Brazil Reopens Amazon Forests To Logging - NYT

[hatrack]

Wow. What a surprise.

RIO DE JANEIRO, Feb. 12 - "To the dismay of environmental groups here and abroad, the Brazilian government has restored logging licenses that were suspended last year as part of an effort to impede deforestation in frontier areas of the Amazon where the jungle is rapidly vanishing. The turnabout came after loggers and their allies blocked a major highway through the heart of the jungle and a large tributary of the Amazon River, burned buses, and threatened to pollute waterways with chemicals and seize an airport.

Environmental groups described the government's unexpected policy change as a setback to conservation efforts in the Amazon and said it would only encourage further lawlessness in an area already noted for violence.

"Giving in to blackmail is always a dangerous precedent, and I think that is the case here," said Adriana Ramos of the Socio-Environmental Institute, a leading research and advocacy group. "Before long, somebody else appears, also wanting to unilaterally force negotiations, so it is important that the government not weaken the implementation of the law."

This dispute is the latest of several since Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and the left-leaning Workers' Party took office two years ago in which the government has bowed to organized acts of civil disobedience. Ranchers, rice growers and farmers who blocked highways last year to prevent the establishment of an Indian reservation in the northern Amazon also got their way, and landless peasants regularly invade and occupy farms with no legal action taken against them. On Jan. 27, the senior environmental inspector in the eastern Amazon state of Para vowed that the government "will not cave in to blackmail." But when the leader of the loggers' association was quoted as warning that "blood will flow" unless his group's demands were met, and business and political leaders in towns along the blockaded BR-163 highway complained that supplies were running short and normal commerce was grinding to a halt, officials in Brasília apparently had second thoughts."

EDIT

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/02/13/international/americas/13amazon.html?

[ramapo]

1. Distressing yet perhaps understandable

I assume the Brazilian government did not do anything to alleviate the financial impact on the loggers from the logging ban. I do not expect environmental enlightment from a group of people who have lost their jobs due to environmental regulation.

Reopening the area to logging is an awful solution though. So what happens now? The loggers keep logging until there's nothing left and then they don't have jobs again. The world has lost a resource that will take a long time to replace. And the Brazilian government has demonstrated stupid incompetence.

[Massacure]

2. It can never be replaced.

In my Environmental Science class we did a unit on biodiversity. Temperate forests don't have as many species, but have greater population than down in rainforests. Go to a temperate forest and you can see a species of tree quite often, but in the rainforest you may see a tree and not find another one like it for several miles. Once the Rainforests are gone, they are gone for good.

[ramapo]

3. Gone for good to us anyway...

I take the very long view that Mother Nature will have the last laugh. The Earth has gone through cycles of life and death, birth and destruction. Clearly this is an era of death and destruction for many of our planet's species, none of which will return, for which we are responsible.

Yet every dog has its day and no day lasts forever. Eventually our own species will be gone, perhaps done in by our own "success". Nature will repair the damage and there will be new and different life on Earth.

Look at how quickly nature reclaims an old, unused parking lot or abandoned homestead. Replacing the rain forest will take immeasurably longer but there will be an eventual rebirth, perhaps leading to intelligent life at last.

[Massacure]

4. Rebirth yes, but not in our lifetimes

New species will have to evolve to replace the ones we made extinct.

[yinkaafrica]

5. Allow me treeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeees!

Goodbye wonderful trees. Wish I had taken time to meet more of you.