Word: mountainize
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...little of that energy will be expended on the mountain. Visitor traffic was down so much the weekend before the Games that Whistler had to advertise the fact that it was open. Part of the reason for the drop in attendance was that the ski resort "lost control of the parking lots on February 1," Jensen explains (they were ceded to the Olympics), so day skiers weren't making the trip...
Weather has also been one of the big stories here. Cypress Mountain, which hosts the half-pipe and mogul skiing events, is so barren of snow the white stuff had to be trucked in from the colder reaches of the Great White North. At Whistler, it's been raining at the bottom of the mountain, which washed away the schedules for the men's downhill and the women's super combined events. In Olympic events, you ski to the bottom of the hill, and the bottom was slushy. (See TIME's full coverage of Vancouver...
...following its own Hollywood film script, Survival International fingers a villain: a London-based mining company called Vedanta Resources that is controlled by billionaire businessman Anil Agarwal. Vedanta's aluminum subsidiary plans to invest $2.5 billion to extract some 78 million tons of bauxite from the Niyamgiri mountain. Its chief operating officer, Mukesh Kumar, insists that the mine will benefit the Dongria - the company will set aside 5% of the mine's pretax profits for a local development agency - and that it has followed all the relevant Indian laws. "Whatever we do, we do in a transparent manner," he says...
...meantime, Vedanta has built an aluminum refinery just north of Niyamgiri mountain. It is using bauxite trucked in from other sites until the Niyamgiri mine is available, and was built on land that was relatively uninhabited. "When you talk of a rehabilitation package, it means only for the plant-affected people - about 100 or so families who have been displaced," says Pramodini Pradhan of the Orissa chapter of the People's Union for Civil Liberties, a group based in New Delhi. Activists say, however, that the refinery has adversely affected nearby land and water. But because people on that land...
...Dongria don't want to leave their mountain, but that doesn't mean they want to be left in an untouched state of nature. At one point in the film, Avatar's hero, Jake Sully, laments about the Na'vi, "They're not going to make a deal ... There's nothing that we have that they want." But that's not necessarily true for the Dongria or the millions of other so-called tribals who live in India's vast stretches of undeveloped forest. While they are largely self-sufficient, living on what they can grow and hunt, they...