http://alutrint.wordpress.com/

Refer to blogroll.

Please read the entire article in the Trinidad Guardian

http://guardian.co.tt/news/general/2009/06/17/judge-stops-smelter-plant

Justice Mira Dean-Armorer

Please read the entire article in the Trinidad Guardian

http://guardian.co.tt/news/general/2009/06/17/judge-stops-smelter-plant

Anti-Smelter Activists Happy

EMA approval for smelter ‘illegal’

Please read article at

http://www.newsday.co.tt/news/0,102188.html

Anti smelter actvists happy.

Please read the article

http://www.trinidadexpress.com/index.pl/article_news?id=161492193

1.Run a line from the government electrical pole into your house, or from the panel-box of your landlord into your apartment.

2.Drill holes in the oil pipeline and collect with gallon pans, buckets, jars, as in West Africa.

3.Declare a claim to your neighbour’s gas rich territory citing any kind of papal bull: law, injury or flying fish.

4.Drill vertically, then miles beneath the ground, like a thief in the dark, drill horizontally into your neighbour’s oil well.

5.Chose any Arab “dictator”, demonize him, invade him, hang him, murder his people, set up a base over his oilfields into perpetuity.

6.“Smoke out” from his cave the one who threatens the energy security of your energy-rich ally, such as Saudi Arabia.

7.Set up military bases anywhere in Afghanistan or in the middle of the Indian Ocean to “stabilize” shipping routes and multinational oil pipelines, to control prices for your own energy dependent market.

8.Sign oil and gas contracts with dodohead governments, tying them up with legalese and fine print.

9.Do deals, cuts, bribes with local gas barons.

10.Run industrial estates for international corporations, shunting contracts – soil testing, engineering services, feasibility studies – to companies you created and owned just a little time back.

11.Kill alternatives to hydrocarbon for they just “pimp” off your control of the gas agenda.

However, one real sockeye way to steal energy is to sell energy to yourself. Create a project to make a product, a project that will bust, even with enormous and cheap inputs of the nation’s gas, a company lined by a relative in the state energy bureau, lined by a relative managing the project. And how do you claim a “profit” at the end of the line? False accounting: hide and disappear a bulk of the economic, ecological, and opportunity costs of the project, the costs that the state and the people will pay. Relatively easy.

 Wayne Kublalsingh

University of West Indies

Enemy of the Environment

This is to be butchered!

Why Essar Steel must be De-constructed

What does Essar Steel Corporation of India want?

 It wants the cheap rental of high-value port lands, over five hundred acres, which was only three years ago allotted to former Caroni workers for farming (this land was taken back and rented to Essar).

 It wants the Environmental Management Authority to further overlook the fact that a steel mill – which will produce thousands of tons of particulates (steel dust), carbon monoxide, sulphur dioxide, nitrous oxide and one billion cubic meters of carbon dioxide, over a thirty to fifty year period – will impair the health of residents in Claxton Bay and six surrounding villages.

 It wants cheap and reliable supplies of our scarce water, a commodity which is fast becoming rare on the world market.

 It wants trillions of cubic feet of our depleting gas to power its gas-guzzling steel mill.

 It wants us to run gas lines for them, which we are doing.

 It wants a reliable and cheap supply of electricity from our power grid to run its mill complex.

 It wants a “corridor” through our mangroves to a port which will destroy portions of the last stretch of mangrove on the West Coast, which has supplied thousands of tons of protein stocks – crabs, fish, oyster, mook, shrimp, crayfish and conch – to our subsistence economy.

 It wants a port, so that it can ship steel coils and sheets to the United States and import iron ore from Latin America, an enterprise which will earn it billions of US dollars.

 It wants, and has, 100% ownership of this local branch of Essar Steel of India.

 It wants control of how many tons of steel it will grant to the local market, and has, because there is nothing in the agreement which commits them to a specific supply to the local business community.

 It wants hundreds of thousands of tons of aggregate, which we will have to mine from the Northern Range, thereby compromising our forests, water and soil systems.

 It wants cement to build its plant, which will raise the price of locally produced cement.

 It wants its handful of associates in the local oil and gas sector, and on benches of Parliament, to remain intact, in order to mask, authorize and justify its commercial agenda.

 It wants as little public disturbance as possible to hide the raw atrocity of this deal for Trinidad and Tobago, a deal which will compromise our economy, our health, our lands, our mangrove and our marine resources and communities.

 It wants its Indian High Commissioner to Trinidad and Tobago to bat for them; as this gentleman recently did in his recent India Republic Day address, saluting the Essar deal as an example of co-operation between two independent Republics.

 It wants our own locally grown oil and gas mogul to stay on his local throne so he can better line them up.

 It wants to move out of the Indian sub-continent to exploit our land and gas on this side of the Hemisphere, so it will be able to advantageously exploit the US market.

Essar wants these terms and conditions and much more.

India is looking to expand economically and to dominate politically in her Austral-Asian spheres of influence. She wants her cushion on the imperial throne.

But Essar Steel of India, our local moghul, the Indian Government and the Indian High Commissioner will not get what they want in Trinidad and Tobago. In sum, they want to funnel our scarce resources into their imperializing coffers to impoverish us and make them dominant. They want to pull off another round of imperialism on us. In Trinidad, they will not get what they want, because they shall be de-constructed in Claxton Bay.

Our Golden Girl

THE CHALLENGE FOR FOOD

 

 Thank God for Miss Samdaye. This woman, a resident Claxton Bay, is a food machine. If you drop her off anywhere on the planet, you could bet your bottom dollar that she will find a spot to plant and grow food.

Growing up in Princess Town, she planted yam, dasheen, eddoes, cassava, all manner of carbohydrate. Then, sixty years ago, a tall man, driving the sugar-cane train from Caroni Ltd, picked her up, married her, took her back to Phoenix Park where he showed her how to drive the Caroni train, how to fish in his boat off Claxton Bay. When he died a year later, in an accident on the same train, she was taken away by a crab-catcher to Crab Village (now Pranz Gardens) to live. Crab-catching was the economy of the day. Crab, mook, shrimp, oyster, crayfish, shellfish, fish, all manner of protein, she harvested. She lived half her life in the Claxton Bay mangrove, and the other half planting cane in Caroni Ltd to raise her seven children.

Today Miss Samdaye is an activist. She is dead set against plans by Essar Steel of India to build a steel mill next to her house, her vegetable garden, her community. She is dead set against the destruction of the Claxton Bay Mangrove System to build a port to facilitate Essar. She points to the children: forty years of steel dust, sulphur and nitrogen dioxides in their lungs. She points to her garden of peas, biganne, cassava, same; these will be contaminated with steel dust. She points to Mr Ramnarine and his goats, which feed on the low grass on the savanna; the goats will ingest steel dust. She points to the open spouting which collects rainwater for residents. She points to the earth that will “harden” if the mangrove is destroyed, if the 500 acres of land are given to Essar. She points to the mangrove, the mother of food.

The logic which Miss Samdaye applies to her immediate situation is not different from the logic which scientists are currently applying to the global food crisis: there is a clear link between the planet’s ecological system and food production. The greater the exhaustion of the planet’s ecological architecture, the lesser the capacity of humans to produce food. And the greatest cause of land exhaustion is unmitigated and unnecessary heavy industrial activity.

When ecologists talk about “land” they are not talking about a horizontal plane stretching from one horizon to the other. They are talking about a vertical, integrated and dynamic structure. Most of this structure is invisible to the naked eye.

The first rung of this structure is deep inside the earth’s crust; vast rivers of water flow miles inside the earth, sometimes trapped in rocks, or caught in sand. These streams are millions of years old; human activity can produce toxins which can leach through soil, sand, crevices in rocks and contaminate the earth’s water cycle.

Second, there are the soils of the earth, complex and varied, bearing millions of tons of microbial life. Resting atop these are, third, the oceans, rivers and swamps. Fourth, there is the vegetation, mangrove, grasslands, forests, and so on. Trinidad and Tobago, because of its proximity to forest and water systems in South America, has one of the densest speciation of life on the planet. The microbial life on a square inch of soil, or bark, or in one drop of ocean or river is one of the densest on the planet.

Moving higher up the ladder there is the ambient atmosphere, the air that humans breathe everyday; then the larger atmosphere; the clouds; the stratosphere and the ozone layer.

This multi-storied global greenhouse, within which humans have traditionally grown food, is in a state of reactivity. Heavy industrial pollutants – over fifty types of organic and inorganic compounds, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, particulates, a complex of trace elements, nitrogen dioxide, sulphur dioxide, carbon – impact on each strata of the ecological system. This poses overwhelming challenges for global food production. Humans will have to find different ways of producing food: new concepts, new technologies, new systems, new persons.

Vast acreages of the 77,000 acres of Caroni lands must become the platform for an agrarian revolution in Trinidad and Tobago. We must build dams, within or at the foothills of the Northern Range, to collect water during the wet season, to store, to irrigate vast tracts of land. Exhausted soil must be rehabilitated and allocated for animal pasturage, tree crop farming, fruits, varieties of peas, hardy ground provisions. The buffalypso must be treated and revived. Farm schools must be established. And a Food Park, with estates entirely devoted to food manufacture, labs, packing and packaging facilities, engineering for small machines, collection and distribution systems, marketing, and animal medicine. And model-farms. And recreation zones. And timber stocks. And wind-farms and solar cell networks. The challenges for building an ital food economy, in the context of global climate change, are enormous. We have not yet begun to meditate seriously on what is required. But there are possibilities.

As hydrocarbon reserves diminish, as our capacity to import declines, individuals, families, communities will have to look to backyards, empty lots, surrounding spaces, pots and porches, to grow their own food.

Four years ago Miss Samdaye and her husband were allotted two acres of Caroni land each, among scores of former workers of Caroni Ltd. This land was located next to their community. They awoke one morning to find their lands being graded down. The residents went to see Prakash Saith, the CEO of the National Energy Corporation, they went to see Dr Lenny Saith, the then Minister of Energy. Their land had been taken back and given to Essar Steel of India. Steel for India, for the US, the Saiths were saying. And NO – to ital food for us.

Come and meet the Ital Man Wayne Kublalsingh in person

Ital Revolution by Wayne Kublalsingh is available at the following booksellers and individuals in Trinidad and Tobago.

The University of the West Indies Bookshop

         UWI Bookshop St. Augustine Campus

           Tel: 662-2002 ext. 2224

Mystic Hemp

      #34 Lewis Street- Tel: 625-0295

         (Cor. Lewis Street & Ariapita Avenue)

Michael Mohammed Bookstore Ltd

      High Street San Fernando – Tel: 653-1166

Rhea Mungal

         rhea.mungal@gmail.com

         769-4672

         Skype rhea.mungal