Word: amazon
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...Ludwig's most intriguing ventures is little known outside his 34th-floor offices in Manhattan's Burlington House. In 1967 Ludwig paid $3 million to a group of Brazilian families for a 4,650-sq.-mi. swatch of rain forest in Brazil's remote Amazon region. He then set in motion a bold plan for developing the tract, which is almost the size of the state of Connecticut, to help meet the future world shortages of food, lumber, and wood pulp for papermaking that he expects. Although the crisis has not appeared?at least not yet?Ludwig has quietly...
...past nine years, under a veil of semisecrecy, Ludwig has spent more than $200 million on his Amazon company, Jari Forest Products, and he plans to lay out another $300 million in the next two or three years. Jari, named for the muddy, winding Amazon tributary that runs through the Ludwig property, is engaged in transforming a vast stretch of virtually unpopulated jungle into a self-contained commercial kingdom. Already it has half a dozen airstrips serviced by Jari planes, hundreds of miles of roads well traveled by a fleet of more than 500 Jari cars and trucks...
...species of trees?more than 300 different kinds on any given acre?for profitable lumbering. At a cost of $250,000 each, Ludwig imported giant Caterpillar "jungle crushers," overgrown bulldozers designed to pull down the natural jungle growth. But these machines proved useless because they damaged the unexpectedly delicate Amazon topsoil. Today one of the jungle crushers stands abandoned and rusting on the outskirts of Monte Dourado. The job is now being done by work gangs using machetes and chain saws to clear the land...
...Gmelina, a fast-growing Asian tree that takes a mere ten years to reach the age when it can be cut for lumber and pulp. In contrast, American cottonwood, which is similar to Gmelina in quality and yield, requires at least 30 years to reach maturity. But again the Amazon proved more complex than Ludwig's experts imagined. His property contained at least two distinct types of soil, one unsuitable for Gmelina. Now about one-fourth of Ludwig's first tree forest is being planted in Caribbean pine, another fast-growing variety that can be harvested in 19 years...
Ghosts and Gods. More than 100 adventure tour packagers are now operating in the U.S., competing for a clientele that numbers in the hundreds of thousands. They offer mountain-climbing tours of the Himalayas, canoe expeditions down the Amazon, hang-gliding excursions in the U.S. Southwest, ghost-hunting trips through haunted English castles, and archeological tours from the Dead Sea to Easter Island...