Several months ago we told you that the Argentinean government was helping the rural zones with their power problems by installing solar energy. That time we are talking about solar energy kitchens for schools in Jujuy. Currently the government is installing solar cells in the province of Catamarca to empower schools, homes and public dependences.

The provincial government along with rural school’s students is involved in a project to install photovoltatic solar cells in different parts of Catamarca. The real news is that students from the Technical Schools themselves will do the installation.

According to the Public Services Sub Secretary, Rafael Assante, the panels will be located mainly in the localities of Aguas Calientes, La Angostura, Corral Blanco and Ampujanco in north Belen. They will also install panels in Ciénaga Redonda, Antofalla and Tijuelas, in the remote Antofagasta de la Sierra department

The panels will generated between 2 and 4 amperes, and between 0,46 and 0,48 volts. The initiative of bringing renewable energies to faraway territories is also taking place in India and Africa.

For Ecowordly , these kind of proposals are always welcome so our salute to the Argentinean government.

Image: Flickr

This time we will visit the second largest natural reserve of the American continent, a jungle known as Selva Misionera or Paranaense (also called Mata Atlántica in Brazil, and Atlantic Forest in english). This jungle has an enormous biological diversity, with more than 2000 floral species, 150 vegetal species per hectare, 400 bird species and a great variety of mammals, reptiles and insects.

Only one hundred years ago, the jungle enlarged over a million square kilometers covering different lands of the Paraguayan , Brazilian and Argentinean territory.

But nowadays it is one of the worst threatened ecosystem of the world. The unrestricted tree felling and the fauna exploitation have reduced the jungle surface significantly. Today remains only 54 thousands square kilometers, the 5 per cent of what it used to be a century ago. Moreover, only 10 per cent is protected area and sometimes even this protection is only a word in a paper, with no real observance.

The remaining lands of the jungle are currently divided into green islands isolated between farms, plantations, roads and urban centers in expansion.

The World Wide Fund For Nature has recently proposed a project to protect this jungle. Several governmental and non governmental organizations have joined them, as well as universities, independent experts and even local residents. The idea is to create a “Green Corridor” along the three nations ( Argentina, Brazil and Paraguay) in where the jungle could grow again and remain protected.

The Selva Misionera is blessed with large rains and the rain water reaches the 2 thousand millimeters per year. The humidity varies between 75 % and 90%, with important night dews. The temperatures are about 16 centigrade degrees in the winter and 25 in the summer, with maximums of 40 centigrade degrees.

The jungle is divided into three stratums. The ground is covered with leafs, branches, decomposed trunks, lichens, fungus and moss. The ground itself is a reddish land.

The first stratum its all about small plants, ferns, grass and pasture. The second stratum is compose by bushes, canes and tree sprouts. In the third stratum there are trees around 12 and 40 metres tall, fighting to get closer to the sun light.

Although there are 200 varieties of trees we will only mention the most important:

The lapacho negro: a tree of 30 meters high and a trunk diameter of 1.5 meters.

The Pino Parana: (Araucaria angustifolia) a colossal tree growing to 40 meters tall and 1.5 meter trunk diameter, with a parasol shaped top. This tree has been protected by the law since 1986 and it is forbidden its extraction outside the Misiones province in Argentina.

The Palo Rosa: (Aspidosperma polyneuron): the biggest tree in the jungle, growing to 40 meters tall and reaching the 1.6 trunk diameter. It has a straight stick of 20 or 30 meters. This specimens is scarce because the cut downs in the pass but today the palo rosa is protected by the Iguazu National Park .

Images: Flickr

In Argentina one of the main factors that puts wild birds in danger is unrestricted hunting. Most Provincial Governments don’t put a limit on this. When a limit is set, there is no control over its observance.

One of the most beautiful and more threatened species is the cauquenes or kaikenes (Ruddy-headed Goose or Magellan Goose), similar in aspect to the goose.

They have robust bodies and small heads and inhabit Tierra del Fuego, a great island in the south of Argentina. These birds are chosen by hunters because they are a good size.

There are five species of cauquenes (Chloephaga) in Argentina. Some of them, for instance cauquens with grey heads (Ashy-headed Goose), are indeed abundant. However, red-headed cauquens (Ruddy-headed Goose) are in danger of extinction.

A troubling factor is that grey cauquen females are very much alike to red-headed cauquens. Grey cauquens are considered a plague to agriculture, so governments have freely given permission to hunt them. Moreover, the government is in favour of hunting grey cauquens, which is a controversial issue per se. The consequences: because of hunter’s ignorance and lack of government control, threatened red-headed cauquens are drastically decreasing in numbers.

Only two populations of red-headed cauquens exists in the world. One lives in Malvinas Islands and the other in Tierra del Fuego’s northern steppe. In the winter they fly from the south, all trough the Patagonia land , to the fields in Buenos Aires province.

This population is estimated to be only a thousand individuals. In Argentina it is in the red book of threatened birds, flagged as endangered.

Fortunately, some provincial governments from Patagonia and the Buenos Aires government recently became aware of the need to protect read headed cauquens and started working together. This is something to salute; they have even handed out brochures with information.

Image1: Flickr

Image2: Flickr

Glaciers are melting. It’s a fact. In terms of global warming, the guilt rests with us. We already saw how many of Switzerland’s glaciers are disappearing. Unfortunately, they are not alone.

Pedro Skvarca, glaciologist from Argentina in Antarctica, witnessed the progressive retreating of glaciers from the White Continent in the last ten years.

This Antarctica summer the glacier Bahía del Diablo, in Vega island, near Antarctica Peninsula, suffered a strong retraction.

Skvarca began to study the movement of this glacier 20 year ago, and in the last 10 years its ice has been decreasing rapidly. He is the head of glaciology division of the Argentine Antarctica Institute, on Base Marambio, an Argentinean base there.

“We watched tremendous ablation, something really unusual”, said Skvarca to La Nación. “Last year I had a box with a thermometer over the ice, this year I found it half meter in the air, hanging from a wire”.

Bahía del Diablo is the only glacier in which measurements have been taken in the past. The scientist measure the difference between the ice added during the winter, and the ice lost in the summer.

“This is important, because if we make a balance of all world’s glaciers we have a clear sign that we are in a time of atmospheric warming. The glaciers are the more clear indicators of climate change”, Skvarca explain.

Image: Flickr

During the next months, engineers will install the solar cells provided by a Spanish firm in each school. In time, the school’s directors will have to take responsibility for the solar system.

Since 1995, the Argentinian government has decided to invest part of the education budget in solar energy. It wasn’t until 2005 that Corrientes began to take into account how many schools were so remote that conventional energy didn’t reach them. They needed to invest in some kind of renewable energy. Since then, 85 schools have acquired the benefit of solar energy. I hope the national government will follow this provincial example and bring solar power to the children in all remote areas.

Image: Flickr

Via | CorrientesOnline

They are planning to build five hydroelectric dams and a high tension line that will be the largest in the world. It will cross Chile from south to north and thus divide it in two.

You read the paragraphs above and at first you may think it’s good, but no. It’s bad news to the environment. It will generate a lot of energy, renewable energy, yes. It’s going to be a record, yes. It’s a huge commercial and industrial project. But what will happen to all that land under water to keep those five big dams functioning? I already said it: it will be under water, all 16,000 hectares.

A big dam causes the rivers of the region to change. The margins will change. The land surrounding the rivers will change. Land full of life, with native forests, and native fauna will be washed out; flooded.

And we aren’t only talking about these five dams. They will build a huge high tension line that will cross green lands with unique fauna and flora. The trees will suffer and be cut down so the big high tension towers will have room.

The line will extend 2200 kilometers from the south of Chile to Santiago, the capital. And an additional 1300 kilometers will run to the north of the country, to the mines of Atacama.

The people of the region are very angry. In Santiago, 2,200 kilometers away, they are proud and happy. But the locals will lose their homes, others will lose their jobs because the tourists will no longer come to see the beautiful landscape now that the government is planning to flood the area.

Some locals are active, and they have published a book with pictures of the landscape now and in the future when the five dams will be completed. Because of their actions the government has agree to decrease the amount of land to be flooded (mainly because of the tourist industry).

Why? Why always progress have to be in conflict with nature?

Via BlogVerde

To avoid the growing car cemeteries, the government of Buenos Aires has decided to eradicate these prejudicial elements to the environment. How? They plan on compacting the cars and waste in a programmed way. Newspaper Perfil, informed readers that at the beginning 60.000 vehicles will be stripped of batteries, fluids and other components that threaten the environment.

The government plans to do a technical verification, a decontamination and compact whats leftover. The process will use software exclusively created by the University of La Plata to define the cars condition. If the car is in good condition, it will be fixed and later used by a government facility; however, if the car is inevitably broken, then it will be stripped, using a protocol elaborated by University of La Plata. This program explains what needs to be extracted and where it will be stored.

This kind of story brings joy to my heart, especially after my trip to Patagonia. It’s comforting to know some people in Argentina are working towards a better world.

Image: Flickr

I drove through route 3. It runs across Argentina from north to south, next to the Atlantic coast. Here you can see a beautiful landscape, steppe to one side and deep blue ocean to the other.

Patagonia: it’s a land of dinosaurs, oil and strong winds. The latter is responsible for a horrifying realization–how dirty it is! The last time I visited Patagonia was six years ago, and I didn’t see the mass amount of plastic bags everywhere.

Plastic bags covered everything: on a bush, on shrub branches, and hanging from wires. The bags, huddled together or alone; in colors, white or transparent; big and small. Plastic everywhere. No one picks them up and thus they will be there for thousands of years. That’s because plastic is not biodegradable and so neither the rain nor the wind will completely degrade those plastic bags.

The wind, always so powerful in Patagonia, gathers the bags together and collects them at the side of the road. The traveler has to drive hundreds of kilometers with that view. We couldn’t enjoy the beautiful landscape of Patagonia; plastic bags jumped before our eyes. Before, we used to see guanacos, ñandues, perdices. Now we see plastic.

The worst places are in front of gas stations or the gates of towns. There you can see, literally, fields of plastic bags, dirty, unwrapped, tied to the bushes and choking them.

I asked the people, and nobody knew that plastic could last thousands of years there. They just thought the bags would disappear into the earth after a rain, like paper. But now they see how the they are there year after year, new and old.

I wonder, if I return in a few years to Patagonia, will it be all plastic?

The first eco-place, will be the National Park Los Alerces in Argentina. You can find it at Chubut province, in the Argentinian Patagonia. It has some of the most beautiful biodiversity in the world, with a wide and rare vegetable variety.

Six lakes are nestled in there. The Lake Futalaufquen, flows to Lake Verde and Menéndez by the Arrayanes river, and Lake Verde flows to Lake Rivadavia by the deep green Rivadavia river.

At these lakes’ margins we can find forests full of life, with a wide variety of trees. The most beautiful of them are, by far, the Coihues. Then the Cipreses, and at last but not least the Alerces that give name to the Park. The Alerces are thousands of years old. But don’t rush, let’s go step by step.

The park was created in 1937, just to protect those Alerces with thousands of years, because they were being cut down indiscriminately to build wood tiles. The Alerces have a very straight trunk, so they were perfect for construction. And they are hard, strong and don’t putrefy.

Now let’s introduce the trees themselves. The Coihues, as you can see in the photograph, have a really beautiful trunk shape, and they tend to grow wide. They live close to water: lakes, rivers or streams.

The local people used to say that they live a part of their life standing up and the other lying down, because the Coihues have shallow roots, so a strong wind can knock them down. But while they are down, they keep growing, and give life to all around them.

The Alerces are the special guests. They aren’t all around the Park, like the Coihues, you will only find them in El Alerzal, deep down into the forest, and in the well protected area of the Lake Menendez. You can only reach there with national park guides.

If you see one Alerce there, you might say, “this tree it’s only 10 years old,” but in reality you can be standing in front of a 1000 year-old Alerce. That is because they grow so little year by year, only 1 millimeter, so Alerces tend to be really thin.

Today you can find specimens 3622 years old, one of them in Chile. In the Park there are trees around two and three thousand years old, like el abuelo, which is more than two thousand.

But, before they suffered being indiscriminately cut down in the Park, there were living trees 12.6 m in diameter, like the one reported by Charles Darwin. If you calculate, an Alerce with 1 meter in diameter as being at least one thousand years old… good lord, can you imagine? A creature with almost 12,000 years.

If you want to visit these great living creatures, you can travel to the city of Esquel, and from there to one of the best green places of the world.

Photo 2: Flickr