In 24 hours, Americans sent more than 802,000 messages urging senators to reject any attempts to revive the Keystone XL tar sands oil pipeline.

The Senate could vote soon on an amendment that would force approval of Keystone XL. Every call you make will help convince wavering senators to stand with us.

Can you phone your senators now and tell them to reject the Keystone XL pipeline?

1. Call the congressional switchboard at (202) 224-3121 and ask to speak with one of your senators. (You can call again to reach your second senator.)

2. Deliver your message. Here is a sample script you can use:

"Hello. My name is _________ and I am a constituent calling from [CITY, STATE]. I’m calling because in 24 hours alone, Americans sent more than 802,000 messages opposing the Keystone XL pipeline. I expect you, and your colleagues, to stand with us against Big Oil, and reject any attempts to resurrect this dangerous tar sands oil pipeline that threatens ecosystems, water and our climate.”

3. Report the results of your call using the form below.

More information on Friends of the Earth

Call for Nominations for the «2012 Public Eye Awards»

Dear colleagues

The Berne Declaration and Greenpeace Switzerland are once again searching far and wide for corporations that pursue profits without regard for social and/or environmental harm. To succeed, we need your support and the critical eye of civil society!

Whether inhumane working conditions, reckless environmental sins, deliberate disinformation, or the disregard for human rights by corporations: In the run-up to the World Economic Forum (WEF) in late January 2012 in Davos, Switzerland, the worst corporate sins will appear on the 2012 Public Eye Awards short list. We thereby place corporate offenses in the international spotlight and help NGO campaigns succeed. A number of firms have already felt the considerable pressure from the unwelcome exposure in the media and the social Web! Over 50,000 people worldwide took part in the online voting for the People’s Award last year.

We are looking for corporations that have caused social and/or environmental damage in a well-documented case. Two awards will be given:

GLOBAL AWARD (selected by an internal expert panel) PEOPLE’S AWARD (selected by online voting at www.publiceye.ch)

Two awards, two opportunities: Tell us who you nominate and why the company deserves one or even both 2012 Public Eye Awards. The easiest way is to send us brief answers to the following questions, totaling no more than two A4 pages:

* What is the company? How big is it? Where are its headquarters? * Which of its activities do you find socially or environmentally irresponsible? * What concrete consequences do the firm’s activities have for humans and the environment? * What is the current status of things, or of your campaign? What are the next steps? * Where on the Internet can we find further information on the case you present?

It pays to participate: If the corporation nominated by your NGO wins, we will bring you to Davos in late January, where you will present your case at our international press conference.

Send nominations to Claudio De Boni, Public Eye Coordinator: info@publiceye.ch DEADLINE: September 30, 2011.

Thank you for your participation and for telling your colleagues!

Good luck and best regards,

François Meienberg Michael Baumgartner The Berne Declaration and Greenpeace Switzerland

More information on Public Eye

Almir Narayamoga Surui, tribal chief of the Surui people from Western Rondonia in the Brazilian Amazon and internationally-recognized indigenous rights defender who participated in an indigenous delegation to Europe last March with Amazon Watch and our allies to expose the destructive lending practices of the Brazilian National Development Bank (BNDES), is once again at high risk as he works to defend the ancestral territory of the Surui people in Brazil’s Amazon rainforest. It is the same threat looming over many indigenous leaders, rural agriculturalists and environmental activists who oppose destructive development, such as illegal logging and ranching, in the Amazon. One difference in this case, however, is that Chief Almir has traveled the world and has over 3,000 friends on Facebook where he’s posted his concerns in an open letter (see below).

Read more on Amazon Watch and sign the petition

GreenPeace launches a campaign of denunciation against the bank BNP-Paribas. BNP Paribas is planning to finance a nuclear reactor in Angra, Brazil that will be built with severely out-of-date materials and will no longer meet international safety or technology standards.

• More informations: http://www.greenpeace.org/international/en/campaigns

With a request for a $3.75 billion World Bank loan for a new coalfired power plant, South African political leaders seem determined to entrench a policy on climate change that disregards clear evidence of catastrophic consequences, echoing the earlier disastrous policies of former President Thabo Mbeki on AIDS. But opposition is mounting to the current plan, which would consolidate South Africa’s Eskom as the continent’s leading producer of greenhouse gases.

South African Finance Minister Pravin Gordhan defended the plan in a March 22 op-ed article in the Washington Post, contending that alternate energy sources were not practical to meet the country’s power needs. But critics say that the power is primarily intended to benefit large multinational companies, rather than South African consumers, and that Eskom has an abysmal record of mismanagement and indifference to public needs. Critics of the loan include not only a large South African civil society coalition, but also international groups and even the U.S. Treasury.

Africa Focus gives all the details of the campaign in South Africa and world-wide, and reposts several articles about the project : http://www.africafocus.org/docs10/c...

Ten thousand men and women displaced by Indira Sagar, Omkareshwar and other dams on the Narmada marched for their right to rehabilitation in alternate lands with the slogan "Give us land or give back our villages!"

The State of Madhya Pradesh, instead of providing alternate lands has brutally lathi-charged the displaced farmers and unlawfully arrested activists Alok Agrawal, Kailashbhai, Kalubhai and some other villagers. Sign Petition to release Narmada activists, farmers and tribals.

Read more about the rally.

River Ganga is now a ‘national’ river. The Prime minister of India announced this on November 4, 2008 after a meeting, with the ministers for water resources, environment and forests and urban development, to discuss how to bring the river back to life. Though a very important step, it is too early to predict what this ‘national status’ would actually mean to India’s most revered river and its people.

What gives us hope is the fact that government has accepted that all is not well with the Ganga Action Plan (GAP)—a dedicated programme launched in 1985 to restore the river back to bathing water quality. This certainly is winning half the battle. Press communiqué from the Prime Ministers Office (PMO) reads:“there is a need to replace the current piecemeal efforts taken up in a fragmented manner in select cities with an integrated approach that sees the river as an ecological entity and addresses issues of quantity in terms of water flows along with issues of quality.”

• More informations : http://www.cseindia.org

Extractive Industries: Blessing or Curse? - An awareness raising campaign to improve the performance of the extractive industry in relation to poverty and the environment.

Overall objective of our campaign is to achieve substantial improvement of the extractive industry performance in developing countries, in order to ensure that it has a positive impact on poverty reduction and that it does not contribute to social and environmental problems.

We will focus on EU based companies and investors involved in the extractive industry activities in developing countries and on national and EU policies that can reverse these negative impacts.

To achieve this goal, Friends of the Earth Europe will work together with Friends of the Earth Netherlands, CEE Bankwatch Network and Friends of the Earth France.

The campaign will run in the following countries: Belgium, France, the Netherlands, Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia and Slovakia. It will also have activities focused on EU institutions.

We will also work together with local partners outside the EU from DAC countries in Cameroon, South Africa, Nigeria, Georgia, Russia, Indonesia, the Philippines, Peru, Croatia, Serbia and Montenegro and the Former Yugoslavian Republic of Macedonia.

• For more information about this campaign : http://www.foeeurope.org/

Caretaker Prime Minister of Thailand

Subject: Please review plans to cooperate with the Burmese military regime for the construction of hydropower dams on the Salween River

Dear Caretaker Prime Minister of Thailand,

Cc: Minister of Energy and Governor of Electricity Generating Authority of Thailand (EGAT)

We, the individuals and organizations from Burma, Thailand, and other countries listed below, are gravely concerned about the likely environmental and social impacts from hydropower projects on the Salween River, a joint-project between the Thai and Burmese governments, the Chinese state-owned Sinohydro Corporation, and Thailand based MDX subsidiaries. If the dams are built, ecological integrity, human security, and local livelihoods will be jeopardized. Therefore, we call for the Thai government and concerned agencies, including the Ministry of Energy and EGAT, to review and withdraw from the projects for the following reasons:

Lack of transparency in the decision-making process

The entire decision-making process for the planning of the Salween hydropower development projects has been shrouded in secrecy. There has been a total absence of public participation among the dam-affected communities in Burma already suffering the atrocities of civil war, or the over fifty ethnic Thai-Karen villages living along the Salween River in Thailand’s Mae Hong Son province.

The Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) between the Thai Ministry of Energy and Burma’s Ministry of Electric Power was signed in May 2005 for the development of five hydropower projects on the Salween and Tanaosri river basins. Then in December 2005, a Memorandum of Agreement (MoA) was signed for joint-investment and implementation of the Hutgyi dam construction between EGAT Plc and Burma’s Department of Hydropower stating that the construction would commence in late 2007. Recently, in June 2006, EGAT and Sinohydro Corporation, a state enterprise from the People’s Republic of China signed an MoU for the development of the Hutgyi dam.

• Sign the petition