CHAPTER 10 PLAYING WITH FIRE

The skies over western Brazil will soon be dark both day and night. Dark from -
the smoke of thousands of fires, as farmers and cattle ranchers engage in their
annual rite of destruction: clearing land for crops and livestock by burning the rain
forests of the Amazon. Unusually heavy rains have slowed down the burning this
year, but the dry season could come at any time, and then the fires will reach a
peak. Last year the smoke grew so thick that Porto Velho, the capital of the state of
Rondonia, was forced to close its airport for days at a time. An estimated 12,350
sq. mi. of Brazilian rain forest - an area larger than Belgium - was reduced to
ashes. Anticipating another conflagration this year, scientists, environmentalists
and TV crews have journeyed to Porto Velho to marvel and despair at the
immolation of these ancient forests.

After years of inattention, the whole world has awakened at last to how much is at
stake in the Amazon. It has become the front line in the battle to rescue earth's
endangered environment from humanity's destructive ways. "Save the rain forest,"
long a rallying cry for conservationists, is now being heard from politicians,
pundits and rock stars. The movement has sparked a confrontation between rich
industrial nations, which are fresh converts to the environmental cause, and the
poorer nations of the Third World, which view outside interference as an assault on
their sovereignty.

The vast region of unbroken green that surrounds the Amazon River and its
tributaries has been under assault by settlers and developers for 400 years. Time
and again, the forest has defied predictions that it was doomed. But now the danger
is more real and imminent than ever before as loggers level trees, dams flood vast
tracts of land and gold miners poison rivers with mercury. In Peru the forests are
being cleared to grow coca for cocaine production. "It's dangerous to say the forest
will disappear by a particular year," says Philip Fearnside of Brazil's National
Institute for Research in the Amazon, "but unless things change, the forest will
disappear."

That would be more than a South American disaster. It would be an incalculable

The river and forest system covers 2.7 million sq. mi. (almost 90% of the area of the
contiguous U.S.) and stretches into eight countries besides Brazil,…. The jungle is so
dense and teeming that all the biologists on earth could not fully describe its life forms. A
1982 U.S. National Academy of Sciences report estimated that a typical 4-sq.-mi. patch
of rain forest may contain 750 species of trees, 125 kinds of mammals, 400 types of
birds, 100 of reptiles and 60 of amphibians. Each type of tree may support more than 400
insect species…

But the diversity of the Amazon is more than just good material for TV specials.
The rain forest is a virtually untapped storehouse of evolutionary achievement that
will prove increasingly valuable to mankind as it yields its secrets. Agronomists
see the forest as a cornucopia of undiscovered food sources, and chemists scour the
flora and fauna for compounds with seemingly magical properties. For instance,
the piquia tree produces a compound that appears to be toxic to leaf-cutter ants,
which cause millions of dollars of damage each year to South American
agriculture. Such chemicals promise attractive alternatives to dangerous synthetic
pesticides. Other jungle chemicals have already led to new treatments for
hypertension and some forms of cancer. The lessons encoded in the genes of the
Amazon's plants and animals may ultimately hold the key to solving a wide range
of human problems.

Scientists are concerned that the destruction of the Amazon could lead to climatic
chaos. Because of the huge volume of clouds it generates, the Amazon system
plays a major role in the way the sun's heat is distributed around the globe. Any
disturbance of this process could produce far-reaching, unpredictable effects.
Moreover, the Amazon region stores at least 75 billion tons of carbon in its trees,
which when burned spew carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Since the air is
already dangerously overburdened by carbon dioxide from the cars and factories of
industrial nations, the torching of the Amazon could magnify the greenhouse effect
-- the trapping of heat by atmospheric CO2. No one knows just what impact the
buildup of CO2 will have, but some scientists fear that the globe will begin to
warm up, bringing on wrenching climatic changes.

The forest functions like a delicately balanced organism that recycles most of its
nutrients and much of its moisture. Wisps of steam float from the top of the endless
palette of green as water evaporates off the upper leaves, cooling the trees as they
collect the intense sunlight. Air currents over the forest gather this evaporation into
clouds, which return the moisture to the system in torrential rains. Dead animals
and vegetation decompose quickly, and the resulting nutrients move rapidly from
the soil back to growing plants. The forest is such an efficient recycler that
virtually no decaying matter seeps into the region's rivers.

In the early 1970s the country built the Trans-Amazon Highway, a system of roads
that run west from the coastal city of Recife toward the Peruvian border. The idea
was to prompt a land rush similar to the pioneering of the American West. To
encourage settlers to brave the jungle, the government offered transportation and
other incentives, allowing them to claim land that they had "improved" by cutting
down the trees.

But for most of the roughly 8,000 families that heeded the government's call
between 1970 and 1974, the dream turned into a bitter disappointment. The soil,
unlike the rich sod in the Western U.S., was so poor that crop yields began to
deteriorate badly after three or four years. Most settlers eventually gave up and left.

If the rain forest disappears, the process will begin at its edges. While the Amazon
forest, as a whole, generates roughly half of its own moisture, the percentage is
much higher in these western states, far from the Atlantic. This means that
deforestation is likely to have a more dramatic impact on the climate in the west
than it would in the east. "Imagine the effects of a dry season extended by two
months," says Fearnside. The process of deforestation could become self-
perpetuating as heat, drying and wind cause the trees to die on their own.

Perhaps the best hope for the forests' survival is the growing recognition that they
are more valuable when left standing than when cut. Charles Peters of the Institute
of Economic Botany at the New York Botanical Garden recently published the
results of a three-year study that calculated the market value of rubber and exotic
produce like the Aguaje palm fruit that can be harvested from the Amazonian
jungle. The study, which appeared in the British journal Nature, asserts that over
time selling these products could yield more than twice the income of either cattle
ranching or lumbering.

But if the burning of the forests goes on much longer, the damage may become
irreversible. Long before the great rain forests are destroyed altogether, the impact
of deforestation on climate could dramatically change the character of the area,
lead to mass extinctions of plant and animal species, and leave Brazil's poor to
endure even greater misery than they do now. The people of the rest of the world,
no less than the Brazilians, need the Amazon as a functioning system, and in the
end, this is more important than the issue of who owns the forest. The Amazon
may run through South America, but the responsibility for saving the rain forests,
as well as the reward for succeeding, belongs to everyone.