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Before Brazil's great land rush, the emerald rain forests of Rondonia state were an unspoiled showcase for the diversity of life. In this lush territory south of the Amazon, there was hardly a break in the canopy of 200-ft.-tall trees, and virtually every acre was alive with the cacophony of all kinds of insects, birds and monkeys. Then, beginning in the 1970s, came the swarms of settlers, slashing and burning huge swaths through the forest to create roads, towns and fields. They came to enjoy a promised land, but they have merely produced a network of devastation...
...ecosystem will decline even with protection. As yet, no one knows the minimum critical size of a rain forest, but in 1979 Thomas Lovejoy, now at the Smithsonian Institution, set up a 20-year experiment with the cooperation of the Brazilian government to determine just that for the Amazon region. Among the findings: the smaller the forest, the faster the decline of insects, birds and mammals...
Since less than 5% of the world's tropical forests receive any protection, the stage is set for mass extinctions. Many plants and animals are doomed, no matter what measures are taken. Some researchers estimate that at least 12% of the bird species in the Amazon basin, as well as 15% of the plants in Central and South America, can be counted among what Janzen calls the "living dead." Many tropical mammals and reptiles face only bleak survival under what amounts to house arrest in game parks and zoos...
...being taken over by organizations concerned about the welfare of developing nations. Conservation International, for example, bought $650,000 worth of Bolivian debt from Citicorp at the discounted price of $100,000. Instead of demanding payments on the loan, the nonprofit organization has created a wildlife sanctuary in the Amazon Basin that the Bolivian government has agreed to protect...
Everything important in A Handful of Dust is in the film: Brenda's almost somnambulistic descent into adultery; Tony's puttering obsession with his awful hereditary home; the death of their child, the tragedy that brings them to crisis; Tony's final flight up the Amazon toward the novel's immortal conclusion. James Wilby's Tony is stoically wet, and the subtlety of Kristin Scott Thomas' charmlessness as Brenda is awesome. But the malice, as well as the compressed energy of the novel, is beyond Sturridge and Granger. Waugh moved us to tears; this adaptation invites only respect...