A Greenpeace team occupies the Harbour Gemini, carrying illegal timber from Papua New Guinea and bound for China
© Sutton-Hibbert/Greenpeace

As we wait for the European Commission to consider legislation to prevent illegal timber from entering Europe, a Greenpeace team in Papua New Guinea have stepped in to prevent a ship from loading up with wood of dubious provenance.

The ship, Harbour Gemini, was loading timber at Paia Inlet in Gulf Province, when four activists from our ship the Esperanza climbed a loading crane to hang a huge banner reading 'Protect Forests, Save Our Climate'. Looking on were groups of local people in boats, while others held their own peaceful protests at the port and nearby logging camps.

It's currently the dry season in the Amazon and, as the live webcast last week demonstrated, fires have been decimating large areas. The video crew weren't the only ones documenting the fires and last week we received images from another Greenpeace team who took to the air to photograph them and the devastated areas they leave behind. We've put together some of the most striking (not to say depressing) images into the slideshow below.

On Friday, a Greenpeace team broadcast a live webcast from the heart of the Amazon rainforest, in an area which was still-smouldering after a recent forest fire. Even rainforests have dry seasons and during the current one, fires both natural and man-made are devastating huge areas.

It was an amazing technical achievement but that wasn't the reason they did it - they were there to show how the forest is being cleared for a variety of reasons (in this case, to open up areas for cattle).

Artist Kurt Jackson has long been a supporter of Greenpeace, employing his talents to help with our campaigns on a number of occasions. From sketching at a demonstration around the Aldermaston AWE nuclear weapons facility to joining the crew of the Esperanza to protest about dolphins dying in fishermen's nets, he's been throwing an artistic light on some of the most pressing issues we're currently facing.

While congestion charging schemes to control CO2 emissions from traffic are proving controversial in London and elsewhere, there's a chance we might see some action in Brussels on this problem very soon.

Some unsettling news appeared in the Independent over the weekend, which revealed that an Environment Agency report has said that containers at Sellafield (where most of the UK's waste is stored) may not be as stable as was thought. The document effectively destroys Britain's already shaky disposal plans just as ministers are preparing an expansion of nuclear power.

I haven't seen Wall-E yet (Joss tells me it's very good) but it sounds like a cross between Happy Feet and Silent Running - cute creatures and incredible animation bundled up with an environmental message. Now while the intentions of the film makers may have been to push the notion of a cleaner, greener world, the companies sitting between us and them seem to have other ideas and Wall-E is being used to sell all manner of less-than-green products.

In the US, one of these is Kleenex which currently has the little robot appearing on its boxes. As Kimberly-Clark, the company that makes Kleenex, is clearcutting forests to make it, Greenpeace USA thought this was a little odd. In fact, they thought it was the height of iron-e. So, with the help of political cartoonist Mark Fiore, they produced this spoof video.

Here's the latest in the Deep Green column from Rex Weyler -author, journalist, ecologist and long-time Greenpeace trouble-maker. The opinions here are his own, and you can sign up to get the column by email every month.

The dispossessed

In 1969, Marie Aimee took her two children for medical treatment, a six-day voyage across the Indian Ocean from their home on Diego Garcia island to Port Louis, Mauritius. Her husband, Dervillie Permal, stayed behind to work at a coconut oil factory and tend the family garden and animals.

After visiting the doctor and picking up supplies in Port Louis, Marie and her children arrived at the quay for the trip home. However, a British Government agent refused to allow them onto the boat, stranding Marie and her children in Mauritius. Throughout the following weeks, other marooned islanders appeared, congregating in a local slum, living in boxes or tin shacks. Two years later, Marie's husband arrived in Port Louis with one small bag and a chilling story.

Slightly later than planned (blame summer holidays and technical snaffus) but in the latest edition of our podcast we take a trip to the recent Climate Camp. Somewhere in the region of two thousand people pitched up for ten days in the shadow of Kingsnorth power station in Kent, where plans to build a new coal-fired plant are afoot - with climate change in mind, this is probably not the wisest thing to do.

In between helping with activities like shifting hay bales and washing up, we talked to some of the other people from all over the country to find out what brought them to the camp. We also caught up with Dave Douglas of the National Union of Mineworkers who was there with Arthur Scargill to get involved in the debate, plus we hear from Jim Footner, one of our campaigners working on the issue, to find out why a coal-powered future is unrealistic.

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In a story not as weird as the environmentally-friendly bullets one but still somewhat unnerving, it appears the US military is gunning for an increase in the amount of energy it derives from renewable sources. Military chiefs want to see 25 per cent come from the likes of wind, wave and solar by 2025 and while it accounts for 1.5 per cent of US energy consumption, the biggest impact could be the civil application for military developments in technology and efficiency so the rest of the country could be following in its khaki-coloured wake.