• Gone in One Second!
    Awake!—1990 | March 22

    • Deforestation has raised a global furor, and it is focused largely on a single country.

      Case in Point: Brazil

      In 1987 satellite photographs of the Amazon basin showed that deforestation rates in this one area were higher than some estimates had been for deforestation of the whole planet! As people burned the forest to clear it, fires by the thousands lighted the nights. The smoke cloud was the size of India and so dense that some airports had to close. By one estimate, the Amazon basin every year loses an area of rain forest the size of Belgium.

      Brazilian environmentalist José Lutzenberger called it “the biggest holocaust in the history of life.” The world over, environmentalists are up in arms. They put the plight of the rain forests into the public spotlight. Even T-shirts and rock concerts proclaimed, “Save the rain forest.” Then came financial pressure.

      Brazil owes over a hundred thousand million dollars in foreign debt and must spend about 40 percent of its export earnings just to pay the interest. It is heavily dependent on foreign aid and loans. So international banks began to hold back loans that might be used to damage the forests. Developed nations offered to swap some of Brazil’s debt for improved protection of their environment. U.S. president Bush even asked Japan not to lend Brazil funds to build a highway through virgin rain forests.

      A Global Dilemma

      To many Brazilians, all this pressure reeks of hypocrisy. The developed countries had long since decimated their own forests and would scarcely have allowed any foreign power to prevent them from doing so. The United States is currently wiping out the last of its own rain forests. They are not tropical, to be sure; they are the temperate rain forests of the Pacific Northwest. Species will vanish there too.

      So deforestation is a global problem, not just a Brazilian one. Tropical rain forest losses are most critical right now. Over half of those losses occur outside Brazil. Central Africa and Southeast Asia are the other two of the world’s great rain forest regions, and there too the forests are vanishing fast.

      Deforestation has effects that are equally global. It means hunger, thirst, and death among millions. It is a problem that reaches right into your life. It touches the food you eat, the medicines you use, the weather where you live​—perhaps even the future of mankind.