ENVIRONMENT These are articles previously published by Toward Freedom related to this category.
In the middle of the modern, concrete city of Caracas, Venezuela, Noralí Verenzuela is standing in a garden dressed in jeans and work boots. She is the director of the Organopónico Bolivar I, the first urban, organic garden to show its green face in the heart of the city of Caracas, Venezuela.
Marcela Dávila hands us hardhats and leads the way toward the intake pumps. Over raging vats of liquid, she explains how water makes its way from the River Suquía to the taps and toilets of her fellow citizens in Córdoba, Argentina.
"Something is happening to the complex system that sustains life on earth," observe the narrators of the new film "The Great Warming." "And the fingerprints are ours."
"Who will come to our town when the smokestack is making its toxic clouds, when the fish die off from the water pollution? How will we make our living then?" -- Gualeguaychú taxi driver
In the stillness of an autumn afternoon in Argentina, Anna and Oscar Bargas launch into their story across the table in an off-season hotel lobby. Organizers with the Gualeguaychú Citizens Environmental Assembly (ACAG), they had never been activists before, just regular participants in small town civic life.
Two years ago, in early November 2003, after a ferocious markets-based campaign in the US, an agreement was signed by US and Chilean environmental groups with the two largest wood products companies in Chile. The agreement, facilitated by Home Depot, was received as an important step forward in promoting collaborative resolution to international environmental conflicts. The agreements language binds the companies to a conservation focused solutions process with the environmental groups, and an end to the practice of the substitution of the native forest with exotic tree species plantations.
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