The Environment

Claim a few large countries are hindering climate talks.

At least 340 Haitian migrant workers have been deported since Hurricane Dorian hit the island.

TRAIRÃO, Brazil (AP) — Night falls in Brazil’s Amazon and two logging trucks without license plates emerge from the jungle. They rumble over dirt roads that lead away from a national forest, carrying trunks of trees hundreds of years old.

ALTER DO CHÃO, Brazil (AP) — A sleepy Amazon town has become the flashpoint for the growing hostility between Brazil’s far-right President Jair Bolsonaro and environmental groups following the arrest of volunteer firefighters he has said set blazes in the rainforest.

Here in the heavy industry heartland of Colombia, environmentalism has old roots and has endured through decades of violence and intimidation.

SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico (AP) — A group of U.S.-based scientists is rushing to document indigenous sites along Puerto Rico’s coast dating back a couple of thousand years before rising sea levels linked to climate change destroy a large chunk of the island’s heritage that is still being discovered.

This faith-based distress at humanity’s poor stewardship of God’s creation has some powerful and outspoken proponents in Brazil.

Yerba mate is a wildly popular leaf that is dried, steeped like tea and drunk hot or cold across Paraguay, Uruguay and Argentina.

An ancient dam in the Cordillera Negra. (Photo by Kevin Lane/Author provided)

Puerto Ricans should have all the facts about small modular nuclear reactors before making critical decisions about their energy future.

“Deforestation and preservation are also economic, social and political matters,” Gabriel Santos said.

If the Gran Chaco forest continues to be leveled at the current rates, it will recede before most people even knew it existed.

MADRE DE DIOS, Peru (AP) — Destruction of the forests can be swift. Regrowth is much, much slower.

HAVANA (AP) — With their shiny, brilliantly striped shells and bodies up to 8 inches (20 centimeters) long, giant African snails have become public enemy No. 1 for epidemiologists, and citizens have grown to fear their ability to transmit diseases and harm crops.

This year’s event was purely driven to inspire action according to the organizer Marissa Reyes, who stressed the urgency, citing  a UN’s climate report.

MÉRIDA, Venezuela (AP) — Blackouts shut off the refrigerators where the scientists keep their lab samples. Gas shortages mean they sometimes have to work from home. They even reuse sheets of paper to record field data because fresh supplies are so scarce.

SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico (AP) — A 6.0-magnitude earthquake struck near Puerto Rico late Monday, rousing and scaring many from their sleep in the U.S. territory.

Araucaria trees have been revered for as long as humans have lived in southern Brazil’s highlands.

BERLIN (AP) — From Canberra to Kabul and Cape Town to Berlin and across the globe, hundreds of thousands of young people took the streets Friday to demand that leaders tackle climate change in the run-up to a U.N. summit.

ALTO RIO GUAMA INDIGENOUS RESERVE, Brazil (AP) — Deep in the Amazon rainforest, there is talk of a looming conflict over land.

RIO DE JANEIRO (AP) — As fires burn across the Brazilian Amazon, the vast state of Amazonas has been among the hardest hit, with more than 6,600 blazes recorded in August, 2 1/2 times more than the same month a year ago.