Brazil can be divided into four major geographic regions. The long, narrow Atlantic seaboard has coastal ranges between the Rio Grande do Sul and Bahia, but is flatter north of Bahia. The large highlands - called the Planalto Brasileiro or central plateau - which extend over most of Brazil's interior south of the Amazon Basin are punctuated by several small mountain ranges and sliced by several large rivers. Two great depressions - the Paraguay Basin, which is characterized by open forest, low woods and scrubland, and the densely forested Amazon Basin - lie in the southeast. The 6275km (3890mi) long Amazon is the world's largest river, and the Amazon forest contains 30% of the world's remaining forest.

Most of the country has noticeable seasonal variations in rain, temperature and humidity, but only the south of Brazil has extreme seasonal changes. The Brazilian winter is from June to August, with the coldest southern states receiving average winter temperatures of between 13°C and 18°C (55°F and 64°F). In summer (December to February), Rio is hot and humid, with temperatures in the high 30°Cs (80°Fs); the rest of the year, temperatures hover around 25°C (77°F). The northeast coast gets as hot as Rio but is less humid and stifling. In general, the highlands are less hot and humid, and are prone to summer rainfalls. The Amazon basin is the rainiest part of Brazil, and while it is humid, temperatures average a reasonable 27°C (80°F).

The Amazon

Brazilians tend to react with outrage at being lectured on the preservation of their environment and the protection of native peoples by North Americans and Europeans, who less than twenty years ago were still accusing Brazil of failing to exploit the very resources they now seek to save. Justifiable as Brazilian accusations of hypocrisy may be, however, they cannot hide the fact that there is a real environmental crisis in Brazil, a reality that is finally gaining lip service at least among domestic politicians.

Amazon ecology

The endangered forest 

In 1983, official Brazilian statistics showed that some two to four percent of the trees had already disappeared from the Amazon region – according to Friends of the Earth it was closer to thirty percent. Even if you bear in mind their respective bias, plus the fact that secondary regenerative growth is often mistaken for true forest in satellite photos, then the real figure was probably between ten and fifteen percent; by 2000 this was more like twenty to thirty percent.

Forest clearance generally follows road building. When a road reaches into new territories it brings with it the financial backing and interests of big agricultural and industrial companies, plus an onslaught of land-seeking settlers. Forest fires are a major threat, generally caused by colonizing farmers who accidentally set alight the forested areas around their plots, but exacerbated by the process of selective logging, which opens up the forest canopy and leaves debris ripe for lighting. This is of particular concern at a time when logging companies are shifting their focus once again to the Amazon after a couple of decades devouring the Southeast Asian rainforests. In 1998 forest fires caused tremendous damage to some 2700 square kilometres of rainforest in Roraima. Alongside the logging, cattle ranching and smaller-scale farming practices, hydroelectic dams are also causing serious damage to the Amazonian environment: north of Manaus, for example, the Balbina hydroelectric dam has inundated an area of over 2000 square kilometres of once virgin forest. As well as the obvious environmental impact of the flooding of this vast region, further previously unforeseen problems are now being faced by the national power company. The water in the reservoir above the dam has been turned highly acidic by the decomposing vegetation trapped underneath the surface, causing the turbines to corrode every two to four years, thereby making the whole project uneconomic.

Until the Amazon was opened up by roads, many areas were inhabited and exploited only by Indian tribal peoples, who had long since retreated from the main rivers. When the Spanish and Portuguese first explored the Amazon they noted that a well-established, highly organized, apparently agriculturally based Indian society thrived along the banks of the main rivers. Within a hundred years this relatively sophisticated Indian culture had vanished. Although many had died from the initial effects of new diseases (flu, smallpox, measles, etc), a large proportion had escaped into more remote areas of the forest.

The rainforest is still seen by many in Brazil as a resource to be exploited until it no longer exists, much as we see fossil fuels and mineral deposits. The indigenous Indians and many of the modern forest-dwellers – including rubber tappers, nut collectors and, increasingly, even peasant settlers – view the forest differently, as something which, like an ocean, can be harvested regularly if it is not overtaxed.

Chico Mendes, the Brazilian rubber tappers’ union leader who was shot dead in 1988, was the best-known voice on the side of the established Amazon-dwellers: “the forest is our mother, our source of life,” he argued. He became a victim of the oppression of forest-dwellers by large landowning interests – mainly large cattle-ranching companies – when he was killed by hired gunmen outside his house in the state of Acre in the southwest Amazon. In February 1989, a few months after Mendes was shot, over 4000 Amazonian forest people gathered in Altamira along with environmental groups, scientists and government officials to thrash out the environmental and socio-cultural issues involved in rainforest destruction and the taking of indigenous land for national developments.

Destruction of the forest: The global consequences 

• The destruction of the forest has two effects on the earth’s atmosphere. The smoke from the vast forest clearances makes a significant direct contribution to the greenhouse effect. Less immediately, the fewer trees there are to absorb carbon dioxide, the faster the greenhouse effect is likely to build.
• The loss of resources is a world problem almost as much as it is a regional one. Only a small proportion of the plants that exist in the Amazon have been studied, and there is a real danger of losing a genetic pool of vital importance. Already, as many as one in four of the chemicals or medicines found in a high-street chemist originate from rainforest products, and there can be little doubt that there are many more medical breakthroughs waiting to be discovered. In 1982 a US National Academy of Sciences report estimated that an average ten square kilometres of rainforest contains 750 tree species, 125 mammal types, 400 varieties of birds, 100 different kinds of reptiles, 60 amphibians; and that a typical individual tree might support over 400 insect species.

Destruction of the forest: The regional consequences

• Climatic experts have predicted that deserts and droughts will be created by the disappearance of large tracts of the Amazon rainforest. This has already happened in the Northeastern coastal regions where barely any of the original forest cover survives. Drought- and poverty-stricken peasants from the Northeast form the majority of the landless settlers moving into the recently cleared areas of the Amazon today.
• The devastation of indigenous tribal groups is a second major problem associated with the destruction of the Amazon. The chief culprit is disease, introduced to people who have no natural resistance, but physical violence has also taken its toll. Gold-miners have polluted rivers (and the water and fish therein) with mercury, and people have been forced to move from their traditional homes to areas less able to support them.
• The loss of the forest itself is also serious. This may sound a circuitous argument, but the fact is that as the forest goes, so does an endless potential supply of rubber and other valuable gums, medicines, nuts, fruits, fish, game, skins and the like. A wide variety of ways to harvest the natural products of the forest are emerging, and, as time goes on, it seems more and more apparent that there is a greater long-term value in this approach if the forest can be saved.

The future

More significantly, Sarney’s successor, Collor, committed himself in the media to the “greening” of Brazil. He outlined a plan for an alternative to military service – Green Soldiers, to work in areas of ecological importance like national parks and reserves. He talked of debt-for-nature swaps and of enforcing severe punishments for “ecological crimes”.

Meanwhile the infamous dry-season queimadas – the annual torchings of the felled forest – continued. To try and control the queimadas in 1989 and 1990, Brazil’s environmental protection agency, IBAMA, organized helicopter surveillance for unauthorized burning of the forest. Not used to outside control of any kind, the larger fazendeiros were quick to react by shooting at helicopters and torching at weekends, at dusk or on Independence Day when the helicopters were less likely to be around. An IBAMA inspector was killed in Marabá by two timber dealers, and there has been a growing number of attacks on and threats to IBAMA workers. The burnings continue today, with selective logging increasing the risk of accidental spreading.

The most recent threat to the Amazon is the Brazilian government’s proposal, put forward in early 2000, to construct 3500 kilometres of new roads in four Brazilian states. A study by a group of non-governmental organizations (NGOs), reported in the El Folho de São Paulo newspaper, estimated that this could destroy up to 187,000 square kilometres of rainforest, a swath of land twice the size of Portugal. Their study also warned that a further 202,000 square kilometres might be destroyed by colonizing farmers following the road developments.

Other areas endangered by roads include Rondônia (already largely devastated by the early 1990s), large areas in southern Pará (notably the giant Carajás industrial scheme, where a rail line provides the transport), the whole Transamazonian belt to the south of the Amazon river, a large region around Manaus, and what’s left of the corridor formed by the Brasília–Belém highway.

Still, there is a growing coalition of environmentalists and forest people uniting against the destruction of the forest (and in the case of the forest people, their own destruction). Indians, rubber tappers and recent settlers have identified a common enemy in the state-backed mega-company. Together the forest people are a growing political force both within Brazil and, since the death of Chico Mendes, on the international scene. In March 1989, the Forest People’s Alliance was formed in Rio Branco to lobby for the creation of “extractive forest reserves” as the first step towards an official policy for the exploitation of Amazon rainforest which might actually be sustainable into the twenty-first century. One of the most hopeful signs in the Amazon is that this view is increasingly gaining scientific and economic credibility, as people come to realize that sensible exploitation of the forest can in the long term be more profitable than clearance.

The forest is a very fragile but potentially sustainable source of harvested fruits, nuts and oils, but some agronomists are of the potentially dangerous opinion that with the same investment in chemical, mechanical and genetic manipulation the Amazon could be a highly productive zone. Even on a relatively small farm level, if properly logged, the forest can provide low levels of capital while at the same time safeguarding the biodiversity and forest resources for the future. The Brazilian government-funded agroforestry research institute, EMBRAPA, based in Manaus, has experimented successfully with incorporating trees and replanted mixed tree species with agricultural production. There are apparently many advantages to the wellbeing of plants and soil in encouraging or maintaining tree species diversity. Sustainable and appropriate matching of cash crops, tree and timber-related products to available resources could make for a viable agroforestry industry in many areas of the Amazon. The Amazon can, many argue, best be preserved by managing it, not destroying it. The line is a fine one, but it is not impossible to clarify.

One basic problem with many “sustainable” forest products is the danger for anyone, let alone tribal groups or subsistence extractors, of relying on what are essentially ephemeral markets in Western luxury products. Brazil-nut oil, for example, is a luxury rather than a basic product for the West. In fact, sustainably managed timber, which represents a more vital and basic, even long-lasting, product for foreign and domestic markets, is probably more likely to provide significant economic security in the long run. But even this depends on the sincerity of the “sustainable” foresters, their ability to reach their markets, and, of course, the attitude and perspective of the consumers in the world market.