Word: rains
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Deep inside the rain forest, south of the mighty Amazon River, lies a 435-mile stretch of dirt road. For many Brazilians, the paving of such rutted, often impassable routes has almost mystical significance as an essential part of economic progress. But to environmentalists this ritual of development always means destruction for the earth's largest rain forest, and in this particular case, could unleash forces that would make this road the most dangerous thoroughfare in the world...
...world has known for more than a decade, of course, that huge swaths of the South American rain forest are burning. I saw the devastation firsthand when I went to Brazil to report TIME's 1989 cover story "Torching the Amazon." But most of the scientists and environmentalists I talked to comforted themselves with the belief that the Amazon was simply too vast for the folly of one generation to destroy it. Now, it seems, the Brazilian government may have stumbled upon a way to do just that...
...fire year, more than 15,000 sq. mi. of Brazil's rain forest went up in flames. Ecologists say the paving of BR-163 will put at risk 580,000 sq. mi.--one-third of the dense forest remaining in the Amazon region. To get an idea of the scale of the potential catastrophe, imagine all of Alaska as scorched earth...
...Brazilian Amazon, roughly 75% of deforestation has occurred within 30 miles of a paved road. Despite laws prohibiting settlement in virgin lands, politicians, who see settlers as voters, have encouraged Brazil's 10 million landless poor to migrate into the interior, torching forest as they go. But the rain forest is not good agricultural land, and many of the farmers sell out to cattle ranchers. The only reason enormous stretches of the forest did not burn down in 1998 was that paved roads did not yet penetrate the most fragile areas...
...irony is that in the end agribusiness will suffer along with everyone else. The destruction of the rain forest could make drought more common all over Brazil, endangering soybean production. In the face of that peril, the government will have to decide whether short-term profits are worth risking an environmental disaster for Brazil--and the whole planet...