Nature’s green vs. the grey concrete jungle
RIO DE JANEIRO (AP) — Alê Roque wanders the untamed orchard in Rio de Janeiro, pushing aside leaves to point out what she helped plant last year. “This is cacao, developing well ... Look at this lime tree, it’s full ... Lots and lots of tomato ... That one’s acai ...,” she says. It seems there’s always more. “Ginger... Avocado... Pineapple... Sweet potato.”
She crouches toward a plump yam, and stops to make a mental note to pick it with the children she’s teaching to garden here and in several other spots in the community. In addition to providing free produce to residents, there’s another benefit: it’s markedly cooler in this blessed shade — a rarity in this part of the city, far from the sea breeze of Copacabana and Ipanema.
The scarce scrap of vacant land is just outside downtown on the slope of Providencia, Rio’s first favela, where working-class homes cram up against one another at slipshod angles and bullet holes attest to the presence of drug traffickers.
It’s one of dozens of places where people are starting projects to create a greener version of a tree-starved urban landscape that contrasts with the verdant rainforest looming over the city. The activist group Catalytic Communities has mapped sustainable projects across the city, and is trying to foster a support network.
“There seems to be now, all of a sudden, in the last six months even, a growth in interest,” said Theresa Williamson, the group’s executive director.
Roque argues that if kids spend their waking days exposed only to alleys, bullets, empty drug capsules and trash, they’ll struggle to contribute good to the world. They need places to play and pick flowers.
“How are you going teach kids about Mother Nature if they don’t have contact with it?” says Roque, 49. “This could be happening in places all over the world, in other favelas, other little areas.”
Rio is famed for magnificent views of its coastal rainforest’s wild topography. Look outside the postcard, though, and there’s a picture of urban dystopia after decades of slapdash sprawl and government neglect. It’s said even the Christ the
Redeemer statue, perched atop a jungle peak near the coast, has his back turned to most of the metropolis.
Whole neighborhoods have severed connections with the forest and, during Rio’s summer, residents feel the lack of greenery in their flesh.
This month, the city’s top temperatures breached 100 degrees Fahrenheit, but people focus instead on “apparent temperature,” a measure that includes wind and humidity -- “sensação” -- that spiked as high as 131 degrees on Jan. 11, just shy of the record.
Rio’s public policy for green spaces trails far behind other cities including
Seoul, Lisbon, Durban and Medellin, and even Brazilian state capitals like Recife and Belo Horizonte, according to Cecilia Herzog, president of Inverde, an organization that researches green infrastructure and urban ecology. So people are taking matters into their own hands, she added.
The city has begun paying attention. Rio this month started planting native tree species to create 25 “fresh islands” in the city’s West Zone.
Meantime, it’s only getting hotter in Brazil, as in the rest of the world. Its Southeast region -- where Rio is located — has recorded three of its steamiest five years on record since 2014.