As Brazil Goes, So Goes the World
7/23/99
OVERVIEW & COMMENTARY by EE
Below is a good general reading, overview piece regarding the
importance of Brazilian forest conservation for the global community.
g.b.
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RELAYED TEXT STARTS HERE:
Title: Brazil: Earth's Laboratory
Source: MSNBC, http://www.msnbc.com/news/ENVIRONMENT_Front.asp
Status: Copyright 1999, contact source for permission to reprint
Date: July 5, 1999
Byline: Jennifer L. Rich
RIO DE JANIERO, July 5 - Ask the locals, and they'll say that God
must be Brazilian. Gazing down at Rio de Janeiro from the open arms of
the Corcovado, it's easy to see why. The city is nestled improbably
among majestic rock formations, an imposing fresh water lake and the
world renowned crescent-shaped beaches of Copacabana and Ipanema.
AN HOUR'S DRIVE inland and the city gives way to pine-covered cliffs
that tower above lushly carpeted valleys, a nod to the good sense of
King John VI of Portugal, who in the early 19th century, chose the
mountains behind Rio for his courtly home.
But behind Rio's striking beauty lies a cautionary tale of epic
proportions. It began not long after the last Brazilian monarch
abandoned his throne near the turn of the last century, when a growing
population began to cut down the country's forests to make way for
agriculture. That practice continues virtually unabated today. The
State of Rio de Janeiro used to be 97 percent covered in natural
forest. Today, less than 20 percent remains.
AS BRAZIL GOES, EARTH GOES
Similar destruction appears throughout the Mata Atlantica, a plant-
and animal-rich ecosystem that once covered 800,000 square miles of
Brazil's coastline. Now, only about 7 percent of the original Mata
remains, 171 species are threatened with extinction, and
conservationists say that the survival of the ecosystem is unlikely.
"The Mata Atlantica has a terminal illness," said Mario Mantovani,
director of Sao Paulo-based SOS Mata Atlantica. "It no longer has the
ability to resist. If there were 20 or 30 percent of the Mata left, it
might be possible revert the damage. Today no."
In a struggle between man and nature that has echoes around the
planet, massive environmental concerns have reared up throughout
Brazil as the government attempts to meet the needs of its growing
population. On the western border near Bolivia, the huge Pantanal
wetlands are being drained to make way for hydroelectric projects,
eliminating an entire habitat.
The worst drought in almost 200 years in the arid northeast is turning
about 110,000 square miles of once fertile land into desert.
Overcrowding in Sao Paulo and Rio, with populations of 18 million and
7 million respectively, has polluted water sources, denuded
mountainsides and spawned outbreaks of disease and unmanageable
criminal violence. Because the country is so large, and the variations
in climate so broad, Brazilians are being forced to find solutions to
virtually all of the world's environmental problems within their own
borders.
The pressure put on Brazil by environmentalists and politicians in the
developed world to curb these trends has often spawned resentment.
After all, ask Brazilians, Egyptians, Chinese and Indians alike, were
not Europe and North America once covered by forest? Should developing
countries put their dreams of prosperity on hold on the evidence
offered by foreign scientists?
"Brazil has a huge tropical rainforest that includes a large
percentage of the world's biological diversity, and the population is
growing rapidly and is becoming progressively more affluent," said
Lester Brown, an environmental authority at the Worldwatch Institute
in Washington. "The possibility of a quarter of a billion relatively
affluent consumers in the future in Brazil means a lot of additional
pressure on world resources.
"If the Brazilian Amazon goes, the rest of the Amazon will go with
it. How this would affect the climate, no one really knows," he said.
RESOURCES TO BURN
Further complicating the debate in Brazil is the misconception here
that the nation is a bottomless reserve of natural resources. Flying
over the Amazon, it is hard to envision that the solid block of green
below is being destroyed at a rate of 5,000 football fields a day, as
conservative figures estimate. Or that an area between up to four
times the size of California has already been stripped of vegetation
in recent decades by "clear cutting," a process by which ranchers
and developers cut or burn down huge swaths of forest to make way for
grazing lands and other agriculture.
The sheer immensity of the Amazon, the largest tropical rainforest in
the world covering an area more than half the size of the continental
United States, means that until recently locals have treated the
forest as if its bounty would never end. Now, it may
be too late to save.
"If we can't find a path to sustainable development in the next 10 to
20 years, it is very likely that by the year 2050 there will be very
little forest left," said Carlos Nobre, head of Brazil's Center
for Weather and Climate Research.
WORLDWIDE IMPACT
The majority of the world's scientists believe that the loss of the
Amazon rainforest would be devastating to the globe's environment.
There is an active debate over how quickly and dramatically the
results will show themselves, but few now argue that such devastation
will pass unnoticed. Among the more catastrophic forecasts: enormous
decreases in air quality and resulting increases in lung diseases and
cancer; the melting of polar ice caps and the submergence of many of
the Earth's inhabited coastlands - among them, large parts of New
York, Hong Kong, London and Shanghai.
Back in the Amazon, Nobre leads a group of international scientists
who recently launched an ambitious project to discover just how the
rainforest fits into the global environmental cycle. Working from a
neatly manicured compound at Kilometer 40 of a lonely stretch of
halfway between Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, Nobre's small group
directs a larger, global effort involving over 200 researchers funded
by NASA, the Brazilian government, universities and European donors.
Ultimately, Nobre said, they hope to pinpoint exactly how crucial a
role the rainforest plays in cleansing the Earth's air of carbon
dioxide, and in turn, controlling the build up of greenhouse gas.
From there, the group hopes to apply its knowledge to devise
sustainable solutions for the Amazon, as well as tropical rainforests
in Africa and Asia.
The Amazon has a long history of defeating grand efforts to tame it,
to develop it and, more recently, to save it. One of the most
spectacular failures occurred in the 1920s, when Henry Ford began
buying up tracts of land for development as a rubber plantation. A
combination of factors, including the mistaken planting of Ford's
trees too close together, led to a blight that wiped out the entire
project.
"All of the efforts to develop the forest have not been based on a
solid knowledge of the functioning of the ecosystem," Nobre said.
"If you start with Henry Ford and the rubber plantations in the
'20s and '30s to the cattle ranches today, all have been failures. We
know why these things fail, but we don't know how to make them work."
CREATING AN INCENTIVE
Several hundred non-governmental groups also are working in Brazil to
find alternatives to clear cutting and other environmental
degradation. Many point to Brazil's rich biodiversity, which includes
55,000 different types of plants or 22 percent of the world's known
species, as a means to profit off of the growing market for medicinal
herbs. Others, including Greenpeace, the World Wildlife Fund and U.S.
Vice President Al Gore, have advocated the use of "matching funds"
that would create an incentive for Brazil to spend on the environment.
So far, however, those efforts which have progressed beyond talk have
failed to make a major impact. Any successful assault on the problems
of Brazil would need to count on the full support of the government.
To date, Brazilian governments have been notoriously lax in making the
environment a priority, preferring to concentrate on economic growth
and - some critics would say - patronage and corruption.
Even in the face of catastrophe, inaction often prevails. Despite the
fact that more than 12 percent of the Amazonian state of Roraima
burned to the ground last year from uncontrollable wildfires during
the February to April dry season, environmentalists say the government
has failed to take preventive measures this year.
"The major problem with the environment in Brazil is that we are not
forward looking," said Garo Batmanian, Director of the Worldwide Fund
for Nature in Brazil. "We usually come in after the problem has
already happened and spend billions of dollars to try and fix it."
The fiscal crisis and near economic collapse earlier this year set
efforts back even further. Acting to quell the market and meet
International Monetary Fund strictures, the Brazilian government has
had to drastically cut its budget. Invariably, one of the main
casualties of the cuts was Brazil's environmental agency and related
programs.
"What the government seems to forget,"said SOS's Mantovani, "is
that you can't stop drinking water. You can't stop breathing. You
can't buy biodiversity. These are issues that are basic for the
country, but we tend to live hand to mouth, without any plan for the
future."
In any other country on this planet, that might be a local or at most
a regional problem. But Brazil's problems, scientists say, are
everybody's problems.