In the Amazon: Conservation or Colonialism?
Enviado: 28 Jul 2007, 20:25
Subject: In the Amazon: Conservation or Colonialism? The New York Times July
27, 2007
Anavilhanas Ecological Station Journal
In the Amazon: Conservation or Colonialism?
By LARRY ROHTER
ANAVILHANAS ECOLOGICAL STATION, Brazil - Depending on one's point of
view, the World Wildlife Fund's financial support of a nature reserve
here on the Rio Negro is either part of a laudable attempt to conserve
the Amazon jungle - or the leading edge of a nefarious plot by foreign
environmental groups to wrest control of the world's largest rain forest
from Brazil and replace it with international rule.
In 2003, after signing an agreement with the WWF and the World Bank, the
Brazilian government created the Amazon Region Protected Areas program.
Since then, more than a score of national parks and reserves covering an
area larger than New York, New Jersey and Connecticut combined have been
brought into that network and provided with an infusion of new funds.
The program's objective is to set up "a core system to anchor
bio-diversity protection for the Amazon," Matthew Perl, the WWF's Amazon
coordinator, said during a June visit to the area, a sparsely populated
archipelago of 400 islands northwest of Manaus. "It's part of a strategy
to buy time, bring each protected area up to certain standards of
management and pool resources for monitoring and enforcement. "
But that effort has aroused the suspicions of powerful business and
political groups in Brazil that want to integrate the Amazon into the
country's economy through dams, mining projects, highways, ports,
logging and agricultural exports.
"This is a new form of colonialism, an open conspiracy in which economic
and financial interests act through nongovernmental organizations, " said
Lorenzo Carrasco, editor and co-author of "The Green Mafia," a widely
circulated anti-environmentali st polemic. "It is evident these interests
want to block the development of Brazil and the Amazon region by
creating and controlling these reserves, which are full of minerals and
other valuable natural resources."
Such views are widely held in Brazil, cutting across regional and class
lines. In a survey of 2,000 people in 143 cities conducted in person in
2005 by the country's leading polling organization, Ibope, 75 percent
said that Brazil's natural riches could provoke a foreign invasion, and
nearly three out of five distrusted the activities of environmental
groups.
Winning the battle for Brazilian public opinion is crucial to any global
effort to preserve the environment and, by extension, curb climate
change. Brazil is the world's fourth largest producer of the principal
greenhouse gases; more than three-quarters of those emissions result
from deforestation, most of which occurs here in the Amazon.
But the notion that foreigners covet the Amazon has long been widespread
in Brazil, fed in part by anxiety about the central government's tenuous
control of the region. Those concerns have been exacerbated in recent
years by the Internet, which has become a home for fabricated documents
and declarations meant to convince Brazilians that their sovereignty is
at risk.
The most notorious example is a widely reproduced map supposedly used in
an American middle-school geography textbook. Rife with misspellings and
errors of syntax of a type common to speakers of Romance languages like
Portuguese, it shows the Amazon as an "international reserve," and
describes Brazilians as "monkeys" incapable of managing the rain forest.
Other spurious documents say that both President Bush and Al Gore made
speeches during the 2000 presidential campaign in favor of wresting the
Amazon from Brazil. Elsewhere, the documents quote an apocryphal
American general, who leads an agency that the Pentagon says does not
exist, as saying, "In the event Brazil decides to use the Amazon in a
way that puts the environment of the United States at risk, we must be
ready to interrupt that process immediately. "
Since the Iraq war began, accusations of American military designs on
the Amazon are often invoked to denigrate environmentalists and their
complaints about government policy. At hearings late last year on a
proposed dam on the Madeira River, proponents distributed a map showing
what they said were American "forward-operations locations" in the
region meant to block Brazil's development, including military bases and
advisers in Bolivia and Venezuela, two countries not exactly on friendly
terms with the Bush administration.
Some of the material circulating has been traced to right-wing
nationalist groups sympathetic to the military dictatorship that ruled
Brazil from 1964 to 1985. But in an unusual instance of former
adversaries agreeing, organizations on the extreme left - even in the
governing Workers' Party - have also endorsed the notion of a foreign
plot to seize the Amazon, as have some active duty segments of the
military.
"Everything indicates that the environmental and indigenous problems are
merely pretexts," said a recent Brazilian military intelligence report,
which was made available to The New York Times by a Brazilian who
received a copy and who was concerned at the views expressed. "The main
NGO's are, in reality, pieces in the great game in which the hegemonic
powers are engaged to maintain and augment their domination. Certainly,
they serve as cover for those secret services."
In reality, Mr. Perl, the WWF coordinator, said, his organization hopes
merely to create a buffer around the nature reserve here through the
creation of a larger "Rio Negro Conservation Bloc." He said the idea was
to protect the existing reserve by helping existing Indian reservations,
state parks and nature reserves along the banks of the river to operate
more effectively.
By 2012, Mr. Perl said, his organization and its partners hope to bring
an area larger than California into the system. A fund administered by a
Brazilian foundation that aims to raise $390 million and includes
donations from the German government and others has been created.
In the mid-1990s, part of the area surrounding the archipelago was in
fact declared a state park. But little was done to make that decree
effective, and since then the federal government's land-reform agency
has settled 700 peasant families here and the Brazilian Navy, Marines
and police have set up jungle training centers in the protected area.
"There is layer upon layer of claims, plan upon plan, and so this has
become an area of conflict," said Thiago Mota Cardoso, who monitors the
park for the Institute for Ecological Research, one of the WWF's
regional partners. "It is ironic that this land belongs to the federal
government, and yet the government does nothing."
27, 2007
Anavilhanas Ecological Station Journal
In the Amazon: Conservation or Colonialism?
By LARRY ROHTER
ANAVILHANAS ECOLOGICAL STATION, Brazil - Depending on one's point of
view, the World Wildlife Fund's financial support of a nature reserve
here on the Rio Negro is either part of a laudable attempt to conserve
the Amazon jungle - or the leading edge of a nefarious plot by foreign
environmental groups to wrest control of the world's largest rain forest
from Brazil and replace it with international rule.
In 2003, after signing an agreement with the WWF and the World Bank, the
Brazilian government created the Amazon Region Protected Areas program.
Since then, more than a score of national parks and reserves covering an
area larger than New York, New Jersey and Connecticut combined have been
brought into that network and provided with an infusion of new funds.
The program's objective is to set up "a core system to anchor
bio-diversity protection for the Amazon," Matthew Perl, the WWF's Amazon
coordinator, said during a June visit to the area, a sparsely populated
archipelago of 400 islands northwest of Manaus. "It's part of a strategy
to buy time, bring each protected area up to certain standards of
management and pool resources for monitoring and enforcement. "
But that effort has aroused the suspicions of powerful business and
political groups in Brazil that want to integrate the Amazon into the
country's economy through dams, mining projects, highways, ports,
logging and agricultural exports.
"This is a new form of colonialism, an open conspiracy in which economic
and financial interests act through nongovernmental organizations, " said
Lorenzo Carrasco, editor and co-author of "The Green Mafia," a widely
circulated anti-environmentali st polemic. "It is evident these interests
want to block the development of Brazil and the Amazon region by
creating and controlling these reserves, which are full of minerals and
other valuable natural resources."
Such views are widely held in Brazil, cutting across regional and class
lines. In a survey of 2,000 people in 143 cities conducted in person in
2005 by the country's leading polling organization, Ibope, 75 percent
said that Brazil's natural riches could provoke a foreign invasion, and
nearly three out of five distrusted the activities of environmental
groups.
Winning the battle for Brazilian public opinion is crucial to any global
effort to preserve the environment and, by extension, curb climate
change. Brazil is the world's fourth largest producer of the principal
greenhouse gases; more than three-quarters of those emissions result
from deforestation, most of which occurs here in the Amazon.
But the notion that foreigners covet the Amazon has long been widespread
in Brazil, fed in part by anxiety about the central government's tenuous
control of the region. Those concerns have been exacerbated in recent
years by the Internet, which has become a home for fabricated documents
and declarations meant to convince Brazilians that their sovereignty is
at risk.
The most notorious example is a widely reproduced map supposedly used in
an American middle-school geography textbook. Rife with misspellings and
errors of syntax of a type common to speakers of Romance languages like
Portuguese, it shows the Amazon as an "international reserve," and
describes Brazilians as "monkeys" incapable of managing the rain forest.
Other spurious documents say that both President Bush and Al Gore made
speeches during the 2000 presidential campaign in favor of wresting the
Amazon from Brazil. Elsewhere, the documents quote an apocryphal
American general, who leads an agency that the Pentagon says does not
exist, as saying, "In the event Brazil decides to use the Amazon in a
way that puts the environment of the United States at risk, we must be
ready to interrupt that process immediately. "
Since the Iraq war began, accusations of American military designs on
the Amazon are often invoked to denigrate environmentalists and their
complaints about government policy. At hearings late last year on a
proposed dam on the Madeira River, proponents distributed a map showing
what they said were American "forward-operations locations" in the
region meant to block Brazil's development, including military bases and
advisers in Bolivia and Venezuela, two countries not exactly on friendly
terms with the Bush administration.
Some of the material circulating has been traced to right-wing
nationalist groups sympathetic to the military dictatorship that ruled
Brazil from 1964 to 1985. But in an unusual instance of former
adversaries agreeing, organizations on the extreme left - even in the
governing Workers' Party - have also endorsed the notion of a foreign
plot to seize the Amazon, as have some active duty segments of the
military.
"Everything indicates that the environmental and indigenous problems are
merely pretexts," said a recent Brazilian military intelligence report,
which was made available to The New York Times by a Brazilian who
received a copy and who was concerned at the views expressed. "The main
NGO's are, in reality, pieces in the great game in which the hegemonic
powers are engaged to maintain and augment their domination. Certainly,
they serve as cover for those secret services."
In reality, Mr. Perl, the WWF coordinator, said, his organization hopes
merely to create a buffer around the nature reserve here through the
creation of a larger "Rio Negro Conservation Bloc." He said the idea was
to protect the existing reserve by helping existing Indian reservations,
state parks and nature reserves along the banks of the river to operate
more effectively.
By 2012, Mr. Perl said, his organization and its partners hope to bring
an area larger than California into the system. A fund administered by a
Brazilian foundation that aims to raise $390 million and includes
donations from the German government and others has been created.
In the mid-1990s, part of the area surrounding the archipelago was in
fact declared a state park. But little was done to make that decree
effective, and since then the federal government's land-reform agency
has settled 700 peasant families here and the Brazilian Navy, Marines
and police have set up jungle training centers in the protected area.
"There is layer upon layer of claims, plan upon plan, and so this has
become an area of conflict," said Thiago Mota Cardoso, who monitors the
park for the Institute for Ecological Research, one of the WWF's
regional partners. "It is ironic that this land belongs to the federal
government, and yet the government does nothing."