Forest fragments north of Manaus, as seen from the air.
Lovejoy flew to Manaus and presented his plan to Brazilian officials.
Rather to his surprise, they embraced it. The project has now been
running continuously for more than thirty years. So many graduate
students have been trained at the reserves that a new word was coined to
describe them: “fragmentologist.” For its part, the BDFFP has been called
“the most important ecological experiment ever done.”
CURRENTLY, about fifty million square miles of land on the planet are ice-
free, and this is the baseline that’s generally used for calculating human
impacts. According to a recent study published by the Geological Society
of America, people have “directly transformed” more than half of this
land—roughly twenty-seven million square miles—mostly by converting
it to cropland and pasture, but also by building cities and shopping malls
and reservoirs, and by logging and mining and quarrying. Of the
remaining twenty-three million square miles, about three-fifths is
covered by forest—as the authors put it, “natural but not necessarily
virgin”—and the rest is either high mountains or tundra or desert.
According to another recent study, published by the Ecological Society of