Doubling Down on Climate Change

The World Bank will stop financing oil and natural gas prospecting and drilling projects after 2019, but Colombia's oil industry vows that won't slow its exploitation of the dirtiest sorts of hydrocarbons.

So, even tho Colombia will be hard hit by climate change: it will lose biodiversity, coffee-growing regions will suffer, its glaciers will melt and the city of Cartagena may be left as an island - its oil sector sees no reason to reduce its contribution to that crisis.

That means investing some US $42 billion over the next two decades, say oil industry officials to drill

Colombia's non-conventional hydrocarbons
are in some of its most biodiverse regions.

some 7,000 new wells and perhaps double Colombia's new hydrocarbon production by increasing controversial methods such as fracking, which some experts warn threatens Colombia's water supply.

'Colombia doesn't have the luxury of leaving these resources in the ground,' the El Espectador newspaper writes, in what sounds like a quote from an oil executive.

Unfortunately, the cost of pumping out these resources, in lost biodiversity and natural areas, and particularly in destruction from climate change, may far outweigh its oil income. But nobody appears to be considering that side of the balance sheet.

Colombia can't stop climate change on its own - and it may in fact be way too late to stop it at all. But once it really gets going, Colombia will have nobody to blame but itself.

And many of the non-conventional resource blocks overlap indigenous territories.

By Mike Ceaser, of Bogotá Bike Tours

Humans Discover the Olinguito - and Condemn It?

An olinguito. (Photo: Smithsonian Magazine)

This week, the Smithsonian Institution announced the 'discovery' of a new species of carnivorous mammal, related to the raccoon, native to the cloud forests of Ecuador and Colombia. It's the first new carnivore species to be identified in the past 35 years.

Indigenous people walk thru Yasuni National Park.
Will oil drilling devastate their culture? 

Except that the olinguito isn't really new. Specimens had been studied in laboratories and even kept in zoos - where the keepers couldn't understand why they weren't interested in mating with other with their zoo companions. It turned out that zoologists had been confusing the olinguito with other, species in the olingo genus.

Ecuador's Yasuni National Park,
on the Colombian border.

Humans' tardy realization that the olinguitos were a distinct species in the olingo genus probably doesn't matter as much to the olinguitos as do peoples' other activities - their invasion and deforestation of the olinguitos' cloud forest habitat. Almost half of the little animals' habitat has already been destroyed by agriculture and urban development.

And that trend looks to accelerate with Ecuador's decision this week to open its vast Yasuni National Park to oil drilling. The park, which covers 9,820 square kilometers may be one of the most biodiverse places on earth, according to Wikipedia. In a single hectare, it has as many insect species as all of North America, as well as myriad bats, amphibians and mammals. Several groups of indigenous people also inhabit the park, living in voluntary isolation from outsiders.

How much impact? Mining titles
awarded by Colombian departments. 

But the park, a UNESCO Biosphere Reserve, also close to a billion barrels of oil. In 2007, the Ecuadorean government offered to leave that oil underground if other countries would pay Ecuador half of the oil's value, or more than 3 billion dollars. But Ecuador received only $13 million and more than $100 million in pledges.

"The world has failed us," Ecuadorean Pres. Rafael Correa said this week, and criticized rich countries' "hypocrisy."

Yasuni National Park at nightfall.
(Photo: Understory.ran)

Correa is right, of course. But one can also criticize Correa's policies as short-sighted and selfish. When it is burned, the oil will pump hundreds of millions of tons of global warming gases into the atmosphere, making Ecuador, a member of OPEC, even more of an accomplice in climate change. The drilling work will also trigger wide pollution and deforestation.

I don't think that the olinguito, which inhabits high-altitude regions, lives in Yasuni park. But Ecuador's decision is only the beginning of wider oil exploration and mining across the Amazon. Ecuador, in fact, is also opening huge areas adjoining the park to oil drilling. And Colombia, naturally, is opening its own wilderness areas to resource exploitation. (Coincidentally, this week Nicaragua also announced that it will open sea waters awarded to it last year by an international court to oil exploration. The waters are disputed by Colombia, which had barred oil exploration from the region, which contains the largest barrier reef in the Americas.)

A waterfall in Yasuni National Park.
(Photo: Sense and Sustainability)

Matt Finer of the Center for International Environmental Law told Britain's Guardian newspaper that Ecuador's decision was "deeply disappointing..."The Yasuni-ITT Initiative was the lone exception to the relentless expansion of hydrocarbon projects deeper into the most remote tracts of the western Amazon. Now there is really no viable alternative to stop the wave of drilling slated for the most biodiverse region of the world."

The olinguito may have entered human awareness only to be soon driven to extinction by human greed. And with it will go many other species still unknown to humanity.

By Mike Ceaser, of Bogotá Bike Tours

Catalina's Endless Urban Expedition

Catalina and some of her sketches.

Three years ago, Catalina Gomez Arias saw something more in Bogotá than bricks and concrete. That launched Catalina on an adventure which she continues today.

One of Catalina's man sketches.

A man walks thru Independence. The palm with the white
trunk is the wax palm, the palma de cera,
Colombia's national tree.

Catalina has criss-crossed Bogotá chronicling the city's sometimes exuberant, often struggling, urban flora. And it is often the meekest, most struggling and ignored fauna which most fascinates her.

Mateo and a native plant. He

 points out the paradox of biodiverse Colombia 

importing plants from overseas.

"Bogotá is a growing city," she says. "And as it grows, it produces cracks," in the sidewalks, thru which plants stuggle up. "And that produces nature which we call 'trash.'"

A decidedely not-native pine tree in
Independence Park in Bogotá.

Walikng past non-native palms
near the bullfighting stadium.

She photographs and makes intricate ink drawings of the plants. She displayed her work this weekend in Casa Tomada, a stylish cafe/bookstore in Teusaquillo's appropriately tree-lined Palermo neighborhood, as part of a comemoration of Colombia's Independence Day, 20 de Julio. While Catalina agreed that her work doesn't have any connection to Independence Day, her project's title does have a clear historical reference: to the famous Expedition Botanica, led by Alvaro Mutis, which documented Colombia's botanical biodiversity between 1783 and 1815. Sadly, Catalina observed, the exepdition's drawings are all in Madrid today.

Exuberant vegetation fills a canyon in
Bogotá's Eastern Hills.

Catalina's work has taken her up and down Bogotá's hillsides, where rivers still flow thru vegetation-choked ravines. In the city proper, most of the city's rivers, sadly, are buried in pipelines. In doing her work, Catalina has been frustrated by lack of interest from city institutions and even outright stonewalling from officialdom.

"The more they denied me the information, the more I insisted," she said.

Cyclists ride past huge, non-native trees
the National Park in Bogotá.

The resulting collection of sketches commemorates an urban ecosystem which is omnipresent but all but ignored.

Check out Catalina's work on Flickr: www.flickr.com/photos/magazzineamazing

Mateo Hernandez, an environmental restorer who gave a talk at Casa Tomada, said that Bogotá has made real strides in returning native trees to the city. A few decades ago, he said, all of Bogotá's street trees were exotic pines, ashes and eucalyptus. Today, about one third are native Colombian species. Similarly, Bogotá's Botanical Gardens has planted many more native species.

It's an advance.

Newly planted trees along Carrera Septima.
But are they native?

However, for native bushes and other smaller plants, the city has done nothing, Mateo says. And those plants provide necessary resources for insects, birds and other small native animals. He gave the example of the chusque, an invasive bamboo which provides food and shelter for many native species including birds, caterpillars and butterflies. For centuries chusque has been aggressively chopped down by residents of the Sabana of Bogotá, but Mateo said at least one stand survives in the Eastern Hills and there's another in the Botanical Gardens - altho the gardens' own workers, evidently ignorant of its importance, chopped that one back recently.

More encouragingly, however, Mateo said that the Eastern Hills' native tree species, which were harvested ruthlessly a century ago for firewood, are now advancing again over their historic habitat.

But their recovery will only be possible as long as that habitat remains. Buildings, often illegal or questionable, are invading Bogotá's hillsides - much of which is supposed to be a sacrosanct Forestry Reserve.

"Of ten steps," to restore local fauna, says Mateo, "we've taken only one.

Mateo blogs at: http://biodiversidadyconservacion.blogspot.com/

By Mike Ceaser, of Bogotá Bike Tours

Big Mining, Small Taxes?

Mining, in all its beauty.

President Santos often calls the mining sector one of Colombia's economic 'locomotives.' But a new report by the contraloria, the government audit office, suggests that the mining industry isn't contributing all that it should for Colombia.

According to the new report, summarized by El Tiempo, the mining industry is using questionable deductions to radically reduce its taxes - 200 pesos in taxes lost for each 100 actually paid. As a result, while mining's official tax rate is 33% of profits, its actual rate is only about 10%.

The report also found contradictions between Colombia's actual gold export numbers and those reported to the government, which were 53 tons less between 2003 and 2011.

Mining, of course, does pump money into the economy in other ways, thru wages and purchase. But it also has a huge deficit, particular from its environmental impacts. For each ton of coal produced, the industry produces ten times as much waste, called tailings. Some of those tailings cover forests and choke rivers. El Espectador reported recently that there are many mining concessions inside of National Parks, apparently in violation of the law.

Mining is already notorious, of course, for its environmental impacts, often dubious respect for environmental laws and its often unhealthy impacts on poor neighboring communities.

And things may get even worse for the environment. In 2010, Colombia approved a new Mining Code to replace the 2001 version. But the next year a court ruled the 2010 code invalid because indigenous communities had not been consulted. At the same time, the court extended the code's validity for two years while a replacement could be developed. But a new code hasn't been created, meaning that as of mid-May the weak, outdated old 2001 code may kick back in.


By Mike Ceaser, of Bogotá Bike Tours

Natural History at the National University

A deer and jaguar at the National University's Natural History Museum.

Think of Bogotá's National University and graffiti, radical politics - and maybe even education - come to mind.

From the Animal Bodies exhibit,
this friendly dog. 

But the university's sprawling campus in the Teusaquillo district, known as the Ciudad Universitaria, contains several museums which are worth a visit, especially as part of a look at of the campus's leftist politics, as expressed in its colorful graffiti and frequent demonstrations.

From the Zoom exhibit,
a fern frond uncurls. 

One of those museums, which also include an art museum, a herbarium, even one displaying musical instruments, is the Natural History Museum, which the city might look toward as inspiration for a full-scale museum about Colombia's great human and ecological diversity somewhere in central Bogotá.

As it is, the university's effort is an interesting, if low-budget, museum, which should have particular interest for Bogotá residents (especially if they have kids and do not have queasy stomachs) thanks to its displays about the region's zoological, paleontological and arqueological histories - which receive less than their deserved attention on a continent where the Incas, Aztecs and Mayans and Argentina's dinosaurs hog the show.

Skulls of prehistoric local residents. 

The museum also has temporary and changing associated exhibits, including a current one called 'Animal Bodies' - a zoological version of the famous and grotesque traveling exhibit of preserved human tissues, and another called 'Zoom' of magnified photos of colorful plants and insects.

The National University also has several off-campus museums in Bogotá, including the Claustro de San Agustin, just west of the Casa de Nariño, and the one-time home of martyred politician Jorge Eliecer Gaitan, in the Teusaquillo neighborhood a few blocks west of the Parque Nacional.

The Zoom photography exhibit is scheduled to run one more week, the Animal Bodies exhibit is scheduled to remain thru the end of March.

A more familiar scene at the National University, the Plaza del Ché.

A 6,000-year-old skeleton from the Tequendama area. 

Ever met an elephant in Bogotá? They used to roam here, as this fossilized skull proves. 

A Zoom image of a flower. 

By Mike Ceaser, of Bogotá Bike Tours