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1. According to Brazilian usage, the designation Rio Amazonas
is applied to the main stem below the mouth of the Rio Negro;
upstream, as far as the border between Brazil and Peru, the river
is named Solimões; and, beyond that, Marañon. In this paper,
Amazon River or, simply, Amazon, is used to designate the
Maranon-Solimões-Amazonas continuum; and Amazonas River or
Amazonas, to specify the section below the embouchure of the
Negro. The name Amazonia (adj. Amazonian) is used variously: to
designate a "natural" region, closely identified with
the rain forest; as equivalent to the official "North
Region," a politicoadministrative division that comprises
the states of Rondônia, Acre, Amazonas, Roraima, Pará, Amapá,
and Tocantins; and, finally, to define an operational region,
"Amazonia Legal," which, in addition to these states,
includes Mato Grosso and part of Maranhão (Brasil, 1992).
2. Such an outflow is equivalent to more than four times the mean
flow of the Congo, and to about ten times that of the
Mississippi. It accounts for between 15 and 20 per cent of all
fresh water passed into the world's oceans.
3. On the campo cerrado (cerrado, for short), as the savanna
woodlands and associated grasslands of Brazil are called, see
chapter 5 in Cole, 1986.
4. According to a recent computation that used data from 168
stations keyed to a 2° latitudelongitude grid (Nobre, 1992).
5. There are now attempts, using satellite images, to quantify
the sediment concentration of waters by their reflectance
(Mertes, Smith, and Adams, 1993).
6. Because the Amazon basin is asymmetric in relation to its
axis, a smaller part of its catchment lies north of the
equinoctial line; furthermore, much of this area is actually
subject to an equatorial rather than a tropical rainfall regime.
The annual rise and fall of the water in the lower Amazon is,
thus, most clearly influenced by the markedly seasonal discharge
of its far-flung southern tributaries.
7. Mertes (1993) calculates that, depending on the magnitude of
the inundation, approximately 60 to 80 per cent of the main stem
floodplain in Brazil is influenced directly by the overflow from
the Solimões-Amazonas. According to her analysis, the area thus
affected in the reach between Vargem Grande and Óbidos amounts,
on average, to c. 40,000 Km².
8. Emílio Goeldi (after whom the famous Museu Paraense in Belém
was later named), having travelled upriver in the early years of
the century, is reported to have remarked on the dissemination of
malaria by steamboats plying the waters from Belém to the upper
Amazon. Although this region was a "paradise" for the
vector, in the absence of the plasmo dium the disease is said to
have been unknown, becoming endemic in the latter part of the
nineteenth century (Lima, 1937).
9. For a pedological study of archaeological black earth in the
region of Oriximiná, Pará see Kern, 1988.
10. See, for instance, Roosevelt, 1993.
11. Despite official protection by law, illegal capture of the
manatee continues. See Sirenews, 1991a and 1991b.
12. The International Union for the Conservation of Nature and
Natural Resources lists Podocnemis expansa as in danger of
extinction and Trichechus inunguis as vulnerable (IUCN, 1990).
This means, according to IUCN categories, that, if the causal
factors continue operating, the giant river turtle is unlikely to
survive, while the manatee is likely to move into the endangered
category in the near future.
13. Local subsidence may have played a role in producing
exceptionally low-lying sections in the recently established
Mamirauá ecological station, situated within more than one
million hectares of continuous wetlands, whose forests have been
described by Ayres (1993) in the first volume of a promised
series of studies concerning the reserve.
14. A vast area targeted for special government incentives,
located north of parallel 8°S and between the Amazon, Xingu, and
Parnaíba rivers, covering part of the states of Pará Tocantins,
and Maranhão.
15. See also the special issue of Pará Desenvolvimento (1987),
devoted to the question of charcoal and iron smelting in
Amazonia.
16. It has been said that the Cali cartel, dominant in the global
cocaine trade since the demise of Pablo Escobar of the Medellín
cartel, is preparing the transfer of some of its processing
laboratories to Brazil (Adams, 1993).
17. A recent survey of Brazil's fluctuating population of
garimpeiros put their number at some 300,000 (400,000, if the
temporarily inactive are included). Those operating in Amazonia
were estimated at 180,000 (Brasil, 1993c).
18. In mid-1994, while a number of dragas had been moved to other
rivers and many had been abandoned as rusting scrap-iron on the
banks of the Madeira, some garimpeiros attempted to dredge the
rich, and virtually unworked, environmentally protected 5-km
stretch in front of Porto Velho.
19. In only partial settlement of charges brought by Alaskan
residents and fishermen, seeking billions of dollars in damages,
the Exxon Corporation in July 1994 agreed to pay US$20 million to
native villagers who claim that the spill ruined their hunting
grounds. Subsequently, a Federal Court jury awarded a $5 billion
punitive award to 34,000 fishermen and other Alaskans (New York
Times, 1994).
20. A recent and succinct statement regarding the status of the
project in Brazil: "no plans are under way, in conjunction
with neighbouring countries, for the connection of hydrographic
basins" (Brasil, 1993a). A symposium entitled "Linking
the Great Rivers of South America," held on 12 March 1993 in
Washington DC under the auspices of the Inter-American
Development Bank, was, according to several participants, an
exercise in futility.
21. See the special issue of Amazoniana (1993) devoted to Careiro
Island.
22. Similarly, in some wetland areas of China, such as the delta
of the Zhu Jiang, an artificial ecosystem of millenary tradition
incorporates the water of the saturated land in a productive form
of land use (Ruddle et al., 1983; Zhong Gongfu, 1989, 1990).
23. The "uncertainties" discussion group of a workshop
dealing with scientific issues in risk assessment recently
identified three general categories of uncertainty that affect
all assessments. They are, with excerpted examples, as follows:
¹ measurement uncertainties, e.g. insufficient observations,
difficulties in making physical measurements; ² conditions of
observation, e.g. spatiotemporal variability in climate and
ecosystem structure; ³ inadequacies of models, e.g. lack of, or
insufficient, knowledge concerning underlying mechanisms. The
consensus of the group was that the third category of
uncertainties was often the most important (Kimerle and Smith,
1993).
24. See, for instance, Phillips and Gentry (1994), who suggest a
possible link between increased turnover in tropical forests and
CO2 buildup.
25. The slaughter took place on 14 August 1993, on Venezuelan
soil, near the border. Figures for the number of Indians
massacred range from 16 to 100 (RAN, 1993).
A combined operation of the Venezuelan National Guard and Air
Force that surrounded 136 Brazilian garimpeiros in 1994, killing
one and wounding several others, gave rise to a minor diplomatic
crisis (O Clobo, 1994a). Meanwhile, the Colombian army deported
300 Brazilian gold miners (O Globo, 1994b) and, as a result of
lengthy negotiations, Surinam is said to have repatriated another
group of imprisoned garimpeiros.
26. In two very similar single-page statements, one focusing on
Amazonia, the other on Central America, Uhl and Parker (1986a,
1986b) attempt to establish a ratio between tonnage of hamburger
meat produced and area of rain forest converted to pasture. The
underpinning calculations were admittedly crude: the authors
recognize "that values might range from half to double those
used in their papers." Subsequently, Goodland (1990) picked
up the "hamburger connection" and, extrapolating from
these calculations, concluded that "the Brazilian government
could have acquired nearly two metric tons of foreign beef for
the same amount of capital it spent subsidizing the production of
1 metric ton of Amazon beef." Without underwriting the
assumptions and computations of these speculative papers, the
essential point remains valid, namely that "the amount of
rainforest for even a simple hamburger is not trivial" (Uhf
and Parker, 1986b).
27. The ubiquitous intrusion of the political into the scientific
sphere was recently illustrated, in connection with the carbon
cycle, by a scientist at the Australian National University:
"There is the political angle - you might want to discover a
substantial CO2 sink in your region if this can be
used to offset industrial emissions of CO2; on the
other hand, this may bring with it restrictions on land use with
concomitant economic penalties" (Taylor, 1993).
28. Repeated attempts to lay hands on Amazonia, made by Leopold
II, King of the Belgians (best known for his appropriation of the
Congo), have only recently come to light (Sternberg, 1988a).
29. Vice-President (at the time Senator) Al Gore (1992),
criticizing the way "the World Bank, the International
Monetary Fund, regional development banks, and national lending
authorities" determine the kinds of assistance given, wrote:
the World Bank should halt the funds that subsidize the building
of roads through the Amazon rain forest as long as there are no
credible safeguards to stop what has been until now the primary
use of such roads: providing direct access to the heart of the
forest for chain saws and torches.
However, closer to home, one candidate for the 1994 presidential
election in Brazil made the controversial highway link of Acre
state to the Pacific Ocean a priority issue in his campaign (A
Gazeta, 1994).
30. According to the latest published farm census (1985),
holdings having more than 1,000 hectares constitute less than one
per cent of the number of agricultural operations in Brazil, but
occupy 43.73 per cent of the nation's farmland. By contrast,
farms with less than 10 hectares represent 52.83 per cent of all
agricultural units, but total only 2.66 per cent of Brazil's
agrarian space (Brasil, 1990). Meanwhile, the increasing
militancy of an impatient landless population ("invade,
resist, and produce") is translated into a growing number of
invasões (seizures of property) by the sem terra, making for
potentially explosive situations (Jornal do Comércio 1994).
31. The matter was given a popular treatment by Rifkin (1992).
Note, however, a recent poll by Louis Harris and Associates, Inc.
(1993), who have been monitoring US health habits since 1983. The
new survey points to a current relaxation in the avoidance of fat
and cholesterol. As the pollsters conclude, "there is
nothing inevitable about progress."
32. See, for instance, Gleick, 1993.
33. With water essential for the survival of human societies, the
issue of its degradation could come to assume something of an
emotional charge. Persons yielding to the foreboding of a
quasi-apocalyptic thirst, and moved by an instinct of
self-preservation, might generate apprehensions reminiscent of
the unjustified oxygen "scare" of the 1970s. At that
time, the misrepresentation in the media of a statement by a
well-known scientist raised the spectre of a critical decrease in
atmospheric oxygen, supposed to result from destruction of the
"lung of the world" - an entirely inappropriate
metaphor for the Amazon forest which still surfaces occasionally.
The resulting outcry raised hackles in Brazil, because it implied
that sovereign decisions concerning Amazonia should be
constrained by the obligation to preserve an essential component
of the earth's life-support system (Sternberg,1980, 1986a,
1987c).
34. Nevertheless, in April 1994, the Itamar Franco administration
made the startling announcement that it was about to plunge
headlong into a two-billion-dollar scheme to divert water from
the São Francisco River to the Nordeste. Construction was to
begin before the national elections in October, and the first
phase of the project was to be inaugurated by year's end.
Involving short-term, high-interest loans, the undertaking, for
which detailed technical studies - if they exist - were not made
public, came under fire from several quarters. Some of the
criticism of the "pharaonic" enterprise (Folha de São
Paulo, 1994a) even originated within the administration, coming,
for instance, from the National Department of Waters and Electric
Energy (Paula and Fechine, 1994), and the then Finance Minister
Rubens Ricupero (Folha de São Paulo, 1994b). In mid-August,
after much controversy and a considerable scaling down of the
plan, imposed by financial realities, Franco interrupted the
proceedings, just as the public bidding phase was about to begin
(Freitas, 1994).
35. Ghillean Prance, director of the Royal Botanic Garden at Kew,
aligns himself with this approach and, in fact, is actively
working in Britain with the private sector to promote the
manufacture of products based on the sustained harvest of
non-wood forest resources (Prance, 1990). For several
perspectives on alternatives to deforestation in Amazonia, see,
for instance, Anderson, 1990.
36. On the growth of the Brazilian environmental movement, see,
for example, Goldstein, 1990; and Kohlhepp, 1991.
37. Concerning this premise, see, in the context of the Yanomami,
1989-1990.
38. With Minister of Justice, Colonel Jarbas Passarinho, arguing
that a 1984 study, the basis for delimitation of the Yanomami
lands, was outdated, President Collor in 1991 ordered the
longdelayed demarcation to be put on further hold, pending a
census of the indigenous population of the area. In this respect,
Jose Goldemberg, then Minister of Education, surmised that a
reserve of 9.4 million hectares was excessive for the then
surviving tribespeople (O Globe, 1991). Given the increased
mortality and general deterioration that afflicts this tragically
victimized group following contact with miners and other invaders
of their territory, the ratio of Indians to land can be expected
to decrease further, and faster. Nevertheless Collor, probably
with an eye to the financial assistance he desired from
industrialized countries, reversed his decision and granted the
dwindling Yanomami population permanent rights to its tribal
lands.
39. A succinct, decidedly upbeat, report on some "good
things" in Amazonia is provided by Smith (1992).