WEBSÉRIE | Para Quem Sopram os Ventos? | - Ep03

I know that when you go into Galinhos, one of the postcards, unfortunately is the stinky dead mangrove wetland. This has been sensitive to me since I arrived here. At the time, this had a major environmental impact because of the salt flats.

A lot of fish were killed because the fish couldn't breathe in the water. No family has ever been compensated. The fishermen families who live here, those who came to this place to fish used to catch the "Galos" fish who named this place.

WHO DOES THE WIND BLOW TO? CLEAN ENERGY? To start with, I love this place.

We adopt people, don't we? I've adopted Galinhos as my land. When I love a place, I defend it.

It has my soul. This has a cost, right? It costs to all of us who defend impartially a place with many environmental weaknesses.

And due to political issues, things don't happen. In 2008 the first researches on wind potential in the region started. However, the first public hearing was on 11/29/2011 causing anger and worries about the the socio-environmental impacts in the region.

Our issue was not against the wind power, the renewable energy, but against its installation in the dunes, for several reasons. One of the things we observed was how the farm was made. When implementing it, they used heavy machines to open up their way on the dunes, and build the roads to each spot where a tower would stand.

These roads are used until today for maintenance. There was a deep impact on the dunes, concerning this. The whole structure of the dune was affected to make the installation possible.

The towers were not placed there easily. They had to make roads and they damaged the dunes a lot. The environment speaks for itself.

The mangrove wetland has its role, nursing life. The dunes, too. So, these areas need to be preserved.

We have a serious problem of erosion and silting. Under the dunes, there's a water table we depend on for water. In some parts, they lowered or extinguished the dunes.

They simply don't exist anymore. A great part of the dunes was reduced in size. The access for the buggy rides is too short now.

It was longer, before. We used to take tourists to the inter-dune lagoons. There were many of them before the farm.

And we used them as a tourist spot for the view and photos. Those lagoons were very pretty. But they don't exist anymore.

I think the priority for the farm in the dunes, should be revised. Galinhos as well as Ceará are examples that installing the farms in the dunes doesn't work. The environmental offices should analyze well, consider other existing examples, and not permit them in the dunes because the impact is really big.

It's absurd to think of that in a unique dune in the world, because the Rosado Dunes are unique in the world in terms of beauty, biodiversity, fauna, and flora There are a few places in the world that work as bird breeding spaces for birds from Africa, Antarctica and other lands. The eolian farms are destroying this. In the dune areas in that region there's breeding of an endangered species, the Batuira Bicuda or Charadres wilsonia.

This species breeds in the region, and when searching for food, for wet areas, they might suffer collision. In this case, we could be favoring higher numbers, leading them, in the long-term, to extinction. But this is not only about birds.

Other groups as well, like, the bat. who might suffer a congestion-collapse of the lungs due to pressure difference provoked by the blades rotation. Studies carried out by the geo-processing and social cartography lab of the Federal University of Ceará highlight that these eolian farms in the dunes provoke fixed dune burial, inter-dune lagoons extinction and fragmentation, and earth moving.

It also highlights that the dunes are doors to the rain. They filter this water, and feed the ground water. They give support to the coastal lagoons, and to the mangrove wetland ecosystem.

And now we, as climate change forum, are drawing attention saying that "In the Rosado Dunes, No! " It's not negotiable!