Protecting the environment with intelligence
Last month, the President of Indonesia did the international investment equivalent of, shall we say, showing a bit of leg in the US. At an event specially organised at the New York Stock Exchange, in Wall Street, Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono boasted to the assembled businessmen of the abundant natural resources on offer to potential investors. [...]
The international community is finally recognising that environmental crime is not some small-scale criminal activity taking place deep in the jungles of Africa or Asia but is serious, growing, transnational and, shockingly, highly organised through the involvement of notorious criminal syndicates and terrorist groups. This week, during the ongoing 67th session of the UN General [...]
I joined EIA at the start of the year and have been struck by the vast range of different environmental issues we have worked on during the past three decades. Since our very first investigation into the Faroe Islands’ pilot whale hunt in 1984, we have investigated and campaigned on the global ivory trade, [...]
Gibson Guitars has finally faced the music. After nearly a year of crying foul, running to the Tea Party for political backing, seeking audience with every possible media outlet and hiring a DC lobbying firm to change the law under which it was being investigated, Gibson Guitars has acknowledged that it did, in fact, import [...]
EIA has received the sad news that Surjani Alloy, the leader of the Aliansi Masyarakat Adat Nusantara (AMAN, an independent organisation comprising indigenous communities from various parts of the Indonesia archipelago), in West Kalimantan, died suddenly on Saturday. I have known and worked with Alloy for more than nine years and we have shared many [...]
Long-term EIA partner Ambrosius Ruwindrijarto has this week been awarded one of Asia’s most prestigious accolades for his fearless work on the front lines of the fight against illegal logging in Indonesia. His citation on receiving the 2012 Ramon Magsaysay Award recognises his “courageous advocacy of natural resource management based on social and ecological justice, [...]