Alleged king of Amazon deforestation detained in Brazil

NBC News: Brazil has detained a land-grabber thought to be the Amazon's single biggest deforester, the country's environmental protection agency said. The Brazilian Institute of Environment and Renewable Natural Resources said Ezequiel Antonio Castanha, who was detained Saturday in the state of Para, operated a network that illegally seized federal lands, clear-cut them and sold them to cattle grazers.

The agency blames the network for 20 percent of the deforestation in Brazil's Amazon in recent years, though the statement issued Monday did not provide the estimated scale of the devastation. It quoted the agency's head of environmental protection, Luciano Evaristo, as saying he hopes Castanha's arrest will "contribute significantly to controlling deforestation in the region."

Castanha will face charges including illegal deforestation and money laundering, and could be sentenced to up to 46 years in prison, the statement said.

Officials said late last year that 1,870 square miles (4,848 square kilometers) of rain forest were destroyed between August 2013 and July 2014. That's a bit larger than the U.S. state of Rhode Island....

A deforested hillside in Brazil, shot by Alex Rio Brazil, Wikimedia Commons, public domain

Brazil arrests eight in Amazon deforestation swoop

Yahoo News via AFP: Brazilian police said Thursday they had made eight arrests in raids to smash a gang considered the worst perpetrators of deforestation in the Amazon region. "Eight arrests have been made so far. Police are searching for a further six (suspects) considered to be on the run," a police spokesman in the Amazonian state of Para told AFP.

The gang would invade public land in northern Para state, burn down forest, divided the land into parcels and sell them, raking in millions of dollars in the process, according to federal police who moved in on the gang Wednesday.

According to the Brazilian Environmental Institute, the group has carried out environmental crimes valued at $230 million, making them "the greatest destroyers of the Brazilian Amazon currently active."

Para authorities say the state has suffered some 15,500 hectares (38,300 acres) of deforestation, with the state prosecutor's office estimating that the area where the gang was operating accounts for about 10 percent of the total.

The institute said Wednesday the gang members should be charged with invading public land, environmental crimes, forgery, criminal association and money laundering.

Police say they have also issued warrants for further arrests in the states of Sao Paulo, Parana and Mato Grosso...

Deforestation in Brazil, NASA photo

Killings of Brazil's indigenous Indians highlight tensions of land disputes

Jonathan Watts in the Guardian (UK): Celso Rodrigues was walking by a river near his home in Mato Grosso do Sul, when he was ambushed by a gunman in a balaclava, shot with a pistol and then finished off with a rifle. It might have been just another killing in Brazil, which has one of the world's highest murder rates. But Rodrigues's case has attracted international attention because he was a member of the Guarani ethnic group, which is at the heart of a fierce national dispute over indigenous rights.

In recent months, the national guard has been dispatched, a senior official has resigned and protests from both sides – tribes and landowners – have moved closer to the office of President Dilma Rousseff. ...The killings add to a rising death toll. According to a report this month from the Missionary Indigenous Council, 452 indigenous people were murdered between 2002 and 2010, sharply up on the 167 killed during the previous eight years. More people have died in Mato Grosso do Sul – a "wild west" border region that has been colonised by ranchers and soya growers – than in any other state.

Lawyers, anthropologists and indigenous rights campaigners have sent a letter to Rousseff, reminding her that the Indians are trying to take back land that was confiscated from them and distributed to powerful families during the dictatorship era.

...There are also growing fears that indigenous groups will be further marginalised because the government is reliant on ruralista (agriculture lobby) votes in Congress and is desperate to jumpstart an economy that slumped last year.

Conflicts have intensified in many other areas over land seizures for farms, mines and infrastructure projects. The Munduruku indigenous group in Para state has threatened to go to war over government plans to build a cascade of hydroelectric dams on the Tapajós river. Many tribes are opposing the construction of Brazil's biggest dam, the Belo Monte, on a site that has been occupied by protesters several times....

Kadiwéu woman from Nabileque River, Brazil. Photo from the Boggiani collection. Published in 1892/ Dr. R. Lehmann-Nitsche

Cool heads likely won't prevail in a hotter, wetter world

Morgan Kelly in News at Princeton: Should climate change trigger the upsurge in heat and rainfall that scientists predict, people may face a threat just as perilous and volatile as extreme weather — each other.

Researchers from Princeton University and the University of California-Berkeley report in the journal Science that even slight spikes in temperature and precipitation have greatly increased the risk of personal violence and social upheaval throughout human history. Projected onto an Earth that is expected to warm by 2 degrees Celsius by 2050, the authors suggest that more human conflict is a likely outcome of climate change.

The researchers analyzed 60 studies from a number of disciplines — including archaeology, criminology, economics and psychology — that have explored the connection between weather and violence in various parts of the world from about 10,000 BCE to the present day. During an 18-month period, the Princeton-Berkeley researchers reviewed those studies' data — and often re-crunched raw numbers — to calculate the risk that violence would rise under hotter and wetter conditions.

They found that while climate is not the sole or primary cause of violence, it undeniably exacerbates existing social and interpersonal tension in all societies, regardless of wealth or stability. They found that 1 standard-deviation shift — the amount of change from the local norm — in heat or rainfall boosts the risk of a riot, civil war or ethnic conflict by an average of 14 percent. There is a 4 percent chance of a similarly sized upward creep in heat or rain sparking person-on-person violence such as rape, murder and assault. The researchers report that climate-change models predict an average of 2 to 4 standard-deviation shifts in global climate conditions by 2050.

..."We think that by collecting all the research together now, we're pretty clearly establishing that there is a causal relationship between the climate and human conflict," Hsiang said. "People have been skeptical up to now of an individual study here or there. But considering the body of work together, we can now show that these patterns are extremely general. It's more of the rule than the exception....

The researchers analyzed 60 studies from a number of disciplines that have explored the connection between weather and violence in various parts of the world, and throughout human history. A sampling of existing results (graphed above) show a correlation between temperature on violent personal crime and rape in the United States (A, B); drought and global civil conflict (H); temperature and the ouster of leaders worldwide (J); deviation from normal rainfall and large-scale violence in Africa (K); and global civil conflict and the intensity of El Niño (L). The darker areas indicate a stronger connection between climate and violence. Panel titles indicate the type of violence studied, the location, the unit of analysis and sample size, and the study citation. (Image by Science/AAAS)

Suspected killers of ecologists on trial in Brazil

Seed Daily via AFP: Three suspected killers of a couple who blew the whistle on illegal logging in the Brazilian Amazon went on trial Wednesday. Antonio Filho, a member of Brazil's Catholic Church-affiliated Pastoral Land Commission (CPT) who is monitoring the trial before a court in the Amazonian town of Maraba, said it was expected to last until Thursday .

In the dock are Jose Rodrigues Moreira, who allegedly masterminded the May 2011 ambush killing of Jose Claudio da Silva and his wife Maria do Espirito Santo near Maraba, and the two alleged perpetrators Lindonjonson Silva Rocha and Alberto Lopes do Nascimento.

The three were arrested in a jungle hideout 300 kilometers (180 miles) from Maraba in the northern state of Para.

The environmentalist couple had for years campaigned against loggers and ranchers who force slave labor to clear-cut large swaths of the Amazon...

Logging in Brazil, circa 1930

A battle for a vital Mayan forest

William Allen in Yale Environment 360:  The 200-foot summit of Temple IV in the ancient Maya city of Tikal provides a spectacular view of Central America’s largest expanse of intact rainforest. ...This lowland forest is the heart of the Maya Biosphere Reserve of northern Guatemala, a 2.1 million-hectare (5.2 million-acre) sanctuary that covers 19 percent of the country and contains roughly 60 percent of its protected area. The UNESCO-designated biosphere reserve sustains a wide array of biodiversity, most notably the last remaining population of a key subspecies of scarlet macaw.

But this magnificent creature and others that inhabit the reserve — jaguars, pumas, Guatemalan black howler monkeys, Baird’s tapirs — are being pressured not just by the standard threats common to tropical regions, such as illegal logging, fires, and commercial hunting. Even more virulent forces are gnawing away at the Maya Biosphere Reserve, including Mexican drug cartels that cut into the forest to build airstrips to transport drugs, Salvadoran gangs that carve out huge cattle ranches to launder drug money, and Chinese organized crime groups moving their illegal logging network toward the reserve to supply Asian markets with prime tropical hardwoods.

As a result, this natural and cultural treasure — the heart of the Selva Maya, a forest spanning the borders of Guatemala, Mexico, and Belize — has in recent years effectively been cut in two. The western side, which includes two of the reserve’s five national parks and is bordered on the west and the north by Mexico, is under siege, according to Guatemalan park officials. The eastern part of the reserve, where Tikal rises above the jungle canopy and which borders Belize, is lush and intact.

“The story of the Maya Biosphere Reserve has increasingly become a tale of two reserves — one of conservation successes and one of failures,” says Roan McNab, director of the New York-based Wildlife Conservation Society’s (WCS) Guatemala program. McNab is a pivotal figure in a coalition of Guatemalan and foreign conservation groups battling to preserve the eastern half of the reserve and claw back some of the denuded lands of the western sector....

In northern Guatemala's Tikal archaeological site surrounded by the Maya Biosphere Reserve, ruined Mayan Temples 1, 2, 3 and 5. Shot by chensiyuan, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license

Rangers losing battle in Philippine forests

Terra Daily via AFP: Father-of-five Alex Lesber patrols one of the Philippines' most important forests carrying a cheap pistol and memories of a pastor being shot dead in front of him. Lesber is one of just 2,000 poorly paid rangers trying to stop what the government admits is "rampant" illegal logging across the country, and their time roaming amid the vanishing forests is becoming increasingly dangerous.

Twenty of his colleagues have been murdered since the government imposed a nationwide logging ban in 2010, according to the environment ministry, a move that prompted already shady timber merchants to adopt more aggressive tactics.

"There is always that possibility that one of us could get hurt where we work. We arrest people, so naturally they hate us," Lesber, 49, told AFP while patrolling Angat forest, one of the main watersheds for Manila's dams.

The stakes are high for the Philippines, a tropical Southeast Asian nation of more than 7,000 islands that has lost more than half its forest cover over the past century. There are only 7.6 million hectares (18.78 million acres) left to be guarded by men like Lesber. But the Philippines' forest rangers are under-funded, out-numbered and extremely vulnerable, according to Environment Secretary Ramon Paje.

"Fighting illegal logging should be a considered a military operation, rather than a regulatory one. We want the army at the forefront, rather than our rangers," he told reporters recently. One of the problems for the rangers is that corrupt government officials are often involved in the timber industry, according to environment activists. This is part of a broader scourge across the Philippines of underpaid local officials or security forces being enticed into lucrative but illegal businesses....

Arroceros Forest Park in Manila, Philippines, shot by Edgar Dann Alcantara, Sheena Thea Alcantara, Sheera Thea Alcantara (Wikipedia Takes Manila participant), Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license

Organised crime behind up to 90 percent of tropical deforestation - report

Thin Lei Win in AlertNet: Organised crime trade worth billions of dollars is responsible for 50 to 90 percent of illegal logging in parts of the Amazon basin, Central Africa and Southeast Asia, with implications for deforestation, climate change and the well-being of indigenous people, said a report released Thursday.

“Green Carbon: Black Trade,” by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) and INTERPOL, said illegal logging is now worth $30 to $100 billion annually and accounts for 15 to 30 percent of the overall timber trade.

Most wood products with illegal origin are destined for China, while Japan, the EU and the United States are also primary importers. “Illegal logging is not on the decline, rather it is becoming more advanced as cartels become better organised,” said the heads of UNEP and INTERPOL in the report’s preface.

Conflict, corruption, decentralised government structures and weak environmental laws fuel the practice, with criminal groups combining old-fashioned tactics such as bribes with high-tech methods including hacking government websites to obtain permits, said the report.

“Murder, violence, threats and atrocities against indigenous forest-living peoples,” also are problems associated with the trade, the report said.

Criminals are using an increasingly sophisticated range of tactics, the report said, from laundering illegal logs through a web of palm oil plantations and saw mills, to shifting activities between regions and countries to avoid local and international policing efforts....

Jungle burned for agriculture in southern Mexico. Shot by Jami Dwyer, Wikimedia Commons, public domain