Amazon forest protection
Ethan Vitaz is a Junior at Pitzer College. He is majoring in Environmental Analysis.
The vast rainforests of the Amazon River basin have occupied a storied place in the minds of kings and paupers, moneyed speculators and landless peons. In grand roadless swaths of the forest, would-be land barons see fortunes in clearing the forest for timber and cattle pasture whereas biologists and indigenous communities see a planet and home intact only in an unbroken canopy and forest floor.
The Amazon’s astonishing biodiversity speaks to a natural history that may stretch to the early Cenozoic period 55 million years ago.[1] In the 21st cen tury, the Amazon faces its nadir: despite nearly four decades of conservation measures, the rate of deforestation in the Amazon forest since the 1970s has remained stubbornly high, despite some hopeful dips in the early 2000s. Rates of deforestation that approach nearly 20 percent of the forest leave the forest system in danger of collapse. The forest’s very mass makes its own weather;[2] when the land is stripped of biomass that stores and cycles nutrients making ecological succession improbable, the land is left to degrade into desert or savannah. A study by Rutishauser et al. showed that that forest recovery can takes about 12, 43, and 75 years when carbon stocks (biomass) are decreased by 10%, 25%, and 50% respectively.[3] Given the role of the Amazon forest in absorbing atmospheric carbon, regulating planetary climate, and delivering precipitation to the South American continent,[4] the survival of future generations is dependent on a renewed focus on forest conservation.
Whereas Brazil, with South America’s largest economy and sixty percent of the Amazon forest inside its borders, appeared to be ready a decade ago to take the lead in safeguarding the future of the forest,[5] setbacks to enforcement of regulations on logging, mining, and forest-clearing for soy and cattle have resulted in rapid loss of forest cover. Moreover, under the presidency of the virulently anti-indigenous president Jair Bolsonaro, militias and criminal organizations have targeted Brazil’s indigenous leadership, leaving scores dead and thousands displaced.[6]
A Brazilian Amazon land trust designed with explicit parameters for forest preservation measurable by future generations may be a means of avoiding the setbacks caused by Brazil’s turn to the right and the descent of Brazil’s northwest into semi-lawlessness. Proposing a land trust for Brazil’s Amazon is obviously a tricky business: any such proposal must avoid mistakes made by non-Brazilian conservationists in the 1980s who called for an “internationalization” of the Amazon forest—a call that provoked a fierce nationalist backlash inside Brazil and a view among some Brazilians of Amazon environmentalism as eco-imperialism. However, a land trust that funneled significantly greater revenue into a network of indigenous reserves and communities, civil society forest defense organizations, sustainable farming and forest enterprises, and enforcement bodies could well provide necessary momentum for a forest conservation a Brazil’s sovereignty public land trust is one possible way of ensuring long term protection of the forest.
[1] For a discussion of the debate over the origins of the Amazon, see Baker, P.A et al “Trans-Amazon Drilling Project: origins and evolution of the forests, climate, and hydrology of the South American tropics,” Scientific Drilling 20 (2015), 41-49. DOI 10.5194/sd-20-41-2015.
[2] Wright, J.S. et al, “Rainforest-initiated wet season onset,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Jul 2017, 201621516; DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1621516114;
Pöhlker, C et al, “Biogenic potassium salt particles as seeds for secondary organic aerosol in the Amazon, Science 337 (August 31, 2012), no. 6098, 1075-78, DOI 10.1126/science.1223264.
[3] Rutishauser, E. et al, “Rapid tree carbon stock recovery in managed Amazonian forests,” Current Biology 25 (2015, no. 18, 787-788, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2015.07.034.
[4] Vizy, E. and Cook, C., “Relationship between Amazon and High Andes Rainfall,” Journal of Geophysical Research 112 (2007), D07107, doi:10.1029/2006JD007980.
[5] Carvalho, W. et al, “Deforestation control in the Brazilian Amazon: A conservation struggle being lost as agreements and regulations are subverted and bypassed,” Perspectives in Ecology and Conservation 17 (2019), no. 3, 122-130, DOI 10.1016/j.pecon.2019.06.002.
[6] Canineu, M.L. and Carvalho, L., “Bolsonaro’s Plan to Legalize Crimes Against Indigenous Peoples,” Human Rights Watch, March 1, 2020, accessed May 25, 2020 at https://www.hrw.org/news/2020/03/01/bolsonaros-plan-legalize-crimes-against-indigenous-peoples