the environment in the process.

Protest resumes against Raukumara Basin oil drilling
from Radio New Zealand
Bonfires burned since dawn on Sunday on beaches around the North Island’s East Cape, as part of an ongoing campaign against offshore oil drilling.
Activists say the bonfires, from Opotiki to Gisborne, are a protest against the environmental damage the mining could cause to fish stocks.
In June, Brazilian energy giant Petrobras was awarded a permit to explore and drill in the Raukumara Basin, off East Cape.
Campaign spokesperson Ani Pahuru-Huriwai says the permit should not have been issued without assurances the company would not damage the environment.
Earlier this year the Government expressed confidence in the experience of Petrobras to make sure a Gulf of Mexico-style disaster does not occur.