Chile’s Atacama Desert is known for its beauty, wildlife, starry night skies and amazing hot air balloon rides. Now it’s also becoming infamous for its dunes of discarded fast fashion.

    Up to 59,000 tons of unsold clothes make their way from the U.S. and Europe to the Iquique Port in Northern Chile’s Atacama Desert every year, according to an Aljazeera estimate. The idea is to sell the clothes in Latin America. But only about 20,000 tons of the clothes leave Chile. What’s left in the Zona Franca de Iquique, or tax-free import zone, winds up piled up in illegal desert landfills or burned.

    Clothing takes hundreds of years to biodegrade, if it ever does at all. Many municipal landfills won’t take textiles because chemicals they contain seep into the ground and cause problems.

    Some of the other problems with fast fashion — child labor, terrible working conditions and outrageous water consumption — were already common knowledge among people who care about such things.

    But the idea of piles of cheap, vibrantly colored clothing journeying from China to the U.S. and then to an enormous desert in South America is mind-bogglingly bizarre and wrong. One recycling project, Ecofibra Chile, is working with importers to remove textile waste and transform it into thermal insulation panels. Other local groups are trying to get funds to address the problem of discarded clothing with heavy machinery to remove the clothes and recover public spaces, starting with areas closest to cities. Of course, there will still be the problem of where to relocate all those hoodies and dresses.

Teresa Bergen. Fast fashion stacks up in Chile’s Atacama Desert. Internet: www.inhabitat.com (adapted)

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An e-mail to Mary

    Hi, Mary!

    How are you? I miss you so much!

I arrived in Rome last week and I’m having a lot of fun. This morning my parents and I woke up at 8:00 and had a great breakfast at the hotel. Afterwards, I walked a little and saw many tourists (many from Russia and China) and even some famous people!

Now we are going to Venice.
How are things in Las Vegas? Come meet us!
See you soon!
Paul.

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[1]  The pilot of a Beech Baron airplane noticed that one of
his engines was on fire. He contacted the nearest air traffic
control center to ask for help. 
  The voice __________ the radio answered, “This is the
[5] Control Tower. “Please inform your altitude”.
  The pilot replied, “We are at 30,000 feet”.

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    Notwithstanding the current turbulent socio-economic conditions in the country, Vice President Yemi Osinbajo has insisted that generating economic growth, developing human capital, and building Nigeria’s infrastructural backbone is doable. To achieve this, Osinbajo said all tiers of government and critical partners ought to be focused, open-minded and collaborative in meeting shared aspirations to provide better and decent jobs for Nigerians, especially the youths.

(Terhemba Daka. www.guardian.ng, 06.08.2021. Adapted.)

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In a new survey of North American Indian languages, Marianne Mithun gives an admirably clear statement of what is lost as each language ceases to be used. “Speakers of these languages and their descendants are acutely aware of what it can mean to lose a language,” she begins – and this is perfectly true, although these speakers must have taken the decision themselves not to teach the language to their children. It happens all too often – people regret that their language and culture are being lost but at the same time decide not to saddle their own children with the chore of preserving them.

When a language disappears [Mithun continues] the most intimate aspects of culture can disappear as well: fundamental ways of organizing experience into concepts, of relating ideas to each other, of interacting to people. The more conscious genres of verbal art are usually lost as well: traditional ritual, oratory, myth, legends, and even humor. Speakers commonly remark that when they speak a different language, they say different things and even think different thoughts. These are very interesting assertions. They slip by in a book on anthropological linguistics, where in a book on linguistic theory they would be highly contentious. Is it true that “fundamental ways of organizing experience into concepts [and] of relating ideas to each other” are specific to individual languages and are therefore likely to be lost when a language ceases to be used? Is it true that when speakers speak a different language, they “say different things and even think different thoughts”? Again, the extent to which thought depends on language is very controversial. These questions must be now faced, because only when we have reached an opinion on them will we be able to accept or reject Marianne Mithun’s conclusion: “The loss of a language represents a definitive separation of a people from its heritage. It also represents an irreparable loss for us all, the loss of opportunities to glimpse alternative ways of making sense of the human experience.”

Fonte: Dalby, Andrew. Language in danger. New York: Columbia University Press, 2003, p. 252; 285. Adaptado.