For three weeks, Bolivia’s soldiers and firemen fought the flames, battling them at the edge of forests while armed only with shovels and water buckets. But the flames, some ascending 50 meters into the air, could not be contained until heavy rains finally came to the rescue at the end of August. By then, two million hectares (five million acres) of forest and agricultural land had been charred, two national parks had suffered serious damage and the government was forced to admit that it is woefully unprepared to handle such calamities. “We don’t have the firefighting planes or the training to put out conflagrations in Bolivia,” Weimar Becerra, the government’s director general for forest affairs, told EcoAméricas. “These rains, they are a blessing from above... [Log in to read more]