Brazil is launching two major Amazon-conservation initiatives, the first of which is the world’s largest national park in a tropical forest. The park, named Tumucumaque Mountain National Park and located along the border with French Guyana in the northern state of Amapá, is 15,000 square miles (39,000 sq kms)—roughly the size of Belgium or Maryland. Declared a park on Aug. 22, it accounts for 27% of Amapá’s land area. President Fernando Henrique Cardoso was scheduled to announce the second initiative early this month at the Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg, South Africa. Called the Amazon Protected Areas Program (Arpa), the effort aims over the next four years to boost the share of nature-reserve land in the Brazilian Amazon to 10% from...
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After failing a second time to reinstate environmental lawsuits they had filed against Texaco in the U.S. courts, Amazon Indians are considering how they might pursue litigation in Ecuador—and push for legislation limiting further oil exploration on their lands. The strategizing follows the U.S. Second Circuit Court of Appeals’ decision last month to uphold a lower court’s dismissal of two class-action lawsuits Ecuadorian and Peruvian Indians brought in New York, Texaco’s home turf. The plaintiffs alleged that while operating in the Ecuadorian Amazon from 1972 to 1992, a Texaco subsidiary improperly dumped its toxic drilling wastes rather than using the standard industry practice of reinjection, or pumping the wastes deep underground into emptied wells. They claimed $1 billion in damages, charging billions of...
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A binational Chilean-Canadian agency created to handle environmental complaints has agreed to consider a claim by green groups that the Chilean government has failed to enforce environmental laws in building a major highway. The complaint, filed by two Chilean environmental groups, was accepted by the Canada-Chile Commission for Environmental Cooperation (AECCC), a commission set up as part of the environmental side agreement to the 1997 free-trade pact between the two nations. It concerns construction of the Southern Coastal Highway in southern Chile’s Tenth Region, where a planned 200-mile (320-km) stretch of the road is now 25% complete. Miguel Fredes, a lawyer with the Chilean Southern Environmental Law Center, claims the government has disregarded Chilean law by failing to conduct adequate...
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For Argentines who vacation on the beaches of Buenos Aires province, eating yellow clams (Mesodesma mactroides) ranks right up there with swimming and sunbathing. Unfortunately, the popular clam’s days might be numbered. So say local officials in the municipality of Partido de la Costa, which covers a 60-mile (100-km) coastal stretch that includes some of the province’s most popular beaches. They’re calling on tourists to refrain from clamming, which is formally prohibited under a 1996 measure that has gone widely ignored. The local yellow clam has been in trouble since 1995, when a great number of the shellfish died off for reasons still unknown. The die-off followed similar events in Brazil in 1993 and in Uruguay in 1994. It left the area’s...
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