Indigenous people living near the Teles Pires and São Manoel dams in the Brazilian Amazon say the projects have polluted their river, causing health problems and wrecking the fishery. COVID-19 made things worse.
IBAMA, Brazil’s environmental agency, has reversed itself, allowing Norte Energia, operator of the mega-dam, to divert water flow to turbines, potentially wrecking the river’s Big Bend Indigenous and traditional fishery.
A plan by Brazil’s Norte Energia, builder and operator of the Belo Monte mega-dam, to drastically reduce Xingu River water flows will be a disaster for habitat, fish, fisheries, and riverine communities, experts say.
A planned industrial shipping channel would destroy vital fish habitat at the Lourencão Rocks on the Tocantins River in the Brazilian Amazon, while also likely wrecking traditional fishing livelihoods.
In a city known for the color grey because of skyscrapers and high pollution levels, the green of Jaraguá State Park’s famed Jaraguá Peak provides a welcome respite. Situated in…
Amazon mega-dam was built with 11,233 MW capacity, but has fallen far short, even as deforestation and drought make the goal more remote. The US$9.5 billion dam may never be profitable.
Tiffany Higgins is a poet, translator, and journalist writing on Brazil and the environment. She is a Fulbright scholar and will begin research in the Amazon in 2022. Her long form narrative journalism appears in Granta and Guernica, and her poems in Poetry, the San Francisco Chronicle, and elsewhere. She is the author of “The Apparition at Fort Bragg” and “And Aeneas Stares into Her Helmet.” In 2020, she was the Annie Tanner Clark Fellow in Environmental Humanities at the University of Utah. She lives in Oakland, California.
