Environment

Vedanta Resources, a UK based mining and metals company with numerous projects in India, is attempting to claim to be social responsible via a huge advertising campaign. However activists have struck back by effectively using social media tools to counter Vedanta's claims. Read More

President Barack Obama personally helped Shell obtain authorization to drill for oil in Alaska, according to a new article in the New York Times. This comes a day afer activists launched two reports on the environemental impact of the drilling plans at the company's annual meeting in the Hague. Read More

War has been declared on Enbridge, a Canadian oil company, by a chief from the Nadleh Whut'en in British Columbia. Chief Martin Louie was attending the company annual general meeting in Toronto where he spoke out Wednesday against the environmental impact of the company's tar sands operations. Read More

Protestors targeted annual general meetings of Enbridge and Bank of America this week for the devastating environmental consequences of extracting energy from two new and unconventional sources: tar sands and mountain top coal. Read More

KLM, the Dutch airline, has been forced to backtrack from a plan to use oil from jatropha seeds grown in Indonesia for commercial flights, after Friends of the Earth Netherlands put out a report criticizing the potential impact on local food supplies. Read More

Dalla Al Baraka, a major Saudi conglomerate, has acquired two million acres of farmland in eastern Sudan, to produce food for export. While the investors are hoping to wean Saudi Arabia off imports from South America, such agreements have also caused concern among local Sudanese farmers. Read More

A shale oil boom in North Dakota is displacing residents from the Fort Berthold Indian Reservation. Fires light up the sky every night as natural gas is flared off while the ground water has been contaminated with toxic chemicals. Read More

An oil spill in northern Russia from a joint venture between Lukoil and Bashneft has damaged fragile reindeer pastures in yet another blow to the indigenous Nenets people. Environmental activists have warned about such disasters for decades but few precautions have been taken by the oil companies. Read More

Is Walmart going green? Mike Duke, the company's CEO, says in a new 126 page report that the company is becoming more sustainable and responsible while "building meaningful, long-term change." Activists disagree. Walmart's "environmental impact has only grown over the last seven years" they say in a counter-report. Read More

Grupo Bozovich - Peru's biggest hardwood exporter - has been accused of harvesting illegal timber, in a new report by the Environmental Investigation Agency. The Laundering Machine report claims that many of the timber certificates do not represent the actual source of the wood. Read More