Highway of Riches, Road to Ruin
January 27, 2018 4:17 AM   Subscribe

Inside the Amazon's deforestation Crisis.
Highway BR-163 cuts a brutal path through Brazil’s conflicting ambitions: to transform itself into an economic powerhouse and to preserve the Amazon as a bulwark against climate change. Stephanie Nolen travelled 2,000 kilometres along the dusty, dangerous corridor, and found a range of realistic — and often counterintuitive ways — that the forest could work for everyone.

“For me, the best days are when we fly over the forest,” she said. “Because down here we’re just in the middle of destruction – but when you’re up there you see things on a different scale. That despite all the damage, there is still a lot of forest. And it’s beautiful, to see that it’s still there.”
posted by adamvasco (7 comments total) 17 users marked this as a favorite
 
The photographer for this piece, Aaron Vincent Elkhaim, has been working on a great project in Brazil for the past few years on the industrialization of the Amazon through hydroelectric infrastructure expansion.
posted by msbrauer at 5:59 AM on January 27, 2018 [1 favorite]


Today I learned that when I read the word "Amazon", the first object I think about is the company, not the rainforest. That's a little sad.
posted by WalkingAround at 6:49 AM on January 27, 2018 [13 favorites]


Ditto. Here I am thinking, “that’s pretty off-brand, Jeff.”
posted by leotrotsky at 7:27 AM on January 27, 2018 [3 favorites]


“People said at first that we were crazy,” Ms. Pereira said, when she welcomed us into their airy house, nestled in a grove of trees. “But then they saw what we were doing and many of them wanted to start doing the same thing.” Ms. Pereira set up an association, teaching women in the community how to make a living from the forest. Some of their husbands switched to “extraction,” as it is known, as well.

The logging bosses did not appreciate any of this: They didn’t want to compete with her for manual labour, and they didn’t like the ethos she was spreading about how the trees had more value left alive.
This is a good long read. It's taken me there in a very good way. I've pulled the above quote, because I always feel that in this kind of thing, what I'd call the sunk moral cost fallacy comes up. People become violent in defence of their criminality at least as much to protect their self-concept (as brave people doing what they have to do in a violent world) as they do to protect their livelihood.

And if we're going to start mentioning confusion between the internet and the forest, the Amazon parallel's a bit basic. I only came back to write this comment because I misread "logger" as "blogger" once, and then couldn't unsee it. It really makes the whole thing read as incredibly silly.
posted by ambrosen at 8:39 AM on January 27, 2018 [3 favorites]


Also in name silliness: the Chico Mendes Institute for the Conservation of Biodiversity – Zero One Fucks Given.
posted by ambrosen at 8:47 AM on January 27, 2018 [1 favorite]


... Mr. de Sousa had boiled the situation down to a question of power.


And in this wonderful world of globalization, I don't think the environment or the rest of us have a chance.
*sigh
posted by BlueHorse at 11:24 AM on January 27, 2018


Does Amazon and The Amazon have an inverse growth relationship starting at some web-year? The company with that namesake really aught to consider flipping that.
posted by filtergik at 7:37 AM on January 28, 2018


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