In Andes, Pope’s Ecological Line Faces Resistance
In Andes, Pope’s Ecological Line Faces Resistance
There is no shortage of environmental issues in South America, but they are not front and center because of the economic problems, points out AS/COA's Brian Winter.
QUITO, Ecuador—Pope Francis faced a delicate mission in his first major speech on global warming on Tuesday: how to balance his advocacy for a new model of development with a poor region’s yearning to exploit its natural resources.
The pontiff, on the first leg of a three-country Andean trip, emphasized in a speech the themes of his papal encyclical blaming global warming on human activity, saying mankind must take steps to reverse it.
“The human environment and the natural environment deteriorate together,” the pope, who took his name from St. Francis of Assisi, the patron saint of ecology, told students at Catholic University. “We cannot adequately combat environmental degradation unless we attend to causes related to human and social degradation....”
....With a recent downturn in the economies of the region, cash-strapped governments are pushing ever deeper into ecologically sensitive regions to search for oil and gas. From Colombia to Peru to Brazil, they are unlikely to embrace the pope’s message by scaling back on energy exploration, said Brian Winter, vice president of the New York-based Americas Society/Council of the Americas....
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