Word: amazoned
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Collor named Jose Lutzenberger, one of the world's foremost champions of rain-forest preservation, head of a new environment secretariat. The President also vowed to reverse decades of untrammeled development that destroyed 415,000 sq km (160,000 sq. mi.) -- an area the size of Iraq -- of the Amazon rain forest. He blew up airstrips used by gold miners who had invaded Yanomami Indian lands in the country's far north and made recognition of native territorial claims a top priority. The most visible symbol of environmental progress could be seen by satellite: the rate of destruction...
Even the slowdown in Amazon destruction, critics say, owes less to Collor's policies than to a sagging economy. Says Willem Groenefeld, who runs an environmental institute in the Amazonian state of Rondonia: "Nobody has any money to cut the forest down...
...also reluctant to join what it describes as "schemes to transform forests in developing countries into preserved areas in return for compensation from the industrialized world." This is an apparent reference to suggestions that Brazil should receive relief from its huge foreign debt in return for protecting the Amazon Basin. While Collor in principle has endorsed debt-for-nature swaps for small projects, only one deal has been negotiated...
Collor's opponents charge that Big Business is the real force behind the government's policy. "The antiecology lobby is better organized than we are," says Alfredo Sirkis, head of Brazil's Green Party. "What does sustainable development mean in the Amazon? The big polluters are hiding behind these two words." In fact, a wood-pulp producer in the Amazonian state of Para has described as "sustainable development" a plan to clear-cut 5,000 hectares (12,000 acres) of virgin tropical forest and replant the area with eucalyptus trees...
FOREST OF THE AMAZON, Municipal Theater, Rio, June 1-21 Set to music by Brazilian composer Heitor Villa-Lobos, Forest of the Amazon is the story of a white goddess who falls in love with a rubber tapper, angering both the Amazon tribe that adores her and the forest itself. The ballet, described by choreographer Dalal Achcar as "a poetic fantasy," is an expanded version of one she originally created for Margot Fonteyn...