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The Dole Food Company is now attempting to sue the filmmakers and producers, and has unsuccessfully attempted to block screenings of the movie at the Los Angeles Film Festival earlier this year. WG Film, Fredrik Gertten and Margarete Jangård, the creators of Bananas!*, have retained a First Amendment rights lawyer to fight back against the multinational giant Dole. The corporation’s lawsuit claims that the film is defamatory and false toward Dole Food. Bananas!* is definitely a movie that the Dole Corporation does not want you to see. It is presently scheduled for wide release this October.

Paso Pacífico, a non-profit organization focusing on the Pacific slope of Central America, is helping endangered Hawksbill Turtles in Nicaragua with a compensation-based conservation program based on incentive payments for local people.

The financial rewards to locals in exchange for protecting endangered sea turtle nests are making a difference: Rangers have reported that egg poaching is on the decline. And Paso Pacífico plans are to make this program sustainable.

As one of the most critically endangered marine sea turtles, little is known about the current population of Hawksbill Turtles (Eretmochelys imbricata ). With 100 percent of their eggs being harvested by local people and sold to poachers, few turtles had the opportunity to reach adulthood - putting this species is at significant risk.

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The medical centers provide crucial aid to approximately 200,000 refugees who have fled Burma because of the catastrophic, genocidal efforts of its military-dominated government.

Located in numerous locations along the border of Burma and Thailand, the remote clinics help people with serious injuries and also with basic care. They are often the only source of medical care refugees have. About 1 million displaced people are estimated to be hiding in the heavily land-mined border zone, doing their best to hang on despite the ever-present possibility of violence.

• » See also: Solar energy group buying discounts in Sonoma County
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The effort to train medical staff so that they could travel to these remote facilities and install solar power systems received top honors at this year’s Energy Globe Awards, competing among 800 environmental projects from 111 countries.

The significance of the effort cannot be understated, as the care centers available to these desperate people were without electricity prior to the training project. The risk of the Burmese military attacking clinics has demanded the use of less permanent, flexible medical facilities. Now that solar power has been installed in many of the mobile clinics, medical personnel can operate more easily on patients who have urgent needs during night hours. Laptops can also be used to assess important medical databases. Communication devices and microscopes can be powered, as well as refrigerators for life-saving vaccines. An eye doctor was even able to start providing cataract surgeries last year: something that was not possible before without electricity.

According to a news release from the Energy Globe website, the Burma solar clinic project won this year’s overall grand prize in a landslide and received a standing ovation. The awards ceremony took place in the Czech Republic earlier this week, and was attended by many of Europe’s key environmental leaders. To read more about the Energy Globe competition click here.

How You Can Help Contribute to the Burma Project and Others

While the remarkable achievement to bring solar power to Burmese mobile clinics is credited to a partnership of groups, our friends at the non-profit Green Empowerment played a crucial role in the project. I’ve written before about one of their successful partnership projects that brought wind power to a small community in Peru that previously had no electricity. With an emphasis on alternative energy and small green initiatives that build community capacity and improve quality of life, Green Empowerment has become a major player in conservation efforts throughout the world.

Proof of this status is clear not only because Green Empowerment is involved with the Burma solar clinics, but also because one of their projects in Nicaragua was also a finalist for the top honors in the Energy Globe’s water category. Green Empowerment has a wealth of detailed information on their website about the Burma solar clinic project, as well as their other efforts worldwide. Their projects are financed via grants and also by people like us.

If you’d like to donate money or resources to the effort to bring solar power to medical clinics in the Burma area, or to other projects, please visit Green Empowerment’s website at www.greenempowerment.org.

Photo Courtesy of Green Empowerment

The January 8th, 2009 6.1-magnitude earthquake in northern central Costa Rica places the Crucitas gold mine project in a new light. Crucitas is located about 60 miles north of the earthquake’s epicenter so the Crucitas area was not impacted significantly. But could it have been? The Associated Press reported that the 82 mega-watt Cariblanco hydroelectric dam near San Jose was damaged in the earthquake and will be out of operation for one year. Bridges and highways were also destroyed. So it seems only reasonable to wonder how a tailings dam would hold up, especially considering how a release of a huge amount of toxic wastewater after an earthquake could grossly compound the environmental destruction wrought by it.

The Crucitas project outline calls for an open pit operation with a tailings pond for catching the water used in cynidation. Its tailings pond will have a dam crest 80 meters (260 ft.) high and 18 meters wide with some rock lining for erosion protection. Infomine.com’s project summary mentions no infrastructure measures for prevention of a tailings pond dam failure due to an earthquake, and possible aftershocks. The site’s project profile also provides no information about seismic activity in the region. However, the Observatorio Vulcanologico y Sismologico de Costa Rica website states that the area near the proposed gold mine is potentially dangerous: “Historically, the central region of Costa Rica has been very active seismically”.

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Few decades ago the share of renewable energy in Nicaragua’s power generation was 70 percent but with growing ties with Venezuela and availability of cheap oil that number declined and now the country gets just 34 percent of its energy from renewable sources. But with the rising oil prices and increasing blackouts the government now seems to be falling back on the locally available and reliable renewable energy sources.

Having close diplomatic relations with Venezuela assured Nicaragua of sufficient oil supply for years but with oil peaking to $147 it became more and more difficult to shoulder the burden of rising energy costs. Although oil-based energy was cheaper than the energy produced from non-conventional sources, the fluctuation in oil prices started hurting the economy of the nation. The government of Nicaragua soon realised that oil-based energy sector is not sustainable in the given circumstances.

Nicaragua, one of the poorest countries in the western hemisphere, is blessed with a wide variety of renewable energy sources - wind, geothermal and hydel energy. The government is now looking to attarct foreign investors to help it develop projects which could eventually reduce the country’s dependence on oil for power generation to a mere 3 percent.

Russia, Iran and Brazil have come forward to invest in renewable energy projects in Nicaragua. A private capital firm, Arctas Capital Group, has invested in a $90 million wind energy project which will start generating 40 megawatts of energy from January. Nicaragua has six active volcanoes and therefore also experiences substantial amount of geothermal activity which it plans to tap through a 250 megawatt project to be build with the help of Russia.

For years the governments of Nicaragua ignored the vast reserves of renewable sources present in their country and increased their dependence on foreign oil as oil-based power plants were cheaper and easy to build but as the oil prices rose to unprecedented levels the already battered economy of Nicaragua seemed to give way. Now the government has set an ambitious but achievable goal of getting rid of costly foreign oil and building a predominantly renewable energy based economy. Other nations need to take the cue and look to utilize the locally available renewable energy sources as it would not only help build a cleaner environment but also build a stronger economy.

Image source: Conor Dupre-Neary at Flickr under Creative Commons License.

Right now, the machine is primarily used like a small factory to make cheese as well as other dairy products. It is currently housed in the Agrarian University of Nicaragua’s Department of Animal Sciences. Solar panels contribute the energy for a mechanical system that heats the milk to 185° Fahrenheit (85° Centrigrade). Approximately 240 liters of milk can produced in 6 hours using the prototype.

The machine’s arrival and its probable success is good news for Nicaragua and many other developing countries. The prototype was made from resources found locally, and will hopefully serve as a model for others who might want to make such a machine from easy to find materials. The design plans for the invention will eventually be made public via the internet.

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Putting those two together, Llamadas Heladas, a  company that offers among other things a phone booth on wheels, partnered up with TecnoSol, a local renewable energy company, to promote the use of CFLs during Earth Month. Yes month, they don’t mess around  down there. The joint campaign was called No Apagones. Basically, it’s reframing these lights to be a source of less blackouts, due to reduced energy use. They may cost four times a regular lightbulb, but they last 10 times as long, and use less energy, saving you both money and the headaches of power outages. A simple, compelling argument. Watch the video on their site. No Espanol needed, the message is clear.

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