This publication shows that carbon prices exceeding US$ 20 per ton of CO2 captured by the natural regeneration of deforested areas in the Amazon would be truly transformative for the region’s landscape. Offsets for captured carbon would ensure forest integrity, inducing extensive forest restoration and the capture of 16 Gt …
Land is causing strife all across the Amazon basin. Many of the conflicts are sparked off by the aggressive forays of miners and loggers into far-flung areas of the Amazon as they attempt to extract coal, gold and timber. The groups range from small miners known locally as 'port knockers' …
The rain-forests of the Amazon region have once again been set aflame by controversies. This time the fuse has been lit by the "Amazon Charter" - recently finalised by the Fernando Cardoso government. The charter proposes a road through the forests leading to the Pacific Ocean. This Pacific link is …
THE 1980s witnessed an unprecedented burst of writing on the forests of Amazonia. This book stands out in this motley crowd for its scholarly treatment of a subject that is voluminously documented, although frequently in partisan and impressionistic terms. When Schmink and Wood describe the residents of Sao Felix in …
"TAKE the gold, but check the pollution": this is the new refrain, born of desperation, that the Brazilian government is directing at the thousands of gold-diggers who have reduced the Amazon basin to an expanse of infertile muck. The only way that the government can spare the Amazon river the …
INDIAN traditional knowledge, as well as plants of the Amazon, continue to be "stolen" by scientists from other nations and used by pharmaceutical companies to develop new drugs. And, says Peter Rudolf Seidl, chairperson of the Brazilian Chemical Association, those who supply the know-how do not receive any of the …
GEORGE Monbiot's book, for which he risked his life, is a delightfully lucid piece of serious investigative journalism on the ecological destruction of the Amazon, which he describes as the world's "greatest environmental tragedy" and its "greatest ecological catastrophe". Monbiot maintains that the Amazon ecosystem, with its large tropical forests, …
THE alleged rape in Brazil of an 18-year-old teacher by Paulinho Paiakan, chief of the Kayapo tribe, may be seen as symbolic of the rape of the Amazon rainforests using as a lure the theory that marketing forest produce is more economically beneficial and ecologically friendly than selling timber. Attracted …
A proper inventory of atmospheric emissions from natural sources is basic to our understanding of the atmospheric cycle of the trace metals (and metalloids), and is also needed for assessing the extent of regional and global pollution by toxic metals1. It is generally presumed that the principal natural sources of …
BIOLOGY Yellow pigment clue to evolution Bilirubin, responsible for the yellowish tinge in the skin, eyes and nails of jaundice patients, has for the first time been identified in plants. The pigment was discovered in Strelitzia reginae Aiton, commonly know as the Bird of Paradise plant. It is indigenous to …
