Every year Mexico braces for wildfires caused by humans, nature or both. But this year’s wildfire season has proven to be one of the worst in over a decade. More than 534,000 hectares (1.32 million acres) have burned thus far in 2011 in different areas of the country, from the Texas border to the Yucatán Peninsula. Although firefighters have managed to put out the largest fires that had raged from March to mid-May over scrubland in the northern state of Coahuila, they were still struggling toward the end of this month to extinguish blazes near the Caribbean coast of Quintana Roo state. Juan Manuel Torres Rojo, director of Mexico’s National Forestry Commission, says it is too early to assess the damage. About two-thirds...
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Fishermen and Lafkenche indigenous communities near the southern Chilean city of Valdivia have lodged a complaint with the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights over a pulp mill’s plan to pipe waste into the sea, says a nonprofit representing the complainants. A spokesman for the nonprofit Citizen Observatory says the complaint challenges a Chilean Supreme Court ruling allowing construction of a waste-disposal pipeline from the Celulosa Arauco (Celco) pulp plant outside Valdivia to a site near the small coastal village of Mehuín. Boris Hualme of the Committee for the Defense of the Sea, a grouping formed by fishermen, indigenous groups and other pipeline opponents from Mehuín, contends that Chile’s Supreme Court failed to meet its environmental responsibilities under the law. Specifically, he and other...
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Panamanians sharply disapprove of their government’s environmental performance and believe corruption is the principal problem preventing enforcement of the nation’s environmental laws, according to a recent survey. The poll, conducted in January and February 2010 by the firm Borges & Associates but not released until last month, found that 61% of Panamanians believe government officials care little or nothing about improving the nation’s environmental conditions. Moreover, while 90% of Panamanians think environmental laws should be applied strictly, a plurality of them, 45%, identify corruption as the principal barrier to doing so, followed by 25% who identify a lack of trained personnel as the main obstacle. The poll canvassed 1,536 people in both urban and rural areas of the country for Vanderbilt University’s Latin American Public Opinion...
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Argentina is poised to enact its first electric- and electronics-waste disposal law, a measure that will create an agency to oversee collection, transport, recycling and disposal of so-called e-waste. The Argentine Senate approved the legislation this month after lengthy discussions involving environmental groups and business associations. Since the bill represents a consensus worked out among these stakeholders, analysts say chances are good it will clear the lower house of Congress—the Chamber of Deputies—without major revisions. Though some e-waste in Argentina is subject to special handling under the country’s decade-old hazardous waste law, the vast majority is sent to landfills along with the country’s other trash. Argentina generates 120,000 tons of e-waste annually, according to Daniel Filmus, the...
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