PANIC ROOM - Yasuni video free download

Panic Room released their second album "Satellite" in 2010 and this track is taken from that hugely successful CD release.

Copyright 2010 Firefly Music Ltd.

'Yasuni' was written by Panic Room, with lyrics by lead vocalist Anne-Marie Helder in response to her distress over the Yasuni National Park crisis in Ecuador, South America.

Oil companies have been plundering and exploiting this beautiful National Park for many years to get at the crude oil reservoirs which lay beneath the land.

However, this has come at a great ecological and human cost, and many organisations are now fighting to stop this purely profit-based devastation of one of the most precious and rare areas of the planet.

ABOUT THE YASUNI:

Situated in the heart of the Amazon basin, the Yasuní National Park is officially recognised as the most biologically diverse place on the planet. It is thought to be a zone that did not freeze during the last ice-age (which began 2 million years ago and lasted up to 10,000 years ago)...

As a result, it became an island of vegetation where flora and fauna took refuge, survived and eventually re-populated the Amazon.

Spanning nearly a million hectares of almost untouched rainforest, It is home to the greatest genetic varieties of plants and animals on Earth. Within one hectare of Yasuní, 644 different species of trees have been identified - This is more than in the whole of North America.

The Park contains 44 per cent of the Amazon Basin's birds, making it one of the world's richest avian sites. And the statistics are similarly plentiful for the variety of bats, amphibians, reptiles, bees and other creatures.

Because of this extraordinarily rich abundance of species, Yasuní has been declared a world biosphere reserve by UNESCO.

It is also home to the Waorani people and many indigenous tribes who who have been living in harmony with the Yasuní for centuries, some in voluntary isolation.

These people have now begun to lose their home due to oil exploitation, deforestation and colonisation.

They live on their ancestral lands, which used to span over 2 million hectares, but now is nearly a quarter of this, and even these boundaries are not being respected. These semi-nomadic people are hunters and foragers, and therefore need a large territory in order to maintain their traditional way of life.

They are the last 'free human beings' of Ecuador, true warriors who only produce the minimum to satisfy their own needs.

But this ancient way of life has been irreparably damaged by the exploitation of their homeland, the Yasuni, and now they are in the desperate situation of trying to protect their families, culture, history and future from the onslaught of destruction by international oil companies.

Some of the native people have managed to preserve aspects of their culture, and try to live in the most traditional way possible, resisting and fighting against further infringements on their rights.

But others such as the Tagaeri and Taromenane, the descendents of ancient warriors, have fled further into the forest to escape 'civilisation' and maintain no contact with the outside world...

What makes this tragedy even worse is that it is the Ecuadorian government which has been to blame for allowing / welcoming the oil companies into the country to extract the oil in the first place.

In the past three decades, Ecuador has become dependent on oil exports for revenue, in the belief that selling off these incredibly rich reserves of crude oil from under the land was the only way to lift the country out of poverty.

And yet, the "resource curse" of oil exploitation has failed to achieve this, and instead has caused extensive watershed degradation, deforestation, toxic pollution, and severe health impacts to the Waorani and other indigenous people. There have been many deaths due to the pollution of natural water supplies from the oil mining.

In 2007, the new government in Ecuador - led by President Correa - offered an unprecedented and historic proposal: Ecuador will not allow extraction of the ITT oil fields in Yasuní, if the world community can create a compensation trust to leave the oil permanently in the ground, and help fund Ecuador's sustainable development into the future.

There were strengths and weaknesses to this proposal, but there are now many organisations who are trying to work with the Ecuadorian government to help make this a reality and to stop the oil harvesting before the Yasuni park is wiped out completely, and the most 'Eden'-like place on earth is lost forever.

LINKS:

These websites all support the 'Save Yasuni' campaign, and you can find out a lot more information here...

www.yasunigreengold.org

www.sosyasuni.org

www.liveyasuni.org/

www.saveamericasforests.org/Yasuni/index.html

www.earthday.org/campaign/save-yasuni-national-park

www.thepetitionsite.com/1/save-the-yasuni-national-park-in-ecuador/

Information provided by Anne-Marie Helder.