Is It Possible to Save the BRAZILIAN AMAZON?

• Position: Brief Article - Statistical Data Included

A $40,000,000,000 onslaught of highways, railroads, hydroelectric projects, and burgeoning population is overwhelming efforts to promote conservation in the Amazon forest of Brazil. If left unchecked, it will soon destroy the greatest tropical rainforest on Earth, experts warn. The well-intentioned conservation programs now under way in the Amazon are wholly inadequate to offset the destruction from agriculture, timber, and mining that are taking place in the name of economic development, a study by researchers from Oregon State University,the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, Michigan State University, and National Institute for Amazonian Research found.

"We've heard a lot about ecotourism, sustainable forestry, and other conservation efforts in the Amazon," points out Scott Bergen, a forest scientist at Oregon State University, Corvallis. "But if these development plans go through, we'll lose the largest remaining wilderness on Earth and a huge amount of the world's remaining biodiversity. And that, of course, doesn't even consider the enormous impacts on the carbon cycle, global climate, and greenhouse warming"

Problems with deforestation in the Amazon are not new, but this study is one of the first to take a wider look at the causes, ranging from population growth to economic policies, pipeline construction, roads, power lines, an influx of multinational timber companies, slash-and-burn farming, ranching, mining, oil exploration, and many other issues. It projects the real impact of those causes on the Amazon landscape 20 years into the future. The results of allowing current trends to continue, the study concludes, are devastating.

Nonindigenous populations in the Brazilian Amazon have increased about tenfold since the 1960s, from 2,000,000 people to 20,000,000. Investments totaling $40,000,000,000 are planned just in the next seven years under the huge Avanca Brasil (Advance Brazil) economic development program. Key environmental agencies in Brazil are largely excluded from the planning of these developments. Roads that once were more confined to the perimeter of the Amazon Forest are penetrating the heart of the basin, and the many land uses made possible by these roads are destroying the forests.

Two models were developed to assess the future impacts of these trends, one somewhat optimistic and the...