South America – Page 6 – See Animals Wild

June 6, 2021June 30, 2022

Contradiction of wildlife tourism – do not kill the wild natural world while cutting your emissions

The world has an unfortunate problem. In many parts of the world we are successfully reducing our carbon footprint dramatically, through cleaning our electricity generation among other improvements.

Unfortunately, in our current setup, often the only way to pay for conserving the wild places on our planet is by visiting them, and for most people, this requires long-distance flights.

Something we must avoid in more wealthy countries is to simply halt all tourism to wild places. If in order to cut a few tons of carbon from our personal emissions, we remove the reason to conserve a large rainforest in Africa or Asia, can we really blame the locals when it gets cut down? In theory, money does indeed get sent to some of these countries to pay for offsetting our emissions. Unfortunately this rarely reaches people on the ground.

March 9, 2021July 1, 2022

Jair Bolsonaro is having a similar impact on environmental laws in Brazil to the impact of Donald Trump in the USA – will the effect be longer lasting?

Just like Trump in the USA Jair Bolsonaro has taken an axe to the environmental protections that Brazil has created over decades. Also just like Donald Trump, the majority of these moves have been done by Executive act. Between march and may last year, Jair signed 195 infralegal acts – and just like under Trunp these acts are thought to be only just legal and should have gone through their governmental body.

More than 4000 square miles of rainforest was lost last year alone

February 17, 2021July 1, 2022

Pablo Escobar’s zoo’s hippo population has grown from about 30 to between 65 and 80 – what might happen in the future?

Pablo Escobar was a drug kingpin in Columbia. Extraordinarily successful he had the money for some pretty impressive personal items including a zoo. Rather alarmingly, when Pablo Escobar’s rein over his crime and drug empire ended, his zoo was not looked after. A variety of things happened to the animals, but the hippos were largely left in the wild to their own devices.

The problem is that with vast amounts of food and no natural predators in numbers have multiplied rapidly and is currently thought to fall between 65 and 80.

February 5, 2021July 1, 2022

Absurd green washing of an environmental failure

One of the most reliable forms of renewable electricity generation is hydro. Create a dam, and then make electricity when ever you release the water from behind it. However, there are clearly places where this is not going to be good for the environment.

The Belo Monte dam is sold as part of the fight against global warming. This is however not a green project, indeed apart from the destruction of a huge area of rainforest, its construction will emit more carbon than it could possibly save in the next several hundred years

If the river that is dammed is running through a forest, then the flooding will cover the rainforest. What happens then? Well all the carbon that is stored in the trees, and the ground is released back into the air.

March 18, 2018December 3, 2023

News in brief – Otters in Peru, Adelie Penguins and Spring in the Arctic

Peru has set up a national park of 868,000 hectares that will protect the areas many animals and native people. This is one of the remaining areas of untouched Amazon within Peru. A recent survey saw showed that this area had a good population of giant otters. This is particularly exciting because, Continue reading “News in brief – Otters in Peru, Adelie Penguins and Spring in the Arctic”