Belo Monte Damn being built "at all costs"

Greetings everyone.

I will soon have two new sets for you all, one sea based: Deep Sea Hydrothermal Vents for the much needed SL underwater landscaping, and a cool set of Giant Ivy Vines.

Now, for something much more serious, and, unfortunately, sad:

Maybe you have heard along the years of the Brazilian Belo Monte Dam proyect, maybe you have seen some of the many documentaries done about how much will be lost with these proyect, or seen the Forest People dance in defense of their rainforests.

 Well, this proyect will take place, destroying more than 400 km2 of tropical jungle forest, displacing more than 20,000 people, flooding one of the last standing lungs of our ailing planet.

Besides having a bachelor’s in art, I am a licensed oceanographer, with specialization in aquaculture and fisheries, and I decided to leave the scientific environment precisely because I found an aching lack of consciousness in the scientific environment back when I was in school. This has changed slowly over the years, and is starting to seem that, at last, spirituality and science are joining paths. I tell you this little known fact about myself for a reason; I have enough experience and scientific knowledge to tell you this: let us be clear about something my friends: A Dam is NOT NECESARLY “clean energy”. 

 Dam projects, specially when as big as this, often kill the life flow of a river, they flood a living ecosystem, they impede the natural navigation of all the beings related to it, they destroy breeding habitats, create environments propitious to the breeding of harmful species, like algal blooms or malaria mosquitoes. And, as is often the case, displace the native cultures.

 It is true that we are a energy-hungry society. But the profit and energy created by these projects rarely, if ever, benefit the communities that have literally been destroyed to satisfy the energy needs of the rich.

This has happened again and again in these mega projects; there are a lot of examples around the world, and there is even a budding attempt to destroy dams to allow rivers to become alive again. If you are fortunate enough to be reading this then you are amongst the privileged. We must cut our energy needs , we must save energy in all ways we can. It’s not my intention to tell you how to protest against these kind of things. We will each have to decide how to react to these things.

But we must be aware of the prize to the whole planet, and the whole humanity, decisions like this have.

I hope with all my heart humankind will survive and mature to remember these kind of things, and a thousand others, as the great ignorant and terrible mistakes of the XX and XXI centuries, when the greed and powerlust of the political class blinded them to the true needs of the people and the planet.

I mourn for the the Raoni, for the people of other forest tribes, and the thousands of lives, human and otherwise, that will be destroyed.

We know now that the change we so dearly need and seek will not come from a megalomaniac government, regardless of the country. They, the rulling class, seems crazed by greed and desire for inmdediate gain, inmediate profit and their own personal agendas.

I mourn for the forest.

For Starters:

http://www.dearchaos.net/2011/05/damn-dam.html

http://amazonwatch.org/work/belo-monte-dam

http://www.survivalinternational.org/about/belo-monte-dam