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...rain forest disappears, the process will begin at its edges, in places such as Acre and Rondonia. While the Amazon forest as a whole generates roughly half of its own moisture, the percentage is much higher in these western states, far from the Atlantic. This means that deforestation is likely to have a more dramatic impact on the climate in the west than it would in the east. "Imagine the effects of a dry season extended by two months," says Fearnside. The process of deforestation could become self-perpetuating as heat, drying and wind cause the trees...
...government could also stop some of the more wasteful projects it is currently planning. Part of the problem in the Amazon has been ill-conceived plans for development that destroy forests and drive the country deeper into debt. Most hydroelectric dams, for example, have proved unsuitable in the region. The Balbina Dam, which was completed in 1987 and began operating early this year, flooded a huge area at great cost to produce relatively little power. It killed trees, poisoned fish and provided breeding grounds for billions of malarial mosquitoes. Despite this experience, the government plans to build scores of additional...
...deforestation on climate could dramatically change the character of the area, lead to mass extinctions of plant and animal species, and leave Brazil's poor to endure even greater misery than they do now. The people of the rest of the world, no less than the Brazilians, need the Amazon as a functioning system, and in the end, this is more important than the issue of who owns the forest. The Amazon may run through South America, but the responsibility for saving the rain forests, as well as the reward for succeeding, belongs to everyone...
Flying high above the verdant Amazon jungle, TIME correspondent Eugene Linden experienced a kind of epiphany. "I had thoughts oddly similar to those I had when I flew in a small plane across the Arctic -- a sense of reassurance that the world still contained places so immense and so empty of people," recalls Linden, who wrote this week's cover story. "But while the emptiness of the Arctic is austere, the forest canopy that seems to extend into infinity is choked with life...
Linden has explored the complex and sometimes tragic relationships between humans and nature in several books, including Silent Partners, which considers the implications of language experiments with apes. For this week's article Linden spent ten days crisscrossing the region by air, water and land to assess the Amazon's chances for survival. Says Linden: "The question is whether the concern everyone now has about the environment will translate into meaningful action...