The city of Curitiba, in southern Brazil, is famous for innovation and rational development. It was one of the first cities to market itself as “green” in a 1980s advertising campaign. And it is.
When it comes to garbage, it’s a matter of perspective. One person’s trash is another person’s cash. Outside of Kigali, in the east African nation of Rwanda, villagers have figured out how to turn food waste into cooking fuel.
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They’re scrubby, fierce with mosquitoes and impossible to walk through, but salt water mangroves are the guardians of Earth’s tropical coastlines and nurseries for her fish. They’re also threatened.
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It’s easy to forget – living in the middle of a continent – that there are limits to the amount of dross we can toss. But when you’re living on an island, in the middle of the ocean, trash can get in your face
Judging from this latest voice transmission, it seems that human beings are poisoning themselves and their planet — transforming the very chemistry of their blue-green home.
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Human beings are deeply dependent on motorized machines to move themselves around. Trillions of these things now choke a vast and growing network of so-called “roads,” getting into deadly accidents and polluting the planet’s atmosphere.
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One of Earth’s tens of millions of species has been mining colossal volumes of organic matter buried for ages, and burning the stuff for fuel — raising the surface temperature of their planet to a level higher than any time in the past.
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I had been pressing Marshall Islands conservationist Ben Chutaro to take me to Mili Atoll, to see the marine/nature conservancy he was setting up — but weather ended up not permitting. We went to Arno instead.
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Agriculture is the backbone of Tanzania’s life and economy. Three quarters of her people are small-scale, peasant farmers. Policies that empower farmers — particularly women — need to be implemented.
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Water is one of Tanzania’s scarcest commodities. In the capital city of Dar es Salaam, about sixty percent of households don’t enjoy a reliable supply. The surest bet is a twenty-liter bucket of precious water for one dollar.
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By its very nature, water can only be successfully managed by consensus. When conflicts arise, smart solutions are often the exception. Nowhere are water conflicts more common than in the landlocked South American nation of Bolivia.
Here’s another dispatch from Victoria Fenner, who spent an action and learning-filled three weeks in Central America earlier in the year. It’s hard to visit Central America and not explore the world of coffee, so here we go.
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On the bottom of a mountain slope in Honduras, farming communities depend on fresh waters and are trying to keep them clean.
Three quarters of Earth’s surface is covered in water. Most of this vast mass of water is salty, a mere two percent fit to drink. You’d think we’d conserve what’s so scarce and valuable. It isn’t always so. Bolivians are trying hard.
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Stuart Franklin is turning air miles into trees. Franklin — the founder of a carbon offsetting project in Ecuador — calculates how many seedlings he needs to plant to capture the carbon dioxide emitted by tourists jetting to the Galapagos Islands each year.
Once upon a time, the US was the world’s top emitter of carbon dioxide. The average American still emits more than the rest of us, but – sometime last year – China’s annual emissions surpassed the US’s. As the Chinese choke on fume-filled air, their leaders are turning to the wind.
Think about threatened waters and their wildlife … what comes to mind? Whales … declining codfish stocks … bleached coral reefs. In the U.S. Territory of Puerto Rico, tiny, luminescent creatures are taking it on the chin. Chemical and light pollution threaten to quench their bioluminescence.
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