Months of Fires Destroyed Millions of Priceless Acres in the Amazon
4/8/98
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Title: Months of Fires Destroyed Millions of Priceless Acres in the Amazon
Source: The Philadelphia Inquirer
Status: Copyrighted, contact source to reprint
Date: 4/8/98
Byline: Monica Yant, Inquirer staff writer
BOA VISTA, Brazil - Raemundo Firmino has never heard of El Nino. He knows
nothing of the world's fascination with the rain forest in his backyard,
and even less about the scale of the environmental disaster beneath its smoky
skies.
But Firmino, 61, and his wife, Francisca Alves, 40, are painfully aware of what
drought and months of fires in the Amazon basin have cost them: 25 acres of
corn, beans, rice and a root called manioc that would have fed their family of
12 for a year.
"Now we have nothing," Francisca Alves said quietly, peeling a shriveled
manioc.
Every few moments she picked up one foot, then the other, because beneath her
thin plastic sandals, the charred ground was still smoldering, hot to the
touch.
"All our work, everything, gone."
It has been a week now since seasonal rains, delayed for months by El Nino
weather patterns, finally came to the state of Roraima in northern Brazil,
blessedly quenching fires that had been burning on the edge of the Amazon basin
since January.
But by then, according to government figures, more than 20 percent of the
state's 87,000 square miles had burned after brush-clearing fires set by
subsistence farmers got out of control. About two-thirds of that was savanna --
poor, scrubby grassland that will be even poorer now. The rest was rain forest
that could take a century to recover, if it ever does.
Environmental groups forecast irrevocable damage to the Amazon, which already
had lost about 13 percent of its 2.3 million-square-mile basin to logging,
burning, or other human encroachment over the last 15 years.
The fire disaster -- coming so soon after similar fires that devastated massive
tracts of Indonesia late last year -- has refocused international attention on
the importance of forestland. And no forest is ecologically more important than
the Amazon basin, home to half the Earth's plant and animal species.
Though other kinds of forests can benefit from fires -- which provide nutrients
and spread seeds -- environmentalists say fire is an unmitigated tragedy in
moist, tropical rain forests such as those of the Amazon.
"Fire kills the trees, it kills the plants, it kills the soil," said Janet
Abramovitz, a senior researcher at the Worldwatch Institute. "In these kinds of
forests, it can take 100 years or more for them to recover."
The rest of the world is bound to feel some of the fire's effects. The Amazon
rain forest functions somewhat like the kidneys and lungs of the Earth, taking
in toxic substances such as carbon dioxide and breathing out oxygen. Taken
together, the world's rain forests produce 20 percent to 30 percent of the
world's oxygen.
In a fire of this year's magnitude, that process shifts, with the trees giving
off more toxins than they absorb. It's as if the lungs of the Earth had been
crippled by cancer.
Everyone here has a terrible story to tell. Eurico Mariano da Silva, who like
Firmino lives in the village of Apiau, lost three of his cows; he watched them
go up in flames when the great fire ripped through his ranch. They were among
nearly 12,000 cattle in Roraima that died of hunger, or thirst, or worse.
Madalena and Lucivan Ambrosio, Macuxi Indians, say they've been competing for
food with panthers and monkeys driven out of the wild by the flames and smoke.
The 17-year-old newlyweds want children soon, but: "we can't have a baby now,"
Madalena said. "Too many problems."
Deep within the rain forest, in the reserve of the primitive Yanomami Indians,
aid workers see children and the elderly suffering from pneumonia, the result
of smoke inhalation, which the tribe had never experienced before. At least two
Yanomami were killed by smoke inhalation.
Along streams that evaporated to puddles of mosquito-infested water, dozens of
new strains of malaria have surfaced. Tribe-wide, outbreaks are up 30 percent.
In remote villages, Indians talk of dried creek beds lined with fish skeletons.
The ground grew so hot in one village, they say, it fried the jabuti turtles.
Up near the Venezuelan border, a Taurepa Indian elder named Astromarino Flores
told how he and seven other men fought the fire for two months. Every day
before sunup, he and his family would beat back the flames creeping onto their
land; as each day grew hotter, the fire came back. Their battle ended only
"when there was nothing left to burn." Three nearby families who were away
visiting relatives returned to find their huts reduced to ashes and soot. More
than 800 orange trees went up with them.
As Flores, 37, spoke on Saturday, the skies rumbled. First a trickle, then a
strong and steady rain began to fall -- the first he personally had seen since
September. Flores smiled, but weakly.
"This is good, but not enough," he said. "The wells are dry. Right now, we take
water from the stream. We can do that for a month. After that, we don't know
how we will live."
[ * ]
It doesn't seem possible, this talk of fire in the tropical Amazon rain forest
-- the largest rain forest on Earth, an emerald-green biological wonder with 20
percent of the world's fresh water and 15,000 kinds of animals, including one-
third of all known fish species.
Indeed, the fire did not reach the central Amazon basin. But it swept through
northern Brazil, on the fringes of the rain forest, where enormous tracts of
land are grassland, or savanna.
Here, subsistence farmers have come from throughout Brazil, lured by government
promises of free land and a new life. But despite the lushness of the nearby
forest, the soil is too poor to grow much.
So they arrive armed with hope and chainsaws, chopping down everything in sight
in an attempt to farm the unfarmable. "I know the land is not good, but I have
to try," said Raemundo Firmino, who moved his family here five years ago. "We
have nowhere else to go."
Farmers like Firmino use fire as a tool, torching the land to clear
undergrowth, to rejuvenate the soil for the next planting season. Each January,
they slash and burn.
Normally, the fires are easily contained in the savannas. Normally, they could
never reach the tropical forest's humid edge, where moisture cloaks the air and
daily showers would extinguish any flame.
But this year was different, thanks to a deadly combination of a seven-month
drought and unusually high winds attributed to the weather phenomenon known as
El Nino. Virtually no rain fell on Roraima from August until Tuesday of last
week.
"It was so hot, you could pour a glass of water, put it on the table and watch
it evaporate," said Cameron Macauley, an American physician's assistant who
works for an Indian aid group in the state capital of Boa Vista.
This year, those who started fires didn't even need gasoline.
"It was already so dry," said Mauricio Pereira, 44, a farmer in far northern
Boca da Mata, "we just used one match."
Some of the fires began in October, but most did not start burning out of
control until December and January.
Though the United Nations first offered help in November, Brazil did not
immediately accept, because its military and government were divided on whether
to allow outsiders in the Amazon. In January, Roraima's governor, Neudo Campos,
declared a state of emergency, but his pleas for aid to the national government
1,600 miles away in Brasilia went largely ignored.
"I tried to ask them why they were so slow. The government did not understand
El Nino. They expected to deal with the fire they way they do every year," said
Fernando Gabeira, the lone Green Party member of Brazil's parliament and part
of a special government commission assessing the damage.
Though Brazil's environmental agency banned farm fires in February, few of the
peasants in the remote rural region heard about the rule. Assuming the rainy
season would arrive on schedule in just a month or so, they continued to clear
their land the only way they know.
The smoke was often too thick for airplanes to fly over and assess damage. Many
of the focus points were inaccessible by foot or four-wheel drive. By the time
an international crew of more than 1,000 firefighters was assembled in mid-
March, even the most optimistic among them acknowledged that rain -- and only
rain -- could stop the fires.
Near the end of March, Gov. Campos declared the fire an ecological disaster,
completely out of human hands.
Then, in the waning hours of March 30, and into the dawn of March 31, nature
relented.
It began to rain -- and then the skies opened up and it poured, drenching much
of Roraima state. It was enough, in just one day, to extinguish 90 percent of
the fires.
The rain came at midnight to his farm, Raemundo Firmino remembers. It came
after he and his family, who are Catholic, had spent the night praying.
"God," Firmio said, "must care about us."
Even with the drenching rains, smoke puffs still dot the landscape, and a few
new, live flames are still visible from the air.
And, in the aftermath, the secondary regrowth in both the forest and the
savanna will be emerge so thick that it will hurt both the farmers and
indigenous groups such as the Yanomami. "Even chopping [ such regrowth ] with a
machete is difficult," the Yanomami worker Cameron Macauley said. "It's so
thickly entangled that it doesn't support the large animals to hunt, either."
[ * ]
Though the fires are gone, the rain has, so far, been sporadic. There has been
just one full day of downpour, and scattered showers on a few others. The
drought, and the unrelenting 100-degree heat, persist.
On the outskirts of Boa Vista, children play on the sand dunes where the mighty
Rio Branco usually flows. Now, an adult can practically walk across it.
In Baixo Mucajai, 80 miles away in the Yanomami Reserve, parts of the Rio
Mucajai are only hip-deep.
The only way in is by plane, and only then with government permission. The
Yanomami need protection, having been devastated by disease after 50,000 miners
swarmed over their land during a 1980s gold rush, bringing malaria,
tuberculosis, venereal disease and alcohol.
The nearest non-Indian farmers are nearly four hours away by boat, said the
village's leader, a man named Paulo. But for a month, smoke from the farm fires
choked his village.
"My head ached, my eyes cried," said Paulo, who like many Yanomami uses only
one name.
With the Mucajai River low, and the smoke so heavy, Paulo couldn't row his boat
to fish. He couldn't hunt, either.
"I saw lots of animals -- all running, running from the fire," he said.
Some Indians have moved farther into the forest in a quest for food, but many,
such as in Baixo Mucajai, need to stay where they are because they rely on aid
from missionary groups.
The Rev. Guillerme Damioli is worried. For 19 years, the Italian priest has run
a Catholic mission in the Yanomami village of Catrimani. He thinks it could be
months before a food supply returns for the nearly 500 Indians there.
For now, the Indians are surviving on fruits and roots they normally wouldn't
touch. They also eat termites, grasshoppers and ants, whose tails they fry in
oil and are said to taste like popcorn.
And the farmers and cattlemen? Those who used to wait for the fires to end are
still waiting. Only now, they wait for more rain.
"I try not to get frustrated, but it's hard not to worry," said Galdino Pereira
de Souza, 35, a rancher with 600 head of thirsty cattle. He is leading them to
an unfamiliar stream, but as the saying goes, they are not always willing to
drink.
He had a hunch about the drought back in November, when it did not rain on a
Dia dos Finados, the Day of the Dead. Now, with Easter approaching, he is
hoping for some divine intervention.
This week is Holy Week, said de Souza, a Catholic. "Maybe then it will rain. It
is time."
c1998 Philadelphia Newspapers Inc.