CAMP AMAZON: Progress or Disaster
In science-speak, it's called the non-optimistic scenario.
To a Brazilian businessman, it looks like progress.
To an American scientist and environmentalist, it looks like disaster.
William F. Laurance, a Smithsonian Institution research scientist who has spent several years in the Amazon region, drew the ire of the Brazilian government in January with publication of an article in Science magazine mapping predictions for deforestation in the next 20 years.
Working with several colleagues, Laurance created a model predicting two different futures for the Amazon.
The non-optimistic scenario shows massive deforestation that might be expected if current plans go forward for development of new highways, railroads, waterways, power lines and other projects. After 20 years, it leaves relatively small areas of pristine and lightly degraded forest.
A second scenario removes the development projects from the computer model and shows a dramatically brighter preservation future - though deforestation in the southern and eastern portions of the forest remains high.
Laurance says about 95 percent of forest losses correlate with the location of roads. When access is increased, development occurs spontaneously - and largely without government control. Farmers move in, slashing and burning to clear the way for cattle and crops. Illegal loggers, as well as licensed logging and mining operators, have a way to get their harvests to market.
While the Brazilian Amazon contains about 40 percent of the world's remaining tropical rainforest, it also has the world's highest rate of forest destruction, Laurance says.
In the time it takes to eat breakfast and read the paper, about 200 football fields worth of Amazon rainforest lands have been destroyed. Somewhere between 4 million and 6 million acres of forest is lost every year.
Interior development is a cornerstone of Brazilian government policy - and that's understandable given the country is increasingly urbanized, concentrating huge pockets of poverty in large, coastal cities. In a relatively poor country like Brazil, "no one can argue against the need for economic development," Laurance told a group of visiting American journalists in mid-June.
But the government's massive top-down plan called Advance Brazil provides fast-track authority and about $40 billion in a seven-year period for highways and other projects that Laurance says will simply lead to "rampant exploitation."
Because "land is dirt cheap," he says farmers and others focus on extensive development, such as large cattle pastures maintained by fire, and have no incentive for taking fewer acres by way of intensive development with high-value crops or sustainable forest projects.
Laurance suggests greater preservation efforts and financial support from outside Brazil. One idea often discussed in the context of global warming concerns is for the developed world to pay Brazil to maintain the rainforest in the effort to soak up carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. The Amazon is often referred to as the lungs of the planet, though people often misunderstand why: it's more of a carbon sink than an oxygen pump.
The notion draws laughter from a group of businessmen in Brazil's industrial center of Sao Paulo, 1,700 miles away from Manaus.
"We're going to rent the Amazon to the world!" is the sarcastic remark from Joao Fernando Sobral, a director of the Federation of Industries of the State of Sao Paulo. As other businessmen nod their approval, Sobral acknowledges the need for debate about the correct way to proceed, "but the only consensus is we must find an economical use for the Amazon."
At a background briefing in the capital of Brasilia, U.S. government officials note that Brazilians are strongly against intervention by outsiders, with some even fearing that American involvement in fighting the drug war in next-door Colombia is simply a ruse to allow secret forces to invade the Amazon.
With that kind of mentality, Laurance knows the preservation fight will be difficult.
"If the world expects Brazil to follow a development path that differs from its current one - and from a path that most developed nations have followed in the past - then substantial costs will be involved," Laurance wrote in the Science article.
"The investment, however, would surely be worth it. At stake is the fate of the greatest tropical rainforest on Earth."
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