An American in Lima

Back in December, msnbc.com published a photo story on Qoyllur Rit’i and global warming, with photos by El Fotógrafo and captions by yours truly.
I neglected to provide the link to that slide show, which includes some of EF’s strongest images of the dangerous (and endangered) glacier pilgrimage, so here it is, belatedly: “Peru’s Disappearing Holy Glacier.”
This photo, [...]

[Read more →]

Tonight NBC Nightly News airs a special report on Peru’s melting glaciers and their downstream effects. (Click here for times and stations across the United States.)

NBC Nightly News Chief Environmental News Correspondent Anne Thompson interviews glaciologist Marco Zapata at Pastoruri Glacier, Oct. 2009 (photo c. Barbara Drake)

Tune in to see footage of dying Pastoruri Glacier and to [...]

[Read more →]

El Fotografo took this shot during the drive to Huaraz last week. It’s of the Callejón de Huaylas (”Alley of Huaylas”), a valley in the Ancash Region in the north-central highlands of Peru. Glaciers all along the mountains there are melting due to rapid climate change.

Mt. Caullaraju; photo c. Jorge Vera 2009

Shooting with a Hasselblad enabled EF [...]

[Read more →]

A front-page article in Sunday’s El Comercio exposed the criminal indifference of local and state governments to the deaths of children in the Andes.

Some Peruvians are outraged at the country’s indifference to the preventable deaths of children in the Andes, as this widely circulated cartoon shows. Others shrug their shoulders and say, “That’s Peru.”

This year alone, 144 children [...]

[Read more →]

El Fotografo and I are turning the house upside-down this weekend, as we air out camping gear to go to the glacier pilgrimage of Qoyllur Rit’i (”Snow Star” in Quechua) next week.

Pilgrims camping at Qoyllur Rit’i, 2008

The annual Andean pilgrimage takes place in a remote valley in southern Peru, at the foot of 16,000-foot-high Qolqepunku Glacier. [...]

[Read more →]

During my month-long hiatus from this blog, I got hooked on another form of social media: Twitter.
Unlike Facebook, which facilitates staying touch with family and friends, Twitter is a freeform broadcast to just about anyone on the planet. That might not sound like a medium that would interest a relatively private person (like me), but it turns out that Twitter [...]

[Read more →]

“There is still time to avoid the worst impacts of climate change, if we act now and act internationally”
–Lord Stern

 
Spent a few hours this morning at a group meeting with Mr. Robin Gwynn, the U.K’s newly appointed special envoy on climate change for vulnerable countries. He came to Lima with spokesperson Kirsty Lewis of the Hadley Center [...]

[Read more →]

image courtesy L.A. Times blog

Word has been out for a while that dwindling meltwater from Peru’s tropical glaciers will lead to dire water shortages in 40 years unless radical measures are taken to find and conserve new sources. Most of the water used along Peru’s coastal region, including Lima, originates in the glaciers of the Andes, which are receding [...]

[Read more →]

A 21-meter-tall high tide in Bristol, England? It’s projected to hit the city if the Greenland Ice Cap melts completely and no mitigation is put in motion, as this installation dramatizes

Following up on a link to yesterday’s post about climate-change denial among U.S. citizens, I discovered an intriguing blog about the arts and the environment.
RSA [...]

[Read more →]

The napkin is my witness: Notes from my Dec. 20 conversation about climate change with reporter Jim DeFede

Reporter Jim DeFede and I were office buddies at Miami New Times back in the mid-90s.  He sat in his tiny cubicle, digging up dirt on crooked politicians and fending off threats from the angry subjects of his [...]

[Read more →]

That, in short, is my message to the United States. I’m inspired to scream in my headline after watching Al Gore warn the U.S. Senate on Wednesday that the U.S. needs to join the rest of the world in signing a treaty to cut greenhouse emissions.
The planet will soon reach a “tipping point” of damage to the climate, Gore [...]

[Read more →]

Here’s some good news for the environment:
According to ANDINA and other news outlets, Peru’s Ministry of Agriculture has initiated an ambitious countrywide tree-planting campaign to counter the effects of climate change.
The project began in December with the goal of planting 40 million trees by February 20. That translates to half a million trees per day or more than 40 million trees [...]

[Read more →]

It’s not every day that you can spend an evening with several brilliant climatologists and have them give you a simplified mini-course on climate change – a sort of “Global Warming and Glacier Recession 101,” if you will — but that’s what I experienced this past Tuesday (6/17) at Lima’s Catholic University (UCP). What a [...]

[Read more →]

Media outlets such as National Geographic speak of Qoyllur Rit’i as “the largest indigenous religious pilgrimage in the Western Hemisphere.” But how big is it, really?
The number of pilgrims most frequently cited by writers is 40,000. I’ve also seen estimates at 60,000 and 80,000. Wikipedia lowballs attendance at an incredible 10,000 pilgrims.
But these figures seem [...]

[Read more →]