Louisiana Is Suing The Oil Companies Destroying Its Wetlands. More than just getting mad, Louisiana is attempting to get even with oil companies whose dredging and dredging has eroded Louisiana’s coastal wetlands for decades. The areas provide an important barrier during floods and storms--and oil companies are supposed to remediate the canals they dig to ensure the longevity of the area. The only problem is: they haven’t been. Now, according to Reuters, the relatively obscure state agency, the Southeast Louisiana Flood Protection Authority - East, is suing 97 oil companies in response--including the big guys like BP, Exxon Mobil, Chevron, and Royal Dutch Shell.
Reuters reports: John Barry, the vice president of the Southeast Louisiana Flood Protection Authority - East, a state agency, said companies’ drilling permits required them to perform remediation work that in most cases was never carried out after digging canals to reach drilling platforms. A Light in the Forest. Across the world, complex social and market forces are driving the conversion of vast swaths of rain forests into pastureland, plantations, and cropland.
Rain forests are disappearing in Indonesia and Madagascar and are increasingly threatened in Africa's Congo basin. But the most extreme deforestation has taken place in Brazil. Since 1988, Brazilians have cleared more than 153,000 square miles of Amazonian rain forest, an area larger than Germany. With the resulting increase in arable land, Brazil has helped feed the growing global demand for commodities, such as soybeans and beef. But the environmental price has been steep. In addition to providing habitats for untold numbers of plant and animal species and discharging around 20 percent of the world's fresh water, the Amazon basin plays a crucial role in regulating the earth's climate, storing huge quantities of carbon dioxide that would otherwise contribute to global warming. To continue reading, please log in. Don't have an account? Emebedding The Rights Of Nature In Our Legal Code. With Earth Day around the corner, it’s a good time to step back and see how we’ve been doing since the first Earth Day in 1970, when 20 million people took to the streets to protest rivers on fire, DDT-poisoned birds, sewage on beaches, and a devastating oil spill off the pristine Santa Barbara coast.
Soon after, many of our basic national environmental laws were passed in direct response to this massive grassroots movement. Is there another wave of this activism coming? Since those early days, we have improved sewage treatment plants and banned DDT, but new threats to human and environmental health are mounting – pollution from hydraulic fracking, leaking oil pipelines, nuclear disasters, and other localized impacts on communities. At the global scale, climate change is real and accelerating, as evidenced by unprecedented droughts, hurricanes, floods, and crop losses.
Enter the “Rights of Nature” movement. The good news is that solutions to this potential culture clash already exist. Global Alliance for Rights of Nature.