Ok, so for my Global Perspectives and Realities class, I am trying to figure out what's going on with the rainforest in Brazil. I read in an awesome New Yorker article yesterday (Um, can't find it online, will add it later) that said something like that Indonesia and Brazil both contribute to 10% of the Carbon Dioxide added to the atmosphere because of their destruction of their rainforests.
Ok, I've known since 4th grade that destruction of rainforests is the worst thing ever (atmosphere, ecosystems, endangered species, the list goes on). But, it seems like it actually might be the worst thing ever. So, I think I'm going to slowly build my project up here (via my blog), looking at why it's happening. Maybe we'll be surprised, maybe not.
When SustainMizzou (our recycling club/organization on campus) showed An Inconvenient Truth last year, I was talking with some enviro-evangelists afterwards about what I could do and it seemed like the most proactive thing was to not eat meat from Brazil that was raised on rainforest land. Uhh...done.
So, I've been obsessed with Brazil for no clear reason for years now, and I want to figure more out about this. Come along!
The picture above is a map of where the Raposa Serra do Sol reservation is. There have been protests and bridge-burnings lately (nytimes article) because the government is removing non-Indians from the area. I don't understand this whole thing, but maybe I will soon.
links for next time:
nytimes: "Brazil, Alarmed, Reconsiders Policy on Climate Change"
nytimes: "In the Amazon: Conservation or Colonialism?"
mongabay.com: "Rainforests of Brazil: An Environmental Status Report"
i'm in. no meat from brazil. let's burn some bridges bitches.
ReplyDeleteHello,
ReplyDeleteWell, by not eating Brazilian meat maybe you'll help, but most probably you'll just boycott legal producers from the center of the country. People that use illegal areas on the Amazon normally don't manage to export, they don't have authorizations - even for the legal producers is not easy to have them :P. They might have "their ways" of passing through, of course, but most of the meat you'll find there is legal, I suppose.
I found your page looking for a map of Raposa do Sol. :P
A major judging was going on this week on the country regarding this place. It's simply immense, and there were many non Indian people living there much before its creation.
With this reserve summed to all others, Indians have exclusively for them 13% of the country territory - that's two times France. Some places are very rich in natural resources. Non Indians can only enter with special authorization, even the State doesn't have much access. Indians correspond to 0,4% of the country's population, and many of them don't live on these reserves.
The decision of the Court? To postpone the decision. :P
The problem there is more about native rights than about Amazon deforestation.
ReplyDeleteThe 1.7 million hectares of Raposa Serra do Sol (4.2 million acres) are mostly in opened areas (fields of grass or bushes)than in forests. That's because there were some farmers (most of them family farmers), breeding cattle on the native grass fields.
It seems difficult to people realize the size of the amazon region. Besides the Amazon Rain Forest, that covers 350 million hectares (870 million acres), it was created a broader area, designated Legal Amazon, where applies some constitutional fiscal incentives to investment (that is one of the poorest region in Brazil, and consequently, in the world). The Legal Amazon, that covers more than 500 million hectares (1.2 billion acres), has many other kinds of vegetation than the rain forest. And most of the human settlings are just out of the rain forest, where it is very hard to live (diseases, poor soil, too much rain, isolated areas, etc...). But deforestation happens, that is true, in savannas, in other kinds of forest, and in the rain forest also.
Unfortunately, deforestation is the best economic activity in areas like those ones, mainly because of the kind of people that live there (illiterate, unemployed).