“Environmental protection is going through its worst moments”
2021 Marzo Nicaragua
In April, the Humboldt Center will celebrate 30 years of working for the environment. To commemorate this date, we offer our country a balance sheet...
The Indio Maíz Biological Reserve: We’re losing this national treasure
2020 Diciembre Nicaragua
In late September, in the community of Nueva Quezada in the department of Río San Juan, the Nicaraguan Army detained 18 members of the Rama Kriol Territorial...
“Changing Nicaragua is about becoming aware of the environmental emergency”
2020 Septiembre Nicaragua
Will the pandemic have positive or negative environmental effects in Nicaragua? Before addressing this urgent question, it’s necessary to understand...
We are staring down a major crossroads
2020 Febrero Internacional
My book is titled La gran encrucijada (The great crossroads). The crossroads I write about is the product of the world’s current multidimensional—ecological,...
Machista violence killed Berta Cáceres
2017 Octubre Honduras
At daybreak on March 3, 2016, environmental activist Berta Cáceres was murdered in her home, an event that shocked Honduras and many people around the...
Water for everyone: A struggle for life
2017 Octubre El Salvador
In 1576, Spanish chronicler Juan López de Velasco wrote this about the Río Acelhuate, whose basin contains San Salvador, the capital: “It is said that...
The Rancho Grande experience: Environmentalism in rebellion
2017 Agosto Nicaragua
On October 12, 2015, the mining project of B2Gold, a Canadian transnational mining company, in the Cerro Pavón area of the municipality of Rancho Grande,...
Mining brings us neither growth nor development
2017 Julio Nicaragua
There is increasingly frequent and concerned talk in Latin America about the expansion of extractive industries and their activities. These industries...
“The State is mainly responsable for the country’s water problems”
2017 Mayo Nicaragua
Reflecting on the quality, distribution and uses of water in Nicaragua has been a pivotal part of my professional career. Back when I was a student...
Is the green economy really the new magic formula?
2016 Julio Internacional
The dominant image of the green economy is that it wants to get away from the use of fossil fuels. It is an attractive and optimistic message: the economy...
The Paris climate agreement is patently insufficient
2016 Febrero Nicaragua
Still reeling from the excessive rejoicing and media acclaim that greeted the climate agreement reached in Paris in December, I’ll try to evaluate some...
The Franciscan Left and ethical socialism
2016 Febrero Internacional
Where are we failing? is the title of a book coordinated by Jorge Riechmann, in which he reflects upon the reasons why the ecological discourse...
The canal will affect ecosystems, species and even genes
2014 Septiembre Nicaragua
Before talking about the impact the interoceanic canal will have on the environment and biodiversity, we would like to touch on some points that, although...
There’ll be no development by ignoring Science
2014 Agosto Nicaragua
If impoverished countries are to progress towards a knowledge-based economy, the environment has to be conducive to innovation and the economic regime...
How much longer will the country’s water last?
2014 Agosto Nicaragua
Although the issue of water is essential and understanding the problems it presents involves a certain complexity, virtually no one seems to want to...
Mining exploitation is as harsh as the dictatorship
2013 Octubre Honduras
In western Honduras a hard-fought struggle is going on between those who apply the law of the jungle to impose their will and those looking for an impartial...
The priority has to be enabling people to eat at least tortillas and beans all year
2013 Septiembre Nicaragua
Every day they tell us Nicaragua is having significant cconomic growth, recovery and improvement. Is this true of the rural sector? What do the rural...
The canal will irreversibly damage Lake Cocibolca
2013 Julio Nicaragua
We in the environmentalist organizations were just as surprised as almost all other national sectors by the haste with which the concession to businessman...
What we know and don’t know about the Tumarín mega-project
2013 Mayo Nicaragua
Mendoza: We journalists go to where things are happening so we can talk to the people there
and give them a voice. We’re not satisfied with...
In six years the gold will all be gone
2013 Abril Nicaragua
I’m both the son and the grandson of miners, and the child of a mining tragedy. My grandfather, who was born in the indigenous Monimbó neighborhood...
A walk in repudiation of the Mining Law
2013 Abril Honduras
The year already has an election smell, and this time, not just among the same parties as always. The LIBRE party candidate is muscling his way onto...
How Nature’s rights are violated
2013 Marzo América Latina
What does the word forest conjure up for us? Some will say it’s a large group of trees. Others will add that it’s also the ferns, orchids, shrubs and...
The ecological crisis in its temporal dimension
2012 Diciembre Internacional
In Time’s arrows: Scientific attitudes towards time, US author and poet Richard Morris said that although the genus Homo has only existed for...
Our future is at risk
2012 Agosto Nicaragua
Nicaragua’s immediate future is determined by the characteristics of its terrain, its natural resources, the development model being espoused, the economic...
The terms of today’s ecological debate
2012 Agosto Internacional
Around 11,000 years ago, the Earth’s temperature began to rise naturally, causing the progressive melting of the last great glacier age. A large part...
The terms of today’s ecological debate
2012 Julio Internacional
Around 11,000 years ago, the Earth’s temperature began to rise naturally, causing the progressive melting of the last great glacier age. A large part...
Concerns about the wind corridor
2011 Octubre México
The use of renewable energy sources, including wind power, is being advocated to respond to the problem of climate change. German, Japanese, Spanish...
Do indigenous peoples think these investments are fair?
2011 Octubre Centroamérica
The combination of large projects to extract natural resources in indigenous communities could become explosive, particularly in Central America. envío...
What the “gold fever” has left us
2011 Septiembre Honduras
They cut the tree / they killed it five gentlemen took it awayleaving the soil bare my green country is a desert...
This song by Honduras’...
2010-2030: The end of a World
2011 Junio Internacional
The “world of 2007” has ended. It no longer exists as such and shall never return. It’s a “world” that is slowly falling apart before our very eyes,...
The ecological crisis goes global: Gaia’s revenge
2011 Mayo Internacional
Serious and ever more conspicuous implications of globalized capitalism’s renewed, increasingly disproportionate monetary-financial aspect are adding...
They’re Threatening Us with “Open Inferno” Mining
2011 Abril Panamá
In 1979, Daniel Núñez, bishop of Panama’s David diocese, wrote: “The children play outside with smiling faces, despite the worms and malnutrition. Their...
The Ecological Crisis Goes Global: The Development We Want Is Unsustainable
2011 Marzo Internacional
In the first half of the 20th century, the still very incipient global ecological crisis didn’t attract institutional interest much less the oratory...
The Adventure of Producing Blue Energy in the Caribbean Region
2010 Diciembre Nicaragua
In 2006, energy cuts in most of Nicaragua frequently lasted up to eight hours a day, affecting production and commerce and the collective and personal...
The Ecological Crisis Goes Global: We're Witnessing a Biological Coup
2010 Diciembre Internacional
The urban-agro-industrial system has had a direct negative impact on the biosphere, all its ecosystems—the life forms and all their habitats—at a rate...
Climate Change: Who’s in the Dock?
2010 Octubre Internacional
By the second half of the 20th century, the environmental repercussions of global capitalism were no longer limited to the land mass, but rather leapt...
The Planet’s First Layer Is Seriously Injured
2010 Agosto Internacional
In the 20th century we went from an “empty” world to a “full” one. This entailed a real historical mutation, causing us to now speak of entering a new...
We Were a Small but Efficient Brigade And the Haitians Grew Fond of Us
2010 Marzo Nicaragua
We flew from Managua to Jamaica and from there to Haiti. When we landed in Jamaica, General Perezcassar called us together and asked us to work with...
Pacific Rim Mining Company: The Kraken of Cabañas
2010 Enero El Salvador
El Salvador lies along Central America’s Gold Belt. According to First Point Minerals Corp., this valuable belt, which runs from Guatemala down into...
An SOS for Climate Change: What Will We Young People Do?
2009 Noviembre Nicaragua
We are already seeing evidence of the environmental crisis, which has a greater effect on those of us living in the world’s basement, in the least advanced...
The Lessons of Mitch: Learned, Not Learned and Unlearned
2009 Enero Nicaragua
To mark the tenth anniversary of Hurricane Mitch, the lucid and biting Nicaraguan caricaturist Pedro Molina drew two parallel sketches of the same family...
The Splendor and Squalor of National Ecotourism
2008 Septiembre Nicaragua
The twin-volcano island of Ometepe, emerging out of the legendary Lake Cocibolca, also known as Lake Nicaragua, was nominated as Nicaragua’s candidate...
Climate Change: We Can Already See What Our Future Will Be Like
2008 Junio Nicaragua
There’s no doubt that we’re seeing and feeling climate change around the world, Nicaragua included, but there are also effects that we still don’t know...
We Have to Learn to Stop Taking Water for Granted
2008 Abril Nicaragua
When we were children in the eighties, we experienced something extraordinary: the generation before ours, young men and women only slightly older than...
Who Gets a Key to the Doors on the Forest?
2007 Diciembre Nicaragua
On the boat trip from San Carlos to Boca de Sábalos along the Río San Juan I get an intensive course on the area’s metaphors: the Tarzans—or boatmen...
Red Alert for Climate Change And a Possible Way Out
2007 Septiembre América Latina
Nobody on the planet any longer questions that climate change is real. It is a direct consequence of the culture currently dominating 100% of the Earth’s...
How Can We Give The Earth a Future?
2007 Agosto América Latina
It’s an honor for me to give this lecture to open this university’s general studies courses. I know many universities in both the East and the West...
We Barely Know the Wealth of Biodiversity Surrounding Us
2007 Junio Nicaragua
Do we Nicaraguans know what animals co-inhabit our our country with us? Not really. The first thing we need to understand is that invertebrates, which...
A Thirsty Country with Lots of Water
2007 Mayo Nicaragua
If Nicaragua has anything, it’s water. Fifteen percent of its surface is water: over 75 rivers, no fewer than 32 lagoons and two lakes that cover 9,000...
“I’ve Been in El Salvador Without Being There”
2005 Noviembre Centroamérica
...
R=T x V and R=T / C Formulas for Sisyphus
2005 Noviembre Centroamérica
...
Miguel Facussé: Fencing off Paradise
2005 Mayo Honduras
A news story tucked away in the corner of page 42 of a national newspaper on April 15 told of the arrest of ten community leaders from the southern Honduran...
Municipal Decentralization Meets the Forests
2004 Junio Nicaragua
Decentralization took a very important step forward in Nicaragua last year with the passage of a law guaranteeing central government budget transfers...
Internationalize the Amazonia?
2004 Abril Internacional
During a debate in a US university over four years ago, a young US ecologist asked Cristóvão Buarque, then the Workers Party governor of the Federal...
For the Forests, For Water, For Life
2003 Julio Honduras
Father Tamayo, the diocesan priest in Juticalpa, the capital of the eastern department of Olancho, organized and led the March for Life in defense of...
Municipal Governments and Natural Resources: Swimming Upstream?
2003 Marzo Nicaragua
San Francisco Libre’s municipal government is tired of trying to stop the logging that’s impoverishing the municipality’s forests. The people who gather...
The New Ecology: Exploiting Forests to Preserve Them
2002 Agosto América Latina
In less than forty years peasant families have gone from being heroes to being villains by clearing forest land to sow maize and beans, cultivate coffee...
Protected Areas and Natural Resources: With or Without People?
2001 Septiembre Nicaragua
In 1983, the Sandinista government decreed the creation of a natural reserve in the San Cristóbal-Casitas volcanic complex to protect what was left of...
Masaya Trembles: The Lessons of a Disaster
2000 Agosto Nicaragua
At midday on July 6, an earthquake whose epicenter was located in the volcanic lake known as Apoyo, just 6 km from the city of Masaya, registered 5.9...
An Ethics for the New Millennium: The Just Measure and Essential Caring
2000 Marzo Internacional
Once a tree has fulfilled its intrinsic potential, it is said to have reached its peak. It then dies and falls. When people have consumed their personal...
Summing Up Hurricane Mitch: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly
1999 Diciembre Nicaragua
One year after Mitch, that mega-hurricane that changed the lives of so many thousands of Central Americans, the activities to rehabilitate what it destroyed...
On the Anniversary of Mitch: The Region’s Revealing Disaster
1999 Noviembre Centroamérica
During this October and November, I traveled through several of the regions of Central America that had been battered last year by Hurricane Mitch. A...
Ciudad Darío: Home of a Poet And Thousands of “Linieros”
1999 Octubre Nicaragua
During the six days of Mitch's heaviest rain, when most other municipal mayors were out directing rescue missions and setting up shelters, Mario Quijano,...
Ocotal: Urban Planning for People
1999 Septiembre Nicaragua
It's not easy to find a municipality in Nicaragua with a central park that is taken care of as well as the one in Ocotal. Flowers and greenery flourish...
Posoltega: Unresolved Property Problems And Continuing Vulnerability
1999 Julio Nicaragua
Posoltega was the main focus of national and international attention after Hurricane Mitch's devastating passage through Central America; it is estimated...
Posoltega: Where the Land Burns
1999 Junio Nicaragua
On the road from Stockholm to Posoltega—passing through Washington, where the multilateral organizations design plans to "save" the countries of the...
Cayanlipe: Six Months of Solitude
1999 Abril Nicaragua
Five months after Mitch, activities directed at the country's reconstruction are not exactly advancing at the pace that the ongoing propaganda leads...
Puerto Morazán: Problems in an Ill-Fated Land
1999 Marzo Nicaragua
Puerto Morazán was originally known as the port that catapulted national production to northern Central America. In the municipality by the same name,...
San Francisco Libre: Giving It One More Try
1999 Enero Nicaragua
Even though hurricane-swollen lake Managua—now again commonly referred to by its original name, Xolotlán—is still well over a kilometer inland of its...
A Way Out of the Economic Growth Trap
1999 Enero Internacional
The limits of growth: A quick look backThe first Club of Rome report, with the now-historic title, "The Limits of Growth," was published 25...
Wiwilí With or Without Mitch: An X-Ray of Underdevelopment
1998 Diciembre Nicaragua
Wiwilí, in Northern Nicaragua, was not in the eye of the storm. It didn't experience the brutal punishment meted out on many other northern communities....
How Do We Make a Country Self-Supporting?
1998 Diciembre El Salvador
El Salvador cannot support itself as a country. Our years as a society are numbered. In an exercise we did we found that El Salvador has environmental...
How Managua Saw the Passage of Hurricane Mitch
1998 Diciembre Nicaragua
How have people in Managua perceived and experienced the catastrophe brought by Mitch? Have the actions of the government and other sectors corresponded...
The Environmental Law In the Eye of The Political Storm
1998 Abril El Salvador
At the end of February, with the debate about the environmental bill in the eye of the storm, the Salvadoran Center for Appropriate Technology (CESTA)...
A Tiny Endangered Country
1998 Enero El Salvador
"We have the right to live in a clean country, one with cool, leafy forests and crystalline lakes and rivers. We have the right to clean beaches, to...
Archeology of the Idea of Development
1997 Septiembre Internacional
Fallen buildings hide their secrets under mountains of earth and rubble. and mental structures are often erected on foundations covered by sand for years...
Forestry Plan Backfires
1997 Septiembre Nicaragua
When technicians from an NGO came to his community with a reforestation program, Pedro Ruiz, a small producer in the south of Masaya, told them, "You're...
From Environmentalism To Radical Ecology
1997 Julio Internacional
While conservationism protects species and environmentalism creates reserves, other deeper and sounder tendencies of ecology express amazement at the...
There's No Heaven Without Earth
1997 Junio Internacional
Perhaps the ecological discourse in these moments is the most universal because its objective-the collective destiny not of a system of life, but of...
Twenty Issues For a Green Agenda
1996 Noviembre Cuba
A Cuban fable of african origin tells that one day, a tocoloro bird began to think about going in search of the end of the world. The first thing he...
Sustainable Agriculture: The Way Out?
1995 Octubre Nicaragua
The crop systems used by peasants in the community of Las Cañas, Matagalpa, are being transformed. The peasants are using neither neolithic agriculture...
Deactivating Mines: Pacifying Nature
1995 Septiembre Nicaragua
Mined territories are one of the scars of all violent conflicts, whatever their origin and duration. Mines have been used massively since World War...
Hydroponic Farming: An Alternative For Everybody
1995 Junio Nicaragua
Felipa Rojas has become the owner of her own destiny. Although life has not been particularly generous to her as she grows older, she has found a stable...
Faith, Hope and Mung Beans
1995 Mayo Nicaragua
The mung bean is small and round, with a striking green color, like hope. And, like everything having to do with hope, it hides within its small size...
Environmental Law: For the Future of All
1995 Febrero Nicaragua
When the Spanish conquerors reached what is today Nicaragua, they marveled at the opulence of life here: gigantic trees, unknown multicolored birds,...
BT: Chronicle of an Opportunity Lost
1995 Enero Nicaragua
For more than 40 years now, we have known that insects take ill and die just like any other animal, and we are also aware that some microbes are capable...
Eucalyptus: the Bessings of a Damned Tree
1994 Noviembre Nicaragua
Is it good to plant eucalyptus? Is it bad? Or does it depend on each specific case?
Andrea Ortiz has a look not often seen among the Nicaraguan peasantry....
The Thousand and One Uses of Bamboo
1994 Octubre Nicaragua
The world demand for wood for both construction and the manufacture of cellulose, paper, resins, charcoal and a thousand other uses climbs daily. The...
SEVEN TREES FOR ANOTHER PARADISE
1994 Octubre Nicaragua
Ecological awareness is growing in Nicaragua and the rest of Central America.
Nothing has such silent and profound influence in our lives
as the...
Laws and Electronic mail: an Alternative of Struggle
1994 Septiembre Internacional
Traditionally, laws have neglected both community interests and the interests of nature and the environment. Their role has thus been viewed with mistrust...
"NIM": Nature's Own Insecticide
1994 Septiembre Nicaragua
When the Green Revolution, with its aggressive and short term agricultural production methods, spread throughout the world, it promoted a negative concept...
Mangrove Swamps: the Sea's Kindergarten
1994 Agosto Nicaragua
They get a lot of bad press they're not good for much except breeding mosquitoes and thus, malaria and other illnesses. But the truth is that mangrove...
The Marango Makes Magic in Water
1994 Julio Nicaragua
Current industry and technology would seem to have the conditions to confront all problems and satisfy all needs. But their responses and solutions...
The Sacred Jicaro Tree: An Economic Solution
1994 Mayo Nicaragua
As the old Mayan codes tell it, the jícaro tree grew out of the liberation of the people. Recent scientific research is finding that this tree offers...
Organic Agriculture: A labor of Love
1994 Abril Nicaragua
The green revolution, begun in the 1950s, was marketed at the time as the solution to all problems of hunger and production. Despite its pretensions...
Selling Sewage Sludge: A Dirty Deal
1994 Enero Nicaragua
They tore away our fruits,
they cut our branches,
they burned our trunks, and now
they want to dry out our roots
filling up our soils
with toxic...
Biodiesel: The Miracle of a "Useless" Tree
1993 Diciembre Nicaragua
According to scientific data, "tempate" (Jatropha curcas L.) is an oleaginous bushy tree belonging to the Euforbiaceas family, which has more than 3,500...
The Environment: Saving Nicaragua's Soils
1991 Diciembre Nicaragua
Due to deforestation and inappropriate agricultural practices, Nicaragua's best soils have been massively flushing into its two bordering oceans for...
An Ecological SOS in Latin America*
1991 Noviembre América Latina
One year before the 500th anniversary of the "encounter" between two worlds and two natural systems, and only a few years before the end of the 20th...
The Nicaraguan Environment.... A Legacy of Destruction
1989 Noviembre Nicaragua
The Esquipulas process has been concerned not only with problems of war and peace in Central America, but also with the region's ecological problems....
Spaceship Earth
1989 Julio Internacional
"We are living in a phase in which we have to renew our thinking daily to be able to renew life on earth. First and foremost, we need to keep nature's...
The Last Word
1989 Enero Nicaragua
“Bush’s victory is good for the opposition,” said Ramiro Gurdián, head of the opposition group, the Coordinadora Demócratica. “This keeps alive...
Nicaragua and Sisyphus
1989 Enero Nicaragua
(Excerpted from the October 29 commentary on the hurricane by Sofia Montenegro in Barricada)
Damned country! Driven into the ground again!...
Just the Facts: Damage Figures From Hurricane Joan
1989 Enero Nicaragua
Facts at a Glance
- 2100 km of roads suffered heavy damage.
- 36 bridges were rendered unusable
- Total damage to agricultural infrastructure...
Waging Peace
1989 Enero Centroamérica
The Central American peace plan has dropped out of the news these days, pushed to back pages by more startling developments in the Middle East, Angola,...
Toll Rises from Hurricane Joan: Emergency as Daily Life
1989 Enero Nicaragua
On November 15, President Daniel Ortega officially lifted the state of emergency in effect since October 20, two days before Hurricane Joan battered...