About Cantareira Forest

Cantareira Forest is the largest urban forest in the world and responsible for supplying water for 10 million people and essential to the survival of São Paulo. Climate control, the neutralization of heat islands and rainfall patterns are some of the important environmental services that the whole of the Green Belt, and especially the Cantareira Forest, offer the metropolitan area and various other municipalities

The green lungs of São Paulo run the risk of ending because of the irresponsibility of many.

The largest urban forest of the world, Serra da Cantareira, runs the risk of disappearing. The cause? The lack of attention on the part of the public authority and the irresponsibility of groups that have made this area a deposit for garbage and waste materials.

Jardim Damasceno is one of more than a hundred neighborhoods that border the foothills of Cantareira. For the past 12 years, on a piece of private land, more than a hundred thousand square meters, exists an illegal land fill. Each week more than 300 hundred dump trucks unload their waste materials in this land fill.

In 1998, Jornal Cantareira , a community newspaper of the region, denounced this illegal activity. This brought threats from those who were benefiting from this illegal activity on the staff of this newspaper. The response of the city government at the time was weak. There were some fines on the owners of the land and of the trucks, but this did not last long.

In 2002, waste material was once again being dumped in this area, and once again the city government applied fines on the land owner and the truck owners. But, once again, this activity on the part of the city government ended. With the end of the fines, there was an increase of waste dumping in the landfill.

At the end of 2004 and the beginning of 2005, those responsible for the dumping, created another larger landfill. Once again, the dump trucks returned in larger numbers, many of which were unregistered with Bureau of Motor Vehicles, dumping the waste in this larger landfill.

The Jornal Cantareira wrote up an article with photos. This time the Jornal sent copies of their article along with the photos to all the major means of communications in the city of São Paulo, along with copies to the City Secretary of the Environment and to the State Company on Technology and Environmental Sanitation (CETESB).

When the major means of communications and many environmental groups began to denounce this illegal activity, the City government and CETESB closed this landfill, declaring it to be a crime against the environment.

The landfill has been closed, but it has not deterred those who benefited from this illegal activity from threatening residents who live close to the landfill. The team that is responsible for the publishing of JORNAL CANTAREIRA, have also been threatened because of the publishing this story.

The Jornal Cantareira team reaffirm their commitment in defense of the environment, ecology, and the grassroots movements that over the past 20 years have manifested for better living conditions for the population.

The local population asks that

1) The city government continue its inspections in this area and decree that it is an area of social interest and therefore make it government land.

2) The owner of the land and those responsible for the land fill recover the area damaged by their illegal activity.

3) Organize an integral campaign to educate the population in order to preserve the SERRA da CANTAREIRA and its environs.

realização: