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The Amazon Is Still Burning. Here’s How You Can Save It.
We need to figure out how to sustainably use the rain forest for the benefit of its inhabitants and the world. Give Brazil a hand without disrespecting its sovereignty.
The Amazon, the greatest reservoir of fresh water and biodiversity on the planet, is burning. Its degradation, which threatens to reach a catastrophic tipping point, means less oxygen and rain as well as warmer temperatures. Human actions have been the driving cause. In Brazil, which holds 60 percent of the Amazonian rain forest, wildcat land grabbers and ranchers, who set fires to clear land in implicit partnership with a lenient government, are the main culprits.
We have been here before. In 2004 deforestation rates were much worse than they are today. In the last years of that decade Brazil stepped back from the brink and imposed constraints on what had been a free-for-all in the region. We now need to be more ambitious than we were then.
The threshold problem is land tenure. Less than 10 percent of the land in private hands has clear title. Chaos reigns: No one knows who owns what and pillage is more rewarding than either preservation or production. To overcome the chaos we must distinguish long-term squatters committed to making a life in the Amazon from predatory ranchers and loggers, and award them full ownership.
In 2009, a law established the legal basis for this vital change by organizing the distribution of federal land in the Amazon. Successive federal administrations have been slow to carry it out but the state governments are ready to step in.
The Brazilian Amazon is more than trees; about 30 million people live and work there. We need to ensure that the forest is worth more standing than cut down. To that end, we must give the inhabitants of the Amazon the means to both use and preserve their environment.
The linkages between the urban economy and the forested Amazon are not yet in place. The free economic zone in Manaus, the capital of the Amazon’s largest state, could well be somewhere in China; its factories assemble products like cellphones and motorcycles. The environment-friendly but primitive production techniques adopted by the native populations in the interior lack the scale and technology required to create a viable economy. On the region’s borders, the main activity in the savanna has become inefficient cattle grazing.
The Amazonian debacle is part of a national misdirection. Brazil has underinvested in its people and relied increasingly on the production and export of commodities. In the Amazon, the easy way out leads to destruction. The only system with a chance of saving both the people and the trees is a knowledge economy.
Technological, entrepreneurial and legal innovation premised on a definitive settlement of land tenure can allow for the sustainable harvesting of heterogeneous tropical rain forests and their use as sources of new drugs and forms of renewable energy. To make this possible, technical environmental services must be provided over an area larger than Western Europe.
Only knowledge-intensive industries and services in the cities can turn toward the rain forest rather than away from it. New ways of organizing ownership and financing production can help local communities and start-ups to experiment, compete and cooperate. This approach can begin to give practical content to the otherwise empty slogan of sustainable development.
Don’t demand that Brazil turn 61 percent of its national territory into an international park. And don’t expect Brazilians, who have managed to preserve about 80 percent of the trees in their section of the Amazon, to appreciate being lectured by European countries left largely treeless by centuries of deforestation.
Saving the Amazon is a project for Brazil to shape and execute and for the world — beginning with the Group of 7, which has just pledged the pittance of $20 million in emergency aid — to support. If the Bolsonaro administration, sunk in its perverse culture wars, refuses to participate, governments, research institutions, and businesses of the world should go to the governors and mayors of the Amazon.
The Amazonian states have joined in a regional organization, the Interstate Consortium of the Legal Amazon, that can partner with our foreign friends. The real Brazil wants to bet on the marriage of intelligence and nature. Give us a hand without disrespecting our sovereignty. Instead of just helping put out fires, help us make the discoveries and achieve the innovations that a better future demands.
There is much talk of sustainable development in the world. But little of it exists. The dominant tone of environmentalism in the rich North Atlantic countries is plaintive and escapist: As history has disappointed us, let’s console ourselves in the great garden of nature.
Brazilians, along with the rest of the world, need alternatives — including institutional alternatives — more than we need consolation. To rescue the Amazon, we need them right now.
Roberto Mangabeira Unger, who teaches at Harvard, served as minister for strategic affairs, in the administrations of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and Dilma Rousseff.
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