Word: amazon
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...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 cause for concern, some good news to report...
...There has also been a remarkable turnaround in Brazilian public opinion about the rain forest. In 1989, then President Jos? Sarney was defensive and defiant about criticism of Brazil?s failure to protect the Amazon; last June, by contrast, an outpouring of popular protest forced the Brazilian Congress to drop a plan to reduce from 80% to 50% the amount of forest to be set aside as nature preserves in future Amazonian development projects. Among the most vocal opponents of the rollback was Jos? Sarney Filho, the federal Environment Minister and son of the pro-development former President. In Acre...
...cleared, the acidic dirt of the forest floor is exhausted after a few harvests. That in turn causes peasant farmers to keep moving and sell their barren holdings to cattle ranchers looking to buy cleared land on the cheap. So the devastation continues to creep forward. All over the Amazon, I saw vast areas of degraded land where before there was a virtually unbroken expanse of trees. In all, the Amazon contains some 550,000 sq km of deforested land, one-third of which has been abandoned...
...Each year, despite all strategies to curb the fires, more and more of the Amazon has burned. During and after the 1998 El Ni?o disaster, Nepstad discovered that the damage was far greater than initially estimated. Even where the forest canopy remained unscathed, ground-hugging fires burned thousands of square kilometers of vegetation beneath the treetops. This burning, invisible to satellites, roughly doubled the reported deforestation by land clearing...
...Repeated over the years, the combination of drought, human despoiling and fire can transform wet tropical forest into permanent savanna. So argues Bruce Nelson, an ecologist who has worked since 1979 with inpa, the Brazilian institute for the study of the Amazon. Nelson believes pre-Columbian Indians created the Gran Sabana in Venezuela, a 75,000-sq-km area of veld stretching across the southeast corner of the country, by repeated burning of the forest. As evidence, he points out that unlike neighboring natural grasslands, the Gran Sabana lacks fire-tolerant tree species. In other words, forests burned down hundreds...