HIST 115 Grossmont College The Light in the Forest by Conrad Richter Essay The report is to be 5-6 pages in length. Please be sure to use both a title page

HIST 115 Grossmont College The Light in the Forest by Conrad Richter Essay The report is to be 5-6 pages in length. Please be sure to use both a title page and works cited page. (title and works cited pages do not count toward the overall page count of your review) You are also encouraged to follow the MLA or Chicago formats to develop this report. In terms of the content of the report, I am looking for two main points of discussion. First, you should devote the first half of the report to a summary of the main points that the author is trying to convey to the reader. To help you to address this issue, consider some of these questions: What type of article is this? Is the author presenting an original feature, or is he/she conducting a book review? If this is a book review, what book (or books) is being reviewed? What is the author’s purpose for writing this article? What is the author’s academic or professional background?As for the second point of discussion, this is where you provide your opinion or perceptions of the article. In other words, what did you think about it? What were the strengths or weaknesses of the article? How did the article relate to the class? You are definitely encouraged to write in first person singular (I feel that…, I think..) as you provide your opinions. As a general rule of thumb, your JSTOR review should be about 60% summary and 40% commentary. Thus a 5-page review with about 3 & 1⁄2 pages summary and 1 & 1⁄2 pages commentary is an ideal proportion. And please let me know if you can open the pdf PreviousNext A Light in the Forest: Brazil’s Fight to Save the Amazon and Climate-Change Diplomacy
Author(s): Jeff Tollefson
Source: Foreign Affairs, Vol. 92, No. 2 (MARCH/APRIL 2013), pp. 141-151
Published by: Council on Foreign Relations
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/23527463
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A Light in the Forest
Brazils Fight to Save the Amazon and
Climate-Change Diplomacy
Jeff Tollefson
the conversion of vast swaths of rain forests into pastureland,
Across the
world,
complex
plantations,
and cropland.
Rain forests aresocial
disappearingand
in market forces are driving
Indonesia and Madagascar and are increasingly threatened in Africa’s
Congo basin. But the most extreme deforestation has taken place in
Brazil. Since 1988, Brazilians have cleared more than 153,000 square
miles of Amazonian rain forest, an area larger than Germany. With the
resulting increase in arable land, Brazil has helped feed the growing
global demand for commodities, such as soybeans and beef.
But the environmental price has been steep. In addition to providing
habitats for untold numbers of plant and animal species and discharging
around 20 percent of the world’s fresh water, the Amazon basin plays
a crucial role in regulating the earth’s climate, storing huge quantities
of carbon dioxide that would otherwise contribute to global warming.
Slashing and burning the Amazon rain forest releases the carbon
locked up in plants and soils; from a climate perspective, clearing the
rain forest is no different from burning fossil fuels, such as oil and gas.
Recent estimates suggest that deforestation and associated activities
account for 10-15 percent of global carbon dioxide emissions.
But in recent years, good news has emerged from the Amazon.
Brazil has dramatically slowed the destruction of its rain forests,
reducing the rate of deforestation by 83 percent since 2004, primarily
by enforcing land-use regulations, creating new protected areas,
and working to maintain the rule of law in the Amazon. At the same
time, Brazil has become a test case for a controversial international
JEFF TOLLEFSON is a U.S. correspondent for Nature, where he covers energy, climate,
and environmental issues.
March/April 2013
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climate-change preven
tion strategy known as
redd, short for “reducing
emissions from deforesta
tion and forest degradation,”
which places a monetary value on
the carbon stored in forests. Under
such a system, developed countries
can pay developing countries to
protect their own forests, thereby
offsetting the developed countries’
emissions at home. Brazil’s prelimi
nary experience with redd suggests
that, in addition to offering multiple
benefits to forest dwellers (human
and otherwise), the model can be
cheap and fast: Brazil has done more
to reduce emissions than any other
country in the world in recent years,
without breaking the bank.
The redd model remains a work
in progress. In Brazil and other
places where elements of redd
have been applied, the funding
has yet to reach many of its intended
beneficiaries, and institutional reforms
have been slow to develop. This has
contributed to a rural backlash against
the new enforcement measures in the
Brazilian Amazon—a backlash that
the government is still struggling to
contain. But if Brazil can consolidate
its early gains, build consensus around
a broader vision for development,
and follow through with a program to
overhaul the economies of its rain
forest regions, it could pave the way
for a new era of environmental
governance across the tropics.
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A Light in the Forest
For the first time, perhaps, it is possible to contemplate an end to the
era of large-scale human deforestation.
LULA GETS TOUGH
The deforestation crisis in Brazil ramped up in the 1960s, when the
country’s military rulers, seeking to address the country’s poverty crisis,
encouraged poor Brazilians to move into the Amazon basin with
promises of free land and generous government subsidies. In response,
tens of thousands of Brazilians left dry scrublands in the northeast and
other poor areas for the lush Amazon basin—a mass internal migration
that only increased in size throughout the 1970s and beyond.
But the government did not properly plan for the effect of a popu
lation explosion in the Amazon basin. The result was a land rush, during
which short-term profiteering from slash-and-burn agriculture prevented
anything resembling sustainable development. Environmental and
social movements arose in response to the chaotic development, but it
was not until the 1980s, when scientists began systematically tracking
Amazonian deforestation using satellite imagery, that the true scale
of the environmental destruction under way in the Amazon became
apparent. The end of military rule in 1985 and Brazil’s transition to
democracy did nothing to slow the devastation; the ecological damage
only worsened as road-building projects and government subsidies for
agriculture fueled a real estate boom that wiped out forests and threat
ened traditional rubber tappers and native peoples. Meanwhile, the
total population of the Amazon basin increased from around six million
in 1960 to 25 million in 2010 (including some 20 million in Brazil),
and agricultural production in the Amazon region ramped up as global
commodity markets expanded.
Things began to change in 2003, when Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva,
the newly elected Brazilian president, known as Lula, chose Marina
Silva as his environment minister. A social and environmental activist
turned politician, Silva hailed from the remote Amazonian state of
Acre and had worked alongside Chico Mendes, a union leader and
environmentalist whose murder in 1988 at the hands of a rancher drew
global attention to the issue of the Amazon’s preservation. With Lulas
blessing, Silva immediately set about doing what no Brazilian govern
ment had previously attempted: enforcing Brazil’s 1965 Forest Code,
which had set forth strong protections for forests and established
strict limits on how much land could be cleared. Doing so represented
March/April 2013 143
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Jeff Tollefson
a major shift in domestic policy and was equally striking at the inter
national level: Brazil chose to act at a time when most developing
countries were resisting any significant steps to combat global warm
ing absent the industrialized world’s own more aggressive actions
and provision of financial aid.
After peaking in 2004, when an area of rain forest roughly the size of
Massachusetts was mowed down in a single year, Brazil’s deforestation
rate began to fall. Then, in late 2007, scientists at Brazil’s National
Institute for Space Research warned that the rate of deforestation had
spiked once again. The increase coincided with a sudden rise in global
food prices, which created an incentive for landowners in the Amazon
to illegally clear more forest for pasture and crops. This suggested
that the earlier decline in the rate of deforestation might have been
driven by market forces as much as by government intervention,
but Lula nevertheless doubled down on enforcement. The govern
ment deployed hundreds of Brazilian soldiers in early 2008 to crack
down on illegal logging, issuing fines to those who broke the law
and in some instances hauling lawbreakers to jail.
The following year, Brazil announced that its rate of deforestation
had hit a historic low, and Lula pledged that by 2020 the country
would reduce its deforestation to 20 percent of the country’s long
term baseline, then defined as the average from 1996 to 2005. His plan
to achieve that goal was based on one version of the redd model,
which had vaulted onto the international agenda several years earlier
as scientists made advances in quantifying the impact of tropical
deforestation on climate change.
GREEN-LIGHTING REDD
Politicians and commentators usually describe global warming a
long-term threat, but scientists also worry about transgressing invi
thresholds and thus provoking potentially rapid and irreversible
term changes in the way environmental and biological systems func
During the past decade, based in part on the results of intensive clim
modeling, some scientists began to grow concerned that the Am
could represent one of the clearest examples of such tipping poi
Think of the rain forest not as a collection of trees but as a hy
logic system, a massive machine for transporting and recycling w
in which trees act as pumps, pulling water out of the ground and th
injecting it, through transpiration, into the air. This process ramps
144 FOREIGN AFFAIRS
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A Light in the Forest
as the sun rises over the Amazon each day; as the forest heats up,
evaporation increases, and trees transpire water to stay cool, simulta
neously increasing the amount of water they take up through their
roots. By constantly replenishing the atmosphere with water vapor,
the Amazon helps create its own weather on a grand scale.
Humans interfere with this process whenever they chop down
rain forests, and at some point, the system will begin to shut down.
And this is not the only threat. Studies
suggest that the Amazon could also be pQr ^ ¿
susceptible to rising temperatures and , . . 1 L
shifting rainfall patterns due to global ^ ^ possible to Contemplate
warming. The nightmare scenario is an end to the era of large
known as “Amazon dieback,” whetein
the rains decrease and open savannas
encroach on an ever-shrinking rain
forest. The resulting loss of fresh water could be catastrophic for
communities, agriculture, and hydropower systems in the Amazon,
and dieback would have drastic effects on biodiversity and the global
carbon dioxide cycle. The Amazon stores some 100 billion metric
tons of carbon, equivalent to roughly a decade of global emissions.
Converting carbon-rich rain forests into open savannas would pump
massive quantities of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, making it
even harder for humans to prevent further warming.
Roughly 20 percent of the Amazon has been cleared to date, and
there is already evidence that precipitation and river-discharge patterns
are changing where the deforestation has been most intense, notably
in the southwestern portion of the basin. And some scientists fear that
the shifting climate may already be exerting an influence. In the past
seven years, the Amazon has suffered two extremely severe droughts;
normally, such droughts would be expected to occur perhaps once a
century. One of the most comprehensive modeling studies to date,
conducted in 2010 under the auspices of the World Bank, suggests
that even current levels of deforestation, when combined with the
impacts of increasing forest fires and global warming, are making the
Amazon susceptible to dieback.
Such projections have heightened the sense of urgency in climate
policy circles and helped focus attention on the redd model. The
concept has been around in some form for more than 15 years, but it
was first placed on the international agenda in 2005 by the Coalition
March/April 2013 145
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Jeff Tollefson
for Rainforest Nations, a group of 41 developing countries that
cooperates with the un and the World Bank on sustainability is
sues. At the core of the model is the belief that it is possible to
calculate how much carbon is released into the atmosphere when a
given chunk of forest is cut down. Fears that this would prove
impossible helped keep deforestation off the agenda when climate
diplomats signed the Kyoto Protocol in 1997. Scientists are steadily
improving their methods for estimating how much carbon is stored
in forests, however, and most experts agree that carbon dioxide can
be tracked with enough accuracy to calculate baseline figures for
every country.
Under various proposed versions of the redd model, wealthy
countries or businesses seeking to offset their own impact on the
climate would pay tropical countries to reduce their emissions below
their baseline levels. There is no consensus about the best way to
design such a system of payments; since redd was formally adopted
as part of the agenda for climate negotiations at the un Climate
Change Conference in Bali, Indonesia, in 2007, dozens of countries
and nongovernmental organizations have put forward a range of
ideas. Most of these call for the creation of a global market that, like
the European carbon-trading system, would allow industrial polluters
to purchase carbon offsets generated by rain-forest preservation.
Some environmentalists and social activists worry about the validity
and longevity of such credits, as well as the prospect of banks and
traders entering the conservation business. One fear is that “carbon
cowboys,” a new class of entrepreneurs specializing in the develop
ment of carbon-offset projects, would sweep through forests, trampling
the rights of indigenous and poor people by taking control of their
lands and walking away with the profits. This concern is valid, as
there is always a danger of bad actors. But civil-society groups and
governments, including Brazil’s, are aware of the problem and are
working on safeguards.
Brazilian officials have also expressed worries that the ability to
simply purchase unlimited offsets would allow wealthy countries
to delay the work that needs to be done to reduce their own emissions.
An alternative backed by Brazil’s climate negotiators and others would
be a state-based funding system, in which money would flow from
governments in the developed world to governments in the develop
ing world, which would guarantee emissions reductions in return.
146 FOREIGN AFFAIRS
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A Light in the Forest
NORWEGIAN WOOD
In 2008, Lula, perhaps hoping to preempt an interminable debate over
how best to design a global redd system, announced the establishment
of the Amazon Fund, calling on wealthy countries to contribute some
$21 billion to directly fund rain-forest-preservation measures. The
proposal went against the market-based approach being pushed by
the Coalition for Rainforest Nations. Based on a more conventional
system of government donations, the Amazon Fund would allow
Brazil to control the money and manage its forests as it saw fit. To the
fund’s backers, the resulting reductions in emissions would represent
offsets of a sort.
Only one country decided to take up Lulas challenge: Norway,
which stepped forward with a commitment of up to $1 billion. Coming
well in advance of any formal carbon market and the international
treaty that many hoped would be signed at the un climate summit in
Copenhagen in 2009, Norway’s pledge was largely an altruistic vote of
confidence in Brazil’s approach, with donations conditioned on measur
able progress. Since 2010, when the funding began, the Brazilian De
velopment Bank, which manages the fund, has undertaken 30 projects,
costing nearly $152 million. These projects include direct payments to
landowners in return for preserving forests and initiatives to sort out
disputes over landownership, educate farmers and ranchers about sus
tainability, and combat forest fires.
Although environmentalists and scientists have criticized some
delays in the program, Brazil’s deforestation rate has continued to
plunge. Each year from 2009 to 2012, the country registered a new
record low for deforestation; in 2012, only 1,798 square miles of forest
were cleared. That is 76 percent below the long-term baseline, leaving
Brazil just four percent shy of its Copenhagen commitment with
eight years to go. Recent calculations by Brazilian scientists suggest
that the cumulative release of carbon dioxide expected as a result of
deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon dropped from more than 1.1 bil
lion metric tons in 2004 to 298 million in 2011—roughly equivalent
to the effect of France and the United Kingdom eliminating their
combined carbon dioxide emissions for 2011.
Redd remains a distant promise for most landowners and com
munities, and the precipitous drop in deforestation in Brazil is more
a function of broader government policy than the result of any individ
ual project. Still, the Amazon Fund is demonstrating the promise
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Jeff Tollefson
and practicality of the redd model. Although the actual cost of pre
venting emissions remains unclear, Brazil is offering donors carbon
offsets at a discounted price of $5 per metric ton of carbon dioxide,
intentionally underestimating how much biomass its forests contain
in order to avoid arguments over the price. Of course, implementing
the redd model could prove significantly more expensive elsewhere.
But the price would nonetheless be significantly cheaper than for
many other methods of cutting emissions, such as capturing carbon
dioxide from a coal-fired power plant and pumping it underground,
which could cost upward of $100 per metric ton in the initial stages.
ROUSSEFF AND THE RURALISTAS
Lula was succeeded by his protégé and former chief of staff, D
Rousseff, in 2011. Although environmentalists have been critica
her broader development agenda in the Amazon and beyond, Ro
seff has upheld Lula’s deforestation policies. And she has done s
spite intense pressure from the so-called ruralista coalition
landowners and major agricultural interests, which currently exercis
tremendous influence in Brasilia.
In the spring of 2012, the Brazilian Congress passed a bill t
would have eviscerated the country’s vaunted Forest Code by scal
back basic protections for land alongside rivers and embankmen
and offering outright amnesty to companies and landowners who
broken the law. Rousseff fought back, and a prolonged tussle ens
The final result was a law that is generally more favorable to agricultu
interests but that nonetheless retains minimum requirements for fo
protection and recovery on private land.
More troubling than the new law itself, perhaps, is the politi
polarization that accompanied its passage. Brasilia now seems divid
into rigid environmentalist and agricultural factions. Fierce oppositio
to Brazil’s rain-forest-preservation efforts is sure to persist,
many observers fear that landowners, impatient with the slow p
of progress on redd, will ultimately begin to test the limits of
newly revised Forest Code. As if on cue, last September, Brazilia
scientists announced that deforestation was 220 percent higher
August than it had be…
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