Lutheran pastor, Jon Magnuson, from Marquette, Michigan, USA, presented the Rio Tinto board with a document signed by one hundred faith leaders of ten faith traditions in Marquette, Baraga and Keweenaw counties. Magnuson said that the document was part of a petition that collected roughly ten thousand citizen’s names in opposition to Rio Tinto’s Eagle Project nickel and copper mine, located on the Yellow Dog Plains, in Marquette County.

“Many of our parishioners and members of our faith communities are . . . involved in the mining industry,” said Magnuson. “But on this particular project we have taken a very strong position - in this place, at this time, for these specific reasons. And one is the massive environmental damage that is threatened to the Great Lakes and the second and most prominent concern is that, what we perceive and experience is a cavalier dismissal of the claims of one of the major Indian tribes in Michigan, the Keweenaw Bay Indian Community.”

See the full report on  http://riotintoagm2009.wordpress.com/.

On 28 February the “Consulta de los Pueblos” (Peoples’ Referendum) in Usa - Kirrandara hill ended with a categorical “no” to the mining industry. It is the first time that a referendum of this sort has taken place in Colombia.

The population of about 1,500 indigenous and Afro-Colombian people expressed their view of the Mandé Norte mining project proposed in their ancestral territories. It was an initiative of the affected people themselves, most of them ancestral inhabitants of Murindó and Jiguamiandó in the biodiverse department (province) of Chocó.

US-based Muriel Mining Corporation is currently carrying out exploration in the area. It has a Joint Venture agreement with Rio Tinto.

See http://www.minesandcommunities.org/article.php?a=9135