Word: brazill
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...This deliberate tree murder?call it selvacide?was the very purpose of the Christo-like covering of the rain-forest floor. The eerie area was the center of a $700,000, U.S.- and Brazil-financed experiment to slowly starve a patch of rain forest of life-sustaining moisture and see what happens as a result. The seemingly sadistic effort was a controlled version of what biologists fear happens periodically all across the Amazon, the precursor of a disaster that could be only a few years, or even months, away...
...highway menace is coming to this part of Par?. Brazil?s ministries of planning and transportation have ignored or forgotten the trauma of 1998 and, without consulting the federal Ministry of Environment, have approved paving the last dirt stretch of BR-163, which runs 1,741 km north and east from Campo Grande in Mato Grosso do Sul to the city of Santar?m in Par?. The 700-km unpaved section runs directly past Tapaj?s National Forest and on through millions of hectares of the most vulnerable parts of the rain forest. Says Nepstad: ?Brazilian scientists call this area the ?corridor...
...drive in the rainy season. It would require less than a day on an all-weather surface. The decision to pave the highway is largely the product of vigorous lobbying by giant agribusinesses, which see the route as a more profitable way to export soybeans. (After the U.S., Brazil is the world?s largest exporter of the crop.) A Brazilian-American consortium is planning to build an enormous dock-and-loading system in Santar?m, the sleepy port that lies at the junction of the Tapaj?s and Amazon rivers, 700 km from the Atlantic Ocean. Exporting through Santar?m might save agribusinesses...
...much as 50% of all the moisture it receives from rainfall. A good portion of that water vapor is carried by air currents that bounce off the Andes and head southward to drop rain on farming regions in the southern states of Mato Grosso and Goi?s, both part of Brazil?s breadbasket. In other words, no Amazon forest in Brazil?s north, no rain in the south. The possibility of calamity threatens far more than isolated trees...
...Scientists have long studied the horrendous impact that fire has on the rain forest. Alberto Setzer of the Brazilian space agency, inpe, shocked the world when he used satellite imagery to show the extent of the burning in 1988. Out-of-control burning first brought me to Brazil in 1989 when I wrote the cover story for the Sept. 18 issue of Time called ?Torching the Amazon.? I have made several trips to parts of this giant ecosystem in neighboring countries since then, but this was my first trip back to the Brazilian Amazon, and there was, amid the rising...