6 Intriguing South American Eco-Stories from August
Below you will find summaries and links to several of the more interesting ecologically-related stories to come out of South American countries in the past month. The list is not meant to be comprehensive or definitive, but hopefully you will find something that teases your interest. Enjoy.
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Location: Brazil
Brazil Wants $21 Billion to Protect the Amazon Rainforest with No Strings Attached via Ecoworldly
Brazil’s choice to launch an international fund to raise money for conservation of the Amazon Rainforest has been controversial. They have publicly stated that they will exclusively manage the use of the money raised by the fund–without receiving input from the countries who donate the money. It will be interesting to see if this fund succeeds a) in raising money and b) in financing means to successfully protect one of the world’s most important ecosystems.
Location: Venezuela
Rabies from Bats Suspected in Venezuelan Deaths via the Associated Press
If you ever wondered if vampire bats are real, this story gives you the answer. While not as fearsome as Hollywood movies might have led you to believe, vampire bats do occasionally bite humans. It generally occurs during the night when people are sleeping, and the vampire bat approaches by hopping along the ground.
Location: Peru
Magnificent Waterfall “Discovered” in Peru– Perhaps One of World’s Tallest via Ecoworldly
A Peruvian explorer has “discovered” an extremely tall waterfall in part of the country’s Amazon Rainforest region. The word “discovered” is in quotes because the waterfall was guarded as a secret by local communities who had known about its existence for a long time, but feared promotion of the attraction would lead to destruction of the area via tourism. An expedition has departed to map, photograph, and measure the waterfall.
Location: Argentina
Buenos Aires to Remove 40 Thousand Billboards to Fight Visual Pollution via Treehugger
It’s great to see a big city in South America (or for that matter anywhere) recognizing the value of landscapes and how they affect our quality of life. It will be interesting to learn whether or not the removal of the billboards will also correlate with a drop in automobile accidents. There is a part of me though that likes billboards in cities, because they can add character in some cases, although usually this isn’t so.
Location: Ecuador
Chevron Lobbies White House to Pressure Ecuador to Stop $12 Billion Amazon Pollution Lawsuit via Democracy Now!
Shame on Chevron for their total disregard for humanity. If you haven’t heard before about how they polluted a region of Ecuador with toxic oil waste creating an “Amazon Chernobyl,” then their efforts to lobby Washington politicians to pressure Ecuador to drop a class action suit against them will make you sick. This article, via transcript from a recorded broadcast, even sheds light on how both John McCain and Barack Obama might be involved in future discussions and decisions regarding this tragedy.
Location: Uruguay
Uruguay is Receiving Free HydroElectric Power from Brazil this Winter– Altruistic Gesture or Ugly Bargain? via Ecoworldly
Energy has become a hot topic across the world these days. It’s nice to see one country lending another a helpful hand. In Uruguay’s case, they have so few energy resources that it makes countries that blunder them look like fools. But when it comes to energy, is there really any such thing as a freebee?
Read More Interesting August Eco-Stories from South America on the Green Options Network:
- Large Wind Power Park Will Be Peru’s First Major Alternative Energy Project
- The First Solar Radio Station in Argentina
- Will Peru Be the World’s Next Big Biodiesel Producer?
- Brazil Will Play Military War Game to Defend Recently Discovered Offshore Oil
- Neighborhood in Lima, Peru Takes on Noise Pollution By Passing 1 Dog Per Apartment Law
Photo Credits:
- BastetAcid on Flickr under a Creative Commons license
- lazlo-photo on Flickr under a Creative Commons license
- Wikimedia Commons under a GNU Free Documentation license
- Wikimedia Commons under a GNU Free Documentation license
- alex-s on Flickr under a Creative Commons license
- deherrera_96 on Flickr under a Creative Commons license
- ogwen on Flickr under a Creative Commons license
The author is evidently misinformed with respect to the lawsuit against Chevron in Ecuador. Rather than elaborate here on the immumerable falsehoods and distortions contained in Democracy Now! article, I urge readers of this publication to review the information on this website http://www.texaco.com/sitelets/ecuador/en/ to avoid being fooled in the future by disinformation spread by the plaintiffs and their U.S. trial lawyers in their attempt to extort a juicy settlement in this case. Thank you.
Yes, if you are wondering, the person who wrote above is writing from a chevron email account.
Hey Levi - Thanks for putting this article together. I’ve traveled to South America and immediately fell in love with this glorious continent, so naturaly I’m interested in the environemntal & human rights issues it faces. I checked out the link Chevron posted above and recommend that anyone doing so go past the main page and deeper into the site. While their main page makes some pretty bold statements about the plaintiffs making “big lies”, following those links deeper into the site reveals them being backed by he-said-she-said claims and nitpickings of the plaintiffs not meeting strick legal requirements. For instance - they claim the plaintiff misplaced 201 test samples out of a total of 648 - sounds bad right? - never mind the fact that the 447 samples that were tested probably showed pretty danming results. All of this seems designed to draw attention away from the fact that Chevron quite likely contributed significantly to polution in the area. @Chevron: how about those results? - I think the strongest way for you to defend your case would be to displose them and show us they’re not that bad. For anyone interested in this trial, I’d recommend checking out the Chevron site-link above (just be sure to go deep and keep in mind when they make he-said-she-said claims) as well as another site: http://www.chevrontoxico.org/ to get both sides of the story.
Here I thought petroleum companies were only slick and not so crude in their corruption… Mr. Levi, tanks a lot for reminding and informing that there’s a lot more than a bunch of monkeys in every barrel.
REVIEW & OUTLOOK (Editorial)
Banana Republic and Friends
632 words
19 April 2008
The Wall Street Journal
A10
English
(Copyright (c) 2008, Dow Jones & Company, Inc.)
Maybe Willie Sutton, the natty thief who robbed banks because “that’s where the money is,” picked the wrong target. If only he’d gone after oil companies, he could have made more money, avoided jail time, and even picked up an award or two along the way.
Consider Pablo Fajardo and Luis Yanza, two Ecuadorians who on Monday were the toast of San Francisco after winning the prestigious Goldman Environmental Prize. Mr. Fajardo, a lawyer, and Mr. Yanza, co-founder of the Amazon Defense Front, have been waging a long legal campaign against Chevron for allegedly despoiling the Amazon hinterland. Late last month, an Ecuadorian court trying the case was handed a report assessing the damages at between $8.3 billion and $16 billion dollars. Chevron is now girding for an adverse ruling from a clearly politicized court.
The story dates back to the 1960s, when Texaco (which merged with Chevron in 2001) became a minority partner with state-run Petroecuador, a partnership that lasted until the early 1990s when the Ecuadorians assumed full control of their oil operations. At the time, an independent environmental auditing firm recommended that Texaco spend $13.2 million cleaning up its well sites. Texaco ended up spending $40 million. Ecuador later “absolved, liberated and forever freed” the company from “any claim or litigation by the Government of Ecuador concerning the obligations acquired” by Texaco.
By its own admission, Petroecuador has since made an environmental mess in the Amazon, with some 1,000 oil spills in the past five years alone. But that hasn’t stopped assorted trial lawyers from prospecting for Chevron’s gold beneath Petroecuador’s sludge. In 1993, “international human-rights lawyer” Cristobal Bonifaz filed a lawsuit against Texaco in the U.S. for $1.5 billion. Mr. Bonifaz’s suit was repeatedly tossed from American courts, most recently last fall when the court also fined Mr. Bonifaz $45,000 for his legal chicanery.
Yet the case has lived on in Mr. Fajardo’s parallel suit in Ecuador. According to last month’s “expert” report, written by a mining engineer named Richard Stalin Cabrera, Chevron owes $2.9 billion in compensation for 428 cancer-related deaths; never mind that the report fails to establish a causal link between oil spills and cancer. Chevron is also supposed to pay $8.3 billion for its “unjust enrichment,” another whopper considering that Petroecuador was by far the greatest beneficiary of its consortium with Texaco. Other alleged Texaco sins include introducing alcohol into the region, a claim said to be substantiated by the alcohol-induced death of an indigenous shaman.
Meanwhile, the case has become the latest environmental cause celebre. In December, CNN awarded Mr. Fajardo one of its “Hero Awards.” Actress Daryl Hannah has had herself photographed dipping her hands in oil spills almost certainly caused by Petroecuador. Groups like AmazonWatch offer one-stop shopping for misinformation about the case. Also in on the act is Ecuador’s radical president (and Hugo Chavez ally) Rafael Correa, who has his own reasons to seek a huge Chevron payday.
How all this will play out is anyone’s guess. Charles James, Chevron’s general counsel, says his company does “not intend to succumb to extortion.” The company will seek international arbitration should it lose in Ecuador’s kangaroo courts. That could take years. In the meantime, we wonder whose interests are served by a case that deflects attention from the real source of Ecuador’s pollution while burnishing the country’s reputation as a banana republic. Certainly not the people of Ecuador.
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