Trouble had been brewing in the Bolivian village of Santa Rosa for weeks. That morning, one of Serafin Carrasco’s cows had been killed, the neighbors angry that Serafin and his four colleagues were starting a watershed forest conservation program. “We should wait a few months for the tension to disappear,” the four others had agreed. Although alone in his determination, Serafin was in no mood to give up….
A little known fact about Venezuela is that grandmothers and engineers are at the forefront of the struggle to improve access to water and sanitation in poor neighborhoods. Nancy la Rosa, Rosalba Ruíz, Florencia Gutiérrez, Petra Escalona and Sulay Morales, all in their golden years, are working as spokespeople and organizers of the technical water committees (MTAs, mesas técnicas de agua) …
The vast Amazon rainforest spans over eight South American countries and covers an area of approximately 6.7 million square kilometers. Thirty million people live in the Amazon, coexisting with about 10 percent of the known wildlife species. The immense network of rivers, lakes and wetlands overlapping this area forms the largest watershed on earth, accounting for 15 percent to 16 percent of the total river discharge into the oceans….
Seventeen–year–old Erika Ybazeta went to school in the small town of Santa Eulalia in the Peruvian highlands. The town is less than an hour’s drive from Lima, the coastal city of nine million that is the nation’s economic and political center. After graduating, Erika was only able to find work doing subsistence farming on her family’s small parcels of land in the nearby rural community of Cashahuacra. …
