Shangri-La and El Dorado: hoped-for earthly utopias, searched for but never quite found. Last month offered glimpses of the real stories of both, through the debut of the restored version of John Noel’s 1924 film The Epic of Everest and the British Museum’s exhibition Beyond El Dorado. Though separated by almost 400 years, the searches…
In the 1980s, perhaps in reaction against the suffocating atmosphere of Thatcher’s Britain, there was a tremendous appetite for knowledge about and if possible direct contact with inspiring political and social movements in other countries. Many seemed to offer hope for the kind of progressive change that no longer seemed possible in the UK. With…
Today is the fortieth anniversary of the coup that toppled Salvador Allende. There are still many unresolved crimes from his period in power. Twenty years ago, I spent a week working on a housing project in one of Santiago’s poorest barrios. It was only three years since Pinochet had left office; people guardedly expressed a…
The Robber of Memories by Michael Jacobs, Granta, 2012. Colombia’s Magdalena River could claim to be the second most important in South America after the Amazon. In some ways it’s more important, if a judgement hinges on the Spanish conquest and its aftermath, since the Magdalena allowed the invaders to reach the Andean regions where…
Proyecto Sol (‘Project Sun’) has been installing solar panels in remote rural communities for nine years. It’s about to start a new phase in the community known simply as ‘Sector 80’, an isolated area to the north of Lake Nicaragua. This community, which had no electricity at all and still has no water supply, received…
Earlier this year the WWF announced that Nutella, the chocolate spread, would soon be produced only from sustainable palm oil. This sounds like good news. Millions of hectares of rainforest have been cleared to make way for palm plantations. In Borneo and Sumatra, this could soon mean the extinction of the orangutan. The smog that…