Chief Raoni crying when he learned that the President of Brazil approved the Belo Monte dam project on the Xingu indigenous lands. Belo Monte will be bigger than the Panama Canal, flooding nearly a million acres of rainforest & indigenous lands. 40,000 indigenous and local people will be forced off their native lands (as well as millions of unknown species & plants) In the name of "progress".
He arrived in Roissy, near Paris, September 19, 2011 to collect a petition to protest the construction of the hydroelectric dam in the Amazonian Xingu River in Brazil.
It's curious, really curious, how the Brazilian government is usually ailed as one of the most "environmental fiendly" in the world and generally adored by champagne Socialists (like most banana republics in South America).
News like this are usually passed "under the radar", as was the persecution of Dutch biologist Marc Van Roosmalen or the mass suicide of the displaced Kaiowas people or the close ties between the "progressive" Brazilian government and the multinational agro-complex.
As Marc Van Roosmalen rightly put it "If an indio puts a tortoise in the pot or kills a deer to feed his family he is persecuted, fined and dragged away in chains but if the government in Brasilia destroys thousands of acres to make room for oil palms and soy fields nobody has anything to say".
I guess energy must become "renewable". At any cost.