Amazon Burning Worst in Memory, Another Casualty
10/9/97
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Headline: Amazon Burning Worst in Memory, Another Casualty
Source: CNN
Date: 10/9/97
Copyright 1997: The Associated Press. All rights
reserved. This material may not be published,
broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
Copyright 1997: Cable News Network, Inc.
All Rights Reserved.
RIO DE JANEIRO, Brazil (AP) -- Charged with
cracking down on illegal burning in the rain
forest, Antonio Neri de Oliveira often has to pull
his car to the side of the road until the smoke
clears enough for him to see where he's going.
"I don't have any numbers to prove it, but just by
looking I can see it's the worst burning ever," he
says.
While fires burning out of control in Indonesia
have captured world attention in recent weeks, the
Amazon rain forest also is burning, suffering
unusually dry conditions due to the disruptive El
Nino weather phenomenon.
Residents of Manaus, a riverside city in the
Amazon Basin, are used to the smoke that rolls in
from fires burning in the rain forest all around
them. But this year's smoke is like nothing
before.
Oliveira, an acting superintendent with Brazil's
Environmental Protection Agency in Manaus, 1,760
miles northwest of Rio, said most of the fires are
started by landowners trying to dispose of debris
left over from logging the forest's tropical
hardwoods.
"To have an idea of how bad it is, a farmer was
trying to burn off 12 acres and he ended up
burning off 500 acres. It's just that dry,"
Oliveira said by telephone.
And this is in Amazonas, a state where
deforestation is less serious than elsewhere. The
majority of smoke blows in from other states like
Rodonia, Acre and Para.
There are no widescale efforts to extinguish the
blazes because they mostly are cases of landowners
burning on their own property, and they pose no
danger of spreading to populated areas.
The huge clouds of choking smoke, however, already
threaten health.
"In Manaus, which is one of the two largest cities in
the Amazon, we have recorded a large cloud of smoke
hovering over the city. Health officials have told
us that they have an increase of 40 percent in
respiratory disease," said Garo Batmanian, the
World Wildlife Fund's executive director for
Brazil.
Elsewhere in the Amazon, "airports in Porto Velho
and Rio Branco have closed down between 20 and 30
times in the last month alone because of the
smoke," he said.
U.S. President Bill Clinton, who comes to Rio on
Monday, is expected to present Brazilian President
Fernando Henrique Cardoso with a report saying
U.S. satellites have detected a 28 percent upswing
in the number of burnings in the Amazon over the
year before, the O Globo newspaper reported
Wednesday.
Seasonal rain patterns over the Americas, as well
as Southeast Asia, have been disrupted by El Nino,
a cyclical rise in Pacific water temperatures that
affects jet stream patterns and alters weather
around the globe.
In Indonesia, fires set to clear farmland have
burned out of control over the dry brush. A thick
haze has spread over several countries, raising
pollution levels to dangerous highs.
The current El Nino system has cut humidity levels
over South America to around 43 percent -- the
lowest since 1939. Normal humidity in the Amazon
rain forest is around 95 percent.
The fires raging in Indonesia and Brazil threaten
to speed global warming by spewing greenhouse
gases into the atmosphere, Francis Sullivan,
director of the World Wildlife Fund's Forests for
Life Campaign, told reporters in London on
Wednesday.
"Two-thirds of the world's forests have been lost
forever," Sullivan said, adding that destructive
logging and the subsequent land-clearing fires are
accelerating the disappearance of the world's
remaining original forests.
A new survey released by the fund showed that of
the 20 billion acres of forest existing in the
world 8,000 years ago, only 7.5 billion acres
remain.
More than half of the remaining original forests
are concentrated in four countries: the United
States, Russia, Indonesia and Brazil with forests
in the latter two jeopardized by logging and
fires.
Tropical forests are being destroyed at a rate of
42 million acres a year and there are similar
losses across the temperate and northern forests
of Canada, Europe, Russia and the United States,
the study found.
The Asia Pacific region already has lost 88
percent of its original forest cover, and only 5
percent of the remaining forest area is protected,
it said. Within the next 25 years, only 10 percent
of the region's original forests will be left, it
predicted. Worldwide, countries such as El
Salvador, Ghana, Madagascar and Pakistan already
have fallen below 10 percent, the study said.