Brazilian fisherman Elson de Oliveira, hauls a dead alligator into his boat at Reis Lake, in Manaus, Amazonas state, on Dec. 3, 2009. Plummeting water oxygen levels due to a severe drought have led to thousands of fish dying along the Manaquiri River. MARCIO SILVA / AFP / Getty Images The Big Thirsty: From contamination […]
By Timon Singh | 02/05/10 – 16:16 Everyone knows that finding a renewable source of energy is crucial to wean the world off fossil fuels and cut carbon emissions, but what are we willing to sacrifice for clean energy? In Brazil, the government has given the green light for the construction of a massive hydroelectric […]
By Gary DuffyBBC News, Sao Paulo Brazil’s government has granted an environmental licence for the construction of a controversial hydro-electric dam in the Amazon rainforest. Environmental groups say the Belo Monte dam will cause devastation in a large area of the rainforest and threaten the survival of indigenous groups. However, the government says whoever is […]
By Gabriel Elizondo in Manaquiri, Brazil The once free-flowing Manaquiri River, which runs through the state of Amazonas in northwest Brazil, is in the fight of its life against a spell of dry weather – and it appears to be losing the battle. Thousands of dead fish are rotting on the river banks and hundreds […]
By Staff Writers, Buenos Aires (AFP) Oct 22, 2009 The equivalent of 36 football fields are being stripped from the world’s forests each minute, the environmental group World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) said in a statement released here on Thursday. The group, presenting its figures during a UN-organized World Forestry Congress held in the […]
By Paula Alvarado, Buenos Aires on 10.16.09 We’re talking about deforestation in the Amazon all the time, but can we really understand the magnitude of what we’re saying? This is where an image is worth a thousand words: this is how a 15 tons, 40 meters tall, ¡250! years of age, fallen tree from the […]
A freak tornado and floods last month may be a harbinger of a troubled future for Brazilian farmers, who worry that climate change could severely disrupt production in one of the world’s breadbaskets. Rising temperatures, a shift in seasons, and extreme weather in coming decades are likely to cut output in some areas and wipe […]
By William Laurance “THE best thing you could do for the Amazon is to bomb all the roads.” That might sound like an eco-terrorist’s threat, but they’re actually the words of Eneas Salati, one of Brazil’s most respected scientists. Thomas Lovejoy, a leading American biologist, is equally emphatic: “Roads are the seeds of tropical forest […]
Though Brazil has pledged to slow Amazon deforestation, and several groups are making headlines trying to tackle the leading cause of that deforestation, cattle ranching, AFP reports new data from Brazil’s National Institute for Space Research that shows the area of trees chopped down in June was four times that of May: In June some […]
By Michael Smith and Adriana Brasileiro July 31 (Bloomberg) — For four decades, Edimar Bentes and his family have survived by farming tiny clearings in the jungle near their dirt-floor shack in the state of Para in the Brazilian Amazon. On this April afternoon, Bentes, 56, squats in the driving rain and dips a glass […]
