Look east in this capital city and you can see an unsightly blemish on the face of the Andes. It is a hodgepodge of US$5 million mansions, crumbling half-hectare farms, eucalyptus plantations, stone quarries and crowded shantytowns made of carton and tin. Relentless development and the arrival of tens of thousands of civil war refugees in recent years have enveloped the Andean slopes on the city’s eastern side in a kind of land-use chaos. Green advocates fear that if this unruly combination of low- and high-income settlement continues advancing up the mountain sides, it will threaten the cloud forests, páramos, rivers and streams crucial for Bogota’s long-term water supply. That’s why environmentalists and editorial writers applauded Catalina Velasco, the planning... [Log in to read more]