Culture and Coexistence into the Great Unknown
Historically a roadless fishing port with little development nor electricity, Puerto Lempira has transformed into a boom-town, host to drug traffickers, nearby military bases, and oil and gas development. In an effort to overcome this adversity, we participated in a blessing for the people and their land and culture in transition, directed by a local Miskitu sukya, or healer, and members of the community.
Ice is melting in the Arctic at one of the fastest rates in human history. Researchers and climate scientists monitoring ice melt in the Arctic have started using the ominous term “death spiral” to describe what’s happening at the top of the world.
Puerto Lempira lies on the shore of the sweetwater Laguna Caratasca, just west of the Caribbean in La Moskitia, Honduras. The largest Miskitu town in the region, with an ailing lobster industry in an atmosphere of post-coup insecurity and governmental corruption, many turn to drug trafficking for income.
In traditional indigenous societies, land means life. Following is a documentary on the struggle of two Western Shoshone elders against mining threats to their ancestral lands from the United States in Crescent City, Nevada.
On a recent trip to the Kruta River near Cape Gracias a Dios on the Honduran Caribbean and the Nicaraguan Border, life without roads and little electricity proceeds slowly, detached from the world at large. Yet, drug trafficking is changing the economy and the culture of the Miskitu People, and due to overfishing, local people can only turn to harvesting jellyfish for China as an honest source of revenue.
On a 2013 trip to the Kruta River near Cape Gracias a Dios on the Honduran Caribbean and the Nicaraguan Border, life without roads and little electricity proceeds slowly, detached from the world at large. As sea levels rise, already economically-marginalized coastal villages in the mangrove swamps are slowly being inundated by the rising tides.
Valero Energy seeks permits for large-scale shipments of low-quality tar sands oil via rail into their Port of Los Angeles refinery, without any public comment or environmental review. As part of a larger move to transport climate-disrupting unconventional crude to ports for refining and export to the world, it presents dangers given recent rail accidents, the corrosive nature of tar sands bitumen, and the significant pollution that surrounding communities already live with.