south america
Water, North and South
23/08/08 14:08
Roughly 30 hours ago,
I was rushing to the Stockholm airport. As I
boarded the plane, I passed a small window used
when guiding the walkway between the plane and the
gate. A little sign a few feet in front of the nose
of the plane stated the airport name, the city, and
the latitude and longitude. Fifty-nine degrees
north latitude, I thought. That’s the farthest
north I’ve ever stood, at least on the ground. Then
I laughed: this flight would carry me in 10 hours
to Chicago, where I’d catch an 11-hour flight to
Sao Paolo, Brazil, and then a last plane headed to
the southwest for two hours to Cuiaba, Brazil, near
the Bolivian border. From there, I drive straight
south several hours to roughly 25 degrees south
latitude, the southern-most point of my life. In
basically a day and a half, I’d be spanning 85
degrees of latitude and pushing the extremities of
my experience.But the contrasts were not merely of
hemisphere and geography. My time in Stockholm was
largely spent at a 2,500-person conference where
water was only visible on PowerPoint slides and
drinking fountains, while the Pantanal is a wetland
the size of England and Scotland filled with
jaguars, hyacinth macaws, and capybaras. The night
sky is bright with stars and is one of the few
places with essentially no planes visible in the
sky. It has a great deal of water and very few
people.
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NEWS: climate adaptation case studies
22/08/08 22:31
A colleague closely
affiliated with WWF who is now at Australian
National University has just written an excellent
series of climate adaptation case
studies. Jamie Pittock, the author,
is in the highest tier of international
freshwater conservation and policy advocates. I
highly recommend downloading the 6.5 mb file. A
major recommendation behind this and a
companion overview
of climate
adaptation that I wrote with another colleague,
Tom LeQuesne, is maintaining healthy freshwater
species and ecosystems is the key to keeping
reliable and high-quality freshwater resources
for societies, economies, and livelihoods
Read
More...
