Experiments with truth: 10/1/09
A dozen people gathered in Kanawha City, West Virginia outside the Department of Environmental Protection on Tuesday to protest the agency's leniency in granting surface mining contracts. They set up a "coalfield cool-ade" stand offering up jugs of black liquid to represent the slurry water coming from the faucets of those who live near coal mining.
- About a thousand indigenous farm workers marched through the streets of downtown Cuenca in southern Ecuador on Monday to protest new water, mining and oil laws that many fear will lead to privatization and destruction of their land and resources.
- The Peasant Movement of the Philippines and the National Federation of Peasant Women in the Philippines held a demonstration in front of the United Nations Climate Change Negotiations in Bangkok on Monday, using street theater to protest false solutions to climate change—such as biofuels.
- 23 Greenpeace activists shut down a conveyer belt used for the extraction of tar sands near an open pit mine in Northern alberta owned by Suncor, Canada’s largest oil company. They held banners reading: ‘Tar sands climate crime.’
- More than 150 university students in Caracas have joined a hunger strike that began last week to demand the Organization of American States investigate allegations that dozens of Venezuelans have been jailed for their opposition to President Hugo Chavez. Some of the students were hospitalized after sewing the mouths shut.
- More than 50 American Indian activists and others demonstrated at the University of North Dakota yesterday to protest the school’s Fighting Sioux nickname and logo. The Board of Education is set to discuss the matter today.
- Around 200 Penn State University students took part in The Sierra Club’s Coal-Free Campus Campaign by holding a silent protest inside the student center on Tuesday.
- Around 20 pro-Tibet supporters stood outside the Empire State Building’s Fifth Avenue entrance yesterday morning to protest its decision to make the nighttime lights red and yellow this week in honor of China’s 60th anniversary.
I enjoy your website and don’t mean to be critical, but I think “peasant farmers” is a much better translation of “campesinos” than “farmworkers.” Just a suggestion.