Editor’s note: The folly of controlling the rivers. “What will those who come after us think of us? Will they envy us that we saw butterflies and mockingbirds, penguins and little brown bats?” - Derrick Jensen   Or will they despise us because we built dams which kill butterflies and mockingbirds, penguins and little brown bats?

China Starts Construction on World’s Largest Hydropower Dam Brazil & China move ahead on 3,000-km railway crossing the Amazon

Editor’s note: Indonesia’s capital relocation mirrors the move of the country’s former colonisers

By Hans Nicholas Jong / Mongabay

JAKARTA — Indonesia’s national human rights commission has found a slew of legal and rights violations in a government-backed project to establish large-scale plantations in the eastern region of Papua.

The so-called food estate project, categorized by the government as being of strategic national importance, or PSN, aims to clear 3 million hectares (7.4 million acres) of land in Merauke district, two-thirds of it for sugarcane plantations and the rest for rice fields — an area 45 times the size of Jakarta.

This lithium company is trying to sue Indigenous land defenders into silence

by Maximillian Alvarez, The Real News Network May 9, 2025

https://open.spotify.com/episode/4bT1oQv4m9xpi42O9TU5oH?si=d7db06343fce4142

Vancouver-based Lithium Americas is developing a massive lithium mine in Nevada’s remote Thacker Pass, but for nearly five years several local Indigenous tribes and environmental organizations have tried to block or delay the mine in the courts and through direct action. Six land defenders, known as the “ Thacker Pass 6,” are currently being sued by Lithium Nevada Corporation and have been barred by court injunction from returning to and peacefully protesting and praying at the sacred site on their ancestral homeland. TRNN Editor-in-Chief Maximillian Alvarez speaks with two members of the “Thacker Pass 6,” Will Falk and Max Wilbert, about the charges against them and the current state of the struggle over the construction of the Thacker Pass mine.