then put your money where your mouth is and buy the acreage. Start a foundation. Start a carbon sequestration fund. Start one of those tourist businesses where they affix ropes and platforms to the trees and you can slide to and fro like George of the Jungle. The key here is, you've got to submit your bid because advocacy is pretty meaningless in the face of local economic interests.

The Brazilians are merely doing what has been done universally to unsettled wilderness. Europe was deforested in the 1200s CE. Manhattan used to be covered with trees, but it's a hell of a lot more valuable now as an island covered in cement, glass, and steel. And let's not get started on Africa, Brave Africa.

As much as you may hope for the preservation of whatever the rainforest represents, you're not going to win out over the interests of the people that actually live there. They gotta do what they gotta do unless you're willing to pague o dinheiro.

Absolutely. It's really disappointing that the GL made REDD sound like just another half-baked aging boomer campaign. Very smart conservationists and finance folks are excited about the possibilities and IMHO it provides the only realistic solution to the 1st world/developing world standoff in climate negotiations.

Sounds like a good program; hopefully the final version of Waxman Markey will allow for the purchase of non-deforestation offsets (or some more eloquent name for them). It would certainly be more effective than the faddish activism of a mononymed European singer.

(And having been to a Police show and a U2 show over the past two years, I'll tell you straight up: those "I can be political too" segments have got to go. Otherwise the concerts both rocked)

The president of Guyana proposed recently to transfer most of the interior of that country into some form of international stewardship, in return for economic and development aid from the West, particularly Britain. Gordon Brown baulked at the idea, which isn't surprising given the state of Britain's finances at the moment, but once a global recovery gets under way, it might offer a good model for rainforest conservation. Afterall, if we want developing countries to forego the economic gain that might come from felling their forests, then surely we have a responsibility to compensate them for that.