EarthAction

UPDATE: Cultural Survival/Global Response Selects the Prey Lang Issue for its Next Campaign

In August, EarthAction brought global attention to the Prey Lang forest issue in Cambodia. The Cambodian government is allowing companies, the military, and illegal groups to make a profit by destroying the ancient Prey Lang forest. Indigenous Kuy communities, who live in or around Prey Lang, have been fighting to protect the forest, the source of their livelihoods and culture.

We are very pleased that the Prey Lang issue has been selected as the next Cultural Survival/Global Response campaign. Cultural Survival, an organization with a consultative status with the United Nations, has partnered with indigenous communities around the world to help them defend their cultures, lands, and languages for nearly 40 years. Just like EarthAction, Global Response was launched at the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro in 1992. Cultural Survival's Global Response Program will develop a campaign that will include action alerts, maps, photos, and additional articles and links to other websites and resources for the campaign. The action alerts will also be published in the winter issue of the Cultural Survival Quarterly magazine, which will be released in mid-December.

For more information about Cultural Survival's Global Response Program activities, please visit www.cs.org

Avatar Activists Photograph by: AFP, Tang Chhin Sothy

Spreading The Word On Biochar

by: Alexandra Reissig

What if there existed a material that could help solve world hunger, fight climate change, and offer a solution for energy shortages to boot? Recent studies on biochar say that it may be just the product, and here’s the kicker: it has been around for at least 2,000 years. It is a solid material produced from the carbonization of organic waste. Extremely high in carbon content, its uses range from replenishing exhausted soil to sequestering excess CO2 out of the atmosphere. Recent discoveries into its uses, both locally and globally, have shown it to be a viable material for an environmentally sustainable future.

Biochar is essentially charcoal, produced when biomass is heated in a low oxygen environment in a pyrolysis process. This process takes dry biomass and heats it at extreme temperatures and at a very low oxygen level. It is very similar to what happens naturally to soil that has been exposed to forest fires: the charred remains are more healthy and nutrient rich. Of the total amount of carbon that goes into the pyrolysis process, half goes into an energy carrying system that can be generated into biofuel. The other half of the carbon is fixed in biochar: a charcoal-like material that can be used as fertilizer to help increase crop yields, prevent run-off of nutrients and fertilizers, retain moisture in the soil and replenish exhausted soils with organic carbon.