100 Places to Remember > Chicago

USA ■ The Windy City has been the Midwest’s centre of transportation, industry, finance, and entertainment ever since it was founded in the 1830s on the south-eastern shore of the great Lake Michigan. Today, Chicago is the third most populous city in the USA. More than 9.5 million people live in the Chicago metropolitan area, popularly known as Chicagoland. It is intersected by the Chicago River, which runs through the downtown area, its banks lined with modern architecture and futuristic tower blocks.

Known as a Mecca of music, film, theatre and culture, Chicago is a melting pot of the descendants of immigrants of every imaginable origin. Its most famous son is US president Barack Obama, but others include the notorious gangster, Al Capone. Chicago attracts 45 million tourists a year. Chicago is also an extremely important transport hub, with a network of 97 km of underground freight railways encompassing most of the downtown area, and freeways connecting it with other cities in the Midwest.

In the last 30 years, the city has seen an average temperature rise of 1.5°C. In 1995, a severe heatwave killed 700 Chicagoans. In 1986, 1996 and 2008, it experienced severe flooding, with torrential rain shutting down highways and railroads, causing damage to streets and bridges and flooding properties in much of Chicagoland. Throughout the rest of the 21st century, Chicago could experience a gradual, dramatic increase in heatwaves and flooding due to global warming. Prolonged summer droughts and heavy rainfall would have a grave effect on its infrastructure and transport system. An increase in hot summer days with temperatures rising above 43°C, combined with unpredictable heavy rain and flooding, could cause more heat-related health problems and damage Chicago’s tourism industry. By the end of the century, the climate in Chicago could be similar to that of southern states like Texas and Alabama today.

Photography: Jim Richardson

100 Places to Remember > Recife

Brazil ■ This commercial centre of north-eastern Brazil is also a prime destination for tourists thanks to its pleasant weather and 187 kilometres of white beaches. Located close to the Equator, the coastal city of Recife enjoys a year-round warm climate and gentle trade winds from the Atlantic Ocean.

The city’s past as one of the first Portuguese colonies in Brazil and a main port for the slave trade has left an indelible mark on Recife. Nowadays it is a cultural melting pot with an ethnic mix of Indians, Africans and Europeans. African culture is particularly visible in the local religion, music, dance and cuisine. When the Dutch took control of Recife from 1630 to 1654, it also became home to the first Jewish community and synagogue in the Americas. Some of those early Jewish settlers later fled to North America, founding the first Jewish community in New Amsterdam – now known as New York.

A line of coral reefs protects the shoreline of Recife and gives the city its name, which is Portuguese for “reefs”. Water covers the reefs at high tide but at low tide, natural pools form along the shoreline. Inland, Recife is full of waterways due to its location at the point where the rivers Beberibe and Capibaribe converge and flow into the ocean. Due to its low-lying coasts and dense coastal development, Recife – like Rio de Janeiro and Buenos Aires – is highly vulnerable to rising sea levels, hurricanes, and storm surges. Any rise in sea surface temperature, combined with the increasing acidity of the ocean, is likely to damage Recife’s natural barriers – the coral reefs – leaving the city even more exposed to flooding.

Photography: Andy Caulfield

100 Places to Remember > Caribbean Sea

Caribbean Sea ■ Sea turtles have been around for tens of millions of years. The males spend their entire lives in the ocean. The females venture onto beaches for a few hours once or twice every second year, lay their eggs in holes 40-50 cm deep and cover them with sand before promptly returning to the sea. Despite living in most of the tropical and subtropical waters around the world, several types of sea turtle are registered as endangered species.

Four types of endangered sea turtles feed and mate among the corals of the Caribbean. One of them is called the hawksbill turtle. Sea turtles of the Caribbean feed and mate among the corals and nestle on the sandy beaches around the rim of the sea, from Barbados in the east to Mexico in the west, from Florida in the north to Colombia in the south.

At about a metre long and weighing up to 120 kg, the hawksbill is one of the smaller sea turtles. Considered a delicacy, it has been hunted for centuries. Now, global warming poses a new threat to its survival. Rising sea levels and temperatures, acidification of the oceans, and extreme storms could erode the beaches where the females nest and could threaten the coral reefs upon which the turtles depend.

This would pose a serious threat to them. Although capable of migrating for thousands of kilometres and taking up to 30 years to mature, sea turtles always return to the beach where they were born to mate and nest. Higher sand temperature presents another threat. The turtles have no sex chromosomes, so the ambient temperature of the sand determines whether hatchlings are born male or female. The hotter the sand, the shorter the incubation and the more likely the hatchling will be female. In other words, hotter sand might result in a drastic decline in the number of male turtles, which would pose a severe threat to the survival of one of the oldest living animal species on the planet.

Photography: Raul Touzon

100 Places to Remember > Kauai (Hawaii)

USA ■ The fourth largest of the Hawaiian Islands, Kauai is one of the wettest spots on the earth. Large parts of the mountainous island are swathed in cloud. These lush and mossy forests are home to the colourful Hawaiian honeycreeper, an endangered bird species. Even small shifts in rainfall patterns could cause major local changes, putting the islands’ distinct ecosystem under severe stress.

These rare birds use their long, downward-curved bills to sip nectar from flowers, hovering like hummingbirds and emitting a variety of sounds, from nasal squeaks to clear, flutelike calls. The species of honeycreeper that is endemic to Hawaii lives at an elevation above 1,500 metres where the climate is too cool for mosquitoes to survive. Most of the Hawaiian honeycreepers are only 10-13 cm long and weigh no more than eight grams. They are extremely vulnerable to diseases like avian malaria. The Hawaiian cloud forests make up one of the ecosystems that is most at risk due to climate change. Relatively small shifts in patterns could cause major local changes, putting the islands’ distinct ecosystems under pressure.

Deforestation and non-indigenous species like pigs and goats have decimated the honeycreepers habitat in recent years, and it is now an endangered species. With the projected rise in temperatures, mosquitoes are likely to gain a foothold at higher elevations in the Kauai mountains, slowly driving the honeycreeper to extinction.

Photography: Ira Block

CUBA ■  It might be a trend in the western world, but organic farming is a daily requirement in Cuba in order to provide food to its population. During the Soviet days, Cuba still had chemical fertilizers and pesticides that were used in its farms. But after the collapse of the Berlin Wall, the Soviet Union could not make the appropriate supplies anymore. With the American trade embargo, the Cuban government had a new challenge: providing its people sustainable agriculture where the country would rely on itself to produce food.

Organic farming is a form of agriculture that produces foods in a natural way. The process relies on biological pest control, compost and crop sequencing to maintain a rich and healthy soil. This method avoids or limits the use of synthetic fertilizers and pesticides, as well as genetically modified organisms. The whole idea of organic faming is to supply food to people without harming the environment.

For Cuba, organic farming was more an obligation than an ethical choice, and it took major planning on a national scale to make the conversion in just a few years. It was necessary to return to old methods using hand tools and compost from animals and plants. There are also over 200 laboratories all over the island that incubate insects, mushrooms and bacteria that can defeat in a natural way all the microorganisms that may harm plants.

The success of bio farming had also a major effect on demographic distribution. In fact, a lot of people have decided to leave the city to live in the countryside. This shift was necessary because organic farming requires more labour than conventional agriculture.

In these times where there is more proof that chemicals used as fertilizers and pesticides are poisonous to humans, this Cuban large-scale farming experiment should be watched by other countries.

Source: Courrier International
Photo: The COP15 Post

USA ■  The auto junkyard of Ayer, Massachusetts, was originally used to retrieve car parts. But with the development of recycling methods, dismantling and storing vehicles was abandoned and replaced by merely the retrieval of metals (steel, aluminum, copper, etc.). Such vehicule ramains deposits will not be put to an end anytime soon: in 2008 car manufacturers have globaly produced more than 70 million vehicles. During that year, for 1000 individuals, there were 593 cars in the Europenian Union, 594 in Japan and 824 in the United States.

Source: Courrier International
Photos: Alex MacLean

HONG KONG ■  Although recently constructed, buildings of the commuter town of Tseung Kwan of the New Territories must already be repaired through scaffolding. The Chinese administrative region of Hong Kong, which has 7 million people jammed into an area of less than 1,100 km², has one of the highest population densities in the world. This trade capital has an excellent public transport network structured by an express subway train which is very rapid and efficient. A symbol of hyperconsumption, the city also offers to its many tourists huge opportunities for inexpensive shopping (theoretically).

Source: Courrier International
Photos: Michael Wolf

GHANA ■  The Agbogbloshie Market in Accra is a place where young men and children work by dismantling computers and other e-waste in search of spare parts to sell at the nearby open-air market. Those machines came mostly from countries of the European Union, where legislation prohibits the illegal discharge of that type of waste and are forced to recycle. Many Europeans are therefore donating their old computers to the Third World. As most recipient countries do not have facilities for recycling, these computers end up sooner or later on markets like Agbogbloshie, and are thus dismantled and the recovered pieces are burned to retrieve copper, which gives off noxious fumes. The air, soil and water are therefore heavily polluted by toxic heavy metals like lead, cadmium, mercury, etc.

Source: Courrier International
Photos: Karl Melander

The story of stuff is a twenty minute documentary that was released on the internet, criticising the ways used of producing and selling goods and services, and the effects of the life-cycle on the environment. It was released on Decembre 4th 2007, and is hosted by Annie Leonard, a graduate degree and a critic of international trade.