disforestation is causing some of the world ’s bad environmental problems . So it may ball over you to key out that disforestation in Brazil , one of the worst - impinge on neighborhood , has dropped by 80 % in the preceding 8 years .
picture via NASA
This workweek , the Economist has a boastful packet of stories commit to how economic growth and environmental sustainability have become unknown raw bedfellows . In the introduction to these stories , Emma Duncan explains what ’s happening in Brazil :
If the events of a single night can be said to have shaped the destiny of life on Earth , it could be those that took place in Paragominas on November 23rd 2008 . Paragominas is a municipality in the Brazilian Amazon two - third the size of Belgium . Its universe of 100,000 is made up for the most part of migrants from the south of the country who were encouraged by the government to colonise the area and chop down the timber . The small town that is its capital has an air of the wild westward about it . man have on cowboy hats in the streets . Five years ago it was a rough place , its breeze full of sawdust and bruit that slave labour was used in the charcoal line fuel by Amazonian timber .
to begin with that daylight , at the request of the mayor , Adnan Demachki , the federal environmental police force had confiscated some lorries piled high with illegally cut log ( pictured below ) . The loggers were not felicitous . That night a few hundred of them enter the town , reclaim some of the trucks , pose them and the office of the environmental police on fire and then tried to burn up down the city manager ’s office too . Paragominas was bang to be the front line of the fight against disforestation , so the burning truck were all over the country ’s television receiver screens .
Mr Demachki , elected for his efficiency , not his political view , had come to believe that Paragominas was on the wrong side of chronicle . He called a townsfolk meeting and contain up two letters he had written . One excuse to the nation for the previous day ’s outcome and committed Paragominas to stopping deforestation . The other announce his resignation . The townsfolk opt the first . The mayor stayed in his job , and Paragominas changed its ways .
The events in Paragominas have been repeat , in less dramatic way , across much of the Brazilian Amazon . Deforestation has fallen steadily , from 28,000 sq km in 2004 to 5,000 in 2012 . Whether this is a lasting victory or a impermanent suspension is not yet clear , but the fact that Brazil has succeeded in greatly repress a on the face of it unstoppable process of demolition raise hope for the future of the rest of life on Earth .
There are a long ton of other astonishingly hopeful stories of how humanity could still fix the environmental mess we ’ve made , in this week’sEconomist . Read them !
FuturismSciencethere ’s hope
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