A voice against Amazonian deforestation

Over at Mongabay, there's a tremendous interview with Sergio Abranches, a Brazilian environmentalist discussing deforestation. Well worth a look:…I would very much recommend using a fair share of the resources to create an investment fund to finance education, science and technology to develop the basis for a new pattern of development in the Amazon. I fear for the success of such programs if they become entirely dependent on governments. "Governmentalization" and "politicization" should be avoided at all costs. I'd rather see these programs under new governance mechanisms, that do not exclude governments, but that are essentially independent, and include other forces, especially for their monitoring and evaluation. Either they'll add strength to the emerging transformative forces in the region, or they'll fail to help preserving the forest. I can't figure out how such a mechanism would succeed as voluntary government programs. They must have binding targets and independent monitoring….

Flooded forest in the Amazon basin, close to the meeting of the Rio Negro and Rio Amazon at Manaus, Brazil. This was taken in Feburary when the river flooding is seasonally low, by Phil P Harris, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 2.5 License