Watching Helplessly As Rain Forest Burns
3/30/98
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Title: Watching Helplessly As Rain Forest Burns
Source: International Herald Tribune
Status: Copyrighted, contact source to reprint
Date: 3/30/98
Byline: Anthony Faiola Washington Post Service
Watching Helplessly As Rain Forest Burns
'An Impossible Mission' in Northeast Brazil
BOA VISTA, Brazil - Amid choking smoke and the crackle of flame, Geraldo Elst
gave the signal for the helicopter overhead to empty its water tanks. The pilot
missed his target, and Mr. Elst, eyes tearing from the searing heat, shrugged
helplessly.
''This is an impossible mission,'' said Mr. Elst, part of a multinational team
of 500 fire fighters recently brought in to battle what Brazilians are calling
the largest conflagration since 1925 in the Amazon rain forest, home to more
than half of the world's known plant and animal species.
The fire fighters here in Roraima state in northeastern Brazil have been unable
to contain a fire that had already scorched a huge area of savanna before it
began its assault on the rain forest.
''There's too much fire,'' Mr. Elst said as he labored in the Apiau region 40
kilometers (25 miles) from the state capital, Boa Vista. ''The best we can do
is slow it down. It's heading deeper into the forest, and the only thing that
can stop that now is rain.''
Fires have smoldered in other parts of the Amazon basin for the last five
months, but nothing has come close to the devastation in Roraima. The fires
are so vast and the operation to contain it still so small that it is like
using needle and thread to sew up a gash in the Hindenburg. Estimates of the
full scope of the destruction are sketchy so far, but roughly 7,300 square
kilometers (19,000 square miles), or 20 percent, of Roraima's forest and
savanna have already been burned.
At the jungle's edge, fire fighters and Brazilian soldiers are using water
rifles and tools that look like giant fly swatters to combat the flames while
helicopters - mostly on loan from the Argentine national park system - dump
water from above.
In Boa Vista, a city of 150,000 people, smoke hangs like a thick fog, grounding
medical supply planes and forcing residents to wear masks and wet cloths.
Hospitals are flooded with patients with respiratory problems. And despite a
government food-distribution program, cases of malnutrition because of lost
crops are being reported.
The fire in Roraima began two months ago, when fires started by farmers
clearing cropland flared out of control. A severe drought, caused by the
climatic phenomenon known as El Nio, has hindered efforts to put out the fire.
Suddenly, this impoverished region of charred earth has become a focus of
national and international attention that is reigniting debate over development
in the Amazon rain forest.
For environmentalists, what is happening here is an apocalyptic vision of the
Amazon's future as, weakened by drought and the encroachment of civilization,
it becomes increasingly susceptible to fire. In the 1990s, large mining
operations, an influx of Asian lumber companies that harvest as much as 80
percent of their timber illegally, and settlers escaping Brazil's choked cities
have led to tree-cutting at a level that has not been seen since the Green
Movement began trying to save the forest more than 25 years ago, according to
government statistics and environmentalists.
''If something bold is not done to prevent the kind of massive destruction
we're seeing in Roraima, we will have a desert in the Amazon in 40 or 50
years,'' said Jose Goldenberg, a professor of energy at the University of Sao
Paulo. ''We need significantly changed law here but, more importantly, new
political will to protect the Amazon.''