FRONT PAGE            A SOUTH AMERICAN PICTURES FEATURE
 
THE DECADES OF DESTRUCTION
ALSO ON NONESUCH NEWS RETURN
This was a forest of giant trees with a vibrant, living canopy. More species of plants and animals than in the rest of the world put together lived here. Now there are just skeletons.
Perhaps not even that......
The rape of Amazonia began in the late 1960's. It was not just in Brasil although it was the focal point. Brasil in the 1960' had a military government with the goal of taking the country from a coffee economy to the 21st century in one giant leap. One project involved a push to 'open-up' Amazonia , at that time one of the worlds's last untamed wildernesses. An Amazon mega-plan was set in motion with the help of international banks and so began the destruction of the world's greatest rainforest.
 
The burning forest The wasted forest
Waste from a plywood factory Erosion follows the destruction
By the mid-1980's the rainforest was burning. It was being torn down , settled and farmed.    An area the size of Belgium vanished in one year alone. Now twenty years on the Brazilian rainforest is being reduced at an unprecedented scale and the Brasilian TransAmazonica Highway is being paved end to end. At the southern edge of the Amazon basin in Bolivia agricultural development is at an all time high and the forest is being turned into a desert.

If you have not seen them you may wish to turn to our pages on Chico Mendes the Brasilian rubber tapper and defender of the forest who was assassinated in 1988. Or there is the Margaret Mee Archive on Nonesuchinfo. These remarkable people stand as icons in a world now despairing for the future.

With a growing world population and demand for energy, is the extinction inevitible? 

Look out for our Amazonia pages being prepared by correspondents throughout the region

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