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Alto, allá arriba en los Andes brilla un bosque bordado de bromelias…
High up in the Andes blooms a brilliant forest embroidered with bromeliads . . .

Set to be released this spring, ¡Olinguito, de la A a la Z! / Olinguito, from A to Z! : Descubriendo el bosque nublado / Unveiling the Cloud Forest takes readers into the magical world of a cloud forest in the Andes of Ecuador. We discover the bounty of plants, animals, and other organisms that live there as we help a zoologist look for the elusive olinguito, the first new mammal species identified in the Americas since 1978. It has received starred reviews from Publishers Weekly, School Library Journal, and Kirkus Reviews, which called it “a breath of fresh air in the too-often-contrived world of bilingual books.”

We asked Lulu to take us behind the scenes of her exquisite art process to make the cloud forest come alive:

I spent an average of ten days working from eight to ten hours per day creating each spread.

The first thing I did was to transfer the sketch to the Arches watercolor paper. Then I decided which areas would be collaged printed patterns and which would be painted in flat acrylic colors.

I prepared the patterned backgrounds pressing leaves gathered in the cloud forest dipped in ink and stamped onto rice paper.

With an X-Acto knife I cut out the shapes of texturized paper and pasted them into the background. I used archival glue and micro tweezers to affix the collage elements in their precise positions.

Next I prepared all the shades of acrylics that I would need for the spread and stored them in small clear jars. Each section of a color required several thin coats to achieve the rich look I was looking for. 

Once the spread was entirely painted I had fun selecting pressed ferns from the forest to affix to the art. This was a delicate process as some of the pressed leaves and ferns are paper thin.

The last thing was to create the letters for the spread. I wanted a layered look, recreating the natural layers of flora in the forest, so I drew the letters on vellum paper and cut out them out. I taped the letters onto a vellum square and with careful precision affixed the letter in the spot it was intended to be. 

Check out the final spread!

Lulu Delacre has worked with LEE & LOW BOOKS on several award-winning titles, including the Pura Belpré award-winning titles The Storyteller’s Candle/La velita de los cuentos and Arrorró, mi niño: Latino Lullabies and Gentle Games; How Far Do You Love Me? (English and Spanish), and Jay and Ben. Delacre has been named a Maryland Woman in the Arts and served as a juror for the 2003 National Book Awards. A native of Puerto Rico, Delacre lives with her husband in Silver Spring, Maryland. For more information about Lulu Delacre visit luludelacre.com.

You can purchase a copy of ¡Olinguito, de la A a la Z! / Olinguito, from A to Z! : Descubriendo el bosque nublado / Unveiling the Cloud Forest on our website here.

Mark Carey is an assistant professor of environmental history at Washington and Lee University and is the author of In the Shadow of Melting Glaciers: Climate Change and Andean Society. The book illustrates in vivid detail how people in the Andes have grappled with the effects of climate change and ensuing natural disasters for more than half a century. In the original post below Carey looks how a recent natural disaster can teach us a climate lesson.

Although some US senators may resist discussion of the new climate and energy bill this week, people around the world continue to live with incessant dangers that disrupt their daily lives and threaten their existence. A recent glacier avalanche in Peru, for example, unleashed a powerful outburst flood that caused significant destruction. It was the same kind of flood that increasingly endangers people living near melting glaciers worldwide, from Switzerland and Norway to Canada and New Zealand, China and Nepal.

Beyond underscoring the need to move forward quickly with a new climate bill, the recent outburst flood also reveals that climate change discussions too often focus solely on the causes of climate change. While critical, this emphasis on what drives climate change and who (or what) is to blame, can derail dialogue about climate impacts that are already occurring worldwide, sometimes with deadly consequences.

The April 11th flood from Peru’s Lake 513 on the slope of Mount Hualcán inundated areas near the town of Carhuaz, destroying dozens of homes and washing away roads. Tens of thousands of residents also lost access to potable water when floodwaters damaged a water treatment facility. Nonetheless, the flood could have been much worse. Luckily, engineers had already partially drained Lake 513 — along with dozens of other glacial lakes in the region.

For seven decades, Peruvian engineers have worked to contain the danger posed by glacial lakes. Nearly 6,000 residents have died from glacial lake outburst floods since 1941, propelling the Peruvian government to drain or dam a total of 34 glacial lakes. Their expertise is now crucial in helping specialists in Asia, North America, and Europe to minimize glacial lake hazards.

The recent flood reveals the promise, as well as the pitfalls, of the Peruvians’ technological fixes. Lake 513 was purportedly one of the glacial lakes that engineers had in fact “fixed.” It originally formed at the foot of a shrinking glacier in the early 1980s, and by 1985 was a significant threat to thousands of Carhuaz residents. Although engineers responded by pumping out millions of gallons of water, the lake kept growing. Finally, in 1991 the dam burst and caused an outburst flood — just as it did earlier this month. Engineers then installed a complex tunnel system to drain even more water out of the lake. Their damage control worked . . . until two weeks ago.

Peru’s experience reminds us that disaster vulnerability is not just about environmental processes. Avalanches and floods only become disasters when they affect people.

In Carhuaz in the 1970s, residents defied zoning laws that prohibited construction in potential avalanche and flood paths below Mount Hualcán. The laws came into being after glacial avalanches on neighboring Mount Huascarán killed 4,000 people in 1962 and 15,000 in 1970. At that point government officials and UNESCO experts determined that Mount Hualcán glaciers were also unstable, and insisted that the population relocate outside the floodplain. Nonetheless, locals resisted, perceiving this as yet another bureaucratic imposition. They also believed that government engineering projects (technology) could p

Megan Branch, Intern

In his new book, The Andes: A Cultural History, Latin American Literature professor Jason Wilson looks at the dramatic influence The Andes have had on South American history and on literature from all over the world. Since we’re nearing the end of travel season, I’ve excerpted a passage below about the uniqueness of rail travel in the Andes—including altitudes that tend to make most people sick.

Crossing the Andes has always meant building bridges, roads and, more recently, railways. In 1934 a recently-married Victor Wolfgang von Hagen, a naturalist and prolific publicist of Latin America, reached Ecuador by boat to visit Chimborazo and the Galapagos Islands. Before the railways had been built from the tropical disease-ridden coast at Durán, across the river from Guayaquil, to Quito 290 miles away, the journey on horseback had taken eight days. Then the American Harman brothers (Archer and John) built their track, switchbacking up the Nariz del Diablo after the Chan Chan river gorge. Work had begun in 1897 and was completed in 1908 in what was a great feat of railway engineering (until suspended in 1983 and again in 1998). It climbed 10,626 feet in fifty miles and reached a pass at 11,841 feet, which von Hagen likened to the tundra in its bleakness, before descending to the Quito plateau. Theroux had wanted to ride this train, but it was overbooked.

Another railway engineering feat is the pass at Ticlio, on the line from Lima to Tarma in Peru, the highest railway pass in the world built above the Rimac gorge by the “indefatigable” and “unscrupulous” New York-born Henry Meiggs (actually at 15,865 feet). According to Wright, over 7,000 Andean and Chinese labourers died building a railway that has 66 tunnels, 59 bridges and 22 switchbacks. You can ask for oxygen masks on the train that now runs from Arequipa to Puno on Lake Titicaca, where the station of Crucero Alto is 14,688 feet high. The 1925 South American Handbook warned that soroche or mountain sickness was “usually the penalty of constipation”. Paul Theroux felt dizzy and sweated up this line, and the “astonishing” beauty of the landscape from the train window was ruined. Then a molar ached. He later learned that blocked air in a filling creates pressure on the nerve: “it is agony,” he wrote. The passengers started vomiting, until balloons filled with oxygen were handed around before they passed through the highest railway tunnel in the world. As a train enthusiast, Theroux marveled at the engineering, supervised by Meiggs between 1870 and 1877 the year he died, but surveyed by a Peruvian called Ernesto Malinowski. There is a Mount Meiggs near Ticlio.

Another gringo, Dr. Renwick, took a train from Arequipa to Cuzco, spotting the extinct volcano of Vilcanto at 17,000 feet, “one of the best known in all Peru”, and nearby Ausangate, towering over all others at 20,000 feet and visible a hundred miles away. He acutely remarked that Peruvians were so accustomed to these mountain giants seen from the train that they hardly noticed a peak like Huascarán, which “anywhere else would fill the mind with astonishment.” He is still right.

A Special Assembly by Debjani Chatterjee and illustrated by David Lumley was commissioned by the Asian People’s Disability Alliance (UK) to provide information for kids with asthma and their families. You can read here about why the project of raising awareness of asthma in Asian families has become a priority of the APDA.

Debjani’s story is upbeat. Raj dreams of being a world-class cricketer - but it looks like that’s all he’ll be able to do, dream about it, because he has asthma… until a class pen-friend project brings a famous Indian cricketer all the way to a special assembly at Raj’s school. And guess what? He has asthma too!

The booklet would make a good resource for introducing a school pen-pal project, while raising awareness of asthma at the same time. It is available upon request, with a charge for postage and packing only: see here for further details.