Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
farmers and ranchers, often exacerbated by the process of selective
logging
, which
opens up the forest canopy and leaves debris ripe for lighting.
Resistance in Acre
Until roads opened up the Amazon, many areas were inhabited and exploited only by
indigenous peoples
. The indigenous tribes and many of the modern forest-dwellers -
including rubber-tappers, nut collectors and, increasingly, even peasant settlers - view
the forest as something which, like an ocean, can be harvested regularly if it is not
overtaxed.
Chico Mendes
, the Brazilian rubber-tappers' union leader, was the best-
known voice on the side of those arguing for a more sustainable approach. Hired
gunmen killed him outside his house in Acre state in 1988, but his ideas lived on.
In time, Acre became the showpiece state of the Brazilian environmental movement
from 1998, when a PT government, led by
Jorge Viana
and dominated by old friends
and colleagues of Chico Mendes, implemented an environmental programme,
including a rubber subsidy to help rubber-tappers remain in the forest, and a series
of innovative initiatives for marketing forest products. Over twenty years, the
environmental movement in Acre has moved to the centre of Brazilian political life:
Viana was triumphantly re-elected in 2002 and went on to become an adviser to Lula;
and a close friend,
Marina da Silva
, an ex-rubber-tapper from Acre who had been a
colleague of Mendes in the rubber-tapper union movement, was Minister of the
Environment from 2003 to 2008.
The consequences of deforestation
The most serious effects of the destruction of the Amazon rainforest are related to
global warming.
•
Local climate change
There is now hard scientific evidence from the deforested
highway corridors that removing forest reduces rainfall, creates dry seasons where
there were none, and extends them where they already existed. This has obvious
implications for crops, soils, flora and fauna.
•
Global climate change
The Amazon is a vital link in maintaining regional rainfall and
it is clear that continuing large-scale deforestation would change weather patterns in
the rest of the hemisphere too, including the US. The destruction of the forest has
two effects on the earth's atmosphere. The carbon in the smoke released by forest
clearances makes a significant direct contribution to the greenhouse effect; tropical
deforestation as a whole accounts for around twenty percent of global carbon
emissions. The exact percentage contributed by Amazonian deforestation is
controversial. Few experts accept a figure of less than five percent of global emissions,
but the Brazilian government fiercely contests this. Less immediately, the fewer trees
there are to absorb carbon dioxide, the faster the planet will warm.
Forces driving deforestation
The blame for deforestation is often wrongly attributed. The following are some
popular, but mistaken, explanations:
•
Population and land pressures
Perhaps the most popular theory of all, certainly in
Brazil, is that an unstoppable tide of humanity is swamping the forest. While there was
something to this between the 1960s and the early 1990s, the rural Amazon has been
losing population for a decade, and the region as a whole has a stable population.
•
Debt
Brazil's foreign debt is another popular scapegoat, but this is even less
convincing. The bulk of the capital Brazil borrowed to create the debt was invested
in southern Brazil. The need to make interest payments has not been a driver of
economic policy in Brazil since the debt was restructured in the early 1990s. Most of
the borrowed capital invested in the Amazon went into the mineral sector and into
