For three days, the indigenous community of Kanaimö closed the airport (landing strip) in Canaima National Park, protesting the destruction and havoc that illegal mining is causing at the riverbend of the Carrao River, part of the Canaima lagoon, a UNESCO World Heritage Site. You can find this video on their youtube channel explaining the situation in full detail.…
What is “eco-socialism”? It’s basically the central government’s term for both its environmental policy and for the ministry in charge of it (which just changed its denomination to Environment and Waters, as Audrey has pointed out). But what does “eco-socialism” really stand for? Mostly, it’s for using environmental issues as political taglines. For example, the government’s PR…
So, this flew under my radar, but apparently Maduro backtracked on the the decision to fuse the Environmental Ministry and the Habitat Ministry, and now, we will once again have and environmental ministry. It will be called the Ecosocialism and Water Ministry (time to change the letterhead AGAIN guys) and the new minister is Guillermo Barreto. Barreto will…
I once called it “Anzoátegui’s unnatural wonder”: A large accumulation of petroleum coke, which is located outside PDVSA’s José Antonio Anzoátegui Petrochemical Complex (better known to the locals as Jose Refinery). The coke mountain started way back in 2009 after a fire caused heavy damage to the docks used to transport the materials to export ships.…
First, I want to apologize, but this post is going to sound like a dialogue from The Departed. As we all know, no other country in the world cares so much about the environment as Venezuela. We care sooo much that we disbanded revamped our Environmental Ministry and created and even better one, (it’s better because it now has the…
I have fond memories of the IVIC, the Venezuelan Institute for Scientific Research. I only got to spend a few months there, specifically in the Cellular Neuropharmacology Lab as part of a short internship – all fun stuff, even got to do scorpion milking once – but I enjoyed every minute of it. What blew my mind was how well equipped the…
Several Twitter users (including world-class freediver Carlos Coste) published multiple photographs of what looks to be a serious oil spill in the beach near the Amuay Oil Refinery in Falcón state. In the face of the evidence, PDVSA admitted the spill and, to their credit, did not use the word “sabotage” but blamed instead a strong…
Climate change… one of the most relevant issues of our time. It’s back front and center on the press headlines this week because of an extraordinary summit in New York City to tackle the issue, organized by the United Nations. Next December, the annual U.N. Climate Change Conference (COP20) will be held in Lima, Peru.…
When bulldozers started turning up at La Restinga National Park, the first to jump into action were students from ECAM, the Applied Marine Sciences Department (ECAM) of the Universidad de Oriente. That didn’t surprise me. I’m an alumna of ECAM. Our school’s ethos was built on protecting La Restinga, the mangrove national park and ecological sanctuary that is a must when…
There are alternatives to oil … There’s electricity in solar and wind, and electric cars. We can begin to do workarounds, albeit not rapidly, but over time we can work around and find alternative energy. But there is no alternative to water. It’s either there or it’s not. Edward Burtynsky Last week, the Environmental Minister Miguel…
A few days ago Miguel Rodríguez, the Environment Minister, leading a march toward Miraflores, said this: “Let’s put on a great national demonstration to show the indignation that is felt at this moment in the Venezuelan environmental movement because of what is happening (…) A demonstration of what we are going to do for our nature,…
Heres a piece of news that got buried under the week’s turmoil – the San Josecito dumping ground has been ablaze since the beginning of February (yet again) causing the collapse of solid waste collection in the city of San Cristobal and 10 other municipalities (yet again). Meanwhile, Vielma Mora, the state’s Governor seems to have his…
This picture recently posted online by Bloomberg’s correspondent in Venezuela Anatoly Kurmanaev is from the La Guajira wind farm in Northwest Venezuela (built as a joint venture with Argentina). It was inspected last April by no other than Nicolás Maduro himself. According to Kurmanaev, locals have told him that since Maduro’s visit no major works…
Since we reported about it back in June, the return of malaria (a disease that Venezuela had erradicated) has now reached a historical high. The latest official numbers from the Health Ministry show 56,291 cases of malaria have reported so far in 2013, a number unseen in the last 70 years. An NGO has hinted…
The people of Valencia have been drinking water with elevated levels of aluminum for the last 29 months now. Aluminum in drinking water has been linked with nerve damage, leading to Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s and Lou Gehrig’s Disease. But that’s not the only thing found in the water: in recent years, stuff like platinum, cobalt, iron, plankton and…
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