By Charles Heck
February 14, 2008
I am writing this article in response to John Fitzpatrick's article Let Brazilians Sort Out the Problems of the Amazon.
First of all, I would like to say that I appreciate Fitzpatrick's column and I have learned quite a bit from it. He is very informed about Brazil and his financial perspective is very insightful. However, I disagree with him that the Amazon should be left to the political whims of those who run Brazil. He represents the Brazilian position as one of a threat to Brazil's sovereignty (a representation by a Scot which is pretty interesting considering his broadside of Johan Hari). He also implies that the destruction of the Amazon is inevitable, perhaps even necessary. Framing the issue in this manner is not constructive. It limits the discussion to a 'Brazil versus the world' mentality, occluding any cooperative effort to conserve Brazil's resources.
Why conserve Brazil's resources? The Amazon has value beyond its instrumental use as paper or for house construction. Studies have shown that vegetation density increases rainfall. It is counterintuitive to consider that it is the forest that brings the rain, but when you consider that trees and plants produce water vapor it makes sense. In short, the forest makes the clouds, which then make the rainforest. Vegetation also shades the ground, preventing water from evaporating. Fitzpatrick should appreciate this, since he called attention to the effect that lower rainfall has on Brazil's ability to produce electricity. Higher rainfall and less evaporation mean more water in the rivers.
Brazil has plenty of farmland, but much of the clearing in the Amazon is done for slash and burn agriculture. This is one of the most damaging practices that can be done to the environment. The smoke pollutes, the trees no longer shade or produce oxygen. The practice is entirely avoidable in Brazil, through proper education and transfer of agricultural best practices. The farmland that is opened up through slash and burn has a very short productive life. Anyone that questions the negatives to this practice should take an aerial tour of Haiti. It is all brown and smoke. The Dominican Republic is on the very same island, but through state action it is green and vibrant.
There is a phrase in economics that describes the process of deforestation. Negative Externality. A negative externality is the by product of economic growth that negatively impacts future growth. For example, in the USA we use a lot of fertilizer to increase the productivity of our agriculture. This causes runoff into freshwater drinking supplies and rivers. The rivers concentrate the fertilizers and other pollutants and carry them to the sea. The largest river in the USA is the Mississippi. Recently a dead spot in the Gulf of Mexico where the Mississippi drains into the ocean has been found. It is getting larger with each passing year. The shrimp and seafood catch has diminished in these areas, causing damage to the fishing industry (already in trouble due to over-fishing). This demonstrates that one action to increase economic growth can reduce the productivity of another industry.
In this sense, Brazil is harming its future economic capacity (due to decreased water reserves for irrigation or to generate power, for example). The environment is not just about one country eroding another country's sovereignty (which has not really happened, nor will it). Framing the issue like this just causes a knee-jerk nationalistic reaction. I recognize that it is hypocritical for the US to dictate Brazil's environmental policy in light of our own problems. But this does not change the fact that the conservation of the Amazon's resources is in the long term interest of Brazil, and the rest of the world.
If Brazil doesn't feel threatened by cooperative efforts and the outside world doesn't try to coerce Brazil's policies, then we might just be able to find a cooperative solution. This would be a much better result than inciting resentment towards one another.
Charles describes himself as a former English teacher in Brazil, licensed securities broker, and now a Phd student of International Politics at Florida International University.
Readers comments:
Chuck,
Thanks for the insightful, thoughtful article. Sometimes the simple things make the most sense. Forest = good.
-- Loren
This is a response to both John Fitzpatrick's original article on the Amazon and sovereignty and Charles Heck's response thereto. Both articles do an excellent job of raising many of the issues near and dear to those who care about these sorts of things. I'd just like to add a few comments to this discussion.
First, the view that Brazilians have some "right" to do whatever they want with the resources within their political boundaries, including chopping down all the trees in the Amazon rainforest, is a sadly outdated argument and one that played well among colonial powers of a different age.
Indeed, there was a time, a mere 300 years ago, when there were fewer than one billion people on the planet, natural resources were abundant, nations expanded and colonized others, and as soon as they had secured their new borders, they claimed "sovereignty" over their domains to exploit the gold and silver and timber and so many other resources to their hearts' delight.
Fortunately, we have evolved politically, culturally and scientifically since that time. Unfortunately, we are producs of our own success, as our population explosion and technological developments have created new problems that we must address with more thoughtful responses than "it's mine and I'll do what I want with it".
Unlike our forebears, we now understand that there is such a thing as carrying capacity. We know that the world's resources are limited. We know that our present global population of more than six billion places undue pressure on those limited resources. We know that when factories pollute in one country, political boundaries do not stop the pollution from rising into the air and dumping acid rain on neighboring nations. We know that when forests are exploited anywhere (not just in Brazil's part of the Amazon) the impacts will not be limited to the area where the destruction took place.
In short, thanks to our growing understanding of the world around us, we now know that political boundaries mean little when addressing global environmental issues.
Does this mean that the United States or any other nation has the right to tell Brazil what to do with its natural resources? No, it does not. Countries are governed by sovereign political entities that make decisions on behalf of their populations, and this fact is not going to change any time soon. However, it likewise does not mean that we should limit our thinking to the artificial political boundaries in which we live.
There are certain environmental issues that go beyond these limitations, whether we want them to or not. The first step is to accept this fact. From there, we can begin to debate the way in which we will deal with these issues as a global community, in order to determine the shape of the world that we will leave for future generations.
-- John M. Milan (Professional economist, former professor of economics at FAAP in São Paulo (1996-2004). Presently a small business owner and independent researcher in North Carolina.)
Previous articles by Charles:
The Brazilian Spirit of Song
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