Can Roads and Rain Forests Co-Exist?

While most of the vast carpet of rain forest cloaking the Amazon River basin remains intact, the forest is looking increasingly tattered in places where road networks intrude. For the most part, such development is a biological and social one-way street. Where roads advance, trees fall and the inhabitants of the forest — human and nonhuman — are forever changed. (When you view the slide show accompanying Elisabeth Rosenthal’s report on climate-driven troubles facing the Indian tribes of the Xingu region in Brazil, note the tire tracks in the dust.)
Stephen D. Nash/Conservation International Saddleback tamarin.

Natalie Angier has a fascinating piece in the Week in Review section describing one unexpected result of recent bursts of rain-forest road building — a boom in the discovery of mammal species, including the saddleback tamarain, found in a newly developed region not far from Manaus, the heart of human-dominated Amazonia. Most species being driven to extinction by human activities are blinking out invisibly as landscapes are transformed. With birds and mammals, at least, we tend to see what we’re imperiling.

The boom in biological discovery accompanying road construction is likely to continue. An ambitious effort to expand trade routes around South America, and particularly from the Amazon to the Pacific Ocean and Asian markets, is well under way. Bruce Babbitt, the former governor of Arizona and secretary of the interior, recently followed one such road route up from the Amazon over the Andes to write on its potential environmental impacts for Americas Quarterly (subscription required).

The highway is a central element of Iirsa, the Initiative for the Integration of Regional Infrastructure in South America, an ambitious plan to develop $69 billion in highways, dams and other projects tying together the economies of that sprawling continent. In a discussion last week at the Americas Society/ Council of the Americas, Mr. Babbitt decried the lack of public scrutiny of the road plan even as international lenders and investors were poised to pour in more money. But some people attending the meeting rejected his dark forecast for Amazon destruction. One was Richard Huber, a retired insurance executive who, with some partners, in 1974 bought about 74,000 acres of rain forest land in the Brazilian state of Acre, near the base of Chico Mendes, the labor and land-rights organizer who was murdered by ranchers in 1988. (They later sold 50,000 acres, and about 17,000 were expropriated by Brazil and made part of the extractive reserve named for the slain activist.)

Mr. Huber said he supports the development of a reliable Pacific-Amazon highway and contends that the inhospitable nature of the rain forests around such routes is nature’s best protection outside narrow corridors of human activity. He added that it is unlikely that outsiders, however well intentioned, will influence the course of development in the countries within the Amazon basin. In a couple of follow-up e-mails after the session, he said:

Land clearing in Acre has almost ground to a stop. If one looks at a Google Earth image of the state today, there is very little change compared with 10 years ago. As for the highway to the Pacific, I really hope it does become a reality, but sort of doubt that I will live long enough to see it!…

I of course don’t want it to sound like I am unconcerned about the future of the Amazon, but that I do feel the hype has been way overblown. And that ultimately the only way to manage the development of this vast area is through the involvement of concerned citizens of the countries themselves. In the specific case of the Western Amazon, a few years ago I flew with my family from Rio Branco to Pucalpa in a single-engine plane. We saw the signs of man for the first five or six minutes out of Rio Branco, then for 2½ hours not a track or plume of smoke. Finally a few minutes before approaching Pucalpa, (reassuredly) again small signs of man.

What’s the best route to balancing economic development and biological conservation in a place valued both as a local resource and global asset?