| Submit your comments on this article |
| Caribbean-Latin America |
| 8 Greenpeace members surrounded by loggers in Brazil's Amazon |
| 2007-10-18 |
| Heh...heh...heh RIO DE JANEIRO, Brazil - Hundreds of loggers and angry residents have surrounded eight Greenpeace members who tried to leave an Amazon town with a scorched tree trunk for an exhibit on global warming, the environmental group said Wednesday. Damn you, peasants! Didn't you hear about Al Gore! The activists are holed up in the makeshift headquarters of the federal environmental agency in the town of Castelo dos Sonhos, Greenpeace campaigner Andre Muggiati said. They are being protected by police and army soldiers. The region in the Amazon state of Para is part of the so-called "arc of destruction," the southern edge of the rain forest that has been devastated by loggers. In 2005, American missionary Dorothy Stang was shot dead in the region during a land dispute. Which has no relevance to the story, but we're AP so we'll throw it in... On Tuesday, the Greenpeace activists tried to haul away a badly burned fallen tree trunk for an exhibit on global warming in Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo, Muggiati said. Where ya going with my tree, ya dirty hippies? Marcelo Marquesini, who is charge of the Greenpeace expedition, said that the loggers had sent a committee Wednesday to meet with the environmentalists. "The situation is calmer now," he said in a telephone interview from inside the besieged headquarters. "I told them we've been illegally imprisoned and they said they'd let us go soon." Yes, Everything is always fine at a beseiged headquarters. Why don't you spout more legalese at them. I'm sure they love that. Marquesini said he expected they would be allowed to leave either Wednesday afternoon or Thursday morning. The environmentalists, however, will not leave at night for safety reasons, he said. Yeah. Bad things out there in the dark...you could disappear without a trace. Muggiati said the federal environmental agency Ibama gave Greenpeace the OK to transport the tree trunk, but the permission was suspended in the wake of the standoff. An Ibama press officer, who declined to be identified according to agency policy, said the permission was suspended in an attempt to diffuse the situation. The newspaper Jornal Provincia do Tapajos said residents were angry Greenpeace removed the trunk without getting the local community's permission. Oh...them? Well, what do they know? They know you ain't leaving with that tree.... "How can Ibama allow Greenpeace to do this type of extraction when they're not even capable of approving our management plans?" community leader Vilson Ketterman told the newspaper. He was referring to plans loggers must file to show their operations meet basic environmental standards. Management plans and permissions to transport tree trunks are the main tools the Brazilian government uses to control illegal logging in the Amazon. But...they're Greenpeace. They're so much better then you... Marquesini said loggers had hauled the tree trunk away and told him they planned to make it into a monument in a public square. "They're probably going to use it to commemorate the day they expelled Greenpeace from the town," he added. Y'all come back now, ya heah...HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA The region around Castelo dos Sonhos has a long history of tension between the federal government, loggers and environmentalists. Greenpeace is especially unwelcome in the region, where the group has denounced illegal logging done to make way for soybean fields. Bet if they were growing weed down there, Greenpeace wouldn't be pissed... |
| Posted by:tu3031 |
| #1 It should be noted that much of the rainforest is being cleared to plant sugarcane for ethanol, a fuel promoted by many environmental groups. |
| Posted by: DoDo 2007-10-18 17:04 |