Mexico is wrapping up an ambitious survey of its woodlands as part of an effort to combat deforestation and help preserve some of the world’s most diverse ecosystems. The five-year inventory, due to be completed later this year, is the third national study of the country’s forests since the 1960s. But it’s the first carried out with an eye toward conservation, rather than toward the promotion of logging and clear-cutting for agriculture. In the 1970s and 1980s, Mexican authorities actually promoted deforestation, says Alberto Sandoval Uribe, the National Forestry Commission (Conafor) official overseeing the US$14 million inventory. “The paradigm was that the more food countries could plant, the better,” he says. “So the only thing politicians thought about was cutting down trees...
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Rising 22,841 feet (6,962 metros) above sea level, Argentina’s Aconcagua is the highest peak in the Americas and the object of many a mountain climber’s most ambitious dreams. With a fast-growing number of those dreams becoming reality, however, Aconcagua and the natural area containing it are being despoiled by large quantities of trash left behind by trekkers and climbers. The number of visits to the 175,000-acre (71,000-ha) protected area—Aconcagua Provincial Park, located in Mendoza province—have increased dramatically. A record 7,313 people, over 5,000 of them foreigners, made the trip during the 2006-7 climbing season, which runs from Nov. 15 to March 31. The current 2007-8 season will produce yet another record, since 7,000 people had visited by the end of...
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Environmental groups plan to press for a ban on whaling in the southern oceans at the next meeting of the International Whaling Commission (IWC), slated to be held in May in Santiago, Chile. Meanwhile, the Chilean government, which has been outspoken in its opposition to Japanese whaling, is considering declaring all waters within its 200-mile Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ) a permanent sanctuary for whales and other cetaceans. And green groups are urging Chile to propose a Latin-America-wide agreement to declare all EEZ waters in the region—from Mexico to Antarctica—off limits to whaling, according to Juan Carlos Cárdenas, executive director of the Santiago-based green group Ecoceanos. Though commercial whaling was banned worldwide by the IWC in 1986, Japan is permitted...
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The Mexican capital is facing a major garbage crisis as the country’s biggest dump reaches the end of its useful life—so far with no alternative landfill location in sight. The Bordo Poniente sanitary landfill has operated since 1985 and currently receives approximately 12,000 tons of solid waste daily. It is the only landfill legally receiving garbage from the federal district, which is the heart of Mexico City, accounting for about half of a sprawling urban area that also takes in portions of surrounding Mexico state. Located on federal land in Mexico state on the dried-out bed of Lake Texcoco east of the city, the Bordo Poniente operates under an agreement with the Mexican Environment and Natural Resources Secretariat, (Semarnat). The conditions of that...
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