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.” [...]

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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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, [...]

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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“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 [...]

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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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, [...]

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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 [...]

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I spotted this unusual blue-eyed alpaca on a hillside in Upis I returned to Lima this past Saturday after a week trekking around Mount Ausangate, in southern Peru, with my cousin and a Quechua-Spanish translator from Cusco. What an experience. It was a work trip, rather than a vacation per se; we’d wake up at [...]

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The beautiful Apu Veronica, considered a female mountain lord by indigenous people in the Peruvian Andes Many mountains in the Andes are considered male by the local people, but a few are female, like Nevado Veronica. She rises wide and conical over the Urubamba Valley, like a big-hipped mama towering over her children. In the photo above, [...]

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