National Tribal Environmental Council

Posted Dec 7, 2011 in the Journal Sentinel Online

The Forest County Potawatomi tribe is proposing to build an $18.5 million biogas energy project adjacent to its Menomonee Valley casino.

The renewable energy plan calls for construction of an anaerobic digester that would produce both electricity as well as heat that would provide hot water and heating for the casino.

The digester would produce gas from wastes produced by the food processing industry, the Potawatomi said in a proposal filed with the City of Milwaukee.

The tribe estimates the project would create 61 construction jobs and five full-time jobs. If all approvals are obtained, construction would begin in late spring and be completed by early spring in 2013.

Posted Dec 9, 2011 by IPS

DURBAN, South Africa (IPS) - For the Laibon community, a sub-tribe of Kenya's Maasai ethnic group, the 33,000-hectare Loita Forest in the country's Rift Valley Province is more than just a forest. It is a shrine.

"It is our shrine. Our Gods live there. We gather herbs from the place. We use it for bee- keeping. It therefore forms part of our livelihood," said Olonana Ole Pulei, who is in Durban, South Africa, to represent his community at the ongoing 17th Conference of Parties under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change.

According to Nigel Crawhall, the Director of Secretariat for the Indigenous Peoples of Africa Co-ordinating Committee (IPACC), different African communities have incredible indigenous knowledge that they use in the conservation of forests and biodiversity in general, and this should be recognised during the negotiations in Durban.

Posted Dec. 8, 2011 by Indian Country Today

Indigenous peoples came to COP 17 with a simple message: Your Kyoto Protocol isn't working for us.

Amid skepticism and growing doubt, the climate talks known as COP 17—shorthand for the 17th United Nations Conference of the Parties—began in Durban, South Africa, on November 28 and are set to end December 9. Many environmentalists arrived feeling that the world's nations aren't serious about taking action to prevent catastrophic global temperature increases, especially in regions most vulnerable to climate change and where indigenous peoples are disproportionately affected as temperatures rise.

On November 26, following a two-day workshop attended by representatives from Ecuador, Panama, India, Nicaragua, Peru and Samoa, the Indigenous Peoples' Biocultural Climate Change Assessment (IPCCA) Initiative issued a strongly-worded declaration denouncing the schemes known as REDD and REDD+, which are acronyms for Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation. REDD and REDD+ were designed to halt deforestation in developing nations by placing monetary value on the carbon absorbing properties of trees which corporations from industrialized nations can then buy the rights to, giving them permission to emit greenhouse gases beyond their agreed upon limits.

Indigenous peoples living within the boundaries of nation-states are subject to the nations' laws (usually without their consent), as are their lands and resources; and as the IPCCA declaration notes, most of the world's remaining forests are within indigenous territories. The forests not only provide the livelihoods of the people, but for thousands of years they have been their homes and the places from which their cultures are derived and maintained. The view of forests as commodities to allow powerful nations to continue polluting is anathema to indigenous beliefs in the sanctity of nature—yet another violation of Mother Earth.