Earth Beat, 11 November 2011. We reach places that other radio shows don’t go, hopping fences and dodging the keep out signs to access the inaccessible. We explore the hardest-to-reach mine in Europe, and find out why taking what’s not yours is for the greater good of the neighbourhood.

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Google Street Views the Amazon

For the first time ever, Google’s taken its Street View technology, usually busy cataloguing the city streets, to the Amazon. Tumbira is a small community in the heart of the Brazilian Amazon with no proper roads. Getting there used to require a long boat trip down the Rio Negro. Until now.

Google sent a team of photographers off on boats (pictured above) and bikes to snap images of this hundred-person hamlet, joining it up to the rest of the Street Mapped world.

Raquel Luna of the tiny village of Tumbira explains its effect.

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Photographing the off-limits

Brazilian photographer Sebastião Salgado has just completed an eight-year project called Genesis to seek out the planet’s most pristine places – and capture them on film.

Sebastiao’s doing what Google’s done in Tumbira on a much larger, much prettier scale – but the goal’s the same: to show us why the world is worth protecting.

View photos from the Genesis project here

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On the hunt for Bhutan’s amazing mushrooms

The Cordyceps is a tiny fungus that’s found in Bhutan - it grows 5,000 metres high in the Himalayas.

This twig-like plant is a nightmare to find and fetches serious sums of money in the Chinese medicine world.

But an influx of foreigners who’ve realised its money-making potential has prompted Bhutanese authorities to draw up a plan to protect it.

British biologist Nigel Hywel-Jones has been hired to help them (more photos below).

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Entering no man’s land

Cyprus has been divided since 1974 when the land was split into two.

There’s a 180 km long corridor that separates both sides known as the buffer zone. Entry without permission is illegal.

Salih Gücel is one of the very few people who was granted access to study the flora and fauna.

But as he tells host Marnie Chesterton, he never found the paradise he was looking for (more photos below).

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Off-limits mining

The Black Angel Mine in Greenland is about as off-limits as they come.

It’s situated on an island in the Arctic Circle that experiences 24-hour darkness for a few months of the year.

The entrance is on a cliff face, 600m above ground (photo below).

Prospector Nick Hall explains you can only get there by helicopter, so he’s decided to build the processing plant for metal ore inside the mine.

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Squatting for the neighbourhood

Squatting is now officially illegal in Amsterdam, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t happen anymore. In fact, there’s been a group squatting in an old animal sanctuary in the east of the city since the summer.

Unlike most squatters though, these guys don’t just want a place to live.

Earth Beat producer Anik See dropped by to have a look, and she found out that they actually want to turn the building into a neighbourhood hub (more photos below).

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What’s squat life really like?

Squatting might be seen by some as a way of fighting mainstream culture but the practical reality is far less romantic.

Especially because owners who know one of their buildings is going to be empty for a while have a tendency to smash everything in there to ensure they’re not habitable for would-be squatters.

Producer Dheera Sujan went along to the Scheinheilig squat in the centre of Amsterdam and met some of its residents (photos below).

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