Less than five months after some logging companies and large environmental groups declared a truce to the “war in the woods” a remote Ontario First Nation is calling for renewed boycotts against Weyerhaeuser Corporation, one of North America’s largest lumber producers. In an open letter today to loggers, retailers and investors Grassy Narrows Chief Simon Fobister states that “[w]e continue to call for the boycott and divestment of Weyerhaeuser Corporation due to their violation of our human rights as Indigenous Peoples.” The letter goes on to say that “[w]e will work with our supporters to promote, monitor, and enforce this position.”
Contact Joseph Fobister for Grassy Narrows. 807-925-2745 or David Sone for Earthroots. 416-599-0152 x.13. For primary source documents email david.sone@gmail.com
Feds Delay Wolf Release
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service today again delayed releasing a pack of eight wolves — badly needed to bolster the dwindling number of Mexican gray wolves in the Southwest — into the Arizona wild. The Engineer Springs pack would infuse new genetics into a wolf population suffering from inbreeding. The Mexican wolf population has declined or stayed stagnant for four years. Just 42 animals were counted in the wild in a survey in January, which was a 19-percent decline from the year before. A new count will be conducted in January 2011. Only one Mexican wolf has been released into the wild from the captive-breeding program, without having previously been removed from the wild, over the past four years. That was in November 2008.
Funding for Bat Disease Research
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has announced that it is providing $1.6 million for several new studies of the disease known as white-nose syndrome that has decimated bat populations in the eastern United States over the past four years. While the funding is an important step, the federal government must do still more to address what has been called the worst wildlife decline in North American history.Biologists fear the bat disease — associated with a fungus previously unknown to science — will show up this winter in the upper Midwest, Alabama and other areas of the South, and parts of the western United States. Last winter, white-nose syndrome jumped across the Mississippi River into caves in Missouri and western Oklahoma. So far, nine bat species have been documented with the fungus, two of which were already listed as endangered before the onset of the disease.