With Broadax and Firebrand

The Destruction of the Brazilian Atlantic Forest

Warren Dean

Gostaria de perguntar por onde é que vocês estão indo?
I'd like to ask where is it that you're going?

— Ailton Krenak, Indigenous Leader

By the early 1990s, the Atlantic Forest was in a critical state. If those remnants identified or presumed to be primary were to survive, drastic measures would have to be undertaken immediately, measures quite the opposite of those customary to Brazilian culture and governance. It was not clear how many of the forest's species still existed. It was still less clear whether it might be possible to re-create sections of the forest that had disappeared. What was quite evident was that, as primary forest on private holdings continued to be converted to arable and pasture, reservoirs and highways, country clubs and slums, and as more and more publicly owned lands gained ever more layers of legal protection, government agencies were becoming the last hope of the forest's salvation.

Manuel Arruda da Câmara was, in 1810, the first to envision the possibility of human-induced extinctions of plants and animals of the Atlantic Forest. It was one of the justifications he advanced for the creation of botanical gardens. Extinction was a worry that repeatedly entered Auguste de Saint-Hilaire's mind. He noted numerous incongruous place-names: Canindé, Anhumas, Guará, Arapongas, names of birds that evidently had once inhabited these locales but were no longer to be found in them. Driven in his collecting by the thought that "these virgin forests as ancient as the world" might one day perish, he reflected mournfully:

Nothing then will remain of the primitive vegetation; a host of species will have disappeared forever and the labors, in which the savant von Martius, my friend Doctor Pohl, and I have consumed our existence, will be in large part nothing more than historical monuments. ₁

Map 11. The Brazilian Atlantic Forest in 1990

Curiously, however, no species of the Atlantic Forest has yet been recorded, with certainty, as extinct, even though the forest has been reduced to less than 10 percent of the area it occupied in 1500 and even though most of what remains has been subjected to all sorts of extractivism and vandalism. Island biogeography theory, which relates the abundance of species to the relative size of landmasses, suggests that at least half of its species should have disappeared by now. Continental ecosystems may be expected to contain or retain more species than islands of the same size, given the greater ease of migration into and within them. The Atlantic Forest is also presumed to offer a superior haven because of its complex topography and climatic variability, which have fragmented its populations into small, viable habitats and are supposed to have accustomed them to rapid adaptation to change. Nevertheless, the physical and climatic environments of the Atlantic Forest do not appear to be so prodigiously distinctive, compared to other tropical places and climes; indeed, they might even be characterized as comparatively bland. ₂

It is therefore remarkable that so few creatures of the Atlantic Forest have even been recorded as endangered. The explanation must be in part historical: Biological collections only began three hundred years after plantation agriculture, cattle raising, and mining began. They were altogether too inadequate and skewed to represent baseline data. It is conceivable therefore that very many species of the Atlantic Forest disappeared before science was ever aware of their existence. The achievements of von Martius, Spix, Saint-Hilaire, and the other naturalists of the early nineteenth century were monumental. Their descriptions of tens of thousands of plants and animals, bound into hundreds of volumes of floral and faunal classification, their transcription into notebooks of many more thousands of pages of field observations, the kilometers of shelves they filled with specimens, dried and pressed or pickled in jars, identifications fading and uncertain, flowers crumbled into dust, tissues grey and gelatinous—a vast intellectual opus, yet tiny before the reality of still more tens of thousands of undiscovered inhabitants of the forest. Most of the collections of this classical period of botany and zoology were made on sunny beachfronts, grasslands, savannas, and secondary woodlands, not in the gloomy eternal forest, whose myriad life forms were sheltered, unsuspected, in the canopy fifty meters above the naturalists' heads. Their collecting, furthermore, was limited to the most accessible places, near the largest cities and along main roads. The 100,000-square-kilometer broad-leaved forest of northern Paraná, for example, was then terra incognita. And their collecting was only incipient—even their most often visited sites, where they persisted intact, later yielded many further discoveries. ₃

The Brazilian successors of these heroic Europeans were for a century and a half but a skeleton crew of talented, self-taught amateurs, idealists, and cranks, often lacking the means to publish their findings. The specimens they collected moldered in ill-funded and ill-kept Brazilian museums and herbaria. Whole collections disappeared. And the Atlantic Forest disappeared even faster. Freire Alemão's frantic rummaging through suburban logging sites was always interrupted when the loggers fired the slash. The irascible Augusto Ruschi identified more than a hundred new species, all in his tiny reserve, the last remnant of primary upland forest in the region. Had Espírito Santo boasted a score of Ruschis, would they not have found hundreds, thousands, more? Research has ever been an interlude before the firestorm, the rising waters of the dams, the real estate speculators' tractors. Pedro Scherer Neto, president of the Paraná birding society, complained that

The scientists had barely a chance to cover Paraná to become familiar with it, to collect. There were some who did, but not enough, because there was too little time. The devastation was greater than the chances of the researchers to carry out the necessary studies to have, today, all the information of the flora and fauna of Paraná. ₄

It appears that what were the most biologically diverse areas were also the most drastically transformed by agriculture and cattle raising. Coffee planting devastated the western reaches of the Paraíba do Sul River valley, which Saint-Hilaire had declared the most unique and diverse that he had found in all of southern and southeastern Brazil. Furthermore, those sectors of the Atlantic Forest considered most appropriate for plantation crops, such as the Northeast coast and the highland Paulista West, have been the most thoroughly scoured of forest, so that nothing but the most insignificant patches remain of what was once a widespread flora.

As funding for biological field research became somewhat more available in the late 1970s, continuing discoveries of new species were made in remnant tall forest. Botanists at the Rio Doce State Forest found 27 between 1979 and 1986. In South Bahia, the Center for Cacao Research identified 300 new plant species and 5 new genera between 1978 and 1980. A study in 1993 of a single hectare of lowland South Bahia found dozens more unclassified tree species. Recent discoveries include others of even the most visible and striking forest life forms—trees, birds, even a primate! That the identification of new species can continue at so rapid a rate, with the enlistment of only a relatively few trained collectors and a collection rate of fewer than four specimens per ten square kilometers, indicates how much has yet to be incorporated into the database. Unfortunately, funding of inventories and monographs of known species has slackened in recent years. ₅

Even more troubling, these discoveries in quite restricted areas of still relatively undisturbed forest suggest that many life forms may have already disappeared before they could be discovered. This thought occurred to the ornithologist Helmut Sick, who considered it possible that "even species of birds as yet unidentified by science may be eradicated, as is suggested by the recent discovery of three new species of hummingbirds." ₆

As early as the 1940s, Frederico Carlos Hoehne averred that more than 300 species of orchids had already gone extinct in Brazil, because of habitat destruction. In 1975, Mauro Victor set the number of extinct plants at 3,000. These estimates are defensible, considering the uniqueness of the plants of the Atlantic Forest, limited in some cases to a single ridgeline or a single valley. Ladislau Netto noted this extreme endemism in his excursion to Minas Gerais in the 1860s. So did Hoehne, in 1927, when he collected 107 species of orchids: "Each one of the ranges of Minas has a flora more or less its own and offers different aspects for the excursionist, even though there are many species and characteristics that are common to all those of the state of Minas Gerais." ₇ The local disappearance of widely distributed species has been frequently recorded: A 1974 study of bird life in Pirassununga, São Paulo, found 9 species lost of 180 formerly recorded. A 1986 census of bird species in Nova Friburgo, Rio de Janeiro, found only 184 of the 285 species collected during the nineteenth century. Such reports suggest the likelihood of concomitant total extinction of unknown species of very limited range. The extreme fragmentation of most of what is considered to be relatively undisturbed portions of the Atlantic Forest is one of the causes of this reduced diversity. The "edge effect"—the exposure of forest interiors to wind, sunlight, and invasion of grassland species by penetration roads, power lines, pipelines, motorbike trails, and such—was coming to be investigated as a major cause of degradation. The fragmented forest was no longer viable for the most free ranging of its species: A study of the probable ranges of Neotropical mammals showed that very large areas were necessary to maintain minimum breeding stocks. Carnivores are the most demanding. Jaguars would require some 5,500 square kilometers to stabilize a population of 500. Tapirs would require about 1,600; the crab-eating raccoon, 1,500. ₈

Although carnivores and other mammals represent but a trifling portion of the forest biomass, their loss or rarefaction ripples through the system incalculably. The complexity of relationships among species of the Atlantic Forest suggests the likelihood of permanent losses. In 1939 Moysés Kuhlman noted that a certain palm was becoming rare, possibly because a bee that pollinated it or perhaps a parrot that spread its seeds—this had been observed by Saint-Hilaire—was also becoming rare. The African honeybee, an exotic strain imported by a laboratory in São Paulo in the 1950s for breeding purposes, had carelessly been allowed to escape and was replacing native stingless bees throughout the forest, with effects upon flora that are incalculable. These transformations remain mysterious and uninvestigated. It has been noticed that some species of insects and birds of the chilly Serra do Mar flee to the warmer interior or to the coast in winter. It would be remarkable if all such migratory creatures have survived the degradation of two distinct habitats over the century preceding the more intensive field investigations of the last fifteen years. ₉

At the First Brazilian Conference on Nature Protection, held in 1934, a few participants made mention of species they considered rare and endangered. Alberto José de Sampaio noted some thirty plants, including Faramea campanella, collected once in Espírito Santo, in 1830, then only once more, in 1932, in Rio de Janeiro, and Sanhilaria brasiliensis, collected by Saint-Hilaire and never again. The potentiality of extinction was vague and formless, however, as long as collecting expeditions remained so infrequent and scattered. Not until the 1960s, then, did this menace gain urgency. Even so, concerns could only be expressed scientifically in regard to species that had been collected at least once, classified, and published. ₁₀

The assessment of the status of rare endemic species became an official object of concern with the promulgation of the Forest Code of 1967, which required the protection of threatened plants and animals. Official lists of such species therefore began to appear shortly afterward. A list of plants threatened with extinction was emitted by the Brazilian Institute for Forest Development (IBDF) in 1968. Only 12 species of the Atlantic Forest were listed, 7 of them orchids. By 1992 the Botanical Society of Brazil recommended listing 28 of the forest's species; oddly, it did not include all those already protected by the IBDF. Closer inspection of the flora of the Atlantic Forest by specialists was likely to reveal the endangerment of many hundreds more species, however. Earlier studies of three genera—Trimezia, Griffinia, and Stephanopodium—for example, had suggested that at least ten of their species endemic to the Atlantic Forest were threatened. Indeed, some of the species on these various lists are likely extinct, because a century or more had elapsed since their last collection. Graziela de Barros, one of Brazil's most distinguished taxonomists, was grimly amused by inquirers who wished to know which plants were threatened. "With so-called development, there isn't any plant that's not threatened." ₁₁

The potential extinction of animals was given a good deal more, though selective and similarly incomplete, official attention. Most of the scientific knowledge of Brazilian animals was concentrated on the most easily observed, spectacular, and engaging—primates, carnivores, and birds. Therefore, extremely few creatures of other orders were included on the IBDF's first list, published in 1973. It declared 11 monkeys protected; the list published in 1989 by that agency's successor, the Brazilian Institute of the Environment and Renewable Natural Resources, protected 25—half of all of the primates native to Brazil. In 1973, 8 carnivores were listed; in 1989, there were 13. The first list showed 10 birds native mainly to the Atlantic Forest; that of 1989 showed 37, two of them probably already extinct. Only a few of the smaller mammals reptiles, amphibians, and other nonmammals were listed, along with 31 insects, nearly all butterflies. Eight of the species on the 1989 list were unknown before 1965. ₁₂

The rarefaction and disappearance of Atlantic Forest species and the retreat of more-or-less undisturbed patches of it to quite restricted areas gave rise to scattered attempts to reconstitute it, to replant its species and nurture it to maturity. The Energy Company of São Paulo, stung by mounting public criticism of its hydroelectric projects, gradually developed techniques for implanting native tree species along the margins of its reservoirs. Even this public company, with vast resources and a vital need to prevent siltation, planted fewer than 300 hectares a year. At that rate, it would take 150 years to reforest the 437 square kilometers with which it was entrusted! More energetic was the Vale do Rio Doce Company (CVRD), equally goaded by the press and also facing problems of erosion of its railroad trackage. In one of its projects, its staff planted a wide swath along its right-of-way connecting iron deposits in the interior of Minas Gerais and the port at Tubarão. Managerial efforts like these, however, were quite different from natural processes. The CVRD planted bushy species, not trees, and avoided economic plants that might attract humans and plants unpalatable to cattle that might spread to adjoining pasture. ₁₃

S.O.S. Mata Atlântica, aware that the fragmentation of preserved areas of the Atlantic Forest increased the danger of extinctions, urged the restoration of its continuity by replanting cleared intervals so as to form "natural corridors." Most of these lands would first have to be expropriated and then improvements within them demolished, foreseeably a much more costly and politically wearing affair than the buying out of inholders in existing forest. Brazilian delegates to a conference on atmospheric carbon dioxide, held at Hamburg in 1988, were challenged to devise means of reforesting their vast national territory in order to assist in the reversal of predicted global warming. In response, a plan, called FLORAM, to reforest 200,000 square kilometers within thirty years was elaborated at the Institute for Advanced Studies of the University of São Paulo. A great deal of discussion was expended on abstract parameters of such a venture and very little on incentives to private landowners. It seemed to be assumed that the same foreigners who instigated the plan would pay for its execution. To this end the planners proposed the use of "debt-for-nature swaps"—the purchase of depreciated Brazilian international debt by foreign environmental organizations or government agencies and their donation to Brazilian environmental entities to fund nature preservation. It seemed unlikely, however, that foreigners, having elicited so ambitious a plan, would actually find the means to finance it, especially since this additional forest land would consist mainly of economic species that would eventually be used for fuel, thus on balance contributing not at all to carbon dioxide storage. ₁₄

In 1986 the government of São Paulo created a Foundation for Forest Conservation and Production to stimulate the planting of protective as well as economic forests. It proposed reforesting 40,000 square kilometers within 25 years. This foundation was intended to service principally small businesses that consumed wood as fuel or raw material. They had been required by new regulations either to pay a tax or plant replacement forest. It was in the state government's interest that they be encouraged to choose the latter, because tax revenues simply disappeared in the craw of the federal government. Therefore it sponsored wood consumers' reforestation associations, which distributed planting materials and assistance to cooperating farmers at no cost. By 1992 the foundation was distributing sufficient seedlings to reach its goal—assuming that they were all planted and would grow to maturity. In 1991 the federal government plugged the most obvious loophole in the Forest Code by requiring that landowners whose properties lacked the required 20 percent of woodland replant trees up to that amount. It was expected that most of this replanting would be in eucalyptus or pine, thereby lessening pressure on native forest but not contributing to its restoration. Some landowners, however, would be required to replant watersheds and riversides they or their predecessors had cleared. These were supposed to be permanent forests that could be exempted from land taxes; landowners might therefore choose to plant them in native species. ₁₅

The technical requirements of replanting with native species were poorly understood. Very little such planting had been done, or at least reported. Traditional or indigenous lore was lost, probably irretrievably. The Botanical Garden of Rio de Janeiro began to attempt restoration in the county of Nova Friburgo, using seeds from the garden. It did not seem to be difficult to plant native species of the sort that sprang up spontaneously in capoeira. Hardwood species that normally were to be found only in primary forest were much less adaptable: When planted in such projects, they vegetated disappointingly. Even a fairly common understory tree like Euterpe edulis, which yields hearts of palm, took fifteen years to reach maturity—as was discovered when the government financed 150,000 hectares of it in the early 1970s, almost none of which came to market. It would apparently be necessary to follow the sequence of succession of the native forest itself. A godlike patience and persistence, and indifference to returns on capital, were called for. Even more attributes of the deity would be needed to calculate which thousands of the forest's myriad species once occupied any given location. Reestablishment of the innumerable commensal, parasitic, and epiphytic relationships of the primary forest seemed, no matter what the will or skill, a goal still less feasible, even though very likely essential to the maturation and reproduction of numberless forest species. ₁₆

Far more resources were devoted to a limited, unbalanced task—the reintroduction of a few endangered species of fauna into a few patches of remnant forest. The public was easily persuaded of the necessity to save species—mainly primates—that engaged its sympathies. Environmentalists and environmental agencies therefore exalted these creatures in their search for legitimacy and funding. Golden lion tamarins and woolly spider monkeys acquired a certain fame in the rich countries as international environmental organizations took up their cause and as foreign television portrayed their habits engagingly. The zoos of Brazil, like those of the rest of the world, were redefining their "primordial function" as "the preservation of species threatened with extinction" and emphasized the breeding of such animals. ₁₇

The most sustained, determined, and expensive of the reintroduction campaigns was the breeding in captivity and release of golden lion tamarins. The tamarin is a fierce-faced little creature, measuring about a meter in length, including its long, prehensile tail, and weighing half a kilogram. It lives on fruits, small animals such as frogs, and insects it collects in dense forest. It has been prized as a curiosity since the earliest days of the colony—many had been captured for Brazilian fanciers, and many had been exported to Europe. So much of the tamarins' lowland Rio de Janeiro habitat had been cleared that by the late 1960s only a few hundred were left in the wild. Zoos in other countries had contributed to this decline, because they had bought tamarins as long as the trade was still legal. They had been largely unsuccessful in keeping them alive, much less breeding them, so that only 70 survived in captivity, worldwide. A 1970 report by National Museum zoologists to the International Union for the Conservation of Nature inspired the World Wildlife Fund to support lion tamarin preservation. In 1974 Adelmar Coimbra Filho, director of Rio de Janeiro's Primatology Center, persuaded the IBDF to expropriate a tract of 50 square kilometers of lowland Rio de Janeiro forest at a place called Poço das Antas, in the county of Silva Jardim, about 100 kilometers east of the city of Rio de Janeiro. There, with the support of the Brazilian Foundation for the Conservation of Nature, he led research on the tamarins' diet and behavior that much improved their survival and reproductive rates, techniques that were adopted in foreign zoos. In 1983, by which time there were several hundred tamarins in captivity, he began experimental reintroduction of these animals into the forest of the Poço das Antas reserve.

Reintroduction proved exceedingly difficult. Few of the tamarins survived the shock of release until training methods were devised to assist their adaptation to the wild. It took eight years, nevertheless, to install 35 tamarins in the forest—a 30 percent survival rate. Some of these were still receiving part of their sustenance from the biologists. These animals did procreate, however: A third generation of 45 tamarins—of which 33 survived—exhausted the lebensraum of the reserve. Meanwhile, another 250 were caged on the reserve, and zoos around the world owned 550 more. A few neighboring landowners were persuaded to accept 70 tamarins—of which 70 percent survived. It is ironic that one of the animals was killed by an attack of African honeybees. The reintroduction program was costing the World Wildlife Fund, with additional help from the National Zoo of Washington and other United States, Canadian, and German organizations, US$150,000 a year. A campaign was initiated in 1991 to increase the budget to US$250,000 in order to install, by the year 2025, 2,000 tamarins—considered the minimum viable number—in forest throughout the Rio de Janeiro lowlands. This, the directors hoped, could be obtained from private Brazilian businesses, which until then had not contributed significantly. Simultaneously, they sought to enlarge potential habitat to 230 square kilometers by persuading a goodly number of planters to set aside their woodlands as permanent preserves and allow them to be stocked with tamarins in return for tax exemptions. ₁₈

The limiting factor in the task of reintroducing the tamarin was proving to be not money but the shrinkage of appropriate habitat. Announcement of the reserve in 1971 had stimulated inholders to sell off their timber; boundaries consequently had to be redrawn in 1975. Poço das Antas had suffered fires nearly every year thereafter. The worst occurred in 1990, when 15 square kilometers were lost in a fire that burned for more than a month. Part of the reserve had been wetland before a dam was built upstream a few years before. The underlying turf subsequently dried out and served as tinder for any carelessly thrown cigarette butt. Indeed, dried turf in the region had been known to catch fire spontaneously. There was also danger from the fire-managed fields and pastures that abutted the reserve. The suspicion of its managers, however, was that the fires were maliciously set, by hunters or fishermen, perhaps angered at their exclusion from the reserve. Fortunately, some local residents looked upon Poço das Antas with favor and had saved it numerous times by warning the staff of the outbreak of fire on its margins. Nevertheless, by 1991, 40 percent of the reserve was degraded, and US\$43,000 had to be spent for two watch towers and firefighting equipment. The federal government, though oblivious of burnings on private lands, righteously demanded that the reserve managers replant the burned areas, as though the fires had been their doing. Restoration, in any case, was a task that was part of their program. Lamentably, another fire in 1992 ruined an ongoing replanting experiment. In worse state was the rest of the county. Its woodlands were subject to enormous pressure by woodcutters, legal and illegal, who supplied the region's tile and brickworks, sugar mills, and salt pans. Owners of these companies were buying entire farms for the sole purpose of harvesting their woodlands.₁₉

By 1992 the lion tamarin program had absorbed US\$817,000 of World Wildlife Fund's money, almost 40 percent of its grants within the Atlantic Forest. The budget at Poço das Antas paid for varied training programs in zoology, forestry, and environmental education; indeed, it had been turned into a sort of outsized zoo, with locked gates and firebreaks, its inmates radio monitored and marked with dyed tails. Even more had been invested in the symbolism of the golden tamarin, to the point that its survival was expected to make possible the survival of the lowland forest itself. Certainly, the disappearance of one of the closer relatives of the human species would be a great disgrace, but this was surely a mistaken formula: Nothing less than the survival of the Atlantic Forest could guarantee the survival of the golden lion tamarin. By the 1990s other tamarin species (or subspecies, biologists were not quite certain which) were in even greater danger. These were all rarer than the golden tamarin—indeed, one was so rare it had been discovered only in 1990, and then only from a contraband pelt! The reserves that served as havens for the other two—Morro do Diabo in São Paulo and Una in South Bahia—were understaffed and nearly unknown to the public. Very few specimens of either were safely housed in zoos. Foreseeably, the reproduction in captivity, reintroduction, and preservation of these creatures would at the very least quadruple the cost of the tamarin program, supposing that they had not all become extinct in the meantime. ₁₉

Keeping some fragment of a few animal populations living and mating in zoos—"preservation ex situ," as it was called—was rather more practical than preserving the genetic material of plants. The world's seed banks, even the largest, were designed for the safekeeping of the germ plasm only of varieties of economic plants and their wild antecedents. This alone was a dauntingly complicated and expensive business. Attempting to keep viable the seeds of tens of thousands of plant species for which no economic use was known was almost unimaginable. Moreover, tropical plant species were much more difficult to store—"recalcitrant," they were called. Many tree species produced seeds in pods the size and density of cannonballs, and often the intervention of specific animals or ambient conditions were necessary to provoke germination. ₂₁

Clearly, the government would have to stand resolutely and consistently behind whatever further efforts to catalog, preserve, and restore remnant stands of the Atlantic Forest might prove feasible. There was unfortunately altogether too much evidence that this was a duty the government found neither congenial nor suited to its talents. During the 1980s, the federal and state governments had responded to international and domestic pressures by emitting a barrage of laws and regulations, creating numberless agencies, and designating dozens of natural reserves. This was done gracelessly: President José Sarney announced his pugnaciously titled "Nossa Natureza" plan in 1989 with a blast of vituperation against the developed countries that had made Brazil the victim of an "unjust, defamatory, cruel, and vicious" campaign, designed to "turn us into salves." Foreign and Brazilian environmentalists might congratulate themselves for the results of "the labor in solidarity of the communities in preserving the memory, the civility, and the biodiversity of the many Atlantic forests they contain"; indeed, they would have to continue to maintain this stance toward the authorities if they were to compel or embarrass them to further actions in behalf of the forest. ₂₂

Nevertheless, some discerned in these triumphs the workings of a traditional conservative response to the "revindications" of novel and potentially disruptive political players: Create underfunded and overlapping agencies, invest them with conflicting mandates, and staff them with corruptible loyalists. Thus the environmentalists could be mollified with the declaration of as many new phantom nature reserves as they demanded. Indeed, Mauro Victor regarded the creation of several new national parks in the last days of President-General João Figueiredo's term as "an affront,"

because it's the consolidation among us of a Brazil of make-believe, a hallucinatory and surrealistic country that exists only in the imagination of a half-dozen authorities disconnected from reality, completely alienated from reality.

These apparently progressive edicts were never designed to "get off the paper"; on the contrary, they would be "systematically disobeyed" by the authorities themselves. ₂₃

Helita Barreira Custódio, who analyzed carefully and critically the flow of environmental legislation that culminated in the constitutional articles of 1988, found in it neither a transformed consciousness nor an anxiety to make amends. She came to the bitter conclusion that it represented

the progressive execution of an anti-ecological policy, seeking only economic development, under the orientation of notorious pressure groups of national and multinational entities, with the criminal connivance of certain politicians, administrators, professionals, specialists, or unscrupulous bureaucrats. ₂₄

The agencies designed to enforce these contradictory decrees ballooned with political appointees and their protégés. They could be counted on to fall into the slough of confusion, inaction, and venality that had already poisoned the state's labor tribunals, social security, health care, Indian protection, land reform, and housing authorities. Environmental agencies could not be made immune to these pressures and distortions. A few have already fallen into disgrace and have been subjected to bureaucratic reshuffling or have been permitted to go on while new agencies, temporarily trustworthy, were created alongside them. These solutions have inevitably caused more confusion, excuses for malfeasance, and opportunities for graft. ₂₅

Clearly, the most fundamental of the government's duties was that of establishing and protecting land rights, public as well as private. Much of the loss of the Atlantic Forest had been caused simply to strengthen the pretensions of squatters and speculators. The contentious and violent practices surrounding land entitlement were nearly as intense in the cities as on the frontier, and there was no sign that the reestablished democratic government was any more willing to face up to this responsibility than had been its predecessors. ₂₆

The pharaonic projects of the 1980s, conceived while vast amounts of recycled international oil money flowed into the government's coffers and flowed out into the pockets of its allies in the private sector, were delayed in completion, but only because of the government's penury. Economic accounting for social patrimony was unknown. Planning for these later projects was uninfluenced by the newly required environmental impact statements, most of which were pro forma, mere afterthoughts. Planning, according to Alceo Magnanini, remained "sectoral or unilateral, seeking exclusively a single end...afterwards it tries to confront problems as they arise." This "mania of doing-to-see-what-happens," he complained, "had brought incalculable prejudices to the collectivity," although it was justified as necessary "at any cost. This ‘any cost' is what we are being charged and what will be charged future generations." The government's justifications for this heedlessness mutated with circumstances. During the 1980s, blame was laid on the accumulated foreign debt of more than US\$100 billion, which, it was alleged, made it necessary to sell off the country's natural resources at an accelerated rate. ₂₇

The persistence of economic stagnation and a whirlwind of inflation were leading the government, and society, to desperate and ill-conceived measures. At Angra dos Reis, the completion of the second nuclear power station was authorized. The director of the National Fuel Department proposed to reduce drastically the government subsidy on liquid natural gas, a product almost universal in cities, even in the poorest households. He therefore recommended that the public revert to cooking on wood stoves. The physicist José Goldemberg estimated that the standard 13-kilogram tank of natural gas avoided the cutting down of 13 trees—a potential increase in demand of more than 900 million trees a year! It seemed quite certain that the shortage of water confronted by the megalopolis of São Paulo would not be resolved through increased protection and extension of its watersheds, improved maintenance of its network, or instilling conservation methods among consumers but by the construction of a US\$10 billion aqueduct through the Serra do Mar forest reserve, a prospect as inspirational to construction companies as it was devastating to environmentalists. ₂₈

The United Nations Conference on the Environment and Development, held at Rio de Janeiro in June 1992, bestowed upon posterity some of the most utilitarian, not to say mean-spirited, views of the natural world of modern times. The diversity of life was therein labeled "genetic resources," forests were characterized as a renewable resource, and preservation was subsumed under the heading of sustainable use. In the twenty years since the last conference, the leaders of the less-technified countries had become to a degree conscious of the fragility of their biotic patrimony but had nursed their resentment and suspicion of foreign intentions and were determined to exploit their resources according to their own best lights. Hidden among the conference's resolutions to the governments of the planet to extract the maximum possible sustenance from their living substrates, however, is the reflection that the forests may deserve consideration for their "spiritual functions and values." The idea seems oddly out of place, even though it does not diverge from the conference's human centeredness—if acted upon, this proposition would exempt certain biota from destruction according to their capacity to inspire elevated thoughts in the citizenry. It did not, in any case, inspire any policy recommendations. The governments of the Third World, supposedly representatives of many "traditional peoples," saw fit to embrace the most materialistic of assumptions and prescriptions. ₂₉

This casual admission of the existence, among some peoples at least, of sympathy, perhaps even respect and identification, with their natural environments requires nevertheless some further reflection. The readiness of Brazilians to protect what remains of the Atlantic Forest surely depends upon some motivation other than self-interest, no matter how conceived. So little of it is left that none can be spared for experiments in "sustainable development"; indeed, all such claims in reference to the Atlantic Forest must be regarded as cant and hypocrisy. Even the nurturing of spiritual values must be severely restrained: Suburban forest stands like Tijuca are in constant danger of fires spread by some practicants of African religions, who leave lighted candles under its trees to propitiate the orixás. The motivation for preserving the forest must be disinterested, then, and it must extend across all levels of society, especially rural society, not merely to some of the better-educated members of the urban middle class. This would be a most remarkable achievement, considering how largely the propertyless depend for their survival on stripping the land of its vegetation and how stubbornly the propertied classes maintain their holdings for the same purposes. Civil society, in nearly all of its individual, as well as private, acts, must refrain from further incursions, now and forever. The role of the Brazilian state might thereby be reduced to the more practicable one of punishing the occasional infractor; it would gain more in prestige and power by enforcing the law than by circumventing it.

Nature appreciation has had few adepts in Brazil. The prestige of urbanity, transferred by the Portuguese as a means of confirming their superior status in a strange environment, has survived nearly intact. "In Minas Gerais," commented Cláudio de Moura Castro,

"woods" [mata] has connotations suggestive of disrespect for nature. The word is pejorative there; to say of a place that "There's only woods" is to condemn it. In the Escola Superior de Agricultura of Viçosa it was common during the forties to hear people tell a student that he came from the "woods" and obtain the reply: "No, my land is all developed." This meant that there were no more woods. ₃₀

A recent news report suggests the persistence of indifference even among the pious: In Rio de Janeiro, federal forest police interdicted a truck emerging from Desengano State Park. It was loaded with vinhático, the finest of all the "woods-of-law," which the Baptist congregation in São José had ordered for the fashioning of its church pews. Even the most otherworldly clergyman would have to know whence the last of Rio de Janeiro's vinhático could be fetched. ₃₁

A century and a half ago, the most conscious of the observers of slash-and-burn farming, that "veritable discount against the future to the profit of the present," were sure that "the descendants of contemporary Brazilians [would] feel cruelly the privation of the immense resources that so much vegetation represents, daily destroyed to no advantage." In fact, they feel nothing of the kind—they have been oblivious, and this is surely one of the reasons that the Atlantic Forest is close to disappearing. An opinion poll of 1987 showed that 90 percent of Brazilians living within the former bounds of the Atlantic Forest had never heard of it. The manner of its disappearance has been erased from the memory bank of even its middle class: Only 2.6 percent of a sample of Paraná university students in the interior city of Maringá were able, in 1983, to recall that twenty years before their region had suffered a catastrophic drought, freeze, and fires that destroyed 21,000 square kilometers of their state's forests. Should not this holocaust of human making be recounted from generation to generation? Should not the history textbook approved by the Ministry of Education begin: "Children, you live in a desert; let us tell you how you have been disinherited"? ₃₂

For five hundred years the Atlantic Forest has yielded easy pickings: parrots, dyewood, slaves, gold, ipecac, orchids, and timber for the profit of their colonial masters and, burned and ravaged, an immensely fertile layer of ashes that made possible an effortless, mindless, and unsustainable agriculture. Population grew and grew, capital "accumulated" while the forests disappeared; further capital was then "accumulated"—in barriers to the gullying of farmland, aqueducts, flood control and flood relief, dredging equipment, planted woodlands, and the industrialization of substitutes for hundreds of products once plucked freely in the wild. No restraint was observed during this half-millennium of gluttony, even though, almost from the beginning, solemn interdictions were intoned intermittently and, in latter days, continually and frantically.

The presence of this primary forest along the Brazilian coastline made possible the colony's uniquely dispersed settlement patterns, its bizarrely precarious land rights, its ever-renewed, ever-decadent land exploitation, and all that this brought in train—social conflict, the prepotence of a latifundist class, primitive economic relations, and poverty. "Discovery" was breathtakingly asserted to be the equivalent of conquest, "conquest" was imbued with unlimited rights over the conquered, and the forest was reduced to booty. Avarice is so pallid a word to describe this expropriation, and avarice itself is only a minor character flaw compared to the ignorance, indifference, and alienation that accompanied it. The exhaustion of the Atlantic Forest does not appear to be working a transformation in strategy. The savanna has recently been shown by modern agricultural science to be nearly as adaptable to machine-driven, integrated farming as forest land, and it is disappearing at a much faster rate. The Amazon Forest, despite the fragility and poverty of nearly all its underlying soils, has been latterly treated as though it were as stable as the "purple earth" of the Southeast. The valor da terra nua—value of bare ground—has become the bank manager's standard for measuring collateral. "An etymological aggression against nature," as one environmentalist has termed it. ₃₃

The irresponsible and spendthrift reduction of the Amazon Basin to bare ground has therefore given rise to international alarm and derision. Among those Brazilians who have studied the history of the Atlantic Forest and appreciate the presence of its remnant stands, the Amazon Forest inspires especial alarm and foreboding. The last service that the Atlantic Forest might serve, tragically and forlornly, is to demonstrate all the terrible consequences of destroying its immense western neighbor.

Notes:

Note 1: Manuel Arruda da Câmara, Discurso sobre a Utilidade da Instituição de Jardins nas Principais Provincias do Brazil (Rio de Janeiro, 1810), p. 3; Auguste de Saint-Hilaire, Voyage dans le District des Diamans et sur le littoral du Brésil (Paris, 1833), 1:51, 2:64-65; idem, Voyage dans les provinces de Rio de Janeiro et Minas Gerais (Paris, 1830), 2:96, 97; idem, Voyage dans les provinces de Saint Paul et de Sainte Catherine (Paris, 1851), 1:92; "Memoire sur le systhème d'agriculture adopté par les Brésiliens et les résultats qu'il a eu dans la Province de Minas Gerais," Memoires du Muséum d'Histoire Naturelle, 14 (1827), 89.  Back.

Note 2: Robert MacArthur and Edward O. Wilson, The Theory of Island Biogeography (Princeton, NJ, 1967), pp. 8-18; C. Barry Cox and Peter D. Moore, Biogeography: An Ecological and Evolutionary Approach (4th ed.; Oxford, 1985), pp. 112-116; Keith S. and G. G. Brown, "Habitat Alteration and Species Loss in Brazilian Forests," in T. C. Whitmore and J. A. Sayer, eds., Tropical Deforestation and Species Extinction (London, 1992), 119-142. Back.

Note 3: The bromeliad collectors Mulford B. and Racine Sarasy Foster, Brazil (Lancaster, PA, 1945), could not collect specimens in Aimoré State Park because its trees were too tall; note also their discovery, p. 230, of a new species in the long-culled Itatiaia park.  Back.

Note 4: Paraná, Coordenadoria do Patrimônio Cultural, Tombamento da Serra do Mar (Curitiba, 1987), p. 35.  Back.

Note 5: Rogério Medeiros, "A Ultima Memória," Jornal da Vale, June 1986, p. 9; "Devastação: 50 Hectares por Dia," Jornal da Tarde, 2 September 1987; Maria do Carmo Mendes Marques, "Botânicos Investigam a Antiga Flora Fluminense," Ciência Hoje, 12 (October 1990), 60-61; Scott A. Mori, "Eastern, Extra-Amazonian Brazil," in D. C. Campbell and H. D. Drummond, eds., Floristic Inventory of Tropical Countries (New York, 1989), p. 445.  Back.

Note 6: Helmut Sick, Ornitologia Brasileira (3d ed.; Brasília, 1984), 1:100. Back.

Note 7: Foster and Foster, Brazil, p. 122; Mauro Antônio Moraes Victor, A Devastação Florestal (São Paulo, n.d.), p. 37; Ladislau Netto, Additions à la flore brésilienne: itineraire botanique dans la province de Minas Gerais (Paris, 1866), pp. 5-6, 7. The quotation is from Frederico Carlos Hoehne, Excursão Botânica Feito ao Sul de Minas e Regiões Limitrofes do Estado de São Paulo (São Paulo, 1939), p. 9; see also pp. 13, 111.  Back.

Note 8: Manuel Pereira de Godoy, Contribuição à História Natural e Geral de Pirassununga (Pirassununga, 1974); L. F. Weinberg, "Nova Colectânea e Listagem das Aves de Nova Friburgo, Cantagalo e Trajano de Moraes," Boletim da FBCN, 21 (1986), 172-190, 22 (1987), 133-134; Kent H. Redford and John G. Robinson, "Park Size and the Conservation of Forest Mammals in Latin America," in Michael A. Mares and David J. Schmidly, Latin American Mammalogy: History, Biodiversity and Conservation (Norman, OK, 1991), pp. 227-234.  Back.

Note 9: Moysés Kuhlman and Eduardo Kühn, A Flora do Distrito de Ibiti (ex Monte Alegre) (São Paulo, 1947), p. 146. The palm was Syagrus oleracea. See Francis Dov Por, Sooretama: The Atlantic Rain Forest of Brazil (The Hague, 1992), p. 50; Keith S. Brown, "Borboletas da Serra do Japi," in L. Patricia C. Morellato, org., História Natural da Serra do Japi (Campinas, 1992), pp. 145-146.  Back.

Note 10: Alberto José de Sampaio, ed., "Primeira Conferencia Brasileira de Proteção á Natureza," Boletim do Museu Nacional, 11 (1935), No. 2, 37-38. See also idem, Biogeografia Dinamica: A Natureza e o Homem no Brasil (São Paulo, 1935), p. 204.  Back.

Note 11: Brazil, Instituto Brasileiro do Desenvolvimento Florestal [hereafter IBDF], "Espécies de Plantas Brasileiras Ameaçadas de Extinção," Portaria No. 303/68, xerog.; Sociedade Botânica do Brasil, Centuria Plantarum Brasiliensium Exstintionis Minitata (n.p., 1992); Pierfelice Ravenna, "Neotropical Species Threatened and Endangered by Human Activity in the Iridaceae, Amaryllidaceae, and Allied Bulbous Families," in Ghillean T. Prance and Thomas Elias, eds., Extinction Is Forever (New York, 1977), pp. 257-282; Ghillean T. Prance, Dichapetalaceae, Flora Neotropica Monograph No. 10 (New York, 1972). The de Barros quotation is in "Plantas Ameaçadas de Extinção; Os Botânicos Reclamam: Não Há Verba," O Globo, 3 April 1981.  Back.

Note 12: Brazil, IBDF, Portaria No. 3481-DN, 31 May 1973, xerog.; Instituto Brasileiro do Meio Ambiente e dos Recursos Naturais Renováveis, Portaria No. 1522, 19 December 1989; Academia Brasileira de Ciências, Espécies da Fauna Brasileira Ameaçada de Extinção (Rio de Janeiro, 1972). See also Sick, Ornitologia, pp. 100-102.  Back.

Note 13: Luis Octávio da Silva, "Recompasição de Matas Nativas Empreendida pela CESP," in Congresso Nacional sobre Essências Nativas, 2, São Paulo, Anais, special edition of Revista do Instituto Florestal, 4 (March 1992) [hereafter CNEN, Anais], 1054-1060.  Back.

Note 14: Consórcio Mata Atlântica-Universidade Estadual de Campinas, Reserva da Biosfera Mata Atlântica (São Paulo, 1992), 1:64; "Memória do Projeto FLORAM," Estudos Avançados, 4 (May-August 1990).  Back.

Note 15: Brazil, IBDF, Plano de Manejo: Reserva Biológica de Poço das Antas (Brasília, 1981), pp. 11-12; São Paulo (State), Fundação para a Conservação e Produção Florestal, Fundação Florestal: Uma Maneira Realista de Conservar (São Paulo, 1990); Antônio Carlos Macedo, Fundação Florestal, interview with the author, São Paulo, 26 October 1992; Wantuelfer Gonçalves and Vanderlei José Ventura, "Uma Política para Manutenção da Biodiversidade no Estado de São Paulo," CNEN, Anais, 1063-1066; Congresso "Produtor Rural Tem de Reflorestar Parte do Que Desmatou," O Estado de São Paulo [hereafter OESP], Suplemento Agrícola, 30 September 1993.  Back.

Note 16: José Carlos Bolliger Nogueira, Reflorestamento Heterogéneo com Essências Indígenas, Instituto Florestal Boletim Técnico, No. 25 (São Paulo, 1977); "Desvio de Bilhões no Golpe do Palmito," OESP, 15 December 1983.  Back.

Note 17: Adayr Mafuz Saliba, director of the São Paulo Zoo, quoted in Marina Caldeira, "Mais Que Lazer, Zôo Trabalha na Preservação de Espécies," Folha de São Paulo [hereafter FSP], 3 January 1988.  Back.

Note 18: World Wildlife Fund, Yearbook, 1970-1971 (Washington, DC, 1971), p. 165; James Brooke, "Golden Monkeys Learn How to Live in Wild in Brazilian Preserve," New York Times, 7 October 1989; Diane Ackerman, "A Reporter at Large: Golden Monkeys," New Yorker, 21 June 1991, 35-51; Adelmar Coimbra Filho, lecture at the Confederação Nacional de Comêrcio, Rio de Janeiro, 24 October 1991; "Proteção para o Mico-Leão," Jornal do Brasil [hereafter JdB], 29 May 1991; Golden Lion Tamarin Conservation Program, "Countdown 2025" (pamphlet; n.p., [1991]); "FEEMA Exporta Conhecimento em Primatologia," Revista FEEMA, 1 (July-August, 1992), 41; "Centro de Primatologia Defende a Vida," Revista FEEMA, 1 (January-February 1992), 20-23; "Prestígio Internacional Leva Centro a Ampliar Atividades," Revista FEEMA, 1 (January-February 1992), 24-25.  Back.

Note 19: "Fernanda Pedrosa, "Poço das Antas em Chamas," JdB, 5 February 1990; "IBAMA Condenada por Incêndio em Reserva," O Globo, 9 April 1990; "Proteção para o Mico-Leão," JdB, 29 May 1991; "Director Acusa Caçadores," JdB, 27 October 1991; "Fogo Atinge 10% de Poço das Antas," O Globo, 27 October 1991; "Desmatamentos Ameaçam Secar os Mananciais Que Abastecem Toda a Região dos Lagos," O Globo, 30 January 1984.  Back.

Note 20: World Wildlife Fund, Yearbook (1987-1988), project 3215; idem, Latin America/Caribbean Projects, FY88-FY93 (Washington, DC, 31 May 1993), printout.  Back.

Note 21: Maria del Carmen Rodríguez-Hernández and Carlos Vásquez-Yanes, "La conservación de plantas en peligro de extinción a través del almacenamiento," Interciência, 17 (September-October 1992), 293-297.  Back.

Note 22: "Sarney Lança ‘Nossa Natureza,"' JdB, 7 April 1989; see also "Desmatamento da Amazônia é Maior do Que Diz Sarney," JdB, 8 April 1989; José Pedro de Oliveira Costa and Fredman Corrêa, "A Reserva da Mata Atlântica," São Paulo em Perspectiva, 6 (January-June, 1992), 111.  Back.

Note 23: Randáu Marques, "Destruição: O Brasil Perde Dois Milhões de Arvores Todos os Dias," JdT, 26 September 1984; Mauro Antônio Moraes Victor, "Floresta Amazônica e Mata Atlântica: Começo e Fim" (paper presented at the International Assembly on Deforestation, Geneva, April 1989), p. 10.  Back.

Note 24: Helita Barreira Custódio, "Legislação Brasileira do Estudo de Impacto Ambiental," in Sámia Maria Tauk et al., orgs., Análise Ambiental: Uma Visão Multidisciplinar (São Paulo, 1991), p. 46.  Back.

Note 25: Keith Alger and Marcellos Caldas, "The Crisis of the Cocoa Economy and the Future of the Bahian Atlantic Forest" (paper presented at the Latin American Studies Association Conference, Los Angeles, September 1992), p. 13.  Back.

Note 26: James Holston, "The Misrule of Law: Land and Usurpation in Brazil," Comparative Studies in Society and History, 33 (October 1991), 695-725.  Back.

Note 27: United Nations, Economic Commission for Latin America, and United Nations Environment Programme, Expansión de la frontera agrícola y medio ambiente en América Latina (Madrid, 1983), pp. 15-16; Alceo Magnanini, "Situação, Legislação e Política Florestais; Algumas Sugestões" (Rio de Janeiro, 1979), xerog., p. 2.  Back.

Note 28: Tânia Malheiros, "Obra de Angra 2 Pode Começar em 93," OESP, 25 October 1992; "De Volta ao Mato," O Globo, 12 March 1993.  Back.

Note 29: United Nations Conference on Environment and Development, Rio de Janeiro, 1992, Report (New York, 1992), 2:24-33, 2:103; 3:111-116.  Back.

Note 30: Cláudio de Moura Castro, "Ecology—Gunpowder Rediscovered" (Rio de Janeiro, [1980], mimeog., p. 31.  Back.

Note 31: "Começa a Operação Salva Mata Atlântica," O Globo, 23 February 1990.  Back.

Note 32: V. L. Baril, Comte de la Hure, L'Empire du Brésil (Paris, 1862), p. 234; Carlos E. Quintela, "An SOS for Brazil's Beleaguered Atlantic Forest," Nature Conservancy Magazine, 40 (March-April 1990), 14 (by 1989, 20 percent had heard of it); Antônio Giacomini Ribeiro, "Seca, Geada e Incéndios no Ano de 1963," Boletim de Geografia (Maringá), 2 (January 1984), 24-33.  Back.

Note 33: S.O.S. Mata Atlântica, Seminário Internacional "Manejo Racional de Florestas Tropicais," Rio de Janeiro, 20-21 June 1988, Seminário ... (São Paulo, 1988), p. 98.  Back.