For 50 years, the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) has offered the world a way forward “based on a vision for a better, healthier Earth built on the pillars of international cooperation,” Secretary-General António Guterres told a landmark special session on Thursday, commemorating the agency’s golden anniversary.
Last modified on Tue 11 May 2021 11.43 EDT
When I was a child, my family would drive three hours from our home in Belo Horizonte to visit my grandfatherâs ranch near the town of Santana dos Montes. On the way, we would cross the Espinhaço mountain range, which runs north to south in the central-eastern portion of Brazil.
Espinhaço means âspineâ in Portuguese, and the name could not be more apt. The range spans 1,200km (750 miles), its bony peaks reach as high as 2km, and the thriving, humid Atlantic Forest drops away to the east, foggy and dense with evergreens, ferns, mosses and bromeliads, the air bursting with the strange songs of birds you never see. On the west side of the mountains, the arid, savannah-like Cerrado stretches flat and exposed, with golden grasslands and small, twisted trees.
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“The mountain range is our soil, our life,” affirms Maria de Fátima Alves, head of the Commission for the Defense of the Rights of Extractivist Communities (CODECEX).
Known as Tatinha, she lives in the Serra do Espinhaço, a mountain range more than 1,000 kilometers (600 miles) long in Minas Gerais state, that marks the eastern transition from the Cerrado savanna biome to Brazil’s semi-arid Northeast.
Tatinha is one of many inhabitants in hundreds of Serra communities who earn their living by gathering flowers, known as sempre-vivas (always-alive), that grow wild in the hills, and selling them.
The name, sempre-vivas, is apropos: the Serra’s beautiful flowering plants are hardy survivors: blooming again and again despite being rooted in shallow, nutrient-poor sandy soils, atop rocky outcrops. Unable to grow long roots to access water and minerals from subsoils, these flowering plants have evolved alternative strategies for surviving drought.