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WORLDWIDE
FOREST/BIODIVERSITY CAMPAIGN NEWS
As
Brazil Goes, So Goes the World
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Forest
Networking a Project of Ecological Enterprises
http://forests.org/ -- Forest
Conservation Archives
http://forests.org/web/ -- Discuss Forest
Conservation
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.
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