Who’s Who in Green: Q’Orianka Kilcher

Activist, actress and glaring omission from our Hottest Girls in Green list Q’Orianka Kilcher has a lot going for her. Kilcher, best known for her role as Pocahontas in the 2005 film New World (and for being singer Jewel’s cousin), has emerged as a green role model and spokesperson for the rights of women and indigenous people, particularly Peruvians. Kilcher herself was born in Germany and is of Quechua/Huachipaeri Peruvian and Swiss descent.

Kilcher, whose first name means “Golden Eagle” in Quechua, already has a long list of charity work under her belt at the age of nineteen. She has campaigned for Amnesty International for the rights of women and indigenous peoples, including protests against the petroleum industry contamination of the Amazon River Basin. She is also the teen celebrity spokesperson of Thursday’s Child, an international charity for at-risk children, and was awarded the Brower Youth Award in 2007 for her efforts.

In June 2009, dozens of indigenous people and Peruvian police died in a bloody conflict over the government’s decision to open tribal lands up to oil companies. President Alan Garcia had signed contracts for 15 oil concessions in a single month, with 75% of the country already open to oil exploration. The indigenous protesters were trying to protect their Amazon rainforest lands from destruction.

Kilcher speaks in this video from the May 2009 protest at the Peru consulate in Los Angeles (starting at the 1:25 mark):

Kilcher also spoke with Democracy Now in June, while on her way to Peru to support the Amazonian protest.

I started trying to highlight the over-thirty-five-year-long struggle that the Achuar community was facing with Occidental Petroleum, a Los Angeles-based company, you know, drilling there, using practices outlawed in the United States, pumping an average of 850,000 barrels of toxic waste in one day on one block alone, and dumping it into the rivers, not using reinjection. And so, I tried to highlight that. And Alberto Pizango and AIDESEP gave me this spear, as well as gave me a silver plate, and named me the voice of the indigenous peoples of AIDESEP.

On why she decided to travel to Peru amidst the conflict:

I’m really appalled at the misinformation and the copy-and-paste media that is happening in Peru right now. And, I mean, the major media is radicalizing the stance on indigenous peoples, because they are being persuaded by government and they’re owned by multinational companies. And they are copy-and-pasting information that is not accurate. And I want to go there. I want to show both sides. I want to inform them correctly.

And finally, check out this interview with G LIVING at the after party for the 11th Hour documentary premiere.

Q’Orianka Kilcher’s Green Score: 17,955

Gold Mine Threatens Peruvian Community

A community in Peru is speaking out about the threat to their livelihood posed by the Canadian company, Manhattan Minerals, which is working to develop a gold mine in Tambogrande, Peru. The woman in the video below expresses her fears about the mine, which are not unfounded. Here’s an excerpt from a report Friends of the Earth did about the Yanacocha gold mine in the Peruvian Andes,

“Had they just shot me in the head, I would have felt better. Nothing could be worse than seeing my daughters suffer and hear them tell me about the tremendous pain in their eyes, their backs, their heads, day in day out. What can a father say to his sick children? How can I explain that the world’s richest gold mine sitting on that mountain does not want to help us?”
-Alfonso Charrasco, more than three years after the mercury spill that forced him and his family to flee their birth village.

China Gets a Bargain on Peru’s ‘Copper Mountain’

One of the most productive copper mines on earth – Mount Toromocho in Peru – is now in the hands of China. Chinese officials plan to exploit the mountain for all it’s worth, sending all of the copper back home to carry out the electrification of the entire country. The deal not only cheats Peruvians out of the true value of the copper mine, since it was sold to China for such a ‘great bargain’, but will displace all of the residents of the area.

From the BBC:

The Peruvian government is happy with the $3bn (£1.53bn) that Chinalco will invest in the Toromocho mines.

The Chinese will be even happier. They have got themselves a bargain.

The copper Chinalco extracts from Toromocho will cost something like US$410 (£210) per ton. Today, the price for copper on the London Metal Exchange was $8,255 (£4,220) – 20 times more.

Chinalco stands to make a 2,000% profit on its investment.

As destructive as it is, there should be a worldwide ban on mountaintop removal for mining purposes. This isn’t just about frightening amounts of power in the hands of China, taking advantage of poor countries, forcing people out of their homes and displacing wildlife. It’s a scary trend that threatens the beauty of the natural world and has the potential to create even more pollution than we’re already dealing with. China has already shown that the environment is far from its top priority, and as the BBC mentions, it has ‘vast reserves of foreign currency’ at its disposal.

Link [BBC]

Peru Turning to Armed Guards to Protect Precious Bird Shit

You may have heard of Peak Oil, but how about Peak Guano? Guano, otherwise known as bird shit, was once so much in demand that wars were fought over it. After synthetic fertilizer was invented, the industry nearly went extinct – but as organic fertilizers come back into vogue, officials in Peru are finding themselves needing to protect it again.

From The New York Times:

The worldwide boom in commodities has come to this: Even guano, the bird dung that was the focus of an imperialist scramble on the high seas in the 19th century, is in strong demand once again.

“Before there was oil, there was guano, so of course we fought wars over it,” said Pablo Arriola, director of Proabonos, the state company that controls guano production, referring to conflicts like the Chincha Islands War, in which Peru prevented Spain from reasserting control over the guano islands. “Guano is a highly desirous enterprise.”

It is a minor miracle that any guano at all is available here today, reflecting a century-old effort hailed by biologists as a rare example of sustainable exploitation of a resource once so coveted that the United States authorized its citizens to take possession of islands or keys where guano was found.

Guano sells for $250 per ton, going up to $500 when it’s headed to countries like the U.S., France and Israel. While it’s highly prized as an organic fertilizer, it isn’t all rosy. The anchovies that the seabirds eat to produce the rich guano are being overfished, and the bird population is shrinking. Peru is working hard to protect the birds, going so far as to introduce lizards to hunt down ticks that infest the birds and posting armed guards to prevent fisherman from scaring them away. Where once 60 million seabirds flew overhead, there are now only about 4 million.

Peak Guano is coming, no doubt about it:

Uriel de la Torre, a biologist who specializes in conserving the guanay cormorant and other seabirds, said that unless some measure emerged to prevent overfishing, both the anchovetas and the seabirds here could die off by 2030.

“It would be an inglorious conclusion to something that has survived wars and man’s other follies,” Mr. de la Torre said. “But that is the scenario we are facing: the end of guano.”

Link [The New York Times] via [Treehugger]
Photo credit: Tomas Munita for The New York Times