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“All Hail the Glacier Gods”: El Fotografo’s MSNBC Pix of Qoyllur Rit’i
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, above, of a veteran ukuku is one of my favorites. The guy must be about 40 years old, but exposure to the harsh Andean elements has made his face a craggy moraine field. Most of the ukukus at QR are in their late teens and early 20s; you don’t see a lot of…
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Peru’s Melting Glaciers on NBC News Tonight, 6:30 p.m.
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.) Tune in to see footage of dying Pastoruri Glacier and to hear correspondent Anne Thompson talk with experts on how Peru is struggling to adapt to a world without glaciers, a scenario that may be realized within the next quarter century. Kudos to the NBC environmental news team for bringing this important story to the attention of U.S. viewers during Copenhagen 15. What happening in Peru is dramatic evidence of the catastrophic effects of global warming and rapid climate change. And although people in North America…
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Photo of the Day: Callejón de Huaylas, Peru
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.
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Needless Deaths in the Andes
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 under age 5 have died of respiratory disease brought on extreme cold in the high sierra, reported El Comercio. Thirty-five of the young victims were from Puno, where temperatures plummeted to -15 degrees C in the last 21 days. (Note that temperature extremes — winter getting colder, summer getting hotter and drier — are an expression…
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In Search of the Vanishing Snow Star
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. The annual Andean pilgrimage takes place in a remote valley in southern Peru, at the foot of 16,000-foot-high Qolqepunku Glacier. Pilgrims travel from all over central and southern Peru, as well as northern Boliva, to attend this remarkable event, the largest of its kind in the Western Hemisphere. The Catholic Church has its hand in Qoyllur Rit’i, but what really interests me and El Fotografo are the indigenous, ice-worshipping rituals that people perform at Qoyllur Rit’i. That’s why we’re…
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Why Twitter from Peru?
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 makes it ridiculously easy to connect with people you’ve always wanted to know. You can tweet with editors of magazines and publishing houses, ask a quick question of New Yorker writer Susan Orlean, compliment Dave Matthews on his latest album and keep up with environmental issues from the Guardian Online, The Climate Project and other…
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Pres. Obama, Where Is Your Commitment to Climate Change Adaptation?
“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 to talk about Peru, climate change and the U.K.’s commitment to helping threatened countries adapt to the environmental crisis. (The image above shows children in Puno being treated for respiratory illnesses in 2008 when record colds induced by climate change led to a rash of mortalities.) FYI: Peru is one of three…
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California to Die of Thirst Like Coastal Peru?
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 due to rapid climate change. Climate patterns in the southern hemisphere, however, don’t worry most U.S. citizens, who mistakenly believe that their own lives will be minimally impacted by climate change. Changes are coming sooner than they think. In his first interview, the U.S. Secretary of Energy Stephen Chu is predicting the end of California agriculture and…
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Artists Envisioning Climate Change: Come Hell or High Water
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 Arts & Ecology blog reports on an outdoor arts project in England that forces viewers to confront the future impacts of climate change on their own city: Tomorrow evening at dusk Chris Bodle’s Watermarks Project comes to life in Bristol city centre. The artwork takes the conjectures about the effect of global warming on sea…
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Hah! An Old Friend Laughes in My Face about Rising Sea Levels
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 no-holds-barred exposés. I sat a few seats behind DeFede at the copy editing desk, tidying up commas and occasionally contributing a feature story on something offbeat, like full-moon drumming circles on South Beach. We were two very different writers; he was a hard facts, investigative guy who’d risk anything to expose corruption in high places. I was a…
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Quit Spewing Out Greenhouse Gases, America!
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 told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. (Click here for CNN news brief, Gore Warns of Damage to Climate Change). If the United States — the world’s biggest per-capita producer of greenhouse gases — doesn’t get on board with cutting emissions drastically, the world’s climate will heat up to levels that may not be able…
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Peru Plants Half a Million Trees a Day to Combat Climate Change
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 in a little less than three months. The trees will capture more than 570,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide annually, a representative for the Ministry of Agriculture estimates. Notes El Comercio: “A workforce of 130,000 people has been recruited, and each person will be planting about 4.5 trees per day. Eucalyptus, pine, cypress and…
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Back from the Land of the Blue-eyed Alpaca
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 six each morning, bolt down some oatmeal and then walk to the next pueblo to find people to interview. I was there to talk to people about climate change and how it’s impacting their daily rituals and religious celebrations. A few random observations: (1) The ice caps are melting rapidly, and extreme weather events are…
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Photo of the Day: Apu Veronica
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, she’s bathed in luscious drifts of snow that resemble swirls of soft-serve ice cream. I suspect the photo was taken a while ago or immediately after a heavy snowfall because Veronica has lost much of her snowcap in the last fifteen to twenty years, as a result of global warming. She’s mainly brown now. Veronica is my favorite mountain in…
