Word: cerrado
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Among Mitraud's current projects is a $1.2 million W.W.F. plan to preserve the 1.5 million-sq-km area of Brazilian savanna known as the cerrado. (The less than $1-an-acre budget shows how badly outmatched many environmental actions still are.) The cerrado is one of the world's most diverse swaths of nature, a kind of National Geographic theme park where howler monkeys and hyacinth macaws dance and sing from buriti palms and vast treeless grasslands. But in the past 30 years, more than half its original vegetation has been chewed away--and almost 75% will be gone...
From her field office in the town of Alto Paraiso, 150 miles north of Brasilia, Mitraud bears a message to locals that is a delicate mix of dire warnings and creative alternatives. Unless you take steps now, she says--use natural fertilizers, market the cerrado's evergreen flowers and fruits, or turn county-size chunks of the region into nature parks for tourists--your children will inherit a wasteland. The message seems to be getting through: in and around Alto Paraiso, a fourth of the residents live off enterprises that don't involve trashing the land...
...Bolivia is a rare place where people profit from nature without destroying it. Called the Pantanal, it is a giant freshwater wetland that covers 140,000 sq km (54,000 sq. mi.). Unlike Brazil's other three great ecosystems -- the Atlantic forests, the Amazon and the plain called the Cerrado -- the Pantanal has not yet suffered grievous damage at the hand of man. Even more amazing, it retains some of the densest concentrations of wildlife in the Americas, despite the fact that settlers have worked cattle ranches in the area for more than 200 years...