The Amazon and the time of the carrot
When Brazil’s Environment minister Marina Silva quit last Wednesday, she wasn’t just letting her boss President Lula da Silva know she’d had enough. She was sending a message to the planet that the Amazon rain forest is in grave danger. The steamroller of Brazilian progress is on a collision course with the lungs of the earth.
Silva, who was raised in the Amazon as the daughter of a rubber-tapper, is an icon of the green movement in Brazil. For decades she fought alongside environmental activist Chico Mendes until he was murdered in 1988. She has also accompanied Lula since the early days of his Worker’s Party and her appointment as environment minister in 2002 was no more than logical.
Since then however, Silva’s has been an uphill battle. Efforts to conserve the rainforest were increasingly thwarted by business interests and to make matters worse she found herself loosing the ear of her mentor. Hailed as the first “green president” when he took office, Lula’s environmental credentials have disappeared at the same rate as the rainforest, as one ambitious infrastructural project after another is revealed. The Amazon has had to make way for hydro-electrical damns, highway networks and even plans for a nuclear power plant.
After many instances in which her policies were either overruled or side-stepped, Silva felt she had become something of a token ‘greenie.’ The final straw came last week when Lula overlooked her and instead chose his strategic planning minister Roberto Mangabeira Unger to oversee the implementation of a government initiative to develop the Amazon in a sustainable way. Silva made the only poignant statement she could make, and quit.
The appointment of Unger was no coincidence. If Marina Silva was emblematic of the long-gone green trade-union leader Lula da Silva, then the former Harvard professor is symbolic of the new progress-or-bust Brazilian president. Unger has plans for the Amazon, although they don’t seem to include the trees.
“The Amazon is the frontier, not just of geography but of the imagination. It is our great national laboratory," he said in a recent interview. “It is the space in which we can best rethink and reorganize the whole country, and define this new model of development.” A brave new world, albeit a concrete one.
His argument is that the Amazon is “not just a collection of trees,” but home to 27 million people who deserve economic opportunities. If they don’t, says Unger, “the practical result will be disorganized economic activity, and disorganized economic activity will lead relentlessly to deforestation. The only way to preserve the Amazon is to develop it.”
But the Amazon basin is also home to 10 per cent of the world's mammals and 15 per cent of its land-based plant species. It holds more than half of the world's fresh water and its vast forests act as the largest carbon sink on the planet, absorbing greenhouse gases.
Meanwhile, deforestation is occurring at a pace of a football pitch every ten seconds. Early successes by Silva were overturned when the rate of deforestation greatly increased last year. A double whammy, because the negative effects on the environment are twofold.
The felling of trees not only diminishes the size of the Amazon and its qualities as a unique eco-system and producer of oxygen, it also adds to global warming. Almost a quarter of the world's total emissions now come from deforestation – far outstripping the 14 per cent produced by planes, cars and industry. Yesterday's deforestation alone released as much carbon dioxide into the air as would eight million people flying from New York to London.
According to Beatrix Richards, head of forests at the World Wildlife Fund in the UK, “The Amazon is on a knife edge due to the dual threats of deforestation and climate change,” she told the Daily Telegraph. The phrase “tipping point” has been used repeatedly to describe the point we’re at.
That’s because once they start burning on a large scale, forests are more vulnerable to further burning. The loss of trees allows more sunlight to reach the forest interior, drying dead leaves and branches on the forest floor. Disappearing Amazon forests speed up climate change, influencing the amount of rainfall around the planet.
The Stern report, which was commissioned by the British government to document climate change, concluded that curbing deforestation was the single biggest thing we can do to halt global warming
Of course, the Brazilians aren’t ignorant to any of this. They know the science, but they also don’t like being lectured by foreigners. After all, the Europeans burnt down their forests to fuel an industrial revolution long before they took an interest in the Amazon. Railroad-fuelled deforestation in 19th century United States is the stuff of nightmares. So Unger and Lula are right to point out that now its Brazil’s turn to develop and use its natural resources.
Waving a stick at the Brazilians is both outdated and patronising. Instead it’s time we turned to the carrot. Luckily, according to the Stern report, arresting deforestation is cheap. 30 times cheaper than reducing emissions from fossil fuels – and no new technology is needed. Just the political will and about 80 billion dollars.
If the EU can fork out a two dollar subsidy per cow per day, as an Australian Trade minister once calculated, and if the US can spend 12 billion dollars every month in Iraq, then surely between all of us we can put together the money to rescue the very air we breath.
Photograph: Stephen Ferry/Liaison/Getty Images
Silva, who was raised in the Amazon as the daughter of a rubber-tapper, is an icon of the green movement in Brazil. For decades she fought alongside environmental activist Chico Mendes until he was murdered in 1988. She has also accompanied Lula since the early days of his Worker’s Party and her appointment as environment minister in 2002 was no more than logical.
Since then however, Silva’s has been an uphill battle. Efforts to conserve the rainforest were increasingly thwarted by business interests and to make matters worse she found herself loosing the ear of her mentor. Hailed as the first “green president” when he took office, Lula’s environmental credentials have disappeared at the same rate as the rainforest, as one ambitious infrastructural project after another is revealed. The Amazon has had to make way for hydro-electrical damns, highway networks and even plans for a nuclear power plant.
After many instances in which her policies were either overruled or side-stepped, Silva felt she had become something of a token ‘greenie.’ The final straw came last week when Lula overlooked her and instead chose his strategic planning minister Roberto Mangabeira Unger to oversee the implementation of a government initiative to develop the Amazon in a sustainable way. Silva made the only poignant statement she could make, and quit.
The appointment of Unger was no coincidence. If Marina Silva was emblematic of the long-gone green trade-union leader Lula da Silva, then the former Harvard professor is symbolic of the new progress-or-bust Brazilian president. Unger has plans for the Amazon, although they don’t seem to include the trees.
“The Amazon is the frontier, not just of geography but of the imagination. It is our great national laboratory," he said in a recent interview. “It is the space in which we can best rethink and reorganize the whole country, and define this new model of development.” A brave new world, albeit a concrete one.
His argument is that the Amazon is “not just a collection of trees,” but home to 27 million people who deserve economic opportunities. If they don’t, says Unger, “the practical result will be disorganized economic activity, and disorganized economic activity will lead relentlessly to deforestation. The only way to preserve the Amazon is to develop it.”
But the Amazon basin is also home to 10 per cent of the world's mammals and 15 per cent of its land-based plant species. It holds more than half of the world's fresh water and its vast forests act as the largest carbon sink on the planet, absorbing greenhouse gases.
Meanwhile, deforestation is occurring at a pace of a football pitch every ten seconds. Early successes by Silva were overturned when the rate of deforestation greatly increased last year. A double whammy, because the negative effects on the environment are twofold.
The felling of trees not only diminishes the size of the Amazon and its qualities as a unique eco-system and producer of oxygen, it also adds to global warming. Almost a quarter of the world's total emissions now come from deforestation – far outstripping the 14 per cent produced by planes, cars and industry. Yesterday's deforestation alone released as much carbon dioxide into the air as would eight million people flying from New York to London.
According to Beatrix Richards, head of forests at the World Wildlife Fund in the UK, “The Amazon is on a knife edge due to the dual threats of deforestation and climate change,” she told the Daily Telegraph. The phrase “tipping point” has been used repeatedly to describe the point we’re at.
That’s because once they start burning on a large scale, forests are more vulnerable to further burning. The loss of trees allows more sunlight to reach the forest interior, drying dead leaves and branches on the forest floor. Disappearing Amazon forests speed up climate change, influencing the amount of rainfall around the planet.
The Stern report, which was commissioned by the British government to document climate change, concluded that curbing deforestation was the single biggest thing we can do to halt global warming
Of course, the Brazilians aren’t ignorant to any of this. They know the science, but they also don’t like being lectured by foreigners. After all, the Europeans burnt down their forests to fuel an industrial revolution long before they took an interest in the Amazon. Railroad-fuelled deforestation in 19th century United States is the stuff of nightmares. So Unger and Lula are right to point out that now its Brazil’s turn to develop and use its natural resources.
Waving a stick at the Brazilians is both outdated and patronising. Instead it’s time we turned to the carrot. Luckily, according to the Stern report, arresting deforestation is cheap. 30 times cheaper than reducing emissions from fossil fuels – and no new technology is needed. Just the political will and about 80 billion dollars.
If the EU can fork out a two dollar subsidy per cow per day, as an Australian Trade minister once calculated, and if the US can spend 12 billion dollars every month in Iraq, then surely between all of us we can put together the money to rescue the very air we breath.
posted by PIT @ 8:21 PM
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