Plans are underway to create a national park in the rare coastal temperate rainforests of Chile’s Tenth Region and to name it for the famed Chilean poet Pablo Neruda. Expected to encompass up to 320,000 acres (130,000 hectares) of rainforest, rivers, lakes, coastline and more, the tract would rank as Chile’s second largest park. (The largest is the privately owned Pumalín Park in northern Patagonia, created by U.S. entrepreneur Douglas Tompkins.) Government officials and leaders of Chilean non-governmental groups say they hope to inaugurate Pablo Neruda Park on Jan. 9, 2004. That’s the 100th anniversary of the birth of Neruda, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1971. Neruda died in 1973, after Gen. Augusto Pinochet seized power in a military coup. The...
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An industrial consortium has scotched a project to build a large hydroelectric dam in the Brazilian Amazon because it could not obtain an environmental license for the project, government officials say. The failure of the effort, which was backed by Brazilian aluminum and ferroalloy companies, is seen by some as a sign other private-sector hydro projects in the Amazon will have trouble getting government environmental approvals. At issue was the $500 million, 1,087-megawatt Santa Isabel dam on the eastern Amazon region’s Araguaia River, which forms a border between Maranhão and Tocantins states. A consortium comprising aluminum makers Companhia Vale do Rio Doce (CVRD), the Votorantim group, BHP Billiton and Alcoa, as well as the ferroalloy producer Camargo Corrêa, has notified Aneel, Brazil’s energy...
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In the run-up to this month’s legislative elections in Mexico, green advocates urged the country’s political parties to do something all too unusual: spell out clear and comprehensive environmental commitments. The environmental group Greenpeace Mexico sent all the parties a questionnaire containing 22 queries on issues ranging from biosecurity to global warming, and asked them to respond by June 11. But the deadline came and went. As of election week only one of the three main parties had responded—the left-of-center Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD), which sent Greenpeace a letter devoid of detailed commitments. In the July 6 electoral contests, the 500-member lower chamber of Mexico’s bicameral congress was up for grabs. Three hundred of the seats were to...
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An insect-borne phytoplasma disease known as lethal yellowing has ravaged Honduras’ coconut palms since first being spotted on the island of Roatán only six years ago. The disease has killed 90% of the Atlantic Tall palm trees that have defined Honduras’ paradisiacal Caribbean landscape since being introduced by the Spanish 500 years ago, leaving barren trunks jutting from shade-less beaches. Lethal yellowing, which has existed in the Caribbean for over 100 years, may have been brought to Honduras’ Bay Islands in the form of infected insects clinging to imported hotel-lawn grass. Its dispersal was exacerbated by the biological stresses caused by Hurricane Mitch in 1998. Since then, lethal yellowing has killed some 600,000 trees, wiping out not only one of the primary...
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