Climate change 'cultural genocide' for Aborigines

AFP ^ | Mon May 4, 2009

[presidio9]

Climate change would force Australia's Aborigines off their traditional lands, resulting in "cultural genocide" and environmental degradation, a human rights watchdog warned Monday.

Australia's original inhabitants, whose cultures stretch back many thousands of years, Aborigines would be deeply affected by the impact of global warming, the government-funded Human Rights Commission said.

Rising sea levels and soaring temperatures would make their homelands uninhabitable, severing spiritual links and laying waste to the environment, according to the commission's annual Native Title Report.

"Problems that indigenous Australians will encounter include people being forced to leave their lands, particularly in coastal areas," the report said.

"Dispossession and a loss of access to traditional lands, waters, and natural resources may be described as cultural genocide; a loss of ancestral, spiritual, totemic and language connections to lands and associated areas."

Being robbed of their traditional caretaking role for land and water resources would also result in "environmental degradation and adverse impacts on biodiversity and overall health and well-being," the commission said.

Blood-borne tropical illnesses such as malaria and dengue fever would increase, while food security for subsistence farmers and hunters and gatherers among indigenous populations would be threatened.

At the time of white settlement in 1788 Aborigines were believed to number more than one million, but now account for just 2.5 percent of the population, with an estimated 517,000 people.

A quarter of these lived in remote outback and coastal areas, with up to 80 percent of adults in these communities relying on the natural environment for their livelihoods, the report said.

They owned, controlled, used, managed or had access to about 20 percent of the Australian continent,

[presidio9]

I do get a kick out of the aborigines defending their "cultural heritage": Shirtless, but dressed in blue jeans, wearing nikes, and carrying iPods. Unfortunately, the and their ancestors are the primary culprits for most of the enviornmental damage that has been done to the continent. Practically since whitey first settled there in 1788 virtually all of the European inhabitants have resided in the 7 major cities. Meanwhile, the aborigines brought their dogs with them when they showed up 50,000 years ago. Some of the dogs escaped into the wild and became dingos. There, they outcompeted marsupial carnivores like the thylacine (tasmanian tiger) and drove them to extinction. Whitey only finished the job, but you will rarely hear a liberal enviornmentalist admit that. The early white settlers knew about as much about enviornmentalism as the aborigines, but they are the only bad guys, because their white.

[Frank_2001]

“Shirtless, but dressed in blue jeans, wearing nikes, and carrying iPods.”

Victims of Western cultural imperialism!/s;)

[Rebelbase]

"At the time of white settlement in 1788 Aborigines were believed to number more than one million, but now account for just 2.5 percent of the population, with an estimated 517,000 people.

A quarter of these lived in remote outback and coastal areas, with up to 80 percent of adults in these communities relying on the natural environment for their livelihoods, the report said. "

Aren't remote outback and remote coastal areas the majority of Australia's geography?

[Red Dog #1]

Anti development global warming alarmism/socialist scams are sentencing the third world to continue poverty, misery and unnecessary death. Bet you won’t see any MSM articles about that.

[Oztrich Boy]

A quarter of these lived in remote outback and coastal areas, with up to 80 percent of adults in these communities relying on the natural environment for their livelihoods, the report said. "

Aren't remote outback and remote coastal areas the majority of Australia's geography?

The article is flip-flopping between 1788 and 2009. What it is really saying there is that today the majority of Aborigines live in urban areas (like the majority of those with no Aboriginal ancestry)

What it is not saying that the majority of those classed as Aboriginal live identical lifestyles to those classed as non-Aboriginal. The now reviled "racist" policy of "integration" actually worked.

[melsec]

Whitey is a racist b#stard PING!

Mel

[Da Coyote]

Aha, the “new” reasons to avoid climate change keep coming.

Please give me the URL for the sun and the universe (cosmic rays) so that these two perps know the damage they are doing.

[dfwgator]

Adapt or Die! - It’s the Law!

[Always Right]

Don’t liberals worship at the alter of Darwin and the survival of the fittest?

[Our man in washington]

Throughout all the ice ages and ice retreats of the last million years, the aborigines have gone extinct many, many, times.

/S

[edzo4]

[Eagles6]

We’ll just ignore the inconvenient facts that the earth is not warming and the seas are not rising and then go from there.