World Environment Day Highlighted from Cuba
Photo feature by Ernesto Gonzalez
HAVANA TIMES —In 1972, the United Nations declared June 5 “World Environment Day” – a celebration held in a different country each year, addressing one of the pressing environmental issues that humanity faces today.
This year, it is to be celebrated in Barbados, under the slogan of “Raise Your Voice, Not the Sea Level.” Its aim is to raise awareness about this delicate issue, which endangers the very existence of small countries (that could one day be left beneath sea-level). Many parts of the Cuban coastline could be endangered if this occurs.
In its insatiable impulse to amass wealth, humanity has degraded nature to such an extent that, should this trend continue, there might not be enough natural resources on the planet to sustain human life in a some years’ time.
Millions of hectares of forest and jungle disappear each year, thousands of plant and animal species become extinct before they are even classified, water becomes more scarce and contaminated every day (as does the atmosphere) – and we are even polluting outer space.
The environment constitutes everything around us: biodiversity, the air we breathe, the water we drink, the mineral resources we use and society as a whole. These photos of different animal and plant species and the environment in general seek to raise the awareness of citizens as regards the protection of nature, inspired by Jose Marti’s maxim: “We do not inherit the earth from our parents. We ask to borrow it from our children.”
Click on the thumbnails below to view all the photos in this gallery. On your PC or laptop, you can use the directional arrows on the keyboard to move within the gallery. On cell phones use the keys on the screen.
In one of his reminicenses in Granma, the ever unctuos Fidel criticized the Canadian mining industry and its environmental impact but carefully avoided mention of Moa – where the nickel mining is operated by Sherrit International a Canadian company. One has to agree that Cuba under the Castros does its best to protect the environment by allowing everything to return to nature. Hundreds of thousands of acres of good agricultural land redverting to bush, hard top roads being allowed to deteriorate into pot holes and gravel.
Moa? A place that has become such an environmental disaster that you are not even allowed to photograph there.