FAREWELL FREI HEITOR

Governador do Acre, Binho Marques, awarding the Order of the Star of Acre to Frei Heitor Turini.

Amidst fanfare and award, our dear friend Frei Heitor ("I AM PART OF THE TREE") Turini has departed his beloved Acre for his Italian land of birth. Foster Brown, rainforest ecologist and Federal University of Acre professor, wrote a homage to the friar's unique personality and devoted service to the people and trees of Acre.


Innocence in Brazil
July 2010
Foster Brown

Friar Heitor Turrini teaches the mathematics of hope
(7 July 2010)

Exponential growth is the monster under the bed of most environmentalists. We don’t think much about it until we reflect what a 10% growth rate would do to energy demand (doubling it in 7 years, quadrupling it in 14 years). My philosopher- friend, Reginaldo Castelo, recently reminded me of the monster when he sent me a link to Albert Bartlett’s excellent lecture on exponential growth.

The classic example portrays lily pads that double their size each day and cover a pond, killing the fish in 30 days1. The question is when do the lily pads cover half the pond? The answer is on the 29th day. With such examples, exponential growth seems like a fungal disease to be avoided. Then I listened to one of Friar Heitor Turrini’s informal sermons. The Friar is an Italian missionary who had come to Brazil in 1950 and yesterday said good-bye to Acre, returning to Italy due to his fragile health. As always, he gave me hope, but this time with a calculation.

Imagine, he said, that he and Father Andre, another Italian missionary, convinced each other how to live in harmony with the earth and with each other. On the next day, Friar Heitor and Father Andre convinced two others. On the third day the four of them convinced four more, and so on for subsequent days. How many days would it take to convince the world’s population to live in harmony? Friar Heitor worked out this calculation during a canoe trip up the Acre River in April.

When I posed this question to colleagues, they came up with months to years, but the Friar showed that it would take only 33 days. “Thirty-three days!” He exclaimed, banging his fist on my knee. “We can change the world, in a month, if we want to!”

Friar Heitor doesn’t believe that he will return to to Acre. During his stay, his systolic blood pressure dropped briefly to 50 mm. The doctor said that if it had slipped to 40 mm, he would have gone to Paradise much sooner than anticipated.

Once I had thought that the Friar was going back to Italy to die; but he soon corrected me. “Italy,” he said, “is in the midst of a moral crisis with abortions and violence.” He feels that he has much to do and awaits Vera’s and my visit to Bologna. And if we don’t make it, then “we will meet in Paradise and figure out how to spend several billion years together.” The Friar always thinks large.

His departure motivated the Governador do Acre, Binho Marques, to award him the Order of the Star of Acre. In his speech at the ceremony, the evening of Friar Heitor’s departure, Binho said that his theory of why Acre is special has much to do with the arrival 60 years ago of a group of Italian missionaries that have made such a difference. Friar Heitor replied that of the nine that arrived, only four are still alive.


Freis Andre, Heitor, Paolino and Foster Brown

A key person in this award was Eufran do Amaral, Secretary of the Environment. The link is long between them; Friar Heitor baptized Eufran in Sena Madureira.

Both Friar Heitor and his fellow missionary Padre Paolino Baldassarri have served as a conscience for the region. Whenever I visited the Friar I would receive a lecture and a question, “When will the U.S. stop its wars in Iraq and Afganistan. When will it stop the killing?” My lack of response spoke to me as well.


[editor's note: Frei Heitor's "knee-banging" style expressively leaves little doubt, as revealed in the following video.]



Both Friar Heitor and Padre Paolino do not support sustainable development the way that they see it in Acre. They find that the logging permitted for sustainable management isn’t sustainable. As Padre Paolino said to me, in the past they protested against their enemies, now they protest against their friends.

Friar Hector’s final words at the ceremony accentuated what we need to do: let the forest live; help the poor; and find alternative sources of energy to preserve the planet.

******

Post script. Friar Heitor has a joie-de-vivre that has served him well. Besides telling me about his experiences of celebrating a Mass in Communist China in 1970 and having survived several crash landings as an Amazonian bush pilot, he once tried to show me a pair of old water skis at the Sena Madureira Convent. I had forgotten about them until I saw the picture below, of the Friar skiing on one of Acre’s rivers when he was in his mid-sixties.



VIVA FREI HEITOR!

Read more!

MARINA SILVA: 

LIGHT OF THE AMAZON

Marina Silva's visionary departure from the business-as-usual politics that has been determining Amazonian policy is rocking the campaign boat of Lula's chosen successor Dilma Rousseff. Here is a report on how the presidential campaign is shaping up:

Lula-Like Candidate May Push Brazil Race Into Second Round on Environment
By Fabiola Moura and Maria Luiza Rabello
Bloomberg - Jul 22, 2010

In the race to succeed Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, only one candidate can match the former union leader’s up-by-the-bootstraps biography: his former Environmental Minister Marina Silva.

Silva, 52, who spent her childhood tapping rubber trees in the Amazon rain forest and worked as a maid before entering politics, had 10 percent backing in an Ibope poll published July 3. Lula’s former cabinet chief and chosen successor, Dilma Rousseff, had the support of 39 percent, tied with opposition candidate Jose Serra, in the survey of 2,002 adults that had a margin of error of 2 percentage points.

Silva, who resigned from Lula’s cabinet in 2008 after losing environmental battles to business interests, may be drawing support away from both frontrunners, said David Fleischer, a political analyst at the University of Brasilia. She promises to maintain her former mentor’s poverty-fighting policies and programs for luring investment while ushering in an era of corruption-free politics and concern for the environment.

“What is right, in the past 16 years, both in economic policy and in social policy, we will keep,” Silva said in a phone interview from Sao Paulo ahead of meetings this week in New York with investors.

“The mistakes we will correct, as we face new challenges, especially promoting sustainable growth.”Silva said in an interview today that if elected she would improve upon Lula’s policies and leave her own “trademark.”

By contrast Rousseff seeks simply to emulate the current president and Serra would stake out opposition positions just for the sake of being different than Lula, Silva said.

Second Round

If support for her Green Party candidacy holds, Silva may push the Oct. 3 election for the next leader of Latin America’s largest economy into a second round, said Christopher Garman, the Eurasia Group’s director for Latin America. A candidate needs 50 percent of the vote to avoid a runoff.

Lula, who left school at age 11 to support his family and lost a pinky finger operating a machine press on an assembly line, is preparing to step down with a record approval rating of 85 percent, according to Ibope.

Silva says her campaign will benefit from new technologies to reach out to voters, such as the Internet and Twitter Inc.’s social networking site, following the example of President Barack Obama. Silva predicted today she would advance to the second round of voting.

All three candidates vow to maintain the decade-old economic pillars that won Brazil its first ever investment-grade rating in 2008: limiting the budget deficit, stemming inflation and allowing a free-floating exchange rate. Since Lula took office in 2003, the benchmark Bovespa index has surged five-fold while the real strengthened 99 percent against the U.S. dollar.

Youngest Senator

Silva, who joined Lula’s Workers Party in 1985 and was elected Brazil’s youngest-ever senator at the age of 36 in 1994, said she’s the best qualified to build on the president’s legacy for reducing poverty by 30 million people. A video on her campaign website touts their shared surname, which is common among poorer Brazilians. The two aren’t related.

Even while praising Lula as a politician, Silva is critical of some of his policies, especially those affecting the environment.

“The biggest risk we run today is complacency,” Silva told investors, including Citigroup Inc.’s former senior vice chairman William Rhodes, in New York today at an event sponsored by Sao Paulo’s BM&F Bovespa SA.

“The growth rhythm we are experiencing today reflects the effects of a cyclical recovery,” Silva said, adding that government spending cuts and other reforms are needed to achieve sustainable growth.

Environment Job

As environment minister, Silva fought for tighter controls on a 656 billion-real ($368.4 billion) infrastructure drive between 2007 and 2010 headed by Rousseff, said Claudio Langone, who worked alongside her at the environment ministry for four years.

Silva quit when Lula passed her over when seeking someone to head the government’s Amazon taskforce, Langone said. Silva entered politics fighting deforestation in the Amazon alongside Chico Mendes, who was assassinated in 1988.

Among Silva’s targets in the campaign is the $11 billion Belo Monte hydroelectric dam, which would be the world’s third- biggest hydropower plant when it’s completed and would require the flooding of a Chicago-sized swathe of Amazon rainforest.

Only two groups, both led by units of state-controlled utility Centrais Eletricas Brasileiras in Rio de Janeiro, bid for the project in April after private-led consortiums dropped out. Brazil’s state development bank known as BNDES said in April it will finance as much as 80 percent of Belo Monte.

Avatar, Religion

“If I were in the government, I would have suspended the auction,” said Silva, who in a blog posting wrote that she identifies with the lean, forest-dwelling humanoids depicted in Belo Monte opponent James Cameron’s sci-fi film “Avatar.”

While Silva, a born-again Christian who prays daily on the campaign trail, said she’ll show “zero tolerance” with the corruption practiced by Brazil’s two main political parties, she isn’t positioning herself as a protest vote against the status quo, according to Garman.

For her vice presidential running mate she chose Guilherme Leal, founder and former co-chairman of Cajamar-based Natura Cosmeticos SA, Brazil’s biggest cosmetics maker. Her main economic adviser is Eduardo Giannetti, who criticized excessive government spending and lack of policy coordination with the central bank in an interview last month with Rio de Janeiro’s O Globo newspaper.

Silva’s stable 10 percent polling level makes it difficult to know which candidate she will steal more votes from, or who she would support in an eventual second round, said University of Brasilia’s Fleischer.

“She has considerable problems with Dilma, because she was her main adversary in Lula’s cabinet,” said Fleischer. “Whether she would come around and support her in a second round we are not sure.”


Go to original article.


Read more!

U.S. CLIMATE BILL: RIP

The last year and a half has produced endless versions of a proposed climate bill. Senate Democrats had already scaled back their plans to pursue limits on greenhouse gas emissions, like those in a bill approved by the House last year. Instead, they had said they would seek a cap on carbon emissions only for power plants. But even that proved overly ambitious.

“We know where we are,” Senate Majority Leader Reid said. “We don’t have the votes.”

[UPDATE: Dave Roberts at GRIST angrily assesses the situation: "What's happened is total and complete surrender. There's no silver lining in this cloud.... It's a sad, corrupt state of affairs this country finds itself in. I wish I had some hopeful words to offer. But at this point, American government appears to be broken. And our children and grandchildren will suffer for it."]

Andrew Revkin lists the things that President Obama might have done but did not do to help move the bill forward and then speculates:

Could it be that the White House has concluded what some political analysts have quietly told me — that only a Republican president could muster the Senate votes to pass a meaningful climate bill? That sounds strange initially but isn’t so strange when you consider the history of major environmental legislation and note that a moderate Republican could bring his or her base and lure many Democrats, while a Democrat is unlikely ever to lure sufficient Republican support to get 60 votes on a climate bill.

Someday, perhaps, Obama or a successor will discard convention and take the lead on this challenge, despite its sweep and complexity.

Of course, one can hope but it's going to take action and will more than audacious speeches.

Read more!

BRASIL BRASILEIRO

Eric Stoner celebrates the incredible beauty and diversity of Brazil.

Gilbert Gil, Brazil's world musician and tropicalista ex-minister of culture, has referred to Brazil as the ultimate center of miscegention and the evolutionary cauldron where both a new planetary citizen and a global culture are being born.

Despite its many problems, to be in Brazil is to walk amidst ever-evolving beauties. Read more!

TOXIC GULF (Views from the bottom.)

Not from the bottom of the sea but from the real folks on the ground. Definitely five stars. (parts 2 and 3 are over the jump)








Read more!

THE CONSPIRACY TO GRAB THE AMAZON

Ever since Henry Wickham committed the bio-piracy that led to the British Empire's more efficient rubber plantations in Southeast Asia and the consequent bursting of the rubber bubble in Amazônia, Brazilians have been especially suspicious of and susceptible to conspiracy stories about foreign attempts to steal the vast treasures of he Amazon Basin. So focused have they been on "foreign theft" that it would have been hard to anticipate a homegrown alliance between forces on the far left and far right to grab the land and forests. But that's exactly what happened when the Communist Party combined with the right-wing "ruralistas" and agri-businesses to revise Brazil's Forestry Code.

Johannes van de Ven elaborates on the far left-and-right conspiracy:

Although conceived more than 40 years ago, this landmark piece of legislation is a most progressive and modern, perhaps even the best in the world. In theory, the law requires landowners to preserve 80 percent of private properties in the Amazon basin, 35 percent in the savannas and 20 percent along its vast coastline. These are the so-called effective legal reserve requirements for rural properties. In practice, however, these reserve requirements have not been respected. The Forest Code has largely been a fiction, used and abused by small and big landowners, cattle ranchers and energy barons, landless peasants and multinationals. Law enforcement has been weak due to federal mismanagement, political omission and lack of financial resources and outright corruption.


On July 6, 2010, the Special Congressional Commission approved Aldo Rebelo’s reform bill, by a surprising 13 to 5 margin. In a typical scene of Brazilian federal politics, proponents of the projects commemorated the adoption by shouting “Brazil, Brazil, Brazil”, while opponents screamed “regression, regression, regression.” As if we were watching a bad movie about the last frontier on the Western front. The approval was only made possible due to rather an awkward agreement between the Communist Party and the right-wing ruralist bloc, which votes according to the interests of large landowners and the agribusiness lobby. This extraordinary coaltion was surprisingly backed by some members of the government coalition (PT/PMDB) and the major opposition party (PSDB/DEM). The only party that strongly opposed to Rebelo's bill was Marina Silva's Green Party.

The old Brazilian political standby of foreign CONSPIRACY played an important role in building support for the revised code:

In order to keep the momentum for passing the bill in the Congress, the awkward alliance of communists and the agribusiness lobby has been vocal. In a recent public debate, which I attended in the city of São Paulo, for example, Rebelo argued that environmental non-governmental organizations are in league with foreign governments in North America and Europe to undermine Brazilian sovereignty. For Rebelo and his communist party colleagues, the concept of forest protection or conservation is a conspiracy invented by the United States and the European Union to restrict Brazil’s economic development. This seems a rather bizarre accusation but is still omnipresent in domestic debates. The conspiracy theory is food for thought and resuscitated at regular intervals in newspaper columns, domestic television debates, especially now in a year of presidential campaigns.


Even Brazil’s agribusiness lobby is hiding itself behind the conspiracy theory of foreign interference in domestic affairs. A recent report of Washington, D.C.-based Avoided Deforestation Partners (ADP) has unintentionally reignited the conspiracy theory among communists and cattle ranchers in Brazil. Rebelo argues that the North American report “Farms Here, Forests There” is evidence that US lawmakers conceive stopping deforestation in the Amazon basin as a way to enhance multi-billion dollar markets for US agribusiness at the expense of Brazil. ADP argues that ending deforestation in Brazil through US and global climate incentives would net $190 to $270 billion by 2030 for US beef, soy timber and oil seed producers. In other words, by promoting forest preservation in Brazil, American farmers would be protected from rising competition from rising agribusiness power nation Brazil.

van der Ven points out that only ex-Minister of Environment and current presidential candidate Marina Siva has had the guts to take a unambiguous public stand against this nonsense:

The proposal is now on the table of the full Congress, where support is not guaranteed. With the presidential elections looming at the horizon later this year, the three main candidates are forced to justify their positions. Marina Silva of the Green Party has placed her opposition to Rebelo's bill at the very center of her presidential campaign. Her support base is growing, also driven by her campaign plea for “zero deforestation” from now onwards.


(continue to van der Ven's excellent in-depth analysis of what the future debate has in store.)

With due respect for and not to diminish the importance of Silva's courageous stand, it's necessary to point out that even zero deforestation will not be sufficient to avert the coming crisis as global GHG emissions cause the warming of North Atlantic tropical waters and bring more frequent devastating storms and more persistent drought to Amazônia. Indeed, the true conspiracy to end the Amazonian treasure trove is not found in foreign or domestic theft but in the joint refusal of China and the United States to reduce their outrageous levels of emissions (which are outrageous in the U.S. and rapidly rising in China) which are threatening to alter the climate and transform a large part of the Amazon basin from forest to savanna. 

Since much of the rainfall for Brazil's great agricultural zone is actually generated by Amazonian forest dynamics, loss of its moisture pumping role would be devastating to the interests of the ruralistas and agri-business as well. Just as China, the U.S. and the developed world must reduce the carbon emissions caused by their energy demand, Brazil must reduce emissions caused by deforestation. The communists, rualistas and agri-business interests would be better-advised to conspire to be part of the growing 21st Century awareness that global warming and deforestation affects everyone.

Read more!

"Can the Amazon Thrive in the 21st Century?"

The title is not mine. It belongs to Andrew Revkin's post at the NY Times blog DotEarth. The post was built around a rather rosy presentation that he facilitated at the Aspen Institute with Peter Seligman, the founder and head of Conservation International, and Fabio Scarano, a Brazilian ecologist and executive director of the organization’s Brazilian branch.



When I read Revkin's sanguine comments they seemed terribly uninformed and I was furious.

"I’m convinced that the system of rivers and forests is durable enough — not to mention expansive enough — to persist, and even thrive, as Brazil and its neighbors develop their economies. ... But there are enormous unresolved issues still that could lead to an acceleration of the slow-drip style of degradation that can cause great biological riches to vanish in plain sight."

I fired back a headline about a recent World Bank (hardly a hotbed of environmentalism) study:

"World Bank Amazon Dieback Study Predicts Greater Probability and Severity of Biome Collapse: Zero deforestation is an emergency requirement, although insufficient to avoid catastrophe."

[UPDATE: 25 July 2010 -- The latest science on the Amazonian rain forests and drought has been published online in a special report from the New Phytologist which concludes that, although mass die-off is not inevitable, "... when expected feedbacks between vegetation and climate are combined with fire incidence and land-use change scenarios, we conclude that Amazon rain forests are highly vulnerable to loss during the coming decades."]

But, as I read to the end of the DotEarth post, I saw that he had invited me to comment. So I calmed down and began writing. Here is an expanded, elaborated and linked version of what I wrote first as a DotEarth comment.

Andy, you ask that I chime in from my perch in Acre, Brazil. I'm not a scientist or an expert. I'm just a guy who loves forests and tries to speak for the trees. Here's how I used to perform my mission in the States. 

Here's what I see now:

The drama of the future of the Amazon basin is indeed playing out here in western Amazônia, in the tri-national region called by the acronym MAP -- Madre de Dios in Peru, Acre in Brazil and Pando in Bolivia -- where the biodiversity of nature's garden is connecting with human aspirations for economic development and a better life. This region used to be considered as the "end of the road" because it literally was. But with modernization and infrastructure development -- bridges, roads, rural electrification, Internet and more -- contact and globalization have set human and wild nature on an ugly collision course. While Acre has been able to make many initiatives toward sustainable development, across the border in much poorer Madre de Dios (Mother of God) it's an often violent confrontation over illegal logging of mahogany and/or "informal mining" in an out-of-control race to grab valuable resources that I covered in my post focusing on the gold rush in Peru.

The post doesn't mention the new road to the Pacific or the ethanol plant and sugarcane plantations; or the planned road from Cruzeiro do Sul, Brazil to Pulcallpa, Peru and the multiple big hydro-energy dam constructions it will support; or the new Peruvian oil leases in indigenous reserves; or the BR$35 million worth of oil exploration in the Juruá watershed in Acre; or the Madeira River complex of big hydroelectric projects in Rondonia near Bolivia. Basically, wherever I look I see that development -- including both its promises and problems -- is in the driver seat.

Apparently, much the same is happening across the Amazon basin in a rushed effort to provide an energy and transportation infrastructure that can keep pace with Brazil's spectacular economic growth. In brief, just as in other places such as China, economic growth is triggering an energy crisis. In Brazil, the immediate remedies for this very real need are seen in the massive number of unharnessed rivers of the Amazon basin and in oil deposits in the jungles of Western Amazônia (not to mention the vast deposits of deep-drilled oil located off-shore along the coast of Rio de Janeiro which is another story).

In the Aspen presentation Fabio Scarano appropriately mentioned the horribly misdirected intention of the Lula Administration to rush the much resisted Belo Monte Dam online. But he didn't mention that Brazil is also accelerating an investment of several hundred billions in the interior development plan PAC2 that includes the intention to complete 50 new hydroelectric projects in the next 4 years and, of course, more and better roads. Yes, there is the emerging Amazon Fund to stall deforestation AND there also are ten times that investment in infrastructure development.

Fabio also mentioned the effort to dilute Brazil's Forestry Code which unfortunately passed the committee stage by an overwhelming vote while you guys were in Aspen. It is headed toward almost certain passage in the full plenary session. Unfortunately, an NGO-inspired ad campaign targeting US farm support for REDD payments in the energy ("climate change") bill claimed that an end to tropical deforestation would mean more profits in the US. The ad stupidly said, "Farms Here, Forests There" and this was used in Brazil to mobilize support for WEAKENING the Forest code. Avoided Deforestation Partners scurried to produce a second report claiming that halting deforestation would also benefit Brazilian farmers but the damage was done.

Contradictions are everywhere, even in the statistics. Thus, figuring out a 21st Century prognosis for the Amazon forest is quite a challenge. The actual factual situation is quite confusing. The most hopeful statistics portray a recent large drop in deforestation which is prompting thoughts of carbon credit money transfers from the developed to the developing based on demonstrated emissions reductions, newly afforested carbon sequestration plus a promise from the Federal Government of Brazil that it will preserve or conserve most of the forest and its ecosystem services. Some large NGOs are even proposing that concessions for "sustainable logging" might be supported by carbon credits. But, it's a can of worms.

The problem is that no one really knows if the drop in deforestation was the result of the global economic downturn or the consequence of new enlightened policies of monitoring and law enforcement or an artifact of different satellite monitoring techniques or how much of what. Some early signs are now emerging, and some don't look promising. Satellite monitoring is showing mixed results -- new deforestation is advancing at a lower rate but fires are increasing to their old levels (fire is a traditional tool of deforestation). This suggests a possibility that the illegal loggers, land-grabbers and ranchers have found a workaround of selective logging and understory burning that leaves the canopy largely intact from a satellite view. Right now, no one knows for sure. The June data tend not to be reliable. We will know better in September. But, since the global economy has been recovering and Brazil's economy has been roaring, there is a reasonable chance that we will soon see deforestation data closer to the old levels.

While it is true that there has been much progress with the large producers of soy and beef products against being complicit with illegal deforestation, it is much more difficult to police the activities of the smaller landholder. For example, one study shows that in Rondonia State, the amount of forest remaining on farm land is already approaching 50% instead of the legally required 80% and the main driver of new deforestation there was the small land-holder.

The problem in large part is that the market for beef is stable and the value is high. Therefore, putting more cows on your land is like putting money in the bank. Cows generate a stable flow of income and, in an emergency, some can be sold to pay a medical bill or buy a new truck or send a kid to college. These are the legitimate aspirations of people living in a developing economy. One can write ambitious laws in Brasilia but it is not so easy to enforce them on the ground (especially if you are expecting local officials and politicians to impose unpopular regulations.)

Few Amazonia states are as progressive as Acre (Chico Mendes country) where there is a serious and well-funded effort to develop a culture, economy and a living practice of sustainability. Acre is hardly perfect but it is certainly on the global leading edge of the search for a sustainable balance between people and nature.

However, in other Brazilian Amazon regions the picture is truly dismal. State and local officials are often complicit with large-scale illegal deforestation. For example, there were recently massive arrests of high level Mato Grosso officials who were facilitating illegal logging. These arrests make great press but, if Brazilian politics run true to form, there's little chance that these characters will actually serve jail time or endure serious penalties. Changing the "wild west frontier take-the-law-in-your-hands" mentality is not an easy task. Bottom line: the issue of governance, of the reach of the Feds into the hinterland, has not been solved.

[UPDATE: The London-based think tank Chatham House reports a significant worldwide drop in illegal logging but Fred Pearce explains that we're not out of the woods.]

And there are two GREAT ironies. First, is that more effective governance can generate a backlash in the Brazilian Congress to weaken the Forestry Code and grant amnesty to those who have committed illegal logging. Second, is that as successful management increases the market value of commodities and land, the greater valuation also increases the incentives for illegal scams or for leakage into areas of weaker regulation and enforcement. Thus, shutting off the flow of illegal commerce in one place can cause it to erupt somewhere else.

I must caution readers not to think that loss of the primary Brazilian forest is somehow a result of unenlightened attitudes of Brazilians in comparison with North Americans. Here are the facts: Brazil has about 80% standing forest in the Amazon with about 30% with some level of fragmentation and 50% as relatively pristine. On the other hand, the U.S. has less than 10% of its historical primary forest standing and it still has not been able to pass a law ending the logging of old-growth trees. Actually, the comparable situation in Brazil is in the Atlantic Rainforest (near the economically developed population centers) which is also reduced to near 10%. In other words, development seems to have destroyed forests equally in BOTH places.

BUT -- get this! -- the current annual level of forest cover loss in both Canada and the U.S. is higher than in Brazil. My forestry friend Greg Nagle points out that losses in North America's industrial "forests" should not be compared losses of old-growth primary forest in Brazil but the important point is that development in the US has already destroyed 90% of its original primary forestland. This is an important reason why Brazilians do not receive kindly criticism from gringos which can easily be perceived as a conspiracy to deny Brazilians the benefits achieved among the already developed.

Americans don't want to give up what they've got and Brazilians don't want to give up the opportunity to get something like it. The result is what Andy refers to as "stasis" -- a fancy word that simply says that all people and institutions struggle first to maintain and enhance their existing behaviors. I'm growing skeptical that an ecologically meaningful political solution will emerge in Brazil, in the US, in China or globally. The internal contradictions of earth capital accumulation are simply too great to be maintained harmonized. The sociologist geographer David Harvey has a great analysis of why we are stuck. Economic development through endless growth without limit is an illusion, but it is one that is too powerful to break with mere politics or clever policy. I'm afraid that we will simply move from bubble to bubble until nature's justice kicks in.

So, while I understand the appeal of the new carbon-and-conservation market strategies, I distrust the consumption-and-profit consciousness that will undoubtedly motivate the players and politicians. There are a lot of nefarious characters in the banks and board rooms and in the backwoods waiting to capture the new wealth of a carbon economy worth trillions. We really must dig into and evaluate the faith that suggests that turning ecosystem services into marketable commodities can lead us away from the destructive consequences of the development and depletion of natural resources.

As is so often the case, the great naturalist and father of the American land ethic, Aldo Leopold, offers a deep insight:

"We abuse land because we regard it as a commodity belonging to us. When we see land as a community to which we belong, we may begin to use it with love and respect."

Can we really keep marketing the land, its products and services? Can the market really be the final arbiter? What are its limits? Perhaps only catastrophe can show them to us? Perhaps Nature's justice will be the teacher? Perhaps we must face losses for the cheap energy binge and the adolescent consciousness of the Industrial Age to yield to the limited growth perception associated with maturity and mutuality?

Perhaps we must fall in order to learn?

It is said that if a fall is our destiny, we WILL fall, but we can choose a fate of falling on a pillow or a rock. The softer way is better but easier desired than done. Here's the prayer I shared on Solstice calling for guidance for traveling the more respectful and loving way. It's not going to be easy but perhaps we can do it.


Read more!

MOUNTAINTOP REMOVAL MINING


Mountaintop removal coal mining in Kentucky

Wendell Berry asks WHAT ELSE?
Go to original at Solutions Journal

For more than 100 years the coal-producing counties of eastern Kentucky have been dependent on the coal industry, which has dominated them politically and, submitting only to the limits of technology, has come near to ruining them. The legacy of the coal economy in the Kentucky mountains will be immense and lasting damage to the land and to the people. Much of the damage to the land and the streams, and to water quality downstream, will be irreparable within historical time. The lastingness of the damage to the people will, to a considerable extent, be determined by the people.

The future of the people will, in turn, be determined by the kind of economy that may come to supplement and finally to replace the economy of coal. Contrary to my own prejudice and sense of caution, I am going to yield here, briefly, to the temptation to talk about the future.

In talking about the future, wishes have a certain standing. My wish for eastern Kentucky, as for the rest of the state, is that the economies of the future might originate in the local use of local intelligence. The coal economy, by contrast, has been an imposed economy, coming in from the outside and also coming down from the high perches of wealth and power. It is the product of an abstracting industrial and mercenary intelligence, alien both to the nature of the land and to the minds and lives of the people. But as we humans seem always to have known, though we have often needed to be reminded, freedom is founded upon the land and upon the free use of local intelligence in husbanding the land. Disfranchisement approaches the absolute when powerful outsiders do your thinking for you. This can happen only when local intelligence is degraded and disvalued and when, as a consequence, political responsibility is sold out.

The local use of local intelligence must start with the local landscape. And so, as a necessary discipline for any wishing, we must ask what, besides coal, the landscape of eastern Kentucky offers to its people. The answer is that the other great natural resource of the region is its forest. Though the forest has a long history of abuse, and though huge parcels have been and are being destroyed outright by surface mining, forestry and the economy of forest products offer the greatest opportunities to local intelligence. And whereas the coal economy is an economy based upon the exhaustion of the resource, the forest, by good use, can be made sustainable.

The other important resource of the region is a significant, if limited, capacity for sustainable food production. The landscape is predominately steep and most of it is obviously best suited for forestry, but there are some bottomlands, gentler slopes, and ridges that can be used without damage as pastures or croplands or gardens. This is made thinkable as a prospect by the numerous people of the region who, as any observant traveler will notice, are excellent gardeners, who practice other arts of subsistence such as beekeeping, and who by such means have kept alive the spirit of self-sufficiency and independence.

I don’t know how many such people there are. Nor do I know the number of acres that might properly be used to produce food. I don’t know how near the region might come to feeding itself. But common sense and mere caution require that every region should become as self-sufficient as possible in food production, just as every community should sustain itself as far as possible by the good use of its land.

As in the rest of the state, the forestry and farming of eastern Kentucky have been wasteful, and the coal companies have made the topsoil and the forest as temporary as coal. But if the region is to replace, or survive, the coal economy, it must develop sustainable ways of using its forest ecosystems and productive soils.

We might like to suppose that it would be better for eastern Kentucky, and for the whole state, if university and government experts should ever become inclined to think about a coal-less future for the region. Maybe so. But we should be extremely uneasy about supposing so.

If these experts ever begin to dare to think beyond their long addiction to coal power, coal money, and such fantasies as “clean coal,” then we should expect and prepare for a noisy tumult of central planning, summoning of outside experts, grant-proposing, visions of high-tech development, souping up of technical education, economic incentives, tax breaks, “job creation,” and marketing of cheap labor. The result, in sum, would be yet another imposed economy for the region, making light (again) of the local economic potential of the local landscape, of local intelligence, local history, and local culture. Industrial intellectuals, as we know, do not hesitate to “apply” ideas and technologies to places they don’t live in and know nothing about. They are recognizable by their contempt for everything they regard as “provincial” and their inability to tolerate anything modest or local. They will run in headlong panic from whatever is small in scale, low in cost, or “old-fashioned.”

We are not confronting the question of whether or not another exploitive economy will try to fasten itself upon the region. That is happening already, most noticeably in the appearance of timber industries that operate, expectably, without regard for forest ecology. It is horrible to think that the coal economy might be replaced by an economy that would in effect mine, and thus destroy, the forest.

And so I wish that in the face of continuing industrial destruction, and despite the official sound and fury of “economic development,” the people of eastern Kentucky will recognize in their own minds and places the powers of economic, political, and ecological self-defense and local self-determination.

Help stop mountaintop mining in Appalachia and in India.

Read more!

WHY OBAMA IS BEING VERY CAUTIOUS ABOUT HERALDING THE CORKING OF THE GULF GUSHER



First of all, we really don't know if the well will hold its integrity or spring new leaks under pressure. Nor do we know if the relief well drilling will succeed.

Second, The New Republic reports:

There's a lot of crude bobbing along in the Gulf right now: Scientists estimate that between 92 million and 182 million gallons have gushed out into the ocean since the Deepwater Horizon platform first blew up back in April. BP is still using dispersants to break up the oil and send it down to the sea floor, even though no one quite knows how the chemicals might affect marine life in the area. And note that oil's still washing ashore, and Bobby Jindal's artificial "barrier islands," which were supposed to protect Louisiana, are now crumbling.

Finally,

The Envisat satellite image (above) shows the Straits of Florida, the area where the Loop Current flows eastward out of the Gulf of Mexico before joining the Gulf Stream and flowing along the eastern coastlines of the US and Newfoundland (not visible).

Scientists are monitoring this area closely as concerns emerge that winds could blow the oil slick in the Gulf of Mexico (visible west of Florida) south toward the Loop Current or that the current could expand north towards the spill.

If oil from the spill were to enter the Loop Current, it could be carried to the Florida Keys (the curved archipelago of islands and associated coral reefs off the tip of Florida) and continue east into the Gulf Stream.

Read more!

HOW TO SPEAK TRUTH TO POWER

Says it all! Read more!