Ecobreves – VENEZUELA: Smuggling Snakes by Mail

Nine small boa constrictors were found last week by postal employees in Caracas, inside a package destined for the United States that raised suspicions because the return address was incomplete, reported Miguel Arévalo of the Postal Institute.

Ecobreves – GUATEMALA: Protecting a Poisonous Lizard

Guatemala's National Council of Protected Areas, CONAP, will begin a strategy for preserving the endangered venomous beaded lizard "Heloderma horridum charlesbogerti", native to the Motagua region, east of the capital.

Ecobreves – CUBA: Construction Put to Hurricane Test

Ecological and inexpensive building materials proved again this year how strong they are in withstanding hurricanes, according to a survey conducted in this city, 268 km from Havana.

Ecobreves – CHILE: Metro Grows, Pollution Declines

Chile's President Ricardo Lagos announced on Nov. 15 the start of two projects to extend the Metropolitan Railroad, slated for 2009, to benefit several impoverished districts around the capital

Ecobreves – BRAZIL: Negotiating Pay for Reducing Deforestation

Brazil will propose negotiating some form of financing or compensating forest conservation during the United Nations Conference on Climate Change to take place Nov. 28 to Dec. 9 in Montreal, Canada.

Evolution Faster Than We Thought

Tierramérica spoke with scientists Peter and Rosemary Grant, who have documented that the process of mutations in finches in the Galapagos Islands is faster than Charles Darwin, father of evolutionary theory, realized.

A Crusade Against Nanotechnology

The award-winning activist Pat Mooney travels the world calling for a moratorium on commercial development based on nanoparticles, pointing to what he says are their potentially harmful effects.

Ecobreves – BRAZIL: Drought in the Pantanal

A drought is taking a toll on the Mato Grosso Pantanal, a 210,000-square-km floodplain in central-western Brazil, while the Amazon, to the north, is struggling to overcome five months of lack of rainfall.

Ecobreves – BOLIVIA: Funds Needed to Save Dinosaur Tracks

The municipal government of Sucre needs 1.5 million dollars to conserve and protect Cal Orko, the world’s largest bed of dinosaur tracks.

Ecobreves – HONDURAS:: Food Security in Poor Towns

The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) is promoting a program for food security, appropriate technology, and environmentally friendly management in the 24 most impoverished municipalities of the Honduran interior.

Ecobreves – BRAZIL: Organics Fair in Rio

Some 200 presenters will participate in Biofach Latin America, Nov. 16-18 in Rio de Janeiro, one of the continent’s largest organic agriculture fairs.

Delays in Land Reform a 'Time Bomb'

Unfinished agrarian reform has Bolivia on tenterhooks as the nation prepares for December's presidential elections. Indigenous communities demand regularization of at least 34 million hectares of farmland.

The Emptying of Brazil’s Mega-Cities

Brazilian metropolises like Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo are seeing their population density -- and their quality of life -- decline.

Petroleum Greases the Deforestation Process

High oil prices are driving up charcoal and firewood use in Haiti, where once-extensive forests now cover less than two percent of the territory.

Ecobreves – MEXICO:: Transgenic Survey

The environmental watchdog Greenpeace at the end of the year will release the results of a survey on the use of genetically modified organisms by food companies in Mexico.

POVERTY AND DEVELOPMENT: SPARSE MEDIA COVERAGE MAY MAKE THEM WORSE

Journalists who specialise in development and cooperation face a very difficult reality, and one that is very hard to change: there is very little room for this subject in the media, writes Mario Lubetkin, Director General of IPS. If the media give this subject so little room, are we to conclude that, despite their prominence in the agenda of the international community, that development issues simply aren\'t that important? If nothing changes, while information and the debate on economic development and the fight against poverty do not reach the general public, international cooperation will remain the exclusive domain of specialists and functionaries, far from the people. And without the participation and commitment of the people, it is unlikely that governments will do all that they can and should to carry out a programme as ambitious and strewn with obstacles as the MDGs.

PROHIBITED OBJECTS

What is natural about these poor-icidal natural disasters? Is their nature so perverse? Or are we mistaking the executioner for the victim? Is it nature that is poisoning the air, polluting the water, razing the forests, and driving the climate into the madhouse? asks Eduardo Galeano, Uruguayan writer and journalist and author of \'\'The Open Veins of Latin America\'\' and \'\'Memories of Fire\'\'. The disaster of cyclone Stan in Chiapas would have been only half as severe, experts assert, if the region had still been protected by its forests. In Cancun, where Wilma left nothing standing and beaches stripped of sand, the immense megahotels of the tourist business had annihilated the dunes and mangroves that had protected the coast. And those other hurricanes that sweep desperate people from the South to the North -- are these natural disasters as well? Misfortunes are disguised as acts of fate and presented as natural. But is it natural for a country to condemn its poorest children to gamble their lives chasing hope at the cost of humiliation and rootlessness?

WHAT IS HAPPENING IN BRAZIL ?

Brazil is undergoing a profound crisis, writes, Joao Pedro Stedile, one of the leaders of the Landless Movement (MST) and Via Campesina Brazil. In this article, Stedile writes that the Lula administration was wrong about everything. It did whatever the right wanted and nevertheless all of the sectors of the right are in the opposition and dedicated to its moral, political, and electoral defeat and to winning power in 2006. The left is in serious need of a profound self evaluation of its approach. It am not talking about corruption but rather the fact that the left has essentially abandoned the ideological struggle for the illusion of governing. It traded voluntary activism for paid employment as functionaries. It abandoned a plan of social change for the vanity of being in power. Perhaps in a collective self-delusion, many convinced themselves that class struggle had been superseded by competition between corporate bodies in which the most expert would prevail. Brazil\'s social movements are working from the assumption that the real way forward is neither the government nor elections but instead the creation of popular force and a grass-roots organisation to generate in the medium term a true mass movement.

Big Commitment to Water

New commitments for clean water are being adopted by Latin America's environment ministers. Some 100 million people in the region don't have access to sanitation services.

A New Nautilus

The SeaOrbiter, a half-submerged mobile research lab of impressive futuristic design, will study marine pollution and marine life beginning in 2008. Tierramérica spoke with its creator, the French architect and oceanographer Jacques Rougerie.

Ecobreves – BRAZIL: Amazonian Caviar – Banned Luxury

The jaraquí and the black piranha, two abundant types of fish in the Amazon, permit production of a caviar similar to that made from sturgeon eggs, according to an experiment by the National Research Institute of the Amazon, INPA.