The same thing that happened to those war torn Somalis - the bored effete moved on to something else that caught their fancy.

Preserving the natural areas of any country is an effort that I fully stand by. Left unchecked, it doesn't take land developers and their greedy black hearts long to completely denude the land - replacing it with plastic, concrete, and bio-engineered crops. So people, wrong-headed to be sure, call out to buy that unclaimed land so as to set it aside for nature. That isn't the solution, never will be, and plays right into the hands of those who stand to make a profit from it. The solution to checking uncontrolled land development lies in having the authorities step in and set that land aside for national parks, wilderness areas, and the like. By doing it this way, those who make profits from land speculation are forced from the business instead of grabbing land like some punk buying domain names on the web in the hopes of blackmailing some future star. It also sets the tone for that land - by having the government set it aside the action tells the populace that this land is special and needs to be cared for. By having out of towners buy it up in the hopes of keeping it pristine - you have the locals crying "Great, a bunch of hippies stealing my land so that they can grow pot in the jungle and let the local peasants starve!"

Unfortunately policies like this take a government that gives two shits about the environment to begin with - Roosevelt is surely rolling in his grave over the treatment of his national parks.

Arable land is the biggest single challenge that this world faces. People laugh at Soylent Green and that hackneyed ending it had - but as social commentary it is far deeper than it might appear.

This isn't an attack. I've been trying to figure out a viable path that we as environmentalists could support concerning the rainforests for some time, and I'd like to know your thoughts.

Brazil's economy grew ~100 billion dollars last year (ppp), largely on the resource gain from increasing cropland (by burning down the forest.

You state that they should set that land aside as a park... but they're a poor nation that is rapidly becoming an international economic power (9th most powerful economy in the world and growing fast)... What do you offer as an incentive to offset their loss of growth that they would experience through protecting the forest.

If you don't bring something to the table - something BIG - then they aren't going to play. This is the problem that environmentalism faces... we cannot expect them to choose to maintain a third world lifestyle any more than we could expect Americans to adopt a third world lifestyle... but that means that anything which is helping them improve their lifestyle - such as burning down the Amazon rainforest - is not going to be something they will set aside without a very large economic incentive.

I was going to say something pithy here having read your response at lunch. But now that I read it a second time I'm afraid I don't have much to offer here other than sentiment.

Why should they give a crap about the rainforests? It's not a simple question of - because they're the lungs of the planet!! They are, but starving people don't care about that - food hungry earthlings want crops and lumber and fish - not morality. So I'm not sure how to answer.

I think the answer to your question is that "we" don't have anything to offer them - short of giving in to extortion or blackmail in the form of slash and burn agricultural habits. We can't pay them to stop - we just ain't got the much money and they may not take us up on it anyway. I guess we could release a form of pneumonic plague in Sao Paulo and Rio de Janerio - but that'd likely have international repercussions unless we were very careful.

The truth is that we CAN'T stop them from using their land the way they wish to. There's no practical way for us to intervene on everyone's behalf (and truly the Amazon Basin is everyone's concern). All we can do is encourage them to embrace their lands through the media, politics, pop culture. That isn't much, but it's all we can do. Brazil has the same exact problem that America and probably every other modern culture faced during it's beginning. The PNW looked like a lunar landscape after settlers got done colonizing it - all the stuff you see today is what has filled in since that time. The same thing will happen in Brazil unless land is set aside by their leadership - and boy what a far flung hope that is. Teddy Roosevelt must have been the second coming of Jesus Christ to have done what he did at that time in our history - no one else would have done it.

What a pain in the ass! People wreck the land without stopping to consider who else that might affect.

I propose we offer them a way to not completely destroy their country and leave their children to suffer and starve and die from thirst. But then maybe I am just crazy to think they might be interested in that.

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"Impact of Amazon drought
In 2005, parts of the Amazon basin experienced the worst drought in 100 years, & there are indications that 2006 could be a second successive year of drought. A 23 July 2006 article in the UK newspaper The Independent reported Woods Hole Research Center results showing that the forest in its present form could survive only three years of drought. Scientists at the Brazilian National Institute of Amazonian Research argue in the article that this drought response, coupled with the effects of deforestation on regional climate, are pushing the rainforest towards a "tipping point" where it would irreversibly start to die. It concludes that the forest is on the brink of being turned into savanna or desert, with catastrophic consequences for the world's climate. According to the WWF, the combination of climate change & deforestation increases the drying effect of dead trees that fuels forests fires." (<link>)