A year after conservationist Douglas Tompkins died in a kayaking accident in Chile, his most important Argentine project has begun to culminate with the donation of prized wetlands to Argentina’s National Parks Administration (APN). The Conservation Land Trust—a foundation that Tompkins, a U.S. clothing entrepreneur, started in 1992—transferred 23,000 conserved hectares (57,000 acres) of northeastern Argentina’s enormous Esteros del Iberá wetlands to the parks agency on Nov. 6. It was the first of four handovers slated to occur over three years in a process under which a total of 150,000 hectares (370,000 acres) will be transferred to the government to form part of a future national park. Tompkins began buying up acreage in 1997 in the Esteros del Iberá, which is located in...
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Things are about to get busier for park rangers at Costa Rica’s Manuel Antonio National Park, the country’s most visited protected area. Along with managing security and conservation within the park, rangers will also have to collect entry fees because the government failed to renegotiate terms with a cooperative that managed the park’s entrance. The new regimen comes as part of a series of government moves that have resulted in rangers getting more administrative responsibilities without gaining personnel to patrol the parks. According to park rangers, such decisions have led to the degradation of important conservation areas including Corcovado National Park, where illegal hunting and gold mining have led to a precipitous decline in the park’s jaguar population. “We are very preoccupied about this decision...
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Resource extraction has accelerated in Latin America so far this century, with primary materials including fossil fuels, wood, meat and crops accounting for over half of exports by nearly all countries in the region, according to the international human rights group Oxfam. In a report issued on Nov. 30, Oxfam says that in some countries in the region the percentage of such exports is far higher—for instance in Chile and Ecuador, where they top 80%. The report, entitled “Unearthed: Land, power and inequality in Latin America,” notes that over half of the region’s agricultural property is concentrated in just 1% of the region’s landholdings. Drawing on such findings, Oxfam concludes in the report that natural-resource extraction in Latin America, while helpful in spurring...
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The Riachuelo River, which forms the southern border of the Argentine capital of Buenos Aires as it flows to the River Plate, has for generations reigned as one of South America’s most notorious examples of industrial pollution. Despite a 2006 cleanup order by the Supreme Court and the expenditure thus far of US$5.2 billion to implement it, contamination still abounds throughout the river’s watershed, home to eight million people. The lack of progress was underscored in a Nov. 30 public hearing before the Supreme Court in which the Matanza-Riachuelo Basin Authority (Acumar), the agency Argentina’s Congress created to spearhead the cleanup, drew heavy criticism from green advocates and justices alike. So pointed was the criticism that Acumar President Julio Torti, who didn’t attend...
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