Brazil

Meet this year’s winners of the Goldman Environmental Prize

The winners (left to right): Silas Kpanan’Ayoung Siakor, Yu Xiaogang, Tarcísio Feitosa da Silva, Anne Kajir, Olya Melen, and Craig Williams. Photo: Goldman Environmental Prize.  Though the connection between people and their surroundings is undeniable — a serving of clean air, anyone? — defense of the environment is still sometimes considered antisocial behavior. But this […]

How South American biofuels are gaining steam, and why that freaks the U.S. out

In his drab office in the fashion-obsessed chaos of downtown Buenos Aires, Argentina, Edmundo Defferrari cuts a farmhand’s figure in a corporate man’s world. Soy is growing up down south. Photo: USDA/Keith Weller. The 28-year-old industrial engineer, in cap, jeans, and scruffy beard, taps through a PowerPoint presentation choked with graphs, statistics, and cartoon renderings […]

Critics question World Bank’s role as carbon trader, fossil-fuel funder

For as long as it’s been around, the World Bank has been prone to mission creep. Established 60 years ago to rebuild war-torn Europe, it morphed into an institution whose raison d’etre was to help developing countries advance, then refined its focus on poverty alleviation and sustainable development in the 1980s and ’90s. During that […]

The Mahogany and the Ecstasy

Brazil clamped down on the logging of mahogany in the Amazon Rainforest last week, putting in place new rules that require loggers to present plans showing how harvesting will be done sustainably. Brazil produces about half of the world’s supply of mahogany, a highly prized — and highly endangered — wood sought for the making […]

Sh*tting By the Dock of the Bay

Ten years ago, delegates attending the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro wrinkled their noses upon encountering the putrid smells emanating from the heavily polluted Guanabara Bay. The summit cast a spotlight on the plight of Rio’s bay and led to the creation of an internationally funded cleanup project. Now, with the follow-up Earth […]

Take the Mahogany and Run

The U.S. takes the war against terrorism to the Amazon

United States military forces bombed the Amazon rainforest today, Pentagon officials said. The predawn assault targeted key habitats of several crucial wildlife species, thought to have been dug in for many years. “Parrots hate freedom,” President Bush said in a press conference shortly after the first squadron of B-2s left a base in San Paolo. […]

Brazilian Army in the Line of Fire

Brazil this week launched a campaign to tackle illegal logging and fires in the Amazon rainforest. The Environment Agency (Ibama) and the army will cooperate to survey by helicopter the region where most deforestation takes place, an area more than twice the size of France. Ibama hopes the Brazilian Senate will approve the release of […]