By David Biello 12 October 2012 NEW YORK CITY (Scientific American) – The state of the planet is grim, whether that assessment is undertaken from the perspective of economic development, social justice or the global environment. What’s known as sustainable development—a bid to capture all three of those efforts in one effort and phrase—has hardly […]
By Ben Tavener, Senior Contributing Reporter25 September 2012 RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – The Brazilian government is planning to build at least 23 new hydroelectric dams in the country’s Amazon region, of which seven are set to be installed in the heart of the region, in previously untouched areas of one of the most biodiverse […]
By Rhett A. Butler, www.mongabay.com20 August 2012 Latin America lost nearly 260,000 square kilometers (100,000 square miles) of forest — an area larger than the state of Oregon — between 2001 and 2010, finds a new study [pdf] that is the first to assess both net forest loss and regrowth across the Caribbean, Central and […]
Futurist Daniel Rirdan’s passionate appeal to save what’s left of Earth’s biosphere: (www.getreal.info) This is the formation of an action-oriented movement with an actual plan to avert an eventual collapse of the various ecosystems and also, indirectly, the manmade world. Also, check out his well-researched book: The Blueprint: Averting Global Collapse. The most important call […]
29 August 2012 (mongabay.com) – Brazil’s Supreme Court on Tuesday ordered work on the controversial Belo Monte dam in the Amazon to resume, overturning a lower court order that suspended the project less than two weeks ago. Construction activities by the Norte Energia, the consortium building the dam, resumed immediately, according to the Associated Press. […]
By Zachary Hurwitz14 August 2012 Federal Judge Souza Prudente of the Federal Tribunal of Brazil’s Amazon region suspended all work today on the Belo Monte Dam, invalidating the project’s environmental and installation licenses. While the project has been suspended previously on numerous occasions, and those suspensions overturned on political grounds, this latest decision could have […]
Caption by Aries Keck8 August 2012 Deforestation in the Amazon Rainforest takes on many different patterns. In Rondônia, a state in Western Brazil, deforestation took on the fishbone pattern revealed in these Landsat images from 1975 and 2012. Access to this remote region began with the building of a major road stretching from north to […]
By CHARLES LYONS30 June 2012 A confrontation between the insatiable appetite for energy and the enduring need for habitability is under way in Brazil as it moves aggressively to harness the power of its rivers with plans for dozens of hydroelectric dams. Such projects are engineering and aesthetic marvels that provide hydroelectric power and can […]
By Fred Guterl 25 May 2012 Adapted from The Fate of the Species: Why the Human Race May Cause Its Own Extinction and How We Can Stop It, by Fred Guterl (Bloomsbury USA, 2012). The eminent British scientist James Lovelock, back in the 1970s, formulated his theory of Gaia, which held that the Earth was […]
25 May 2012 (BBC) – Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff has vetoed parts of a controversial bill which regulates how much land farmers must preserve as forest. Among the 12 articles which President Rousseff rejected is an amnesty for illegal loggers. Brazil’s farmers’ lobby had argued that an easing of environmental restrictions would promote food production. […]
