Preservation of this precious forest is a tough battle. In June
2000, the biggest landowners in Brazil who control 50% of the agri-
cultural land, pushed a draft law through the Brazilian senate com-
mittee which would have allowed a 25% increase in annual rates of
clearing and burning of the forest. An international email campaign
amongst environmentalists, instantly mounted, generated hun-
dreds of thousands of signatures, forcing the Congress to back
down. Less than a year later however, the Brazilian government
launched the much more ambitious Avanca Brasil plan to develop
most of Amazonia, with new highways, even railroads; new settle-
ments and extraction of minerals and timber. The whole region will
be transformed in the next twenty years, with the remains of the
forest chopped into strips and blocks with little chance of survival.
This unbelievably irresponsible policy can be stopped only by mass
international protest.Forestry
The death of the forests is only the tip of the iceberg and is a reflection
of the deeper deterioration in humankind itself
Ernst Krebs
If a forest's climate changes over hundreds or thousands of years,
the types of trees that grow in it will gradually change, without
threatening the survival of the forest. However, if the rate of climate
change accelerates, as it is doing today, certain species disappear
before new species can take hold. The forest starts to lose its vital-
ity and will gradually deteriorate into an arid wasteland.
The modern science of forestry began in the early nineteenth cen-
tury. Napoleon in his passage over the Alps removed an unbelievable
number of great trees, and the Swiss were determined to restore the
damage. Less concerned with mass production than we are today,
they insisted that planting must be of appropriate species. Though
this sensitivity to landscape and the environment is still practised in
Switzerland and Austria, in other countries forestry has deteriorated
to the production of timber for cheap furniture, chipboard and fire-
wood, as that is about all the poor quality of timber is good for.
Forestry today is about planting single species' woodland to be
harvested within as short a time as possible (while the trees are
mere adolescents) in order to maximize the profit. A redwood forHIDDEN NATURE