For the last two years, Global Response has issued action alerts to support the indigenous Penan in Sarawak, Malaysia, who are determined to stop logging companies from destroying their rainforest home. Most recently we helped form a coalition of 37 international organizations urging investors and banks to refuse financing to Samling, the logging company that is entering Penan traditional territory with the aid of Malaysian police forces.

For updates on the Penan struggle, please see two articles, below.

A Maya man was shot to death last week after a heated discussion with workers from a mine that has opened on his community’s land.

Workers from the Glamis Gold Marlin mine are being held responsible for the March 12 death of Alvaro Sánchez, a Sipakapense villager from Pie de la Cuesta, Guatemala.

Since the controversial mining project began, tension has risen in the area and both community members and outside mine workers have started carrying arms on a regular basis.

We denounce the forced relocation of indigenous families from their traditional lands at the hands of the Venezuelan government and the multi-national coal corporations.

By Paul Malone 

The Canberra Times, Saturday, 10 March 2007

THE BLOCKADE the Penan had erected looked pitiful in the rain, a few bamboo poles strung together across the muddy logging road that cuts through the rainforest near Long Benalih in the upper Baram River region of Malaysian Sarawak, near the Kalimantan border in Borneo. No one was in sight to man the blockade, nor was there any sign of the police who had knocked it down days earlier, or the men from the giant multinational logging company, Samling, on whose behalf they had acted.

Basel (Switzerland), 8 March 2007

37 non-governmental organizations from 18 countries are asking investors and banks to shun the Malaysian logging giant Samling which was publicly listed on the Hong Kong stock exchange earlier this week. The NGO's appeal is appearing in a quarter page advertisement of the Friday 9 March global edition of the International Herald Tribune under the title "Investing in rainforest destruction: Samling Global Ltd. listing with support from Credit Suisse, HSBC, Macquarie".

MOSCOW - Russia plans to start new checks on the Exxon Mobil-led Sakhalin-1 oil and gas project at the end of March, an environmental watchdog official said on Thursday.

Oleg Mitvol, deputy head of the Russian environmental agency RosPrirodNadzor, said the examination of the scheme on the Pacific island of Sakhalin would focus on how Exxon and its partners fulfil their environmental obligations.

Last primary rainforests of Sarawak under immediate danger of destruction

12 February 2007

Samling, the Malaysian logging giant, has started to log the last primary rainforests of the Malaysian state of Sarawak after the police removed a roadblock set up by the local indigenous Penan communities. This was learned from the Borneo Resource Institute BRIMAS, a local NGO based in the city of Miri.

Environmental groups are withholding judgment on the deal struck Thursday between Shell and Russia in which the government-controlled Gazprom apparently acquires a majority stake in the problem-plagued Sakhalin II oil and gas project.[1]

There’s good news to celebrate with our campaign partners in New Caledonia! A French court ordered a temporary halt to construction of the Goro Nickel plant in New Caledonia, on environmental grounds. Since 2003, Global Response has organized several rounds of letter-writing in support of the indigenous Kanak people who oppose the Goro project.

Tropical Rainforest and Native Communities May Never Fully Heal From Three Decades of Carcinogenic Dumping: Online Interviews with Achuar Leaders

By Tony Thien

Some 3,000 Penan from 11 longhouses in the Belaga district in Sarawak filed a complaint with the Human Rights Commission of Malaysia (Suhakam) against a private company engaged in logging, plantation and reforestation activities on a sizeable area of their land.

A Suhakam team which went to the area recently to follow up on the complaint found clear evidence of what one of its commissioners Dr Denison Jayasooria described as "the devastation of forests as far as the eyes can see."

Russia has ordered a full environmental probe of Royal Dutch Shell's US billion Sakhalin-2 oil and gas development in Russia's Far East

Shell has already spent upwards of US billion on Sakhalin-2, due to start up in 2008. Much of the initial production has found customers in the United States and Japan.

Until August, the company said it had worked in step with Russian regulators to fulfil all necessary regulations.