Culture and Coexistence into the Great Unknown
In search for legendary “City of the Monkey God,” explorers ignore indigenous residents and archaeologists who have worked in the region for years, and shamefully claim to find the “untouched ruins” of a “vanished” culture found in the remote Moskitia region eastern Honduras.
The fracking boom threatens Puebloan and Hopi ancestral homelands around New Mexico’s sacred Chaco Canyon and local Diné communities are fighting drilling, pipeline projects and just general industrialization of their region without bringing real economic development. See the videos from the Solstice Project.
The model planners and economists touted as “sustainable development” has only exacerbated ecologic distress and community dislocation through its focus on wealth-creation. The needs of our ailing planet facing an impending 11 billion population calls for ecology and human welfare to dominate economy, but how to achieve this in a world bought and paid for by finance capitalism?
A gold rush that accelerated with the onset of the 2008 global recession compounds the woes of the Amazon basin, laying waste to Peruvian rain forest and spilling tons of toxic mercury into the air and water.
In the isolated region of La Mosquitia, Honduras, narco-traffickers act as shock troops in the assault on native Miskitu, Tawahka, and Pech homelands, ruthlessly dispossessing residents and rapaciously converting forest commons to private pasture primed for sale to multinational corporations.
Canadian “Porn King” Randy Jorgensen’s mega-tourism “development” projects are stirring conflict and destroying Afro-Caribbean Garífuna communities in Trujillo on the north coast of Honduras.
Deep in the tropical forests of Southeast Asia grows a rare and beautiful tree whose wood is so highly prized that men will kill to possess it. In Thailand, environmental organizations and park rangers are fighting back against organized crime syndicates bent on logging it and smuggling it to the burgeoning Chinese market.