Amazon: a tale of two economies

Supporting communities who live in the Amazon rainforest to use the forest sustainably will help to protect it for future generations

The river runs thick and wide, lined on both sides by deep green rainforests. In the distance, vast, grey graceful curtains of rain float over the horizon. Rain fills the river with freshwater, carried over vast distances. At places it is eight kilometres wide, a veritable sea of fresh water. When clouds stop pouring, the sun soaks up the monsoon bounty – from the river and from the rainforests – and sends more rain. The circle of life plays over and over again. This is the mighty Amazon – the greatest of all river systems on Earth, and by far the most majestic.

This single system empties one-fifth of all the freshwater that flows into the world's oceans. If the Earth had lungs, they would be the Amazon rainforest. And if it had pulmonary arteries, they would be the Amazon and its many tributaries and branches.

Manaus, the capital of Amazonas state in Brazil, is located at the confluence of the Rio Negro and the Amazon. It is 1,450km up the Amazon from the Atlantic Ocean.

From Manaus, it takes six hours by boat to Tumbira, a small village with a school, a church, and a football field (the three institutions of rural Brazil). Tumbira is also home to the field centre of the Amazon Sustainability Foundation (FAS).

The Amazon is over 1km wide here, but above and beyond the visible river system is another, gigantic, invisible, "river" system. An estimated 20bn tonnes of water vapour is released every day by the Amazon rainforests. Animated satellite pictures show a constant global flow of airborne water vapour from the Amazon along the tropics, which scientists say is a source of rainfall not just for South America, but the world.

Both these river systems are at risk. A parliamentary amendment to the forest code is thought to have led to a rise in deforestation, and a spate of recent murders of environmental activists and small farmers has shocked the world.

Deforestation is often blamed on three vital groups of stakeholders: big local business, local people and consumers. These are the people who benefit from the fields and farms the Amazon rivers irrigate. Big local business can look after its own interests. Global governments representing foreign consumers of the Amazon's services are beginning to put money on the table – Norway has set an example by committing a $1bn to Brazil for REDD+. That leaves the weakest stakeholders – local people – who clearly do need support, and this is beginning to be organised.

A sustainable future for the Amazonas state and conservation of its remarkable rainforest river systems is no small challenge. It needs multiple efforts on multiple fronts.

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Amazon River on New 7 Wonders of Nature top list

The Amazon Rainforest/River has reached the final stage of an international online competition to name the world's seven natural wonders, the New 7 Wonders Foundation announced today.

The 28 official finalists also include Angel Falls (Venezuela), Galapagos (Ecuador), Grand Canyon (The United States), Iguazu Falls (Brazil/Argentine), Bay of Fundy, Black Forest, Bu Tinah Shoals, Cliff of Moher, Dead Sea, El Yunque, and Great Barrier Reef.

Halong Bay, Jeita Grotto, Jeju Island, and Kilimanjaro, Komodo, Maldives, Masurian Lake District, Matterhorn/Cervino, Milford Sound, Mud Volcanoes, Puerto Princesa Underground River, Sundarbans, Table Mountain, Uluru, Vesuvius and Yushan, were also added to the list.

Competition organizers expect more than a billion people to participate in the online voting, which will continue into 2011, when the finalists by categories will be announced.

A panel of experts chose the finalists among the 77 nominees that gained the most votes in an early round of polling. People had suggested 261 landmarks in countries all over the world.

The panel chaired by Federico Mayor, former chief of Unesco, the U.N. Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, picked the finalists depending on geographical balance, diversity and the importance to human life.

The Amazon Rainforest, also known as Amazonia, the Amazon jungle or the Amazon Basin, encompasses seven million square kilometers (1.7 billion acres), though the forest itself occupies some 5.5 million square kilometers (1.4 billion acres), located within nine nations: Peru, Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador, French Guiana, Guyana; Suriname and Venezuela.

The Amazon represents over half of the planet's remaining rainforests and comprises the largest and most species-rich tract of tropical rainforest in the world.

The Amazon River is the largest river in the world by volume, with a total flow greater than the top ten rivers worldwide combined.

It accounts for approximately one-fifth of the total world river flow and has the biggest drainage basin on the planet. Not a single bridge crosses the Amazon.

http://www.andina.com.pe/Ingles/Noticia.aspx?id=TjV3xvhBG6M=

One River

The prodigious biological and cultural riches of the vast Amazon rain forest are being lost at a horrendous rate, according to the author, often without yielding their secrets to the Western world.

During his years in the South American jungle, ethnobotanist Davis (The Serpent and the Rainbow) has done much to preserve some of these treasures. He tells two entwined tales here - his own explorations in the '70s and those of his mentor, the great Harvard ethnobotanist Richard Evans Schultes, beginning in the '30s.

Both men have been particularly interested in the psychoactive and medicinal properties of the plants of the Amazon basin and approach their subject with a reverence for the cultural context in which the plants are used.

The contrasting experiences of two explorers, a mere generation apart, starkly demonstrates how much has already been destroyed in the rain forest. Although Schultes probably knew more about Amazonian plants than any Western scientist, he was constantly learning of new ones and new uses for them from native experts.

Davis graphically describes the brutal clash of cultures from Columbian times to the present, often so devastating for indigenous peoples, that has defined this region.

At times humorous, at times depressing, this is a consistently enlightening and thought-provoking study.

http://www.excitingbrazil.com/theamazonriver.html

Book Review: Primal wonderland fated to exploitation

Publication of John Hemming's history of the Amazon has coincided with the release of photographs by Brazil's indigenous affairs department of a rainforest tribe uncontacted by outsiders and with the resignation of the country's environment minister amid strains over development policies.

Tree of Rivers highlights themes that have long shaped the fate of the Amazon rainforest and river system - the irresistible desire to explore a wilderness, and the strains generated by the compulsion to exploit its natural riches.

As a breathtaking reminder of its size, Hemming points out that there may still be 40 to 50 uncontacted tribes. That is plausible because, even after decades of destruction, the Amazon forests with those of the adjacent Orinoco and Guianas extend to nearly 2m square miles.

The river system discharges a fifth of the water that flows into the oceans from all the rivers on the planet.

A consummate explorer and former head of the UK Royal Geographical Society, Hemming has done much to nurture an interest in Brazil's indigenous peoples.

But his book is much more than a thrilling account of the derring-do - and foolhardiness - of determined explorers.

It is an economic history of a region coveted - despite the relative poverty of much of its soil - by outsiders for its capacity to yield in abundance all the factors of production: land, labour and capital.

Tree of Rivers traces journeys by explorers, adventurers, slavers, biologists, soldiers, rebels and opportunists up and down the Amazon river and its tributaries since the first incursion in 1500 by a Spaniard, Vicente Yáñez Pinzón.

It stops along the way at moorings that permit forays into the dark stories of unspeakable cruelty that have been played out beneath the forest canopy.

Thinking he had sailed up the Ganges, for example, Yáñez provided an ominous portent - seizing 36 indigenous men as slaves.

The author describes with moving authority the decimation of indigenous peoples by the outsiders through murderous enslavement, overwork and imported diseases and avarice.

Just as it was the territory's fate to be squabbled over by Spain and Portugal, it was also its lot to be plundered.

In subsequent centuries, a long list of real, or imagined, tradeable goods would lure outsiders: gold, slaves, turtle meat, spices, quinine, cacao, rubber, hardwoods and, most recently, land for colonists, cattle ranchers and soya producers. Even scientific missions often had a commercial imperative.

The 19th-century rubber boom is, perhaps, the most well-known period in this story but, today, land for ranches and farming is the new commodity driving development - and deforestation.

The Amazon has also been a fertile source of dreams - it germinated tales of El Dorado and of what Hemming calls the "legendary tribe of sexually liberated women" after whom the river itself is named; it fuelled the radical ideas of the Enlightenment and of the noble savage; it nourished bizarre racist theories, then buried their inventors; it legitimised the colonising zeal of General Emílio Médici as a "land without people for a people without land"; and, today, it ventilates green politics everywhere as the "lungs of the world", a vast carbon sink essential for the survival of the planet.

It provided a ready supply of souls for theocratically inclined Jesuits, and was a haven for runaway slaves, esoteric cults and all the most significant South American guerrilla movements.

While there will always be optimism that a middle way between extraction and conservation can be found, it is a measure of how so much, yet so little, has changed since the 15th century that the story Hemming tells is one pregnant with the inevitable conflict between wonder at the discovery of new worlds, and our capacity to ruin them.

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/6b0b8bd6-4c88-11dd-96bb-000077b07658.html?nclick_check=1

13 Die in Boat Crash in Amazon River

Brasilia, 22 Feb (Prensa Latina) The authorities and first aid lifesavers reinitiated the search for people disappeared during the shipwreck of the ship of passengers Almirante Monteiro, that took place on Thursday in Amazon River.

According to what the fire brigade told TV Amazonas, 13 people died including four children when a riverboat crashed into a ferryboat in the Amazon River.

Same source indicated 92 passengers and crew members survived the strong current that the river has in the place where the shipwreck happened, far-off 108 miles Manaus, capital of Amazonas State.

Crew members of the ship of passengers Almirante Monteiro, who sank when hitting a load raft, told police that 110 people traveled in the boat, reason why firefighters still look for five people who disappeared in the accident.

The official causes of the accident have not been stated either. February is regarded as the rainiest month of the year in the Amazon rainforest region, where constant rain turn the December-May period into the local "winter," despite the fact that it is summer in the southern hemisphere. Although rainfalls have an influence over the rivers' flow, which has not yet been confirmed to have contributed to the accident.

Divers and two helicopters are currently working in the rescue mission.

http://www.plenglish.com/article.asp?ID=%7B9964F3E2-721F-48F2-8945-2746DCC2FDE9%7D)&language=EN

Amazon River

This vast, sparsely inhabited region is the world's last great frontier, and the Amazon basin covers the bulk of it. After traveling through the region at the beginning of the century, the Brazilian writer Euclides da Cunha described Amazonia as the "last unwritten page of Genesis."

The North and Amazonia roughly coincide, covering an area seven times the size of France. At the mouth of the great river, Marajo Island alone is larger than Switzerland. The Amazon River was called the River Sea by the early Spanish and Portuguese explorers, it is one of the great natural wonders of the world.

Stretching more than 3,900 miles from its source in the Peruvian Andes until it empties into the Atlantic, the Amazon is just a few miles shorter than the Nile.

After descending from its source in the Andes (at an altitude above 18,000 feet), the river drops less than two inches per mile over the next 3,500 miles to the Atlantic.

Even more impressive than the river's length is its volume and size. Because the Amazon is more than fifteen miles across in some spots, its opposite bank is sometimes invisible below the horizon.

Reaching a depth of 250 feet in some places, it is the deepest river *in the world. The Amazon discharges 160,000 cubic meters of fresh water per second into the Atlantic - about 15 percent of all the fresh water emptied each day into the world's oceans.

Its daily discharge could supply all U.S. homes with their water needs for five months. (As a point of comparison, the Mississippi passes less than 20,000 cubic meters per second into the Gulf of Mexico.)

This immense river system drains one fifth of the world's forests.

Ancient Acai - the Amazing Fruit of the Rainforest

For five centuries, the Rainforest has fascinated and perplexed the outsider and attracted explorers and adventurers. Without a doubt, it is the best known and most widely written about area of Brazil.

The enormous states of Amazonas (in the west) and Para (in the east) cover most of the North and Amazonia. The region also includes the small states of Amapa (on Brazil's northernmost coast) and Roraima (sandwiched between Amazonas and Venezuela).

The states of Acre and Rondonia on the Peruvian and Bolivian borders make up the remainder of the region. just under 7 percent of Brazilians live in the North. The population density is 3 inhabitants per square kilometer.

The vast majority of the region is uninhabited.

Two major cities, with more than a million inhabitants each, account for half of the population of the North. Belem (at the mouth of the river) and Manaus (1,000 miles upriver). Three quarters of this sparse population are the descendants of both Europeans and Indians (caboclos).

Since the arrival of the first Europeans in the sixteenth century, the Amazonian North has been alternately portrayed as a hell or a paradise on earth.

The pessimists see nothing but dense jungle, unbearable heat and humidity, hundreds of deadly predators, and tropical diseases.

The optimists see a tropical Garden of Eden, vast resources with enormous potential, and seemingly unlimited land.

For five centuries, Amazonia has attracted (and often swallowed up) countless outsiders in search of El Dorado, the Garden of Eden, or a world they believed to be uncorrupted by modern civilization.

Amazon River

http://www.excitingbrazil.com/amazonriver.html

Amazon rivers' newest ship is floating eco-lodge

I thought my impish Brazilian guide was pulling my leg. All doubt was banished when, standing on a wooden dock in the Amazon village of Novo Airão, I was greeted by three robustly pink dolphins thrusting their heads from the water.

I followed my guide's prodding to slip into the tea-colored river holding a sliver of fish, which was deftly plucked from my fingers. The dolphins playfully jostled me for more, bumping and rubbing me with their cool, rubbery bodies.

The Amazon basin is a place of natural astonishments, and pink dolphins are just the start. Many are albino, with coloring ranging from rosy gray to flamingo pink. They apparently grow pinker when excited, as if blushing.

A small pod has become friendly with a village family that innocently started to feed them fish scraps. The dolphins became daily visitors, and word spread, putting Novo Airão on the small but burgeoning Amazon tourist circuit. The French hotel group Accor is building a 100-room hotel nearby, slated to open in 2010. Hilton also plans to build an eco-resort here.

I arrived by luxurious riverboat from Manaus, a Brazilian city of nearly 1.8 million people in deep rain forest, 1,000 miles upriver from the Atlantic coast. Dozens of small boats carry tourists on river trips from Manaus, but the one on which I traveled has caused a splash by being the newest and largest.

The Grand Amazon is a floating resort modeled on Nile River cruisers. It offers 72 balconied cabins on four decks, a good restaurant, sun deck with pool and bar – all the amenities of a large passenger ship.

Based in a jungle lodge, I had explored the area before, visiting the wilds in motorized canoes.

I feared that a cruise ship would offer a more superficial experience. That is, until I grasped the concept. The Grand Amazon is essentially a lodge that moves. The ship carries small boats for exploring. And this lodge can relocate overnight.

The vessel was custom-built in Manaus (Brazilian hardwoods lend a rich glow to its interiors) by Spanish hotel company Iberostar to make this difficult environment easily accessible to the growing number of eco-tourists.

Like the lodges on land in the area, the ship offers a choice of two or three excursions each morning, afternoon and evening.

After breakfast, we'd clamber into the boats – about 20 people per group, accompanied by local guides – and head off on our chosen tours. Skimming across water as glassy as a polished mirror, I loved how the river reflected the mountainous clouds in the blue sky. At night, with the moon and stars duplicated in the black water, I had the sensation of cruising across the universe.

On hikes through pungent forests, we learned which plants could be eaten and which were poisonous, which were best for building shelter and which could sterilize wounds. We learned that potable water can be found in vines, filtered by the plant. We ate açai berries, a nutrient- and antioxidant-rich fruit considered a superfood.

With eyes trained to spot things we could not, the guides found ant nests, scorpions, tarantulas and huge spiders. I managed to spy a twiglike insect and one large ant.

"Bullet ant," said Marco, our naturalist. He tapped his machete against a tree trunk, and the bark soon was crawling with the agitated insects. "The bite of one can make you very sick," he advised us, "and 10 could kill you." The pain of the bite is likened to that of a bullet wound, hence the name.

During an onboard buffet lunch of local specialties, the ship would sail to a new spot, and we'd reboard the small boats for a slow cruise through channels and flooded forests. Or, we'd be transported to another hiking trail.

"You won't see an anaconda in the wild," said Rafael, one of our guides. "They are too secretive." Yet, on the second day I spotted one of the giant snakes swimming.

"You won't see a jaguar," the guides told us, and we didn't.

But we did see toucans, scarlet macaws, parrots and dozens of other exotic birds. We saw sloths, and howler and spider monkeys. We fished for piranha.

At night, our shallow-draught boats slipped through reeds in search of crocodiles, their eyes glowing red in our strobe lights.

At Manaus, the Amazon splits into two tributaries: the cola-colored Rio Negro and the muddy Rio Solimões. The rivers present two distinct environments, and Grand Amazon explores both waterways. Rio Negro is the Amazon of our imagination: dark, deep, mysterious. Rio Solimões resembles the Amazon of headlines: pockets of settlement, river traffic and trees cut to make room for cattle.

I preferred the unspoiled Rio Negro (and the pink dolphins of Novo Airão), while others onboard enjoyed the Solimões with its river traffic and greater concentration of wildlife. More people live on the Solimões because there are more fish, and more fish also mean more birds and animals.

A four-day itinerary focusing on the Rio Negro and a three-day route on the Rio Solimões can be booked separately, but it makes sense to do both. In a week, I felt I'd seen and learned a lot.

The explorer in me was secretly disappointed, though, that it was so easy. And so comfortable.

http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/fea/lifetravel/stories/013108dnamazon.32a8297.html

Return to the Amazon With Jean-Michel Cousteau

The Amazon: The most powerful of the world's rivers, its rapid transformation will alter the global climate. Emptying into the great Atlantic Ocean, it flows through the world's largest tropical rainforest, the vast, natural theater where evolution has gone wild, creating the greatest biodiversity of any area on the planet. Twenty-five years ago, Jean-Michel Cousteau explored this fabled region with his father, the legendary Jacques Cousteau. Since then, an area the size of Texas has been deforested. With an intimate look at recent changes, Jean-Michel returns with a new expedition for the signature PBS environmental series, Jean-Michel Cousteau: Ocean Adventures. Combining science and discovery with expert story-telling and astonishing footage, the new season premieres nationally with Return to the Amazon, airing in two parts on April 2 at 8pm, and April 9 at 8pm (both 60 minutes), and is narrated by the acclaimed actor, Delroy Lindo.

Traveling down the Amazon River basin with Jean-Michel are his children Fabien and Celine and his crew of adventurous oceanauts. Over the course of ten months, through wet and dry seasons, in the water and on land, the team encounters debilitating challenges and uplifting discoveries throughout the multiple expeditions and forays into both wild and developed regions. All experienced ocean divers, they now have the unique experience of investigating the murky waters of the Amazon basin, where there are more species of fish than there are in the entire Atlantic Ocean! The team encounters many unusual, rare species and surprises, including swimming with an anaconda, the world's largest -- and perhaps most dangerous -- snake; going nose-to-nose with the jacare, the Amazon version of the crocodile; and playfully swimming with beautiful pink river dolphins.

Over 4,000 miles long, and without a single bridge crossing it, this is the world's longest and widest river. Negotiating it is not easy. Covering an area larger than the continental United States, the team travels together on long river passages and also breaks into small, mobile groups, sending Fabien and Celine on trips to investigate more leads. From the Brazilian city of Manaus -- a hub of commerce on the main Amazon tributary, the Rio Negro -- to protected areas in the Amazon like Xixuau and Mamiraua Sustainable Development Reserve, they investigate projects and places that are finding solutions to the destruction of the land and river. From the mouth of the Amazon at the Atlantic Ocean to a glacier in the Peruvian Andes, they explore incredible natural phenomena and the catastrophic consequences of climate change and deforestation.

Issues, challenges and problems that exist in the Amazon have a direct connection to the rest of the world, especially through global commerce. Expansive soy farms, lumber companies, commercial fishing, illegal animal trafficking, and more come under close scrutiny, but the Cousteau family and Ocean Adventures team uncover both inspiring and shocking stories throughout Brazil and Peru. They investigate the crucial role of native people in sustaining the natural rainforest and river system, and visit indigenous peoples in small, remote villages, as well as in large, protected reserves. New business models such as ecotourism, fish farms, organized fish monitoring by markets and fishermen, and developing and exporting sustainable rainforest products and medicines are all examples of potential solutions to global issues, as clear progress is made in the Amazon.

From this region of urgency and conflict, where human enterprise and expansion not only compromise the health and ecology of the river and rainforest basin, but truly inflict consequences on a global scale, come new beacons of hope and sustainability. The fight for the future of the Amazon and its people is underway, and Return to the Amazon presents solutions already in motion for keeping the forest alive and thriving.

Return to the Amazon is shot in high-definition and is narrated by Delroy Lindo, the Tony award-nominated actor whose films include "Malcolm X," "Crooklyn," "Get Shorty," "Romeo Must Die" and "The Cider House Rules." He most recently starred in the 2007 holiday hit, "This Christmas."

Jean-Michel Cousteau: Ocean Adventures is produced by KQED and Ocean Futures Society. The exclusive corporate sponsor is The Dow Chemical Company.

http://www.prnewswire.com/cgi-bin/stories.pl?ACCT=104&STORY=/www/story/01-29-2008/0004744927&EDATE